Guy Saville, THE AFRIKA REICH: A review
It's 1952. More than a decade has passed since the Dunkirk debacle brought an end to Great Britain's war against Nazi Germany, and the beginning of an uneasy truce with Hitler.
In Africa, the swastika flies from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. State-of-the-art autobahns cross Africa's rain forests and jungles, and the Reich's jet fighters patrol the skies, The horrific presence of the Schutzstaffel -- the dreaded SS -- is evident everywhere.But now the diabolical plans of Walter Hochburg, the architect and Nazi Governor-General of Kongo, the former Belgian Congo, now a territory of the Reich, threatens Britain's colonies, which are on very shaky legs.
In England, Burton Cole, a former mercenary, is offered one last contract. Burton accepts it gladly, for it gives him the opportunity to revenge himself on Hochburg, who was responsible for the death of his mother and the death-by-arson of a whole orphanage full of African children. The woman Burton loves protests strongly against his taking up the contract, but he goes ahead with it. For if he fails, unspeakable horrors will be visited on Africa, and no one in Africa, black or white, will escape the doom Hochburg has planned for them.
But Burton's mission goes down in flames, and he is forced to flee for his life, from Kongo's unholy ground to SS slave camps, to war-torn Angola -- and finally to a conspiracy leading to the dark heart of the Afrika Reich itself.
In this magnificent novel of an alternate history, the author combines meticulous research with edge-of-the-seat suspense, showing in detail the horrific pathologies that a Nazi victory would have brought about. From Hochburg's determination to "turn Africa white" by grinding up the bodies of dead German soldiers in order to mix them in with the soil of the Congo and exterminate all black Africans to remove the "taint of blackness" from Africa, to the ghastly execution by fire of one of Burton's confederates as Burton and another of his confederates manage to escape the Nazis, to Burton's discovery of a plan to ensure his death in action by the very English superiors who had hired him to kill Hochburg, this novel never lets up. Its all too plausible scenarios remind us of the ruthless and horrifying nature of the enemy we faced in World War II, and how narrowly the world escaped a future of the sort envisioned here by Guy Saville. Warning: Beautifully researched and written as it is, The Afrika Reich is not a novel for those with weak stomachs. And even hardier souls may find themselves pursued by nightmares after reading it. Even so, it is eminently worth acquiring and reading, for it shows in graphic detail how terribly wrong history could have gone, and how narrowly the world escaped that fate.