The Man with the Iron Heart

HISTORICAL NOTE

There really was a German resistance movement after V-E Day. It was never very effective; it got off to a very late start, as the Nazis took much longer than they might have to realize they weren’t going to win the straight-up war. And it was hamstrung because the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Hitler Youth, the Luftwaffe, and the Nazi Party all tried to take charge of it-which often meant that, for all practical purposes, no one took charge of it. By 1947, it had mostly petered out. Perry Biddiscombe’s two important books, Werewolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement 1944–1946 (Toronto: 1998) and The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944–1947 (Stroud, Gloucestershire and Charleston, S.C.: 2000) document what it did and failed to do in the real world.

I have tried to imagine circumstances under which the German resistance might have been much more effective. The Man with the Iron Heart is the result. In the real world, of course, the attack on Reinhard Heydrich that failed in this novel succeeded. Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were the assassins. They both killed themselves under attack by the SS on 18 June 1942. The SS also wiped the Czech village of Lidice off the map in revenge for Heydrich’s murder. A good recent biography of Heydrich is Mario R. Dederichs (Geoffrey Brooks, translator), Heydrich: The Face of Evil (London and St. Paul: 2006).

How would we have dealt with asymmetrical warfare had we met it in the 1940s in Europe rather than in the 1960s in Vietnam or in the present decade in Iraq? Conversely, how would the Soviets have dealt with it? I have no certain answers-by the nature of this kind of speculation, one can’t come up with certain answers. Sometimes-as here, I hope-posing the questions is interesting and instructive all by itself.

German nuclear physicists really were brought to England for interrogation and then returned to Germany as described here. And the Germans really did leave ten grams of radium behind in Hechingen. Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, N.Y.: 1996) is the indispensable source for the episode. To this day, no one seems to know what became of the radium.

Unwary readers may suppose that no Congressman would say a President wanted to send troops anywhere to get their heads blown off for his amusement: words I’ve put in a Republican Congressman’s mouth aimed at President Truman. But, as reported in the October 24, 2007, Los Angeles Times, California Democratic Representative Pete Stark did say that, aiming the charge at President Bush. Truth really can be stranger than fiction. A motion to censure Congressman Stark failed, but he did subsequently apologize.