World War II (novel timeline) is the counterfactual history on which the novel’s political order rests: Nazi Germany wins decisive victories, makes peace with Britain and the United States, and sustains an empire still fighting at its eastern frontier. The war is not merely distant background. Its official anniversaries, broadcasts, military monuments, and concealed records shape everyday life in 1964, while documents recovered by Xavier March expose the mass murder hidden beneath the language of victory and administration.

The war in March’s memory

March’s recollections begin with the regime’s expansion. In 1938, while he was still at school, he was called from class to hear that German troops were entering Austria and that the country had returned to the Fatherland. His headmaster, a First World War veteran who had been gassed, wept before the boys in the school gymnasium. The memory places public celebration beside private grief, a contrast that deepens the following year.

In 1939, seventeen-year-old March listened at home with his mother to Adolf Hitler’s live speech from the Reichstag. Hitler presented himself as the Reich’s first soldier and promised not to remove his uniform until victory or death. March’s mother wept; March, by contrast, felt ashamed of his emotional response and looked toward a photograph of his father in the Imperial German Navy uniform. He hoped war would allow him to live up to what his father had wanted of him. His memory records not only the broadcast’s promise but the youthful expectations through which he initially received it.

March was at sea during the next broadcasts. The regime announced victory over Russia in spring 1943 as proof of Adolf Hitler’s strategic genius. In the account March remembers, the Wehrmacht’s summer offensive the previous year had cut Moscow off from the Caucasus and separated the Red armies from the Baku oilfields, leaving the Soviet war machine without fuel. The later announcement of peace with Britain was likewise credited to Hitler’s supposed counterintelligence genius: German U-boats were recalled to Atlantic bases for a new cipher system after the public was told that British codebreakers had compromised German communications. The regime’s version concluded that Britain had been starved into submission and that Winston Churchill and his associates had fled to Canada.

Victory, armistice, and the continuing war

Peace with the United States followed in 1946, after the United States defeated Japan with atomic bombs. Adolf Hitler then sent a V-3 rocket to explode over New York as a demonstration that Germany could retaliate in kind. The war did not simply end: it dwindled into bloody guerrilla conflicts at the fringes of the German Empire. Diplomats called the resulting nuclear stalemate the Cold War. The distinction between peace and war is therefore unstable in the novel’s timeline: the great powers have stopped fighting directly, but violence persists at the empire’s edges.

The regime’s announcements continued to organize public memory after the major victories. When Hermann Göring died in 1951, solemn music filled an entire day before the news was announced. Heinrich Himmler received similar treatment after his death in an aircraft explosion in 1962. Such broadcasts folded the deaths of Nazi leaders into a wider sequence of victories, wars, calls for sacrifice and revenge, and reports from the eastern front. March remembers battle names including Oktyabrskoye, Polunochoye, and Alapayevsk as part of the prolonged struggle against the Reds on the Urals Front.

In 1964, this history is experienced collectively through state-managed media. At the Werderscher Markt offices, staff gather in the canteen beneath television screens showing a map of the Reich, while Beethoven selections accompany announcements promising important news. March sees apprehension and forced humor among people who have brothers, sons, or husbands in the East; they keep watching the screens. The war’s continuing consequences have entered family life, while the broadcast ritual attempts to make official news a shared, controlled experience.

The war made monumental

The regime’s account of wartime sacrifice is also built into the capital’s architecture. March passes through the immense arch at the center of the Avenue of Victory, a granite structure measuring 118 meters high, 168 meters wide, and 119 meters deep. Its inner walls bear the names of 3,000,000 soldiers who died defending the Fatherland in the wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1946. March looks away as the coach passes the Roll of the Fallen: his father’s name and those of both grandfathers are somewhere among the carved names.

Beyond the arch, the Avenue of Victory embodies the scale of the victorious state. Designed by Reichsminister Albert Speer and completed in 1957, it is 123 meters wide and 5.6 kilometers long—wider and two and a half times longer than the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The monument’s vastness turns the official history into a physical route through which visitors are guided. Yet for March, the Roll is not an abstract celebration: it links the national story of sacrifice to the particular deaths in his own family.

The concealed history behind victory

The war’s official narrative is challenged by documents March uncovers. The Wannsee Conference minutes identify a meeting held on January 20, 1942, at Am Großen Wannsee 56–58, concerning the Final Solution of the Jewish question. The minutes estimate that around eleven million Jews were involved and list populations across more than thirty European nationalities. Their administrative phraseology describes the deportation of Jews to the East for labor and anticipates that many would die through what the document calls “natural reduction.” The gap between bureaucratic wording and the scale of the plan makes the record evidence of a continental policy, not an isolated wartime measure.

A fuller draft of the minutes makes the machinery of murder more explicit. It records Reinhard Heydrich’s discussion of the shortcomings of shooting, including its slowness, security risks, and effects on the men carrying it out. Rudolf Lange then compares mass shootings near Riga, gas trucks at Kulmhof, and experiments using Zyklon B at Auschwitz. Heydrich’s handwritten objection appears in the draft, but the corresponding discussion was reduced in the final minutes to a single phrase. Comparing versions reveals how the record was edited as well as what it originally described.

Martin Luther’s inspection notes supply a different kind of evidence: an eyewitness account of the Auschwitz camp’s organization and operations. They describe a railway siding, guarded arrival areas, and a transport from France. Nearly 2,000 deportees are directed through a building labeled in several languages as a bathing and disinfection facility. The notes then record the killing installation, the removal of bodies, and the processing of possessions and human remains. Four gas-chamber and crematorium installations are reported, each with a capacity of 2,000 bodies a day. The account connects conference policy to deportation, camp infrastructure, and an organized system of mass killing.

The paperwork continues beyond the killing itself. A circular dated August 6, 1942, orders that human hair cut in concentration camps be put to industrial use: female prisoners’ hair is to be made into thread for socks for U-boat crews and felt stockings for the railways, while monthly quantities are to be reported to the SS Economic Administration Main Office. Set beside the inspection notes, the circular shows how the regime’s administrative processes extended the exploitation of prisoners’ bodies into industrial supply and routine reporting.

Counterfactual history and documentary form

The novel distinguishes its invented post-1942 history from historical persons and records. Its author’s note states that many named characters were real and that their biographical details are accurate up to 1942, while their later fates in the novel differ. It also identifies the Wannsee invitation, Hermann Göring’s July 31, 1941 order to Reinhard Heydrich, extracts from the conference minutes, and the memorandum on the use of prisoners’ hair among the authentic documents quoted in the text. The fictional timeline is therefore constructed around a mixture of altered outcomes and documentary evidence, rather than presented as unqualified history.

That mixture gives the war two opposed forms in the novel. In public memory, it is a succession of victories, peace settlements, monumental inscriptions, and carefully staged announcements. In March’s investigation, it emerges through minutes, amendments, inspection notes, and circulars whose ordinary administrative forms expose the policy and practice of mass murder. The contrast is central to the timeline’s significance: the regime has won the war and controls its public history, but its own surviving documents disclose what that victory narrative is designed to conceal.