The Nazi Conspiracy – The time: November 1943. The place: Tehran, Iran. In the capitol city of this country in the Persian Gulf region, a conference will take place between the three leaders of the Allied forces: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. This first face-to-face meeting between the “Big Three” has a great deal of importance behind it, because what will be discussed between these powerful leaders will determine the next plan of action to finally defeat Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers during World War II.
The one subject that will dominate the discussion at the conference is the possibility of launching an invasion that would open up a second front against Nazi Germany in Western Europe; this will subsequently provide the genesis of “Operation Overlord”, or as it was better known as “D Day”.
The planning of the Tehran Conference was intense, especially the details concerning security. This is because the location of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran is quite a distance from their British and Soviet counterparts, which were located adjacent to each other. This meant that some form of deception had to take place when it came to transporting President Roosevelt from the U.S. to the Soviet embassy, which served as the actual site of the conference.
However, there is a serious wrinkle that could directly affect the staging of the conference, and even worse, the lives of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Mike Reilly, who is in charge of the Secret Service detail at the White House, discreetly finds out from a member of the Soviet delegation that one of their spies discovered that a small group of Nazi intelligence agents parachuted into Tehran a few days before with one dangerous assignment: to assassinate the three Allied leaders, which can possibly turn the tide of the war in favour of the Axis Powers.
This scenario is not a spy novel from the pen of Ian Fleming or Len Deighton, but the third volume of the “Conspiracy” series of hidden history books written by the team of Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch, called The Nazi Conspiracy.
After reading the book, the impression I got was that although this is a work of nonfiction, it reads like a combination of a Frederick Forsyth novel (i.e., Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File) and a John Frankenheimer political thriller movie (i.e., The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May). Those elements keeps the reader captivated, but this example of hidden history offers quite a “what might have been” if those Nazi agents were successful with their secret mission in Tehran.
Meltzer and Mensch shifts the focus back and forth throughout the book that leads to the fateful occasion when both the Nazi and Allied sides converge in Tehran, not to mention the characters who make up the dramatis personae. That includes not only Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, but also Franz Mayr, the Nazi spy who plays a role in the plot, but is practically forgotten by his superiors in Berlin while he is posted in Iran; Walter Schellenberg, the head of the Reich Intelligence Service (SD), who hopes the success of the plot will bring him to the same level of respect and recognition by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy that was enjoyed by his predecessor, the late Reinhard (“The Hangman”) Heydrich; and Otto Skorzeny, the Abwehr agent who is given the responsibility of carrying out the plot after he becomes a celebrity in Nazi Germany when he led a daring rescue mission of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini after his arrest by opposing Italian forces.
And on the other side, things are kind of chaotic with the “Big Three” in the months leading to the Tehran Conference, that are practically maddening and could threaten the show of strength and unity that’s needed to launch the effort to strike the final blow against the Nazis. First of all, Roosevelt wants to meet with Stalin by himself without giving Churchill any prior knowledge. Then there’s Roosevelt and Churchill pussyfooting around with Stalin regarding the choosing of the site of the conference and the issues to be discussed in order to placate the Soviet leader and not upset him in any way that could lead to weakening disunity amongst the three. And then there’s the maneuvering between Roosevelt and Stalin to convince Churchill to go along with the second front invasion plan of northern France, which he has opposed from the start.
…And that’s all before Mike Reilly finds out about the handful of Nazi agents, who secretly parachuted into Iran with assassination on a grand scale on their minds.
It certainly takes a certain skill to take a lot of historical research from both sides of the story, and turn it into a cohesive, riveting narrative, and the duo succeeds with The Nazi Conspiracy. Although it does read like a good spy thriller novel, the book still gives the reader a chilling feeling about the historical ramifications that might have been had this assassination plot was successfully carried out, and what it could have meant for the rest of the free world had the Second World War ended differently … and not for the better.
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