Europa Reich Series
BOOK 1 – MOONSHOT
BLAST OFF MINUS TWO!
A decade ago, the challenge was accepted: to send a man to the Moon and to return him safely to the Earth and now a giant rocket ship designed by Wernher von Braun stands ready on the pad and the clock is counting down.
Ten years ago, nobody thought it was possible. But that was then and this is now. Mankind has chosen to sail the new sea of space, to quest after the knowledge and the dreams of the star-filled abyss, to climb the infinite ladder to the stars.
While the peoples of the Earth shiver in the chill winds of a thirty-year-long Cold War, and the superpower protagonists prime their thermonuclear arsenals across the ideological void, one country, one empire has dared to attempt what seemed impossible only a decade ago.
The race to the Moon is all but run; there can be only one winner and for the loser it may, or may not be an omen of what is to come. To the victor go the laurels; to the vanquished…the ashes.
However, this is not July 1969. That world never came to be in in this universe because in the days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 Adolf Hitler was persuaded not to declare war on the United States of America.
The United States never came into the war against Germany; and the world was never the same again.
Today is 14 January 1975.
Now the mighty Moon rocket standing on a pad in Guyana bears not the Stars and Stripes but the Swastika Flag of the Third, Europa Reich and the launch has been timed so that a German astronaut’s boots will disturb the regolith of the Lunar surface on the tenth anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler, the founding father of the Nazi Movement….
Listen to the Moonshot audiobook sample:
BOOK 2 – OLYMPIAD
It is July 1976 and history hangs heavily over Germania – the Welthauptstadt – ‘World Capital’ of the Europa Reich with its great Olympic Park built over the top of and dwarfing the footprint of Adolf Hitler’s 1936 stadia.
Thirty years into the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Third Reich, the Summer Olympiad is returning to the city after a gap of four decades. For the first time since the Second World War the first city of the Reich is being opened up to the world media. While most people look forward to a festival of sport, and the Nazi regime to an unprecedented orgy of positive propaganda few can guess that the churning tides of past, present and future history in the making, will violently awaken the darkest nightmares of recent history.
Thus, as the Olympians toil, medals are won and lost, terror stalks the streets, nobody is safe, terrible secrets begin to surface and an American President travels to the heart of the Reich for the first time since the war contemplating the unthinkable, because that may yet be the only way to live in peace with the monstrous abomination of the Nazi Empire.
History, as they say, never really goes away and now, at last, it may be that it has finally come back to haunt the masters of the Empire of Evil.
What now for the children of the great generation who won the war?
BOOK 3 – TRIUMPH
The 1976 Germania Olympiad, blighted by terrorism proved to be anything but the great propaganda triumph designed to accompany Reinhard Heydrich’s supposedly epoch-defining peace treaty with the United States.
However, far from drawing a line under the crimes of the past, the Europa Reich is riven with generational and economic problems and never has the concept of a grandiose Roman-style Triumph to celebrate the disaster of the recent games and a token exculpation of the atrocities committed by the ‘Great’, wartime generation, been more divisive across a Reich attempting to re-write the history books.
And just beneath the surface the man ‘with the heart of iron’ has deliberately added fuel to the fire by triggering the long-signalled first purge of his decade-long leadership, a ‘brutal housekeeping’ of the Party and the SS state on the scale of the infamous Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
The dawn of a new era of global relations. A settlement of the Cold War, a rapprochement with the United States, a settling of a thousand old scores at home and an admission by the Reich that it murdered millions of Jews in the 1940s (and then spent years covering up the evidence)?
How on earth was that ever going to end well?
Especially with a US Navy squadron trapped in the Baltic and the awakened US-sponsored Resistance movement attempting to wreak havoc in the World Capital, Germania.
For Albrecht and Christina Kramer and their infant daughter, under protective custody of the Waffen SS at the Prora resort on the Baltic Coast, the nightmare is about to begin.
Hunted by friends and foes alike they must flee for their lives.
BOOK 4 – Exile
A year after the generals finally turned on their Nazis masters the Thousand Year Reich survives, albeit stumbling from one crisis to the next in the absence of the guiding hand of a ‘strong man’ whose whims and psychoses have wrought so much misery since 1933.
Thousands of people died in the putsch, the home SS was purged by the Wehrmacht and ruthlessly bombed by the Luftwaffe, brutally excising the SS, the Gestapo and much of the infrastructure of National Socialist rule from the fabric of the Fatherland Reich. Now the SS is a shadow of its former vainglory, an adjunct to the Armed Services banished to the never-ending war in the East and garrison duty around the crumbling margins of the empire.
Disunity on the home front has manifested itself with troubles all around the uber-sized Nazi empire. The generals have no answer to the catastrophe looming over the Reich, their puppet Fuhrer has turned out to be anything but a puppet and Christina Kramer, Reinhard Heydrich’s daughter, and it now seems ‘princess in wating across the water’ exiled in America, far from being a bit player in the unfolding drama, may actually be at the very nexus of the disintegration of her Father’s evil empire.
An ‘accidental’ Fuhrer, his wife and the Queen of the Reich Broadcasting Service, dissensions among the three members of the Council of Officers whose putsch murdered Heydrich, provoked battles that scarred and in some places, burned out the hearts of a score of German cities and a monstrous scandal that is about to transform the United States into a wary, isolationist party to a thirty year-old Cold War, into the Nazis’ worst nightmare explode across the pages of EXILE, the fourth instalment in the EUROPA REICH SERIES.