Who Was Hitler's Successor and Why Should You Care?

April, 1945. Hitler is deep inside his bunker in Berlin and he’s not coming out, except maybe, eventually feet-first. The war is finally ending and now, suddenly, people have started wondering what comes next?

But even as Nazi Germany is being torn to pieces and swallowed up by the Allies, Hitler’s henchmen are jockeying with each other over who will be the next Fuhrer. The problem is it can’t be just anybody. It has to be someone Eisenhower won’t just respect, it has to be someone he’ll......like!

Himmler, Goering, Speer; each believes he’s the one. But someone else unexpected gets the job. Suddenly the war is over. Suddenly everything is different, but not different in the ways they’d expected.

Even though the defeat is total, the surrender, unconditional, nobody, not even the victorious Allies, know what to do next. For a while, at least, the surviving Nazis are free to imagine any rosy, surreal future they wish. Days turn into weeks and a caretaker regime does what all governments naturally do; it grows. Welcome to the Flensburg Reich of Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz!

And into this unhinged world sail four brothers, Manni, Franzi, Ziggy and Sebastian, the once-famous Flying Magical Loerber Brothers and the toast of Prewar Berlin. This time, though, they’re not out to entertain. They’re Jews, they’re spies, they’re assassins and they’re out for revenge.
(Germania by Brendan McNally, first published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster, now also available on Kindle here)