The Nazi Conspiracy: The secret plot to kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch
Pub date: 2023
How I read it: Audiobook
Narrator: Scott Brick. He employed a dramatic and theatrical tone throughout which went well with the way the authors laid out the subject matter. He’s apparently an audiobook narrator superstar with over 800 books like Jurassic Park and the Jack Reacher series under his belt!
Tags: WWII, history, Japan, Russia, Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill
In a nutshell: There are a couple of iconic photos of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill together – the most famous is of the leaders at the Yalta conference, but they also met and posed during the Tehran conference in 1943. This book describes the long path to that meeting – it took years to come together – and includes many side stories from the Second World War. New to me was the improbable but successful Nazi effort to break Mussolini out of his ‘prison’ in the mountains of Italy.
Prior to reading this I was unaware of the Nazi plan to assassinate the Allied leaders while all three were in the same place at the same time in Iran. Can you imagine the chaos that would have ensued if they succeeded?
Writing: The Nazi Conspiracy reads like a thriller – which of course it is. It takes the reader back and forth in time and focuses on the players as well as the plots. The authors clearly put research first and did a great job of combining the historical facts into an engaging tale complete with twists and cliffhangers.
And another thing: Meltzer has similar books about secret plots to kill George Washington (The First Conspiracy) and Abraham Lincoln (The Lincoln Conspiracy).
Bottom line: There are so many aspects to WWII, so many fronts and battles, we can never understand it all. But I believe that we owe it to the over 75 million souls who lost their lives in the war to try. Books like The Nazi Conspiracy go a long way toward answering questions and helping us to grasp the magnitude of the war. It compels us to keep learning, to keep peeling back the layers in an effort to understand.
bookthrasher 