In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a 2003 alternate history novel by American author Harry Turtledove, expanded from the eponymous short story. The title comes from Psalm 23:5. The novel depicts a world in which the United States remained isolationist and so did not participate in the Second World War, thus allowing a victory to the Axis powers, which divided the world. However, some years after the war, the Third World War occurred and featured the Axis powers defeating the United States and Canada.
Set in 2010, the novel focuses on Heinrich Gimpel and a small group of Jews who survived the Holocaust by passing as Gentiles; all the book's viewpoint characters are members of this secret Jewish group. The events occur against a backdrop that parallels the Soviet Union's last days, with characters based upon Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and others.
Plot summary Wehrmacht officer Heinrich Gimpel astonishes his 10-year-old daughter, Alicia, with a secret that has been hidden from her all her life: the family is Jewish. He explains that the Gimpels, their friends Walther and Esther Stutzman, and their extended families all belong to the remnants of Jews who now survive by hiding in plain sight within the very society that wants them dead. Now old enough, by family tradition, to be trusted with this life-or-death deception, Alicia is obliged to hide the truth from her friends, her classmates, and even her younger sisters, even as she is forced to regard her school's racist curriculum from a new perspective that leaves her sick and angry over all the antisemitic propaganda that she had always learned and parroted without question.
Meanwhile, Heinrich finds himself caught in the marital strife between his co-worker, Willi Dorsch, and Willi's wife, Erika. Willi, doubting Erika's fidelity due to her constant flirting with Heinrich, begins an extra-marital affair with his secretary. Embittered by her husband's infidelity, Erika seeks to have a retaliatory affair with Heinrich. He resists, which leads to Erika accusing him of being a Jew and Heinrich being arrested by the Sicherheitspolizei. It is only after Erika realizes that her accusation caused Heinrich's children to be taken as well that she confesses her lie and attempts to commit suicide, unaware the entire time that Heinrich and his family actually are Jewish.
Esther Stutzman, who works as a receptionist in a doctor's office, also experiences a close call with Nazi policies when her friends Richard and Maria Klein, closeted Jews like herself, bring their ailing eight-month-old baby, Paul, in for a checkup. The diagnosis, Tay–Sachs disease, is a disease known to be prevalent among Jews. A subsequent investigation into his family background would spell doom for his parents and any names that they might be forced to reveal under torture. Although Esther's husband, Walther, is able to hack into the Reich's computer network and change the Klein's family history, it is the revelation that Reichsführer-SS Lothar Prützmann has a nephew with Tay-Sachs that brings the investigation to a halt.
In the background, the death of the current Führer, Kurt Haldweim (modelled on the real-life Austrian president Kurt Waldheim), causes him to be replaced by the reform-minded Heinz Buckliger, who relaxes the oppressive laws of the Reich. In a secret speech, with word-of-mouth spreading it to the populace, the new Führer denounces his predecessors and says that the Reich committed crimes in the past. Reactionary opposition rallies around the SS, and the populist Gauleiter of Berlin, Rolf Stolle, champions accelerated reform.
Things come to a head with the announcement of relatively free elections: candidates need not be Nazi Party members though they must be Aryan. Led by Reichsführer-SS Lothar Prützmann, the SS carries out a conservative coup d'état, imprisons the Führer, and installs former High Commissioner of Ostland Affairs, Odilo Globocnik, as the new Führer. However, Stolle instigates a people power movement, which the Wehrmacht supports. The coup d'état is defeated after Walther Stutzman salts the country's computer network with the information about Reichsführer-SS Prützmann's Tay-Sachs afflicted nephew. Soon, Berlin comes to the conclusion that Prützmann is a Jew, which definitively turns the tide against the coup. In the aftermath, Prützmann kills himself, Globocnik is lynched, and Buckliger is re-enstated as Führer (albeit harrowed by his detainment and eclipsed by the popular Stolle).
At the end of the novel, elections deliver a pro-reform majority to the Reichstag, with Stolle as its speaker, and produces a mandate for the independence of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in a concurrent referendum. Also, the Gimpels and the Stutzmans gather to tell the ten-year-old Francesca that she is a Jew.
Viewpoint characters
Heinrich Gimpel, a hidden Jew serving as an officer at the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin. Heinrich is careful and meticulous about maintaining his masquerade and originally even from the reader, who does not before nearly a whole chapter learn that Gimpel is a hidden Jew and a leader of a secret Jewish community. Heinrich's specific job is to monitor the American payment of tribute to Germany and to detect the frequent attempts to avoid payment. Gimpel is arrested because a friend's wife denounces him as a Jew although she did not know that he really is one after he resisted her sexual advances. Gimpel is eventually released from custody, with an SS major who escorts him out the door casually remarking to him: "You find us in the oddest places." Lise Gimpel, Heinrich's wife, also a Jew. Alicia Gimpel, Heinrich and Lise's ten-year-old daughter and oldest of three sisters. At the beginning of the book, she is initiated into the secret that she and other family and friends are Jewish. She is stunned but gradually comes to accept it. Susanna Weiss, a Medieval English scholar at the Friedrich Wilhelm University. She is also one of the few surviving Jews left in the Reich. Esther Stutzman, a receptionist at a Berlin area pediatrician's office. She and her husband, Walther, are also hidden Jews. She is a tuckerization of the well-known science-fiction/fantasy author Esther Friesner. Walther Stutzman, a computer programmer at Zeiss. He has unauthorized access into many of the Reich's databases using codes created by his father, who was involved with transferral of paper records to computer records. He can assign false Aryan pedigrees to Jewish people to allow them to avoid detection by the Reich.
Setting
World politics and geography
Political alignment The Führer of the Greater German Reich is the world's most powerful political leader. Besides the Reich itself, the "Greater Germanic Empire" includes countries that are occupied (but not annexed) and others that are allied. The occupied countries have their own governments but limited sovereignty; the Nazis interfere in their internal affairs, especially in applying racial ideology. The allies, though technically independent, are subject to heavy Nazi influence; most of them represent the local varieties of racist, fascist, and radical nationalist forces.
Italy's empire is around the Mediterranean Sea, including the parts of Africa granted by the Reich. The Nazis compel the Italians to carry out large-scale massacres of Arabs in their territories in the Middle East. The nation is controlled by the House of Savoy (headed by King Umberto) and the Duce of the Italian Empire. While much of Africa is divided up among Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, an "Aryan-dominated" Union of South Africa remains as an independent ally of the German Reich. Spain is mentioned as being governed by a caudillo, but no mention is made about the status of the Spanish monarchy.
Although it is less powerful than Germany, Imperial Japan is a nuclear power that keeps the Reich at bay with the implicit threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, Japan has its own subordinate rulers (only the Emperor of Manchukuo is mentioned) in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Despite having "an ocean of slave labor" at its disposal, Japan now concentrates upon developing high technologies. Despite the Germano–Nipponese alliance, the Nazis consider the Japanese to be racially inferior and lacking in creativity, using propaganda pointing to a perceived decrease in Japan's technological advances as proof. Even so, Japanese tourists, students and restaurants are commonly seen within the Reich.
United States and Canada In the 1960s and the 1970s, Germany and the Axis powers defeated the United States and Canada in the Third World War with the nuclear bombs that they had developed. The key American cities of Washington, DC and Philadelphia were destroyed by the bombs, with their environments being rendered uninhabitable for years to come. Other cities such as New York City, St. Louis, and Chicago were heavily damaged by conventional bombing raids. The US capital was moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where a pro-Nazi puppet government was set up, and the Reich maintains Wehrmacht occupation forces in New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha itself. Upon conquering the US, the Einsatzkommandos and the American white supremacists systematically kill the country's Jewish and most of its Black populations, with any remaining Black people being used for slave labor by the Reich.
The US pays annual tribute, an important income for Germany's economy, despite US hyperinflation and the US dollar's disappearance as a world currency. Whenever possible, the US evades paying the tribute.
Other occupied nations Henry IX is the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom (although his lineage is never explained), which has been annexed by the Reich. The British Union of Fascists is the governing party, with Charlie LyntonTony Blair's full name is Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. as Prime Minister; however, it is internally divided over the extent of the Reich's influence in its governance (reminiscent of British euroscepticism) and the selection process for a new Führer.
The Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Serbs are killed because they are Untermenschen, and the Arabs for being as "Semitic as Jews." Moreover, the Reich, Italian Empire, Portugal, and Spain commit the genocide of the African populations and enslave survivors. South Africa, however, still continues its apartheid and so ironically keeps the Black South Africans from being either killed off or used for slave labor.
Any Jews found are immediately killed on sight, and while "the surviving Russians were pushed far east of the Urals," there is much guerrilla fighting, which requires forts to protect the German settlers.
The Nazis treat the Czechs, Croats, and Bulgarians relatively well, despite being Slavs: the Czechs greatly contribute to the Reich's economy, and the Croats and Bulgarians savagely persecute the Serbs by severe racial discrimination, suppressing rebellions, and enslavement or killing of dissidents. Iranians and Indians are classified as "Aryan" and so are not persecuted by the Nazis; some are even invited to study at German universities.
Technology
The level of technology in the novel is much the same as in the actual 21st century. The Wehrmacht uses jet aircraft, panzers, U-boats, armoured personnel carriers, assault rifles, and a variety of naval warships. The "Ministry of Air and Space" is mentioned as having planted a permanent outpost on the Moon and to be carrying out a human landing on Mars, and it may be planning a crewed mission to the Jovian moons. Orbital weather platforms are also mentioned in the novel.