The Boys from Brazil (novel)

For the film of the same name, see The Boys from Brazil (film).

The Boys from Brazil (1976) is a thriller novel by Ira Levin. It was subsequently made into a movie of the same name that was released in 1978.

Plot

Yakov Liebermann is an elderly gentleman who is known as a Nazi hunter: he runs a center in Vienna that documents crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Holocaust. The waning interest of the Western nations in tracking down Nazi criminals has forced him to move the center to his lodgings.

Then, in September 1974, Liebermann receives a disturbing phone call from a young man who claims he has just finished eavesdropping on the so-called "Angel of Death," Dr. Josef Mengele, the concentration camp medical doctor who performed horrible experiments on camp victims during World War II. According to the young man, Mengele is activating the Kameradenwerk for a strange assignment: he is sending out six Nazis to kill 94 men, who share a few common traits. All men are civil servants, and all of them have to be killed on or about a certain date.

Before the young man can finish the conversation, there is a muffled sound of sudden action, followed by silence, and then the telephone line goes dead.

Liebermann hesitates about what to do: he gets so many prank calls. But what if what the young man said is true? He decides to try to investigate. It eventually transpires each of the 94 targets has a son aged 13, a clone of Adolf Hitler planted by Mengele. The assassination of the civil servant father is an attempt to mimic the death of Hitler's own father, with the hope of creating a new Führer for the Nazi movement. This suggests that the Third Reich can develop again into a new superpower.

See also

Alternate history novels that deal with the Nazi regime:

• Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
• Robert Harris's Fatherland
• Stephen Fry's Making History
• It Happened Here
• The Ultimate Solution
• 1945
• SS-GB
• In the Presence of Mine Enemies

Clive Cussler's Novel "Atlantis Found" features a storyline about escaped Nazi war criminals who plan to clone Hitler.

Allan Folsom's novel "The Day After Tomorrow" also dealt with a similar theme of resurrecting Hitler. The theme of a clone produced in order to give "a second life" to a dead VIP is dealt with (in a quite different way) in the science fiction novel Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh, and in Joshua Son of None by Nancy Freedman.

External links

• Review on the Ira Levin website