Fatherland

executed by the Israelis in 1962. Karl Schöngarth was condemned to death by a British court in 1946. Otto Hoffmann was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment by a U.S. military court. Heinrich Müller went missing at the end of the war. The others continued to live in either Germany or South America.
    The following documents quoted in the text are authentic: Heydrich's invitation to the Wannsee Conference; Göring's order to Heydrich of July 31, 1941; the dispatches of the German ambassador describing the comments of Joseph P. Kennedy; the order from the Auschwitz Central Construction Office; the railway timetable (abridged); the extracts from the Wannsee Conference minutes; the memorandum on the use of prisoners' hair.
    Where I have created documents, I have tried to do so on the basis of fact—for example, the Wannsee Conference was postponed, its minutes were written up in a much fuller form by Eichmann and subsequently edited by Heydrich; Hitler did—notoriously—avoid putting his name to anything like a direct order for the Final Solution but almost certainly issued a verbal instruction in the summer of 1941.
    The Berlin of this book is the Berlin Albert Speer planned to build.
    Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Cecilia Gallerani was recovered from Germany at the end of the war and returned to Poland.
    Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been.
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

    GLOCKEN VERLAG LIMITED: Six lines from The Merry Widow translated by Christopher Hassall. Copyright © 1959 by Glocken Verlag Ltd. Rights throughout the British Commonwealth of Nations, its Protectorates, Dependencies and Mandated Territories, Eire, and all the United States of America by Glocken Verlag Limited; published in all other countries by Ludwig Doblinger (Bernard Herzmansky). Reprinted by permission.

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS: Excerpt from the translation of "Marschliedchen" from page 191 of Hitler and the Final Solution by Gerald Fleming. Copyright © 1984. Reprinted by permission.