There is a Cold War between the former Axis Powers allies, Germany and Japan, both of whom have nuclear weapons and are engaged in an arms race akin to that between the United States and Soviet Union in our own timeline.

Slavs and blacks are raised at "laboratories" and "farms" where their vocal cords are cut at birth and having the legal status not of slaves but of "domestic animals"; naked black gladiators fight to the death at the Madison Square Garden (the Roman "thumbs up" or "down" are modernized into green and red buttons, with a computer making the tally and automatically electrocuting the losing gladiator); children being encouraged by TV programs to torture and kill animals; policemen routinely carrying mobile torture kits for "on the spot interrogations" and having the power of extrajudicial execution against "Enemies of the Reich"; body parts of murdered Jews on sale at souvenir shops, with "collectors" trying to have "a complete collection" of samples from all extermination camps; Christianity (and presumably other religions as well) suppressed in favor of Odinist temples; pedophilia being legal with parents selling their children to sex brothels; and naked Slavic women being crucified in eroticized torture shows, among other horrors.

"Respectable" society is murderous, but when the protagonist starts digging deeper into the underworld, he discovers, hidden but still there, (what we would call) decent or even heroic people: first, old men still playing chess at the tables in Washington Square; a former Roman Catholic priest who had once broken under Gestapo interrogation and who dreams of a second chance to die as a martyr (the detective protagonist grants him his wish); a member of the underground, known as "Patties" (from George S. Patton, who together with Douglas MacArthur was executed in the "St. Louis Trials") still carrying on a desperate anti-German fight against all odds; finally the hunted Jew himself (who turns out to be from our own world, having fallen into this world by the worst of bad fortune).

"[2] Gavriel David Rosenfeld, in his book The World Hitler Never Made (2005), suggests that Norden might have been inspired to write his novel by a ten-day-long interview he conducted with Albert Speer, which was published in the June 1971 edition of Playboy.

In support of the latter view can be cited such features as that except for one German appearing briefly in the first chapter, all Nazis in the book are Americans, including the members of the SS and Gestapo, the concentration camp guards and commanders etc.