As March uncovers more details, he realises that he is caught up in a political scandal involving senior Nazi Party officials, who are apparently being systematically murdered under staged circumstances.

Nebe, a veteran of the pre-Nazi period, suggests that he is engaged in a power struggle against Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS, a potential successor to the elderly Hitler.

March meets with Charlotte "Charlie" Maguire, an American journalist of German descent, who was secretly contacted by one of the victims, Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, and discovered his body.

Maguire tells March that Stuckart had wanted to defect to the United States and claimed to possess important information that would help his case.

Upon their return to Berlin, March eventually discovers that several documents related to all victims have been removed from the Reich archives, but that an initial invitation for a political conference centered around "resolving" the Jewish question in 1941 was overlooked by the Gestapo.

Recovering them, March and Maguire discover the truth: in 1942, Heydrich has summoned dozens of officials to a conference in Wannsee to plan the Final Solution, the extermination of all the Jews which few Germans are aware of beyond rumors.

The elimination was hurried however due to an upcoming meeting of Hitler and US President Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., by ensuring that the fate of the missing Jews can never be revealed.

Nebe reveals to March that Germany needs the Americans to stop supporting the Soviet guerillas in the east due to the abject failure of Hitler's Lebensraum policy.

Bühler, Stuckart and Luther had realised in 1942 that Heydrich's refusal to produce a signed order from Hitler authorising the Final Solution was meant to shield him politically and let others take the blame if needed.

In the cellars of Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, March is tortured but does not reveal Maguire's location, aware that the longer he holds out is the more time she has to get away with the story.

Odilo Globocnik, Heydrich's right-hand man who had been responsible for the assassinations, boasts that Auschwitz and the other camps have been totally razed and that March will never know the truth for certain.

[1] Throughout the novel, Harris gradually explains, in a fictional backstory, the developments that allowed Germany to prevail in World War II.

[1] A significant early point of divergence is that Heydrich survived the assassination attempt by Czechoslovak fighters in May 1942 (he was killed in reality) and later became head of the SS.

Kennedy, however, remains neutral to avoid further damaging relations and refers only to vague "human rights violations" that he wishes to investigate when he visits Berlin.

A greatly reduced Soviet rump state— presumably composed of Siberia, the Russian Far East and Central Asia—still exists, with its capital in Omsk.

The countries of western and northern Europe have formed the European Community (EC), a pro-German economic bloc with its parliament located in Berlin.

It is made up of Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

New German buildings are constructed with mandatory bomb shelters, and the Reichsarchiv [de] claims to have been built to withstand a direct missile hit.

The Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933, the legal basis for Hitler's dictatorship, remain in effect, and the press, radio and television are all tightly controlled.

However, the imminent diplomatic meeting between Hitler and Kennedy forces German propaganda to shift to a more positive image of the United States and its people.

Despite its ideological and moral decline, Germany maintains a high standard of living, having built an empire at the expense of the rest of Europe.

In spite of the general repression, the Beatles' real-life Hamburg engagements occur in the novel and have already been denounced in the state-controlled press.

Nazi organisations such as Kraft durch Freude still exist and fulfill their original roles such as providing holidays to resort areas under German control.

[16] The British scholar Nancy Browne noted the similarities between the ending of Fatherland and that of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls: "Both novels end with the protagonist about to embark on a single-handed armed confrontation with a large number of Fascists or Nazis, of whose outcome there can be no doubt - but the reader does not witness the moment of his presumed death.... Like Hemingway's Robert Jordan, Xavier March is facing this last moment with an exhilaration born of having no further doubts and dilemmas, no more crucial decisions which need to be made, nothing but going through on his chosen course and dying in a just cause.

[17] The review by The Guardian, written by John Mullan, noted that Harris had acknowledged a debt to Len Deighton's SS-GB (1978), an earlier postwar alternative or "counter-factual" history, which was set in Great Britain in late 1941 after the (fictional) British surrender.

The ending is changed slightly to allow for the limitations of the medium: the entire Auschwitz camp is discovered in an abandoned state, and Maguire's passage into Switzerland is confirmed to have occurred.

The unabridged audiobook version of the novel was released by Random House Audio in 1993, read by Werner Klemperer, a refugee from Nazi Germany [citation needed] who is best remembered for his two-time Emmy Award-winning role of bumbling Colonel Klink on the 1960s TV series Hogan's Heroes.