In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a 2003 alternate history novel by American author Harry Turtledove,[1] expanded from the eponymous short story.

The events occur against a backdrop that parallels the Soviet Union's last days, with characters based upon Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and others.

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 anti-Semitic propaganda that she had always learned and parroted without question.

Willi, doubting Erika's fidelity due to her constant flirting with Heinrich, begins an extra-marital affair with his secretary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Wehrmacht uses jet aircraft, panzers, U-boats, armoured personnel carriers, assault rifles, and a variety of naval warships.

Jet airliners, televisions (called televisors), computers (although the Internet has not reached the same level as its real-life counterpart for fear of it being a "security nightmare"), modern cars, microwaves, and dishwashers are used throughout the Reich.

(In real-life, the Nazi state already used the punchcards developed by IBM to mark out the Jews and eventually arrest them and send them to extermination camps.

Although it is possible for a woman to have an academic career, the few who do so face great difficulties and must engage in daily, petty struggles to gain privileges that are granted to men.

Although the Jews are considered to be exterminated in 2010, anti-Semitic stereotypes remain strong in popular culture and official propaganda and are an important part of school education.

The books of anti-Semitic author Julius Streicher (Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow, No Jew on His Oath, and The Poison Mushroom) are universal reading for German children.

In one passage, an industrial accident in the Ruhr is reported on television as having caused the deaths of "Twelve Aryans and an unknown number of Untermenschen."

Unlike Jews, Gypsies, and other "inferior races," which are thought to have been wiped out" homosexuals continue to arise and are hunted by the security police unless they have political connections to protect them.

The Soldier's Hall commemorates the German Reich's military might by exhibiting the radioactive remains of the Liberty Bell (displayed behind lead glass), gliders that were used to invade Britain, the first Panzer IV to enter the Kremlin, and the railroad carriage in which Imperial Germany surrendered to the Allies in 1918, at Compiègne, France, and in which France surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940.

The Arch of Triumph is 170 m wide and 1700 m deep although it is modelled on the smaller Arc de Triomphe in Paris; much of the Berlin district's automobile traffic transits through it.

Captured enemy weapons and battle wreckage (a British fighter plane, a Soviet tank, a US submarine conning tower) are displayed outside the station.

Berlin also has the headquarters to the key government ministries: Air and Space, Justice, Interior, Transport, Food, Economics, Colonial, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, and the Führer's Office.

The Kurfürstendamm is a commercial district that glitters with neon signs and reflected sun light, but the citizens of Berlin use the street's full name in their daily lives, instead of the abbreviated slang of the native.

Berlin is culturally vibrant by offering residents and visitors a wildly successful musical on Churchill and Stalin and cosmopolitan cuisines, but under the Reinheitsgebot, the nation's medieval beer-purity law bans the importation of Japanese beer.

Some areas of the city have been in ruins for over 70 years because of both the harsh reparations imposed on the British by the Germans and the partisan uprisings that were completely crushed only by the mid-1970s.