He meets Professor Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has a strong personal interest in Hitler, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.

They decide to use a permanent male contraceptive pill, stolen from Michael's girlfriend (a biochemistry researcher), who, due to his continual distraction, has left him to take a position at Princeton University.

More alarmingly, Gloder's Nazis also had a head start on the research and development of nuclear weapons, which led to the destruction of Moscow and Leningrad, eliminating Joseph Stalin and his Politburo in this alternative 1938.

The Greater German Reich annexes Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Turkey, and invades the remnants of the former Soviet Union.

Because there was no sixties upsurge of social liberalism and decriminalisation of homosexuality in (Nazi-occupied) Western Europe in this world, in the US the latter is still a felony and racial segregation is still active.

Michael is apprehended by the authorities, who believe that he is a possible spy—since Britain had been under Nazi rule for nearly half a century, anyone speaking like a Briton is a suspect.

With Michael and Steve's help, they plan to send a dead rat to poison the well so that it will be pumped clean of the sterilising water.

He gives up his career in academia, figuring he can at least make some money "writing" the songs that he remembers from the previous reality.

For example, there is an early scene where Hitler's mother's vomits when trying to draw water and getting out of the pump a stinking maggot-filled mass; this turns out at the book's end to be the result of the protagonist sending back in time the rotting bodies of dead rats in order to prevent Hitler's father from drinking the sterilizing water.

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times found the comic tone of the book "shockingly tasteless" and "deeply offensive" given the subject matter.

[2] Israeli researcher Asaf Ben Vered[3] noted that "The protagonist of Making History gets told that "There are no Jews left in Europe".

In that case, in the 1990s there should have still been a big number of sad old and middle aged Jews with no progeny, and the Nazis could not have kept them completely hidden from the world.

(...) The book avoids the real moral dilemma which it could have easily posed and which would have made it a far more profound and thought-provoking work.