The World That Could Have Been

What if Adolf Hitler had developed nuclear weaponry by 1941 and had won the war … and only you had the power to travel back in time to stop him? THE WORLD THAT COULD HAVE BEEN, by Bijan Anjomi, one of America’s most successful nonfiction authors in the field of spirituality, tells the story of John Potter, a restaurant owner in Nazi-controlled Orange County, California in the year 1967. John, forty, like others of his generation, has never come to terms with the Nazi takeover of the United States (and the rest of the world), and harbors the deep desire to contribute somehow to the movement that would uproot the Nazi occupation from his beloved country.

At the same time, John’s father, an intelligence agent who had been sent to Germany by the United States government in the early 1930s, was captured and killed by the Nazis, thus contributing a personal level of dedication on John’s part to the anti-Nazi cause.

The only problem is that one man can have no effect on the future of world affairs … especially a man running a restaurant that, like it or not, caters to high officials of the Nazi regime in Southern California. But then it dawns on John: look how much evil one individual, Adolf Hitler, was able to perpetrate in his lifetime (which in the story, never ends, as Hitler celebrates his ninety-first birthday as the story opens). If one man is able to create so much evil in the world, John muses, perhaps one man could create an equal or superior amount of good.

John gets his wish when one day he discovers a time travel machine placed in his basement by the “Ancients,” the spirit guides who have decided that the time has come for mankind to oppose Hitler and the Nazis. More to the point, they have decided that John is the right person to go back in time and change the course of history, depriving the Nazis of their world domination.

John, of course, can’t believe that a time machine could possibly exist. He gives it try, going forty years into the future, only to discover that the Nazi hold on power is even more complete. So he returns to the present day and risks his life to withdraw a sizable enough amount of money from the bank to purchase a contraband Nazi uniform in his size from 1931, the first year to which the Ancients have directed him to travel.

John’s actions do not escape the notice of his “treuhandler,” the woman in charge of maintaining that his business adheres to Nazi standards. She appears to be arresting him…and then confesses her own hatred of the Nazi regime and agrees to come with him back into the past.

John and Rebecca make several forays into the future and the past, saving the life of Albert Einstein in 1931 and learning of the Nazi missile base at Peenemunde, on the North Sea. Pursued by the Gestapo and in search of both Einstein and John’s father, on the spy mission which would claim his life (unless John can redirect history), John and Rebecca act as a team to destroy the Nazi hold on power, rescue Einstein from imprisonment at Peenemunde, and thus eliminate Nazi control from the United States.

They return to the present day to be reunited with John’s parents (now that history has changed, he no longer dies on his mission, and so he is alive in the present day). They also discover that all traces of Nazi presence have vanished from the United States…but then they get a new message from the Ancients. Hitler himself has survived the bunker fire-a doppelganger or double was left for dead there-and in the sequel to this fast-paced, exciting, and ultimately spiritual work of action fiction, John and Rebecca find themselves on Hitler’s trail.