Overview

Encapsulated within a Baby-Boomer's memoir of growing up in St. Louis under the shadow of our Greatest Generation, you will find the story of a small hotel located in the Bavarian Alps at a place known as Hitler's Mountain., and the British plot to murder the leader of the Third Reich. This story will transport you from our nation's heartland to a bygone era of elegance, power, and heartbreak. Come, join in this journey to remember, a two-part tale that begins as the author returns to the land of his mother's parents-Germany. "Before my flight had left Lambert St. Louis Airport, an unseen hand came to guide me. In Luxembourg, I was led to where a relation had crash landed his P-38 fighter-bomber during the Battle of the Bulge. In Bavaria, a grey-haired woman told me of her grandparent's home where she once served breakfast to the Twentieth Century's most powerful man. In Austria I was brought before a weathered oaken door. Should I open it, will I be treated as an interloper if I do?" Following a three-week, nine-nation trip, he returned home profoundly moved by what had been seen and experienced. As an amateur historian he was faced with the reality of a half-century of bookish studies. Reflecting, he kept asking, "What if?" What if the war could have ended months earlier? What if my relation had not died alone upon that windswept hill in the Ardennes? What if the German town of Wurzburg, like so many others, had not been brutally bombed into rubble in the spring of 1945? What might have happened had Britain's S.O.E. had gone ahead with their plan to kill Hitler? What if?