The Boys from Brazil (1976) is a fiction thriller novel by Ira Levin. It was subsequently made into a movie which was released in 1978 (see The Boys from Brazil (film)). This is one of the earliest pieces of science fiction to deal seriously with the prospect of cloning. 1976 (MCMLXXVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1976 calendar). ... The thriller is a broad genre of literature, film, and television, with numerous overlapping sub-genres. ... Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe; title page of 1719 newspaper edition A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended fictional narrative in prose. ... Ira Levin (born August 27, 1929 in New York) is a Jewish-American author of fiction thriller novels and is also a playwright and songwriter. ... 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ... The Boys from Brazil was a 1978 thriller directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... Cloning is the process of creating an identical copy of an original. ...

Story line

Yakov Liebermann is an elderly gentleman who is known as a Nazi hunter: he runs a center in Vienna that documents crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Holocaust. 'Center' is a big word: the waning interest of the Western nations in tracking down Nazi criminals has forced him to move the center to his lodgings. Nazi hunters are private individuals and groups who track down and gather information on fugitive Nazis and others so that they can be brought to justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Holocaust. ... Vienna (German: Wien ; Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian: Beč, Czech: Vídeň, Hungarian: Bécs, Romanian: Viena, Romani: Bech or Vidnya, Russian: Вена, Slovak: Viedeň, Slovenian: Dunaj) is the capital of Austria, and also one of the nine States of Austria. ... Selection at the Auschwitz camp in 1944, where the Nazis chose whom to kill immediately and whom to use as slave labor or for medical experimentation. ...

Then, in September 1974, he receives a disturbing phone call from a young man who claims he has just finished eavesdropping on the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, the concentration camp medical doctor who performed horrible experiments on Jewish victims. According to the young man, Mengele is activating the Kameradenwerk for a strange and gruesome assignment: he is sending out six Nazis to kill 94 men, who share a few common traits. All men are civil servants and all of them have to be killed on a certain date, give or take a few days. Josef Mengele Dr. Josef Mengele (March 16, 1911 – February 7, 1979) was a Nazi German SS officer and a physician in the concentration camp Aus chwitz. ... It has been suggested that Internment be merged into this article or section. ... Odessa is the name of a city in Ukraine. ...

Before the young man can finish the conversation, there is a muffled sound of sudden action, then icy nothing, then the line goes dead.

Liebermann hesitates about what to do: he gets so many prank calls. But what if what the young man said is true? He decides to try to find out what's going on. A crazy hunt for Mengele and his boys ensues.

Notes

The book claims that the characters, with the exception of the 'persons of note', are not intended to represent specific living persons. However, the Liebermann character bears a more than passing resemblance to Simon Wiesenthal. Simon Wiesenthal Simon Wiesenthal, KBE, (Buczacz, December 31, 1908 – Vienna, September 20, 2005) was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer who became a Nazi hunter after surviving the Holocaust. ...

The meaning of the title only becomes evident later in the book when Yakov Liebermann begins to discover why the 94 men are to be killed.

See also

Alternate history novels that deal with the Nazi regime: Alternate history (fiction) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...

• Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
• Robert Harris's Fatherland
• Stephen Fry's Making History