What if I told you at the height of World War II there was a secret Nazi plot that would've changed history?

A plan to assassinate the big three.

Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill.

Welcome to "Between the Covers", number one New York Times Bestselling Author, Brad Meltzer is here.

And you know he writes pageturning thrillers, but he also writes nonfiction.

And today we're looking at "The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill".

I am so glad you are here.

Isn't it nice to be back in person again?

I think one of the last interviews I did was with you in 2020, and then we all went away, and now we get to finally be back again.

And I am so glad you were our first one.

So welcome, welcome back.

I can't wait to talk about this book.

First of all, there are these heartpounding scenes, there's intrigue, there are body doubles.

Yeah, it sounds like our Brad Meltzer novel.

But it's not a novel because this is true.

So, if we can set the stage a little bit, because what really got me started on this, the planning that was involved to get these three giants together for this meeting.

Tell me a little bit about that.

So you have a moment where you see, we're in Tehran Iran, we're in 1943 in January, and the presidential motorcade is going through the street.

And everyone's looking to see the president, everyone's waving, and there's a man who's waving back but that's not the president at all.

The real President of the United States, obviously FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is in a different car.

Not in a motorcade at all, he's in a beat up car with a Jeep in front of him speeding through the back alleys of the street.

And what they're doing is trying to hide him and get him to the Russian embassy so they can have a meeting of the big three.

Of Winston Churchill, of FDR, and of Joseph Stalin.

And this is how the plan is taking place.

I just ruined Chapter 1 of "The Nazi Conspiracy" for you, but that's Chapter 1.

And what you see is the big three has never gotten together.

They've never been together all in on room to make their plans together.

And what "The Nazi Conspiracy" is about is a Nazi plot to kill them as they all finally get together for the very first time in 1943.

That is a chilling sentence.

There are things in this book that make your hair stand on end.

Some of us.

But there's one thing that I, and this is just a little side thing, Churchill, not Churchill, but FDR, this was the first, the second time I guess, he'd flown by plane, correct?

Yeah, well that's the thing is, you know, we think today if you wanna put the leaders together, it's so easy to do.

Back then it was so much harder.

I mean, travel was by train for the most part, you really didn't even go by car.

I mean, FDR to get there takes part of the trip by boat.

He's on a big giant uboat.

Can you imagine?

I mean, so you're talking... One of the things that they had when they wanted him to leave is they said, if you leave, you have to understand no legislation can be passed while you're gone.

And the Constitution requires certain amounts of time from when a law is voted to be yes, and the president has to vote on it.

So they're trying to just figure out, how do we get there and back quickly enough for the technology limits that they have?

So, the technology is the smallest part of it.

Plus you've got a bunch of Nazis trying to kill you as you're trying to do all this.

So, logistics is one thing, but gamesmanship and egos, oh my goodness!

And this is just one little part that you, there was a message that Roosevelt wanted to get to Stalin.

And I believe he's asking Joseph Davies to handdeliver this message, totally cutting out Churchill.

So who do you trust?

Well, that's what kind of caught me off guard.

I found this story a number of years ago, and I remember thinking, wait, there's a secret plot by Nazis to kill FDR and Churchill and Stalin at the height of World War II, that's just interesting on its own.

But what you just pointed out is exactly what got me.

Which is just how impossible it was to manage not just three egos, not just three countries, but also the dynamics that were just, no one was fully committed to anyone else.

We now tell the story of, Churchill and Roosevelt where dear friends, and they had each other's back.

That's not how it was.

FDR had his agenda, 'cause he wanted what's best for the United States.

FDR agenda is different than Churchill, who wants what's best for, of course, the British.

And Stalin is being slaughtered by Nazis on a daily basis in Leningrad, one of the biggest murders ever to happen in a city in all of history.

He's trying to just keep his people alive.

So it's completely tenuous.

And so you have exactly what you said is, FDR says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute.

We gotta do what's good for us.

Don't tell Churchill what we're doing, let me talk to Stalin first and get him in line with me."

And you're literally watching these guys who are such great friends, or supposedly great friends, work around each other to get what they really needed in this moment in time.

It's like, I'm thinking, there's not enough room for the egos of these three men to fit into one room.

And the security issues, they get there, like you said, they had to move FDR to the Russian compound.

What could go wrong?

Yeah, I mean what happens is, right?

They say, wait a minute, we think that the American compound has been compromised.

And now you go, "Well, we can't stay here."

So Churchill says, "Well, you should come stay with me in the British compound."

And Stalin says, "You should come stay with me in the Russian compound."

So, who do you trust?

Who has the better place?

Which one's gonna be best for all of them to meet, and don't forget, FDR also can't walk.

He's in a wheelchair.

Which of course, is being hidden for most of the country, but you have to take into account too, maybe putting them in Churchill's might be good for one meeting, but is it good for where all of them are gonna meet?

And you're watching all of this...

It's gamesmanship, is what's really happening.

And on top of that, it's not just egos, but these giant personalities.

So we have a moment, one of my favorite moments in the whole book is you see that FDR invites Churchill to come to the White House for the first time.

And they come and they have this great meeting, and they walk in, you know, Churchill says, "I want my drinks, and I want my bath, and I want my stuff."

And he's making the White House like it's his own and it's wonderful, and they walk in on Churchill one day, and Winston Churchill is completely naked out of the bath.

And he turns around, and this incredible personality, Winston Churchill looks and says, "The Prime Minister of Britain has nothing to hide from the president of the United States."

And I was like, we have to put that in the book.

It's just one of the great moments of history.

These are human beings at the end of the day, and they're trying to figure out what's best for themselves and for their countries.

And at this moment of pure madness, right?

The whole world is at stake.

World War II is is such an amazing topic and we all love it, but the reason we love it is 'cause there's rare moments in time where we know who's good and we know who's bad.

Look at our culture today where we're all fighting on different sides.

We know who the bad guys are, we know who the good guys are.

And what I love is, you see them push back.

You see the good guys not just win but push back and do the right thing at this moment where you know, absolutely know, millions of lives are truly at stake.

It wasn't also just a bit of roses at the compound where Churchill was either.

You were talking about a valet stealing information.

Yeah, so his own...

I don't wanna ruin this part, but let's talk about it.

You have obviously everyone...

When the Nazis find out that Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, and FDR are all gonna be together, you know what they think?

We have the greatest thing of all in any war planning.

We have an opportunity.

And once there's an opportunity to really damage the war effort, they have course poor resources.

They have teams of Nazis jumping down and paratrooping in the middle of the night to get there.

You have secret spies who are working the other side.

You have Winston Churchill's, as you said, own valet secretly giving information.

And we think we're so smart and we've got it all together, we don't realize how much the Nazis had cracked of all of our information.

And this isn't the late days of the war in 1945, this is the heart of it.

We're in 1943, and even 1942.

They've got all of our information and it keeps going.

So we don't even realize how much trouble we're really in at this moment in time.

We have to talk about some of the characters.

'Cause the plot is one thing, but there are these peripheral characters who just blew my mind.

And one is the man in Tehran who, from what I'm gathering, I think he thought the Germans had forgotten about him.

Franz Meyer.

So Franz Meyer, right?

So Franz Meyer is basically the smallest guy on the totem pole.

He's a guy who they put in, here you are, you're in the Nazi Party, you figured that I've got my spot, and they station you of all places, not in Germany, you're not going to Russia, you're not going to the forefront of everything, you're gonna go to Tehran.

And he's like, what, this is where I got?

This is not gonna be good.

But then it winds up, just at a pure, blind, dumb luck, guess where the meeting between Churchill and Stalin and FDR is gonna take place?

It's in Tehran.

But he'd been there for years.

He is a mole inside Tehran, and is hiding there thinking, "Well, hopefully I'm gonna get this underground network of people going, I'm gonna get everyone on our side, we're gonna find people who are loyal to the Nazi cause, we're gonna build this underground team.

And he thinks, you know, maybe we can do something one day, but they don't really care about him.

He finds that they really don't care about him.

Until, until moment where he finds out that the big three are meeting in Tehran.

And now Franz Meyer becomes the heart of potentially one of the most important secret missions in World War II history.

And no one knows about it.

And I don't wanna ruin this part of it, but needless to say, they bring another group of paratroops in, and you know 'cause you've read it already, everything goes wrong for them.

Nothing can go right for them.

Their leader winds up, I won't say whether he dies or not, but he dies, and over and over it just goes south and all this is happening while simultaneously Hitler has his own plans, and we should talk about those characters too, that are gonna come from the other side.

And to me, all these people are lost to history.

I didn't know about any of 'em when I started this project, but you just see, again, my core belief that it's these ordinary stories that become the most fascinating.

And for readers, they have to read this part because they have to read about Lily, his girlfriend, Oh, that's my favorite part.

What is it with spies and girlfriends, and they're always spilling secrets.

You know, I deal with a lot of people in the CIA and the FBI and Secret Service, all these organizations, when I write my thrillers.

And they always tell me, there's only three reasons why someone switches sides.

It's sex, it's money, and it's power.

And I always think, I've heard that a million times.

It's so cliche, it can't be true.

I've heard it a million times.

And then I read in this story, of course, Franz Meyer, how do they figure out what's really going on?

Is he's got a girlfriend.

And once you got a girlfriend, you got someone who knows your stuff that shouldn't know your stuff.

And again, I won't ruin this part of it, but when you find out how they find this girlfriend through the most mundane, silly moment, and the whole thing comes apart by just this...

But think what I love Ann, is that, if this moment goes the other way, all of history changes.

If everything goes right for these guys, all of history changes.

But it comes down to of all things, whose dentist you're using and who you're related to.

We're gonna leave that one right there.

And I wanna get to who I found the most heinous, brutal man in this story.

Otto, is it Skorzeny?

Skorzeny.

Handpicked by Hitler for this really dangerous mission with a glider.

Tell me as much or as little as you want about this.

No, this is the one I wanna talk about.

He's by far the most interesting character in the book that you don't know of.

Beyond Churchill, beyond Hitler himself, beyond FDR.

Is a man named Otto Skorzeny.

And Otto Skorzeny, Hitler brings all of his special forces, his best soldiers, his best fighters, brings them all to the Wolf's Lair, his headquarters, of course.

And he says, he lines them all up in a row and asks them one question, okay?

He's trying to figure out who's the best.

And he says, what do you think of Italy?

And every single one of the men give an answer that says, oh, you know, Italy is an ally of the Reich and so we support them, and they say, oh, we of course are loyal to the Reich and we're so loyal to you, to the F hrer, and Otto Skorzeny, at the end of the line, takes a chance.

And he instead raises his hand and says, "Sir, I am from Austria."

And he knows it's a gamble in that moment.

He knows that Adolph Hitler is from Austria.

And what no one in the line realizes is that during the First World War, is that Italy got a key piece of Austria that the Austrians are forever angry and hold a grudge over.

And he takes a gamble to say, you know what?

I'm just like you, right?

He says it right to Hitler's face, and in that moment Hitler finds his man and puts Skorzeny on a secret mission to end all secret missions.

You know what, Ann?

This incredible moment to rescue Mussolini.

It's the most amazing scene in the book where Skorzeny, handpicked by Hitler himself, gets hang gliders, fills them with nine other Nazi troops, and they parachute down and crash land.

Don't even parachute down, I would say crash land their gliders on the top of a mountain to rescue Mussolini.

I won't say what happens at the end, but you will not believe when Nazis are falling from the sky in the secret mission to end all secret missions.

In gliders.

In gliders of all things, and they say, you can't land on a runway, you're not allowed to land on the runway.

So they say, you know what?

Then we'll crash land.

Everyone hold tight.

I remember when my wife read that scene, she was like, this is the best scene in the book.

She's like, this is where "The Nazi Conspiracy"... You know, 'cause we know the stories of Adolph Hitler, and FDR, and Churchill.

But you never know all these other missions that were happening that changed all of history the way they played out.

You never knew what happened When Mussolini gets captured.

you'd never know who... Those things are just footnotes.

But I love footnotes, and so I love bringing these things to life.

That's what you're so good at.

But what kills me at the end of this, this man, I mean, this really happened.

We find him years later after the war.

You can't say what happened to him.

You can't say.

But that moment, let's talk about it.

That moment, Is so spectacular, right?

'Cause of course the question we had, Josh mentioned we work on these books together together and he worked on us when we did our History Channel shows, and he is an awardwinning documentarian.

And we had to research this book.

We didn't obviously just have to go to the archives of the United States and Britain, but we had to go to archives in Germany, and we had to get a Russian translator to translate what happened in Russia back then.

And so we're using all these, and the things that were most interesting to us, was, again, we've heard the stories from the American perspective.

We've heard the stories from the British perspective.

But now you're gonna hear what the Nazis were seeing.

And now you're gonna hear what the Russians were seeing, and it was very different than what we were seeing.

And when you see what happens to Otto Skorzeny in the end, it's one of the best endings for any character in the book.

It's mind blowing to me.

It is mind blowing.

Leave it there, because I...

Exactly, I have nothing else to to say about that.

Tip of the iceberg here, with antisemitism.

I wanna talk about that for a little bit, because in this book you are very explicit.

The Nazi meetings, when they are coming up with the final solution, people are not questioning this plan.

Yeah, no.

And for me, listen, I'm Jewish.

I'm writing about the Nazis.

And I know all of us have seen that story so often, some of us, right?

I mean, I grew up with that story.

So how do we present it in a way you've never seen it before?

And for me, I'm gonna actually, I brought a scene to read from the book.

Because what caught me off guard when we were working on "The Nazi Conspiracy" was just how mundane it all was.

We always wanna blame the story on Adolph Hitler and Adolph Hitler did this and there were a couple bad guys that followed him, it'll never happen again.

But we show you the moment at the Wannsee Conference where it's truly just a government bureaucratic meeting.

They might as well have been deciding how many tomatoes to grow that year.

But instead they're talking about Jewish lives.

And the little part I brought to read 'cause it's such a staggering moment, this is the moment where Heydrich, who convenes the meeting, takes charge of the meeting.

And in his opening presentation he reads a prepared paper outlining in dry bureaucratic language, a program by which every Jewish population in Europe should be first exploited as slave labor, and then simply murdered.

And this is what he says: "In the course of the final solution, the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the east.

Able bodied Jews separated according to sex will be taken in large work columns to these areas to work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The final remnant will since undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly 'cause it is the product of natural selection and would if released act as the seed of a new Jewish revival."

And it's just in a boring, bureaucratic report.

And the thing that we concluded after studying this is we all blame it on one person.

We tell, you know, Hitler did this.

But it starts as a political party.

That hatred spreads to an entire country.

And all the time, when the bureaucrats, and literally just in a government meeting are saying, "Here's what we're gonna do, "we're gonna kill 'em all."

"Here's where they're all hiding, "here's what we're gonna find them."

Nobody says no.

Nobody says no.

And the reason we do these books, we always, it's not just to tell a story of the past, but it's to inform us in the present.

And as we see authoritarianism rising once again, whether it's in Russia, in the Ukraine, or whether it's here in our own country, it's back again.

And we always look at the holocausts and say, never again.

But it's only never again if you don't learn the lessons from it.

I think it was 1841, 1941, excuse me, there was this horrible massacre in Ukraine, since we're talking about Ukraine.

A mass grave of 30,000 Jews killed in a matter of days.

And and the wild part was, is we wrote that scene and wrote that part before the invasion of Ukraine happened.

I wondered about that.

And when we got to that moment, we were proofing the book and we said, "Oh my gosh."

So of course we were like adding to it and trying to figure out how to read up, but we found that and it just became eerily prophetic to where we are.

And you know, it's striking to me, when we did the book about the plot to kill George Washington, we were trying to write about what great leaders do.

When we did the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, we wanted to show what a great leader does when the country's divided in two.

'Cause that's what the country was, it's what the country still is right now.

What Abraham Lincoln did in that moment is instead of saying, "Well I hate the other half of 'em, just stay with me," is he said, "No, we should be together."

His inauguration speech said, "We should be friends, not enemies."

That's what great leaders do.

And it's the same thing in "The Nazi Conspiracy".

The one thing that I believe now after studying FDR, after studying Lincoln, after studying Washington, writing books about each of them, what the best presidents do is, it's not the ones that run on the best platforms, it's not the ones who have the best votes or the most votes, it's all nonsense.

What the best presidents that all of us agree on do is they're faced with a disaster, and the question is, how do you handle that disaster?

And we're once again, as a culture right now, on a potential disaster.

And it's amazing to watch us all as human beings, 'cause it's all of our responsibility to struggle with what's going on.

I wish we had the answer to how you defy hatred, but what I wanna do now, 'cause I think this is the perfect time, is to pivot to your other series, which is children's biographies, and they're called "Ordinary People Change the World".

You've Done Anne Frank, Neil Armstrong, Ben Franklin, Jackie Robinson.

The new one is John Lewis.

Wonderful time to do this.

Tell me about the series, tell me why John Lewis.

Yeah, and it goes right to your last question we were talking about.

I mean, how do you change all this hatred that's coming in this world?

And my conclusion is it's really hard to change adults.

I wish it were easy.

I wish you read "The Nazi Conspiracy" and you're enlightened, and you just go, "I know how to be a good person."

And my belief has come over time, it's really hard to change adults' minds.

So I'm gonna focus on kids.

I'm gonna give my kids, what I wanted for my kids were lessons of kindness and compassion.

Values that we have forgotten about.

Humility and perseverance.

So we did, "I am Abraham Lincoln", and we did, "I am Rosa Parks", and "I am Albert Einstein", "I am Amelia Earhart".

My daughter loves animals, so I did, "I am Jane Goodall" for her.

My son loves sports.

I said, here's Jackie Robinson.

My youngest loves Lego and creating, and I did, "I am Walt Disney" for him.

"I am Jim Henson" for him, "I am Leonard DaVinci", to show him the power of creativity.

And then I looked around to where the world is right now.

And that's how we always pick our heroes.

And of course, we had to do John Lewis.

We had done, "I am Martin Luther King Jr", but it's John Lewis who shows us, even more than Dr. King does, the power of peaceful resistance, the power of getting into what he calls, good trouble.

And that's what "I am John Lewis" is all about.

Is me trying to introduce my own kids and helping people build libraries of real heroes for their kids, their grandkids, their nieces and their nephews.

It is such a beautiful book.

Thank you for sharing it with me.

And how many do we have now?

Yeah, so we're on now 32 books.

We're building a true library.

We just did Muhammad Ali, we did Malala.

You know, we get requests from everyone.

We did I.M.

Pei 'cause people were like, where's your Asian hero?

We did Frida Kahlo for creative kids, and I love working on these books.

And John Lewis, I always wind up writing 'em for my kids, and my nieces and my nephews, but I always wind up getting things for myself.

And John Lewis talks about, he says, how when people hate you so much, when everyone's fighting against you, how do you get through it?

And he says, faith.

He says, but not just blind faith.

He's like, you gotta really, his phrase is, "You gotta make a way out of no way."

And boy, when I look around where the world is right now, and I worry about where we are, it gives me faith to go, we're gonna make a way outta no way.

And if I can teach my kids that, I've given 'em the best gift I can give them.

Absolutely.

A way out of no way.

I hate to ask, but is there one in the works after John Lewis?

There are always, we are always, there are many in the works.

So, we are going to be doing, by the time you see this, so the next book out after John Lewis, we're doing our first autistic hero, we're doing, "I am Temple Grandin" and I got to spend time... You know, when we did "I am Martin Luther King Jr", John Lewis was my advisor for the book.

He actually helped with the book.

He of course, has passed away.

I saw him at Miami Book Fair a number of years ago.

But the people who march with him, his team and his staff helped me with "I am John Lewis" With Temple Grandin, Temple Grandin helped us.

So I got on the phone with her and she helped us really figure out her story in the best way possible.

So, that's the next one in the series.

That's great.

What a good, good choice.

We are gonna even switch gears again here.

We've talked about Nazi Conspiracy, we've talked about the kids' books.

Talk about you for the couple of minutes that we have left.

Your favorite story as a child that made you want to write?

Oh, it's so funny.

My favorite story was my grandfather told me a story.

It was actually not even a book, it was a story my grandfather told me.

He said, "Batman and Robin were in the Batmobile and they had a white van in front of them with the Joker, The penguin, The Riddler and Cat Woman were inside it.

And they were racing after 'em, and then they caught 'em."

And I would say, "Tell it again."

And he'd say, "Batman and Robin are in the Batmobile."

And it was the same story.

It was like 30 words in the whole story, but he would tell it to me again, and again, and again.

And in that story my grandfather told me, he showed me the power of story, but he showed me the power of kindness.

It was probably boring to him for the 95th time, but he knew I loved it.

And that story always, always, always inspires me.

There is also a power in reading to children and talking with children.

Okay, the most interesting place you've ever visited.

Lately it's been... Oh, well, the White House is really good.

And the National Archives is really good 'cause they take me on secret tours.

So they show me things like, you know, they took me the National Archives, this is one that comes to mind, and they handed me, they used to have lo loyalty oaths where you swear your allegiance to the country.

So George Washington signed the first one.

They're all number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

And I think number 4 is signed, and they handed it to me, and it's Benedict Arnold's.

And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, you shouldn't let me touch this."

And so I just love the fact that I get to see those secret things.

So those are always fun trips to me.

That is special.

What about a place you've never been but you really want to go?

I do want to go, I have an odd desire to go to Russia 'cause I know I shouldn't go to Russia and I'm not going to Russia.

I do wanna go to Japan.

I've never been to Japan, and I feel like that would, the history now after doing World War II, but we found some amazing things on the Japanese side that I'd love to research in history.

And my last one, your passion for comic books is legendary.

So, if you could have a superpower, what would it be?

See, the answer should be invulnerability, 'cause it means you can't be hurt.

That's the right answer, right?

That's what you should, but that's no fun.

There's no fun in being invulnerable, so of course I wanna fly like everyone else.

And to me, we argue that point at our dinner table all the time.

But I'll still say fly.

Flying.

I like it.

Brad Meltzer, I have known you for years.

It is always a treat to talk with you.

I wanna thank you so much for being here because every time, you always make me smarter.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ann.

I'm Ann Bocock, please join us on the next "Between the Covers".