Cleaning out my office this August, I came across the typescript of a book proposal, “The Secret Ending of World War II: How Nazism Survived to Fight Another Day,” submitted to me in 1990 by Carl Oglesby, and never published. OBS has been offering publishing services since 1982; decades of work leave a long trail of artifacts such as manuscripts, VHS tapes of TV interviews, and a fire safe full of archived web sites. But Carl’s manuscript struck me as more vital than an artifact—a sharp tap on the shoulder, unfinished business urging action.

I worked with Carl starting in 1976, both as literary agent and supplier of freelance writing projects, until he died in 2011. He was a gifted writer and brilliant and intrepid political thinker. He published 6 books and hundreds of articles. This newly-rediscovered book proposal points to a manuscript that appears to represent the culmination of his life’s work. He often told me this; his estate’s spokesperson recently agreed.

Through the years, Carl occasionally shared his ongoing research about Reinhard Gehlen, Adolf Hitler’s spymaster-in-chief. Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) files that Carl secured from the US Government, and from extensive, even obsessive scholarly digging, he was outraged to discover that Gehlen defected to the United States before the end of World War II, along with his spy team and his files, to help Allen Dulles build the spy apparatus that is today’s CIA.

I read this shocking proposal, footnotes and all, in one sitting. Some side reading revealed that conflicting information on this topic has been published over the years. Gehlen’s own memoir “The Service” was published in 1972 by Times Mirror in an English translation by alleged Holocaust denier David Irving; David Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government”  (Harper, 2015) appears to validate Oglesby’s thesis regarding Gehlen’s Nazi spy network’s apparent victory over the West; Timothy Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA”  (Doubleday, 2007) spends less than 1 of its 702 pages painting Gehlen as a self-serving Nazi whose defection offer was morally repugnant to the CIA. Where does the truth lie?

I reached out to Carl’s estate last month and got permission to publish “The Secret Ending of World War II” proposal as a stand-alone to reach today’s audiences at a time when its contents might resonate. Blockchain seems an appropriate publishing platform for this project because it is immediate, global, nonexclusive, secure, permanent, and accretive. One can innovate on Blockchain; we plan to launch a “book future,” an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), to raise money to find a developmental editor to finalize the book, tentatively titled “A Nazi Peace,” and then publish the book in a traditional manner.

To this end, we are conducting publishing experiments with two Blockchain platform companies. With Bookchain, we intend to publish two Oglesby ePubs. The first is “The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond,” (Berkeley-Penguin, 1977), which offers context for Oglesby’s “The Secret Ending of World War II: How Nazism Survived to Fight another Day” proposal. Bookchain will accept “fiat” currency (credit cards) and intends to offer a secure, browser-based ePub reader. On the second platform, Publica, we intend to post an ePub version of “The Secret Ending of World War II” as an ICO, seeking to raise $5-10,000 USD to finalize the existing Oglesby manuscript and then publish the book. The ICO offering will be available only as crypto currency; the ePub(s) published at Publica  will be accessible through their proprietary browser.

We are excited by these experiments in Blockchain publishing—watch this space for updates as the story evolves! If you are a publisher interested in reading “The Secret Ending of World War II: How Nazism Survived to Fight Another Day” for purposes of publication, please email info@obs.com to request a copy of the proposal.