Free The War That Came Early: The Big Switch by Harry Turtledove

right off the bat.
    Federov didn’t say anything much. Kuchkov muttered profanely under his breath, but not far enough under it. Sergei, and no doubt the new officer as well, learned that he thought Federov looked like a jerk and talked like a jerkoff. In point of fact, the Chimp expressed himself more frankly.
    He expressed himself so frankly that Sergei leaned close to him. “Come on, Ivan,” he said quietly. “You can’t talk about a new crewmate like that.”
    “Why the fuck not?” Ivan returned, still not bothering to hold his voice down. “We’re supposed to fly with that whistleass peckerhead? My dick we are! He’ll screw us over some kind of way—you wait and see.”
    “How can you tell?” Sergei asked, clinically curious.
    “
Bozhemoi!
Just look at the motherfucker. Fuck me in the mouth if he’s not on the lam for something or other.”
    Sergei didn’t think Vladimir Federov looked like a robber one jump in front of the law. To him, the new crewman seemed more like a would-be tough guy than the genuine article. Trying to explain that to Ivan would be pointless. It would also be hopeless, because the Chimp was no more inclined to listen than a veritable anthropoid would have been.
    Disastrous introduction or not, they flew their first mission together three days later. They—and their squadron of SB-2s—bombed the train station in Bialystok to keep the Fascists from moving men and matériel through it. Federov seemed able to handle the instruments and calculations a bomb-aimer had to use. Sergei wasn’t sure the plane’s bombs hit the station, but they came as close as anyone else’s.
    After the SB-2 came back to the airstrip, though, Ivan Kuchkov said, “See? I told you he was a useless cocksucker.” Sergei sighed. Weren’t the Nazis enough trouble? Plainly, Ivan didn’t think so.

arah Goldman and her mother and father stood in a long line outside the Münster
Rathaus
. Everybody in the line—graybeards, younger adults, children, babies—was Jewish. Everyone except the babies (exempt by the tender mercy of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) wore on his or her clothes a prominently displayed six-pointed yellow star with
Jude
imprinted on it in big, black, Hebraic-style letters.
    The Nazis had figured out a brand-new way to make life miserable for Jewish residents in Germany. (Jews were no longer citizens of the Third
Reich
.) They all had to get new identity cards. And on each of those cards would be a new first name branding its possessor as a Jew—as if everything else the
Reich
had done were somehow inadequate.
    From now on, her father, Samuel Goldman, would legally become Moses Samuel Goldman. All Jewish men in Germany would have Moses grafted on in front of whatever their first name happened to be. All Jewish women would have a new first name affixed in front of their own, too. For them, it was … Sarah.
    “No fair,” Sarah said as the queue slowly advanced. “They shouldn’tneed to bother with me. My card’s already fine. I could have stayed home and twiddled my thumbs instead of coming with you and—”
    “Twiddling your thumbs here,” Father finished for her. “Even if you’ve already got the name the government aims to give you, it’s just as well you came along. The new card will probably be different from the old one some other way, too. The people who run things will be able to see who’s, God forbid, using an old ID card, and all the people who are will catch it.”
    He’d spent many years in the classroom and lecture hall, passing on his knowledge of ancient Greece and especially Rome. Like an actor, he could put anything he wanted into his voice. A stranger walking by would be sure he approved of all the moves the government made. So would an informer. Sarah knew better. So did her mother. Neither Sarah nor Hanna Goldman said anything, though. Why stir up more trouble? Didn’t Jews in Germany already have plenty?
    Although a bright sun shone down