What? There's no Santa Claus?

...or rather, no Howard W. Campbell?

Coming off of Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo, I'd gotten into the habit of assuming that characters who are fleetingly referred to are either entirely real (you just can't make this stuff up!) or based on someone real. So imagine my disappointment when I discover that there was not a prominent American expatriate from Schenectady working in the Nazi propaganda department.

Oh, well. I guess the important thing is that Howard W. Campbell was entirely believable in the sense that I was not shocked by his existence. After all, there were (and still are) plenty of Nazi sympathizers and Nazi party members in the United States, so the concept of one working for Goebbels is not out of the question.

Campbell was originally created for one of Vonnegut's earlier works, Mother Night (1961, eight years before SH5), but he fits in well with one of the messages of the later work: anybody can do terrible things.

...okay, that sounded a bit like a motivational poster.

In order to shy away from a traditional view of the war, Vonnegut muddles the lines of who exactly is fighting whom and avoids identifying one particular side as "Committer of Atrocities". The American soliders are miserable; the Germans are equally miserable, and save Billy from his own squad. The bombing of Dresden is senseless and horrible, but those candles are always burning in the background. Billy is an American taking shelter with Germans from an American and British bombing raid; Campbell is an American working for the Germans, just another part of the blurred boundaries.

But still, it's a bit of a letdown that Vonnegut had to invent the character instead of ripping him straight from history.