

When Michael awakens he is completely disoriented. They decide to send this pill back in time to the well in Braunau am Inn so that Hitler's father will drink from it and become infertile, with the result that Hitler will never be born. They decide to use a permanent male contraceptive pill, stolen from Michael's girlfriend (a biochemistry researcher), who, due to his continual distraction, has left him to take a position at Princeton University. Together, they hatch a plan to modify the machine such that it can be used to send something back into time. Leo has developed a machine that enables the past to be viewed-but it is of no practical use as the image is not resolvable into details. However, it is later revealed that Leo was born Axil Bauer, the son of Dietrich Bauer, a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz who – when the Nazi defeat became certain – gave his son the identity of a Jewish doctor that he murdered. Michael assumes this is due to his Jewish heritage.

He meets Professor Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has a strong personal interest in Hitler, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. The story is told in first person by Michael "Puppy" Young, a young history student at Cambridge University on the verge of completing his doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolf Hitler and his mother. The book won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. While most of the book is written in standard prose, a couple of chapters are written in the format of a screenplay.

Its plot involves the creation of an alternative historical timeline in which Adolf Hitler never existed. Making History (1996) is the third novel by Stephen Fry.
