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Friday, August 23, 2024

Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II

Model of the Volkshalle in World Capital Germania part of Adolf Hitler's vision for the future of Nazi Germany after the planned victory in World War II.

A hypothetical military victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of World War II (1939–1945) is a common topic in speculative literature. Works of alternative history (fiction) and of counterfactual history (non-fiction) include stories, novels, performances, and mixed media that often explore speculative public and private life in lands conquered by the coalition, whose principal powers were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.

The first work of the genre was Swastika Night (1937), by Katherine Burdekin, a British novel published before Nazi Germany launched the Second World War in 1939. Later novels of alternative history include The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick, SS-GB (1978) by Len Deighton, and Fatherland (1992) by Robert Harris. The stories deal with the politics, culture, and personalities who would have allowed the fascist victories against democracy and with the psychology of daily life in totalitarian societies. The novels present stories of how ordinary citizens would have dealt with fascist military occupation and with the resentments of being under colonial domination.

The literature uses the Latin term Pax Germanica to describe such fictional post-war outcomes. The term Pax Germanica was applied to the hypothetical Imperial German victory in the First World War (1914–1918). The concept is derived from that of Pax Romana and follows the trend of historians coining variants of the term to describe other periods of relative peace, whether established or attempted, such as Pax Americana, Pax Britannica, Pax Sovietica (see pax imperia; derived from Pax Romana).

Academics such as Gavriel David Rosenfeld in The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (2005), have researched the media representations of 'Nazi victory'.

Depictions of the Axis powers

Wochenspruch der NSDAP 26 January 1941 claims that "National Socialism is the guarantor of victory".

Themes

Helen White stated that a hypothetical world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War is a harsher and grimmer place to live in than the real world, where Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers lost the War in 1945. Speculative literature about hypothetical military victories by the Axis Powers have generally been English-language literary work from the British Commonwealth and the United States as such protagonists tend to experience events from the perspective of military defeat and foreign military occupation.

The literary tone of alternative history fiction presents the military victory of the Axis Powers as a melancholy background against which the reader sees the unfolding of political plots in a socially strained atmosphere of foreign occupation and socio-economic domination.

The social story of SS-GB (1978), by Len Deighton, concludes with a US commando raid into Nazi-occupied Great Britain, to rescue British nuclear scientists, while the British Resistance remains hopeful of eventual military liberation by the United States. In Clash of Eagles (1990), by Leo Rutman, the people of New York City rebel against the Nazi occupation of the US.

Some depictions focus on Nazism's contradictions, suggesting that even with military triumph, the system would eventually start to collapse under its own weight. In Fatherland (1992), by Robert Harris, the Greater German Reich faces economic crisis, forcing Hitler to pursue rapprochement with the US; at the story's conclusion, the protagonists thwart this effort by exposing the Holocaust to the American people. Harry Turtledove's In the Presence of Mine Enemies (2003) presents the Nazi world two generations after their victory in WWII, in a time and place that allowed political liberalization and democratization. The Hearts of Iron IV mod The New Order: Last Days of Europe shows the Reich declining thanks to economic stagnation and hostile relations with its former allies. Another example can be found in Wolfenstein: Youngblood's plot, set in an alternative 1980s; high ranked SS generals are seeking to establish a Fourth Reich which will replace the unstable and corrupt Reich after they lost most of their power since the liberation of America and the demise of Nazi key leaders such as Deathshead, Frau Engel and even Hitler himself in the 1960s.

Early depictions

The novel Swastika Night (1937) presents the post-war world born from the victory of the Axis Powers: a dictatorship characterized by much "violence and mindlessness" which are justified by "irrationality and superstition". Published two years before Nazi Germany began the Second World War in 1939, Swastika Night is a work of future history and not a work of alternative history. The book reviewer, Darragh McManus, said that although the story and plot of the novel are “a huge leap of imagination, Swastika Night posits a terrifyingly coherent and plausible [world]”, that “considering when it was published, and how little of what we know of the Nazi regime today was then understood, the novel is eerily prophetic and perceptive about the nature of Nazism”.

The short story, I, James Blunt (1941), is a work of wartime propaganda set in a fictional September 1944 when Great Britain is under Nazi rule. The story is told through the entries of a diary, which describe the social and economic consequences of military occupation such as British workers sent to the shipyards of Nazi Germany and Scotland to build warships to attack the U.S. The short story concludes with the diarist exhorting the reader to ensure that the story of the Nazi occupation of Great Britain remains fiction.

The novel We, Adolf I (1945) presents a Nazi victory in the Battle of Stalingrad which allowed Hitler to crown himself emperor of the world. In Berlin, the Nazis build an imperial palace featuring architectural elements of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. In the course of the story, the despot Hitler enters a dynastic marriage with the Japanese Imperial princess in an effort to produce a Fascist heir to rule the world after Hitler.

The Last Jew: A Novel (Ha-Yehudi Ha'Aharon, 1946) tells the future history of a Nazi world ruled by the League of Dictators. The League of Dictators plan the public execution of the last Jew as entertainment during the Olympic Games. Before they can realize the spectacular death of the last Jew, the Moon's excessive proximity to Earth, a negative consequence of Nazi lunar colonization, provokes a catastrophe that extinguishes life on planet Earth. The novel was written by the Jewish author Jacob Weinshal and should not be confused with Yoram Kaniuk's novel The Last Jew, which has been translated to English.

The stage play Peace in Our Time (1947), by Noël Coward explores the nature of fascist rule in London and examines the deleterious effects of military occupation upon the mental health of the common man and the common woman. As a playwright, Coward was included in the Gestapo's Black Book of enemies-of-the-state to be arrested upon completion of Operation Sea Lion, the Nazi conquest of Great Britain.

The novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) presents an Axis victory after Franklin D. Roosevelt is assassinated in 1933 and the United States is divided between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Later depictions

Additional notable depictions of Axis victory include:

Literature

Counterfactual scenarios are also written as a form of academic paper rather than necessarily as fiction and/or novel-length fiction:

In the All About History Bookazine series, What if...Book of Alternate History (2019): Among the articles are What if...Germany had won the Battle of Britain? and What if...The Allies had lost the Battle of the Atlantic?

Film

Television

Comics

Video games

Hypothetical German victory in World War I

Depictions of the Central powers

A similar but less frequent theme are alternate histories describing a hypothetical victory of Imperial Germany in World War I.

The first of this kind was When William Came (full name: When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns) written by British author Saki (the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro) and published in November 1913, thus at the time a future history rather than alternate history. Correctly predicting a war between Britain and Germany (in which Saki himself would be killed), the book assumes that Germany would win and impose a harsh occupation regime on the defeated Britain.

A much later example is Harry Turtledove's Curious Notions, describing a world dominated into the late 21st Century by the descendants of Kaiser Wilhelm, who promote monarchies everywhere and preserve Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire as German satellites. In the book, the people of the occupied United States, like the rest of the world, are harshly oppressed by an omnipresent German secret police, similar to the role of the Gestapo in Nazi victory scenarios, but without the Nazi murderous antisemitism.

In the alternate timeline of Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium, Imperial Germany won the First World War but failed to consolidate its victory, with a chaotic and highly destructive war, and eventually, a nuclear war, continuing to sweep the planet for generations.

Philip José Farmer's The Gate of Time mentions, but does not describe in detail, an alternate timeline in which Kaiser Wilhelm IV (rather than Adolf Hitler) controls an expansionist, imperialist Germany in this world's Second World War.

The alternate history mod Kaiserreich, Legacy of the Weltkrieg of the video game Hearts of Iron IV also covers a world where Germany won World War I, as the United States never joins the Entente. Causing Germany to gain territory in Central Africa and Eastern Europe, securing their gains under the Reichspakt military alliance and the Mitteleuropa economic alliance. The British and French mainlands were taken over by syndicalist revolutionaries, while their governments remain in exile in Canada and Algeria respectively. Italy is divided between a syndicalist government in the north, the Two Sicilies in the south, the Papal State in Rome, and the Austrian-supported Italian Republic in Lombardy and Venetia. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire survive the war and Bulgaria gains territory from Serbia and Greece. The Russian Civil War still occurs, but ends in the victory of the White movement. The United States continues to be in an economic depression by 1936.
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