Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II

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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

Fascist Italy.[1][2][3]

The first work of the genre was

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.[1][4][5]

The literature uses the Latin term Pax Germanica to describe such fictional post-war outcomes.

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'.[7]

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.[8] 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.[9]

The literary

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.[1]

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

Hitler himself in the 1960s.[12]

Early depictions

The novel

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.[13]

The novel We, Adolf I (1945) presents a Nazi victory in the

Fascist heir to rule the world after Hitler.[1]

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.[14] 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.[15]

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.[5]

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.[1]

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.[21][22]

A much later example is

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

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.[23]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Manheim, Noa. "Alternative History: What Might Have Been Had Hitler Won?". Haaretz. Archived from the original on 2017-08-17. Retrieved 2016-12-18.
  2. ^ Fred Bush (July 15, 2002). "The Time of the Other: Alternate History and the Conquest of America". Strange Horizons. Archived from the original on 3 January 2010. Retrieved 2 January 2009.
  3. ^ Hoare, Callum. Daily Star. Nazi coin from 'future' FOUND – sparking claims of parallel universe WW3. Retrieved on 15 Oct. 2023
  4. ^ a b McManus, Darragh (12 November 2009). "Swastika Night: Nineteen Eighty-Four's lost twin". The Guardian.
  5. ^ a b Hardy, Michael (30 September 2014). "Review: Peace in Our Time is a Play for Our Time". Houstoni magazine. Retrieved 18 December 2016.
  6. ^ "Carl Tighe: Pax Germanica — The Future Historical. Journal of European Studies, Vol. 30, 2000". Archived from the original on 2020-04-04. Retrieved 2017-08-31.
  7. ^ Moorcock, Michael (July 2005). "If Hitler had won World War Two…".
  8. ^ Helen White, Round-up of New Essays in Twentieth History Popular Culture. Alan Wiedemann (Ed.).
  9. ^ Edwards, Sam (20 February 2017). "SS-GB: Why the Renewed Obsession with Alternative Nazi Histories?". The Conversation. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  10. ^ Michael Kornfeld, "Face It, Sometimes There is Just No Happy Ending, None Whatsoever" in Round-up of New Essays in Twentieth History Popular Culture, Alan Wiedemann, Editor.
  11. ^ "The New Order is a narrative-driven Hearts of Iron 4 mod that's compelling and bleak". Wargamer. 3 January 2021. Retrieved 2023-04-25.
  12. ^ Scott Braid, Wolfenstein: Youngblood Ending Explained, Screen Rant. Jul 30th 2019
  13. ^ ""I, James Blunt", by Kenneth Fields". 18 January 2020.
  14. ^ Eshed, Eli. "Israeli Alternate Histories" (in Hebrew); Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2 November 2000. [1]
  15. ISBN 978-1-55584-838-5
    .
  16. ^ "World War Two: The Rewrite". The Independent. April 23, 2006. Archived from the original on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2009-06-26.
  17. ISBN 9783825877347
    .
  18. ^ "Marvel Knights Captain America Vol. 4: Cap Lives". Marvel Masterworks.
  19. ^ A-Next #11–12
  20. ^ Borsilli, Timothy (August 17, 2020). "The New Order Is a More Narrative Driven Hearts of Iron 4 Mod Experience That's Both Compelling and Bleak". Wargamer. Retrieved August 17, 2020.
  21. ISBN 9781476615325
    .
  22. S2CID 162284702
    .
  23. ^ "Hearts of Iron 4's Kaiserreich mod is the best historical strategy sandbox". 30 December 2021.

Further reading

  • Rosenfeld, Gavriel David
    . The World Hitler Never Made. Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (2005).
  • Tighe, C., "Pax Germanica in the future-historical" in Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, pp. 451–467.
  • Tighe, Carl. "Pax Germanicus in the future-historical". In Travellers in Time and Space: The German Historical Novel (2001).
  • Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. "The Third Reich in Alternate History: Aspects of a Genre-Specific Depiction of Nazism". In Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 39 no. 5 (October 2006).
  • Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers. Nazi Palestine. The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine, New York: Enigma Books with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010.
  • Stevens, Gordon (1991). And All The King's Men. Pan.
    ISBN 0-330-31534-X
    .
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