I write counterfactual histories from time to time because, well, I like to. I like writing off my frustrations. Production has slumped a bit recently, but this is a counterfactual history that I've completed in which the Axis powers win WW II (always a popular theme).

The basic point of divergence is that Roosevelt is assassinated in WW II and the subsequent Presidents are a lot less interventionist. Resultingly, Japan never attacks the US and WW II goes radically different. This is the first chapter.



Unthinkable: a World Where the Axis won World War II

Prologue: February 15th 1933.

It was February 15th 1933 and president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt was giving an impromptu speech from the back of an open car in the Bayfront Park area in Miami, Florida. Present as well was the deranged Giuseppe Zangara who had set himself the goal of assassinating all “capitalist presidents and kings” who he blamed for his problems.

Barely five feet tall, he was unable to see over the crowd and therefore stood on a wobbly folding metal chair. He wildly fired four shots of which two hit Roosevelt in the chest, leading to his death which set in quickly before he could utter any significant last words. His running mate John N. Garner became President of the United States instead as the thirty-second one since America’s independence.

Chapter I: Victory, June 1941-August 1942.

Part 1: Europe.

It was 1941 and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had conquered Europe. The dictator controlled Germany by 1939 after having used demagoguery and propaganda to arouse popular sentiment against the Jews and the hated Treaty of Versailles which Hitler had relegated to the dustbin by rebuilding Germany’s armies. Austria and Czechoslovakia had been annexed without French or British responses, same for the remilitarization of the Rhineland. The invasion of Poland, however, had crossed a line. Poland had been crushed in weeks and as per the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact the Soviet Union had occupied the eastern part of Poland. Denmark and Norway had then fallen in swift paratrooper and naval action. France had been subjected to the so-called Sickelschnitt plan in which a brilliant move through the Ardennes had cut Allied forces in half. The legendary panzers with massive air support had then crushed the French army, destroying its image as the strongest army in the world. Britain stood alone.

In June, however, Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union with his Operation Barbarossa throwing nearly 4 million Axis soldiers against the Russian bear, or Red menace in Axis propaganda, and British hopes were raised now that they had an ally, but they would soon be smashed. Successes were enormous since the Red Army was still reeling from the purges which had killed 30.000 officers, the most brilliant Soviet military minds among them. Also, Stalin had wilfully ignored telltale warning signs that hinted at the pending invasion and had even ignored British and Swedish intelligence that gave him the exact date, June 22nd 1941.

The result was complete surprise and by July German troops had already advanced beyond Minsk and Riga, and with Stalin’s orders not to fall back and ill-prepared counteroffensives also ordered by Stalin, they inflicted massive losses in enormous encirclement and annihilation battles such as at Minsk where the remnants of 32 divisions were encircled and defeated with massive loss of life on the Soviet side. The advance was resumed on July 3rd after the infantry had caught up with the panzer divisions and they attacked six Soviet armies in old defensive lines near Smolensk after a Soviet attack on the Third Panzer Army had failed, enveloping them by the end of the month and capturing 180.000 inside though 100.000 escaped in the ten days that it took to neutralize the Smolensk pocket. Nonetheless, in spite of heroic Soviet efforts, Smolensk had fallen by early August 1941 and the road to Moscow was in German hands and it was now that then differences in opinion on strategy between Hitler and his generals emerged.

Hitler wanted to send general Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2, also known as Panzergruppe Guderian, south to attack the bulge in the front in the Ukraine around Kiev that consisted of around 650.000 Red Army troops, arguing that Ukrainian grain, industry and natural resources would be needed to continue the war effort. Guderian and several other generals, including the commander of Army Group Centre Fedor von Bock, argued in favour of continuing the all-out thrust toward Moscow. They pointed out that the enemy capital was an arms production centre, the main hub of the highly centralized Soviet transport and communications systems, and that the bulk of the Red Army was concentrated around the capital under marshal Semyon Timoshenko for a last stand and that a drive on Moscow would allow for these forces to be bagged and annihilated. Hitler remained adamant at first, but Guderian’s argument was supported by Von Bock in a meeting in early August shortly after the Battle for Smolensk had ended. A number of other generals in Army Group Centre who were wary of confronting Hitler directly were swayed in private conversations by Guderian who had a knack for getting what he wanted. Generals Adolf Strauss of the Ninth Army and Hermann Hoth of Panzergruppe 3 supported the assault on Moscow, and even Günther von Kluge who commanded the Fourth Army – with whom Guderian had frequent conflicts over insubordination – supported Guderian’s position. Also, General Von Manstein, who wasn’t even a commander in Army Group Centre, argued in favour of the Moscow option and so Hitler was inclined to give the generals their way.

He decided to leave Panzergruppe Guderian with Army Group Centre and didn’t divert troops to Leningrad either. Guderian, however, went further and managed to wriggle out of Von Brauchitsch and Hitler to release several divisions from their occupation duties in France, pointing at the strength of coastal defences and the subsequent unlikelihood of British invasion by sea. There were a total of 51 occupational divisions stationed across Western Europe of which some 22 were of combat quality. Twelve divisions were redeployed east to guard Army Group Centre’s rear and flanks against the flanking attacks that Hitler feared, forming four new motorized corps. By the end of August, everything was set to commence with the final assault on Moscow and Hitler’s decision became known as the “Lötzen Decision” for it was there that the decision to attack Moscow was made.

On August 20th, after some delay due to the internal bickering, the offensive on Moscow, which had unofficially been dubbed Unternehmen Ragnarok (Operation Ragnarok, referring to the end of times in Norse mythology) started. Panzergruppe Guderian, now renamed the Second Panzer Army, took Bryansk on August 25th and within three days they reached Orel, pocketing both the Third and Thirteenth Armies and destroying them. The Second Panzer Army and the Second Army then turned northward toward Tula in mid September and thereby they formed the southern pincer that advanced on Moscow. The Third and Fourth Panzer Armies in the north attacked the first Soviet main defensive line at Vyazma, trapping the Soviet Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-Fourth and Thirty-Second armies and occupying the city by early September. They continued their advance to Mozhaysk where a second defensive line, the last before Moscow, lay and it was shattered by the Germans who once again took numerous prisoners and captured a lot of Soviet equipment around the middle of the month. Stalin of course ordered counteroffensives which led to the forces in the Kiev pocket to attack Army Group Centre in their right flank, but the Germans successfully repelled this offensive from low quality and ill-prepared troops which had a defensive rather than offensive purpose, inflicting serious losses. These troops did manage to escape an offensive by Army Group South aimed at Kiev in late October/early November and regrouped in the eastern Ukraine. The two German pincers, in the meantime, reached Kalinin in the north and Kaluga in the south by late September/early October, threatening Soviet flanks in preparation for the encirclement of the Soviet capital that stood poised to take place.

Stalin right now still had 800.000 men in 83 divisions available for the defence of Moscow, but only 25 of these divisions were anywhere close to combat worthy and he only had 200 tanks or so that were operational and around 600 aircraft, all thanks to the earlier devastating losses, and Timoshenko could not promise Stalin that he would be able to hold the city with these limited forces. The Communist Party Headquarters, governmental ministries and other important party and political institutions, diplomatic missions of foreign countries, leading cultural establishments, military command and their staff were evacuated to the Kuybyshev in the south on the Volga River while Stalin chose to stay behind to keep up morale. Germany fielded 1.160.000 men to take Moscow who were much better equipped, though with supply problems, and who had air superiority. On October 5th the Third and Fourth Panzer Armies crossed the Moscow-Volga Canal to the northeast of the Soviet capital city and marched to Klin while the southern pincer took Obninsk shortly thereafter in spite of the rasputitza rains that had begun, reducing most roads to mud. The German army was less than sixty kilometres away from Moscow and intense aerial bombing of the city commenced, using hundreds of bombers. One week later, both Podolsk and Krasnogorsk on the city’s outskirts had fallen and the city was subjected to artillery bombardment which led to an exodus of the population. The monumental Saint Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square was damaged as were parts of the Kremlin’s walls though the famous Kremlin Spasskaya Tower stood firm among the burning ruins, a symbol of hope and national resistance though to little avail. After several days of intense bombing and shelling which devastated much of the city, German troops entered Moscow in the north and south on October 15th. On the advice of Marshal Timoshenko, Stalin left the city in his armoured train (that was already pre-prepared should he change his mind about staying in Moscow) and he arrived in Kuybyshev the same day.

German troops converged at Balashikha east of Moscow on October 21st 1941 and cut off around 400.000 surviving soldiers in metropolitan Moscow, starving them of food, fuel and ammunition with the spires of the Kremlin in sight in the distance. Stalin of course ordered the over 180.000 troops that had escaped encirclement to launch counteroffensives to relieve the city, but the Germans had a superiority in equipment, troops and most of all airpower. Therefore, the results for these relief forces were predictably disastrous with over 100.000 casualties and almost total losses in armour and airplanes for the Red Army. Timoshenko in the encircled city of Moscow fought fiercely, but lacked in ammunition and weapons which in some cases forced as many as four soldiers to make do with one rifle and perhaps four to five bullets per soldier. Similar shortages existed in the artillery with shortages in anti-tank shells, little to no shells for heavy calibres and so on. There were also only few tanks in Moscow itself and of these only a handful were of the modern T-34 and KV-1 models which were the only Soviet tanks that were superior to the most common German models, the Panzer III and to a lesser extent the Panzer IV. The few T-34s and KV-1s in the city did manage to take a significant number of enemy tanks with them before they were destroyed by enemy fire or abandoned by the crew due to lack of ammunition and fuel.

Nevertheless despite these shortcomings in the Red Army, street-to-street battles were waged with great brutality in Moscow’s ruins with a Soviet determination that surprised German commanders. But courage compensated only so much for their manifold problems. It didn’t take long before shortages in weaponry, fuel and especially food became extremely urgent and morale dropped as rationing was tightened on a daily basis. The rationing was strongly in favour of the army rather than the civilian populace which encouraged theft which in turn led to executions by the NKVD; some women in the meantime resorted to prostituting themselves to Red Army soldiers, mostly officers, for scraps of food, clothing and a safe place to sleep. Even besides this, the civilian population and the troops alike were subjected to daily bombings and shelling which led to a drop in morale even more, more so with German megaphone messages calling for surrender for 24/7, keeping many soldiers from sleeping.

On November 5th 1941, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko surrendered with 160.000 survivors who were all taken prisoner; Timoshenko became a propaganda ploy for the Germans who took every opportunity to display the fallen Soviet Field Marshal who after the war was extradited to the USSR and executed for cowardice and incompetence in a show trial ordered by Stalin. Besides the capture of the city itself, perhaps the most memorable moments for both sides though in different ways, were the hoisting of the swastika flag on the famous Spasskaya Tower of the Kremlin, the taking down of the red stars, and German officers inspecting Stalin’s private quarters. These events were highly publicized in Axis propaganda with on the forefront the highly effective Nazi propaganda machine under Goebbels. The fall of Moscow was a blow to Soviet morale, especially when the surrender was conducted by such a high-ranking and prominent officer, but it was also much more than a moral defeat.

Moscow meant much more than a moral defeat considering that it was not just another conquered city like Minsk, Smolensk, Odessa or Kiev. Moscow, unlike in Napoleonic times, was much more than “just the capital”. Under Soviet domination and especially during Stalin’s rule the Soviet Union had become a hyper centralized regime with sole political authority resting within the Moscow Kremlin’s walls which had had consequences. Moscow had grown into the central hub of all communications and transportations systems in the entire country as well as the nexus of any and all state, cultural, military and party institutions. Simply moving such an enormously centralized regime over thousands of kilometres to an unsuitable replacement capital was an almost impossible effort. Even just from a logistical point of view the loss of Moscow was disastrous since transport and communications were now immensely complicated: transport now needed to be conducted through lacking peripheral railroads, or by truck which the Red Army also lacked, or simply on horseback or even on foot which was slow; communications now needed to go through messengers and peripheral, regional lines of communication since the phone lines and telegraph system centred in Moscow couldn’t be used anymore for obvious reasons. This was besides the enormous losses suffered in the Battle of Moscow which were close to 700.000 killed, missing, wounded or taken prisoner.

Stalin ordered an immediate counteroffensive after he received word from his spy in Japan Richard Sorge that Japan had no intentions to attack in the Soviet Far East. Thirty Siberian divisions under the command of general Georgy Zhukov were released worth some 600.000 men, but even Zhukov advised against an immediate counteroffensive, and he repeatedly warned Stalin about the likelihood of a German offensive into the eastern Ukraine toward the Volga and Stalingrad that would cut off the oil supply of the Red Army. Stalin remained unconvinced by Zhukov’s arguments and ordered Moscow to be recaptured regardless of his best general’s beliefs about the strategic situation, emphasizing its morale value. Hitler and his generals in turn had anticipated that the Red Army would likely try to retake their capital city and so the Führer had ordered defensive positions to be built on Moscow’s eastern side and that no further advances east of Moscow were to take place. Trenches had been dug, pillboxes and bunkers with overlapping fields of fire had been built, minefields had been laid, anti-tank obstacles were in place as were barbed wire entanglements (though in part these were Soviet defences that had simply been restored by the Germans).

The Soviet counteroffensive began on December 5th 1941 with over 600.000 Soviet troops opposing Army Group Centre which was still large even if forces had been siphoned away to the south for the coming spring offensive. The Soviet counteroffensive was poorly prepared due to supply problems: there were weapon and ammunition shortages; equipment maintenance was sorely lacking due to trouble getting spare parts in time; troop movement was largely on foot or on horseback due to lack of rail transport and trucks which meant that the advance went at a snail’s pace; messages from the front took a long time to be relayed and so by the time an order was finally given, the situation could already have changed, making the order outdated. These Siberian troops were battle hardened against the Japanese, and cold was no problem, but the other problems were significant. Zhukov’s armoured spearheads did manage to penetrate the strong German defensive lines for some time, but they were cut off due to lack of support. Under German armoured counterattack and air superiority, Zhukov was compelled to withdraw and by the end of the month the offensive had petered out. This was a confirmation of Hitler’s opinion that the Soviet Union had been all but defeated.

Pro-German sentiment in many parts of the world was strengthened when the Nazis uncovered the horrible deeds of Stalin with the discovery of the mass grave at Katyn, Poland, in January 1942 with 22.000 counted bodies (mostly executed Polish officers, killed after the Soviets invaded eastern Poland as part of the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact). This led to renewed strong sentiment against communism. What little pro-Soviet sentiment against Nazi aggression existed in the US, took a nosedive. The mass release in the press of all captured documents and orders from Moscow archives (for as far as these archives hadn’t been destroyed) relating to the state instigated Holodomor famine (dubbed “Stalin’s Holocaust”) and the Great Purge which had caused millions of deaths, made joining the Anglo-Soviet Allies even less popular. Goebbels’ highly effective propaganda machine had a field day with broadly meting out Stalin’s atrocities into great details, including Soviet “interrogation methods” used by the NKVD. Communism all of a sudden came in a very bad international light as the pariah ideology of the world rather than Nazism or fascism with these facts revealed to a world audience, making it public knowledge. Stalin’s regime became widely reviled, losing most of its credibility and legitimacy.

US support to the Allies which a few Americans may have wanted became nearly unfeasible regardless of good Anglo-American ties and so the small interventionist faction in Congress died a quiet death. The isolationist Republican President John W. Bricker and his government, while sympathetic to Britain, didn’t lift a finger for Britain. They now couldn’t even if they had ever wanted to.

Soviet atrocities, even if sometimes over exaggerated by the Nazis, made Britain’s alliance with the USSR very inconvenient all of a sudden and they partook in denouncing the Holodomor, the Purges and so on. The uncovering of the Katyn mass grave resulted in the Polish government-in-exile ending diplomatic ties with the USSR while the British government grew desperate once more with their only ally close to defeat, which further enhanced the German aura of invincibility. Perhaps just as convenient for Germany was the capture of over a third of the Soviet Union’s gold supply which had been left behind in the shoddy, improvised operation that evacuated the government to Kuybyshev.

Hitler, in the meantime, visited Moscow in January 1942 and saluted to parading German soldiers on Red Square. He then went on to personally visit Stalin’s personal quarters in the Kremlin and inspected them, reportedly without showing much emotion other than complaining about the winter cold. He then visited Stalin’s Kuntsevo Dacha which was one of the few places in Moscow where central heating was still functioning properly and he stayed there alongside the commander of Army Group Centre Von Bock who had made it his headquarters. From there he ordered troops from Army Group Centre to be diverted to the northern and southern fronts since no offensive against Moscow was to be expected soon. Hitler then applauded the comfort of the dacha in a contemptuous tone saying the following: “This is a clear sign of Judeo-Bolshevik cleverness. They make statements about the equality of men, but Stalin is the new Genghis Khan, living in luxury on their toil. I wonder how many stupid Slavic slave labourers it took to build this palace because I want to surpass that number by a hundredfold when I build mine!” He then made a visit to the frontlines and flew back to the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. All in all, his first and only visit to Moscow had lasted for a mere three days and in the meantime the consequences of Moscow’s fall were showing.

In the north, Army Group North under the command of general Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb managed to break the Red Army troops in the besieged city of Leningrad who were now receiving no supplies at all. They and the civilian populace of Leningrad were simply starving and freezing to the death with nothing to eat and little to burn for warmth. The frontline now ran from Leningrad to Moscow and then on to Kiev to end in the Crimean Peninsula where Sebastopol was still under siege.

Hitler now planned a major offensive toward the river Volga to finish the Soviet Union off with units transferred from Army Groups North and Centre to Army Group South which included the First and Fourth Panzer Armies, the Sixteenth Army, the Eighteenth Army and the Sixth Army. The offensive started in May 1942 and by the end of June the northern and southern pincers had reached Voronezh and Rostov, and so the highly industrialized Donets Basin fell into German hands. The northern flank of the German offensive then turned south from Voronezh and wheeled down the right bank of the Don River while the southern flank went on to take Voroshilovgrad and advance to the Don as well. In August 1942, German troops crossed the Volga and took Stalingrad in spite of fierce Soviet resistance which inflicted heavy casualties. Zhukov on Stalin’s orders attempted to retake the city, but he failed and Stalin, in a fit of rage because the city bearing his name had been lost, had Zhukov executed for cowardice and incompetence. With one of his best generals dead, Stalin was incapable of preventing the Germans from reaching Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea and cutting off the fuel supply to the Red Army.

The Soviet government in the temporary capital of Kuybyshev subsequently requested peace grudgingly, seeing how the military situation was hopeless, and started to move to Sverdlovsk which was further away from the new border and thus safer. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed at the exact same place were Lenin had surrendered in 1918, the Soviet Union accepted German peace terms. Finland was returned all the territories it had lost in the Winter War and Romania was allowed to annex Bessarabia and govern the territory between the Dniester and the Southern Bug River. The rest of the occupied territories west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Astrakhan were annexed by Nazi Germany. Besides this, the Soviet Union was to pay Nazi Germany annual duties of petroleum, coal, iron ore, tungsten, copper, molydenum and nickel to further fuel the German war effort. This would nearly bankrupt the USSR, considering their weak financial state (though Stalin did not care as long as he had enough forced labourers). Hitler had triumphed once more.

Part 2: Asia.

The Empire of Japan was mired in a war with China that didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast, a war that had been started to gain China’s natural resources and industry, and to make it a market exclusively for Japanese produce. The war, by now, however was becoming more of a drain rather than an economic sphere of influence unlike what the military junta wanted.

By late 1941, many in the Imperial Diet and within the Supreme War Council, especially naval officers, argued for a strike south because, in their opinion, Southeast Asia possessed the manpower and natural resources needed to bring China to its knees. The southern strike faction prevailed, despite of German successes against the USSR, as they pointed out the pointlessness of conquering the frozen, empty and resource poor Siberian wastelands. This wouldn’t aid the struggle against China all that much and so a battle plan was drawn up: attacks on Hong Kong, Malaya and then attack Java, Sumatra and the Bismarck Archipelago; Australia and New Zealand were then supposed to be isolated; given the isolationist stance of the United States under the Bricker Administration, the Philippines and other American possessions would be bypassed. All-in-all, a speedy victory was expected because Britain was tied down in North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, and Dutch colonial forces were weak and depleted. The attack was scheduled to commence in January 1942, thus leading to the final victory of Axis forces in Europe and Asia.

Japanese forces in China attacked Hong Kong without a preceding declaration of war or any kind of warning on January 1st 1942 and it would fall within two weeks regardless of the efforts of Canadian forces and the Royal Hong Kong Volunteers. Thailand, invaded by Japan from occupied French Indochina, surrendered within one day and formally allied itself with Japan shortly thereafter to function as a springboard for the Malaya Campaign. Malaya was invaded shortly hereafter in late January and numerically inferior but better prepared Japanese forces with air superiority ran it over, taking Singapore by February 1942 which led to the largest surrender of troops in the British Empire’s history. During the campaign, battleships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were sunk. Japan continued with massive invasions and amphibious operations against Burma, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and they captured Rabaul. The pace was rapid with Bali and Timor falling to Japanese forces in February, and so the badly coordinated resistance of Commonwealth and Dutch troops faltered, especially after the disastrous defeat in the Battle of the Java Sea. The ever more desperate British government promised independence once the war ended to the Indian National Congress if India committed its means to the war effort, this in light of recent events.

This was a resounding victory for the Imperial Japanese Navy, and by now Japanese aircraft had control over the skies as signified by the successful and psychologically devastating (though militarily insignificant) bombing raid on Darwin, Australia. The Japanese fleet launched two raids on Ceylon and sank aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, banishing the Royal Navy from the Indian Ocean all the way to Kenya, and freeing the way to Rangoon, which fell in May, and to India. In China there were new successes too now that cooperation between the Kuomintang and the CCP collapsed as both tried to increase their area of operations in occupied territories at the expense of the other. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s campaign continued into June with raids along the coast of Australia and even as far away as Kenya. Japan now controlled Southeast Asia, dominated the Indian Ocean and much of the Pacific, and controlled the skies above these territories. Britain, however, didn’t surrender yet.

Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka, head of the Navy General Staff’s planning section, therefore propositioned the full-scale invasion of northern Australia, something which Admiral Yamamoto consistently opposed as he preferred the westward option of India. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo similarly opposed an invasion of Australia and instead wanted to cut off its lines of communications, and so two camps arose in the Supreme War Council: one supported mostly by the Imperial Japanese Army that wanted to go for Australia, and one with mostly navy support that wanted to go for India and Ceylon, and expand operations in the Indian Ocean.

A compromise solution was reached with a battle plan to invade Melville Island north of Darwin with a limited force to induce a fear of invasion in Australia, and secondly a plan to reinforce Vichy French Madagascar and raid the western Indian Ocean from there to interdict communications to India. And so it was done. Battleship Mutsu, aircraft carrier Hiryu, two heavy cruisers, six light cruisers and fifteen destroyers constituted the “Australia Taskforce”. They shelled and bombed Melville Island’s weak defences, cut it off from the mainland, and established air superiority after which 5.000 Japanese soldiers quickly seized control of the island on June 28th, raising the fear of an invasion. Shortly hereafter, the “Madagascar Taskforce” consisting of battleships Yamato and Nagato, aircraft carrier Zuikaku, four heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, eighteen destroyers and six submarines arrived together with 22.000 Japanese soldiers to reinforce the Vichy French garrison and raid British shipping.

In the light of recent events, many British, including many in the government, considered peace. After the surrender of the Soviet Union in August and with Britain’s bankruptcy nearing, a vote of no confidence was issued against Churchill and Lord Halifax replaced him as Prime Minister.

ohh! I like this.

I'm happy you like it. I will therefore upload chapter 2.



Chapter II: Peace and the Realization of a Horrible Vision, 1942-1945.

The British Empire was in the direst of situations at this point: the Soviet Union had surrendered and its empire in Asia had been largely overrun, with Japanese troops now knocking on India’s doors. Prime Minister Halifax requested a fair peace from the Axis forces and the peace he got was fair considering circumstances. To Germany, Britain lost no territory whatsoever and to Italy it ceded Malta, returned Libya and returned Italian East Africa. In Asia, losses were more considerable as Britain had to recognise Burma, Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, Nauru, Ocean Island, the Gilbert Islands, the Solomon Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, other British islands in the Pacific, and New Guinea as being in Japan’s sphere of influence, in addition to the Dutch East Indies, Thailand, French Indochina and other French and Dutch colonies in Asia. Now, Germany and Japan could begin consolidating their conquests.

Hitler consolidated his conquests in the east. A total of sixty divisions remained in the east as an occupational force and to fend off any possible ill-planned Soviet attempts to stab Germany in the back. A true administrative organization would follow later, and in the meantime it remained under military administration though the SS had very large jurisdiction which made the occupation barbaric to say the least, seeing how the east became an SS playground with little oversight from other authorities.

The SS Einsatzgruppen under the authority of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had continued to round up and massacre Jews until the Soviet surrender, much like at Babi Yar near Kiev in 1941 where 33.771 of them had been machine gunned down and buried in a ravine. By the time Stalin surrendered, hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been exterminated and the remaining ones were to be expulsed to the unoccupied territories in Siberia. Entire trains, mostly for transporting livestock, were mobilized to deport as many as 100.000 Jews a month to the eastern frontier. There the Jews were unloaded and under machine gun fire they were forced to flee across the border to the rump-USSR where close to half of them would die from the winter cold and the inability of the Soviets Union to feed these people since they had lost their most important agricultural lands. And many embittered survivors threw their lot in with Stalin’s regime, be it in the Red Army or has political commissars of the NKVD. Stalin of course reported such atrocities to the League of Nations, but to them he was hardly believable anymore considering the murderous, tyrannical nature of his own regime.

The Nazis started to implement their Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) for the colonization of the newly conquered Lebensraum with more such mass expulsions and ethnic cleansing though these would take many years to complete. The Polish people were to be driven from Poland, to house German and other Germanic settlers, and were to be spread out across the eastern lands in the hopes that they’d be assimilated so that Polish culture would cease to exist. The Polish intelligentsia were savagely murdered since they were seen as the bearers of Polish culture and the plan was that by 1950 only four million Poles would still be in Poland as docile peasants to serve the Germans. In the Ukraine and Belarus, whose ethnic make-up had already been altered by Stalin’s deportations, the indigenous population were to be largely removed from areas that the Nazis desired. The cities were to be cleared out except for large industrial ghettos where the Slavic people would make cheap consumer goods; the rest of the population were to work on the sovkhozes and kolkhozes (state farms and farming collectives respectively) established by Stalin to produce cheap grain for Germany. Hitler stated that they only needed to be able to read the road signs, that the Slavs needed no further education, and that they should “rot in their own filth”. Thirty million were to be killed or expulsed in the next three decades and the remaining 8 million would serve as docile slaves. The Crimea was to be completely cleared out to make it a “German Riviera”. For a time, the economic prosperity promised by Hitler seemed to come true: German industry was running great due to Soviet oil, nickel, tungsten, coal and so on, there was cheap grain and there were cheap consumer goods.

There was, however, a growing resistance movement all over the eastern territories with 10.000 partisan groups with over 2 million members, mostly remnants of Red Army units caught behind enemy lines and also armed civilians. By late 1942 they conducted campaigns of guerrilla warfare, car bombings, assassinations, sabotage and so on which in turn provoked brutal Nazi retaliation against the civilian populace with mass executions, rape, pillage, mass arson and other random acts of violence. The resistance would only grow and was fuelled secretly by Soviet weapons sent by Stalin alongside secret operatives – many of whom were vengeful Jews – who educated the guerrillas, who were often mere peasants, in modern tactics and strategy; de facto the Soviet-German war was still ongoing though on a low level and never officially. When Hitler was confronted with these facts he said: “Good, that way the German people will remain in a state of perpetual alertness”. The resistance would sap German power, but in 1942 this was far from apparent to the ordinary German citizen who generally didn’t know of these atrocities. From their point of view, the war had been won and no one could blame them at this time for thinking this way.

Besides this, atrocities on a lesser scale continued in Germany itself as well. Under the oversight of the SS, the “Institute for Racial Hygiene” was founded which continued the work of Aktion T4, namely the compulsory euthanasia for mentally ill, physically deformed and others with disabilities. Hitler’s stance that these people were genetically inferior and should be eliminated to prevent them from contaminating the “superior German racial stock” hadn’t changed. Besides this, the Institute for Racial Hygiene monitored interracial relationships through the Gestapo, SS, SD and other services and punished violations heavily; it did the same for homosexual relationships. Furthermore, it continued the work of the Lebensborn program: in this program thousands if not tens of thousands of women, all blonde hair and blue eyes, were recruited (tempted by money) to be impregnated by SS men of similar “superior genetic stock” to create super humans; the children would then be whisked away from their parents to be raised by the SS to become the future of National Socialism. Under Reich health leader Leonardo Conti this work continued well into the late 1970s when it was cancelled: by then, with eugenics clearly outdated due to advancements in science (not to mention that the human genetic structure now, much less then, isn't fully understood), the Institute for Racial Hygiene had become an embarrassment and was quietly dissolved; its main building is now an office building and any reference to its original function has been removed from sight for tourists. Nothing remains that hints at the atrocities that were concocted there, and few nowadays know of or care about the hundreds of thousands of casualties, not to mention the tens of thousands of indoctrinated and psychologically scarred (the fall of Nazism destroyed their entire belief system and known world) children from the Lebensborn program.

Japan was struck by a strong hyper nationalist fervour that almost made German feelings of superiority seem modest by comparison. The Japanese Empire started to implement their plan for a Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a plan that had originated from an idealistic notion of freeing Asia from colonizing powers. The militarists, however, viewed Japan’s new sphere of influence as a means to gain vital raw materials and markets for Japanese products, thus forming an autarkic economic system dominated by Japan. The slogans broadcast by the Japanese government were still idealistic, ostensibly portraying the new system as liberation of Asia from western imperialism. In reality, Japan wanted an empire of its own and its occupation of large parts of Asia was extraordinarily harsh.

A secret government report, similar in outline somewhat to the Nazi “Generalplan Ost”, known as “An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus”, was written down in 1943 in six volumes totalling 3.127 pages. It was the definitive end result of notions of an East-Asian economic sphere that had been circulating for years, and it was the epitome of Japanese imperialism. There were three main elements: 1). Living space: this element borrowed heavily from racial, political and economic theories popularized in Germany by National Socialism. It was argued that the Japanese people required more space and raw materials, a notion that rationalized Japan’s dominance in the eastern hemisphere. 2). Element number two was the racial superiority of the Japanese people which easily fit with the “living space” argument although it was based on Confucianist ideas and the metaphor of the family rather than Nazi race ideology. Just like a family the Sphere was supposed to have harmony and reciprocity, but also clear-cut hierarchic relations and so the Japanese as racially superior people were be the eternal head of a family of Asian nations. 3). This second element fit with a third and last one which made a distinction between jinshu (race) and minzoku (people), describing the latter as “a natural and spiritual community bound by a common destiny”. The authors, however, asserted that blood did matter. They called for the medical professions to not focus on the weak and sick, but instead on mental and physical training, and selective marriages to improve the gene stock, and some even went so far as to praise Nazi efforts at eugenic improvements. This plan with Nazi elements, social-Darwinist elements, racism, and Confucianism driven to absurd extremes, led to Japan’s horrible regime.

Puppet regimes were installed in the Dutch East Indies, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, Indochina and a Cambodia separate from Indochina, regimes similar to those in Manchukuo and Mengjiang in China. Hong Kong, Macau and East Timor (purchased from Portugal), Nauru, Ocean Island, the Gilbert Islands and other British island possessions in the Pacific, and French island possessions like New Caledonia and French Polynesia were governed directly from Tokyo like Korea and Taiwan already were.

The Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity was officially founded in 1944 when the heads of state of the puppet regimes, such as Sukarno for Indonesia and Ho Chi Minh for Indochina, assembled in Kyoto where they signed the charter, thus paving the way for decades of Japanese economic exploitation. The charter provided for high tariff walls against European and American products, ostensibly to allow the underdeveloped economies of the Asian countries to develop, but in reality to shield them from foreign imports other than those from Japan. The charter also led to the formation of a so-called protectionist “yen bloc” in which the Japanese yen was the accepted currency throughout the Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was supposed to lead to linked political and economic relations. The Sphere was also a military alliance and Japan’s privileged position was recognised here as it was in other fields. Japan commenced with the economic exploitation of the recently conquered areas immediately. Japanese colonists soon arrived to assume economic top positions in agriculture and industry as a new “master race” and would soon prove to be worse than the European colonists before them.

They acquired large swaths of farmland across Southeast Asia from which the original owners were removed, and here peasants would toil every day in long shifts for little pay to produce cheap rice, pepper, sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, nutmeg, cinnamon and cacao for Japanese consumers and rubber for Japan’s industry. These enormous agricultural holdings (easily 150 hectares (370 acres) or more in size), owned by Japanese elites saw the implementation of a plantation based system. These enormous plantations raised efficiency through the use of machinery, pesticides and modern artificial fertilizer, but represented a rupture in traditional economic patterns of small rice paddies. Production was raised, but only to the benefit of Japanese landowners and not the peasants who saw their real wages drop in spite of gruellingly long workdays and horrible conditions. Other examples of economic exploitation were the Indonesia Petroleum Company and the Indonesia Mining Company of which most stockholders were also Japanese. They mined oil, natural gas, coal, iron ore, bauxite, silver, tin, copper, nickel and gold for Japan’s industry and investing companies like for example “Showa Steel”. In both cases, the mined products were acquired by the Japanese at bottom prices.

Of course some positive developments took place as well such as the development of a modern infrastructure. Roads, railroads, bridges, power plants for electricity and modern communications such as telephone lines were constructed over short periods of time, though again at the expense of the conquered peoples who toiled like slaves to get it done in time (with harsh punishments if they failed). Besides the Japanese elites, only the collaborating puppet regimes profited from these developments. Schools were also built which increased literacy rates over all of Asia, but these schools served to “Japanise” Japan’s subjects who all learned the Japanese tongue as their second language.

Of course there was resistance to Japan’s dominance, mostly from Asian independence movements who had quickly become alienated and had separated themselves from the ones that collaborated with Japan. Illegal radio broadcasts, illegal newspapers, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, assassinations and terrorist attacks against Japanese civilians were their used methods. The Japanese army and intelligence services retaliated with mass reprisal executions of suspected sympathizers of the resistance, mass arson and destruction in areas suspected of hiding resistance fighters, rape of real and perceived female sympathizers of the resistance, forcing real or perceived female sympathizers of the rebels to work as “comfort girls”, death marches, imprisonment, deportation to forced labour camps and concentration camps, and so on. Japan would, within a decade, find itself in a state of war against the growing and ever more organised resistance movements. Support for the “Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity” would dwindle except among collaborators who profited from it and among the indoctrinated and deceived Japanese population. Most Asians, if not hostile, were increasingly cynical about Japan’s anti-imperialist rhetoric although in the 1940s these stirrings were still far from a threat to Japan’s dominance.

Japan’s regime and the Nazi regime in Eastern Europe, all-in-all, were equally oppressive, brutal and exploitative. The only difference was that Japan never expulsed or exterminated population groups based on race and instead used them as labour, and so Japanese, unlike Germans, would never become a majority in most of the areas they occupied.

Very nicely done. I love alternate histories

You don't even attempt to explain the most important part - why the USSR would have lost in this alternate history.

One must assume that the different American government in this alternate history doesn't pass the Lend-Lease act to help the British in 1941, who in turn can't spare any resources to help the Russians.

Good point!

Great read, I would really love if you went into more detail about the man power issues and how the Germans got over the that in fighting the USSR. I suspect your answer would be the same as my thoughts, but just wondering.

Chapter III: Consolidation, Cold War and Succession, 1945-1960.

The war had been won with Hitler triumphant in Europe and Japan in Asia, but now a new phase commenced. It was a phase of chilled relations and proxy conflicts between the major power blocks, the Anglophone world, Imperial Japan and Nazi dominated Europe. The latter two also still struggled against the rump Soviet Union under Stalin and Chiang’s China respectively. Yet at this time, the world wide struggle for dominance had hardly been decided with Hitler’s Nazi regime still firmly in control of the reins of power in Germany and the European continent, and Japan dominating Asia. The British Empire on the other hand seemed to be falling apart with the independence of India and the loss of its Asian colonies, and the United States not willing to intervene to save the Empire. It was compensated by the rise of America and its monopoly on nuclear weapons after their 1946 Trinity test which the Americans soon made known. Hitler threatened retaliation with nerve gas equipped long range missiles should atomic bombs ever be employed against German cities, and Japan also possessed stockpiles of nerve gas, not to mention bacteriological weapons. The Cold War power balance seemed hardly unambiguous at the time.

Part 1: Developments in Europe.

At the time of the end of the war, Germany and the Nazi regime had reached the pinnacle of their power. The Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933, the foundations for Hitler’s dictatorship, remained in effect even if the regime somewhat softened its image post-war. For example, concentration camps also still existed for political dissidents, but now there were staged inspections by the International Red Cross. Nonetheless, there was, however, some dissent rising from the generation that had reached adulthood after the war, something which, however, wouldn’t become apparent until after Hitler’s death in 1954 and his succession by Himmler. The latter would try to squash it which would decrease his popularity heavily, leading to his ultimate downfall from power. Despite these cracks, however, the inherent flaws of the regime were hardly apparent to most people at the end of the 40s and early 1950s.

German society was affluent thanks to the cheap products from the east and because there was no more need for physical labour since that was what Ukrainian, Russian and Czech slaves were for. Economically, the Greater German Reich or “Germania”, was on the rise which was signified by the achievements of the regime exalted in state propaganda and a high GDP per capita which significantly surpassed the pre-war level which seemed to prove Hitler’s point that the eastern lands brought Germany wealth. Among the Third Reich’s achievements were the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1950, the launch of a satellite into Earth orbit in 1953 from Peenemünde by the team led by Wernher von Braun which gave Germany the lead in the space race, the creation of a vast network of ten lane autobahns, the creation of Hitler’s dreamed-of vast network of broad gauge railways with massive trains, and the construction of the world capital Germania.

Culturally, in the 40s and 50s, Hitler’s crabbed, banal tastes became the norm which led to a boringly repetitive German cultural atmosphere dominated by neoclassical art, baroque art and Wagnerian opera, and also the Nazis still used subversives as scapegoats. With the Jews removed almost completely from Europe except neutral countries like Switzerland, these were communism, interracial relations mainly between Aryans and Slavs, and also the “disease” (as Hitler called it) known as homosexuality that kept returning despite attempts to wipe it out. Homosexuality and violations of “racial hygiene” were heavily punished by the regime with approval of the Nazi party and the “Institute of Racial Hygiene” which combined Germany’s leading eugenicists.

America functioned as a convenient foreign scapegoat in the Cold War that ensued after the end of World War II. The latter was increasingly being blamed for Nazi Germany’s problems with propaganda depicting it as a country of corruption, poverty, racial degeneration and on the verge of societal collapse and civil war due to racial tensions between the general Aryan populace, the “shrewd Jewish capitalist plutocratic elites” and the “black movement” which was seen as an extension of the sway the Jews were said to have over US politics. Said Jews, according to state propaganda, were bent on undermining German power by supporting their “Soviet puppets”.

Hitler, after the war, focused first on his mega construction mania by building his world capital Germania, though he was quickly disappointed with the fact that Berlin’s soil could not support his pet building project. He reluctantly ordered for alternative locations to be found, with focus on Nuremberg and Munich which were of great importance in Nazi party history and Nazi symbolism. Nuremberg was chosen for the construction of the grand world capital of Germania as decided by Albert Speer with the following major changes which made the city a construction site for the better part of the post-war decade: the city was to be bisected by a north-south and an east-west avenue, each twice the length of the Champs-Élysées in Paris and flanked by 24 metre tall neoclassical marble columns adorned with Nazi eagles; on the north side of the junction of the two a massive forum for a 350.000 large crowd was to be built; on the north side of said forum would be the massive neoclassical People’s Hall, a domed structure that could house a crowd of 180.000 people, was 250m wide, 200m tall, had 24m tall columns supporting it, had a gold eagle statue in the back, and was adorned with an eagle clutching a globe rather than a swastika to symbolize world domination; Hitler’s vast baroque/neoclassical palace with its 700 metre facade and enormous gardens for Hitler’s German shepherds and Goebbels’ children to play in would be on the west side; the chancellery would be on the south to dwarf the existing one in Berlin; on the east of the forum would be the high command of the military; spanning the width of the north-south avenue would be an Arch of Triumph one hundred metres tall and on the inside would be carved the names of the victims of both World Wars; a massive air port known as the “Hermann Goering Airport” which was the largest in the world, was also built in Nuremberg; lastly, an Olympic Stadium capable of holding 400.000 people was to be built since Hitler was convinced that the Olympic Games would and should forever be held in Germany in the future (they weren’t though, and the Nazis organised their own equivalent, the “Aryan Games”).

Nuremberg was largely evacuated for the construction work with those who needed a new home being offered a free patch of land in Polish or Ukrainian lands that had been cleared of their original inhabitants, or receiving homes that had formerly belonged to Jews. This had to do with practical concerns, but also due to the fact that Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish and Czech slave workers as well as political dissidents were used as cheap, unskilled labour which the Nazi regime wanted to hide from the general populace and the world. Munich and Linz saw some minor changes with the former being the site of Hitler’s mausoleum and the latter of the mausoleum for Hitler’s parents, both modelled on the Pantheon in Rome.

The Berghof in Berchtesgaden in Bavaria was also expanded and Hitler would spend the last few years of his life there together with his mistress Eva Braun whose life continued the same way it had during and before the war. She was not allowed to take part in political decision making and so when Reich dignitaries came in, she was banished to the confines of her bedroom. She did have a little more freedom than before for her hobbies like nude sunbathing, smoking and photography (of which the former two were deeply disapproved by Hitler), this thanks to Hitler’s increasing reclusiveness from the late 1940s onward. She did, for the first time, appear alongside Hitler in public on the Nuremberg rally in 1946 since the older Hitler wanted to give the populace a new image that as he grew older, he was settling down for a quiet family life instead of the political activism of the 20s and 30s and his activities as a war leader in the mid 40s. She bore Hitler a son named Siegfried in 1947 and a daughter named Frida in 1949. She otherwise led a sheltered life in luxury with her own servants, driver and nannies for the children, far away from the hustle and bustle in Nuremberg and Berlin, in the boring daily routine of the Berghof. She took care of her children, something which gave her some distraction, as did her vacations to the spas and beaches on the Black Sea.

Hitler did not see much of his children as they were under his wife’s care as he believed it should be, and because they were sent off to boarding schools at the age of five to be moulded into ideological copies of their father. This was successful since both Siegfried and Frida Hitler are fanatical supporters of the Nazi cause up until today and have always denied the crimes committed by their father, blaming his underlings and claiming that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust. Otherwise, from what little they know, they remember him as a caring father and husband. They have an honorary position in the NSDAP thanks to their heritage. Braun would care for Hitler during the last two years of his life until 1954. After his death, she inherited the Berghof and lived out her life there. She also inherited Hitler’s wealth, earning a 600 pound-sterling allowance per month. After the fall of the Nazi regime, she consistently denied having any knowledge of Hitler’s crimes as stated in numerous interviews though some historians believe that she at least some superficial idea of what was happening. She died in 1994 at the age of 82.

In the meantime, Hitler’s power was by the late 40s very much absolute in his empire, but the constant annoyance of the guerrilla to the east loomed, especially now that this combined with pure terrorism (though justified considering Nazi state terror). Ethnic German minorities from across Eastern Europe were re-settled in the cities from which the original population was expelled to the countryside or industrial ghettos. The result was a sporadic campaign of car and suicide bombings to complement the guerrilla in the countryside. The control of the Germans didn’t stretch beyond the range of their guns which meant that the countryside was a pretty much lawless region with the SS as only one of the players, though it was the strongest. The Germans mostly only ventured outside the cities to collect the harvest, put down too troublesome resistance groupings, and continue ethnic cleansing, specifically the removal of Jews which was almost complete with most of them expelled to the Soviet rump-state and with Stalin’s news of this being met with disbelief outside his own country due to the tyrannical nature of his own regime. Stalin nonetheless continued to fuel the guerrilla war while the remnants of the Red Army unofficially fought on as well.

But still despite problems in suppressing the rebellious population in the east, Generalplan Ost seemed to be achieved even quicker than anticipated all things considered. For the 1940s and 50s, since rumours of Nazi crimes were mostly dismissed as Soviet propaganda or wilfully ignored by most of the world, the SS could continue pretty much undisturbed on its little playground of horror without any oversight from any higher authority except for an elite group in the Nazi party, and they grew more effective under the ruthless management of SS-Obergruppenführer (SS-general) Reinhard Heydrich who grew in influence. Heydrich, who was appointed as the new “minister for the eastern territories” replacing Rosenberg, started to slowly expand from the cities in an effective “inkblot strategy”, advancing only slowly and consolidating for lengthy periods of time. Thanks to these factors, the SS could work relatively speedy and by 1950 both Poland and Bohemia-Moravia were 75-80% Germanized. It also allowed for the SS to grow steadily in terms of influence because it wasn’t subjected to any higher governing body and because its manpower increased to over 2.5 million men with 1.3 million in the armed branch called the Waffen-SS which was deemed necessary if the SS was to be able to continue carrying out its tasks.

In the process of these practices of genocide, the conquests to the east were also given an official governmental structure. The Baltic States and Belarus became the Reichskommissariat of Ostland, northern Ukraine became Gotenland, southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula became Taurida, the territory around Moscow became Muscovy and the lands south of Stalingrad simply became known as Caucasus. Leningrad was renamed St. Petersburg again and Stalingrad became ‘Hitlerstadt’. Further to the west, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway remained ‘Reichskommissariats’ while Luxembourg was officially annexed as Moselland and Alsace-Lorraine as the Westmark. Austria became the Ostmark, Poland was continued to be called the General-Government, and the Czech territories remained as they were, the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia though it was de facto annexed into Germany.

The rest of the European continent was organised into the European Community, a military alliance and customs union of the fascist powers. All European countries joined in except for Switzerland which the fascist leaders used as a safe haven for shady financial transactions, and it remained as only one of three democratic powers in Europe, the other two being Sweden and Finland. Even neutral Portugal under the Estado Novo regime joined in to avoid being absorbed by Francoist Spain. In reality, the EC was a way to make Europe a market for cheap German grain and industrial products from the eastern lands, a market shielded from American and British produce by high external tariff barriers. The EC was officially governed by biannual meetings of a council of ministers and heads of state and also a parliament wherein seats were apportioned by population size. De facto though, these governing bodies were powerless with a strong German voice in proceedings which was a de facto veto right, a right that only the Italians had a slight say in since they had some respect from Germany for being allies throughout the war. German influence was strengthened by the fact that the EC’s headquarters was in Berlin and thus subject to scrutiny by German intelligence services. The EC was in reality a ploy for Nazi Germany to exert influence over the fascist puppet governments across Europe.

In the meantime, besides the almost complete jurisdiction over the east and its manpower, the SS and Gestapo jointly controlled the Nazi atomic bomb program. In 1946, the United States had successfully tested a nuclear weapon and Hitler suddenly radically put an emphasis on it. Under joint SS-Gestapo jurisdiction and the overall oversight of Reinhard Heydrich a search began for uranium deposits which were discovered in Bohemia-Moravia and Ukraine. Heydrich managed to “motivate” the scientists, the main ones being Diebner, Heisenberg, Hahn and Weiszäcker, by threatening their families if insufficient progress was made, which resulted in the invention of a new type of centrifuge to separate the uranium isotopes. Their fear for their lives and the lives of their families led them to excel and so Heydrich was once again effective even if his methods were highly questionable. Through espionage more intelligence was gathered and Nazi Germany finally tested a 22 kiloton atomic bomb in the Ukraine in 1950 and a 2.2 megaton (scaled down from 5 megatons for the live test) hydrogen bomb in 1956. The atomic bomb was tested on a Ukrainian village to determine the effects of a nuclear blast and the effects of radioactive radiation and other effects on the human body, but this was of course carefully omitted from the state propaganda campaign regarding success in the nuclear program. Italy was allowed to set up a nuclear research program of its own and received German help, allowing them to test a 12 kiloton device in the Libyan Desert in 1958.

The growth of the SS and its assorted branches such as the SD and Gestapo was symptomatic of a power struggle going on within the Nazi regime itself, behind the scenes of course well hidden from the general populace. Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler didn’t have good health though this was in part due to hypochondria, and also the stress suffered in the war contributed though that factor was now gone which meant a slight improvement. Still, Hitler became ever more reclusive as his health deteriorated and his cronies now started to run the state for him, only coming to him to ask for approval and feeding him mostly false information while he was under increasing medical care. In this way, Himmler managed to persuade Hitler to merge the SS with the Wehrmacht which had been one of Hitler’s goals for a long time now anyway. This gave Himmler a strong powerbase to seize power with once Hitler was dead which was what he had been aiming for all along. The SS was now a true state within a state and the dominant factor in Nazi politics though the combined influence of Goering, Goebbels, Bormann and a few others with their own leeway with Hitler managed to balance them out as long as the latter was still alive. Hitler in the late 40s/early 50s was still alive which prevented open infighting and also ensured a solid foreign policy since Hitler still dictated this from the confines of his palace.

In Hitler’s foreign policy, Germany consistently supported anti-British and anti-American nationalist resistance movements in the Middle East (Hitler didn’t want to support blacks in Africa which he considered inferior, and besides this France and Italy didn’t want examples for their own colonial subjects; as a result, black nationalist movements took on a strongly communist platform, though adapted to their own country’s needs). For example, the regime of the young Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi received help from German trainers and military advisors with generals Guderian and Rommel as military liaisons to Tehran. In 1944, British troops were compelled to withdraw from Iran since they had promised to do so after the war in Europe had ended and thusly German “advisors” returned. Iran after this purchased Messerschmitt Me-262 jetfighters, Stg.44 assault rifles and Panther tanks, forming the core of a modern air force and land army and it was in Iran that the first crisis erupted in this Cold War. When Iran nationalised the oil in 1950 under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq the first war between the West and Nazi Europe threatened. The firmly anti-British, due to his perceived humiliation in the late 1930s, foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop took a strong pro-Iranian position against the British who steered towards conflict, signing a mutual defence pact with the Shah and Mossadeq while in Tehran. The crisis dragged on with the US and Britain attempting an embargo but the Nazi-founded “European Community” continued to buy Iranian oil, importing it through Turkey, and so it was ineffective. Iran mobilized its armed forces as Britain sent a naval squadron with a battleship and an aircraft carrier. In 1951, German nuclear-armed Luftwaffe bomber squadrons were based in Iran and US President Truman wasn’t willing to start a Trans-Atlantic war over this and so Iran successfully nationalised its oil.

Another example was Palestine where Palestinian anti-British groups received German weapons which eventually led to a reluctant, grudging British withdrawal in 1949 and the foundation of the Republic of Palestine, in the process expelling most of the Zionist Jews, that had become the majority. In Syria, Pétain’s France gave independence under German pressure and an Arab nationalist government was installed with pro-Nazi sympathies.

As an extension of this foreign policy, Hitler also commenced construction of a big navy with an altered “Plan Z”. Eight “super” aircraft carriers of Japanese design based on the Japanese Shinano were laid down between 1945 and 1953 though the design was altered; these carriers of the “Hermann Goering-class” had superior armour to ward off both aerial bombs and torpedo attack. Their full weight increased to 78.000 tonnes when fully loaded and they could carry fifty aircraft. The reason for constructing these, for their time, massive carriers was American numerical superiority which Hitler wanted to compensate by means of these “super carriers” which, through their powerful armour and weaponry, could operate without a “carrier group”, unlike US carriers. Then four H41 class battleships (with 68.800 tonnes displacement and eight 42 cm [16.5 inch] guns), three O-class battlecruisers, 12 P-class cruisers, two further Hipper-class heavy cruisers, six M-class light cruisers and six large destroyers were to be built. For the construction of the aircraft carriers, Japanese expertise was employed. Many middle and lower rank Japanese naval officers (“military liaisons”) were subsequently employed to teach German naval officers and airmen modern naval aviation tactics. With this, the navy became the only force remotely capable of resisting the SS in the upcoming power struggle, but unfortunately it was pretty much an apolitical organ as long as its traditions weren’t touched. And strongly pro-Nazi admiral Dönitz was unlikely to intervene either as he supported radical Nazi ideas as much as the leaders of the SS.

In 1954, Adolf Hitler died at the age of 65 due to the effects of Parkinson’s disease, and also amphetamine and cocaine addiction caused by his quack of a doctor Theo Morell although the officially stated cause of death was a heart attack. Hitler was embalmed, much like Lenin in the Soviet Union, and permanently enshrined in his mausoleum in Munich and a power struggle erupted shortly thereafter, but it was short since there were only two main contenders, namely Himmler and Heydrich and the latter supported the former. Goering, Hitler’s designated successor, had retired to one of his castles in southern Germany to live a luxurious, even decadent life and had died of a stroke induced by his enormous obesity and morphine addiction in 1951 at the age of 58. Goebbels by himself wasn’t at all that powerful and unwilling to challenge Himmler or Heydrich who conspired to gain power while Bormann was discredited as a sycophant to Hitler and lacking in popular standing. He was quickly side-tracked as Reichskommissar of Muscovy, a prestigious position in name, but one that wasn’t very powerful and above all far away from Berlin, the de facto capital of Nuremberg and the party headquarters in Munich. He’d die there in 1967 at age 66 which didn’t receive too much attention (he had been politically sidetracked since the 1950s) other than a brief mention during a televised speech by Heydrich.

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler seized power with his large sway as leader of the SS and with the nominal support of Heydrich, leader of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) – under which the Gestapo, SD and Criminal Police resorted – and who technically was his subordinate. Himmler became Führer and Heydrich, the power behind the throne, was promoted to Reichsführer-SS for his loyalty and assumed command over all of Germany’s police forces. The now nearly 54 year old Himmler immediately proved to be a much greater maniac than his former master which would prove to be his undoing.

In the meantime, in Italy, Mussolini died as well a few years later in 1958 at the much higher age of 75 and ironically his death was much more illustrious than Hitler’s. This was pretty much ironic since, though Hitler admired Mussolini, the latter had drifted into the Austrian corporal’s shadow as a marionette to the Nazis, often complaining that there was a “German behind every tree”. But still, he did show up at Hitler’s grand funeral to pay his respects. He died after speaking to a large crowd of Italians gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the “March on Rome”. To the shock of the crowd, Mussolini had collapsed on stage, and after several tense days the news was released of his death due to cerebral haemorrhage. He too left a legacy of genocidal practices, though not nearly at the same scale as those of Hitler, the Japanese junta or even Stalin. After the war, Libya had risen up once again against which Mussolini had responded harshly with aerial bombings, chemical weapons and deportations to concentration camps in the desert which were cesspools of disease and famine, killing nearly 500.000 people or half of the original population. When oil was discovered in 1949, he became even more determined to hold it and many Italians immigrated to Libya and Tunisia over the following years. By the mid 1950s, the Italian populace, coming mainly from poorer southern Italy, had already demographically overwhelmed the indigenous Arab and Bedouin populations who were forcibly Italianized. By the 1950s, Libya had became Mussolini’s dreamed of “Fourth Shore” and the oil wealth made Italy rich beyond even Mussolini’s expectations. The same could not be said for Italian East Africa where an uprising erupted leading to a vicious colonial war and more genocide. These practices continued after his death when Count Galeazo Ciano took over government.

In the meantime, Himmler increased the intensity of actions against the Ukrainian and Russian populations which led to a new level of resistance, something which led to the “Continuation War” between the USSR and Germany since the latter now recognised it was still at war with the aforementioned country now led by the now 76 year-old Joseph Stalin who was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1955 for his long struggle as “Father of the People”. This “Continuation War” was a move that was unpopular with the Nazi brass. Himmler also introduced his radical “Cultural Revolution” in which he planned to destroy all elements of the old, Christian culture beginning with tearing down churches and building occult heathen temples to restore “pre-Christian Germanic martial values and racial vitality” which in Himmler’s opinion would strengthen Germany. Himmler also harshly cracked down on voices of dissent; there was increasing criticism on the regime since it was subject to constant terrorist attack despite its repressive nature and the efforts of the SS, SD and Gestapo to make Germany safe. These ruthlessly oppressive policies provoked massive popular unrest as the SD reported, something which the Gestapo suppressed harshly. Himmler was so erratic that any semblance of a coherent government disappeared with most government institutions working next to each other which made the bureaucracy enormously inefficient and slow since a lot of work was done doubly. He still managed to build the H-bomb and launch a manned mission into space in 1957, but this was no compensation for the tens of thousands dead German citizens resulting from the chaos of fanatical SS youths destroying anything that had to do with “post-pagan Germany”.

Heydrich decided to end the chaos and act with the power he had at his disposal as head of the Gestapo, Germany’s police forces and the SD which was an enormous network embedded into all layers of the Nazi state. When Himmler returned from a vacation in the Crimea in the summer of 1957, his plane exploded under mysterious circumstances and rather few asked questions since hardly anybody cared about the death of the unpopular leader. Heydrich seized power, ending the most infamous period in Nazi history. He declared Himmler a traitor to the German people and Hitler to be “Eternal Führer” and assumed the position of President out of respect for Hitler with Goebbels as his Chancellor. He restored collective government by summoning the Reichstag for the first time since 1942 and convening the cabinet for the first time since the mid 1930s to create a joint policy and most of all streamline decision making which included smoothing out structural flaws such as overlap in jurisdiction that had existed and caused rivalries for the past twenty years. He also wanted to end the corruption inherent to both party and state. Heydrich did so with ruthless pragmatism and efficiency which he tried to instil into all of his subordinates. He would lead Nazi Germany into a new era in the Cold War and to its final collapse from within.

Part 2: Developments in Asia and Elsewhere.

Imperial Japan had a much less complicated administrative structure since most of its conquests were governed indirectly through puppet governments, and the ones that weren’t were usually so small that a massive bureaucracy was not needed (Micronesia) or they had long since been integrated into Japan (Korea, Taiwan). Japan’s goals also didn’t include the extermination of a large portion of its subjects, rather their economic exploitation which was led by corporate structures (influenced by the state) with protection from the Japanese army.

Japan’s economy in the late 40s and early 50s grew which seemed to prove the point of the militarists about an autarkic economic system. Indeed, products from all over Asia such as tea, coffee, cacao, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, tobacco, rice and so on were available in large quantities and at low prices for Japanese consumers whose affluence grew during this period. Japanese companies dominated Asia, forming cartels and gaining monopolies on many products that they exported to other countries in the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere at high prices which led to high profit margins. Japanese products such as steel, heavy machinery, coal, oil, spices but also consumer products like cars were also available outside the Sphere and Japan signed a number of commercial agreements. One such agreement was with Nehru’s India which had a leadership that admired Japan’s development into a superpower. Nehru signed an agreement with Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo in which Japan agreed to provide coal, oil, steel, rubber and construction materials at low prices to help develop India’s industry as part of Nehru’s Five Year Plans. In return, Japan was allowed to import Japanese products without tariffs imposed on them and Japanese business conglomerates were allowed to invest what Nehru deemed “non-key industries”. Japan dominated Asia’s economy, but appearances were deceiving as the occupational duties of the Imperial Japanese Army rested ever more heavily on Japan’s finances. Moreover, protectionism was not an incentive for innovation and so stagnation would set in from the 1960s.

The lack of the extermination element led to a weaker resistance, although it definitely existed as shown by terrorist attacks in the occupied territories and within Japan itself against Japanese civilians. The ruling oligarchy handily used this resistance to further increase its very authoritarian regime into a ruthless totalitarian and omnipresent bureaucratic machine. For this purpose, Imperial Japan possessed not one but three police services, namely the Kempeitai (Military Police Corps), the Tokkeitai (Navy Secret Police) and the Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu (the Special Higher Police) which became dreaded by all opponents of the regime. The tasks of the first agency, the Kempeitai, comprised counter-propaganda, psychological operations, counterintelligence, supply gathering and rationing, and rear area security. It carried out these tasks in all the areas occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army with great diligence, efficiency and ruthlessness; the smaller Tokkeitai carried out similar work for the Imperial Japanese Navy. The last one, colloquially known as the “Tokko”, combined criminal investigation and counterespionage functions much like the Gestapo, and was the largest, most dreaded of the three.

It was a civilian version of the other two and its tentacles permeated all layers of society. The Tokko consisted of six departments: Special Police Work, Foreign Surveillance, Koreans in Japan (renamed to “Foreign Asians in Japan” in 1945), Labour Relations, Censorship and Arbitration. A sub-bureau known as the “Thought Section of the Criminal Affairs Bureau” created in 1927 to “study and suppress subversive ideologies” became the nucleus of the organisation in the 1950s as terrorism became an increasing problem. The Tokko used both uniformed and non-uniformed agents alongside a large network of informants and had units active in every Japanese prefecture, major city, and every overseas location with a significant Japanese population (such as Berlin, London, New Delhi, Jakarta or Shanghai). Informants infiltrated suspicious organisations with “dangerous ideologies” and vastly expanded its operations after the war, using local collaborators which undermined any resistance. The Tokko also monitored external communications and telephone lines inside and outside Japan. The Tokko was immensely powerful and rivalled only perhaps by the Gestapo, leaving behind agencies like MI5 and the FBI. It competed with the Gestapo for the position of largest number of active personnel per capita in the world.

In its foreign affairs, the Empire of Japan was deadlocked in an endless conflict against Chinese guerrillas supported by America and Britain that increasingly drained Japan’s financial strength although Japan maintained the upper hand during the 1950s. This conflict coincided with a Cold War against the United States and its allies which forced Japan to maintain an enormous naval strength that Japan could not realistically afford in the long term. Japan also developed nuclear weapons in 1955 after a nuclear weapons program riddled with difficulties and conflicts over jurisdiction between the army and navy. The Cold War expanded with the ascension of Himmler as Führer in Germany as he viewed the Japanese as racially inferior. Relations between the two former Axis partners would never completely recover.

In its internal politics, Japan saw factional strife similar to Germany’s, but it differed from Germany because none of the factions could gain ultimate power. The two main factions were the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy with the former supported by the Kempeitai and the latter by the Tokkeitai while the Tokko supported whichever side supported its interests the most at any given time. These factional conflicts decided on the balance in defence policy with the army focusing on suppressing China and the navy having a wider focus, including possible conflict with the United States. Despite these struggles, Hideki Tojo (1884-1960) remained the dominant political figure in the 40s and 50s as Prime Minister from 1941 to 1949, as Home Minister from 1941 to 1942, Foreign Minister in 1944 and again from 1957 to 1960, Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff from 1944 until 1960, and again as Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960. He was the strongman of Japan with the support of the Showa Emperor.

The United States under President John W. Bricker had recognised during the latter’s second term (1945-1949) that isolationism was no longer tenable. On the eastern seaboard the US was faced with Nazi Germany angrily staring across the Atlantic and making America a scapegoat for its problems, and, more importantly, imposing tariffs against American products. On the western seaboard, America opposed militarist Japan, competed with it for influence in the Pacific, and supported resistance against Japanese colonial rule with finances, intelligence and weapons. Both were ideologically anti-democratic and therefore anti-American, both had interests that went against American interests, both blamed America for their problems, and both were enemies of Washington DC’s British allies. Isolationism was increasingly criticized because, contrary to what isolationists said, it harmed American interests more than it helped them and a strong foreign policy did not limit the government’s ability to solve America’s internal problems.

Bricker during his second term, with the pro-interventionist and liberal Republican Thomas E. Dewey as his Vice-President, became full military allies with Great Britain. Washington also supported London financially, enabling the British government to end the post-war financial and economic crisis and start an economic boom. The United States also strengthened ties with South American countries through bilateral agreements of political, military and economic nature. Against rightist totalitarian Japan and Germany, the US supported moderate, reform-minded, socialist oriented leftwing governments across South America. These governments with American assistance managed to modernize their (partially planned) economies and create social welfare. Except for the dictatorial regime in Brazil, Argentina under Juan Person and Paraguay under Alfredo Stroessner who maintained ties with Berlin and Tokyo, and Uruguay which just wanted to remain neutral, all South American, Central American and Caribbean countries (and Britain) joined the Atlantic and Pacific Treaty Organisation (APTO) in 1948. Besides this, America supported independence movements in the colonies of Italy and France, and it supported the colonies that Britain “let go” during the 1950s with only some competition from Japan and its anti-imperialist rhetoric. Nazism and Italian Fascism were totally alien to African independence movements.

This resulted in internal shifts in the American political parties with many conservative, isolationist minded Republicans leaving to join the Democrats and many progressive, pro-interventionist Democrats to defect to the Republicans.

America itself also instituted the draft and Congress approved the “Ten-Five Program for the United States Navy” which outlined the expansion of the navy. More specifically, the plan called for ten aircraft carriers and five battleships (hence the name) to be laid down every year from 1946 to 1951 for a total of 50 carriers and 25 battleships to be finished by 1953. America started an arms race.

I applaud your effort but this kinda sucks. Really bad alternate history.

Why would you go inventing stuff like Roosevelt being killed or why would would you change the date of certain incidental events like discovery of Katyn? Seems like you just wanted to eliminate USA or help German propaganda by making up any crazy story you could think of. That's just silly.

Roosevelt being killed is something I saw as a way of making the Axis win; Roosevelt was pretty interventionist and I wanted isolationist presidents. I also wanted to prevent the Nazi state from going down in international revilement (hence the Katyn thing) for story purposes obviously. Too bad you think it's bad .

I think it's a decent effort, and not only because the amount of your writings but I like more "realistic" alternate histories with Germany beating Britain in North Africa and not invading USSR or Germans capturing Moscow in 1941 and achieving some kind of a victory by late 1941, accompanied by USA beating Japan (their conflict was pretty much inevitable by 1941 anyway, unlike the German invasion and so was the American victory).

OK, so here's another chapter.

Chapter IV: The Reinhard Doctrine, Détente, Cracks and Crisis, 1960-1980.

Part 1: Developments in Europe.

In 1960, it seemed like the Reich was at the highest point of its power and indeed arguments could be made for this point of view, arguments spelled out further below. Politically and militarily, Nazi Germany dominated the European continent as the leading power in the European Community and the bulwark against the “evil Judeo-Bolshevik hordes”. The European countries mostly followed Germany’s lead with some measure of acceptance of German dominance ranging from full and willing cooperation as with Italy and Spain, to tolerance from the French and reluctant cooperation in Denmark to preserve democracy. Loss of German support and being left to the tender mercies of Stalinist bolshevism was something that Germany also dangled in front of European leaders’ faces, specifically the eastern Europeans; it was a great way to motivate them to stay in line. Perhaps the reason why Germany never chose to obliterate the USSR with nuclear weapons, besides fear of the American response, was that it served as a convenient bogeyman.

Germany had a large and powerful army as well with highly advanced main battle tanks, with perhaps the most advanced gunnery systems and armour in the world, and third generation jetfighters with advanced radar, missiles and thrust vectoring pioneered by Messerschmitt. Germany was also the leader in the field of intercontinental ballistic missiles and possessed 2.000 nuclear weapons – making it one of the five nuclear powers of the time besides the US, Britain, Italy and Japan (France developed none since it was under Germany’s nuclear umbrella, and the USSR committed all of its means to the war effort and would be subject to nuclear attack should it ever develop its own atomic bomb as Heydrich had threatened). The Nazi empire also had the largest stockpile of nerve gas and second largest stockpile of bacteriological weapons in the world (in part to compensate for a relatively small nuclear stockpile when compared to that of the US which was ten times larger).

Economically, Germany was also the leader in Europe with the economic system it had created which had been laid down in the European Community’s charter. The EC was a customs union with free traffic of capital, services and people and which provided for very high tariff walls against foreign products. De facto this allowed for German companies to dominate most sectors of the European economy and for German export products to flood European markets, making German entrepreneurs rich. Technologically, Germany was a leading power as well, having brought the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit in 1953 and the first man into space in 1957 while manned missions to the moon and Mars were being planned. The Reich also had a highly developed infrastructure, at least in its core regions, with ten lane autobahns, a dense railroad network and good telecommunications.

On a cultural level the Nazis also dominated the European theatre, and in it the aforementioned telecommunications network came in to play as the Nazis manipulated a new tool invented in the late 1940s. The aforementioned network namely included television which was a tool that the still serving propaganda minister Goebbels handily made use of and which he called “a marvel, the dream of any propagandist”. Television allowed for German culture to be spread even quicker with movies produced by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry being aired on a continent spanning scale, with a number of masterpieces among them (even if they were obviously propaganda movies) with a new generation of actors. Western and Aryan heroism were exalted with numerous movies on themes that included, as one of the favourite ones, the Mongol invasion of Europe in which Genghis Khan (though it was actually his son Ogedei that had invaded Europe) was portrayed by actors who were very obviously dressed to look like Stalin. On the whole though, Nazi culture was very stagnant with not much new being developed to replace the repetitive Wagnerian operas and German folksong which led youths to look for music outside the German sphere in spite of the fierce condemnation of Western rock ’n roll by the regime as decadent. German cultural dominance did, however, leave the legacy that most of those born in Europe after 1930 had German as their second if not first language.

In the meantime, while Goebbels disagreed with what he referred to as “immoral decadence”, “English rubbish” or simply “noise”, Heydrich had a somewhat more pragmatic stance on music matters since he wanted the youth movements – that were forming in Germany just as in Britain and the US in spite of state repression – to keep quiet since he didn’t feel like suppressing internal popular unrest. He never really was as stagnant in cultural politics anyway as a pragmatist and, as a musician, he is said to even have appreciated and enjoyed a few Beatles tunes, playing a few of them on his violin and owning a few of their records (even though they were technically illegal). And so, in the 1960s the cultural climate eased somewhat, a phenomenon that spread out to other European states. In 1964, The Beatles had twelve gigs in Germany in Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover, Dortmund, Frankfurt and a few other major cities with ticket sales totalling 850.000. Thusly, German teens who hadn’t seen much of the war years if anything and therefore hardly grasped the why of the need for such a tight state control over culture, were introduced to live pop music, psychedelic rock and full blown rock and roll which was a vast improvement over hard-to-come-by low quality copies of records and music cassettes illegally smuggled in from Britain and the US by tourists. The first and largest concert in Hamburg with a crowd of 110.000 was to be broadcast on live national television over Goebbels’ protests. Two years later, in 1966, The Rolling Stones toured the Reich as well though they were more careful after an unsuccessful tour in the US. They did five gigs, playing for an estimated 275.000 people, playing in Cologne, Düsseldorf and also in Amsterdam and introducing their audience to their brand of rock ‘n roll, but also rhythm and blues, blues rock, and blues.

The relative tranquillity in fascist Europe was but a facade as unrest brewed below the surface in a number of places in and outside Germany. In Slovakia, still led by the clerical-fascist collaborationist government of the now 79 year-old Jozef Tiso, unrest exploded in 1966. In the capital of Bratislava, a group of students gathered that quickly swelled in size to tens of thousands, this after the wrongful imprisonment of a dissident student for “seditious and treasonous activities” which meant that said student potentially faced life-long imprisonment or the death penalty. Tens of thousands marched on Bratislava to join in the protest, and in the Slovak People’s Party of Tiso, a political realignment took place in which moderates ousted him in the autumn of that year and placed the aging dictator under house arrest after a 27-year rule. The new government under the reform-minded Alexander Dubcek announced liberal reform with more civil rights, and political and economical decentralization. Heydrich responded quickly with a military action in which German, Hungarian and Romanian troops invaded and occupied Slovakia, restored Tiso’s totalitarian regime and executed several thousands of dissidents, thus putting an end to any unrest. In a big, pompous show of force the clerical-fascist regime had been put back in charge by foreign powers, but this use of arms couldn’t conceal the cracks that were beginning to appear in the fascist hegemony and in fact it was a symptom of a slow decline. It was in this period after the so-called “Slovak Autumn” that Heydrich formulated the so-called “Reinhard Doctrine” which justified the invasion, stating that any threat to the monopoly of “National Socialism and the People” in one country, was a threat to all National Socialist countries (with National Socialism here being conveniently broadly defined to include fascism, clerical fascism, Franco-style authoritarianism and so on). In the aftermath, only one concession was made: the dissident student was shown “mercy” by being sentenced to a “mild” 15-20 year prison term instead of life-long imprisonment or death; death would have been a blessing considering the abuse he had to endure at the hands of Slovak secret police that was well trained in Gestapo torture tactics.

In the meantime, the Nazi economy was growing ever more stagnant by the early 1960s, even in spite of quite high oil prices which contributed to state income through control over Baku in Azerbaijan. A cause for this was the relatively inefficient economic system of the strongly regulative Four Year Plans that created a partially centrally planned economy. Even private corporations had to produce in line with the government’s set production quotas which reduced investment-profit incentive and eventually government financing came to dominate private business. Also, the guerrilla in the east dragged on which cost the state a lot of money and therefore the tax burden in Nazi Germany could be as high as 60% or even 70%. Besides this, the Nazis maintained an enormous standing army in general which drained funds as did the space projects and atomic bomb production. The innovativeness of the Nazi economy faded away as time passed on since there was little incentive to innovate. Any income made from patents was heavily taxed to “redistribute wealth to the little man” and most inventions weren’t worth much on the commercial market since the Nazi state emphasized military and aerospace technologies and not the consumer market. Generally, German companies from the 1960s started to increasingly lose their leading economic positions as they barely introduced new, exciting products and didn’t increase production very much. The only reason that immediate collapses and an enormous economic depression were avoided was the EC’s very high tariffs against foreign produce.

On a micro-level, the stagnating economy was noticed a little later since the people were kept satisfied by news of “great military victories” and of course successes in the space race such as the lunar landings in 1964, but also the more or less successful creation of a personality cult around Heydrich by Goebbels. By the end of the 1960s, however, the economic reality could no longer be hidden from the populace. Living standards dropped due to increasing taxes which were now also applied to the middle and lower classes “for the benefit of the Reich and the people”. Real wages started to drop as well due to inflation which led the Nazi central bank to raise the interest rate to slow down the creation of money. The central bank also devaluated the Reichsmark which made German exports cheaper, but this measure had undesired effects. Imports from Germany’s European allies suddenly became much more expensive and so Germany imported less. This fed a European-wide economic crisis as other countries took similar measures, feeding a downward spiral that worsened as time progressed, especially when protectionist measures were taken. The entire economic framework of the European Community suddenly became pointless and started to falter, ceasing to exist in all but name by the 1970s. As a result, living standards decreased across Europe. Strong feelings of scepticism and apathy gripped the population as they were no longer stimulated to work while the hypocrite party elites still enriched themselves.

In other European countries similar developments took place such as in France and Italy who waged long colonial wars, especially the former in Algeria. France tried to maintain its colonial empire where the British had already largely failed. They used Italian repressive tactics which were ordinary crimes against humanity, but their colonial empire was much bigger and by 1970 they only controlled the areas around Oran and Algiers which were dominated by French settlers. They gave up Algeria minus the aforementioned French-dominated areas which were incorporated into metropolitan France. Italy lost Ethiopia, though they didn’t recognise it, but kept strongly Italianized Eritrea and Somalia (and Libya) after a decades’ long effort to maintain control over the whole of Italian East Africa.

A climate of disinterest and some measure of small but growing dissatisfaction set in; this was hardly surprising considering the grim, grey, dull, monotonous reality that many lived in. Though it was mostly limited to some small, daily complaining and moaning, it was no help for the Nazi state and party apparatus as they tried to maintain a totalitarian regime, something which required some measure of support among the people. Therefore, old but still wily propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels decided to put up a grand spectacle at the first best opportunity to show German might. This opportunity came in 1973, when Goebbels was already 75 and close to 76, with the 40th anniversary of the Nazi Party’s assumption of power in 1933 which gave Goebbels the opportunity to stage massive displays of power. Massive military parades, marches of the Hitler Youth and their oaths of loyalty, the full party brass assembling in full regalia to honour Hitler’s legacy at his mausoleum in Munich, torch parades, and constant reminders of the great things achieved under National Socialist rule were a part of it. Massive celebrations took place and the entire week of celebration was declared a national holiday with schools and most businesses closed. The opportunity was taken to organise an NSDAP Congress in the Olympic Stadium filled with 400.000 fanatical party members and which was broadcast on national television. The Nazi propaganda department put up quite a show to convince the world but most above all its own people about the strength of the Greater German Reich.

The image put up in an intense several months long propaganda campaign of a happy, affluent and strong Germany, however, was to many a farce, even a fallacy. To the outside world it seemed real enough, but many Germans had a dull life and were sick and tired with the corruption and sluggishness in the party and state bureaucracy, not to mention the bleak economic prospects. It seemed Goebbels had lost his magical touch as a propagandist and he knew it because the SD, the party’s intelligence service, reported that the people’s morale had barely been affected by the enormous grandeur displayed in the celebrations. Goebbels “retired” as minister of propaganda and chancellor for “health reasons” in 1974 and ironically he’d be the only one of the “old fighters” to live long enough to witness the fall of the Reich (not completely true, former SA leader Wilhelm Schepmann would see it too, but he was an irrelevant political lightweight since the SA had been marginalized since the 1930s) which he would lament in his diary published in four volumes by his wife four years after his death in 1985 at the age of 88. His wife Magda, the (in)famous “First Lady of the Reich”, would die a few years later in 1990 at the age of 89, outlived by her seven children who, except for foreign minister Helmut Goebbels, served no public function and led quiet lives except for the occasional interviews about their parents.

Nazi Germany in the 1970s was definitely unable to keep up with the United States as a military power as much as Heydrich tried to push the economy which continued to falter and even started to decline in the mid 70s. By now, state finances were becoming ever more burdened at an alarming rate due to the low-level guerrilla in the east in which said guerrillas were gaining ground, but also the enormous social welfare system which supported many who had become “social parasites” since it often was more beneficial than actually having a job, even a full-time one.

Germany only lasted through the late 60s and the early-mid 1970s due to détente with the US under President Kennedy which temporarily relieved the burden. This was caused by high oil prices which negatively affected the US economy and benefited Germany’s. Kennedy requested Heydrich to pressure his Middle Eastern allies to lower oil prices during his state visit to Berlin in 1970 and in return he would tone down America’s anti-German foreign policy. This would enable Germany to lower defence spending and spending on their very expensive space program. This détente wouldn’t last long after Kennedy’s presidency.

Another thing that betrayed growing German weakness was unrest in other European countries such as Romania for example where a monarchist dictatorial regime still ruled. Here, an uprising similar to the 1966 one in Slovakia threatened to overthrow the regime and maybe even the King in favour of a more reform-minded government which led to an invasion by Hungarian, Bulgarian Italian and German troops which restored order even if this restoration was only temporary. Heydrich died in 1979 at the age of 75 of a heart attack most likely induced by stress caused by his inability to hold back the tide of history and with the end of his iron fist reign of terror, Germany’s grip over Europe weakened. In France and Italy the regimes saw uprisings by a reform-minded young generation which the French military junta and Italy’s Grand Council of Fascists tried and failed to suppress and this time there was no foreign military intervention to restore fascist rule.

In Germany itself there was popular unrest as well. The people demanded peace, bread, work and freedom. Initially, the regime under the new Reichsführer-SS and President Kurt Waldheim tried to violently and brutally suppress the uprisings through the “specialist bureaus”, namely the SS, Gestapo, SD and the police, but at a certain point the uprisings could no longer be contained as much as they tried. The same applied to Italy where the OVRA was deployed to suppress dissent and failed or Spain where King Juan Carlos conceded democratic reform. Elections were scheduled to be organised in 1983 after exactly five decades of Nazi rule and democracy finally returned. This happened right after Waldheim had the Nazi dominated Reichstag issue an enormously elaborate network of amnesty laws which acquitted them from the “actions necessary” in their service of the Nazis. A final peace was also signed with the USSR under a reform-minded leadership that had succeeded the 85 year-old Stalin in 1964 after the latter’s death after his over two decade long fight against fascism. Many regions had been Germanized and Germany managed to keep them through threatening with nuclear violence. Poland, the Baltic States, the Crimea and all territory west of the Dnieper remained in German hands and grudges remained, but peace was there. The Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, in the meantime, were restored to independence. Hitler’s so-called “Thousand Year Reich” was over after an existence of only half a century and Waldheim had the dubious honour of being its last leader. The “New Order” had failed.

Part 2: Developments in Asia and Elsewhere.

The Japanese Empire underwent similar developments in the 60s and 70s. Economically, Japan was dominant in Asia with Japanese business cartels having long since established monopolies. These monopolies, however, had a stagnant effect on Asia’s economies since there was no competition and therefore no incentive to innovate, and so Japan started to lag behind when compared to the technologically and quantitatively superior American economy. This declining economic base needed to keep up a large military occupation to put down rebellions in Asia and maintain order. Fear of disorder was only increased after the ’66 uprising in Slovakia which was omitted from the state controlled press. Besides this, Japan needed to maintain a powerful fleet to compete with the growing United States Navy. Politically, Japan saw no change in the 60s and 70s with an oligarchy of officers and representatives of the mega-corporations, conglomerates and cartels ruling Japan “in the name of the Emperor”.

There was some measure of détente under Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida who was open to improving relations with the United States under the very popular, reform-minded three terms President John F. Kennedy (President from 1961 to 1973). He was heavily criticized for getting too cosy with Berlin and Tokyo and failing to drag the economy up on its feet despite major reforms (who’s effects would only show themselves in the Nixon presidency, earning Nixon undeserved popularity). This Democrat interlude ended with Richard M. Nixon moving into the White House in 1973 after winning the 1972 Presidential Election. With a Republican victory in Congressional elections shortly hereafter, Nixon and his running mate Reagan could push through a much more aggressive foreign policy and so relations with Japan and Germany deteriorated. The US, during Nixon’s presidency from 1973 to 1981, embarked upon a massive rearmament program, and Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan struggled to keep up.

While Germany democratized, ended its military occupation of Europe, and stopped the counterinsurgency in the east under pressure from its own population and because of the need to reduce military spending to lighten the burden on a stagnating economy, the Imperial Diet in Tokyo never even considered it. The Japanese military junta tightened its grip on the reins of power over the course of the mid-late 1970s with increasing censorship. News, media and even letters from Japanese soldiers stationed abroad were heavily censored and Japan isolated its population ever more from news of the outside world, bombarding them with anti-American propaganda while they were at it. Going on vacations outside of Asia were also forbidden to everyone except the elites to “prevent people from being influenced by subversive ideologies”. Japan ever more became a “hermit empire” as today’s political analysts and historians call it. News of military defeats in China piling up never reached Japan in this way even though Japan was by now mostly pushed back to the major cities in eastern China except in Manchuria. Any dissent was picked up by informants that riddled all layers of Japanese society of the Kempeitai, the Tokkeitai, Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu and especially the latter’s infamous sub-bureau. This was the “Though Section of the Criminal Affairs Bureau” better known simply as the “Thought Police” which by the 70s was the largest of them all with much more agents and funds and the dominant branch of the Tokko in all but name. The thought was that any resistance began with dissenting thoughts and these needed to be suppressed before they manifested themselves as a real threat or influenced others.

In this way, the Japanese regime managed to linger on into the 1980s and as conditions grew ever worse, the ruling oligarchy of military officers and businessmen continued to blame America and “subversive elements” for its troubles and become more totalitarian than ever before. They even believed their own propaganda, and soon started to consider the unmentionable, the unthinkable: a quick, decisive decapitation strike against the United States to eliminate it and thus Japan’s problems. Plans were created, as revealed recently, though fortunately never executed.

It's back .

Chapter V: Return of Democracy, 1980-2012.

Part 1: Reform in Europe.

Of the Greater German Reich, a rump remained though it was still significantly larger than other European states, stretching from the Dnieper to Alsace-Lorraine and from the Danish border to the Italian one with 100 million inhabitants. There was ire from the occupied countries and also the NSDAP became widely despised by many as after the 1983 elections, the Nazis’ political opponents released documents concerning the massive genocides and relocations as part of Generalplan Ost, which made Nazism a pariah ideology as much as Stalinism outside Germany itself; inside Germany a significant group of followers remained, especially among those born between 1920 and 1950 who lived through the glory days of Nazism and also the hundreds of thousands of party members, state officials, SS men, SA men, Gestapo agents that had gotten their hands dirty, even forming organisations to rehabilitate their image and collect funds for lawyers for those put on trail for their crimes. Though Germany was weakened, it maintained an economic centre position in Europe which forced the European nations to maintain economic ties with them and Germany thusly avoided complete international isolation. Countries that during or after the war had willingly cooperated with Hitler-Germany – Finland, Romania, Italy, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Portugal, Italy and Spain – remained members of the European Community which became a more open alliance with true equality to the member states.

France, however, had gotten a coalition of liberals and social-democrats who pushed the proponents of the military regime into the opposition and the National Assembly voted to leave the EC. The Netherlands, Belgium, France and Norway formed the European Atlantic Community joined later by Sweden and Denmark, neither of which had been happy being pressured into the European Community to begin with. Newly independent Serbia and Montenegro joined into a customs union with Greece, which had also attained its independence from Italy after a four decade long occupation, though failed to get Albania to come along since the latter got an autonomous status within Italy. Through Italianization and Italian settlers, its ethnic composition had been too heavily skewed for it to break free, but at least the Albanians now got representation.

Within the remaining members of the European Community, democracy re-emerged after decades of dictatorship, starting in Germany with others following their example. The NSDAP saw a split between radicals who adhered to the old Nazi ideology and moderates who emphasized the Socialist element in National Socialism and who formed the National People’s Party (Nationale Volkspartei) which would have a feud with the “old party” for several more years to come. The NVP combined notions of welfare state, corporatism and a regulated economy, but unlike the NSDAP it discarded Hitler’s old “racial doctrine” as outdated which was proven by developments in western science that discredited ideas on racial superiority and eugenics.

Besides these two parties who initially formed the main part of the political spectrum from left to right, several other political parties were (re)formed as well with certain degrees of success. The social-democrat SPD was reconstituted by dissident German exiles who returned to their home country and thanks to their social program that promised economic reform to the benefit of the lower middle class and the working class, they won big in the 1983 elections. The Catholic Centre Party (Zentrumpartei) also reconstituted itself since many Catholics had been discontented with Nazi rule because the Nazi regime had mostly banned religion from public life after the war. They, however, would not regain the political prominence they had had before 1933 because the initiative to form a joint Christian-Democrat bloc (or a party) failed with many Protestants choosing to vote for either the NSDAP or the NVP. German Protestantism was dominated by the “German Christian” movement which had tried to synthesize elements of the Protestant faith and Nazism, hence the failure. The DNVP was also rebuilt with a standard conservative-nationalist platform without Nazi ideas. A liberal party also formed known as the Freedom Party of Germany (Freiheitspartei Deutschlands) or FPD which scored strongly among the upper and upper middle class in Germany which resented strong state control over economic and cultural life. The communist KPD was also returned from underground opposition, but decade long revilement in state propaganda ensured that they remained a fringe movement.

After the elections, three months of intense negotiations took place since each party had its own ideas on firing up the stagnating economy and making Germany a world leader again. A coalition was formed between the social-democrat SDP, the liberal FPD and the socialistic NVP with the SDP as coalition leader.

The new coalition headed by Helmut Schmidt wrote down a new constitution with some leanings toward the old Weimar constitution, but they could not escape from the tradition of centralism (partially out of fear for instability) that had dominated German politics ever since Germany’s foundation in 1871 except for the brief interlude from 1919 to 1933. In the new political structure in Germany, elections by proportional representation for the Reichstag were to be held every four years and presidential elections every seven years. The Bundesrat was elected indirectly by the member states of the newly christened Republic of Germany; besides this, these states exerted little autonomy except when it came to infrastructure and educational policies. The judiciary which had been interwoven with the state to serve state and party interests – to the point that it was barely recognisable as a separate entity – was again separated as a recognisable legal branch with many old Nazi judges being removed, and several prominent ones disbarred. The President’s power was also a lot weaker when compared to the Nazi era though he remained the dominant political figure. The cabinet was solely responsibility to the parliament, and the latter presented a check on Presidential power since he was unable to dissolve parliament and issue new elections unless his cabinet asked him to, and his vetoes could be undone by a 60% majority. The President was the commander in chief of the armed forces, but was not immune to parliamentary power since they could impeach him with a two thirds majority in votes. Besides this, the President was not immune to court decisions, this in order to avoid the excesses under the Nazi regime with leaders who believed themselves to be above the law.

The coalition leaders introduced strong economic and social reform in the early-mid 1980s which reduced if not removed government control over most sectors except for key sectors – mining, electricity production, arms industry, aerospace industry, public transportation and higher education – and the system of Four Year Plans was abandoned altogether. The re-introduction of free market workings proved to work to some degree though wasn’t as successful as initially anticipated by the rather overly optimistic coalition leaders who didn’t realize what was needed to move away from such a heavily regulated economic system. The first few years in fact saw a continuation of the trend of economic decline until the first growth in 1986 when a number of German companies had regained something of their economic top positions, among them Krupp but also a computer company named Zeiss which invented a revolutionary, easy-to-use new steering program for personal computers in 1988 known as Optica. The program was quickly adopted as the standard program in the state bureaucracy and quickly spread to the rest of Germany and most European countries though it faced heavy competition from companies Microsoft and Macintosh who got foot aground in the UK, France, the Benelux Norway and Sweden from where they tried to move into European markets. In part, this economic growth that started in the latter half of the 1980s was to be attributed to a much decreased defence expenditure which allowed for money to be invested elsewhere, which also meant that Germany acceded to American global military dominance, though they maintained a large nuclear stockpile.

Part 2: The Sun Sets on the Empire of Japan.

Acceding to American military dominance was never something that came up in the Japanese Diet, however. Both the army and navy insisted on maintaining parity in conventional forces to the United States as well as a sufficient nuclear deterrent. With an economy the size of France’s economy, this was an impossible task and Japan got ever more impoverished and isolated. The indoctrinated populace, spoon fed “Bushido” code of conduct and having been isolated from the outside world, was still loyal for now (the Japanese had never been ones to protest very quickly anyway). The ascension of a new, reform-minded Emperor would provide the catalyst for the militarist regime to overplay its hand vis-à-vis the Japanese people.

In January 1989, Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa, died after a reign of more than 62 years. He was succeeded by his son Akihito, the Heisei Emperor, and this new Emperor was very reform-minded; he wanted to continue the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in a democratic form with equal relations with the other member states. He easily saw that Japan could not maintain parity with the US, that military rule had reduced the country to economic crisis and poverty, that Japan’s eternal war in China was going nowhere fast and that Japan was becoming ever more isolated. A democratic Japan with a respectable great power status (not superpower) and normalized relations with Asia and the rest of the world was the best, most viable option.

The ruling oligarchy of military officers, cartel leaders, and managers of the dominant mega-corporations disagreed and had the Emperor placed under house arrest which went to show how much the Emperor had become a mere symbol. Radicals (even from a Japanese perspective) assumed total power and drew their plan which they believed would restore Japan’s power. They had not counted on the Japanese populace.

Japan’s military situation in China was dire with Japan only in control of the major cities and Manchuria with the Kuomintang, leader of the resistance, dominating the countryside and smaller cities. Japan’s economy was descending into hyperinflation, scarcity, stagnation and rationing to keep up the war effort. The house arrest of the Emperor, who was still considered the “Son of Heaven”, pushed the Japanese population over the edge. In early 1989 massive student protests erupted in Tokyo, but those were fiercely stamped down upon by the police. The protests, however, grew and continued into spring 1989 and the brutalisation of the conflict discredited the military junta heavily, leading to the Imperial Diet, normally a rubber stamp institute, to disavow them. That enabled Emperor Akihito to stage a palace coup and form a moderate government that announced democratic reform and the withdrawal of Japanese forces overseas.

Under his lead, Japan would give up its military parity, democratize, normalize its relationship with the US, China (for as far as possible), Asia and the rest of the world and return as a growing economic power from the late 1990s, early 2000s.

Part 3: Developments in Post-Nazi Europe.

Europe profited from American economic growth in the 1990s and also aided efforts toward economic development in Japan, China and the rest of Asia.

A controversial issue were the “Waldheim Amnesty Laws” which he had firmly carved into stone before giving up power. There were many who were all too willing to punish the Nazis since they themselves had suffered from Nazi crimes, but succeeding Presidents who themselves had often served in the Nazi state or party apparatus vetoed any efforts to abolish these amnesty laws. A decade’s long debate would erupt, something which would only be drawn out when an NVP-NSDAP-DNVP coalition gained power in the 1999 elections. It was voted out of power in the 2003 elections and in 2004 the amnesty laws were finally repealed. Most old Nazis were dead, but Waldheim was still alive and was made a scapegoat for many Nazi crimes with the trail starting in 2004. He was imprisoned since he was considered flight dangerous in 2005 and died in 2007 before he could be sentenced, having served only two years in prison.

Democratization also took place in other countries in the European Community. In Spain, for example, King Juan Carlos reformed the state into a constitutional monarchy and the same occurred in Italy. In Romania, where monarchist dictatorship had begun after Antonescu’s death in 1960, opposition parties gained power and in a referendum the vote was cast in favour of abolishing the oppressive, reactionary, collaborationist monarchy as the King refused to concede power to parliament. In Bulgaria, this was avoided since, starting in 1979, Tsar Simeon II had introduced liberal economic and political reforms which would lead to Bulgaria attaining pre-1979 production levels the quickest and becoming a political role model. In Serbia, the monarchy easily survived since its (unsuccessful) efforts to resist foreign domination made it a symbol of national unity and freedom. Greece, after decades of Italian occupation had attained independence through peaceful means; Albania was given an autonomous status and remained a part of Italy (as did Libya, Eritrea and Somalia).

Despite successes in political reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the wake of Heydrich’s death and the following death spiral and collapse of the Nazi regime, unrest simmered. This unrest was partially caused by the fact that Germany’s grip over Europe had been temporarily weakened with German garrison forces being removed as part of decreases in defence expenditure. This was enhanced by the new democratic regime which was reluctant to intervene with the Nazi heritage of military intervention and domination in Europe in the back of their minds.

In Serbia, a government dominated by conservatives and ultranationalists gained power which agitated against perceived oppression of Serb minorities in Italy. Very soon, in 1983, a war erupted between the two which expanded. Bulgaria partially mobilized its sizeable army and moved troops to the border. They very soon got into a shooting war with Serb forces and Greece took its time to side with Serbia to get Thrace back from Bulgaria. A separate shooting war started between Romania and Hungary regarding the status of northern Transylvania, but neither side got very far, and it was separate from the other conflict since both countries had to lose by expanding the war (seeing how Bulgaria claimed northern Dobrudja from Romania and Italy claimed bits of Hungarian territory).

This chain of events initiated the Third Balkan War, which would last until 1986 since it took that long for the European Community to get its act together, leading to the worst atrocities in Europe since the late 1950s (when Heydrich had moderated Nazi racial policies to little more than propaganda). A joint taskforce of Spanish, German, Italian and Turkish troops intervened and imposed a ceasefire on the warring parties in 1987. In the subsequent Istanbul Accords, the pre-war boundaries were recognised by all parties except for some changes on the Croat-Serb borders. Population exchanges to settle ethnic conflict were promoted and the European powers warned that war as a means to settle such issues wouldn’t be tolerated with the perpetrator being punished (the “Istanbul Doctrine”).

In the rest of the world, Germany did not act so forcefully and in fact withdrew to a lower position since it no longer competed for the position of global hegemonic power. It no longer could considering its reduced military projection capabilities with much of its previously vaunted navy with aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines rusting in port until the revival in the mid 1990s (which resulted in some accidents and the loss of the pride of the navy, nuclear submarine Taurida, in an exercise in the Baltic Sea in 1993 due to failures in the safety of her nuclear reactor). Withdrawal of support to many countries meant that they reoriented elsewhere or that their regimes collapsed. The military junta in Burma for example turned to the booming economic giant India which affirmed itself as an independent bloc.

In Iran and Iraq, however, the dictatorial regimes fell apart in favour of liberal and democratic, though somewhat unstable regimes with either a pro-Soviet or a pro-Chinese stance for lack of alternatives (because there were lasting grudges about colonization by Britain). All in all, German political power waned on the global scene in the 80s.

In the 1990s, however, there was an economic boom in Germany which propelled it forward back into the position of second economic power in the world behind the United States though with India vying for the same position right behind the Germans followed by a developing China and resurgent Japan. The Asian tiger India started to invest in Europe, especially Germany with a market of over 120 million consumers, and they also vied for the attention of German investment and technological expertise in turn. Germany from 1994 to 2002 saw a 6% economic growth and only slight decline in growth afterward, a growth that allowed for renewed military expenditure and space adventures. And so, the new democratic state could enter the 21st century with renewed strength and a prominent place in world politics, albeit with many loose strings that remain to be tied up as Germany has as of date failed to officially apologize for the crimes committed under the Nazis who have left us with a lasting and dark legacy.