Deutschland Uber Alles

A few eons ago I posted a blog about various alternate history stories in which the South won the US Civil War, or at least in which the Civil War took a dramatically different course than it actually did.  Of these, Turtledove’s timeline was the most ambitious: not only did the South win the Civil War, North and South clashed again three more times, ending in a vast WWII conflagration in which the South’s blacks perished in concentration camps, a Southern Hitler, Jake Featherston, ran a CSA dictatorship with his Freedom Party, and the Kaiser nuked Petrograd.  Now it’s time to review a similar slew of books in which Nazi Germany won World War II.

 In The Presence of Mine Enemies, by Harry Turtledove.  This takes place in Berlin, Germany around 2009.  The US had stayed out of WWII, allowing Hitler to defeat the USSR and England.  A few decades later, an atomic-equipped Germany managed to defeat and overrun the USA as well.  Having won, the Nazis make no secrets about the Holocaust.  In fact, they’re starting to bump ugly with the Japanese, though it’s still just a rivalry between the two remaining superpowers.   Hitler, Himmler, and Waldheim, a succession of Fuhrers, have come and gone; now a new Fuhrer, Buckliger, with new ideas has come to power.  And the few Jews still alive, hiding out in German roles, finally see some hope for salvation.  The Gauleiter of Berlin is an obnoxious, womanizing liberal (analogous to Boris Yeltsin) and Buckliger is very much the Gorbachev of this story; as Turtledove so often does, he simply transposes a “plot” of history to another context but otherwise keeps the story faithful to the original (“historical plagiarism” is my term). 

 The Man In the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.  Nazi Germany has won WWII and taken over most of the Eastern US.  The Japanese control the West Coast.  Between them is a lawless, neutral middle zone where fugitives from the coasts tend to reside, including the so-called “Man in the High Castle”, a recluse who has written an alternate history book in which the Nazis lost WWII.  Among other notable achievements in this timeline, the Nazis managed to plant their flag on Mars.  I don’t recall much in the way of a plot; most of the characters consult the I Ching for guidance.  Despite the vague non-plot, I did find it very entertaining and enjoyable. 

 Fatherland.  It’s 1964, and Adolf Hitler is turning 75.  After a Cold War with the US, a rapprochement, a détente is imminent; the US president is Joseph, not John F., Kennedy.  But in Berlin, some top Nazi Party and SS men are mysteriously turning up dead.  An SS police detective starts snooping around, and finds that the victims share knowledge of a hideous secret: what really happened to all those Jews who were supposedly “resettled” in the East.  Of all the books listed, here, this is the only one made into a movie: Rutger Hauer plays the main character, March.  Incidentally, March has SS rank and membership because he’s a police detective (the Kriminalpolizei, KriPo, as opposed to Geheime Staats Polizei, Gestapo, come under SS jurisdiction), not because he’s an SS butcher. 

 SS-GB.  Len Deighton takes the Nazis to London, in November 1941.  The US is unconquered at this time, and the USSR has yet to be invaded.   A British physicist working on the Nazis’ atom bomb project is murdered and the protagonist has to solve the murder, which leads him to the Underground, the imprisoned King, and a linkup with the US.   I remember being only modestly entertained by this story and never compelled to re-read it later.