Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II


A hypothetical military victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of the Second World War is a popular topic in alternate history. Works of alternative history and of counterfactual history include stories, novels, performances, and mixed media that often explore speculative public and private life in lands conquered by the coalition, whose principal powers were Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan.
The first work of the genre was Swastika Night, by Katherine Burdekin, a British novel published before Nazi Germany launched World War II in 1939. Later novels of alternative history include The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, The Ultimate Solution by Eric Norden, SS-GB by Len Deighton, The Divide by William Overgard, and Fatherland by Robert Harris. The stories deal with the politics, culture, and personalities who would have allowed the fascist victories against democracy and with the psychology of daily life in totalitarian societies. The novels present stories of how ordinary citizens would have dealt with fascist military occupation and with the resentments of being under colonial domination.
This subgenre usually focuses on Nazi Germany's supremacy over Great Britain and/or the United States, although The Ultimate Solution, Man in the High Castle and The Divide all provide some description of life in the Japanese Empire's domination over the Pacific Northwest coast of the former United States. In both The Ultimate Solution and Man in the High Castle, there is a cold war between the two estranged Axis partners, similar to the real animosity between the United States and the Soviet Union. The most detailed discussion of the Japanese Empire's coeval ascendancy is in Man in the High Castle within the occupied Pacific States of America. The short story "Two Dooms" by Cyril Kornbluth also more actively explores the Japanese presence in the defeated and occupied United States. In Man In the High Castle, Fascist Italy is relegated to a distant and dependent third place, with derisive mention of its "African empire."
The term Pax Germanica was applied to the hypothetical Imperial German victory in the First World War. The concept is derived from that of Pax Romana and follows the trend of historians coining variants of the term to describe other periods of relative peace, whether established or attempted, such as Pax Americana, Pax Britannica and Pax Sovietica.
Academics such as Gavriel David Rosenfeld in The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, have researched the media representations of 'Nazi victory'.

Depictions of the Axis powers

Themes

Helen White stated that a hypothetical world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War is a harsher and grimmer place to live in than the real world, where Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers lost the War in 1945. Speculative literature about hypothetical military victories by the Axis Powers have generally been English-language literary work from the British Commonwealth and the United States as such protagonists tend to experience events from the perspective of military defeat and foreign military occupation.
The literary tone of alternative history fiction presents the military victory of the Axis Powers as a melancholy background against which the reader sees the unfolding of political plots in a socially strained atmosphere of foreign occupation and socio-economic domination.
The social story of SS-GB by Len Deighton concludes with a US commando raid into Nazi-occupied Great Britain to rescue British nuclear scientists, while the British Resistance remains hopeful of eventual military liberation by the United States. In Clash of Eagles, by Leo Rutman, the people of New York City rebel against the Nazi occupation of the US.
Some depictions focus on Nazism's contradictions, suggesting that even with military triumph, the system would eventually start to collapse under its own weight. In Fatherland, by Robert Harris, the Greater German Reich faces economic crisis, forcing Hitler to pursue rapprochement with the US; at the story's conclusion, the protagonists thwart this effort by exposing the Holocaust to the American people. Harry Turtledove's In the Presence of Mine Enemies presents the Nazi world two generations after their victory in WWII, in a time and place that allowed political liberalization and democratization. The Hearts of Iron IV mod The New Order: Last Days of Europe shows the Reich declining thanks to economic stagnation and hostile relations with its former allies. Another example can be found in Wolfenstein: Youngblood plot, set in an alternative 1980s; high-ranking SS generals are seeking to establish a Fourth Reich to replace the unstable and corrupt Reich after it lost most of its power due to the liberation of America and the demise of Nazi leaders such as the fictional Deathshead and Frau Engel, as well as Hitler himself, in the 1960s.

Early depictions

The novel Swastika Night presents the post-war world born from the victory of the Axis Powers: a dictatorship characterized by much "violence and mindlessness" which are justified by "irrationality and superstition". Published two years before Nazi Germany began the Second World War in 1939, Swastika Night is a work of future history and not a work of alternative history. The book reviewer, Darragh McManus, said that although the story and plot of the novel are "a huge leap of imagination, Swastika Night posits a terrifyingly coherent and plausible ", that "considering when it was published, and how little of what we know of the Nazi regime today was then understood, the novel is eerily prophetic and perceptive about the nature of Nazism".
The short story I, James Blunt is a work of wartime propaganda set in a fictional September 1944 when Great Britain is under Nazi rule. The story is told through the entries of a diary, which describe the social and economic consequences of military occupation such as British workers sent to the shipyards of Nazi Germany and Scotland to build warships to attack the U.S. The short story concludes with the diarist exhorting the reader to ensure that the story of the Nazi occupation of Great Britain remains fiction.
The novel We, Adolf I presents a Nazi victory in the Battle of Stalingrad which allowed Hitler to crown himself emperor of the world. In Berlin, the Nazis build an imperial palace featuring architectural elements of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. In the course of the story, the despot Hitler enters a dynastic marriage with the Japanese Imperial princess in an effort to produce a Fascist heir to rule the world after Hitler.
The 1946 novel The Last Jew by tells the alternative history of a Nazi world ruled by the League of Dictators. The League of Dictators plan the public execution of the last Jew as entertainment during the Olympic Games. Before they can realize the spectacular death of the last Jew, the Moon's excessive proximity to Earth, a negative consequence of Nazi lunar colonization, provokes a catastrophe that extinguishes life on planet Earth.
The stage play Peace in Our Time by Noël Coward explores the nature of fascist rule in London and examines the deleterious effects of military occupation upon the mental health of the common man and the common woman. As a playwright, Coward was included in the Gestapo's Black Book of enemies-of-the-state to be arrested upon completion of Operation Sea Lion, the Nazi conquest of Great Britain.
The novel The Man in the High Castle presents an Axis victory after Franklin D. Roosevelt is assassinated in 1933 and the United States is divided between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Later depictions

Additional notable depictions of Axis victory include:

Literature

Counterfactual scenarios are also written as a form of academic paper rather than necessarily as fiction and/or novel-length fiction:
  • What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been contains "How Hitler Could Have Won the War" by John Keegan.
  • Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, edited by Niall Ferguson, contains "Hitler's England: What if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940?" by Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, and "Nazi Europe: What if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union?" by Michael Burleigh.
  • If the Allies Had Fallen: Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II by Dennis Showalter.
In the All About History Bookazine series, What if...Book of Alternate History : Among the articles are What if...Germany had won the Battle of Britain? and ''What if...The Allies had lost the Battle of the Atlantic?''