SS-GB, set in a Nazi Britain, raises some serious questions for all of us, says the historian

My pet hates are television dramas and movies like The Imitation Game (starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing) which claim to be based on true events but have distorted the facts and deceive people into believing that what they’re viewing is historically accurate.

The new BBC drama SS-GB, based on Len Deighton’s thought-provoking novel of the same name, is different because everybody knows that mercifully the Nazis never occupied Britain.

Some people will argue that ‘counter-factual’, what if? stories such as this are nothing but entertainment, another example of Britain’s obsession with the past and even risk antagonising our German friends. I disagree. Yes, alternative history can sometimes be taken too far, but dramas like SSGB are useful. They make us consider what might have been, and what we might have done in such circumstances. Would we, for instance, have had the courage to take in Jews or help the Resistance?

Detective Douglas Archer – played so convincingly by Sam Riley – encapsulates the dilemmas a lot of us would have faced in a Nazi-occupied Britain. He is morally compromised, forced to look the other way as the Germans go about their business, and treads a fine line between being on ‘the inside’ and being branded a traitor.

The reason the Second World War still has such a powerful hold on our imagination is that it raises questions of moral choice. It’s been easy for us to judge other nations which were occupied in a slightly superior way, telling ourselves we would never have collaborated. But that’s preposterous, as SS-GB demonstrates. The sad truth is that a large proportion of Britons would have ended up working with the enemy just in order to survive. It is the degree of collaboration, and the degree of resistance, that would have mattered.

The drama is also visually stunning, and the images of a bomb-damaged Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament draped with swastikas paint a realistic picture of how a Nazioccupied Britain would have probably looked.

That said, I don’t think SS-GB could be accused of fomenting anti-German sentiment. Indeed I don’t think anyone can make a comparison between the Germans of today and those of that period. Germany has done more to face up to the horrors of the past than any other nation, the result being it is probably the most pacifist country in Europe, if not the world. Only the worst ignoramus could draw any modern-day parallels.

SS- GB, tomorrow, 9pm, BBC1. Antony Beevor’s latest book, Ardennes 1944, is out now in paperback. Visit antonybeevor.com.