SS-GB 2017
Sunday night’s BBC drama shows what 1940s Britain would have been like if Hitler had won. But what if the Nazis were still ruling the world today? A top historian gives a chilling insight
Dusk falls over London. Along Mosley Avenue, formerly known as Whitehall, the red, white and blue swastika flags flutter above the crowd barriers. The ss’s British Free Corps are out in force, fingers poised on the triggers of their Mauser assault rifles, but few people seriously expect any trouble.
Tomorrow, after all, will be a day of joy — at least officially. The government calls it Liberation Day, but most people know it as VE Day, marking the 70th anniversary of the day Churchill’s bunker fell to its besiegers and World War II in Europe came to an end.
Among the great what-ifs of history, the most chilling is the possibility that the Nazis might have won. This is the premise behind Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, Philip k. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle, now an Amazon TV series, and Len Deighton’s ss-GB, which has been adapted by the BBC and is airing on sunday nights.
But while all three are set shortly after the war, when the scars of the conflict are still vividly raw, few writers have ever wondered what the world would be like today — in 2017 — if the Nazis had won. so I decided to have a go.
What follows is necessarily speculative, but it has reminded me how lucky we are to enjoy the democratic freedoms we too often take for granted.
In my scenario, the Germans would have been victorious at stalingrad, smashing the Red Army and opening the wayto the oilfields of the Caucasus.
This gave them the momentum to fight off the British and American landings at D-Day, which turned into a disaster for the Allies.
They completed the conquest of European Russia a year later, and a German invasion force landed in Britain in the late summer of 1946.
By March 1947, London was taken and Prime Minister Winston Churchill was dead. Seven decades on, the events of that bitter winter of 1947, seem like ancient history.
The Greater German Reich now completely dominates Continental Europe, which is known as the New Order.
Indeed, when schoolchildren from all over the Reich make the required visit to the spot where Churchill died — or, as the guides put it, the ‘greatest war criminal in history met his end’ — you can see them stifling yawns of boredom.
Yet no one doubts that tomorrow’s VE Day celebrations will be a big deal.
After all, the youthful Chancellor of the Greater German Reich, Frauke Petry, the first woman to wield supreme power in Europe, is flying in specially.
According to sources at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, she is expected to read from Hitler’s speech announcing the end of the war in Europe and to laya wreath at the vast statue of Edward VIII.
He returned to claim the throne (following his abdication in 1936) at the end of the conflict and ruled until his death in 1972.
Little wonder that Party officials are expecting at least a million people on the streets of London.
Thank goodness, then, for our famously efficient train network, which should easily cope with the extra demand.
Yet despite the sense of occasion — the crowds in the beer halls, the children with their swastika-themed balloons, the ubiquitous posters showing that famous image of two Wehrmacht soldiers raising the Nazi banner over the ruins of Buckingham Palace — these are troubled times.
The European economy has never truly recovered from the financial crash of 2007-8, when the collapse of the giant Creditanstalt bank in Vienna sent shock waves through the banking system.
Indeed, thousands of German troops are still fighting nationalist partisans in Greece, which bore the brunt of the consequent austerity and has been engulfed in a bloody war ever since.
An even greater shadow, however, is that of terrorism.
Despite the efforts of our friends and allies in the Middle East, including the Greater Arab Republic’s veteran president, saddam Hussein, Islamist extremism remains a genuine threat to the Fatherland and its neighbours.
Only last week, Chancellor Petry-told the Reichstag that enemy-funding for Islamist terrorism had reached unprecedented levels.
OF course, most of the money is coming from Washington DC, where the president of the world’s most infamous rogue state, Hillary Clinton, won power last November on a platform of ‘ no compromise with National socialism’.
The u.s. has been an isolated pariah since conceding defeat in 1955, when the Germans dropped atomic bombs on st Louis and Philadelphia, but were too exhausted by war to mount a fullscale occupation.
At home, too, the mood is much less comfortable than the Party-likes to pretend.
some commentators blame the development of the internet, which owes much to the efforts of ss research scientists in the so-called silicon Valleys of the Mosel and the Rhine.
To the consternation of many-public officials, the new age of social media has seen an upsurge of dissent, particularly among the young. some newspaper column- ists talk of a ‘liberal movement’ sweeping Europe, marked by an upsurge in demagogic liberalism that could, according to the Chancellor Petry, ‘endanger all the social and economic progress the Fatherland and its allies have made since the dark days of the war’.
In some quarters, it has even become fashionable to be nostalgic for the early days of the occupation in the Fifties, when, as Partyapproved historians argue, times were hard, but there was a genuine sense of community.
‘ It was a time of tough, but necessary, decisions,’ says one Oxford historian. ‘The war in the east was still going on, there were the bombs in America, there was still some resistance here in Britain and, of course, the camps were still very busy in those days.’
His voice trails off and there is an awkward pause. But it was also, he adds, an age when society was becoming ‘safer and cleaner’.
Indeed, by the early sixties, living standards were rising, the first pop groups were arriving from Hamburg and many middle-class families were taking their first package holidays to the Baltic and the Black Forest.
Things might, of course, have been different. But for decades, it was forbidden to suggest that if things had worked out otherwise, the Allies might even conceivably-have won World War II.
During the sixties and seventies, dissidents sometimes exchanged ‘ underground’ books, such as Philip k. Dick’s fantasy The Man In The High Castle, which imagines that Britain and the u.s. actually-won in 1945, or the novels of Len Deighton, who portrays a Britain that the Germans never invaded.
To be caught with such a book, however, meant imprisonment — or worse.
Today, the mood is more relaxed. The breakthrough came in the Nineties, when Robert Harris published his best- selling novel Fatherland, set in an imaginary
Germany some years after an Allied victory.
As every schoolchild knows, though, the real story was very different. History is compulsory until the age of 16, and everyone studies three core elements: ‘The Making of a Germanic Nation: England 410-1066’, ‘Britain and Germany in the Age of Bismarck’ and ‘Churchill, the Jews and the Road to War’.
Television, meanwhile, cannot get enough of World War II, though documentaries tend to cover the same topics again and again: the German victory at Stalingrad, the Allied defeat on D- Day, the execution of Stalin and the fall of London. For all the fashionable nostalgia, though, no one denies that those were hard years.
Though most ordinary people, like their counterparts in Continental Europe, grudgingly collaborated with their new masters (or ‘liberators’, as the invaders called themselves), resistance continued for more than a decade.
Only in the mid-Sixties did the German army, working closely with the SS British Free Corps — never short of recruits, incidentally — manage to flush out the last armed cells in the mountains of mid-Wales, the Western Isles and the Lake District. But by then, most ordinary people had accustomed themselves to the National Socialist regime, established under Edward VIII and his Fascist Prime Minister, Sir Oswald Mosley, later Duke of London.
By this time, the wider war was over. German rule over Europe, North Africa and the Middle East was secure, while the conflict in the East had dwindled to a guerrilla campaign in the foothills of the Urals.
With the U.S. surrender, German supremacy was complete.
Hitler died in 1958, and was succeeded after a brief power struggle by the SS hardliner Reinhard Heydrich, who had narrowly survived an assassination attempt by Czech partisans in 1942.
Heydrich lasted ten turbulent years until he was deposed in a palace coup, but since then the transfer of power has been relatively smooth.
In the meantime, the map of Europe has been remarkably stable. The Greater German Reich, incorporating much of what were once Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic States and European Russia, stretches from the English Channel to the Urals.
The Mediterranean is an Axis-dominated lake, while there is no more reliable German ally than the Fascist state of France, ruled since 1985 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine.
As for Britain, which has retained a vague pretence of democracy under the Nazi aegis, there is no doubt that things have changed enormously since occupation.
Economic recovery in the Sixties gave way to nationalist agitation a decade later.
EVEN now, politicians shudder to recall the wave of demonstrations that culminated in the notorious Winter of Discontent, when Berlin was forced to send in thousands of armed reinforcements to restore order.
After the death of the ageing, autocratic Mosley in 1980, however, the situation began to improve.
Most German units were pulled out a few years later. The British Union of Fascists was rebranded as the National Party, other Rightwing groups were allowed to compete in local elections and there was even talk of a new age of
offenheit (openness). Tragically, however, there were those who sought to exploit the new atmosphere for their own ends. When student protests broke out in London in 1989, the inevitable crackdown culminated in the massacre of Trafalgar Square, when hundreds were reportedly killed by the SS.
Today, despite the more liberal climate, talking openly about Trafalgar Square risks a visit from the Secret State Police, the equivalent of the Gestapo.
Yet if you search on the internet, you can easily find the famous photograph of a lone protester facing a German tank, which has become an icon for what remains of Britain’s resistance movement.
A giant version of that image reportedly hangs in New York’s Times Square, symbolising many Americans’ sympathies with what they see as a crushed and downtrodden Britain.
But no one here has ever seen it, since travel across the Atlantic is strictly forbidden.
Seventy years after the end of the war, then, is Nazism entirely secure? The honest answer is that no one really knows.
MOST
people in Britain have never known anything else. Almost all grew up under the New Order.
They have absorbed its key principles: the importance of the Leader and the Party, the necessity for racial health and integrity, the unique role of the Germanic peoples, the inferiority of Africans and Asians, the historic villainy of the Jews.
Few of us feel proud to be British; after decades of Nazi education, we are only too aware of our nation’s crimes in the 20th century.
Even in small things, we are all Nazis now. We drink German wines, drive German cars and eat German food.
Our children study the great works of Goethe and Hitler; our best footballers aspire to play for German teams; we even prefer German comedies to our own. And the Last Night of the Proms always ends with Wagner. But all is not quite as it seems. And, tomorrow, when the crowds line the streets of London for the military parade, many people will know deep down that there is something missing. Or to put it more accurately, someone.
Even now, there are places in Britain where you just don’t go.
Some are deserted ruins, hidden behind lines of rusting barbed wire. Others are still heavily guarded, though you can sometimes see thin, ghostly shapes moving behind the watchtowers.
The government claims that ours is a better world. No one is mad or disabled. There are no gypsies, no homosexuals, no subversives — and no Jews.
Sometimes, when you walk down the street, you can still see empty houses, uninhabited for decades. Perhaps, when you’re out shopping, you walk past a space where there was once a synagogue.
Or an elderly relative mentions a half-forgotten playmate and then falls abruptly silent.
Or maybe you pick up a book in a second-hand shop and notice an unfamiliar name — the kind of name you never hear these days — scribbled on the first page.
There were people here once. Not just in Britain, but across Europe: millions of them, talking and working, laughing and playing with the rest of us.
But they are gone now. Where they stood, there is just a black hole. We never talk about them. But we all know, deep down, who they were, and where they went.