Nazi Britain Andrew Roberts imagines if Hitler had won
Nazi invasion thriller is not a million miles away from the plans Hitler drew up for Britain, says historian
Summer 1940. With the Battle of Britain an unqualified victory for the Luftwaffe – the tiny RAF crushed in a matter of weeks after the German air force managed to destroy Britain’s radar stations and leave it flying blind – the Nazi invasion of Britain, known as Operation Sea Lion, was put into full assault mode. The Royal Navy steamed down from its northern base at Scapa Flow in an attempt to protect the Channel ports, but met catastrophe off the eastern coast at the hands of the massed Uboat “wolfpacks” that were lying in wait. The Wehrmacht had successfully landed in a flawless amphibious operation that the German General Staff had been meticulously planning ever since Hitler had come to power in 1933. It then raced for London, using Blitzkrieg tactics to easily knock aside the only motorised British army division that had not been lost in the disastrous retreat to Dunkirk, which had seen a quarter of a million soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force captured.
Winston Churchill refused to escape to Canada with George VI and the Royal family, but decided to fight it out in the secret government bunker in Dollis Hill, north London. “You can always take one with you,” he famously said, and was credited by eye-witnesses with killing three German stormtroopers before turning his Colt .45 on himself.
Within weeks, all organised resistance was over. The Third Reich now extended from John O’Groats to the Polish border with Russia, as the huge swastikas all the way down the Mall from Kriegsflotte Arch to the former Buckingham Palace signified. For the British, the war was over.
“To speculate on who would have collaborated if the Germans had invaded Britain,” Sir Isaiah Berlin once told me, “is the most vicious game a Briton can play.”
It’s true, yet we love playing it over and over again, with the excellent dramatisation of Len Deighton’s thriller
as the latest effort, hard on the heels of the second series of Phillip K Dick’s
Yet we don’t have to turn to fictional accounts to imagine what would have happened if Britain had been successfully invaded by the Nazis. Enough of their plans for the administration of this country were captured after the war to let us imagine the horrific outcome if we had lost the Battle of Britain and been subjected to the full force of the kind of Blitzkrieg that had already devastated Poland, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium and Holland, and was shortly to crush Yugoslavia and Greece, too.
The Occupation would have been much worse even than that depicted by Field-Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch’s
drawn up in September 1940, stated: “The ablebodied male population between the ages of 17 and 45 will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be interned and dispatched to the continent.” With a quarter of the male population being shipped off to slave labour in Germany and Occupied Europe, the kernel of any future resistance group would be removed, as happened to millions of troops of the French army after their defeat in 1940.
A puppet government akin to the one set up by Vidkun Quisling in Norway would almost certainly have been created at Westminster and Whitehall, though who would have served in it is open to doubt. The Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley is most often mentioned, but he had very little political support before the war. A more likely candidate might have been the former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, who had admired Hitler when they met before the war, and who might well have performed much the same role that Marshal Philippe Petain did after the fall of France. It is also not impossible that the Duke of Windsor might have been reinstated as Edward VIII, with the Abdication Act of 1936 repealed by a Vichy-style parliament. Like him, some of the more enthusiastic of the prewar appeasers might have persuaded themselves that their serving in government could possibly soften the severity of the Nazi occupation.
Like the Vichy government in France, any British government would have been expected to participate in the rounding-up of Jews, 300,000 of whom lived in Britain in 1940, for transportation east to the extermination camps of Poland and eastern Europe. SS-Brigadeführer Dr Frank Six was given the job of setting up six death squads based in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and Edinburgh, which would have carried out that operation and also conducted vicious reprisals against any resistance. The Metropolitan Police would have been conscripted into that monstrous task, just as the French police were. The extermination programme would also have been carried out against all Communists, gays, gipsies, the “racially inferior” and the mentally and physically handicapped, as it was across the rest of Occupied Europe
As in Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia, hostages would have been taken from the local population, including women and children, who would have been executed if any resistance was shown. Limiting access to food would have been used as a way of cowing and weakening the local population, as it was in the USSR, with starvation constantly beckoning. If anything, the good-looking cast of are far too well-nourished.
Despite the terror and torture, there would undoubtedly have been immensely brave resistance, not just by the Home Guard that was being joined in huge numbers at the time of the evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940, but also from special “auxiliary units” that were being organised by Colonel Colin Gubbins. Typically comprising six or seven men each, whose purpose was to sabotage German supply lines, they were to be supported by “secret duties personnel” (civilian spies) and were intended to be the kernel for a post-invasion resistance movement. Housed in corrugated iron shelters underground – one was under a cucumber frame in the orchard of a Hampshire manor house – they also served as supply dumps for sub-machine guns and explosives. They might not have been able seriously to disrupt Nazi control, but as one of their commanders later put it: “The true purpose of resistance is to preserve a nation’s soul.”
From the experiences of the European resistance movements, especially the Dutch, Danish, Polish and Norwegian, it is possible to state with certainty that immense bravery would have met with truly horrific reprisals. Patriotism, identity and loyalty would have been strained to the limit. British women who slept with the Germans and had babies by them, as tens of thousands of French women did, would have been despised by their neighbours.
In order to decapitate any organised resistance movement, Dr Six was furnished with the Sonderfahndungsliste GB (special search list for Great Britain) drawn up by the counter-espionage unit of Directorate of Reich Security, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Known as the “Black Book”, this listed the 2,820 Britons who were to be “taken into protective custody” – ie, arrested and in most cases executed – after the invasion. It included Winston Churchill and the government, of course, but also writers such as HG Wells, Rebecca West, EM Forster and the singer-playwright Noël Coward. (When the list was published after the war, West joked to Coward: “My dear, the we should have been seen dead with!”) It was planned to shut down the Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Boy Scout movement as potential areas of future opposition.
The Nationalities Plan that the Nazis hoped might weaken loyalty to the British government would have been put into immediate operation, with independence (under the Reich) being granted to Scotland, Wales and a United Ireland, and a semi-autonomous status for the west of England. Of course, these governments would all have been ultimately controlled by German Gauleiters, but on the surface it would have been presented by the newspapers, radio and newsreel broadcast news – all of which would have been completely controlled by the Nazis – as a form of national liberation from Westminster.
If Britain had fallen, and without the United States being able to use us as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, as she did after 1941, it is hard to see how liberation would ever have come about. Churchill predicted that defeat in 1940 would have meant that everything, “including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age”. reminds us yet again how right he was.