If Hitler had won
How the world would have changed
In 1962, famed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick published a little novel titled “The Man in the High Castle.” The book depicts a nightmare world in which Hitler and the Axis powers have won World War II. The United States is occupied territory — the Germans in the East, the Japanese in the West — and Americans are having trouble adjusting to the new regime.
The book offers fascinating insights into the way that history unfolds, as seemingly little things add up to big things and eventually shift the historical train onto another track altogether. It was turned into a television program in 2015 for Amazon Prime Video, but the book is still worth reading, one of the classics works of “alternate history.”
Now, let’s be clear. If we view the historical situation objectively, Axis victory in World War II was highly unlikely. All we have to do is to examine the power balance at the time — numbers and resources, strategic position and industrial production — and it soon becomes clear that the Allies were probably going to win the war. Their advantages, particularly in terms of wealth and economic power, would have been difficult for anyone to overcome, and in the end, the Axis lost the war by a mile.
Let’s just say the improbable happened, however, and the Allies lost. Perhaps President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies before he fulfills his historic mission of readying the U.S. for war. Remember, FDR was the victim of an assassination attempt in February 1933, even before he was sworn in as president. The mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, was hit at his side and eventually died of his wounds. Without Roosevelt, maybe isolationist sentiment hangs on just long enough to hamper U.S. military preparations for war. The country finally starts scrambling to get ready in late 1941, not mid-1940, but it’s too little, too late. As a result, America’s post-Pearl Harbor recovery — remarkably swift, in actuality — takes a lot longer. The Germans are able to solidify the defenses of their European empire, Stalin eventually reaches an arrangement with Hitler, and the Japanese run riot in the Pacific even more successfully than they did in our timeline. The United States, under a president not named Roosevelt, sees the futility of rolling back Axis gains and eventually seeks terms with the Axis.
So, the Axis wins World War II. What then? What is daily life like in Hitler’s new world order?
Well, it’s horrible, in a word. We often treat Hitler as some sort of garden variety “conqueror” who dreamed of ruling a global empire, in the mode of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan or Napoleon. He was much more than that, however. He was a hater, a man with a monstrous racial project in mind, one that included the destruction of entire races whom he deemed to be inferior or “subhuman,” and of course a complete global genocide of the Jews.
In our scenario, Hitler’s realm certainly would be vast enough. The Reich would stretch from the English Channel to the Eurasian steppes, and from the North Cape to the Mediterranean basin (the latter controlled through his lackey Mussolini) and North Africa — all administered from the new capital city of “Germania,” a metastasized version of Berlin, with monstrous domes and boulevards hundreds of yards wide. All in all, Hitler holds power over something like half a billion people.
Those unfortunate half-billion would the subjects of a vast experiment, the “total demographic and racial reordering of the globe,” in the words of historian Gerhard Weinberg. That would have meant a cruel fate for many of them: the murder of millions, Auschwitz-scale killing facilities from one corner of his realm to the other, widespread sterilization programs to prevent targeted groups from propagating and, of course, euthanasia on a grand scale against the mentally and physically handicapped, what the Nazis called “life unworthy of life.” We know now that the victims of this last effort would have included hundreds of thousands of badly wounded veterans of the German Wehrmacht, an ironic and horrible note of gratitude from the Führer for their sacrifices on his behalf. Even the subject races of the Germanic empire who were not targeted for total physical extermination — the Slavic peoples, for example — could look forward to a brutish life of serfdom, hard labor and a starvation diet.
For the rulers, of course, things would be different. The “Aryan” elite of this nightmarish realm would live the life of privileged overlords, whizzing along modern four-lane autobahns to their new estates in the conquered eastern provinces or riding in luxury coaches on the new super-railroads Hitler planned to build. Beneath these luxury cabins, cruder lodgings — more like barracks on wheels — would be hauling hordes of slaves to their next destination, perhaps to be worked to death farming the broad farmlands of the Ukraine, or in vast, dimly lit armaments factories, or on the construction site for the massive new German naval base that Hitler was planning for Trondheim in Norway.
Nazi inhumanity would have been accompanied by global instability. If anything, Adolf Hitler was a restless force of nature, never satisfied with whatever victory he had just won, always looking for his next target or victim. As grand as he might have felt winning World War II, it’s hard to imagine him stopping. In “Man in the High Castle,” author Dick has Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan constantly on the brink of coming to blows. At the very least, both would have continued to arm feverishly, even in victory. Their fascist ideology demanded a constant buildup of arms, nonstop mobilization of the citizenry, and brinksmanship in foreign policy. It’s not difficult to conjure up some future economic crisis leading to a break between the Axis partners. And then, who can say what might have followed? A German amphibious drive into the Indian and Pacific oceans, German grenadiers coming ashore on Iwo Jima in 1957, Japanese ICBM strikes on Hamburg, even a nuclear war engulfing the entire planet — nothing would have been off the table.
Germany’s own internal politics would have also kept things on the boil. Despite Hitler’s professed love for law, order and discipline, his Third Reich was one of the most chaotically run states in human history. He liked to give three or four officials the same task, let them duke it out in a contest for power, then intervene to choose the winner. His Darwinian view of administration was extraordinarily wasteful, time-consuming and inefficient. That’s why, in real life, things like the design and production of the ME-262 jet fighter took the Nazi state so long to bring to fruition. Hitler’s “survivalof-the-fittest” system also let energetic and aggressive voices come to the fore — however, usually younger men arguing for the most radical policies. That process of radicalization almost certainly would have continued after winning the war. A post-victory Third Reich would have become more murderous, not less, even after Hitler’s death and the rise of his successor. It is just not possible to conjure up notions of a lasting peace in a world ruled by the Nazis.
Finally, how would life change in the United States if the Nazis had won the war? Even if America was not decisively defeated on the battlefield, and remained unoccupied, the need to formulate policy for dealing with the Hitler regime would have changed our democratic way of life. We would have become a much more militarized society. We would stay armed to the teeth — not as in the post-World War II style, where we have relied on more powerful weapons and a fewer number of soldiers. Instead, we would have no choice but to keep 10 million men under arms; indeed, that figure is lowball. Consumer production, and thus civilian standards of living, would have stayed low. Constant vigilance against new attacks by Japan and Germany would have been the order of the day. In our real world, the United States lived through a Cold War for 50 years after World War II, and it was bad enough. This alternate version we’re describing would have been “colder” and more tense, but also much more likely to go hot at any time. Remember, we’re talking about Adolf Hitler here.
In the end, “The Man in the High Castle” is a work of fiction. And for that, we should all be eternally grateful.