What if Germany won Second World War?
Sansom’s novel portrays a defeated Britain
LONDON — C.J. Sansom was immersed in writing his most controversial thriller when he was diagnosed with cancer of the bone marrow.
It was a frightening moment. But the bestselling novelist never contemplated stopping work on Dominion, a work of alternate history that envisages a Britain that surrenders to Nazi Germany on May 9, 1940.
That’s one day before, in real life, Winston Churchill became prime minister and vowed to fight Hitler to the end.
Sansom knew he would be unable to write once his chemotherapy started — but he was determined to use the narrow window of time available.
“So I just had time to finish Dominion and get it off to press.”
Talking by phone from his home in Brighton, the 61-year-old author is quietly matter-of-fact about his ordeal. The passion comes when he discusses a novel that zeros in on the year 1952 and a Europe that — save for the Soviet Union — remains in Hitler’s grip.
In Britain, Canadian-born newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook is now the pro-German prime minister, ready to condone the continuing erosion of civil liberties and the spectacle of Britain’s Jews being rounded up and deported.
A massive painting of Hitler hangs in the entrance hall of the hallowed National Portrait Gallery. Prominent writers critical of the regime — J.B. Priestley, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster — have vanished.
Meanwhile an aging Churchill is in the shadows, the leader of an underground resistance group.
“All history is contingent,” Sansom says. “You change one event and everything turns out differently.”
The novel’s prologue goes back to that crucial May day in 1940 when discredited Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain finally steps down and a successor must be named.
But in Dominion, it’s not Churchill who takes over 74 years ago. It’s Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary and Chamberlain’s “right-hand man in the government’s appeasement of Germany.”
Under this scenario, Halifax signs a peace treaty with Hitler. And in the years that follow, Germany’s dominion over Europe becomes unbreakable.
Sansom enjoys international popularity for his historical crime thrillers, featuring a hunchbacked Tudor sleuth named Matthew Shardrake. But after four of these novels in a row, he wanted a break. Besides, as a trained historian, he had long wanted to write about the implications of that day in 1940.
“I was always struck by how close it came to Churchill not getting the premiership and it going to Lord Halifax,” he says.
Churchill had many enemies, and as Wellington said in the aftermath of Waterloo, it was “a near run thing.”
Halifax had been anxious to make further peace overtures to Germany; Churchill was determined to fight to the end. A British surrender, Sansom argues, would have been catastrophic.
“Everything changes everywhere. If that one event changes, the whole stack of cards falls quite differently.”
When Dominion was published in Britain it sparked an immediate uproar. Sansom has no qualms about depicting a quisling puppet government that includes notorious Thirties Fascist Oswald Mosley as home secretary. But he doesn’t stop there. Other real-life figures are also part of the Nazi-loving crowd. An aging David Lloyd George, Britain’s Liberal prime minister during the First World War, is there. So is birthcontrol pioneer Marie Stopes who’s advising the government on eugenic sterilization.
But the biggest controversy has been triggered by the inclusion of Enoch Powell who was a member of a postwar British cabinet and achieved lasting notoriety for an anti-immigration speech predicting “rivers of blood” if non-whites continued to be allowed into the country.
But Sansom remains unrepentant. “I don’t think I’m wrong about Enoch Powell,” he says. He’s equally blunt about Lloyd George; “he was fiercely pro-Hitler.”
But what of Canada’s Lord Beaverbrook, born Max Aitken in New Brunswick and destined — despite his dubious politics — to become part of Churchill’s wartime cabinet? Could he have ended up heading a pro-Nazi government?
“In the end it really did seem that the most plausible candidate was Lord Beaverbrook. Certainly, up to the end of 1939, he was fiercely pro-appeasement, and he was an opportunist — utterly unscrupulous and rather sadistic … someone who enjoyed power.
“I don’t think Beaverbrook was particularly anti-Semitic, but I think he was the sort of person who would have let pressure be put on him on that issue.”
When it comes to anti-Semitism, Sansom questions theories that the Holocaust was the product of a peculiarly German sensibility. The central character in Dominion is David Fitzgerald, a civil servant who has done well under the regime until his concealed Jewish heritage catches up with him and he becomes a Gestapo target.
“Of all the European countries in the 1930s, Britain probably had the least anti-Semitism, but it did have anti-Semitism, and there were prejudices against Jews and quotas against Jews, although there wasn’t the hatred there was in parts of Europe.”
The Edinburgh-born Sansom sees excessive nationalism and “exceptionalism” as a threat to democracy and human freedom. He detests the Scottish Nationalist Party — adding that many of its members were soft on Hitler during the war.
“Politics based on national identity are wrong and dangerous,” he says.