Iron Sky is back! Read our review of The Coming Race #dieselpunk
It took quite a few years, but the long-awaited sequel to 2012’s Iron Sky has landed! (Pun intended.)
The sequel takes place 29 years after the events of the first movie (our review here), which you’d have to see to understand what’s happening in the second. Considering the first is an absolute dieselpunk classic, you absolutely should if you haven’t already!
I won’t go into the plot…
Nazis surviving the fall of the Third Reich is a common trope in #dieselpunk and #atompunk fiction
Rumors that the Nazis survived the fall of the Third Reich started to circulate almost as soon as the war in Europe ended in May 1945. There were stories that Adolf Hitler had escaped to Spain or South America. Some of his top lieutenants, notably Martin Bormann, were missing.
The speculation had some basis in reality. There really were efforts to smuggle Nazis out of Europe, but not on the…
What would the world look like if the Axis had won WW2?
We previously imagined a world in which the Axis powers signed a peace treaty with America and World War II is still being fought as a prolonged Cold War. But what if Germany and Japan had pressed ahead and invaded the United States?
This next worldbuilding installment is heavily inspired by Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle(1962) and the Amazon drama series that is based on it…
One of the earliest descriptions of a dieselpunk world was written by “Piecraft” in 2006. He envisaged an alternate 1950s “where the Great Depression never arrived and World War II is still being fought as a prolonged Cold War.”
Japan continues its progress toward technological modernization, developing the earliest computers and terminals. Nazi scientists continue experimenting by taking the route of biotechnology, sparking off a genetic revolution of bio-mods, clones and organ harvesting, while the Americans and British take both of these technologies to develop mind-control devices, spawning man-machine interfaces and sparking the atomic-powered machine age.
Let’s explore this diesel-fueld world in the first installment of a new series we’ll call worldbuilding.
We deviate from our timeline during the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe is able to destroy the Royal Air Force. Nazi Germany successfully carries out Operation Sea Lion and occupies the south of England.
With London on the verge of being surrounded, King George VI and his family flee to Canada. Winston Churchill is arrested and shot. The Nazis restore Edward VIII to the throne, who negotiates the island’s surrender. India refuses to recognize a Nazi puppet as emperor and declares its independence. The remaining British Empire recognizes Elizabeth as queen when Edward’s brother George dies in 1952.
Click here to learn how the Nazis planned to invade Great Britain.
With Britain out of the war, but the British and French still fighting in Iraq and Syria, Turkey’s generals spot an opportunity to restore their country to its former glory.
President İsmet İnönü, who had kept Turkey neutral, is ousted in a military coup and replaced with a pro-Axis junta. It allows the Germans to use Turkish territory to open a second front against the British in Egypt and support the conquest of the Caucasus from the south. In exchange, Turkey gets Armenia, Kurdistan and Mesopotamia.
Britain and the Soviet Union are forced to withdraw from Iran, which they had occupied preemptively in 1941. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the young shah, signs a nonaggression pact with Germany, which the latter breaks only months later to use northern Iran as a staging ground for its encirclement of the Caspian Sea.
Click here to learn about Hitler’s feared invasion of the Middle East.
With Germany in control of southwest Russia, including the oil fields of the Caucasus and the Volga Delta, it can out-wait the Red Army during the winter of 1942-43 and seize Stalingrad and Moscow in the spring.
Joseph Stalin and the Soviet government flee first to Kuybyshev and then to Omsk, from where they continue to lead a guerrilla war in the Ural Mountains. Without the bulk of their territory, people and resources, though, it is a hopeless struggle.
The Nazis reorganize Eastern Europe into four Reichskommissariaten, each largely cleansed of ethnic Slavs and made ripe for German settlement: Ostland, comprising the Baltics and the former Belarus; Ukraine, extending eastward to the River Volga; Moskowien in the northeast and Kaukasus in the south. The Crimea becomes part of the Reich itself.
Despite land being freely available to ethnic Germans, resettlement proves less popular than the regime had anticipated. With forced labor freeing Germans from hard work, only fanatics, many of them in the SS, dream of leaving the comforts of the Reich behind to become Wehrbauern in the East.
Even though Britain has been defeated and the Soviet Union is reduced to a rump state in Siberia, America continues to fight — until the Germans drop the Bomb.
In the morning of April 20, 1945 — the Führer‘s 56th birthday — two Messerschmitt Me P.08.01 flying wings detonate what the Germans call the Heisenberg Device over Manhattan. Around one million people die instantly. Tens of thousands more perish in the aftermath from burns and radiation poisoning. President Rexford Tugwell, who succeeded Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, agrees to negotiate America’s surrender at a peace summit in Iceland.
Neither Germany nor Japan has designs on the continental United States. Japan does demand America’s Pacific possessions, including Hawaii, while Germany formalizes its influence in South America in the Reykjavík Treaty.
Although now at peace with the Axis powers, America continues to clandestinely support what is left of the British Empire, China and the Soviet Union in their war efforts.
Finland defeated the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939-40 and was rewarded by the Nazis with control of the Kola Peninsula and Karelia.
Like its Scandinavian neighbors, the country seeks an equidistant position for itself between Germany and the United States. But the nearness of Germany, and the American exit from the war, mean it must often defer to Berlin.
The Nordics’ official neutrality is useful to all powers, though, as it gives them a venue for diplomacy and a way to circumvent trade embargoes.
Japan controls much of East Asia as well as most islands in the Pacific, including the formerly American Aleutian Islands and Hawaii, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Karafuto (formerly Sakhalin), Manchuria, Korea, coastal China, Formosa (Taiwan), Indochina, the Philippines. Plaek Phibunsongkhram’s Thailand and Sukarno’s Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) are nominally independent but in reality subjugated to Tokyo. Pridi Banomyong leads the Free Thai Movement from Burma.
Japan still eyes Australia, Burma and India. It has little interest in Siberia but occasionally engages in border skirmishes with the Soviets to keep the Germans happy. Communists continue to wage a guerrilla war in the Chinese hinterland.
Japan got the atomic bomb from Germany in return for the submarine aircraft carrier. Relations between the two Axis powers are strained, however. Japan doesn’t trust the Germans, who consider all Asians racially inferior.
Britain’s dominions — Australia, Canada, Ceylon, Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa — have become independent states, as have Kenya and Rhodesia, which house many refugees from European Britain. All recognize Elizabeth II as head of state. The remaining colonies in Africa and the Caribbean are ruled by the British government-in-exile, led by Admiral Conolly Abel Smith from Ottawa.
India’s independence was a blow to British prestige, but it freed up troops for the defense of Burma under Lord Louis Mountbatten. His hope was to retake Malaya and Singapore next, but with America out of the war after the nuclear attack on New York, and the Soviet Union unable to open a second front in Manchuria, those plans had to be postponed indefinitely.
With New York gone, America’s economic and cultural life shifts to Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Without the interruption of the Great Depression, art, architecture, fashion and technology have progressed steadily from the Roaring Twenties, although the Cold War with Nazi Germany and Japan is giving way to more austere preferences.
A Monument to Democracy, designed by Millard Sheets, graces the Port of Los Angeles. Like the Statue of Liberty before it, it holds out the promise of a better future for the oppressed peoples of the world.
Click here for more unbuilt Los Angeles and here to learn about the fashion of the 1930s.
With the war effectively over, Hitler can concentrate on his hobbies: architecture and trains.
The former involves the total reconstruction of Berlin into the world capital of Germania. Designed by Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, Germania was meant to convey the greatness of the German people, but it turned into a dud for the German people living in it.
Speer did not believe in traffic lights, nor was he a big supporter of trams. Germania has excellent subways, but its denizens tire of going underground. It’s not just the metro; pedestrians are forced into tunnels every time they want to cross one of the city’s ridiculously broad streets and, in the city center, enormous towers block out the sun altogether.
Click here to learn more about Hitler’s nightmare capital of the world.
Hitler’s trains are more popular. The giant double-decker trains that connect the Reich’s major cities on broad three-meter gauge tracks, called the Breitspurbahn, are fast, luxurious and affordable. Only a few hours and you’re in Paris, Vienna or Lemberg for a weekend getaway. Members of the Hitler Youth get a free Breitspurbahn travel pass to see the Reich when they turn eighteen.
Click here to learn more about Hitler’s super trains.
In Germany, eugenics and selective breeding are widespread with the purpose of improving the Aryan master race. People with congenital defects are removed from the gene pool. Those who are deemed to possess superior genes are encouraged to have as many children as possible. The result is a society obsessed with pure blood and building the Übermensch.
The next step in creating living space the German people do not need is draining the Mediterranean.
First proposed by Herman Sörgel in 1929, the Atlantropa project would dam off the Strait of Gibraltar and the Dardanelles. A third dam, between Sicily and Tunisia, would further lower the Mediterranean’s sea level and create vast new areas of land. The Adriatic Sea would largely disappear, which is why Italy isn’t keen on the plan.
Click here to learn more about Atlantropa.
The modern Roman Empire stretches from Savoy in the northwest to Somaliland in the southeast. Albania, Corsica, Libya, Tunisia, the Sudan and Italian East Africa are integral parts of the new Italy while Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt and Greece are ruled by puppets.
Benito Mussolini has expanded Rome itself with large neoclassicist neighborhoods in the style of the EUR.
Click here to learn more about Mussolini’s new Rome.
Europe’s other fascist dictators are content to live in Hitler’s shadow. The only ones who pursue an independent foreign policy are Spain’s Francisco Franco and Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar. Both came to power before the war.
Salazar is regarded warily by the Nazis. Portugal is the only country in Europe that recognizes continued British and French rule in Africa and Asia. Franco is considered more reliable, despite his refusal to give Gibraltar to the Reich.
Jozef Tiso still rules in Slovakia. Miklós Horthy has abolished the Regency in Hungary and formally established himself as dictator. In Bulgaria, Tsar Simeon II presides over a pliant, pro-German government. Michael I has become more powerful as king of Romania as Ion Antonescu’s health has failed. There are rumors that Antonescu has in fact died already, but that the regime cannot agree on a successor.
In the late 1930s, German explorers discovered a large ice-free plateau in the Antarctic with more than 100 freshwater lakes and outlets to the sea. They dubbed the area the Schirmacher Oasis and started building a base there.
It is now the center for German military and scientific activity in the Southern Hemisphere, housing U-boats and Haunebu flying discs.
Click here to learn more about Nazis’ Antarctica base.
The next step is the Moon. Wernher von Braun leads a Nazi space program at Peenemünde. His rocket technology is also being used to develop long-range missiles that can reach North America. The hope is to put a man on the Moon before 1960.
Click here to learn more about the Nazi Moon base.
All three superpowers have atomic weapons, but America, with the help of British, Jewish and Soviet scientists, has surpassed Japan and the Reich, detonating the world’s first hydrogen bomb in the Nevada desert in 1952.
Germany built the first jet-powered fighter plane, the Messerschmitt Me 262. It also pioneered the flying wing. Supersonic German jets ferry civilians and officials between Tokyo and Berlin.
Click here to learn more about the strange aircraft of the Third Reich.
America has gone the atomic route. The first aircraft that was equipped with a small nuclear reactor was the Convair B-36 Peacemaker. North American Aviation is developing the XB-70 Valkyrie as a deep-penetration strategic bomber that would extend American deterrence around the globe.
Click here to learn more about America’s atomic-powered aircraft.
Hitler’s obsession with size has seen Germany develop impractically large tanks and guns. Landkreuzern (“land cruisers”) are really only deployable in the desert of the North Africa. Huge railway guns guard the Eastern Front but are an ill fit in the guerrilla war against the remnants of the Soviet Union.
Click here to learn more about the wonder weapons of the Third Reich.
In a #dieselpunk world, World War II is still being fought as a prolonged Cold War One of the earliest descriptions of a dieselpunk world was written by “Piecraft” in 2006. He envisaged an alternate 1950s “where the Great Depression never arrived and World War II is still being fought as a prolonged Cold War.”As the Allies closed in on Hitler’s Germany in late 1944 and early 1945, a desperate Nazi regime turned to “wonder weapons” in a final effort to turn the tide in the war.
The best-known as the V-1 and V-2 rockets, which rained down on London by the hundreds but failed to demoralize the British. Others, such as the V-3 cannon and Schwerer Gustav railway gun, were barely used. Others yet, like the German atomic bomb and Die Glocke, either barely advanced beyond the drawing board or never existed at all.
The V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket (also known as the A4 in the Aggregat series) were the two best-known Vergeltungswaffen.
V-1s were hurled at London from France. The V-2 was launched from Holland. It was the first successful long-range guided ballistic missile.
Both were developed at Peenemünde under Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun. Neither was successful in its aim: to demoralize the British.
Report in Popular Science (October 1947)
The A9/A10 Amerika Rakete would have been at least twice the size of the V-2. Because engineers feared existing guidance systems would not be accurate enough over long distances, it was decided to make the A9 piloted. (The A10 was the booster rocket.)
Popular Science reported in October 1947 that German “robot missiles and piloted rocket bombers” would have been hurling across the Atlantic if the invasion of Europe had been delayed by as few as six months. “Rocket bombing of New York was scheduled for early 1946.”
Cutaway of the Fortress of Mimoyecques, where the V-3 cannons were meant to be housed (Wikimedia Commons)
The V-3 was a supergun designed to hit London from across the Channel. Attempts to build an underground bunker for the weapons, in what is now called the Fortress of Mimoyecques, were thwarted by the Royal Air Force.
Smaller versions of the weapons, sited at Lampaden in southwest Germany, were used during the Battle of the Bulge.
Artwork of a nuclear explosion in New York from Zack Parsons’ My Tank Is Fight! (2006)
Most historians believe the German atomic bomb project was a failure, but Geoffrey Michael Brooks and Rainer Karlsch claim in Hitler’s Terror Weapons (2002) and Hitler’s Bomb (2005), respectively, that a team led by Kurt Diebner managed to detonate a nuclear device near Ohrdruf in Thuringia in March 1945.
Brooks speculates that the Ardennes Offensive was driven by Germany’s need to maintain launch sites for V-2 rockets in the Low Countries that could target London. The idea was to equip the rockets with uranium bombs and try to force the British out of the war at the last moment.
The Karl-Gerät and Schwerer Gustav were both designed to break the French Maginot Line. When it turned out they weren’t needed, they were sent to the East. Both were used during the Battle of Sevastopol. Karl-Gerät bombarded Polish resistance fighters in Warsaw in 1944.
Karl was the largest self-propelled mortar ever deployed, Gustav the largest piece of artillery ever used in war.
A second version of Gustav, called Dora, was built. It briefly saw action in Stalingrad, but, like the other two guns, it just wasn’t very practical.
An abandoned Gustav can be seen in Stuart Jennett’s concept art for the horror movie Panzer 88, which appears to have been canceled.
The Landkreuzer (“Land Cruiser”) was a self-propelled platform for Gustav, which could otherwise only be mounted on trains. Hitler was keen on the idea. His more sober-minded armaments minister, Albert Speer, canceled the project in 1943, seeing how it was completely impractical.
Artwork of the German Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte super tank (TIGΞΓ)
The Monster, for its part, was a bigger version of the proposed Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte, another Hitler favorite that Speer realized was nuts.
The enormous Hydra tank in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) was inspired by the Ratte.
Artist’s impression of the Bell (Discovery Channel)
Die Glocke (“The Bell”) is an alleged Nazi anti-gravity project. It was popularized by the Polish journalist Igor Witkowski and investigated by the British military journalist Nick Cook. Neither was able to produce evidence to substantiate the outlandish claims made about it.
The story is that the Nazis built the Bell in a giant underground factory in Lower Silesia known as Riese. When powered by red mercury, it would kill everything within a 150- to 200-meter radius.
Conspiracy theories usually tie the Bell to Nazi occultism. The Bell myth inspired the 2008 horror movie Outpost.
Artwork of the German sun gun from Life magazine, July 23, 1945
Life magazine reported in July 1945 that German scientists had designed a “sun gun”. They calculated that a huge mirror in space, made of metallic sodium, could produce enough heat to burn a city or boil part of an ocean.
Needless to say, this wasn’t exactly feasible.
Flying bombs, superguns and a mysterious anti-gravity bell: Wonder weapons of the Third Reich #dieselpunk #ww2 #history As the Allies closed in on Hitler’s Germany in late 1944 and early 1945, a desperate Nazi regime turned to “wonder weapons” in a final effort to turn the tide in the war.Did you know many of the strange German warplanes we see in dieselpunk are based on real designs?
As World War II drew to a close in Europe, Nazi Germany rushed the development of advanced bombers and fighter jets in a final effort to stop the Allies. From the world’s first operational turbojet fighter to a flying wing, some of these technologies were so far ahead of their time that Allied commanders speculated the Germans could have turned the tide of the war if only they had managed to prolong it by a few months.
The best-known of Germany’s strange aircraft must be the Horten brothers’ flying wing.
Walter (1913-98) and Reimar Horten (1915-94) had virtually no formal training in aeronautics, yet they came up with some of the most innovative aircraft designs of the twentieth century.
The Horten Ho IX (also known as the Ho 229 and as the Gotha Go 229 after the Gothaer Waggonfabrik where it was built) was a favorite of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring. Originally construed as a bomber, his Air Ministry ordered the addition of two 30 mm cannons so it could be used as a fighter as well.
The first Ho IX flew on March 1, 1944, followed by another test flight in December 1944. Göring ordered forty aircraft built at Gotha. The program was accelerated after the Allies crossed the Rhine in March 1945, but production was too slow. The only flying wing ever readied for combat was promptly captured by the Americans. It is now stored at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber Restoration Facility in Suitland, Maryland.
Of course, that doesn’t stop dieselpunk from imagining what could have been.
Various alternate World War II video games feature Horten-style flying wings, including War Front: Turning Point (2007), Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of WWII (2007) and Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014).
Revell sells model kits of the Ho IX with amazing box cover artwork by Egbert Friedl.
Stuart Jennett’s concept art for the horror movie Panzer 88 features a similar flying wing. Not sure if that movie will get made, though, it appears to have been in development hell for years.
Messerschmitt, one of the largest aircraft builders of the Third Reich, designed their own flying wing, the Me P.08.01, in 1941. It never made it off the drawing table.
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) has a flying wing, but it’s smaller than the Horten brothers’. Given that the movie is set in (an alternate) 1936, it must be a different plane altogether.
Hydra’s flying wing in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) clearly takes its inspiration from the real thing, but it is many times larger. It has two massive jet engines as well as eight flying bombs stuck in the back, whose propellers help lift the plane.
The designer, Daniel Simon, has more at his website.
For the Amerika Bomber (more on that later), the Arado company proposed the Arado E.555. It came in several versions, the most notable of which mounted six jet engines on top of a flying wing. Revell sells a model kit of this version.
A similar plane appears in the 2008 video game Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. it is set in a world where Winston Churchill died in 1931, Britain is defeated and the Nazis have launched an invasion of the continental United States.
Another weapon the Germans bring to America in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is the Messerschmitt Me 270, a successor to the real-world Messerschmitt Me 262. It was the first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft in history.
Engine problems prevented the Me 262 from entering World War II until 1944. Although it was faster and better armed that its American and British counterparts, by that point it was too late to have an impact on the war.
The Henschel Hs 132 was designed as a dive bomber and interceptor to counter the Allied invasion of Europe. Its unique design featured a top-mounted jet engine and a cockpit completely faired into the fuselage contour, with the pilot in a prone position, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the contemporary Heinkel He 162.
The Luftwaffe ordered six prototypes. Only three were built before the war’s end.
The Amerika Bomber project was one of the most ambitious advanced aviation initiatives of the Third Reich. It sought to obtain a long-range bomber for the Luftwaffe that could strike the continental United States.
Messerschmitt submitted the Me 264.
The Horten brothers proposed a bigger version of their flying wing, called the H.XVIII, with six turbojets.
The most exotic design by far was the Silbervogel (“Silver Bird”), a rocket-powered sub-orbital bomber dreamed up by Eugen Sänger and his wife, Irene Bredt. It would have been shot into the stratosphere, cross the Atlantic at a speed of 5,000 kilometers per hour, drop its bombs over America and then land in Japan.
The design that was ultimately chosen was a more conventional one: the Junkers Ju 390.
But it has an interesting story! It is claimed — and disputed — that at some point in 1944, one of the prototypes made a transatlantic flight to within twenty kilometers of the American East Coast.
The Triebflügel was designed by Focke-Wulf as a vertical takeoff and landing interceptor to defend important industrial sites that had no or only small airfields.
Rather than wings, the Triebflügel had a rotor/propeller assembly that functioned much like a helicopter on liftoff and like a propeller in horizontal flight.
The Triebflügel was never built, but something like it appears in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), called a “Parasit”. The designer, Daniel Simon, has more at his website.
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle features a German supersonic jet that is similar to the Anglo-French Concorde, which first flew in 1969. (The Man in the High Castle is set in 1962.)
In the Amazon TV series, the airliner is only a little different from the real plane. The cockpit windows are larger, the tail is straight, not curved, and the German version appears to have only two doors in the front. The real Concorde had two in the back as well.
Strange aircraft of the Third Reich: real and imagined Did you know many of the strange German warplanes we see in dieselpunk are based on real designs?
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