Thought the 1950s couldn’t get any scarier? Think again. Imagine communists ruling all over Europe, the Soviet Union stretching from Finland in the northwest to Port Arthur in the southeast, Britain under the sway of “Big Brother”, America under President-for-Life Douglas MacArthur and East and West vying for influence in Africa and the Middle East.
This atompunk world is on its way to George…
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…
450 years ago this year, the Dutch Revolt against the Catholic king of Spain started. For eighty years, the largely Protestant provinces of the Netherlands fought for their independence. They got it in 1648, when the Peace of Münster (part of the Peace of Westphalia) recognized the Northern Netherlands as an independent republic.
But the largely Catholic South remained Spanish until 1714, when it became Austrian. It was briefly joined with the Netherlands after the defeat of Napoleon, but by then the two had grown apart culturally, economically and linguistically. Belgium seceded from the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830.
This separation was not preordained. In 1581, Brabant (which is now split between Belgium and the Netherlands), Flanders as well as Mechelen had joined the Northern provinces in their declaration of independence, the Act of Abjuration. But they were quickly reconquered by Spanish forces. Antwerp and Brussels had been the centers of economic and political life in the Low Countries. They too fell under Spanish rule. The North continued as a republic, centered on Amsterdam.
What if the rebels had succeeded in holding the South? What could a United Netherlands have looked like?
Peter Vandermeersch, the Belgian-born editor of the Netherlands’ NRC newspaper, suggests it would be a country of 25 to 30 million today.
Millions of them would speak French. Standard Dutch would sound more like the dialect of Brabant than Holland’s. Perhaps we would be a republic or perhaps a monarchy that celebrated not a member of the House of Orange but a Saxe-Coburger or a descent of the Habsburgs on King’s Day. The center of the country would be the former Duchy of Brabant. The most prosperous city would undoubtedly be Antwerp, a true metropolis that wouldn’t have been stunted in its growth by the blockade of the Scheldt. Amsterdam — unfortunately for the North — would be a nice provincial town.
Let’s take Vandermeersch’s points one by one.
When Dutch was first standardized in the sixteenth century, the Brabantian dialect of Antwerp was the most influential. Hollandic, which was spoken in Amsterdam and the other cities of the northwest, lost out when between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees from Brabant and Flanders, escaping Spanish rule, resettled in the North.
This mix of Brabantic and Hollandic developed into Standard Dutch. In the twentieth century, a combination of national education, urbanization and the rise of mass media weakened regional dialects. Brabantic today sounds a little different from Standard Dutch, which is associated with Holland, but there is no language barrier.
In what became Belgium, by contrast, French, the language spoken by the elite, influenced the way Flemish is pronounced, but not the way it is written.
When the Dutch provinces seceded from Spain in 1581, they initially shopped around Europe for a king.
Francis, the Duke of Anjou and a possible heir to the French throne, was considered, but Holland and Zeeland — the two wealthiest regions — rejected him. Francis himself was also dissatisfied with the provinces’ offer of limited sovereignty.
William of Orange, the leader of the Revolt, was asked to become Count of Holland, but he was assassinated before he could accept the offer.
Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, was appointed governor-general of the Netherlands in exchange for English support in 1585, however, his attempt to ban continued Dutch trade with Spain made him the enemy of the big-city merchants who ran the country.
Only then did the States General of the Northern Netherlands declare themselves sovereign and a republic was born. The Netherlands finally became a monarchy in 1815 under a descendent of William of Orange.
The Southern Netherlands remained under Habsburg rule. The War of the Spanish Succession switched control from the Spanish to the Austrian branch of the family, which lost it to the French First Republic in 1794.
When the Belgians — irritated by King William I’s Holland-centric development — seceded in 1830, they invited Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, two German principalities, to lead them.
Leopold had been married to the eldest daughter of King George IV of the United Kingdom and still enjoyed support in Britain, which was crucial to securing international recognition of the new Belgian state.
Brabant used to be the cultural, economic and political heartland of the Low Countries. During the Revolt, it became a war zone.
‘s-Hertogenbosch, one of the three largest cities of Brabant, was finally conquered by Frederik Hendrik, the youngest son of William of Orange, in 1629. Antwerp continued to elude him. The wealthy merchants of Amsterdam, who financed the war, were wary of liberating their rival port for fear of losing business. The Republic never made a move on Brussels.
If Holland had been willing to provide the necessary funds, there is a fair chance it could have taken all three cities and with it the entire Duchy of Brabant. When the French briefly allied with the Dutch in the 1630s, they nearly overran the whole of Flanders.
Instead, Brabant was partitioned at war’s end. The southern half, including Brussels, remained Spanish. The north was admitted into the Republic not as a sovereign province, but as a federally governed entity called Staats-Brabant. The Catholic population were for a long time treated as second-class citizens.
A Dutch blockade of the Scheldt, coupled with Spanish persecution of non-Catholics in the Southern Netherlands, caused tens of thousands of merchants and tradesmen to flee Antwerp and seek refuge in Amsterdam, where they contributed to the Republic’s sudden explosion in prosperity and what was later called its Golden Age.
Frederik Hendrik’s hopes of reconquering Antwerp were never realized. A final battle, in 1638, led to the worst Dutch defeat in the Eighty Years’ War. By then it was probably too late for Antwerp to reclaim its former glory anyway. Amsterdam had already established itself as the entrepôt of Europe. The city’s capitalist ruling class was not going to give up its newfound power and wealth.
What if they had been persuaded by the other provinces? Each, after all, had one vote. Holland was first among equals. Some of the more fanatically Calvinist provinces, led by Zeeland, argued for the liberation of the entire Netherlands.
Vandermeersch suggests Amsterdam would have reverted back to a provincial town, but that seems unlikely. Not only had it become the center of Northern European trade; it was now the financial capital of Europe.
But no doubt it would have had to share the crown of Antwerp, which was favorably situated at the mouth of the Belgian river system. Its proximity to France could have created more opportunities for trade, whereas the Amsterdam-dominated Netherlands became highly dependent on Germany in later centuries. Belgium took full advantage of the Second Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, when the Netherlands fell behind. During the Belle Époque, Antwerp could easily have become the richest and most cosmopolitan city of the Low Countries — and perhaps Western Europe.
What if Belgium and the Netherlands had remained one country? #alternatehistory 450 years ago this year, the Dutch Revolt against the Catholic king of Spain started. For eighty years, the largely Protestant provinces of the Netherlands fought for their independence.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.”
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