I’m looking for a book that seriously hypothesizes what would have happened to the world if Germany had won WWII (the big one), or if they had at least defeated all of the Allies except the U.S.
No, I’m not a neo-n*zi, far from it, I would just like to see what informed sources might project the world to be like nowadays.
(Or uninformed sources, if any dopers want to give their opinion.)
Well… Harry Turtledove has a six or seven volume series, not quite what you’re looking for, but… He assumes that, in the middle of WWII, aliens from beyond the solar system arrive, wanting to wipe out humanity. Humans have to unite to fight them, despite their own battles.
The net result seems to be four “regions” or “empires” – Communist (Russia), Capitalist (US), Europe (Nazi), and … er… alien.
The science fiction author Harry Turtledove has written, co-written and edited a number of books with alternate histories as their primary theme. I would post a link, but I hate to include commercial links here.
There are innumerable books on this subject, mostly fiction. Fatherland by Robert Harris is very good. There’s also a British movie, It Happened Here, an outstanding example of low-budget film-making, which postulates a German invasion of Britain after Dunkirk, but the Americans win in the end.
If you’re lokoing for a serious, discursive, scholarly book, I can’t think of one. Professional historians often feel that their reputations will be damaged by engaging in full-scale “what if?” speculation.
If you want a decent, readable history of the Second World War, which you could use as a starting point for your own specualtion, try A J P Taylor or Martin Gilbert.
Len Deighton wrote quite a good murder mystery, set in a Nazi-occupied England. “SS-GB” was the title, as I recall.
In a less speculative mode, Peter Fleming (brother of Ian, the James Bond writer), who was in British Intelligence during the war, wrote an excellent book on the planned German invasion, based on documents recovered in 1945. I believe it was called “Operation Sea Lion: The Projected Invasion of Britain 1940.”
Launcher may train without warning.
I think the finest example of “alternate history,” and Nazis-winning-the-war alternate histories in particular, is The Man in the High Castle, by Phillip K. Dick. A real winner that came out in the early 60s. Still in print.
Good choice, SofaKing. I posted that one in response to this question on another Dope board. I’ve got my copy right here on my desk. Very creepy. Dick has a talent for taking the surreal and impossible and making it all too real.
I just haven’t been the same since that house fell on my sister.
In addition to all of the above suggestions, I’d also recommend The Divide by William Overgard. It’s a great alternate history novel but unfortunately it’s out of print and very difficult to find.
There’s also a collection of short stories called Hitler Victorious whose subject should be apparent.
And if you’re looking for a more non-fictional approach you might check out The Hitler Options or What If? Strategic Alternatives of WWII. Both of these are collections by historians of speculations on how WWII could have turned out differently.
You want a book that seriously sets out the agenda of a Nazi controlled world?
*Mein Kampf[i/].
That book laid out the ideas of the concentration camps. The death camps.
15 years before those camps went on line.
The goals and how those goals were to be achieved and maintained are all there.
Check out this website for books about alternate histories:
http://www.uchronia.net/
As far as I remeber the anthology Roads Not Taken : Tales of Alternate History was quite good and you should really read Dick’s Man in the High Castle as recommended by Sofa King.
For once you must try to face the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.
And now that most of the legitimate responses have come in (I, too, vote for Man in the High Castle), I’ll throw in a pedantic note. (Well, someone’s got to do it, dammit.)
Deutschland über Alles, both the song and the concept, did not spring from the idea on German world conquest. It arose a hundred years earlier when there was no Germany, simply a hodgepodge of principalities, duchies, free states, and assorted political regions of people who all spoke German, but who were passed around and redistributed by each new war or royal wedding. After the Napoleanic wars, the idea germinated of bringing all those folk with a common language together under a single government.
Thus: “Germanspeakingland over all” (concentrate on the higher notion of Germany rather than fretting about Westphalia, Hesse, Hanover, Saxony, Bavaria, Thuringia, etc. Prussia was allowed to think more highly of itself, of course, since the best Germans were Prussians.) The movement’s grand architect was Bismarck.
(This is not to say that such a popular phrase was hard to convert to a meaning of “Germany over all (Europe)”, but that is not where it originated.
Tom~
All the really good, big, Nazis-Have-Won books have been mentioned…but if you want a really good SMALL one, see if you can find a copy of THE SOUND OF HIS HORN, by Sarban.
It doesn’t look at the global scene, but at a little corner of Europe in the year 2045, and what transpires there. It includes a political take on “The Most Dangerous Game.”
Kingsley Amis wrote of it, “If the Nazis had in fact won their war, we could have expected to see – those of us who were still around – a systematic development of the master-race concept into a kind of feudal structure, with a small oligarchy of immesely powerful and capricious overlords, a middle stratum of fiendishly conscientious Party administrators, and a huge slave-proletariat absolutely subject to the whim of their masters, even to the lengths of provding them, as here, with human game for the chase.”
Knockout of a book, chosen as one of the 100 greatest horror/thriller novels of all time by Michael Moorcock.
Uke
Sory, NOT Michael Moorcock. He put together the FANTASY: 100 BEST BOOKS.
Stephen Jones and Kim Newman edited HORROR: 100 BEST BOOKS (Carroll & Graf, 1988).
Incidentally, these two volumes, plus H.R.F. Keating’s CRIME & MYSTERY: 100 BEST BOOKS, make some great reading-for-leading-to-other -reading.
Read, “A Man in a High Castle”
(The title goes something like that…it’s been so long)
Awesome site!! Exactly what I was looking for.
Many thanks to all who responded with suggestions. My reading list will be full for quite some time.
For a scholarly look at alternative history, check out Virtual History, edited by Niall Ferguson, a hotshot young British historian. Chapters include “Hitler’s England: What if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940?” and “Nazi Europe: What if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union?”.
The other chapters, in case anyone’s interested, are: “England without Cromwell: What if Charles I had avoided the Civil War?”, “British America: What if there had been no American Revolution?”, “British Ireland: What if Home Rule had been enacted in 1913?”, “The Kaiser’s European Union: What if Britain had ‘stood aside’ in August 1914?”, “Stalin’s War or Peace: What if the Cold War had been avoided?”, “Camelot Continued: What if John F. Kennedy had lived?”, and “1989 without Gorbachev: What if Communism had not collapsed?”. Each chapter is written by a reputed historian. I highly recommend the book.
Another alternative history I’ve read is Robert Sobel’s “For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga”. Sobel was (I think he’s dead now) a well-known professor of business history who wrote an excellent book on the history of the US film industry. He wrote “For Want of a Nail” back in the early '70s, long before alternative history was cool. Your public library probably has it. I highly recommend it, too.
About nine months ago the Economist, in one of their surveys, did a long article on alternative histories. Again, you might check it out at your public library.
for a fantasy alternative history, try Poul Anderson’s “A Midsummer’s Tempest.” He starts with the premise that every word of Shakespeare’s plays was true, giving an odd mixture of supernatural (Oberon, Titania, Prospero) and a speeded-up industrial and scientific timeline (chiming clocks in Caesar’s Rome, etc.) Great fun.
and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel to toe
True, but not all… Keegan and Ambrose (among many others) contributed to the book What If?, a recent publication about alternate histories. I haven’t had time to read the whole thing, but Keegan poses that Hitler might have had more success attacking Russia through the Middle East, while Ambrose speculates on what would have happened had Operation Overlord (D-Day) failed. I don’t recall seeing an essay that addressed the OP, but you might be interested anyway.