We’d be treated to “historically accurate” photos of happy Jews horsing around the pool at their lush, leisure-oriented internment camps right before they all accidentally died of cholera. The book would feature the “Ship of Fools” story prominently (The many countries that condemned Germany’s anti-Jewish policies would, given an opportunity to absorb one paltry shipload of Jewish refugees, pass on it. This did, in fact, happen, but our high school history classes usually gloss it over). Roosevelt and Churchill would routinely be depicted as baby-eating monsters with frothing, blood-flecked mouths.
There’s actually a Firesign Theater album based on this very premise (Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers), but the satire is indirect to the extreme.
The official story in Nazi Germany was that Britian and France were afraid of Germany becoming too powerful and them losing influence internationally so they used the invasion of Poland as an excuse for war. I’m pretty sure the invasion of Chezkoslovakia was promoted on human rights (the nazis said they were protecting nazis in Chezkoslovakia who were being persecuted at the time).
Sudeten Germans were allegedly being mistreated. This group had, as in Austria, an extremely small but active and vocal Nazi minority, and were, as a whole, Nazis or not, delighted to be made a part of Germany.
I doubt they would have boasted of exterminating the jews, and they would have denounced as cranks and “revisionists” any historians probing into the truth of the “relocation to the east” cover story.
Contemporary evidence indicates the approach they would have taken. During the war they went to considerable length to hide their extermination program and Himmler in a speech at Poznan in 1943 said:
**“I shall speak to you here with frankness on a very grave matter. Among ourselves, it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934 (Night of the Long Knives - an internal purge of the Nazi party) to do our duty as we were ordered, to stand our comrades against a wall and shoot them, and we never spoke about it and we will never speak about it. It was a matter of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, that we never discussed it. Each of us shuddered and yet each of us knew clearly that next time he would do it again if it were an order and if it were necessary.”
“I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the things that is easily said: “The Jewish people are going to be exterminated.” That’s what every Party member says, “Sure, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews - extermination - it’ll be done!” And then they all come along, 80 million worthy Germans and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a first-rate Jew! Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen, not one has had to go through with it. Most of you know what it means to see 100 corpses lying together, or 500, or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written”**
Officially it just never would have happened, and stories to the contrary they would likely have attacked as fabrications of the hostile jewish population of the United States. American jews would surely be asking questions about their missing relatives and there wouldn’t be any satisfactory answers.
Actually, the Posen Castle speech is slightly open-ended about what the German people would be told eventually. There’s the “page of glory” remark and the various passages emphasising that it’s all highly secret, but later on Himmler also says:
(as quoted in Sereny’s Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth.)
Even during their actual years in power, the Nazis’ language about the Jews was so routinely revelling in violence that it seems at least possible to me that after a few generations in power they’d have been confident enough to happily proclaim the exterminations as their greatest triumph.
I think this is extremely possible. The prevailing, very active, anti-Jewish sentiments would make it likely that they would be proud of how they freed themselves of ‘the lice in their fur’.
They would have also stress how they defended European culture against the barbarian communist hordes, that would have shat in our fountains and stabled their horses in our museums.
Of course we are also to be gratefull of how they protected us from the US gansters with their lawlessness, moneyhunger and indecent morals.
“Saving everyone from communism” would be a big deal.
Aryan-type countries would be accepted in with a “Well, your government was in the wrong, but you’re decent chaps on the whole, let’s forget that embarassing period of history where you war-mongered us.”
Embarassing nazi officials wiped out would be edited out.
Not sure what’s unclear about it. Firesign Theater, a comedy group from the late 60s-onward, did a “concept” comedy album in 1970 called Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers. The concept was, what would American life be like today if America had lost WWII? Half the album was some luckless stoner listening to the radio under this regime with strange ads (Pizza delivery places that wouldn’t go into certain sectors after dark and say so in their commercials) and stranger musical programming (Lots of Christian musical programming). The other half of the album focuses on a radio show the stoner tunes in and listens to, an old “Henry Aldrich”-type program called “Porgie Tirebiter.” You need to sift through to find clues about what’s happened in this society; roving gangs of Latino hoodlums, schools with names like “Communist Martyrs High School,” high school pep rallies with themes like “Shoes for Industry!” and so on.
If I were to do a show with this specific concept, I’d probably go for the obvious and it would look a lot more like that old 80s miniseries Amerika, only with Nazis instead of Communists (Open with drum majorettes hefting banners of Washington and Hitler at a Fourth of July parade, etc). Firesign Theater’s approach was a lot more roundabout. Their point was that, on a cultural level, we probably did lose the war.
I imagine it would have been painted as energetic, smart underdogs perservering against the great, corrupt, old colonial powers of the world. Of Germany finally winning her rightful place as a great, colonial power of her own. The young and strong replacing the old and weak.
As for Russia and places East and South of Germany it would be painted as superior humans putting things right with the world and lesser humans in their productive place in the heirarchy.
