Last year, we featured a map of North America from the title credits of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, which shows the United States divided into German and Japanese zones.
The second season of the series, which is also based on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 alternate-history novel and started streaming in December, gives us a fuller picture of the world.
Continue reading “The World of The Man in the High Castle”When you look at the projects that the Nazi government tackled, you cannot rid yourself of the feeling that they had a grandiosity fetish.
To put it in more direct terms: Megalomania was an intrinsic feature of the system. World domination, tank-battleships like the Landkreuzer Ratte and the drastic redesign of Berlin into the capital of the world — Germania.
Continue reading “Hitler’s Nightmare Capital of the World”After Germany had overrun France and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940, an invasion of Britain — then the only nation still free in Europe — seemed like a distinct possibility. German fighter planes and bombers waged a months-long air war with their British counterparts over the Channel and the south of England in the summer of that year. The Germans meant to follow up with an amphibious assault once the Luftwaffe had established air superiority.
Of course, the Germans never managed. Prime Minister Winston Churchill congratulated Britain’s airmen in August, saying they had “unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger” and were “turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion.”
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” he said.
The British had been outnumbered and outgunned yet managed to fend off the Nazi air assault and give Adolf Hitler his first defeat.
Even if they’d failed, though, it is doubtful that a German invasion of Great Britain would have succeeded.
Continue reading “How the Nazis Planned to Invade Great Britain”Earlier this month, we looked at some hypothetical Axis invasion plans of the United States. In reality, neither Germany nor Japan ever had a concrete plan to attack North America. But what if they did?
Philip K. Dick’s 1963 novel The Man in the High Castle gives us a world in which the two Axis powers not only mounted an invasion of America but succeeded in conquering it.
Continue reading “What If Germany and Japan Had Conquered the United States?”The Axis powers in World War II never had plans to invade the continental United States. The Nazis hoped to keep the Americans out of the war altogether. As late as the spring of 1941, Adolf Hitler said a German invasion of the Western Hemisphere would be as fantastic as an invasion of the Moon.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year did prompt the Germans to develop long-range bombers that could reach the East Coast. But although Hitler started speaking grandly of a future contest between America and Germany, no preparations for it were made.
Nor did the Japanese think seriously about conquering the United States. Some advocated seizing Hawaii, and Japan briefly occupied the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, but that was it.
Of course, that’s what we know now. Things looked very different in the winter of 1941, when America unexpectedly found itself at war with both the Empire of Japan and a Nazi Germany that controlled most of Europe.
Continue reading “Axis Invasion Plans of the United States”These pictures were made by Hugo Jaeger, Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer. He sold them to America’s Life magazine in 1965, but some weren’t published until 2009. Continue reading “Munich Under Nazi Rule: Color Photos”
The Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Bavaria were Albert Speer’s first assignment as Adolf Hitler’s chief architect. The grounds he designed — and which featured prominently in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece, Triumph of the Will — were based on ancient Doric architecture, magnified to an enormous scale and capable of holding over 240,000 spectators. Continue reading “Albert Speer’s Nazi Party Rally Grounds”
Discerning viewers of Amazon’s alternate-history drama The Man in the High Castle (our review here) may have taken notice when one of the characters made a passing reference to a German plan to drain the Mediterranean.
It sounds like just the sort of thing a megalomanic Third Reich would do, but they actually didn’t. The Nazis weren’t interested in the plan — but it was real.
Continue reading “Atlantropa: The German Plan to Dam the Mediterranean”Dieselpunk fans will be familiar with the 2012 movie Iron Sky, which shows how a group of Nazis fled to the Moon after Hitler’s defeat in 1945 and return to Earth with flying discs and a huge zeppelin-like spaceship.
Not all may be aware that the fantasy of a German Moon base precedes this film.
Continue reading “Nazis on the Moon”During World War II, German scientists synthesized anabolic steriods and experimented on concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war in an attempt to treat chronic wasting. Experiments were allegedly conducted on German soldiers to increase their aggression and agility, however, there is no evidence whatsoever that something like an Übersoldier (a play on the Nazis’ idealized Übermensch) was ever in the making — let alone created.
Yet “supersoldiers” keep appearing in video games.
Continue reading “Dieselpunk Games’ Obsession with Nazi Supersoldiers”
