Reichbusters: Projekt Vril is cooperative action-adventure board game by Mythic Games set in late 1944. The Nazis have discovered a mysterious energy source known as vril that could change the outcome of the war. An elite team of over-the-top Allied operatives, called the Reichbusters, are sent in to eradicate this new threat before it is too late.
The art is by Guillem H. Pongiluppi from Barcelona, Spain.
Continue reading “Reichbusters: Projekt Vril Art”
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 of this movie. Suffice to say that, like the first Iron Sky, it is utterly and completely out there and I’m here for it. Old villains, old heroes, new villains, new heroes. A total sarcastic approach to non-fictional personas, dieselpunk tinkering and utter madness: it’s Iron Sky alright.
Continue reading “Iron Sky: The Coming Race”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 scale Allied intelligence feared in the aftermath of the Second World War. Nor did anyone make serious preparations for a Fourth Reich.
Don’t tell diesel- and atomicpunk authors, who tend the exaggerate this history to spin wild tales of Nazi conspiracy.
Continue reading “Nazis Survive”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 (2015-present). Other inspirations are William Overgard’s The Divide (1980), Harry Turtledove’s In the Presence of Mine Enemies (2003) and Guy Saville’s The Afrika Reich (2011).
Continue reading “What if the Axis Won World War II?”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-fueled world in the first installment of a new series we’ll call worldbuilding.
We’ll draw on Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978) and the BBC serialization (2017, our review here), Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and the Amazon drama series (2015-present), Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992), Allen Steele’s V-S Day (2014), the video game Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014), the art of Stefan Prohaczka and Sam van Olffen, and the real-life Nazi Generalplan Ost, among other sources.
Continue reading “What If World War II Never Ended?”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.
Continue reading “Wonder Weapons of the Third Reich”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.
Continue reading “Strange Aircraft of the Third Reich: Real and Imagined”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”The Axis powers in World War II never really had any 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 was 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 were made.
Nor did the Japanese think seriously about conquering the United States. Some advocated seizing Hawaii and Japan briefly occupied the leutian 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 almost all 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”
