The Fatherland - a Nazi victory TL
- Thread starter Onkel Willie
- Start date
- Status
but it is BEAUTIFULL! I thought about that. As far as we know from the timeline, Finland annexed pre-Winter war territories after Round 1 of the war with the Soviets, but we don't know what they got in the second invasion.
There is an argument to be made for Finland getting pretty much what it was occupying in 1942 IOTL - the famous "three-isthmus border". The area is mostly wilderness, of little value to Germany outside the ability to use the Murmansk railway. And then of course the Germans are seriously shorthanded with what they have conquered. The more of these out-of-the-way areas the Finns control, the less the Nazis would have to use resources to keep them pacified.
The Kola peninsula the Germans would probably keep themselves, because of its mineral wealth and the strategic value of naval bases on the Arctic coast.
I think Finland would have Kaerlia and Kola - they did in Fatherland too.
I also think the Anglo-American decolonization would see a lot of those smallee countries merged. Like we'd have an East African Republic instead of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
I also think the Anglo-American decolonization would see a lot of those smallee countries merged. Like we'd have an East African Republic instead of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
Yes, if only to better defend themselves from Fascist colonialist depredations
If you actually take the time to add up the numbers (85% of Poles, 65% of Ukrainians etc) the number of Slavs designated to be killed or deported (most of those deported would likely die in the process) comes out to over 100 million people dead within a few decades.
That’s more than 4 million people worked to death, starved, shot and dead from disease every single year.
Belarus: 6,120,000 out of 8,160,000 (75%)
Ukraine: 25,350,000 out of 39,000,000 (65%)
Lithuania: 2,180,250 out of 2,565,000 (85%)
Estonia: 526,000 out of 1,052,000 (50%)
Latvia: 905,500 out of 1,811,000 (50%)
Poland: 29,000,000 out of 34,000,000 (85%)
Russia: 57 million out of 76 million (75%)
Czechoslovakia: 5,100,000 out of 10.2 million (50%)
25 million dead is a very conservative estimate especially since it includes Jews. None of the above numbers include Jews since the Reich figured they’d be gone before the late 1940s.
Zagan
Donor
You seem to conflate ethnicity (ex. Poles) with citizenship (ex. Poland). They did not match and the differencies were quite large. The Nazis used ethnicity in their calculations. You used citizenship. Thus, your figures are not correct.
The nazis DID reshuffle their views multiple times. They planed far ahead, then reality knocked on their door. The question is: Why shouldnt the nazis dont rearange their "Generalplan Ost" program? Of course its very convenient, to let them murder everyone or at least the most poles and slaws to show, that they are bastards. But the nazis were, at least in my opinion, very pragmatic. I read somewhere, that even the big wigs know, that most of their rhetoric was stupid shit. So they see after a few years, they cant settle all of the east allone. So the logic conclusion would be to ramp up the "Lebensborn" program to a massive scale. The idea with the "russians" which have viking blood is something like that. There is no need to murder all this people, when you can use them as workers.
There were several drafts of the general plan. Those numbers were not set in stone, and I think they refer to the populations of the areas slated for German settlement, not everything west of the Urals.
Honestly I think 125 million Germans are too low, as a significant number of the Slavs was meant to be assimilated into Germans from the start, and when pretending you're a German get you a "get out of a mass grave or serfdom" card, the incentive increase dramatic. Of course this also mean you know if Germany ever lose control with the area, you live in, your neighbours won't treat you kindly. So I imagine that we would see the Slavs who have been declared to be Germans, would be most German at all. The surviving non-assimilated Slavs, when Speer get to power will likely also be a pretty broken people, the Ukrainians have lived through the Holodomor, the World War and decades of random massacres from the Nazi. I expect they only want peace, even as second class citizens, it's their children who will protest their status as second class citizens. All in all their culture and identity will likely be pretty broken, so they will likely push their Goth or Varangian identity pretty hard.
Also... I can't help but wonder if the German government will have tried to recruit any "Aryans" from outside Germany to settle the east?
Like, for example, white people who are leaving newly-decolonized countries, as well as Nazi-sympathetic people from the UK, US, etc. Farmers from the Southern USA opposed to desegregation. German-Americans in particular.
If they're trying to emulate Manifest Destiny, that would be the obvious strategy- and further increase the number of Germans/ Aryans in the east.
Like, for example, white people who are leaving newly-decolonized countries, as well as Nazi-sympathetic people from the UK, US, etc. Farmers from the Southern USA opposed to desegregation. German-Americans in particular.
If they're trying to emulate Manifest Destiny, that would be the obvious strategy- and further increase the number of Germans/ Aryans in the east.
Chapter XII: Exit Nixon, Enter Kennedy, 1960-1965.
And Nixon's going out with a bang!
On November 8th 1960 the United States presidential elections took place with the charismatic and popular Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (JPK Jr.) facing incumbent President Richard M. Nixon. The latter had a thriving economy going for him, had established friendly relations with newly independent countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, had overseen the development of superior thermonuclear weapons that were available to the US in far greater numbers than to the Nazis, and had established NASA to gain the lead in the Space Race. After Roosevelt, Nixon was the second President in US history to pursue more than two terms (an amendment proposed in 1947 to limit the number of terms a person is eligible to the office of President to two didn’t get approved by Congress).
Kennedy, during the campaign, charged the Nixon administration with the fact that the US had fallen behind on the Reich technologically, pointing out that the Germans had beaten the US to launching the world’s first satellite and had launched the first manned mission to space less than six months prior on Wednesday April 20th 1960, coinciding with Hitler’s birthday. He said he’d get “America moving again.” Governor Kennedy also accused Nixon of hypocrisy for his campaign against communists as well as Nazis domestically, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, while allying with the Soviets against the Nazis. Later, as a proponent of civil rights, he brought up the position of African Americans as second rate citizens despite claims of opposing Nazi racism. Joe Kennedy also pointed out the loss of the Middle East to Germany. He reiterated these points in a live TV debate seen by 70 million Americans. In the same TV debate, Nixon, who also supported civil rights, riposted by pointing out that old Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was a virulent anti-Semite, that keeping the support of the Middle East would’ve required sacrificing the Jewish national home in Palestine, and that US support of the Soviets was a choice “between the evil we know, and the evil we don’t know.” In the end, Nixon got 278 electoral votes and 51% of the popular vote while Kennedy got 244 electoral votes and 48.6% of the vote.
Nixon became the second US President to serve more than two terms, but only three months into his third term an incident occurred that made him wish he hadn’t run for re-election. On Monday January 16th 1961, a catastrophe took place that totally overshadowed Nixon’s approval of the Civil Rights Act the previous day. A B-52 bomber carrying two Mk.39 3-4 megaton bombs, based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base near Goldsboro, North Carolina, tried to refuel in mid-air when the tanker crew noticed a leak. The B-52 assumed a holding pattern, but the leak got worse and the airplane was directed to return to base immediately. During descent the pilots were no longer able to keep the plane stable and the crew ejected on the orders of the pilot in command at an altitude of 2.700 metres (~ 9.000 feet), believing the safeties installed on their nuclear cargo were enough to prevent a disaster. Based on what happened next investigators later concluded that the safeties on one of the two weapons failed. A 4 megaton thermonuclear explosion devastated nearby Goldsboro and killed 15.000 people in an instant while a south-southwestern wind blew the fallout toward Washington DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Dignitaries and visitors that had arrived in Washington to attend the inaugural ceremony of President Nixon panicked as they believed this could be the start of WW III. The inauguration was postponed and Nixon raised the alertness level of the armed forces to DEFCON 1 (the only time in American history this has ever occurred) and nuclear armed B-52s took to the skies, an action with an irony that wasn’t lost on later observers. The White House frantically contacted Berlin and Speer categorically denied Germany had anything to do with it (a “hotline” was installed so the US President and the German President could directly call each other). Cooler heads prevailed and the Americans had to accept the terrible truth that they’d nuked their own country. After that, a small, solemn inaugural ceremony took place indoors in the Capitol’s Old Senate Chamber rather than the grand inauguration planned outdoors at the west front of the building.
Wayne County, the location of the radioactive crater that used to be Goldsboro, was eventually evacuated. This didn’t happen immediately because knowledge of the effects of nuclear fallout was still limited, because the government was inexperienced in dealing with a disaster of this magnitude and because the US had a history of responding to nuclear accidents ineptly, with Bikini Atoll being the most prominent pre-Goldsboro example. At the same time, harvests of fruits, vegetables and wheat, dairy products and meat in the north-eastern United States had to be thrown away and the government had to compensate the affected farmers and stores. A circle with a 20 mile (32 km) radius centred on the blast area called the “Goldsboro Exclusion Zone” (with a total area of 1.242 square miles/3.217 square kilometres) was evacuated too, was federalized by the government and has been off-limits to civilians ever since. This has led to wild speculations (approaching the levels of Area 51 conspiracies) among the locals about government experiments going on there, some say to create “mutant” super soldiers while others stick to the theory that radiation can power the UFO that supposedly crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. In reality, even today radiation maintenance workers, scientific researchers and the occasional journalist are only allowed in for three hours a day for two weeks, followed by a three week detoxification period. Nearly sixty years later eastern North Carolina also still has above average occurrences of cancer, miscarriages and children born with genetic defects.
The Goldsboro Disaster, as it became known, led to widespread mistrust toward nuclear energy despite countless pundits testifying at a Congressional hearing and later reiterating on TV shows that this was a freak incident and that nuclear energy was perfectly safe. Despite this, a movement against atomic energy developed and a minority within that movement even questioned the necessity of nuclear weapons. The Democrats latched on to this movement and promised to block the construction of more nuclear power plants. Nixon did everything he could, including a promise to provide free healthcare to anyone who was verifiably in the path of the fallout on the day of the incident, visiting countless victims, and signing the National Cancer Act with an annual budget of $8 billion for cancer research (to be adjusted for inflation). The Democrats nonetheless scored a spectacular victory in the 1962 mid-term elections by gaining a majority in the House of Representatives, rendering the remainder of Nixon’s tenure a lame duck presidency. He passed his most significant piece of legislation before that in 1961 and it remains known as “Nixoncare”: a private health insurance employer mandate and the implementation of state-run health insurance plans available to all, with income-based premiums and cost sharing. It was quite popular, but not enough to restore Nixon’s popularity and it didn’t go far enough for the Democrats who proposed something akin to Britain’s National Health Service.
Germany rubbed it in by successfully carrying out a test with the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever built, codenamed Thor, on November 8th 1961. The 27 tonne device was moved to a test site in occupied Russia north of the arctic circle as its predicted yield was too great for the Ohrdruf test site. Once there, it was encased in an enormous glider construction that was tethered to an Me 696 supersonic delta wing bomber. Once brought to an altitude of 15 kilometres (nearly 50.000 feet), the tether was cut and the bomber sped away at Mach 1.3 to ensure it was at minimum safe distance before the weapon would explode at an altitude of 5 kilometres. The weapon produced an explosive yield of 100 megatons and remains the most powerful manmade explosion ever. American nuclear superiority, however, remained an inescapable fact: in 1961, the Germans had roughly 2.500 warheads and the Americans more than 22.000 (the British had 155, Italy 10 and China 5). A nuclear war would heavily damage the US, but it would survive as a country. Europe, on the other hand, would be annihilated.
Feelings toward nuclear energy in the two countries were very different. In America, there was free press and everybody could freely question the safety of nuclear power and posit alternatives to it or even go so far as protest against it. Once seen as the future, many Americans now came to view atomic energy as an evil made necessary by the fact that America’s arch rival the Third Reich also had the Bomb. In the Reich, accidents were covered up (several incidents took place at experimental sites in the occupied east that nobody ever knew about, but caused several zones in Russia where there are higher occurrences of cancer and birth defects). Without any serious accidents that anybody knew of, peaceful nuclear power plants were seen as just another way to make the country autarkic by reducing dependence on foreign fuel imports in the technocratic Speer administration.
In Europe, nuclear power was the future and in 1963 prototype locomotives for the broad-gauge railways or “breitspurbahnen” powered by miniaturized nuclear reactors appeared, entering service in 1965. They far outperformed regular steam trains and they didn’t need to refuel often as the fuel rods could last for a year, but the principle was similar: the heat generated by the reactor was used to produce steam in a boiler to move reciprocating pistons connected mechanically to the main wheels. They only needed to stop to have the boiler filled, and the designers managed to reduce the number of required stops by making the first car a streamlined tanker car that fed water into the rear of the locomotive through a pressure valve. These bullet shaped streamlined 375 tonne and 60 metre (~ 197 foot) long locomotives the size of an apartment building could pull a 4 kilometre long 16.000 tonne train at a maximum speed of 130 km/h (~ 80 mph). From a standing start, a locomotive pulling such a massive train could accelerate to that speed in 15 minutes and 35 seconds. Higher speeds were attainable (up to 200 km/h or 125 mph without pulling a train), but the designers put heavy emphasis on their recommended not-to-exceed-speed of 140 km/h (~ 90 mph) for the long, heavy trains the nuclear locomotives usually pulled. Speer had a personal train pulled by a such a nuclear locomotive, but preferred the new Presidential airliner.
Speer used his airliner to fly to Washington and visit North Carolina after the Goldsboro Disaster, offering Nixon the official condolences of the Greater German Reich. The Nazi delegation also had unofficial liaisons with Democratic leaders, offering the prospect of détente and a subsequent de-escalation in the arms race. He was received with the normal honours reserved for any visiting head of state, but he couldn’t count on much more love from the Democrats than from the Republicans. The Democrats, led by Massachusetts Senator Robert F. Kennedy after his older brother’s defeat in the 1960 Presidential elections, vilified the recklessness of the “military-industrial and nuclear complex.” Initially the second brother, John Kennedy, was intended as the new face of the Democrats, but his health problems got worse as the mid-60s progressed. His wide range of ailments included high fevers, stomach, colon, and prostate issues, abscesses, high cholesterol, adrenal problems, serious back pain, Addison’s disease and hypothyroidism. After a car accident in September 1963 made things worse, John gave up his Massachusetts Senate seat. According to the Seventeenth Amendment, his older brother Governor Joe Kennedy Jr. could appoint a replacement to complete the term or to hold office until a special election could take place. He appointed RFK. Normally that’d be seen as nepotism, but in the post-Goldsboro years most had other priorities.
The Democrats concluded that geopolitically the rivalry made little sense as Europe hadn’t been an area of interest to the US before the war and because Germany and the US weren’t traditional rivals, but also that the Nazis had kept the rivalry going by striving for world domination. The Democrats also concluded that national socialist ideology and the Nazi political system were the antithesis of the values the United States of America stood for.
RFK was willing to engage in détente, but would maintain the means to defend the country and insisted the Germans ended their war against the Soviets and stopped their crimes, referring to the Final Solution among other things. Though details weren’t known, Allied leaders had been aware of the genocide of the Jews as early as 1942 and in the late 40s and early 50s a handful of escaped Jews testified to the existence of extermination camps. Their testimonies were dismissed as scandalous lies by Nazi propaganda and, at any rate, were unverifiable as only a privileged few got to see German crimes with their own eyes and live to tell about them. Rumours that the Nazis were conducting genocide and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale in the occupied parts of the USSR persisted and also reached Allied governments, but they couldn’t verify those either. By the time they had U-2 spy planes available, the Germans had missiles to shoot them down with as the Americans painfully discovered in 1960 when the US tried to photograph Peenemünde from the air.
The 1964 US Presidential elections were a total disaster for the Republican candidate, incumbent Vice President Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who only won his home state of Massachusetts and his predecessor’s home state of California. Nixoncare was somewhat popular and became a Republican pet subject, but the Democrats reiterated their desire for a British-style national health service. The main issue, however, was the alleged incompetence that led to insufficient safeties installed on a nuclear weapon so it could go off in a plane crash even though that shouldn’t be possible. Under any other circumstance a young man who only had been Senator for a year wouldn’t have stood a chance against an incumbent Vice President and wouldn’t even have been nominated. Lodge won 41% of the popular vote and 54 electoral votes while RFK got 53% and 484 electoral seats in the most lopsided US Presidential election ever. Richard M. Nixon probably became the first and worst example of the “third term curse.”
Robert Francis Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1965 as the youngest man elected President ever, aged 39. In response to the successful German lunar mission he said in an address to Congress: “Space achievements will, in many ways, determine the future of Earth and therefore it is time for a new enterprise in which America takes the leading role in space as the leader of the free world against tyranny. Recognition of Germany’s head start in missile technology means a commitment to redouble our efforts. Even though no project will be this difficult and expensive to achieve, this nation will commit itself to putting a man on another planet and returning him home safely in no more than fifteen years, for it will be that next step to exploring that final frontier: outer space. Like those bold explorers pursuing Manifest Destiny, a new generation of Americans will boldly go where no man has gone before.” This short speech was received with thunderous applause and Congress approved a massive increase in NASA’s budget, ushering in a new chapter in the Space Race and the Cold War.
PS. I edited the previous update based on comments. I also just made some minor edits to this one.
Chapter XII: Exit Nixon, Enter Kennedy, 1960-1965.
On November 8th 1960 the United States presidential elections took place with the charismatic and popular Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (JPK Jr.) facing incumbent President Richard M. Nixon. The latter had a thriving economy going for him, had established friendly relations with newly independent countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, had overseen the development of superior thermonuclear weapons that were available to the US in far greater numbers than to the Nazis, and had established NASA to gain the lead in the Space Race. After Roosevelt, Nixon was the second President in US history to pursue more than two terms (an amendment proposed in 1947 to limit the number of terms a person is eligible to the office of President to two didn’t get approved by Congress).
Kennedy, during the campaign, charged the Nixon administration with the fact that the US had fallen behind on the Reich technologically, pointing out that the Germans had beaten the US to launching the world’s first satellite and had launched the first manned mission to space less than six months prior on Wednesday April 20th 1960, coinciding with Hitler’s birthday. He said he’d get “America moving again.” Governor Kennedy also accused Nixon of hypocrisy for his campaign against communists as well as Nazis domestically, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, while allying with the Soviets against the Nazis. Later, as a proponent of civil rights, he brought up the position of African Americans as second rate citizens despite claims of opposing Nazi racism. Joe Kennedy also pointed out the loss of the Middle East to Germany. He reiterated these points in a live TV debate seen by 70 million Americans. In the same TV debate, Nixon, who also supported civil rights, riposted by pointing out that old Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was a virulent anti-Semite, that keeping the support of the Middle East would’ve required sacrificing the Jewish national home in Palestine, and that US support of the Soviets was a choice “between the evil we know, and the evil we don’t know.” In the end, Nixon got 278 electoral votes and 51% of the popular vote while Kennedy got 244 electoral votes and 48.6% of the vote.
Nixon became the second US President to serve more than two terms, but only three months into his third term an incident occurred that made him wish he hadn’t run for re-election. On Monday January 16th 1961, a catastrophe took place that totally overshadowed Nixon’s approval of the Civil Rights Act the previous day. A B-52 bomber carrying two Mk.39 3-4 megaton bombs, based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base near Goldsboro, North Carolina, tried to refuel in mid-air when the tanker crew noticed a leak. The B-52 assumed a holding pattern, but the leak got worse and the airplane was directed to return to base immediately. During descent the pilots were no longer able to keep the plane stable and the crew ejected on the orders of the pilot in command at an altitude of 2.700 metres (~ 9.000 feet), believing the safeties installed on their nuclear cargo were enough to prevent a disaster. Based on what happened next investigators later concluded that the safeties on one of the two weapons failed. A 4 megaton thermonuclear explosion devastated nearby Goldsboro and killed 15.000 people in an instant while a south-southwestern wind blew the fallout toward Washington DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Dignitaries and visitors that had arrived in Washington to attend the inaugural ceremony of President Nixon panicked as they believed this could be the start of WW III. The inauguration was postponed and Nixon raised the alertness level of the armed forces to DEFCON 1 (the only time in American history this has ever occurred) and nuclear armed B-52s took to the skies, an action with an irony that wasn’t lost on later observers. The White House frantically contacted Berlin and Speer categorically denied Germany had anything to do with it (a “hotline” was installed so the US President and the German President could directly call each other). Cooler heads prevailed and the Americans had to accept the terrible truth that they’d nuked their own country. After that, a small, solemn inaugural ceremony took place indoors in the Capitol’s Old Senate Chamber rather than the grand inauguration planned outdoors at the west front of the building.
Wayne County, the location of the radioactive crater that used to be Goldsboro, was eventually evacuated. This didn’t happen immediately because knowledge of the effects of nuclear fallout was still limited, because the government was inexperienced in dealing with a disaster of this magnitude and because the US had a history of responding to nuclear accidents ineptly, with Bikini Atoll being the most prominent pre-Goldsboro example. At the same time, harvests of fruits, vegetables and wheat, dairy products and meat in the north-eastern United States had to be thrown away and the government had to compensate the affected farmers and stores. A circle with a 20 mile (32 km) radius centred on the blast area called the “Goldsboro Exclusion Zone” (with a total area of 1.242 square miles/3.217 square kilometres) was evacuated too, was federalized by the government and has been off-limits to civilians ever since. This has led to wild speculations (approaching the levels of Area 51 conspiracies) among the locals about government experiments going on there, some say to create “mutant” super soldiers while others stick to the theory that radiation can power the UFO that supposedly crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. In reality, even today radiation maintenance workers, scientific researchers and the occasional journalist are only allowed in for three hours a day for two weeks, followed by a three week detoxification period. Nearly sixty years later eastern North Carolina also still has above average occurrences of cancer, miscarriages and children born with genetic defects.
The Goldsboro Disaster, as it became known, led to widespread mistrust toward nuclear energy despite countless pundits testifying at a Congressional hearing and later reiterating on TV shows that this was a freak incident and that nuclear energy was perfectly safe. Despite this, a movement against atomic energy developed and a minority within that movement even questioned the necessity of nuclear weapons. The Democrats latched on to this movement and promised to block the construction of more nuclear power plants. Nixon did everything he could, including a promise to provide free healthcare to anyone who was verifiably in the path of the fallout on the day of the incident, visiting countless victims, and signing the National Cancer Act with an annual budget of $8 billion for cancer research (to be adjusted for inflation). The Democrats nonetheless scored a spectacular victory in the 1962 mid-term elections by gaining a majority in the House of Representatives, rendering the remainder of Nixon’s tenure a lame duck presidency. He passed his most significant piece of legislation before that in 1961 and it remains known as “Nixoncare”: a private health insurance employer mandate and the implementation of state-run health insurance plans available to all, with income-based premiums and cost sharing. It was quite popular, but not enough to restore Nixon’s popularity and it didn’t go far enough for the Democrats who proposed something akin to Britain’s National Health Service.
Germany rubbed it in by successfully carrying out a test with the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever built, codenamed Thor, on November 8th 1961. The 27 tonne device was moved to a test site in occupied Russia north of the arctic circle as its predicted yield was too great for the Ohrdruf test site. Once there, it was encased in an enormous glider construction that was tethered to an Me 696 supersonic delta wing bomber. Once brought to an altitude of 15 kilometres (nearly 50.000 feet), the tether was cut and the bomber sped away at Mach 1.3 to ensure it was at minimum safe distance before the weapon would explode at an altitude of 5 kilometres. The weapon produced an explosive yield of 100 megatons and remains the most powerful manmade explosion ever. American nuclear superiority, however, remained an inescapable fact: in 1961, the Germans had roughly 2.500 warheads and the Americans more than 22.000 (the British had 155, Italy 10 and China 5). A nuclear war would heavily damage the US, but it would survive as a country. Europe, on the other hand, would be annihilated.
Feelings toward nuclear energy in the two countries were very different. In America, there was free press and everybody could freely question the safety of nuclear power and posit alternatives to it or even go so far as protest against it. Once seen as the future, many Americans now came to view atomic energy as an evil made necessary by the fact that America’s arch rival the Third Reich also had the Bomb. In the Reich, accidents were covered up (several incidents took place at experimental sites in the occupied east that nobody ever knew about, but caused several zones in Russia where there are higher occurrences of cancer and birth defects). Without any serious accidents that anybody knew of, peaceful nuclear power plants were seen as just another way to make the country autarkic by reducing dependence on foreign fuel imports in the technocratic Speer administration.
In Europe, nuclear power was the future and in 1963 prototype locomotives for the broad-gauge railways or “breitspurbahnen” powered by miniaturized nuclear reactors appeared, entering service in 1965. They far outperformed regular steam trains and they didn’t need to refuel often as the fuel rods could last for a year, but the principle was similar: the heat generated by the reactor was used to produce steam in a boiler to move reciprocating pistons connected mechanically to the main wheels. They only needed to stop to have the boiler filled, and the designers managed to reduce the number of required stops by making the first car a streamlined tanker car that fed water into the rear of the locomotive through a pressure valve. These bullet shaped streamlined 375 tonne and 60 metre (~ 197 foot) long locomotives the size of an apartment building could pull a 4 kilometre long 16.000 tonne train at a maximum speed of 130 km/h (~ 80 mph). From a standing start, a locomotive pulling such a massive train could accelerate to that speed in 15 minutes and 35 seconds. Higher speeds were attainable (up to 200 km/h or 125 mph without pulling a train), but the designers put heavy emphasis on their recommended not-to-exceed-speed of 140 km/h (~ 90 mph) for the long, heavy trains the nuclear locomotives usually pulled. Speer had a personal train pulled by a such a nuclear locomotive, but preferred the new Presidential airliner.
Speer used his airliner to fly to Washington and visit North Carolina after the Goldsboro Disaster, offering Nixon the official condolences of the Greater German Reich. The Nazi delegation also had unofficial liaisons with Democratic leaders, offering the prospect of détente and a subsequent de-escalation in the arms race. He was received with the normal honours reserved for any visiting head of state, but he couldn’t count on much more love from the Democrats than from the Republicans. The Democrats, led by Massachusetts Senator Robert F. Kennedy after his older brother’s defeat in the 1960 Presidential elections, vilified the recklessness of the “military-industrial and nuclear complex.” Initially the second brother, John Kennedy, was intended as the new face of the Democrats, but his health problems got worse as the mid-60s progressed. His wide range of ailments included high fevers, stomach, colon, and prostate issues, abscesses, high cholesterol, adrenal problems, serious back pain, Addison’s disease and hypothyroidism. After a car accident in September 1963 made things worse, John gave up his Massachusetts Senate seat. According to the Seventeenth Amendment, his older brother Governor Joe Kennedy Jr. could appoint a replacement to complete the term or to hold office until a special election could take place. He appointed RFK. Normally that’d be seen as nepotism, but in the post-Goldsboro years most had other priorities.
The Democrats concluded that geopolitically the rivalry made little sense as Europe hadn’t been an area of interest to the US before the war and because Germany and the US weren’t traditional rivals, but also that the Nazis had kept the rivalry going by striving for world domination. The Democrats also concluded that national socialist ideology and the Nazi political system were the antithesis of the values the United States of America stood for.
RFK was willing to engage in détente, but would maintain the means to defend the country and insisted the Germans ended their war against the Soviets and stopped their crimes, referring to the Final Solution among other things. Though details weren’t known, Allied leaders had been aware of the genocide of the Jews as early as 1942 and in the late 40s and early 50s a handful of escaped Jews testified to the existence of extermination camps. Their testimonies were dismissed as scandalous lies by Nazi propaganda and, at any rate, were unverifiable as only a privileged few got to see German crimes with their own eyes and live to tell about them. Rumours that the Nazis were conducting genocide and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale in the occupied parts of the USSR persisted and also reached Allied governments, but they couldn’t verify those either. By the time they had U-2 spy planes available, the Germans had missiles to shoot them down with as the Americans painfully discovered in 1960 when the US tried to photograph Peenemünde from the air.
The 1964 US Presidential elections were a total disaster for the Republican candidate, incumbent Vice President Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who only won his home state of Massachusetts and his predecessor’s home state of California. Nixoncare was somewhat popular and became a Republican pet subject, but the Democrats reiterated their desire for a British-style national health service. The main issue, however, was the alleged incompetence that led to insufficient safeties installed on a nuclear weapon so it could go off in a plane crash even though that shouldn’t be possible. Under any other circumstance a young man who only had been Senator for a year wouldn’t have stood a chance against an incumbent Vice President and wouldn’t even have been nominated. Lodge won 41% of the popular vote and 54 electoral votes while RFK got 53% and 484 electoral seats in the most lopsided US Presidential election ever. Richard M. Nixon probably became the first and worst example of the “third term curse.”
Robert Francis Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1965 as the youngest man elected President ever, aged 39. In response to the successful German lunar mission he said in an address to Congress: “Space achievements will, in many ways, determine the future of Earth and therefore it is time for a new enterprise in which America takes the leading role in space as the leader of the free world against tyranny. Recognition of Germany’s head start in missile technology means a commitment to redouble our efforts. Even though no project will be this difficult and expensive to achieve, this nation will commit itself to putting a man on another planet and returning him home safely in no more than fifteen years, for it will be that next step to exploring that final frontier: outer space. Like those bold explorers pursuing Manifest Destiny, a new generation of Americans will boldly go where no man has gone before.” This short speech was received with thunderous applause and Congress approved a massive increase in NASA’s budget, ushering in a new chapter in the Space Race and the Cold War.
PS. I edited the previous update based on comments. I also just made some minor edits to this one.
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Interesteing look at ITTL politcs, only question i have is what are the Conservatives doing ITTL? Is Barry Goldwater still kicking around in the senate, how do they Regard the Nazis?
Given the much earlier enactment of Civil Rights stimulated by demonstrative anti-racism against the Reich, Senator Goldwater's opposition to it means he likely becomes TTL's equivalent of a Wikipedia stub.
I like how you handled the Kennedy Brother situation. Joe Jr. loses to Nixon, JFK’s health problems catch up to him and he never has a chance to run for President so it is Robert who fulfilled Papa Joe Sr.’s dream. I am surprised that Lodge won his home state. I guess the people of Massachusetts were tired of the Kennedy clan ruling the state? Did Joe Jr win his home state against Nixon in 1960?
You do know he wasn't really Racist,if he saw Nazi germany I could see him dropping his opposition in a red hot minute
Damn it, the US is really shooting itself in the foot. They got one option though, a Marshall Plan over Africa. Pretty much do what China is doing in Africa, by building infrastructure and stuff, whIle also getting more allies, resources, and future help in conflicts.
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