That wouldn’t be a bad thing. It’s not like anybody wants the Nazis to succeed.
How do know that Angela might be the one who wears the pants in the family? She still might end up running Germany in this ATL.
The Fatherland - a Nazi victory TL
- Thread starter Onkel Willie
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How do know that Angela might be the one who wears the pants in the family? She still might end up running Germany in this ATL.
WarEnsemble
Banned
I always have a feeling there would be a little game to happen in the Far East during the Fatherland TL and this realistic version of it. Japan probably would have the same economic recovery, but with the Germans winning and Hangman Heydrich ruling, I think the Nazis are going to try and influence the Japanese to be more Nazi-friendly and cause resentment to the US for blasting them harder than OTL. There is still a lot of Japanese nationalist tendencies in our OTL today, but with the Nazis surviving the war, they might crank it up.
I don’t think so, the Japanese-German alliance was more out of convenience rather than any similar ideological and political reasons. And the Japanese military is probably just as restricted by their Constitution as OTL. Anyways, I don’t think that one more nuclear weapon is really going to change anything.
Oh, I must have mixed it up with a different AH WW2 thread. But I still think it might not make much of a difference in Japan’s attitude towards the US. If anything, they might be even more adverse to a military buildup due to the greater destruction enacted upon them in consequence for their warmongering actions.
Chapter XX: Détente, Mission to Mars and the Rise of China, 1992-1995.
Update time!
Further escalation of the Cold War could have followed in the 90s, but for months Heydrich had been feeling increasingly weak, nauseated and fatigued. In November 1991 the 87 year-old Heydrich was finally diagnosed with Adult T-cell lymphoma, a highly aggressive type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma with a life expectancy of no more than twelve months. He resorted to euthanasia in July 1992 after his illness had reduced him to a physical wreck while morphine could no longer keep the pain at bay. He died at the age of 88. The ruthless and ideological “Man with the Iron Heart” was no longer there to lash out violently against whoever seemed to be the next ideological or racial enemy. The man who had unfetteredly realized those visions that Hitler hadn’t gotten around to during his lifetime had left the stage, leaving an indelible scar on the collective memory of the eighties. With the climate of Heydrich’s uncompromising, immovable ruthlessness gone, more pragmatic candidates could run for the office of President of the Greater German Reich. Once again, scions of the Goebbels, Goering, Bormann and Speer dynasties stepped up during the 1992 Nazi party leader election in Germania.
During the process of electing a new party leader and de facto head of state, a disaster occurred that was so enormous that the propaganda machine couldn’t cover it up. An accident on one of the broad-gauge railways involving one of the nuclear trains happened near Leipzig. Errors were made on the North-Southeast route. Amazingly, these nuclear trains had run mostly on time and with zero major accidents due to a combination of excellent personnel training, strongly present supervisors and an elaborate computer and sensory system designed to prevent collisions, which had received regular updates and upgrades. As it later turned out, the computer system of the control centre supervising the particular section of track suffered from a malfunctioning circuit board. Simultaneously, the train driver headed toward Leipzig missed a red light (trains didn’t stop automatically after missing a red light at the time) and sped into a curve at an excessive speed to impress his girlfriend. Around the curve the driver saw a parked train less than two kilometres away and hit the brakes. That distance was nowhere near enough to bring the train to a standstill. A colossal train collision was the result in which the 25 cm (9.8 inch) titanium-lead alloy armoured casing protecting the reactors on both trains wasn’t enough. The reactors on both locomotives melted down and radioactive material was spread out all over the place. Some 1.089 train passengers and personnel were killed instantaneously while ten thousand people in the immediate area suffered varying degrees of radiation poisoning, of which 1.289 died in the following days and weeks. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Leipzig were instructed to stay indoors as much as possible for 30 days while super markets threw away tonnes of produce to avoid health risks. Soldiers went door to door to distribute potassium iodide pills. Over 25 years after the fact, cancer rates in Leipzig are the highest in all of Germany. After analysis of the causes, measures were taken: firstly, personnel only areas would really be personnel only from now on, with CCTV installed to monitor compliance and allow for disciplinary measures if need be; secondly, the systems that should detect hardware problems in the computerized control system were improved; thirdly, a system was installed in all trains to make them stop automatically for a stop sign.
The result was that much of the establishment was discredited, at least for the near future. This shock to the credibility of the traditional leading families of the Third Reich was combined with two other issues. Firstly, the Reich was considered guilty of genocide in the court of public opinion in the rest of the world. Though the regime tightly controlled all media outlets, the fact that the outside world condemned Nazi actions as revolting and obscene still slowly seeped in. Anti-Semitic sentiments ran deep after decades of indoctrination. Therefore many shrugged and felt the Jews had gotten what they deserved. A significant minority, however, was left wondering if the Reich hadn’t gone too far, even if the Jews were enemies. Surely there should have been an alternative to slavery and mass murder, shouldn’t there? After all, the Reich had always portrayed itself as morally superior to the moral decadence and racial degeneracy of the United States. Secondly, many countries limited their trade with the Reich after the Schindler revelations and that affected the Reich’s economy negatively.
The Gauleiter and Reichsleiter voting for a new Party Führer and President had their finger on the pulse of their communities and knew there was a budding desire for change. In between rounds of voting with no clear winner, a consensus developed among the attending Gauleiter and Reichsleiter that a young leader would be best, preferably without a direct link to any of the leading party families (Goebbels, Speer, Bormann etcetera). Perhaps the crown prince of the founding father was the only one who could set the Reich on the right track.
In the end they elected the relatively young Siegfried Hitler, Hitler’s son who was only 45 years old at the time. He’d been born in February 1947 and had been mostly raised by his mother, nannies and the best private tutors, the latter of which spoon-fed him Nazi thought to mould him into an ideological clone of his father while his father made time for his son as long as his health allowed it. When not studying, he had playdates with the children of other Nazis and could often be found at the house of Goebbels, who was like an uncle to the boy and ensured nothing bad happened to the son of the idol he had worshipped. After graduating from high school at age 18, the young man was set up for a ready-made SS career and by the mid-1980s was Oberst-Gruppenführer. By then he was married to Angela Hitler (née Kasner) and had become a father to Adolf Hitler II. At this point, however, the ideological indoctrination slowly started to wear off as he witnessed how racial criteria and other qualifications were a lot less important to promotion than bribing or sucking up to the right people or just ruthlessly elbowing your way up by screwing people over. Perhaps he saw it better than anyone because he viewed it from the outside as his name exempted him from such practices. Besides that, he knew that “certificates of Aryan Blood” could be purchased by Serbs, Slovaks and other Slavs who needed them to establish businesses in the Reich and who were able to pay the right amount of money. Clearly, ideology was applied selectively when somebody could throw enough money at it to make it go away. Only true Jews and Gypsies were the exception, but by the 80s almost none were left in Europe. Besides that, Siegfried Hitler had seen much of the world in his foreign travels for both business and pleasure. The young Hitler concluded power was the only thing that really mattered and placed it way ahead of ideology. Besides his father’s black hair and blue eyes, Hitler’s son had also inherited his thirst for power and control and his manipulativeness, though not the ideological zealousness.
In September 1992, Hitler became the new President of Germany, serving the country’s head of state Eternal Führer and his father Adolf Hitler. From the very beginning he assumed a conciliatory tone toward the US that contrasted sharply against Heydrich’s earlier Cold War hostility. As far as recent revelations were concerned, he admitted that the treatment of the Reich’s enemies had been excessive and should’ve been handled differently. Hitler also didn’t always don the militaristic party uniform or his SS uniform (as opposed to Heydrich, who wore his SS uniform in public without exception). Furthermore, he carried out some mostly cosmetic reforms in domestic policies, mainly relaxations in censorship laws to accommodate the country’s fairly innocuous counterculture. The reason for these supposed signs of change was that in order to matter in the world, the Reich had to improve its image in order to keep their remaining allies and perhaps get a few more. Thanks to Heydrich’s anti-Catholic “Cultural Revolution”, allies like Slovakia, Croatia and Hungary were only being kept in line by force of arms and fear.
A few months later a leadership change took place on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean too. Reagan had briefly considered running for an unprecedented fourth term, but later decided against it for two reasons. Number one was that he too realized that after twelve years in the White House the electorate was usually tired of the incumbent party, regardless of whether the Republicans or the Democrats were in charge. Given how narrowly he’d won in 1988, he was likely to lose. That was especially likely after the results of the 1990 midterm elections were available: the Democrats held the Senate but lost the House of Representatives (the result was a significant increase in the number of executive orders in the 1990-1993 period). The second major reason was his own functioning. During his second term he had already displayed memory lapses, especially with names, and this got worse over time. The stresses of the presidency undoubtedly exacerbated the progress of his illness and in July 1991 he was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 80. After learning this, he definitively stopped entertaining the thought of a fourth term. Instead, he rode out the final nineteen months of his third term with the support of the White House staff, who had come to care deeply about him, while Vice President Carter also assumed a lot of the workload. Reagan, however, couldn’t escape the third term curse: information about his Alzheimer’s disease was leaked in September 1992. Carter won the nomination at the Democratic National Convention and chose Greek American Senator from Massachusetts Paul Tsongas as his running mate.
Meanwhile, the Republicans had undergone a bit of a crisis. After fielding credible candidates like popular Texan governor George H.W. Bush and war hero and popular Senator from Kansas Bob Dole and still losing in ’84 and ’88, there were no established names at the 1992 Republican National Convention. None of them wanted to be tarnished by defeat. Believing Carter would get at least one term by riding on Reagan’s popularity, the established names of the GOP in the early 90s wanted to wait until 1996. Figuring that if they were going to lose they might as well go out in style, the Republicans resorted to nostalgia by fielding a candidate that pundits and the media saw as a has-been with no chance to win: former President Richard M. Nixon (ironically, after the ideological shifts of the past decade, Nixon was closer to the Democrats).
After several years in the political wilderness after the end of his presidency in 1965 due to the Goldsboro Disaster, he became an established author by writing a dozen books (including an autobiography). He had also appeared on television a lot. As an elder statesman, both his successors consulted him on foreign policy. In the role of elder statesman and foreign policy consultant, he appeared on television and radio semi-regularly and had an ambitious schedule of speaking engagements, writing and meetings with foreign leaders, and he was heavily involved in charities funding cancer research. By the late 80s, nearly three decades after the Goldsboro Disaster, Nixon was popular again, as a more balanced opinion on Nixon emerged: by the 80s it was accepted Nixon couldn’t have done much to prevent Goldsboro given the state of technology back then; secondly, he was appreciated among the African American community for passing the Civil Rights Act in 1961 despite the opposition that existed to it among the Republicans at the time; thirdly, he was also remembered positively for Nixoncare, which was a precursor to the Federal Health Service, more commonly known as Kennedycare. Against all odds, Nixon sought the Republican nomination and got it (meanwhile, he asked George H.W. Bush, who hadn’t sought nomination, to become his running mate).
At the age of 79, Nixon became the oldest person to run for the presidency ever and was the underdog from the start because of his age. He performed surprisingly well in several debates against his opponent Carter, proving that this mental faculties were still excellent. He noticed how the US national debt had risen from less than 35% of GDP to 70% of GDP due to Reagan’s policies. The increase came from spending on defence as well as NASA and Carter argued high defence spending was necessary to supersede whatever the Germans came up with. Polls showed that Nixon actually had a chance of winning, which would make him the oldest person ever elected to the office of President if he won. Popular underdog Nixon won 21 states plus DC and 319 electoral votes as well as 50.8% of the popular vote against expectations. The Carter/Tsongas ticket won 31 states, 219 electoral votes and 48.6% of the popular vote. When he was inaugurated in January 1993, Nixon was the first octogenarian as well as the oldest person ever elected to the office of President (he was 80 at the time). He also became the first President after Grover Cleveland to serve a non-consecutive term and the first ever with a non-consecutive fourth term.
Meanwhile, in January 1993, Hitler cut off support to the Rhodesian government as he recognized the Rhodesian Bush War was a lost cause with the Balkanization of South Africa. Previously, most German support to Rhodesia was funnelled through South Africa as its Apartheid regime was on good terms with its neighbour, and provided its own support as well. The result was that the Rhodesian white minority regime finally collapsed in 1994, which was followed by an exodus of whites who feared massive ethnic cleansing. The German focus, in the meantime, shifted on maintaining the new Afrikaner Republic that controlled about two fifths of Cape Province (and which took in many of the white Rhodesian refugees) while initiating the South African Peace Process in the United Nations. Hitler’s conciliatory tone toward the US helped in getting the Americans along (though Nixon also had his own reasons to get closer to the Reich). Through the mediation of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, Germany, Britain, Italy and China) as well as a number of African countries following Congo’s leadership, the Elisabethville Accords were signed in 1993. The Afrikaner Republic and the Zulu Republic became independent and their borders were established. This was against the wishes of the African National Congress, which had fought for a free, democratic and unified South Africa. The rump that remained in between the Afrikaner Republic and the Zulu Republic became the Syndicalist Federal Republic of South Africa (with the failure of Marxist-Leninist socialism, syndicalism had succeeded it as the most prominent radical left-wing ideology, taking hold particularly in those places where factors like authoritarianism, corruption and poverty mixed). In its constitution it was stated that it saw the Afrikaner Republic and the Zulu Republic as breakaway provinces that could re-join the country whenever they wanted to, hence the choice for a federal structure.
Nixon’s reason for going along with the Germans in South Africa was that he wanted a massive reduction in conventional armed forces to rein in the rising national debt, which had doubled as a percentage of GDP in the previous decade. Though the Republicans had campaigned on curbing the national debt among other things, Nixon knew he could never sell a massive reduction in conventional forces to Congress if the Reich didn’t go along with it. That would be seen as kneeling before the Germans (which would be totally unacceptable given what had been revealed by Oskar Schindler a few years earlier). The truth was that defence spending was a heavy burden on the Reich too, which provided common ground for an agreement. The Conventional Armed Forces Treaty or CAFT signed in 1995 limited land forces to 10.000 tanks, 17.500 armoured combat vehicles, 10.000 artillery pieces, 5.200 combat aircraft and 1.600 helicopter gunships. Both signatories agreed to downsize their armed forces to the agreed to size within three years. Neither could now legally have a larger army than the other and both signatories had to stick to it to ensure the other didn’t have an excuse to violate CAFT. The treaty would expire in ten years, after which both signatories could decide to renew it.
In the meantime, warhead production continued unabated: by the mid-1990s, the Reich had about 45.000 nuclear warheads while the US had an arsenal of 38.000, giving them the means to destroy the entire world several times over. The arms race had gotten out of hand. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty or SALT signed in 1978 had put a brake on the production of nuclear weapons, but it hadn’t stopped it. SALT froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels and provided for the addition of new SLBM launchers only after the same number of older ICBM and SLBM launchers had been dismantled. SALT also limited land-based ICBMs that were in range from the north-eastern border of the continental United States to the western border of the Reich. In addition to that, SALT limited the number of SLBM capable submarines that the US Navy and the Kriegsmarine could operate to fifty with a maximum of eight hundred SLBM launchers between them. SALT, however, said nothing about nuclear missiles that weren’t ICBMs and also said nothing about how many strategic bombers either side could have. The highly expensive production of weapons grade plutonium for more warheads had therefore continued unabated.
The Second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, more commonly known as SALT II, was a much more radical step than SALT I. SALT II determined that neither the United States nor the Greater German Reich could have more than 10.000 warheads. The combined number of ICBMs and SLBMs was maximized at 2.500 and the number of MIRV warheads a missile could carry was limited to five. As a result the Kriegsmarine had to convert a number of its Type LVIIs from SSBNs to SSGNs (nuclear powered cruise missile submarines) while the US Navy had to do the same to a number of its Illinois-class submarines. Furthermore, in SALT II the two signatories agreed to limit their number of intermediate range and shorter range missiles to a total of three hundred each. The result was the elimination of nearly 75% of all strategic nuclear weapons and over 90% of tactical nuclear weapons then in existence in the entire world. SALT II was signed and ratified by both parties in 1997.
The major cutbacks on defence spending allowed by CAFT and SALT II allowed Nixon to prevent further tax increases and the defence cutbacks were ostensibly aimed at reducing national debt, which the Republicans had campaigned on. The Nixon Administration subsequently passed across the board tax cuts for all classes, increasing the purchasing power of most. He undid the heavy taxes on the highest incomes as the Republicans considered them “punitive taxes motivated by jealousy toward hard-working Americans.” Further deregulatory measures were taken that benefited major businesses and resulted in increased investments by big American companies like General Motors while banks extended credit more easily. The Nixon Administration’s policies supercharged the economic growth that had begun in the late 80s and as a result Nixon got credit for the boom of the 90s. After all, unemployment was at an all-time low by 1996. The end result was that the decrease in defence spending and the tax cuts were offset by increased tax income due to the economic boom. National debt as a percentage of GDP subsequently decreased from 70% to 60% between 1993 and 2001.
Besides getting credit for the economy in the 90s, Nixon also got credit for a program that had been initiated by Robert F. Kennedy: the Mars Program. Enormous budget cuts to NASA had taken place during the Rockefeller Administration as the government felt the country shouldn’t be spending billions on what was essentially a prestige project. The goal of getting to Mars by 1980 was given up and launch was postponed indefinitely as there wasn’t any money to develop the Mars Module and make the modifications to the Saturn V so it could carry it. Given the longer journey, the Mars Module was significantly bigger than the Apollo vehicle used for the lunar missions so it could carry the necessary supplies; secondly, the Mars Landing Vehicle or MALV had stronger engines because it needed those to escape Mars’s gravity. During Reagan’s tenure, spending on NASA had increased again to the point it could continue the Mars Program. In May 1995, a Saturn V enhanced with strap-on boosters launched a crew of three to Mars (the boosters allowed it to carry the 90 tonne Mars Module, which included the Mars Landing Vehicle, usually abbreviated to MALV). The launch was attended by President Nixon and former Presidents Reagan, Rockefeller and Kennedy and shortly thereafter the Mars Module made a slingshot around the moon and then truly began its journey. Seven months later, in December 1995, the Mars Module arrived and American astronaut Jerry L. Ross was chosen to descend to the surface, where he planted the American flag with a commemorative plaque in the Elysium Planitia plane (Robert D. Cabana and Nancy J. Currie stayed in the command module). Fourteen months after leaving Earth, the Mars Module and its three crewmembers returned home safely in July 1996. Reagan’s determination in the 80s and the 1990s economic boom under Nixon had finally allowed for the realization of Kennedy’s dream fifteen years later than planned.
The Germans couldn’t stay behind and they were in fact rather stunned that suddenly they were behind the Americans in the Space Race. The Reich Space Agency (“Reichraumfahrt Agentur” or RRFA) had taken their time with their own Mars program, believing they were ahead of NASA by quite a stretch. Besides satellites sent to photograph the entire surface, robots had been sent down to collect information on the planet’s surface conditions, including the presence of water. The Germans would catch up in the year 2000 and, to annoy the Americans, planted a bigger flag and plaque only half a mile from where the Americans landed.
The final success of the Mars Program was the exception in a neoliberal evolution. Neoliberal government and economic policies consisted of privatizations and cutbacks in the public sector (except for the highly popular system of Kennedycare), the lowering of income taxes, the value-added tax and excise taxes on alcohol and car fuel, and a laissez-faire approach with little in the way of economic regulation, tariffs, subsidies and privileges. Economic liberalizations were coupled with social liberalizations that allowed states to experiment with decriminalization or outright legalization of vices like marihuana and prostitution. The fortune saved by economizing on the conventional forces of the US Forces as well as strategic nuclear forces through disarmament treaties paid for all of this. That the 90s were an era of low Cold War tensions made those treaties possible to begin with. That left the question of how to deal with the rise of a new competitor for global dominance unanswered.
In Asia, China had assumed the position of dominant power by default after Japan had been crushed, defeated and occupied by the Americans in 1945. Japan’s armed forces were subsequently completely disbanded and Japan was mostly left to its own devices in regards to rebuilding, except for industry, infrastructure and other structures the American occupational forces needed. The hatred towards the Japanese for the unprovoked, deliberate surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was still widespread among Americans and therefore there was little interest in helping Japan rebuild so it could become a threat again. The result was by the early 1950s, a lot of war damage was still highly visible, particularly in the six cities destroyed by nuclear weapons (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, Niigata, Yokohoma and Osaka) and people didn’t really understand how radiation sickness worked and were afraid of getting it. Resentment festered among the Japanese about a few highly publicized rape incidents, the hundreds of thousands of their women in prostitution servicing American GIs and the destitution of countless people living in bombed out ruins while the country’s American guests were well off. There were a large number of car bombs, suicide bombings, attacks on US soldiers, raids, acts of sabotage and counterpropaganda in an insurgency led by remnants of the dissolved Imperial Japanese Army that lasted until the mid-50s. Slowly material wealth increased as American investment picked up to develop Japan to counter China as Sino-American relations soured after the mid-50s.
China was also in tatters after eight years of war, but had a big, competent American trained army supplied with lots of modern American equipment. For the first time since before any Chinaman could remember the country was also free from domineering invasive foreign influences as well as unified, definitively leaving the warlord era behind it. Moreover, it could count on its own natural wealth whereas Japan had none and also possessed an ocean of unskilled labour. Furthermore, China was a US ally in the immediate post-war era and could rely on American aid. Chiang Kai-shek used it for two Five Year Plans to develop key sectors of the economy like steel industry, heavy machinery production, the aviation industry, shipbuilding, electricity production, coal mining and petroleum production while the White Terror had destroyed all opposition while forcing the criminal triads underground. After taking Macau from Portugal in 1956, at a time when Portugal was still pro-Western, the opportunistic Chiang had to switch sides to the Nazis and they helped him get the bomb in 1960 and helped him build a small navy.
After that, China continued to develop its own military-industrial complex as the economy grew and diversified while the Kuomintang regime played the two Cold War superpowers. Like the economy of any developing country, it grew rapidly by an average 12% annually like clockwork from the late 40s throughout the 1950s until the end of the 1980s in wherewithal of the economic ups and downs of those decades. China’s economy grew by 9% in the 90s, 6% in the 2000s and 4% in the 2010s, transitioning to a high wage country in the early 21st century. Around the turn of the century it was also transitioning from a resource extraction and heavy industry based economy to a country with a strong services sector as well as the production of high-tech and precision goods. As early as 1955, China achieved a GDP of $100 billion and surpassed Great Britain as the world’s third economy. China officially attained a GDP of $7.91 trillion in 1995 (with a GDP per capita of $6.085 based on a population of 1.3 billion). China thereby became the world’s largest economy and surpassed the United States who had a GDP of $7.67 trillion in 1995 ($28.802 per capita based on a population of 266.3 million). The Reich, with a GDP of $7.3 trillion and a population of about 280 million ($26.071 per capita), was displaced as the world’s second economy by the US. The rise of the Asian giant concerned policy makers in Washington DC enough to consider a US-German co-dominium.
Chapter XX: Détente, Mission to Mars and the Rise of China, 1992-1995.
Further escalation of the Cold War could have followed in the 90s, but for months Heydrich had been feeling increasingly weak, nauseated and fatigued. In November 1991 the 87 year-old Heydrich was finally diagnosed with Adult T-cell lymphoma, a highly aggressive type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma with a life expectancy of no more than twelve months. He resorted to euthanasia in July 1992 after his illness had reduced him to a physical wreck while morphine could no longer keep the pain at bay. He died at the age of 88. The ruthless and ideological “Man with the Iron Heart” was no longer there to lash out violently against whoever seemed to be the next ideological or racial enemy. The man who had unfetteredly realized those visions that Hitler hadn’t gotten around to during his lifetime had left the stage, leaving an indelible scar on the collective memory of the eighties. With the climate of Heydrich’s uncompromising, immovable ruthlessness gone, more pragmatic candidates could run for the office of President of the Greater German Reich. Once again, scions of the Goebbels, Goering, Bormann and Speer dynasties stepped up during the 1992 Nazi party leader election in Germania.
During the process of electing a new party leader and de facto head of state, a disaster occurred that was so enormous that the propaganda machine couldn’t cover it up. An accident on one of the broad-gauge railways involving one of the nuclear trains happened near Leipzig. Errors were made on the North-Southeast route. Amazingly, these nuclear trains had run mostly on time and with zero major accidents due to a combination of excellent personnel training, strongly present supervisors and an elaborate computer and sensory system designed to prevent collisions, which had received regular updates and upgrades. As it later turned out, the computer system of the control centre supervising the particular section of track suffered from a malfunctioning circuit board. Simultaneously, the train driver headed toward Leipzig missed a red light (trains didn’t stop automatically after missing a red light at the time) and sped into a curve at an excessive speed to impress his girlfriend. Around the curve the driver saw a parked train less than two kilometres away and hit the brakes. That distance was nowhere near enough to bring the train to a standstill. A colossal train collision was the result in which the 25 cm (9.8 inch) titanium-lead alloy armoured casing protecting the reactors on both trains wasn’t enough. The reactors on both locomotives melted down and radioactive material was spread out all over the place. Some 1.089 train passengers and personnel were killed instantaneously while ten thousand people in the immediate area suffered varying degrees of radiation poisoning, of which 1.289 died in the following days and weeks. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Leipzig were instructed to stay indoors as much as possible for 30 days while super markets threw away tonnes of produce to avoid health risks. Soldiers went door to door to distribute potassium iodide pills. Over 25 years after the fact, cancer rates in Leipzig are the highest in all of Germany. After analysis of the causes, measures were taken: firstly, personnel only areas would really be personnel only from now on, with CCTV installed to monitor compliance and allow for disciplinary measures if need be; secondly, the systems that should detect hardware problems in the computerized control system were improved; thirdly, a system was installed in all trains to make them stop automatically for a stop sign.
The result was that much of the establishment was discredited, at least for the near future. This shock to the credibility of the traditional leading families of the Third Reich was combined with two other issues. Firstly, the Reich was considered guilty of genocide in the court of public opinion in the rest of the world. Though the regime tightly controlled all media outlets, the fact that the outside world condemned Nazi actions as revolting and obscene still slowly seeped in. Anti-Semitic sentiments ran deep after decades of indoctrination. Therefore many shrugged and felt the Jews had gotten what they deserved. A significant minority, however, was left wondering if the Reich hadn’t gone too far, even if the Jews were enemies. Surely there should have been an alternative to slavery and mass murder, shouldn’t there? After all, the Reich had always portrayed itself as morally superior to the moral decadence and racial degeneracy of the United States. Secondly, many countries limited their trade with the Reich after the Schindler revelations and that affected the Reich’s economy negatively.
The Gauleiter and Reichsleiter voting for a new Party Führer and President had their finger on the pulse of their communities and knew there was a budding desire for change. In between rounds of voting with no clear winner, a consensus developed among the attending Gauleiter and Reichsleiter that a young leader would be best, preferably without a direct link to any of the leading party families (Goebbels, Speer, Bormann etcetera). Perhaps the crown prince of the founding father was the only one who could set the Reich on the right track.
In the end they elected the relatively young Siegfried Hitler, Hitler’s son who was only 45 years old at the time. He’d been born in February 1947 and had been mostly raised by his mother, nannies and the best private tutors, the latter of which spoon-fed him Nazi thought to mould him into an ideological clone of his father while his father made time for his son as long as his health allowed it. When not studying, he had playdates with the children of other Nazis and could often be found at the house of Goebbels, who was like an uncle to the boy and ensured nothing bad happened to the son of the idol he had worshipped. After graduating from high school at age 18, the young man was set up for a ready-made SS career and by the mid-1980s was Oberst-Gruppenführer. By then he was married to Angela Hitler (née Kasner) and had become a father to Adolf Hitler II. At this point, however, the ideological indoctrination slowly started to wear off as he witnessed how racial criteria and other qualifications were a lot less important to promotion than bribing or sucking up to the right people or just ruthlessly elbowing your way up by screwing people over. Perhaps he saw it better than anyone because he viewed it from the outside as his name exempted him from such practices. Besides that, he knew that “certificates of Aryan Blood” could be purchased by Serbs, Slovaks and other Slavs who needed them to establish businesses in the Reich and who were able to pay the right amount of money. Clearly, ideology was applied selectively when somebody could throw enough money at it to make it go away. Only true Jews and Gypsies were the exception, but by the 80s almost none were left in Europe. Besides that, Siegfried Hitler had seen much of the world in his foreign travels for both business and pleasure. The young Hitler concluded power was the only thing that really mattered and placed it way ahead of ideology. Besides his father’s black hair and blue eyes, Hitler’s son had also inherited his thirst for power and control and his manipulativeness, though not the ideological zealousness.
In September 1992, Hitler became the new President of Germany, serving the country’s head of state Eternal Führer and his father Adolf Hitler. From the very beginning he assumed a conciliatory tone toward the US that contrasted sharply against Heydrich’s earlier Cold War hostility. As far as recent revelations were concerned, he admitted that the treatment of the Reich’s enemies had been excessive and should’ve been handled differently. Hitler also didn’t always don the militaristic party uniform or his SS uniform (as opposed to Heydrich, who wore his SS uniform in public without exception). Furthermore, he carried out some mostly cosmetic reforms in domestic policies, mainly relaxations in censorship laws to accommodate the country’s fairly innocuous counterculture. The reason for these supposed signs of change was that in order to matter in the world, the Reich had to improve its image in order to keep their remaining allies and perhaps get a few more. Thanks to Heydrich’s anti-Catholic “Cultural Revolution”, allies like Slovakia, Croatia and Hungary were only being kept in line by force of arms and fear.
A few months later a leadership change took place on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean too. Reagan had briefly considered running for an unprecedented fourth term, but later decided against it for two reasons. Number one was that he too realized that after twelve years in the White House the electorate was usually tired of the incumbent party, regardless of whether the Republicans or the Democrats were in charge. Given how narrowly he’d won in 1988, he was likely to lose. That was especially likely after the results of the 1990 midterm elections were available: the Democrats held the Senate but lost the House of Representatives (the result was a significant increase in the number of executive orders in the 1990-1993 period). The second major reason was his own functioning. During his second term he had already displayed memory lapses, especially with names, and this got worse over time. The stresses of the presidency undoubtedly exacerbated the progress of his illness and in July 1991 he was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 80. After learning this, he definitively stopped entertaining the thought of a fourth term. Instead, he rode out the final nineteen months of his third term with the support of the White House staff, who had come to care deeply about him, while Vice President Carter also assumed a lot of the workload. Reagan, however, couldn’t escape the third term curse: information about his Alzheimer’s disease was leaked in September 1992. Carter won the nomination at the Democratic National Convention and chose Greek American Senator from Massachusetts Paul Tsongas as his running mate.
Meanwhile, the Republicans had undergone a bit of a crisis. After fielding credible candidates like popular Texan governor George H.W. Bush and war hero and popular Senator from Kansas Bob Dole and still losing in ’84 and ’88, there were no established names at the 1992 Republican National Convention. None of them wanted to be tarnished by defeat. Believing Carter would get at least one term by riding on Reagan’s popularity, the established names of the GOP in the early 90s wanted to wait until 1996. Figuring that if they were going to lose they might as well go out in style, the Republicans resorted to nostalgia by fielding a candidate that pundits and the media saw as a has-been with no chance to win: former President Richard M. Nixon (ironically, after the ideological shifts of the past decade, Nixon was closer to the Democrats).
After several years in the political wilderness after the end of his presidency in 1965 due to the Goldsboro Disaster, he became an established author by writing a dozen books (including an autobiography). He had also appeared on television a lot. As an elder statesman, both his successors consulted him on foreign policy. In the role of elder statesman and foreign policy consultant, he appeared on television and radio semi-regularly and had an ambitious schedule of speaking engagements, writing and meetings with foreign leaders, and he was heavily involved in charities funding cancer research. By the late 80s, nearly three decades after the Goldsboro Disaster, Nixon was popular again, as a more balanced opinion on Nixon emerged: by the 80s it was accepted Nixon couldn’t have done much to prevent Goldsboro given the state of technology back then; secondly, he was appreciated among the African American community for passing the Civil Rights Act in 1961 despite the opposition that existed to it among the Republicans at the time; thirdly, he was also remembered positively for Nixoncare, which was a precursor to the Federal Health Service, more commonly known as Kennedycare. Against all odds, Nixon sought the Republican nomination and got it (meanwhile, he asked George H.W. Bush, who hadn’t sought nomination, to become his running mate).
At the age of 79, Nixon became the oldest person to run for the presidency ever and was the underdog from the start because of his age. He performed surprisingly well in several debates against his opponent Carter, proving that this mental faculties were still excellent. He noticed how the US national debt had risen from less than 35% of GDP to 70% of GDP due to Reagan’s policies. The increase came from spending on defence as well as NASA and Carter argued high defence spending was necessary to supersede whatever the Germans came up with. Polls showed that Nixon actually had a chance of winning, which would make him the oldest person ever elected to the office of President if he won. Popular underdog Nixon won 21 states plus DC and 319 electoral votes as well as 50.8% of the popular vote against expectations. The Carter/Tsongas ticket won 31 states, 219 electoral votes and 48.6% of the popular vote. When he was inaugurated in January 1993, Nixon was the first octogenarian as well as the oldest person ever elected to the office of President (he was 80 at the time). He also became the first President after Grover Cleveland to serve a non-consecutive term and the first ever with a non-consecutive fourth term.
Meanwhile, in January 1993, Hitler cut off support to the Rhodesian government as he recognized the Rhodesian Bush War was a lost cause with the Balkanization of South Africa. Previously, most German support to Rhodesia was funnelled through South Africa as its Apartheid regime was on good terms with its neighbour, and provided its own support as well. The result was that the Rhodesian white minority regime finally collapsed in 1994, which was followed by an exodus of whites who feared massive ethnic cleansing. The German focus, in the meantime, shifted on maintaining the new Afrikaner Republic that controlled about two fifths of Cape Province (and which took in many of the white Rhodesian refugees) while initiating the South African Peace Process in the United Nations. Hitler’s conciliatory tone toward the US helped in getting the Americans along (though Nixon also had his own reasons to get closer to the Reich). Through the mediation of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, Germany, Britain, Italy and China) as well as a number of African countries following Congo’s leadership, the Elisabethville Accords were signed in 1993. The Afrikaner Republic and the Zulu Republic became independent and their borders were established. This was against the wishes of the African National Congress, which had fought for a free, democratic and unified South Africa. The rump that remained in between the Afrikaner Republic and the Zulu Republic became the Syndicalist Federal Republic of South Africa (with the failure of Marxist-Leninist socialism, syndicalism had succeeded it as the most prominent radical left-wing ideology, taking hold particularly in those places where factors like authoritarianism, corruption and poverty mixed). In its constitution it was stated that it saw the Afrikaner Republic and the Zulu Republic as breakaway provinces that could re-join the country whenever they wanted to, hence the choice for a federal structure.
Nixon’s reason for going along with the Germans in South Africa was that he wanted a massive reduction in conventional armed forces to rein in the rising national debt, which had doubled as a percentage of GDP in the previous decade. Though the Republicans had campaigned on curbing the national debt among other things, Nixon knew he could never sell a massive reduction in conventional forces to Congress if the Reich didn’t go along with it. That would be seen as kneeling before the Germans (which would be totally unacceptable given what had been revealed by Oskar Schindler a few years earlier). The truth was that defence spending was a heavy burden on the Reich too, which provided common ground for an agreement. The Conventional Armed Forces Treaty or CAFT signed in 1995 limited land forces to 10.000 tanks, 17.500 armoured combat vehicles, 10.000 artillery pieces, 5.200 combat aircraft and 1.600 helicopter gunships. Both signatories agreed to downsize their armed forces to the agreed to size within three years. Neither could now legally have a larger army than the other and both signatories had to stick to it to ensure the other didn’t have an excuse to violate CAFT. The treaty would expire in ten years, after which both signatories could decide to renew it.
In the meantime, warhead production continued unabated: by the mid-1990s, the Reich had about 45.000 nuclear warheads while the US had an arsenal of 38.000, giving them the means to destroy the entire world several times over. The arms race had gotten out of hand. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty or SALT signed in 1978 had put a brake on the production of nuclear weapons, but it hadn’t stopped it. SALT froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels and provided for the addition of new SLBM launchers only after the same number of older ICBM and SLBM launchers had been dismantled. SALT also limited land-based ICBMs that were in range from the north-eastern border of the continental United States to the western border of the Reich. In addition to that, SALT limited the number of SLBM capable submarines that the US Navy and the Kriegsmarine could operate to fifty with a maximum of eight hundred SLBM launchers between them. SALT, however, said nothing about nuclear missiles that weren’t ICBMs and also said nothing about how many strategic bombers either side could have. The highly expensive production of weapons grade plutonium for more warheads had therefore continued unabated.
The Second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, more commonly known as SALT II, was a much more radical step than SALT I. SALT II determined that neither the United States nor the Greater German Reich could have more than 10.000 warheads. The combined number of ICBMs and SLBMs was maximized at 2.500 and the number of MIRV warheads a missile could carry was limited to five. As a result the Kriegsmarine had to convert a number of its Type LVIIs from SSBNs to SSGNs (nuclear powered cruise missile submarines) while the US Navy had to do the same to a number of its Illinois-class submarines. Furthermore, in SALT II the two signatories agreed to limit their number of intermediate range and shorter range missiles to a total of three hundred each. The result was the elimination of nearly 75% of all strategic nuclear weapons and over 90% of tactical nuclear weapons then in existence in the entire world. SALT II was signed and ratified by both parties in 1997.
The major cutbacks on defence spending allowed by CAFT and SALT II allowed Nixon to prevent further tax increases and the defence cutbacks were ostensibly aimed at reducing national debt, which the Republicans had campaigned on. The Nixon Administration subsequently passed across the board tax cuts for all classes, increasing the purchasing power of most. He undid the heavy taxes on the highest incomes as the Republicans considered them “punitive taxes motivated by jealousy toward hard-working Americans.” Further deregulatory measures were taken that benefited major businesses and resulted in increased investments by big American companies like General Motors while banks extended credit more easily. The Nixon Administration’s policies supercharged the economic growth that had begun in the late 80s and as a result Nixon got credit for the boom of the 90s. After all, unemployment was at an all-time low by 1996. The end result was that the decrease in defence spending and the tax cuts were offset by increased tax income due to the economic boom. National debt as a percentage of GDP subsequently decreased from 70% to 60% between 1993 and 2001.
Besides getting credit for the economy in the 90s, Nixon also got credit for a program that had been initiated by Robert F. Kennedy: the Mars Program. Enormous budget cuts to NASA had taken place during the Rockefeller Administration as the government felt the country shouldn’t be spending billions on what was essentially a prestige project. The goal of getting to Mars by 1980 was given up and launch was postponed indefinitely as there wasn’t any money to develop the Mars Module and make the modifications to the Saturn V so it could carry it. Given the longer journey, the Mars Module was significantly bigger than the Apollo vehicle used for the lunar missions so it could carry the necessary supplies; secondly, the Mars Landing Vehicle or MALV had stronger engines because it needed those to escape Mars’s gravity. During Reagan’s tenure, spending on NASA had increased again to the point it could continue the Mars Program. In May 1995, a Saturn V enhanced with strap-on boosters launched a crew of three to Mars (the boosters allowed it to carry the 90 tonne Mars Module, which included the Mars Landing Vehicle, usually abbreviated to MALV). The launch was attended by President Nixon and former Presidents Reagan, Rockefeller and Kennedy and shortly thereafter the Mars Module made a slingshot around the moon and then truly began its journey. Seven months later, in December 1995, the Mars Module arrived and American astronaut Jerry L. Ross was chosen to descend to the surface, where he planted the American flag with a commemorative plaque in the Elysium Planitia plane (Robert D. Cabana and Nancy J. Currie stayed in the command module). Fourteen months after leaving Earth, the Mars Module and its three crewmembers returned home safely in July 1996. Reagan’s determination in the 80s and the 1990s economic boom under Nixon had finally allowed for the realization of Kennedy’s dream fifteen years later than planned.
The Germans couldn’t stay behind and they were in fact rather stunned that suddenly they were behind the Americans in the Space Race. The Reich Space Agency (“Reichraumfahrt Agentur” or RRFA) had taken their time with their own Mars program, believing they were ahead of NASA by quite a stretch. Besides satellites sent to photograph the entire surface, robots had been sent down to collect information on the planet’s surface conditions, including the presence of water. The Germans would catch up in the year 2000 and, to annoy the Americans, planted a bigger flag and plaque only half a mile from where the Americans landed.
The final success of the Mars Program was the exception in a neoliberal evolution. Neoliberal government and economic policies consisted of privatizations and cutbacks in the public sector (except for the highly popular system of Kennedycare), the lowering of income taxes, the value-added tax and excise taxes on alcohol and car fuel, and a laissez-faire approach with little in the way of economic regulation, tariffs, subsidies and privileges. Economic liberalizations were coupled with social liberalizations that allowed states to experiment with decriminalization or outright legalization of vices like marihuana and prostitution. The fortune saved by economizing on the conventional forces of the US Forces as well as strategic nuclear forces through disarmament treaties paid for all of this. That the 90s were an era of low Cold War tensions made those treaties possible to begin with. That left the question of how to deal with the rise of a new competitor for global dominance unanswered.
In Asia, China had assumed the position of dominant power by default after Japan had been crushed, defeated and occupied by the Americans in 1945. Japan’s armed forces were subsequently completely disbanded and Japan was mostly left to its own devices in regards to rebuilding, except for industry, infrastructure and other structures the American occupational forces needed. The hatred towards the Japanese for the unprovoked, deliberate surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was still widespread among Americans and therefore there was little interest in helping Japan rebuild so it could become a threat again. The result was by the early 1950s, a lot of war damage was still highly visible, particularly in the six cities destroyed by nuclear weapons (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, Niigata, Yokohoma and Osaka) and people didn’t really understand how radiation sickness worked and were afraid of getting it. Resentment festered among the Japanese about a few highly publicized rape incidents, the hundreds of thousands of their women in prostitution servicing American GIs and the destitution of countless people living in bombed out ruins while the country’s American guests were well off. There were a large number of car bombs, suicide bombings, attacks on US soldiers, raids, acts of sabotage and counterpropaganda in an insurgency led by remnants of the dissolved Imperial Japanese Army that lasted until the mid-50s. Slowly material wealth increased as American investment picked up to develop Japan to counter China as Sino-American relations soured after the mid-50s.
China was also in tatters after eight years of war, but had a big, competent American trained army supplied with lots of modern American equipment. For the first time since before any Chinaman could remember the country was also free from domineering invasive foreign influences as well as unified, definitively leaving the warlord era behind it. Moreover, it could count on its own natural wealth whereas Japan had none and also possessed an ocean of unskilled labour. Furthermore, China was a US ally in the immediate post-war era and could rely on American aid. Chiang Kai-shek used it for two Five Year Plans to develop key sectors of the economy like steel industry, heavy machinery production, the aviation industry, shipbuilding, electricity production, coal mining and petroleum production while the White Terror had destroyed all opposition while forcing the criminal triads underground. After taking Macau from Portugal in 1956, at a time when Portugal was still pro-Western, the opportunistic Chiang had to switch sides to the Nazis and they helped him get the bomb in 1960 and helped him build a small navy.
After that, China continued to develop its own military-industrial complex as the economy grew and diversified while the Kuomintang regime played the two Cold War superpowers. Like the economy of any developing country, it grew rapidly by an average 12% annually like clockwork from the late 40s throughout the 1950s until the end of the 1980s in wherewithal of the economic ups and downs of those decades. China’s economy grew by 9% in the 90s, 6% in the 2000s and 4% in the 2010s, transitioning to a high wage country in the early 21st century. Around the turn of the century it was also transitioning from a resource extraction and heavy industry based economy to a country with a strong services sector as well as the production of high-tech and precision goods. As early as 1955, China achieved a GDP of $100 billion and surpassed Great Britain as the world’s third economy. China officially attained a GDP of $7.91 trillion in 1995 (with a GDP per capita of $6.085 based on a population of 1.3 billion). China thereby became the world’s largest economy and surpassed the United States who had a GDP of $7.67 trillion in 1995 ($28.802 per capita based on a population of 266.3 million). The Reich, with a GDP of $7.3 trillion and a population of about 280 million ($26.071 per capita), was displaced as the world’s second economy by the US. The rise of the Asian giant concerned policy makers in Washington DC enough to consider a US-German co-dominium.
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I could see China and many countries picking up those surplus American and German conventional arms for discount prices.
I think the Americans and Germans would try their best to ensure that the arms they are selling would not find their way to the Chinese, given China's rise and potential destabilizing of the present world order by its mere existence and ambitions...
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FillyofDelphi
Banned
Um... that's not how nuclear reactors work. Especially slow/low yield ones like you'd use to power a vehicle engine (You'd have to; controlled energy output). You don't have the mass to get one of those reactions to go critical without very specific circumstances even if you're actively trying to set it up. Oh, you'll get nuclear leakage if the containment is totally blown and the fuel rods scattered by the explosion, but it'd be conventional not nuclear.
SubscribetoPewdsToday
Banned
Who said it will? The Reich looks more stable than even the USA right now.
Its basically a dynastic monarchy now. They have lasted 100’s to thousand years.
If it happens it'll be against China and any allies they can gather (Italy perhaps?)
How does the German East look like? Speer ended Generalplan Ost but I imagine Slavic culture was still suppressed and Germanisation continues. Is the East more German than it was before or has it largely stayed culturally Russian?
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