Ultima Thule: 1962
Legacy of the Eigenreich
Originally, this was supposed to be a funny thought exercise on "What if WW2 was fought with magic?" but then it went on to develop itself into something greater than its original state as a shitpost.
Ultima Thule is my take on a timeline where Hitler, disillusioned by the Great War, devotes himself to the study of the occult prior to his involvement in politics. The complete write-up will probably be posted in its own thread, but for the sake of exposition some of it will be posted below. The map itself is final, I will not be changing it, but the lore has yet to be fully explored.
On a dark and stormy German night in 1919, a meeting of brothers-in-arms in a candle-lit study would divert the river of history into a wholly different channel. Survivors of the Great War, they sought to undo what the meat grinder of Europe stole from them. A leg, an arm, the gift of sight and peace of mind. Alas, things went wrong, as they always do. Perhaps it was for the best that the only survivor of the Pasewalk Incident was the man seeking to undo his loss of sight and hearing. Adolf Hitler would miraculously regain both in the following days, along with the burden of knowing exactly what happened to his comrades in that study on that night and voices that whispered knowledge and secrets to him in his sleep .
Hitler would spend his time divided between a brief return to the army and his involvement in the Thule Society with his mentor Dietrich Eckhart, impressed by the former’s encounter with incomprehensible forces. During his time he would publish articles on occult research that permeated throughout the world, ushering what would be known as the Second Renaissance. Eventually he was introduced to politics, and before long he was addressing thousands in various vitriolic beer hall speeches. Fast forward to 1936, the German Reich was picking itself up at a rapid pace, infrastructure improvements and developments were accelerated by utilization of strange machines. Throughout the years, Hitler would not only focus on a plan to restore German glory, but a way to fuse his knowledge of the esoteric and arcane into it. “Eigentechnik”, or Special Technology, was the official term used by the Nazi government to explain the unnaturally quick progress made by the nation. Of course, eigentech had already been carefully studied for applications in weaponry, directly overseen by Hitler himself. The Berlin-Rome Treaty of Mutual Understanding was signed shortly after, on the grounds of limited eigentech sharing between Germany and Italy, and the former’s desire for access to ancient Roman sites and artifacts for the implied purpose of occult research. Later that year, the Munich Conference saw the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany under the presence of new British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who took office after his predecessor died in his sleep the previous year.
Across Eurasia, the world continues to turn. The Emperor of Japan underwent involuntary abdication thanks to the efforts of a gun-toting communist. Italian troops seized Ethiopia while Mussolini declared himself Protector of Islam in Libya. A coup in Brazil installs the communists into its government, allegedly with external support. FDR secures a second term in the United States. Through it all, research into mystical artifacts, folk legends and esoteric or thaumaturgical phenomena continue worldwide in muted fashion. It was common belief that most, if not all legends and associated paraphernalia had some form of innate power, locked away by the passage of time and waiting to be released. British egyptologists unearth record-breaking numbers of tombs and artifacts, an increase in Jewish immigration into the United States spark a renewed interest in Jewish mythology and folklore, and a Soviet expedition to Central Asia attempts to find the rumored necropolis of Genghis Khan.
World War Two would proceed to alter the landscape of the world, quite literally in some cases, as the Allies rushed to develop their own eigentech, be it via independent research or reverse-engineering German eigentech. Occult superweapons, or eigenweapons, while more common, would not be employed on the scale seen in Europe due to the wildly varying costs of usage and general unpredictability.
By 1962, the state of the world is not so different from OTL as the Cold War continues to ferment and fester, if one chooses to ignore the anomalous zones spanning the Arctic Circle, the proliferation of eigentech in modern society, and the ever-looming threat of annihilation with an occult flavor. These truly are strange times we live in.