Nazi victories are probably the most common counterfactual-history prompt out there. But most portrayals of a victorious Nazi society seems to be set in the late 20th century, usually around the Cold War: The Man in the High Castle, Fatherland, The New Order, etc. There are usually motifs of space programs, mass infrastructure projects, and obviously legions upon legions of atomic-armed bombers and missile silos...
...but, much rarer is the depiction of a Nazi Germany in the modern day, with Internet, computers and smartphones and all that fancy stuff. How might Nazi internet culture, with all of its subcultures, memes, quick trends and fads, evolve?
Now, people will offer the obvious retort that the Nazis couldn't have survived, would have eventually collapsed, etc, and scenarios like The Man In the High Castle and The New Order are already predicated on pretty ASB preconditions and developments (i.e. the Germans hilariously getting the bomb first and somehow managing to deliver it to the US).
So, sure. I'm well aware of the arguments, and don't necessarily disagree with any of them: the Third Reich was a regime of mass plunder, and the likeliest scenario even given their (already-unlikely) survival is eventual collapse due to gross economic mismanagement, probably sometime in the late 20th century.
But assume, by some dint of luck, it somehow didn't.
Assume out of the millions of worlds, diverging since WW2, most ending up with with allied victories, or continued Nazi survival but eventual collapse in the late 20th century, we choose instead to peer into the (say) few dozens of worlds where a Nazi regime, or something close to it, exists in the modern day... in 2023. No US entry into the war, but the Soviets still fall (the Nazis roll all sixes, the Soviets roll snake eyes: maybe Stalin dies early—smoking habit caught up to him?—and the Soviets are divided in leadership: the political climate of the 1940s Soviet Union was not a chill one), and the Germans swoop most of the East, with Siberia being a rump state, maybe under US protection or something.
How does it look like? For the sake of survival does it likely eventually moderate—do we see a Nazi Germany eventually chilling, as most totalitarian states do, or does it somehow retreat into its shell, remaining a North Korea-type bastion of extremist nationalism and totalitarianism? Or something in the middle, not as extreme as the 1940s, but not entirely apologetic or liberal either?
Then there is the obvious question of all those Genocides, of all those tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions—if they're "successful") of corpses. Possibly they employ the US/Australia/insert-settler-colony type excuse of "we're regretful, but no reparations beyond symbolic sorries: it's a done deal, and it was a long time ago, and everyone who did it is dead or old, and they fought and murdered each other anyway, and what's this about your own history?"-type excuse, but it might not be as clean-looking without the international hard or soft power that comes from being the leading global hegemon to back it up (not to mention the lack of a cool movie industry: "Naziwood?"... but the censors, man!)
Or assuming they're _really_ thorough, maybe with most of the victims dead, there just isn't anyone to advocate for them (well, aside from the US Jewish lobby...)
Obviously the question of how the Nazis do (somehow!) survive, does directly relate to how they will look like in the modern day. That's not something you can just handwave, I concede. But basically I'm just looking for thoughts and ideas here.
...but, much rarer is the depiction of a Nazi Germany in the modern day, with Internet, computers and smartphones and all that fancy stuff. How might Nazi internet culture, with all of its subcultures, memes, quick trends and fads, evolve?
Now, people will offer the obvious retort that the Nazis couldn't have survived, would have eventually collapsed, etc, and scenarios like The Man In the High Castle and The New Order are already predicated on pretty ASB preconditions and developments (i.e. the Germans hilariously getting the bomb first and somehow managing to deliver it to the US).
So, sure. I'm well aware of the arguments, and don't necessarily disagree with any of them: the Third Reich was a regime of mass plunder, and the likeliest scenario even given their (already-unlikely) survival is eventual collapse due to gross economic mismanagement, probably sometime in the late 20th century.
But assume, by some dint of luck, it somehow didn't.
Assume out of the millions of worlds, diverging since WW2, most ending up with with allied victories, or continued Nazi survival but eventual collapse in the late 20th century, we choose instead to peer into the (say) few dozens of worlds where a Nazi regime, or something close to it, exists in the modern day... in 2023. No US entry into the war, but the Soviets still fall (the Nazis roll all sixes, the Soviets roll snake eyes: maybe Stalin dies early—smoking habit caught up to him?—and the Soviets are divided in leadership: the political climate of the 1940s Soviet Union was not a chill one), and the Germans swoop most of the East, with Siberia being a rump state, maybe under US protection or something.
How does it look like? For the sake of survival does it likely eventually moderate—do we see a Nazi Germany eventually chilling, as most totalitarian states do, or does it somehow retreat into its shell, remaining a North Korea-type bastion of extremist nationalism and totalitarianism? Or something in the middle, not as extreme as the 1940s, but not entirely apologetic or liberal either?
Then there is the obvious question of all those Genocides, of all those tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions—if they're "successful") of corpses. Possibly they employ the US/Australia/insert-settler-colony type excuse of "we're regretful, but no reparations beyond symbolic sorries: it's a done deal, and it was a long time ago, and everyone who did it is dead or old, and they fought and murdered each other anyway, and what's this about your own history?"-type excuse, but it might not be as clean-looking without the international hard or soft power that comes from being the leading global hegemon to back it up (not to mention the lack of a cool movie industry: "Naziwood?"... but the censors, man!)
Or assuming they're _really_ thorough, maybe with most of the victims dead, there just isn't anyone to advocate for them (well, aside from the US Jewish lobby...)
Obviously the question of how the Nazis do (somehow!) survive, does directly relate to how they will look like in the modern day. That's not something you can just handwave, I concede. But basically I'm just looking for thoughts and ideas here.