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PART 11
Intervals of Horrible Sanity
When you look back at the turbulent years of the early 1950s. It is not hard to see how such a event like the Grey Scare that rocked the United States during this troubling times could've come about. The recipe for paranoia and fear had been sown and laid in the ground like crops into soil in the aftermath of Edward Prent's assassination of President MacArthur; paranoia that men like Senator Fitzgerald and even President Stassen himself took advantage of to fuel their own interests. As history has proven countless times, man is a very easily freightened creature. And where there is fear. There are those who seek to exploit it for their own personal gain.
Figure 1: Harold Stassen, President of the United States since 1951
The events of June 1951 were a series of unexpected calamities that hit the American public like a giant boulder. The untimely assassination of MacArthur was enough of a blow. Add that onto the revelation that the Condor Legion; a Fascist political organization that both Edward Prent and Leonard Dritt were involved with quickly left many reeling from the news. In response to the growing amount of evidence that the FBI and CIA had gathered on the MacArthur assassination since June. President Harold Stassen quickly authorized the establishment of a Government Commission designated to investigate fascist and totalitarian political groups within the United States. Under the leadership of Senator Fitzgerald. the infamous "Fitzgerald Commission" quickly got to work on the matter.
The first task of the Fitzgerald Commission was to deal with Leonard Dritt, Staff Sergeant Roger Michaels and the other 4 four figures that were discovered to have directly associated with Prent and Dritt in the weeks and months prior to the MacArthur assassination. The Commission's investigation into the matter would quickly uncover a series of financial transactions between Leonard Dritt and Edward T. Prent, showing that the former had paid the latter ten thousand United States Dollars (the same amount of cash discovered in Prent's possession back in Green Bay the month prior) for the task of assassinating the President, Which Prent ultimately delivered on. The other 5 men on the other hand; including the Staff Sergeant were all discovered to have long term associates of both Leonard Dritt and the Condor Legion itself. While the Staff Sergeant had been personally responsible for supplying the Scoped M1 Garand that Prent would later use to murder the President with. The Commission's investigation into the group in the end would quick and thorough. With all 6 men subsequently being tried and convicted on multiple counts of both Treason and Conspiracy to Commit Murder. All ultimately meeting a final fate at the ominous wooden gallows.
Figure 2: Leonard Dritt (1916-1952). A former veteran of the Pacific War and a man with known ties to Fascist organizations in the United States purchased Edward T. Prent services in his scheme to assassinate then President MacArthur, while Dritt was successful in his desire to kill the President, he and 5 other men involved in the planned assassination would ultimately meet their fates at the wooden gallows after they were tried and convicted for their crimes.
The 6 men involved in the Assassination of President MacArthur were however not the only men to raise the ire of the Fitzgerald Commission. The fear of German intrusion into the country was already too prevalent to ignore; and Senator Fitzgerald soon made it his personal mission to weed out the "Un-American Fascist scum" that he perceived were infiltrating and taking over every asset of the American government. Over the period of the next 3 years, over 700 individuals; including several famous personalities such as Actor and Animation Director Walt Disney were arrested by the Fitzgerald Commission on various charges related to "Un-American and Pro-Fascist activities". While many of the individuals arrested were rightfully detained for various treasonous activities; Many of the charges filed by the Commission were fabrications of Fitzgerald and the other member's of the Commission's own Anti-Fascist paranoia. leading to hundreds of innocent men and women (many of them ethnic Germans who had immigrated to the United States in the years before the War and after) targeted by the Commission and accused of being German spies or otherwise being guilty of various treasonous activities.
Elsewhere around the world. The effects of the tense world situation were very prevalent in Europe. Especially in the tense waters of the Mediterranean as tensions between the two France's threatened to boil over into outright conflict. The Two France's situation was a tense situation between two government's that claimed to be the rightful government of France. One was the French State aligned with the Germans. (commonly referred too as "Vichy France" by those who sought to delegitimize it's status as the legal French government), Which controlled the French mainland in Europe, Vichy was opposed on the other side of the Mediterranean by Charles De Gaulle's French Republic, which controlled the French colonial empire throughout the world. A war scare between the two France's occurred in July of 1952 when a Vichy warship fired on and sunk a Free French cargo ship traveling from Algiers to Miami. War was barely avoided thanks to the diplomatic intervention of the Reich and the United States that ultimately resulted in the defusing of the Inter-French crisis and a ultimately peaceful end to the situation. While this did not and would not end the tensions that existed between Paris and Algiers, It ultimately showed many that the line between War and Peace is very thin.
Figure 3: Pierre Laval (1883-1955), the Prime Minister of France multiple times during the Third Republic and Vichy eras. and briefly President of France after Petain's death in 1949. Leval presided the French state over the first years of the 1950's, he was forced to resign from his post in 1952 due to immense pressure from the Germans in large part because of the Inter-French Crisis that almost resulted in war between the two France's the same year. Laval would die, disgraced and living in exile in Spain a mere three years later.
Elsewhere in Europe, the other members of the Tripartite Pact itself was not exempt from increasing political tensions. This was very prevalent in Hungary and Romania. While both countries were technically allies via their mutual membership in the Tripartite Pact. They clashed over the issue of Transylvania. The region while populated by a Romanian majority; had historically for most of it's history been apart of Hungary before it was awarded in whole to Romania as a result of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire's defeat at the end of the First Great War. The Hungarians reacquired the northern half of the Transylvanian region thanks in large part to the mediation of the Germans; a mediation which resulted in the Second Vienna Award of 1940.
The issue had been put aside between Bucharest and Budapest due to the ongoing war with the Soviet Union. However the end of the war would bring back to the surface the heated Transylvanian question. With the disputed status of the region coming back to the mainstream as Hungarian reasserted historical claims to the Southern half of Transylvania and Romania to the Northern half it had lost due to the German mediation. The Germans themselves were however perfectly content with the inner-pact bickering between Hungary and Romania. Seizing the opportunity to exploit the existing tensions to keep both parties in line and in favor with Berlin; playing both off of each other to ensure the continued German dominance over the Reich's "supposed" allies.
Figure 4: a Hungarian Army regiment trains near the Romanian-Hungarian border, circa 1952
While the Cold War itself had already manifested across the world into things such as mass paranoia, bickering between the world pacts and even inner pact bickering, Tensions could not always be mediated by the cool hand of diplomacy, This was no more prevalent in the early years of the 1950's then in the unruly Middle East.
The events of 1949 and 1950 had seen a wave of revolutionaries topple British rule across large parts of Northern Africa; resulting in the end of British colonial rule in Libya, Palestine, Egypt and the Sudan, the "Free Officers Revolution" and the establishment of a Republic in Egypt had spearheaded the so called "Arab Spring" that drove the British out of much of the region. However outside of Egypt, these new fledgling states struggle to survive. Especially Palestine. which suffered from increasing religious violence between the restless Jewish minority of the country against the Palestinian Arab majority. Unbeknown to the Palestinian leadership at the time; restless minorities would not be their only threat. The core of the Egyptian leadership that come about after the Free Officers Revolution, including men such as President Muhammad Naguib and the young but charismatic Colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser; were Pan-Arabic. seeking to expand Egypt's borders to create a large Pan-Arabic super state comprising of the entire Muslim world; a "United Arab Republic". That would be able to stand on it's own as a regional power free from the influence of the United States and the Greater German Reich. Free to carve it's own destiny in the world for their people and culture.
Figure 5: Egyptian forces bombard Jerusalem during the Palestinian-Egyptian War, circa 1952
The small and weak Palestinian state was seen by the government in Cairo as the perfect first step towards their Pan-Arabic dream. the Egyptian Army invaded the young Palestinian Republic after several months of preparations on May 7th, 1952. The fight was however essentially decided from the beginning. and within 19 days the Egyptian Army had marched on and captured the Palestinian capital and Holy City of Jerusalem; smashing the last of the Palestinian resistance to a bloody and lifeless pulp. The invasion and gross violation of Palestine's sovereignty was met with universal and loud condemnation from the members of ACT and many other nations across the world. With the United States serving as the most vocal opponent of the Egyptian invasion. The Germans and the other members of the Tripartite Pact quietly objected to Egypt's invasion of Palestine. but nonetheless continued to increase their ties with the newly reformed United Arab Republic behind the scenes. Serving to spread Berlin's influence within the strategically important Middle East.
Is Mengele making lighters out of toe joints, The Man in the High Castle style? 
