alternatehistory.com

Inspired by one of my old TLs and varyar's 'Ghost Cities of the Reich'.


Dear Fatherland, No Fear be Thine: A Look at the Reich


REPORTER: Thaddeus Jones


The German Reich. For 80 years since the end of WW2 in 1947, a byword for tyranny, but now a word for decay. This report by Thaddeus Jones, takes a look at the decay of one of the world’s most feared states.


----


I’m on a train from Strassburg to K
önigsberg right now, and one thing I’ve often noted is the total silence that is everywhere, almost uncanny. This is the silence of absolute terror. People talk in quick, furtive sentences, whispering just at the edge of hearing. They’re afraid to meet one another’s eyes, looking at the tables, at the dull newspapers and government-approved books. It’s as if they’re living a nightmare.

I’ll talk to one in my best German.


REPORTER:
Who are you?

FRITZ:
Fritz Steiner. And you?

REPORTER:
Thaddeus Jones, American reporter.

FRITZ:
Ah, Amerikaner. Do you have anything to do with the Treuepolizei?

REPORTER:
Not at all.

FRITZ:
Good. You can’t trust them, not at all. Don’t tell them I said that.

REPORTER:
I won’t.

The train arrives at K
önigsberg Station, a vast neo-classical edifice, completed on January 1 1989, the 100th anniversary of Ludwig Karl Sternberg, first Fuhrer’s, birth in this selfsame city. Fuhrer Stauffenberg, of course, used it as a major propaganda coup. Not that the West cared that much.

Leaving the station, I note the decay of the general architecture. The general mood here is grim, under a grey Baltic sky. More silence, the unease is terrifying. Then, two soldiers march up to me.


SOLDIER:
Papers.

I show him my passport. He looks over it.


SOLDIER:
Hmm. Amerikaner. You’re free to go.

Nobody around me looks surprised; apparently such random stops are common around here. There are soldiers, or people in military uniforms, practically everywhere. This is a key part of the
Ostfestung, a defence against the Russians created after the Soviet Union, one of the Reich’s key allies, transmuted into the Velikorussian Federation. This shattered the Pact of Steel, one of the key accords of the Axis.

The shift between ‘heroic Soviets’ and the current propagandistic depiction of the Russians as cowardly ‘running-dogs’ can be dated back to this breach in relations between Germany and Russia.


Anyway, enough about history, I’m here to talk about the economic climate. I walk into a newspaper shop, the usual barometer of the local economy. The newspapers, their headlines talking about the latest bizarre theory about President Germanotta, are untouched. People seem to be buying sweets though, and a stall of copies of
Deutschlands Krieg (Sternberg’s 1930 book) has been emptied, presumably by zealous soldiers and Party officials.

I ask the storekeeper, Karl Schneider, how business is doing.


REPORTER:
How’s business in newspapers?

SCHNEIDER:
Not good. People these days, they get their news off the internet. The BBC site, for instance.

REPORTER:
Isn’t that blocked?

SCHNEIDER:
They use proxy servers and other tricks, so they can see foreign news.

REPORTER:
Do you do that?

SCHNEIDER:
I wouldn’t say if I did, besides I’m old.

The difference between this and New York is striking.


----


I arrive at Tempelhof Airport, and am driven to the heart of Berlin, passing row after row of identikit concrete apartment blocks built to house those driven out by the grandiose building efforts of the 50s-60s under Fuhrer Skorzeny. I am quickly surrounded by grotesquely large building efforts, the very least of which is the Erzengel Concourse. From Brandenburg Gate to the ruins of the Volkshalle, it stretches 5 kilometres long, 500 metres wide. The very best word to describe it is ‘immense’. The effect is somewhat spoiled by the Volkshalle itself. It took a decade to build, and the great dome collapsed on the day before it was due to be dedicated.


The building is now slowly sinking into the soil which was unable to support its weight. Nobody has got the necessary money or will to rebuild it. The parades of the Concourse remain somewhat hollow despite the marching legions of Sturmwache and Blitzwehr bearing eagle banners decorated with the Reich’s horizontal tricolour of black-white-red, or the Valkyrie ICBMs which remain to threaten America and the free states of Europe.


I look at the nearest cinema, the Official Reich Theatre – there’s the new
Lohengrin film (a remake of the original 1949 epic) and various other tributes to Wagner advertised. Few American films, and nothing of any real quality – they have to receive a National Certificate to be shown, sold, or imported. Not that anybody really cares – everybody buys bootlegs if they want to watch American movies. And practically everybody does.

----


I’m talking to Professor Erich Wagner, at the University of Vienna,
Österreich District. He’s a sociologist who has recently published some papers on the troubles afflicting Germany. Not that the Reich is about to arrest him, he’s too influential to silence and he hasn’t expressed dissident political views. At least not that they know of.

REPORTER:
What’s the problem?

WAGNER:
The problem is the same as the Soviet Union. Too much focus on the military. We have ICBMs, we have tanks, we have thermonuclear weapons, but people have a lower standard of living even than during the War years. How is this even possible?

REPORTER:
What would you suggest?

WAGNER:
I don’t know. My suggestions have reached the top. They have clearly not listened. We cannot constantly be on a war footing. Yes, the French and Russians are against us. We are not secure on the Continent. But that doesn’t matter when we have the United States breathing down our neck with the most powerful military ever. Autarky also will not work. This obsession with self-sufficiency is becoming damaging. Holding on to Libya and so forth for the oil is fruitless; the natives require a whole army group to keep down. I can’t predict if the Reich can last another five years. Beyond that, I can’t even begin to speculate.
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