Reign of the Swastika - a new TL

In Asia a new conflict was about to begin. In 1955 Mao requested Stalin’s support for a war of conquest against the Republic of China. On February 19th 1955 the PRC declared war on the ROC to liberate it from the capitalist/fascist yoke and bring Socialism to the working classes of the South. Most see this as a continuation of the Chinese Civil War but Chiang Kai-Shek was prepared now and brought to bare advanced panzer VIIs, German produced artillery and brand new jet fighters. Korea and the PRJ also declared war, providing extra reinforcements for the North’s “Peoples’ Liberation Army or PLA for short. Chiang managed to mobilize in time to coordinate a response as Chinese Soviet-made T-55s, T-34s and IS-10s crashed over the border headed toward the Southern capital of Nanjing. The strategy was to take the South’s coastal regions and major ports to cut them off from foreign trade and outside help and then proceed to defeat the ROC’s army in a series of cauldron battles. The PLA relied on a doctrine of mobility, speed, good communications and quick annihilation battles or “cauldron battles” in which enemy forces would be quickly surrounded and then destroyed. This was to be conducted in the context of Deep Battle, the military doctrine of the Red Army which had been created to get the maximum potential out of the Soviet Union’s large army. It involved multiple operations, conducted either in parallel or in rapid succession, to punch through enemy lines had several points and overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers and the large spread of such an offensive. This would be supported by strong artillery support, which the Red Army was known for, and air support which the enormous Red Air Force could provide. Stalin had been kind enough to provide his Maoist allies in North China with tanks, aircraft, weapons, trucks and “military advisors” for this purpose. As agreed earlier, America did not intervene. They preferred a united and strong China, even a China united under Mao, over a China tied to the Reich which could threaten US interests in the region which the rather independent minded Chiang might do. They had told him that China would be reunited in the future and that America would support this. He didn’t take their friendly relations with Stalin’s regime well as it ruined chances of uniting China under Nationalist rule and didn’t have the patience to wait until Stalin and Mao dropped dead. In fact, he had plans ready to attack the North with German support which had been postponed indefinitely after the first Soviet nuclear test, fearing that the Soviets might give the Bomb to Mao. Mao had strengthened his country a lot in a series of two Four Year Plans, the last of which was a shift to war production. In 1950 agriculture had been collectivized after the Soviet example, causing resistance but also breaking the power of the landowning elites. The land was redistributed to smaller peasants who saw an increase in living standards. Large numbers of medium-sized and large farmers were ruined and resisted heavily, leading to food shortages which didn’t completely end until a year later. Coal and steel production had tripled between 1947 and 1955 and North China for a time was the largest industrial power in Asia, producing much heavy machinery, weapons, coal, steel, iron ore and crude oil. The Stalinist model of industrialization by command economy was seemingly successfully supplied. In response to the war America voiced a weak protest. The Germans however reacted quite vociferously and sent a carrier group to the South China Sea and the US in turn upgraded to DEFCON 3. The group consisted of aircraft carrier Hermann Goering, H-class battleship Admiral Graf Spee (named in honour of the pocket battleship of the same name), the Gneisenau, three light cruisers, 20 destroyers and two Type XXI submarines.


This wouldn’t be the first Soviet attempt to gain more influence. In the Middle East they supported the Ba’ath party which advocated Arab nationalism and socialism. Their quasi-socialist leanings earned them Stalin’s attention. In 1963 the Ba’ath parties staged a coup in both Syria and Iraq, overthrowing the monarchies in those regions. The Germans supported rightwing militants against these new regimes. The Persian Shah remained on a friendly footing with the Nazis although he was smart enough not to provoke the USSR by entering an alliance. Saudi-Arabia was friendly to the Nazis as well because they feared the Socialist regimes multiplying on their border, especially when Arab Socialists took power in Kuwait too. In 1955 Stalin had invaded Afghanistan to help the local communist party take power over the nation (Stalin settled for nominal rule in the mountainous south as the tribes there were good fighters and the Soviets didn’t want a protracted guerrilla war in such an inhospitable region), giving him a puppet close to India with which Stalin maintained good relationships. In India Nehru held power and he advocated a socialist model for India, no taxes for farmers and nationalization of heavy industries such as steel, aviation, shipping, electricity and mining. An extensive public works and industrialization campaign resulted in the construction of major dams, irrigation canals, roads, thermal and hydroelectric power stations, modernizing India to a degree.Also education was made free and even women were enrolled into schools. Also caste discrimination became punishable by law with punishments ranging from fines to several weeks in prison. After Nehru more conservative, pro-US and religious parties would find that undoing his reforms was impossible due to their support among the populace. Thus India maintained good relations with the Soviet Union even though it remained staunchly non-aligned. In Africa the Soviets supported several communist movements throughout French, Italian and German colonies and in the 60s and 70s the USSR would support several proxy wars in places like Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Rwanda and Sudan against German supported anti-communists, Arab militants and the like (even if they were unenthusiastic about supporting negroes, they’d rather not see Africa turn red). In South America the Soviets remained notably quiet to not anger the US who considered South America their backyard, in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, although one socialist regime arose on its own accord in Cuba under Fidel Castro. The US tolerated this but nothing more and the USSR delivered minimal support as they considered the Americans allies against the Euro-fascist block which was growing stronger (both economically and militarily) by the day with its arsenal of ICBMs, nuclear weapons and an integrated market which got one single currency. The Reichsmark became the de facto currency of the EC as it was accepted everywhere next to the various national currencies. The economic power of Germany, strengthened by their monopoly on European trade, surpassed the Soviet industrial base but not the American one. In Soviet propaganda the US was a nation of capitalists and enemies of the workers but out of real politics this was toned down to the minimum and instead focused on Germany.

In the face of a resurgent and unfriendly Nationalist China, the US allowed Japan to rearm to a degree which caused a public outcry in both Chinas who denounced Japan as an imperialist, militarist aggressor that should be muzzled permanently. The North was quick to tone down its propaganda against Japan on Soviet insistence and they focused on South China instead, calling them fascist puppets. The South was driven further away from the United States and into the arms of Nazi Germany. In the revised peace treaty the Americans allowed the Japanese to constitute new armed forces which would become known as the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, or JSDF for short, which would consist of 225.000 soldiers. A navy was also included which would consist of one battleship, one aircraft carrier, eight cruisers and ten submarines. In addition to this the navy was sold several smaller American vessels to provide them with smaller ships including a flotilla of destroyers, frigates, corvettes and fast attack craft. This was a sizable force but the American Pacific fleet alone massively outgunned this navy so it wasn’t that much of a threat. The Japanese admiralty was of course well aware of this and divided its fleet into taskforces much like the Germans had done earlier. Each such taskforce would be centred around a battleship, an aircraft carrier or one of Japan’s heavy cruisers and would be accompanied by a submarine and an array of smaller vessels to protect the mother ship of the flotilla such as destroyers, frigates, corvettes, and fast attack craft and could do a lot of damage. They had a limited range but anything that came within range of 800 kilometres of the Home Islands was toast if it had hostile intentions. An amendment was made to the Japanese constitution that these forces would only be used to defend Japan and not wage any wars of aggression. These forces would remain on a high alert for the duration of the Chinese conflict which by now was known as the War of The Two Chinas. Within four weeks Northern troops had reached the Yangtze river and stood poised to attack Nanjing but Chiang, fearing that he might lose the capital, used mustard gas which punched a hole in Northern lines. A lot of Mao’s attacking infantry died and in the consternation Chiang broke through Mao’s lines in a major counteroffensive, surrounding several units and crushing them and forcing Mao to regroup some 100 kilometres to the north. To support Mao, Stalin sent more “military advisors” as by 1956 Chiang had managed to return the frontline roughly to the pre-war situation except in Tibet, large swaths of which were occupied by Northern troops. Chiang however didn’t care much for the cold, arid and mountainous region which only swallowed up troops. Mao had managed to retreat in good order from Nanjing as his tank army and his Soviet-built APCs had Atomic Biological and Chemical protection gear, commonly abbreviated to ABC-gear. In the summer of ’56 his army numbered in the millions and received some 500.000 Korean reinforcements, courtesy of Kim Il-Sung, some 100.000 Soviet troops and around 7.000 Japanese volunteers from Hokkaido, as it was referred to by almost everyone (officially it was called the PRJ), to aid in his cause. As a response the European Community sent an expeditionary force to aid Chiang whose situation was becoming increasingly precarious. It consisted of forces from Germany but also French, Hungarian, Italian and Turkish troops who were sent for the common goal of fighting communism, the enemy of the New Order. The French and the Italians included sizable naval contingents consisting of battleships Jean Bart, Vittorio Veneto and Italy’s first true carrier Aquila which would be joined by Sparviero in 1960 and Falco in 1965. This would make Italy the only continental European country with carries, besides Germany which had eight. In the summer offensive of ’56 Mao had made significant gains and had taken Nanjing. Soviet, Chinese and Korean troops had crossed the Yangtze river at several places in spite of a stubborn defence mounted by Chiang in pre-war defences. Mao had suffered heavy casualties against this defensive lines of trenches, bunkers, barbed wire, land mines, tanks and men but one million men more or less didn’t mean much to him. The arrival of the EC’s expeditionary force made these gains undone by winter of ’56/’57. The presence of Soviet and German forces was well known but both powers didn’t go to war and limited confrontation to avoid a nuclear war which was becoming an increasing threat to Europe and the USSR.


In 1955 the Germans and Soviets had both tested strong boosted fission weapons to provide some kind of means of retaliation in the event of a thermonuclear war with the United States. Each weapon had had a yield of some 350-400 kilotons, enough destructive force to level a city and take out hardened military facilities except for missile silos and nuclear bomb shelters. In 1956 the Germans tested their first fusion device which was somewhat smaller than the American Ivy Mike shot. The German device had been designed on 3.3 megatons but was scaled down to 1.1 megatons for the live test as the test was merely needed to confirm German theories regarding nuclear fusion. The bomb was notably lighter than Ivy Mike as it lacked the cryogenic device. As a propaganda stunt the Soviets let their bomb explode at the full force of 5 megatons at their new Semipalatinsk test site which would remain the testing ground for Soviet nuclear devices. The Germans had selected the same test ground in the western Ukraine and, according to rumours, chained groups of captured rebels to the bomb to find out the effects of a thermonuclear blast. The ascension of the Reich and the USSR to thermonuclear powers had some effects on the Chinese War. Both Stalin and Heydrich considered using nuclear weapons to break the stalemate which had ensued after the joint South Chinese-German-Italian-French-Italian-Hungarian-Turkish counteroffensive had driven Mao back to pre-war positions once again. In 1957 Stalin proposed an armistice because for every minute that the war was extended, the risk of someone employing nuclear weapons (be it tactical or strategic) increased. Heydrich accepted and in the Hebei Treaty North and South recognised each other’s sovereignty even if enmity between the two remained. A demilitarized zone was created between the two as well and Soviet and Korean and German and EC forces were stationed there permanently. On the North side Mao militarized and industrialized his country even further. In the Seven Year Plan that followed, heavy industry was emphasized even more and an army of some 13 million men was created, three quarters of which was deployed on the Chinese DMZ. This had the effect of tying North and South more to their effective patrons (i.e. the Soviets and the Reich). With support from Germany Chiang started to actively pursue a nuclear weapons program. German scientists were sent to the recently built Nanjing University and constructed a Zippe centrifuge and a heavy water reactor so China could get U-235 and plutonium quickly. The Chinese chose for the plutonium design which was easier to create. In 1960 the Germans provided the Chinese with a test warhead (not functioning model of course) for them to take apart. In 1966 the South would test a 50 kiloton device, the strongest first test ever. A year later, in 1967, the South would test a 2.2 megaton thermonuclear device and so South China rose to the position of a fourth power block in its own right. Stalin didn’t allow Mao to have nukes. Mao was quite disappointed and instead increased stockpiles of nerve gas for use against the South’s cities. Stalin aided him by stationing a fleet of Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers near Beijing. In the aftermath of the conflict the Americans founded the Pacific Treaty Organizations or PTO which included the US, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, Peru, several Central American countries, Australia and New Zealand. This organization would ward off fascism and Nazism and their first police action came in 1965 when Suharto tried to overthrow Sukarno’s quasi-socialist Maerhenist regime. The Soviets didn’t join and instead formalized their alliance with the PRC, the DPRK and the PRJ in the Omsk Pact which Ba’athist Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and communist Afghanistan would later join. An Arab Socialist take over in Egypt was sadly crushed by neighbouring Italian troops from Libya and Nasser was killed.


A brief détente between the US and the Reich occurred with the election of Joseph P. Kennedy as President as he was decidedly more anti-communist leaning and for a while the Red Scare returned due to his government’s propaganda even if it wasn’t as severe as in the 1940s. He was more friendly to the Reich but this stance led to quite some unpopularity among Democrat circles and he was forced to draw more support from the Republicans. He would be the first American President to visit the Reich and meet the Nazi leaders face to face. He also met with the new Duce. Alessandro Pavolini who had succeeded Benito Mussolini after the latter’s death of a heart attack in 1959 at the age of 75. The Italian regime had elected the popular Pavolini who had previously occupied several other posts, including minister of culture, and was notorious for his cruelty against opponents of the fascist regime. He was elected by the Grand Council of Fascism who favoured him over the older Count Ciano who had become somewhat disenfranchised with Hitler and the Nazis and he didn’t hide these sentiments and sought a more pro-American independent course and splitting of certain Balkan countries to form a “Mediterranean League”. These sentiments had arisen as early as 1939 and became stronger as Italy became a German puppet dependent on Germany for military aid as the war progressed and became worse for the Italians. This was deemed unacceptable and Mussolini’s latest favourite Pavolini, Ciano’s rival, became the new Duce. Under his leadership Italy would become a great power in its own right although he maintained friendly relations with the Nazis who remained in superpower status indisputably and would remain the dominant European country. The first step had been set with the discovery of oil in Libya in 1959. The colony subsequently received more and more settles as the Libyan economy grew. By 1970 Italians and smaller numbers of Greeks and Albanians would outnumber the indigenous Arabs and Bedouins 3:1, more so since the last revolt in 1957 had decimated the Libyans as Mussolini had ordered the use of disproportional retaliation for every dead Italian in the shape of napalm, chemical weapons and fire bombings. Pavolini met with Kennedy in Rome and tried to impress him with military parades as a show of Italian strength. Kennedy then continued his journey to Paris and Berlin. He also visited London to reassure the British of strong Anglo-American ties and reluctantly went to Omsk as well as Stalin was asking questions about his overtures toward Heydrich.
 
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Shorter update this time.


Chapter V: Order, Discipline and Rumbling behind the façade, 1964-1989


The détente between the Nazi regime and the US was short-lived as Joseph P. Kennedy lost his popularity for his fraternizing with Berlin and dissent among the ranks of the Democratic party grew. Kennedy therefore was not nominated as the Presidential candidate of the Democrats for the 1964 Presidential elections and was replaced by Hubert Humphrey who was a proponent of the old course and the Cold War with the Reich reached pre-détente peaks again very quickly. The end of the thaw was marked by the progress of the space race and the arms race in which both nations led alternatively. In space the Germans dominated. After the launch of Copernicus-1, the Germans had launched Copernicus-2 in 1955 which had brought the first living being, a chimpanzee, into space and the well designed re-entry vehicle had managed to bring the chimp back to earth safely. The pod landed in the Atlantic Ocean after two days in orbit with its parachutes. The chimp had been heavily trained and the mission had been conducted to research the effects of outer space on mammals without endangering humans, but with the intention of bringing a man into space in short order of course. Both the Copernicus-1 and 2 had collected valuable data on the circumstances in outer space such as radiation, temperature and space debris, all of which could be potentially dangerous. Copernicus-3 blew apart in the atmosphere but No.4 managed to get in high earth orbit and collect more data and take some (for the time) high resolution pictures. Several more probes were sent into outer space to explore further and by 1957 the Germans felt ready to bring a man into space. With the launch of the Copernicus-5 the Germans brought the first man into space, giving them their second first in the space race and a score of 2-0-0 against the US and the Soviets. NASA stood powerless as the Germans were years ahead in terms of rockets although the Americans caught up through sheer willpower. In 1960 they brought a man of their own into space. They were always slightly behind on the Germans which they couldn’t afford in this prestige contest. Where they lacked in missiles, the Americans were ahead in hypersonic aircraft which were capable of semi-orbit. These planes were attached as parasite craft to B-52 bombers. These planes could reach mach 7 and “bounced” of the atmosphere with their heat shield. The Germans once had a similar project but abandoned it as undoable. When launched in Florida these craft could bounce their way around the world and land in California with only short intermittent engine bursts once mach 7 was achieved. The one thing the Americans had on the Germans was their nuclear stockpile and bomber fleet with 27.000 nukes versus some 2.500 German ones. German missiles were technologically superior and more accurate but America possessed an enormous strategic bomber fleet of B-52s. To underline German superiority after the end of the thaw, the Germans launched a new series of missiles. They had launched Luna-1 in 1963 to explore the moon and had made accurate maps. With their new Colossus missiles, the Germans put a man on the moon in 1964, one of the largest undertakings in Reich history thus far. Between 1954 and 1964 the German space program’s budget had tripled, leading to enormous spending but it gave the Germans a lead and soon they were leaps ahead of the Americans and Soviets but this overspending on space programs and the military would lead to a massive overspending bubble within the next two decades.

The space race continued with exploratory probes sent to Mars and Venus throughout the 60s and an American Lunar landing. The Soviets maintained a more modest space program and instead focused on building permanently manned space stations and became experts in building the space-proof modules that space stations were made of. The largest one was over 100 metres in length and 280 metres wide with enormous solar panels stretching out like insects’ wings and was called Lunagrad as it was a small town in space with at least two dozen researches in space at any given time. American astronomers who saw the thing pass by as it was in orbit nicknamed it “Stalin’s space bug”. Very large research facilities for biomedical, botanist and other research were conducted such as research on the effect of weightlessness on organisms ranging from microorganisms and algae to dogs and primates was conducted along with radiological research. Later a joint US-USSR project would join an American module and a Soviet one and American scientists would exchange all kinds of data and make it an International Space Station. Because of ongoing space station building the Soviets also sought to build a reusable means of transport. The result would be the so-called Buran or space shuttle.

Stalin would not live to see it fly as technology wasn’t developed enough in the 1960s to build it yet. The Buran wouldn’t fly until 1980 or so. Stalin ruled as the Soviet Union’s Red Tsar as always when he suddenly collapsed after dinner on a winter evening on October 21st 1964 of a heart attack and died at the age of 85 which was a remarkable age considering that he lived his life in luxury. With all the food and drink he had available he should have had a heart attack much earlier. He was one of the last remnants of the 30s and 40s and the last of Europe’s great dictators to pass away as Hitler and Mussolini had already preceded him. It is said that he lived so long through sheer willpower and out of fear of what the Nazis might do if he passed away. The ensuing power struggle was over very quickly as Stalin had left hardly anyone (semi-)competent that could have succeeded him because they had all perished in his paranoia induced purges which had eliminated any competitors for power but one. Stalin was officially proclaimed dead a few days later on October 26th 1964 and a nation mourned. Under his tenure the USSR had achieved great heights and deep depths. Stalin had led the USSR through the horrors of the Great Patriotic War (or Fatherland War as the Germans call it) and had kept the nation together in its darkest hour and had left the largest standing army in the world and a superpower armed with atomic weapons and an advanced space program. His country was the second largest most industrialized nation, only surpassed by the US and the combined EC and had a free educational system and free healthcare and women’s emancipation. He hadn’t restored the Soviet Union to pre-war borders but he consoled himself with the fact that he had outlived his nemesis, Hitler. He however was also a brute dictator who had established a totalitarian regime, slaughtered some 45 million people and had established a police state with total control over the his subjects, the closest example of an Orwellian regime in the real world. Mao and Kim Il-Sung sent their condolences. Millions came to pay homage to Stalin one more time and some came to see their leader in the flesh. He was succeeded by Lazar Kaganovich or “Iron Lazar”, an old guard Stalinist, one of the few old guard communists left. He had Stalin’s body embalmed and interred in the mausoleum next to Lenin. He continued Stalin’s rigid economic policies and ruthlessly persecuted and exterminated his enemies much like Stalin had done and established a cult of personality surrounding him and Stalin. News reels in the US devoted time to the matter and the New York Times came with the article “Passing of a Titan”. Even German news sources paid some attention to Stalin’s passing.

In Europe there was a disturbance in the New Order. In 1970 large student protests against the fascists erupted in Rome. The older generation was generally supportive of the fascist regime as they remembered the Great War and the economic and political turmoil that had ravaged Italy afterward and how Mussolini had restored order. The younger generation hadn’t known this and didn’t see why the fascist regime had the right to suppress any free thought, art and the new pop culture and “rock and roll” which was actively suppressed. The Grand Council of Fascists ordered the uprising put down and dispatched tanks and troops to restore order in Rome. Student uprisings spread to Milan, Naples and Florence which was seen as a centre of rebelliousness as the pop and rock culture was most prevalent there. They were a reaction to the government’s violent response and unrest and discontent grew as parents went out on the streets to save their children which they considered more important. Pavolini declared martial law and order was restored although the fascist regime had something to think about. The first cracks in the seams of the European Nazi order were beginning to become visible.

Heydrich continued undeterred and ruthless as ever and crushed any dissent in Germany but the White Rose movement made a comeback regardless and the calculating Heydrich knew he had to do something to please the youth as he didn’t want them to make a scene like had happened in Rome which was widely publicized in the US and the Soviet Union. First Heydrich reacted by putting the Gestapo and the SD on the White Rose’s back but their popularity increased instead of decreasing. Reluctantly Heydrich allowed the youth a few basic freedoms and even allowed the British rock band The Rolling Stones to tour Germany in 1972. In the meantime he continued to build up his nuclear stockpile and the space program. The Germans launched several space probes to explore the solar system, most notably Mars and Venus but also the other planets. They also sent out a probe in 1975 with a message to any alien civilization. German satellites circled the globe and reconnaissance probes extensively mapped the Jovian and Saturnian moons with the prospect of establishing colonies there. Especially the Jovian moon Europa attracted their interest as it was theorized that their were oceans of liquid water under the surface. The cold war continued with Italy becoming the second nuclear power in Europe, much to Heydrich’s concern even though Pavolini reassured him of Italian friendship. The impatient Mussolini had pursued a small nuclear program to reassert Italy’s strength but had made little progress. Pavolini had continued the program and pushed it, resulting in a small bomb by 1972. In that year a 10 kiloton blast lit up the Libyan desert and provided a second sun. In 1979 Italy would test a 4 megaton warhead. Unlike Germany however Italy would not pursue a MAD deterrent and settled for a 150 warhead strong arsenal. Germany would show its dominance both to the US and Italy by detonating a 100 megaton warhead in 1975. It was meant as a propaganda stunt and a show of force as the weapon was impractical; it shattered windows as far away as Kiev and the floor of Heydrich’s palace in Germania trembled.
The strict order of the Nazi regime, military parades, naval shows, nuclear testing and an advanced space program hid the true nature of Nazi Germany. Behind the façade the regime was crumbling. The nuclear program was costing massive amounts of money (although the Nazis did achieve parity with the US) as was the space program. A lot of money and effort went into this while the economy crumbled under the weight and the infrastructure was aging and crumbling and discontent grew. In spite of all the Nazis achievements and power, their was a total lack of basic freedoms such as freedom of speech. The Nazi regime was oppressive and stagnating in their everlasting quest for more power and glory. In reality propaganda was becoming ineffective and the people was starting to question Nazi rule and why their rule was still necessary. Stalin was gone, the Reich was strong and Germany dominated Europe. They no longer needed the Nazis and wanted to be free again. This was amplified by growing dissent in the EC. In France a revolt broke out in France against the militarist Vichy regime and soon army units joined as they too wanted to shake off German rule and an end to the endless colonial wars in Africa for the preservation of North Africa. A joint police action by the EC with contributions from Italy, Spain, Germany, Romania and Hungary put down the revolt. This intervention was known as the Heydrich Doctrine, a deviation from the New Order wasn’t allowed. The remaining Slavs took the opportunity presented by Nazi overstretch and started another revolt which swept eastern Europe. The overspending bubble finally burst as military expenditure was upped even more, increasing the burden on the Reich’s economy. Heydrich’s sheer ruthlessness kept the Reich together but with his death in 1989, Germany had rough times ahead.
 
Chapter VI: Full Circle, 1989-2009


For the totalitarian regimes of the USSR and Nazi Germany it was time to come full circle. All great powers rise, have a zenith and the fall and neither of these two regimes was an exception. Germany possessed a fleet of nuclear powered submarines with the new Admiral Dönitz-class being the latest with 24 nuclear armed missiles with five 200 kiloton nuclear weapons each. Germany also possessed a carrier fleet, a large army and the world’s most advanced space program with missions for Mars and the Jovian moons on the drawing board. This however came at a cost and their was a burden for Germany. The German army had to keep the whole of Europe under control with a large military, air force and navy and Germany’s nuclear missile forces were constantly being pushed to maintain parity with the United States and the Soviet Union and by 1989 the Reich possessed an arsenal of 25.000 nuclear weapons by 1989. Because of all the overspending the economy was heavily burdened as was German society which became increasingly gloomy with increasing unemployment, lack of consumer products and a stagnant cultural life. Many Germans were becoming disenfranchised with the oppressive and militarist government as their prosperity decreased in favour of building nuclear weapons, expensive rockets and tanks. They were also becoming increasingly unenthusiastic about the “war to crush the degenerate Americans” that propaganda constantly blabbered about but which never came. The cost for so many programs and so much militarization and the need to keep unruly subjects in line, led to overspending an the economy stagnated as the Germans generally paid little attention to the needs of the consumers to keep up with the US as the Reich didn’t accept a second-class status. The Reich decreases in power as the Americans slowly but surely overtook the Reich on all fronts. By 1989 the decay was visible as many monuments and buildings were in serious need of maintenance and/or repair and had to be closed down for safety concerns. The closing of the massive Volkshalle was a prime example of the Reich’s decay. The iron-willed Heydrich had kept the Reich together by means of fear and force.

Heydrich was succeeded by Helmut Kohl who was a moderate and the Hitlerite wing of the party accused him of revisionism and Strasserism but most rulers saw the need for reform. In 1990 the revolts of eastern Europe spread to western Europe. The Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians and Danish all demanded independence as they had retained their sense of nationalism in spite of decades of Germanization. In The Hague, Brussels, Copenhagen and Oslo student protests erupted and these quickly grew to open revolt although the German army and the SS managed to contain these outbreaks of violence. On December 25th 1991 the Reichskommissariat of the Netherlands declared its independence and the German leadership didn’t respond. On April 5th 1992 the Germans recognised Dutch independence and included Wallonia into the new Dutch state. One things that the Germans had been successful in was creating a rift between the Walloons and Flemish by supporting Flemish nationalism and separate Dutch and Francophone education, promoting Flemish culture and widening the rift by keeping Walloons and Flemish apart. The Walloons declared their independence soon thereafter as did the Norwegians and Danes. The Reich was falling apart and the fall continued. Slavic uprisings in eastern Europe now went unchecked as many soldiers refused to fight to maintain the Reich and because the army was lacking funds due to the aforementioned overspending which caused a major government deficit but soldiers demanded pay. In 1993 the Germans organized referendums regarding independence and the last German forces left eastern Europe in 1995 which broke up in several new states almost immediately. Ukraine and Belarus emerged as independent nations for the first time in centuries. The Caucasus had been Russian dominated before the war but broke up into several new states. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh and Dagestan. In spite of this Germany remained the dominant European nation and Europe remained heavily German influenced. The Germans were the only large nuclear power and all these new nations joined the EC for protection against the USSR which was already looking eagerly to retake their long lost lands bring their old brethren into their fold. The new Slavic nations would have nothing of it as they were independent for the first time in centuries. Germany remained large as the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine west of the Dnieper, Austria, Czechia, Lorraine and Alsace had remained part of the Reich as they had been heavily Germanized through mass expulsions and genocide. The Nazis had murdered tens of millions of Slavs, gipsies, homosexuals, mentally ill and Jews had been systematically murdered. Still, the new nations preferred a now democratizing Reich over the still Stalinist USSR. By 1997 all German forces had retreated and the NSDAP organized the first mostly free elections (although some social-democrat participants were barred and the communist party remained outlawed). The NSDAP emerged as the largest party as no one had known anything else but Nazi rule. They reached 40% of votes. In spite of attempts to achieve the opposite, Christianity was still strong and the Christian-Democrats achieved 35% of votes and the social-democrats got some 22% of popular vote as the social-democrats had made a resurgence as the younger generation voted for whatever the established order didn’t want them to vote for. The NSDAP - Christian-Democrat – Nationalist coalition excluded the social-democrats from the government as they didn’t like their progressive stance.

The USSR wasn’t doing much better. The centrally planned economy was inefficient and cracks were becoming visible in the framework although Kaganovich forcibly held the the Soviet Union together through Stalinist terror tactics. Here the decay was even more visible. The Soviet economy was based around heavy industry and totally ignored consumer needs, leading to lacking exports to foreign countries. Kaganovich attempted to turn his country into an autarky but that only increased shortages and famines. The Soviet Union’s industrial complex was aging with old machinery and a badly maintained infrastructure which was highlighted by several industrial accidents such as the Kramatorsk Chemical Plant Disaster in which a chemical complex had exploded and had let loose a cloud of toxic gasses, killing tens of thousands. The Reich luckily avoided such incidents with tight supervision. It was the most militarized nation on the planet with an army of 12 million men in active service and an air force to match with some 35.000 aircraft to patrol the skies over the Soviet Union. Poverty increased and prosperity decreased as the economy was unable to supply the people with even the most basic of needs. The USSR was a decrepit state which kept up appearances with massive rallies, military parades and a space program to match. This was all just a façade as the USSR was nearing bankruptcy. Kaganovich died in 1991 and witnessed the Soviet Union’s disintegration but hadn’t taken action in the quarter century of his rule.

The USSR responded in the opposite way and Gennady Zyuganov, Kaganovich’s successor, tightened control in his own country although other countries started to distance themselves from the Soviet Union as that nation became weaker and more isolationist. The PRC became more reluctant to take orders from Omsk. The Maoist leader Hua Guofeng was deposed in a palace coup as the PRC’s economy disintegrated from years long of inefficient central planning and suffered the same ailments as the Soviet economy such as an aging industrial base, a too one sided economy and massive administrative errors such as too much or too little of certain products. China produced enough coal, steel and crude oil but little in terms of consumer products and food. The 1991 famine was the trigger for the rise of a reformist regime. In 1994 the PRC achieved an economic growth of 6% after extensive reforms such as liberalization of agriculture, the consumer industry and several smaller sectors. The new government also stimulated small and medium-sized businesses with state funding. This was called Socialism with Chinese characteristics and was heavily denounced by the USSR as revisionism and heresy. In that same year the PRC detonated a nuclear weapon to assert its independence. Zyuganov let it pass and focused on retaining power and absorbing more power as the cult of personality reached new heights and the USSR new depths as it turned into an impoverished third world run-of-the-mill dictatorship with a huge but aging army and an arsenal of nuclear missiles which were left rusting in their silos. The USSR mostly stayed together out of propaganda induced fear of what would happen if each Republic went its own way and because of the all feared NKVD which housed the ideological fanatics.

South China was also democratizing by the late 1980s. Pressure was exerted by the people much like in Europe but in the shape of rather more non-violent student protests and later large peaceful protests as the Chinese had been taught respect and discipline as part of their culture. The Chinese government acquiesced to demands for more democracy. For the previous four decades China had been a pseudo-fascist regime which controlled every aspect of Chinese life and had made South China a dominant power with a 7 million men strong army, some 500 nuclear weapons and a reasonably well growing economy although corruption was still a problem in spite of brutal crackdowns on corrupt officials. The fascist regime had nationalized key industries but had otherwise allowed a great deal of market working although they supported corporatism, leading to cartels, price agreements which caused less competition and more balance although economic growth was slowed down a lot. Still, a growth of 6.7% had been achieved with German investment in the period 1953-1989. Education was also good and illiteracy had dropped to 6% but with knowledge came power and the lower classes became more and more aware of their power and the political leverage they had on the Nationalist regime. With the ascension of a more moderate regime in the north, democratization was justified and in 1995 South China organized free elections. China still remained somewhat authoritarian with a powerful president and a somewhat militarized society but there was improvement. There were two major parties, the Nationalist KMT and the socialist/social-democrat Democratic Peoples’ Party or DPP for short. Other parties were the liberals, greens and a plethora of conservative, religious, traditional society. With the ascension of a more moderate regime in the north there was talk of reunification although they way was long and hard. The North still lagged behind in infrastructure and in spite of reforms, there was still a lot of poverty and the economy was only beginning to recover of five decades of Stalinist central planning. There is also the cultural barrier to consider as many northerners are still adjusting to the opening of their country to foreign influences as there were so many and all they had known was Grandfather Mao. A tentative date for reunification has been set at 2012.

Luckily for the empires of today there are no barbarian hordes to tear them down, As of 2009 the German Republic as it is now known is on its way to superpower status once again with a revived space program. The now democratic Europe is ascending. With the federalization of Europe’s colonial empires in Asia, the former “untermenschen” now received full representation in the European Community and reaped from the benefits that Europe had made over their backs such as a strong, versatile economy with lots of resources and high-tech gadgets. The space race was back but now as a joint EC project as Germany didn’t want to make the same mistakes again and bankrupt themselves all over again. Relations with the US continued to be somewhat chilly as Europe was still a little authoritarian whereas the Americans had become more and more liberal and leftist. Both the EC and the US are planning manned missions to Mars by 2012 and Lunar bases somewhere around 2025, 2020 or even as early as 2018. The horrors the Nazi and communist regimes had brought. Their legacy was tens of millions of deaths but also strong nations and now the Reich has come full circle. The Nazi regime started out as a quest to right old wrongs and re-establish German pride and dominance in Europe. The Nazis achieved it, fell and then Germany arose from the ashes like a phoenix and seems destined for a bright future.

Oh and

The End
 
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