The Children's War
- Thread starter Faeelin
- Start date
joatsimeon@aol.com
Banned
Faeelin said:
-- I found the Polish superguerillas a bit hard to take, and their no-go area _in Poland_. Given the actual performance of the Home Army.
Also, the reasons given for the relative lack of domestic servants in Germany seemed a bit weird.
As Mr. Stirling says, some _rather_ improbable bits, but I have to give it points for showing a long-term-survival Nazi regime in it's full glorious corruption and idiocy, rather than the usual power fantasies about Nazis conquering the world, colonizing the planets, draining the Mediterranean, etc., etc.
Bruce
Bruce
My favourite AH novel! I read it twice so far. There is a nice undercurrent of humour in it, particularly when Peter and Karl try their respective propaganda offensives in America. I didn't feel it dragged at any point.
Did you know there is a sequel? A Change of Regime. It is shorter but more expensive than The Children's War; it looks like The Children's War was not a commercial success, as A Change of Regime is self-published, with profits going to charity (Amnesty International, I think).
As to the plausibility of the Home Army's survival, consider how much success America and Britain are having quelling the resistance in Iraq. Iraq is a single flat country occupied by nations who are trying to bring freedom and democracy. The Germans, with a smaller population and a lower level of technology than the US, have had to occupy an entire continent (with handy mountains for guerillas) filled with people who know they will be enslaved or exterminated under German rule. If the people suffering occupation decide not to lie down and take it quietly, I can believe the Germans would have problems. They are only human after all, not the Ubermensch that Nazi ideology painted them as. Granted the Home Army must have had wise leadership coupled with a certain amount of luck, but is that implausible? Perhaps the Germans were distracted by events elsewhere and took their eye off the ball long enough for the Home Army to become competent.
A Change of Regime mentions that the Reich was at war for a long time and also that the whole of Eastern Europe is still dangerous for Germans, which to me implies that there must be guerilla armies and resistance movements elsewhere in Eastern Europe (which includes the Balkans). Since America has technically always been at war with the Reich, despite the nuclear stalemate, perhaps the guerillas were kept supplied by the Americans via Turkey (I notice the European part of Turkey - including Constantinople - belongs to the Reich on the book's map). By the time the events in the book take place the Americans have lost interest in the war, but the Home Army have workable defences in place against the Germans, including their terrorist bomb network (including atomic bombs), infiltrators within the German security services and targeted assassinations, so they have a certain amount of security.
Did you know there is a sequel? A Change of Regime. It is shorter but more expensive than The Children's War; it looks like The Children's War was not a commercial success, as A Change of Regime is self-published, with profits going to charity (Amnesty International, I think).
As to the plausibility of the Home Army's survival, consider how much success America and Britain are having quelling the resistance in Iraq. Iraq is a single flat country occupied by nations who are trying to bring freedom and democracy. The Germans, with a smaller population and a lower level of technology than the US, have had to occupy an entire continent (with handy mountains for guerillas) filled with people who know they will be enslaved or exterminated under German rule. If the people suffering occupation decide not to lie down and take it quietly, I can believe the Germans would have problems. They are only human after all, not the Ubermensch that Nazi ideology painted them as. Granted the Home Army must have had wise leadership coupled with a certain amount of luck, but is that implausible? Perhaps the Germans were distracted by events elsewhere and took their eye off the ball long enough for the Home Army to become competent.
A Change of Regime mentions that the Reich was at war for a long time and also that the whole of Eastern Europe is still dangerous for Germans, which to me implies that there must be guerilla armies and resistance movements elsewhere in Eastern Europe (which includes the Balkans). Since America has technically always been at war with the Reich, despite the nuclear stalemate, perhaps the guerillas were kept supplied by the Americans via Turkey (I notice the European part of Turkey - including Constantinople - belongs to the Reich on the book's map). By the time the events in the book take place the Americans have lost interest in the war, but the Home Army have workable defences in place against the Germans, including their terrorist bomb network (including atomic bombs), infiltrators within the German security services and targeted assassinations, so they have a certain amount of security.
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Constantinople
Banned
lets bring this book up again.
I have it, but I had trouble finishing it. What exactly happens in A Change of Regime? Does it ever explain what the rest of eastern europe is like? Does the reich collapes?
I have it, but I had trouble finishing it. What exactly happens in A Change of Regime? Does it ever explain what the rest of eastern europe is like? Does the reich collapes?
Would love to get the sequel to Children's War.Anyone know where I can get it?joatsimeon@aol.com
Banned
-- well, the fact is that it's sorta unlikely people would do that. If you pass off someone else's kids as yours, you're splitting the inheritance (including imponderables like pull) among more people, thus depriving your own genetic descendants of a share. Not very Darwinian.
Plus, what's so intolerable about having 4 or 5 kids? My mother had 4, and I know plenty of people in that range among my siblings, cousins, etc. My grandmother was one of _13_. Cultural imperatives can shift rapidly.
And secondly, there are things like blood tests to determine paternity. They don't work as well as DNA comparisons, of course, but they work well enough that it would be extremely dangerous. Plus the simple solution of sterilizing the domestics.
Hitler, if you read his Table Talk, had a thing about chattel slavery: he was for it.(*) I'd expect a lot of it in a world dominated by his followers.
(*) hence the giant sign over the Krupp works during the war: "Slavs are Slaves!"
joatsimeon@aol.com
Banned
-- the Home Army in "The Children's War" are _holding territory_ which the German army doesn't try to go into. That does not work; ask them in Faluja. Guerillas have to avoid combat except on their own terms to survive -- they run away or hide when confronted with superior force.
More generally, guerilla warfare only works under certain special circumstances; it's the weapon of the weak, and as such it generally it fails.
In particular it fails if the occupying power is willing and able to simply liquidate the entire population. There are no Tasmanian Aboriginie terrorists or guerillas.
As Mao said, the guerilla swims among the people like a fish in water. If there's no water, the fish dies. About 25% of the population of Yugoslavia died during 1941-45; extrapolate the trend a few years.
In point of fact, you rarely have to go that far. You just have to show that you _will_ go that far and have the power to do so. Then the locals give up, and themselves kill or grass up the irreconcilables, for sheer survival's sake. Plenty of people talk about fighting to the death, but few do it. Most human beings will only support a struggle if they feel there's a reasonable chance of winning.
If this weren't so, slavery and other forms of oppression would be impossible, and history demonstrates that they are.
joatsimeon@aol.com
Banned
Throughout history, domestic-servant slaves have been overwhelmingly female, for obvious reasons.
In fact, if you look at the Iliad, you'll see that the majority of _slaves_, period, were females -- something born out by the Mycenaean Linear B texts, which show groups of hundreds of slave women working at textile production and so forth, but comparatively few slave males. This seems to be the default state; it was common in Islamic slave systems too, for example.
It is possible to hold large numbers of males in slavery -- the Romans did it -- but it requires a much more elaborate infrastructure of control.
Also, women survive extreme oppression where men die.
A notable case is the slave regime in the West Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries; the planters bought slaves who were 2/3 males, but the actual labor gangs on the plantations (and nearly all the domestics) had a female majority.
The men started out more numerous, but despite the perils of preindustrial childbirth the women soon outnumbered them. The men took sick more often, fell victim to malnutrition and related ailments more often, and committed suicide, including "suicide by resistance" far more often too.
Hence the absence of female domestics in "The Children's War" universe is striking, and, I think, implausible.
In fact, if you look at the Iliad, you'll see that the majority of _slaves_, period, were females -- something born out by the Mycenaean Linear B texts, which show groups of hundreds of slave women working at textile production and so forth, but comparatively few slave males. This seems to be the default state; it was common in Islamic slave systems too, for example.
It is possible to hold large numbers of males in slavery -- the Romans did it -- but it requires a much more elaborate infrastructure of control.
Also, women survive extreme oppression where men die.
A notable case is the slave regime in the West Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries; the planters bought slaves who were 2/3 males, but the actual labor gangs on the plantations (and nearly all the domestics) had a female majority.
The men started out more numerous, but despite the perils of preindustrial childbirth the women soon outnumbered them. The men took sick more often, fell victim to malnutrition and related ailments more often, and committed suicide, including "suicide by resistance" far more often too.
Hence the absence of female domestics in "The Children's War" universe is striking, and, I think, implausible.
Faeelin
Banned
Were there none? IIRC, the main character slept with another slave or two as a servant, didn't he?
joatsimeon@aol.com
Banned
-- there were some, but it was explicitly stated that they were rare. Given Nazi ideology and their actual actions -- they went to the trouble of deporting hundreds of thousands of female domestic workers to Germany right in the middle of the war -- I would expect them to be ubiquitous after a German victory.
Remember that there were over a million and a half domestic servants in Germany in the 1930's; it was one of the major occupational categories. It's only after WWII that servants became a rarity.
In fact, I would have expected something fairly close to classic chattel slavery to emerge as a major form of labor use. It started to during the war, with 'trading' in forced laborers.
Where does it say that? It's not the impression I got from the book.
Max Sinister
Banned
I guess they used only or predominantly males for slave work in the mines, which had an even higher death rate...
joatsimeon@aol.com
Banned
-- the main protagonist in the book was a male domestic servant for much of the story. And English, at that. Doubly unlikely.
Nazi ideology was mad, but they took it seriously, and they always regarded the English as they did the Dutch or Scandinavians; ie., essentially racially identical to Germans.
(For once, they actually had something; genetically speaking the English _are_ Germans/Netherlanders/Frisians. Ghu alone knows what the "Race and Resettlement" bureaucrats would have made of the Welsh.)
"Nordic" occupied countries were treated differently from, say, Slavic ones and the difference would almost certainly have become more pronounced if they'd won. The Nazi higher echelons regarded them as potentially valuable sources of human breeding-stock to augment German numbers, which was a eugenic obsession of theirs.
The highest probability is that they (and their populations, minus the Jews, of course) would eventually have been incorporated in Greater Germany and treated as "honorary Germans", with intense attempts to Germanize them linguistically and culturally and to recruit them as settlers in the East. A start was made on that during the war, in fact. It would probably have worked, too, if they'd won.
As a Swede said during the conflict: "If the democracies win, we're a democracy. If the Germans win, we're Nordic."
Peter's enslavement was a part of the punishment for his "crimes". The English are Aryans, albeit non-Germanic Aryans (they are "mixed-race"), but Peter is reclassified as an Untermensch. As Dr. Lederman explains "Your actions have shown your true blood", ". . . you must have some Jewish or other foul blood in you, as do so many of you English."
He was employed initially as a shop-worker as part of an experiment to see whether criminals could be successfully reformed by methods that in OTL would be called behaviourism. In order to see whether or not their methods had worked, Peter had to be employed in a position of responsibility. Karl's wife wanted a domestic servant, but he couldn't afford one, so he pulled rank in order to take Peter from his previous employer at a low price.
So this Englishman ending up as a domestic servant was the result of a series of fluke events, not something common in TTL.
Actually, the genetic contribution of the Anglo-Saxons to the modern English race is negligible. Both the English and Celtic peoples of the British Isles are genetically the descendents of the Pre-Celtic ancient Britons.
IIRC, Nazi policy in TTL in the years after the war *was* to Germanise the English - Peter's parents and brother are "Germanised" Englishmen - but the attempt failed due to German favoritism towards other Germans and due to the dislike of the English population at large to having a foreign culture imposed upon them. At some point, Nazi ideologues decided that the persistant troublesomeness of the English must be due to their being of impure blood.
The sending of young British males to Germany to work as labourers - seen at the beginning of the book - was something the Germans had planned to implement after the conquest of Britain. It was concieved as an attempt to Germanise the British but in the book it has ended up being more about supplying Germany with cheap labour.
According to the map at the end of the book, Britain *is* part of Germany, classed alongside northern France, Poland and presumably Denmark and Norway as a "New Reich" area. Ireland is an "Autonomous Region" and Sweden is a "Protectorate".
I may be imagining this, but I think it says somewhere in the book that the Germans take very little interest in Wales.
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But one should also remember that a fair number of Polish and Slavic orphans were adopted by Germans in the Third Reich. Now they had to look German enough but it did happen.
In fact it was prevalent enough for the History Channel to do a documentary on it. So by extension it wouldn't be too incredibly implausible for a few Germans to have Slav children. Except they'd be hiding that fact and not really flaunting it.
Also, IIRC Hitler had a soft spot for the British. In his follow up to Mein Kampf, Zweites Buch, he envisions the British Empire allying itself to the Greater German Reich. Not being fully subjugated by it. Admittedly the fact that the British decided to fight the Reich means that Hitler's whacked out vision of a final showdown between the Reich and the United States, with the British Empire on the Reich's side, never came to fruition.
In my own humble opinion at least the British Empire might be kept around as a puppet state.
In fact it was prevalent enough for the History Channel to do a documentary on it. So by extension it wouldn't be too incredibly implausible for a few Germans to have Slav children. Except they'd be hiding that fact and not really flaunting it.
Also, IIRC Hitler had a soft spot for the British. In his follow up to Mein Kampf, Zweites Buch, he envisions the British Empire allying itself to the Greater German Reich. Not being fully subjugated by it. Admittedly the fact that the British decided to fight the Reich means that Hitler's whacked out vision of a final showdown between the Reich and the United States, with the British Empire on the Reich's side, never came to fruition.
In my own humble opinion at least the British Empire might be kept around as a puppet state.
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