The Fall of Goering and Udet's Mediterranean Strategy of 1940-41 (yay another TL)

China was a fairly new addition to the constant struggle between fascism and communism. The new Peoples’ Republic of China was led by none other than the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, who turned out to be a similarly ruthless dictator as his patron Stalin. The latter had an interest in a strong China as a counterbalance against both influence from the Anglo sphere powers and the Nazi regime which was supporting the Republic of China on Taiwan under Chiang Kai-Shek again as their Japanese ally had been thoroughly cut down to size by the Americans.

Like in the Soviet Union, China became a highly centralized state and the economy became a planned economy on the Stalinist model although China didn’t have to do it alone like the USSR had to in the 1930s. Stalin had built up his country with almost entirely internal means, creating an autarky. Mao wanted to do the same. He had a large distrust for experts as he thought them to be intellectuals (who he distrusted a lot) with liberal and fascist sympathies. He could hardly say this about Soviet experts sent by Stalin and he reluctantly let them in although this arguably saved China from some of his more zany schemes. Among them were building small furnaces on the collective farms which would be fed pig iron lumps and which would produce steel and make China the greatest steel producer in Mao’s vision. Soviet technical experts persuaded him that this was a very bad idea. This was the beginning of the First Seven Year Plan which would see a great influx of Soviet men, materiel and resources. Mao learned from Stalin’s favourite methods and started using anti-communist prisoners for his projects as slaves. Soon railroads and roads connected the major cities along with modern communications. Vast industrial complexes similar to those around Magnitogorsk and Moscow were built around cities like Harbin and produced modern machinery such as tractors, but also tanks. It turned out that China had the world’s largest coal reserves and massive mining projects were created out of scratch, with many deaths as a result due to lack of decent safety measures. In 1949, a team of Soviet geologists discovered the Daqing oilfield in Manchuria. In seven years, the production of coal, steel and pig iron doubled or even tripled. According to Chinese figures, the heavy industry sector had achieved 112% of its preset aims. This most likely wasn’t true, but production increases were enormous, new production processes were invented and China was modernized overall to the level of the USSR. China’s east coast where most major cities were, was electrified. The army also benefitted from this.

The Peoples’ Liberation Army, or PLA for short, saw an influx of equipment that was sold for bottom prices by Stalin. The new IS series tanks and also the highly successful T-34 entered service and soon Chinese made copies came off the assembly lines. The IS by now had met its opponent in newer German models, but still ranked among the best tank designs. Its 122 mm gun was powerful and its armour nearly impenetrable for the standard 50 and 75 mm anti-tank guns of the day. The new T-54 was even more powerful with 203 mm armour plating of high quality steel and a 100 mm gun which, although smaller in calibre than the IS 122 mm gun, had a higher armour penetrating capability. Something similar was happening in Korea albeit at a smaller scale than in China and the USSR. This was a build-up for war, a war that wouldn’t come, not during Stalin’s lifetime anyway.

Besides the atomic bomb project, Hitler ordered Plan Z to be restarted with several modifications. The new Plan Z was formulated in 1945 and now planned for the following ships to be built by 1962: six H-class battleships, twelve aircraft carriers, three battlecruisers, eleven heavy cruisers, sixty-six light cruisers, one hundred destroyers and five hundred U-boats of the new, modern Type XXI long ranged type which outclassed all other existing diesel-electric submarines without exceptions. This new model had a new engine that allowed it to remain submerged permanently due to a special chemical reaction that created the necessary oxygen for the diesel engines. This design was also among the more silent submarine designs in the world and was hardly audible to the existing anti-submarine technology and often wasn’t heard by patrolling destroyers until too late which frequently led to a war fever among crews as they feared that if the Germans wanted to attack, the torpedo had already been launched. This was one of Hitler’s many grand schemes besides his reconstruction of Berlin into his world capital of Germania and his new enthusiasm to achieve nuclear power for the Reich after learning of the successful American Trinity test. The new H-class battleship with a weight of 62.500 tons and a main battery of eight 406 mm (16 inch guns) was a daunting opponent, even more so when the designers upgraded the armour with the new Lion-class and Iowa-classes as new opponents. Learning from past mistakes, the fire control and communication centres of the ship were moved below where the 295 mm armour belt protected them. The aircraft carriers were of a completely new design and were renamed the Hermann Goering-class after his final demise in 1949 of a cerebral haemorrhage. They were based on the highly successful Essex-class. This would give Germany a big navy although still outnumbered by the USN in everything except U-boats in which German designers held the lead.

Nazi prestige, however, culminated in Germania, Hitler’s megalomaniac project to remake Berlin. Soon engineers found, however, that the soil of Berlin was unfit, but Hitler insisted and therefore immensely deep foundations had to be laid. A new Olympic stadium was built which could fit a crowd of 400.000 people along with the Volkshalle, a two hundred metre high dome in which Hitler could address 180.000 people simultaneously. It had a bronze eagle on top which, instead of the traditional swastika, held an earth ball which signified Nazi dominance over the world. The stairs were flanked by the statues of the two titans Atlas and Tellus who carried the heavens and the earth respectively. Inside, twenty-four metre tall Doric columns made out of marble supported the ceiling and behind Hitler’s stand where he addressed crowds, a twenty-four metre golden eagle stood. This building was the most magnanimous and the epitome of Nazi megalomania and of the world capital Germania, the centre of Nazism and it was envisioned as a shrine to future Nazis with a symbolic meaning that would be similar to the meaning the St. Peter Basilica had to Roman Catholics. It was truly ambitious. The other buildings weren’t unimpressive though. A one hundred metre tall triumphal arch spanned the road on the east-west axis where most government buildings were. There was also the equally impressive north-south axis. The façade of Hitler’s palace was 700 metres long. Munich and Nuremberg would be recreated in a similar way with Speer’s marble and granite giants with Munich, for example, having a Roman temple style monument to those who had died in the 1923 coup attempt and a large skyscraper with a marble eagle perched on top. Very soon, Germany had the largest concentration of neo-classicist and baroque architecture in Europe, if not the world, with only Italy coming close as Mussolini was attempting to recreate ancient Rome in fascist style.

The Cold War had already sparked an arms race and the space race also began in earnest when the Germans successfully brought man’s first artificial satellite in orbit in 1950. The ballistic missile program had taken off in the 1930s as these weapons were not restricted by the Treaty of Versailles. Great leaps had been made since this field had become popular in the 1920s when rockets could barely achieve an altitude of 100 metres. The A4 missile (A for Aggregate series) had already achieved semi-orbit in 1944 and had a range of 320 kilometres and was able to carry a one tonne warhead which could be a conventional warhead but also a chemical or biological one filled with nerve agents of which the Nazi regime had the largest stockpile or anthrax (nuclear payloads were still far too large). These rockets were fuelled with a liquid propellant of ethanol and liquid oxygen which could propel it to speeds of thousands of miles per hour at an altitude of 88 kilometres where no weapon on Earth could shoot it down. The impact of this weapon was inevitable once it had been launched although its guidance system of gyroscopes and gyroscopic accelerometers was grossly inaccurate and unsuitable for military targets and certainly not hardened facilities. This rocket was to be used as a terror weapon only and was also a test bed for future designs of Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists who were the leaders in their field as of the 1940s. The program had eventually led to the A9/A10 was a two stage rocket which stood 41 metres tall and weighed in at over 100 tonnes and was able to reach New York, Washington, Sverdlovsk and Beijing with a projected range of over 10.000 kilometres. It, along with the A11 that would follow, had the potential to bring a satellite payload into orbit which happened in 1950 as planned. This new super weapon could hit the eastern seaboard of the US and Washington therefore started its own program although it would take them years to catch up as Germany launched the first manned flight into space in 1953 and landed a man on the moon in 1959. The space race was definitely on.

For both the USSR and the Reich it was time to ascend to superpower status as well. In 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. The test was called RDS-1 which was an acronym of First Lightning or, allegedly, Russia Does it Herself which would have been ironic as the Soviets, like the Germans, received a lot of information from espionage in the US and not through their own research. The test was a success nonetheless as the design was almost a full copy of the Trinity design or implosion design as it is officially known. With a yield of 20 kilotons, it was equally powerful. The Nazis, however, made it very clear that they had other weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. Hitler had no qualms of letting anthrax and nerve gas rain down on Soviet cities such as Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and even as far away as Sverdlovsk and Omsk with his rockets and new Ju 390 long range bombers which had a range of 10.000 kilometres and could strike at any Soviet city, even as far away as Vladivostok. Stalin knew that Hitler, being in the mental state that he was in during the late 1940s, would probably live up to this threat and postponed his plans for revenge even further until it was too late and the task of avenging the loss in the Great Patriotic War fell in the hands of his successor. He had built up too long for his vengeance war and had made a lot of propaganda and now the Soviet Union’s chance was gone, perhaps forever. Hitler tested his own nuclear weapon in 1950 and it achieved an incredible yield of 22 kilotons. This test was perhaps the most gruesome of all as Hitler ordered it to be tested on a concentration camp with Slav prisoners to see what effects of a nuclear blast and the radiation would have on the human body cheaply. Several thousands of inmates would die directly from the blast while many thousands more would die of radiation disease and severe burns while German doctors, among them Josef Mengele or Doctor Death, who would conduct a great many gruesome experiments on his irradiated victims. Hitler himself saw the test and was astonished, claiming euphorically that he had the power of God at his fingertips now and that no one would dare to challenge the Reich ever again. This was perhaps one of the only moments that Hitler became emotional about anything else than his monomaniac obsession with racial purity.

America, however, tested an even more powerful weapon in 1952 with their Ivy Mike test. The 62-ton "Mike" device was essentially a building that resembled a factory rather than a weapon. It has been reported that Russian engineers referred to Mike as a "thermonuclear installation". At its center, a very large cylindrical thermos flask or cryostat, held the cryogenic deuterium-tritium fusion fuel. A regular fission bomb (the "primary") at one end was used to create the conditions needed to initiate the fusion reaction. The device was designed by Richard Garwin, a student of Enrico Fermi, on the suggestion of Edward Teller. It had been decided that nothing other than a full-scale test would validate the idea of the Teller-Ulam design, and Garwin was instructed to use very conservative estimates when designing the test, and that it need not be deployable. The primary stage was a TX-5 boosted fission bomb in a separate space on top of the assembly (so it would not freeze, rendering it inoperable). The "secondary" fusion stage used liquid deuterium–tritium despite the difficulty of handling this material, because this fuel simplified the experiment, and made the results easier to analyze. Running down the center of the flask which held it was a cylindrical rod of plutonium (the "sparkplug") to ignite the fusion reaction. Surrounding this assembly was a five-ton (4.5 tonne) natural uranium "tamper". The exterior of the tamper was lined with sheets of lead and polyethylene foam, which formed a radiation channel to conduct X-rays from the primary to secondary. (The function of X-rays was to hydrodynamically compress the secondary, increasing the density and temperature of the deuterium–tritium to the levels needed to sustain the thermonuclear reaction, and compressing the sparkplug to supercritical ignition.) The outermost layer was a steel casing 10-12 inches (25-30 cm) thick. The entire assembly, nicknamed "Sausage", measured 80 inches (2.03 m) in diameter and 244 inches (6.19 m) in height and weighed about 54 tons.

With a yield of approximately 10.4 megatons, the test was an amazing success. Destruction was caused for miles around and the atoll of Elugelab which was the test site, was wiped off the earth. It was just a test to find out whether fusion worked and soon the scientists would begin working on a deployable version which would be tested in 1955. Hitler responded by ordering his scientists to build him one of these super bombs as well although the Nazis wouldn’t achieve fusion weapons until 1962. Another result was that Hitler decided to ‘give’ the bomb to Italy which had its own nuclear energy project. Hitler donated the Italian team a non-functional nuclear warhead which would have had a yield of around 25 kilotons which gave the Italians something to work with. In 1954, they successfully tested a 40 kiloton device in the Libyan desert, making Italy the country to have the strongest first test in history.

This era would also see the deaths of three great dictators. Stalin died first on March 5th 1953 in his dacha near Sverdlovsk of a stroke, leaving his underlings to fight for power. The more reform minded candidates such as Khrushchev were removed quickly enough by the Stalinists who wanted to keep the USSR ‘disciplined’, highly militarized and ready for a war with the Nazis. The task of taking up the imperial robes fell to Vyacheslav Molotov who became the new secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union while Beria became premier and Bulganin took over his position as head of the Peoples’ Commissariat for Internal Affairs, better known as the widely feared NKVD. The second to die was Hitler who fell from power in 1955 at the age of 66 after cancer had eaten up his body just like it had his mother’s. Research was conducted on how to combat this disease, but for the Führer it came too late. By now, Hitler was senile and insane and others took care of day to day affairs as he was deemed incapable of decision making although he remained the official leader of Nazi Germany to keep up appearances. An uneasy truce had remained in place during his lifetime, but a fierce power struggle erupted among the Nazi leadership now that he was gone. Himmler perished first as he returned by plane from the Crimea where he had been on vacation in a dacha formerly belonging to a high ranking communist party member. His plane blew up in mid air and leader of the Gestapo, the ruthless Reinhard Heydrich who was his second in command, is still expected from this although the evidence is only circumstantial at best with a lot of it locked up in bunkers deep under Berlin with access for certain privileged people only (read: high party members). The Nazis called it sabotage by restive Ukrainian elements. With Himmler dead, Heydrich took over his SS and used it to purge the party. Hess and Bormann were killed and Goebbels was intimidated. He had little following and with Goering dead, the Luftwaffe was in hands of Udet who was apolitical. In 1955, Heydrich took up the mantle of Hitler and became the new Führer and with his SS, Gestapo and SD networks, he had more power and control than any other candidate could have ever dreamed of. The last to die was Mussolini who died in 1958 of a heart attack at the age of 75 after, ironically, having visited Hitler’s tomb in Linz. He was succeeded by the pro-German Alessandro Pavolini who was elected by the Grand Council of Fascists over Count Galleazo Ciano who was les popular. A new age could begin.
 
BOOM. The end. Sorry for the ending if you don't like it, but I was in a very dystopic mood when I wrote this.



Chapter VIII: Reaching for the Stars, Heydrich’s Tenure, The Fall of Fascism & Communism and the rise of China, 1960-2009


Heydrich was now left in charge of Europe and although his country was a superpower, the US still overpowered the Nazis by far in terms of nuclear weapons with five times as many nuclear weapons as the Germans had in their possessions. Heydrich therefore decided to shift the emphasis definitively to the space program which promised to yield greater rewards and boost German prestige, Germany’s technological base and Germany’s scientific progress more than the nuclear weapons program although Germany would still acquire hydrogen bombs in 1962. Having put a man in space and on the moon, new goals needed to be created and space stations and orbital platforms were among them, with use as a weapon in mind of course. The Germans began constructing their first true space station in 1960 and it would see completion by 1964 when it would be inaugurated on what would have been Hitler’s 75th birthday (had he still been alive) which Heydrich made a national holiday. The space station was 100 metres long and at least 200 metres wide with solar panels stretching out into space to capture that solar energy that provided it with the power needed to run. It had several laboratories where experiments were conducted to test the effects of zero gravity on organisms ranging from microorganisms to rodents and even plant life and to test the effect of prolonged exposure of the human body to zero gravity and to develop ways to combat the problems that were the result of prolonged stays in space in preparation for the lunar base that was to be built.

It was another success in the Nazi space program which was the most advanced space program anywhere in the world. Another secret installation was also under construction in low earth orbit. It was an orbital platform armed with nuclear missiles that could strike at any place on earth at any time. Heydrich put this top secret project under his direct jurisdiction to ensure its secrecy. Naturally, the Germans weren’t planning on publicizing any of this as the Americans would surely try to stop it or even shoot it down although, arguably, American missiles of the late 1960s were not nearly accurate enough to do that. The effort of building this orbital weapon was classified above top secret by the Gestapo. American intelligence efforts to infiltrate this part of the Nazi space program failed miserably and they wouldn’t find out what it was until it was too late. This very obviously wasn’t a propaganda stunt, but a serious attempt to do something about the enormous inequality in firepower between the US and German nuclear arsenals and create a weapon with which the Germans could strike at the heart of the United States with impunity as anti-satellite missiles were yet to be invented as the guidance systems for such weapons hadn’t been made yet by the world’s rocket scientists. This would give Germany at least some parity. It was a highly advanced attempt at that although this nuclear satellite was merely a test bed for much larger space platforms which would transform space into the battleground of the next decade. It could only carry six nuclear tipped ICBMs which each carried a single 1.1 megaton nuclear warhead which was far from the destructive power of future space weapons. The power of these orbital missile platforms would increase exponentially with the invention of MIRVs or Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles which basically meant that a single ballistic missile could now carry multiple nuclear warheads and strike at several targets instead of one. While the Americans slept under the seemingly harmless skies, the Nazis built more weapons although the Americans found out in the early 1970s and decried this as a threat to American national security and started building their own. By 1970, Germany’s space arsenal had become truly destructive with their latest battle station, as it was called, being armed with sixteen nuclear missiles armed with six 3.3 megaton nuclear warheads each which hovered dangerously close over the continental US. Space, however, was not under US jurisdiction and so the Nazis could strike at will with little warning for the sleeping Americans below.

By now the lunar base was being built. Starting out humbly as a small settlement with solar panels to harness the sun’s energy and a set of rechargeable batteries, a living quarters, a hydroponics bay and a water recycling facility, it had grown into a true village by 1980 with a team of 200 scientists present at any given time and mining efforts beginning to extract the moons silicates and iron ore which were the most abundant elements. By this time a launch platform had been added for the planned manned mission to Mars which was first on the Nazi schedule. The mission was a success like the other important accomplishments before them although this only hid the cracks in the Nazi framework from the rest of the world. A small settlement was constructed on Mars as well with new modern robotics to assist the researchers who remained on site for over a year in a small living quarters similar to how the lunar base had begun although this one was powered by a nuclear reactor as the sun’s rays were much weaker on the Red Planet which made solar panels a less effective way to generate electricity for experiments that often needed lots of electricity.

In his internal politics, Heydrich was less of an ideologist and more a pragmatist than his predecessor. He stopped the implementation of Generalplan Ost which he himself had worked on so ruthlessly and feverishly when Hitler had been in charge. He recognised that the German military-industrial complex couldn’t handle this ongoing counterinsurgency effort forever as state finances were already becoming drained. Heydrich introduced a system similar to South African Apartheid, but not quite the same. He introduced new legislation which from now on made the Slavs ‘separate but equal’. They now had the same rights as Germans, but still lived in separate boroughs, were not allowed to marry or have intercourse with Germans and were barred from taking part in national politics. These reforms weren’t out of any love for the Ukrainians and Russians, but out of pragmatic reasons as the endless guerrilla war drained away German resources although with the inherent inefficiencies of the Nazi economic model and the corruption in the enormous Nazi bureaucracy, it wasn’t sure whether this would be enough even if Heydrich seemed to think so. Whatever the case, it certainly increased the viability of this pan-European state and extended the life of National Socialism for decades at the least. For some groups it was sadly too late. By the early 1950s already, the Poles had been all but assimilated or eradicated and were no longer a people, although small communities still existed in America, the Soviet Union and Britain. The same was true for the Czechs of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia which would be Germanized fully by the 70s.

To the east, the USSR had turned even more into a ruthless totalitarian regime after Molotov had succeeded Stalin. Like his predecessor, he was ruthless and purges and campaigns of industrialization and exploitation continued on a daily basis to lay the foundation for the world’s most militarized state. With an army totalling 13 million men (including reservists) in peace time, the Soviet Union had the largest standing army in the world although it arguably needed to have such an army with such long borders. The inefficiencies of the Stalinist model of a command economy were beginning to show here as it did in China as well. The system was grossly inefficient and very one-sided as it focused on military equipment, resource extraction and heavy industry, neglecting the consumer based industries and lighter industries which led to either enormous surpluses or deficits of many goods. Starting in the 1970s, the Soviet Union’s economy started its long decline although Molotov bluntly refused to reform. He would die in 1985, senile, but also the longest ruling leader of the Soviet Union with a reign spanning over four decades. He left an empire with atomic weapons and the world’s largest military, but it was a power that was supported by a fragile economic basis that would only lead to poverty for the indoctrinated masses. They cheered even though they were poor and the NKVD kept it that way as long as Molotov was still alive.

China, by now, was a genuine superpower as well as it had seen a lot of modernization and its own industrial revolution. Nevertheless, the Chinese suffered from the same problems as the crumbling Soviet Union. Their economy was showing the same inefficiencies and economic growth stagnated. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, however, China started to reform where the Soviet Union did not. The farming collectives were disbanded which led to enormous production increases and the light industry and consumer based industry sectors were privatized which led to a massive influx of western capital as they were eager to exploit Chinese unskilled labour to make consumer goods. With such a large population, China is now the largest producer of electronics and consumer goods in the world thanks to the reforms of the 1970s and 80s. China, along with the US would inherit the world as one of two superpowers that would remain in place. Needless to say though, the USSR under Molotov condemned this as a counterrevolutionary ‘bourgeois’ revolution and Molotov formally cut off ties with Beijing in 1980, formalizing what had been in progress for several years as there could only be one dominant communist power. China and the USSR had long since had outstanding territorial claims and some of their interests clashed, mainly over India which was also friendly to Moscow. Under the tenure of Mao, however, relations with Moscow had always remained cordial, a status quo which Molotov and the Soviet leadership wanted to keep. This was known as the Sino-Soviet split.

After something of a leadership crisis, a moderate leader called Gorbachev emerged in the Soviet Union who started to address the economic problems of the country which didn’t go down well with the old guard Stalinists, most of which still held senior positions in the politburo. He needed to though, as the infrastructure and economy were falling apart. He also began to liberalize the Soviet Union’s totalitarian system of government which he felt was not the way a socialist state was supposed to be run. There were heavy protests from the old guard, but he erroneously brushed them aside which angered them deeply. On December 27th 1988, they staged a coup against him and Gorbachev went missing. The reforms were undone as was autonomy to the republics which caused an uproar which the new leadership brutally but down, instating martial law and mobilizing the armed forces.

The German leadership looked upon this with growing alarm as they too saw how the Red Army mobilized, leading them to think the Soviets wanted to go to war which was in fact true although they didn’t want to go to war with the Nazis alone. They had China in mind as well. The new leaders, however decided that the Nazi regime was the bigger threat in the short term and they also had nationalist reasons for their plans. They would deal with the ‘upstart’ Chinese later. They wanted to restore the lands that the Nazis had stolen from the USSR in the Great Patriotic War which would be a tremendous boost to the economy with a lot of new resources and modern industrial complexes built by the Germans. Another reason for this war was that it would distract the population of the enormous internal problems the Soviet Union, problems which even the new establishment couldn’t deny. They believed that a quick, limited war would force the Nazis into conceding at least something to the Soviet Union that would constitute a victory. On January 16th 1989, the Soviets started what they knew to be their war plan called ‘Fourteen Days to the Vistula’. 20.000 Soviet tanks crossed the border en masse followed by 10 million men which were supported by thousands of aircraft which gave the Soviets a tremendous local superiority in almost everything. They invaded Gotenland (the Ukraine) and Ostland (Belarus and the Baltic states). The German army fought back and successfully held a line on the Dnieper river which halted the Soviets dead in their tracks which irritated the leaders who really needed a quick victory to stir up morale in their crumbling country. They used several 10 kiloton tactical nuclear weapons against bulwarks of German resistance which led to the Germans retaliating against counter value targets (i.e. Soviet military bases and troop concentrations). The Soviets marched on and liberated Kiev and Minsk. The Germans were losing by now and Moscow as in a euphoric state. No matter who started the war, it was the Germans who decided to switch from tactical to strategic use of nuclear weapons. Helmut Kohl, a new reform minded leader, didn’t want to see the Soviets run over his country.

On January 21st, German missiles in space left their platforms and rained death and destruction on Soviet cities and with little warning time (no more than a few minutes). Millions died and the Germans succeeded in knocking out a large part of the Soviet nuclear arsenal although sadly not all of it. The Soviets’ own space platform known as Peter the Great, which they had built after desperate attempts to catch up with the Nazi space program, launched nine nuclear missiles, the 200 kiloton warheads of which would destroy an entire series of targets over eastern Europe although Germania was fortunately spared as the bombers that were supposed to destroy it with several nuclear weapons had been destroyed on the ground. German radar operators could only watch the missiles’ trajectories as they headed for their programmed targets. The barrage was followed by launches of missiles tipped with biological and chemical warheads by the Germans which reached the very few Soviet cities that had been spared the initial onslaught soon and killed many hundreds of thousands more with anthrax, chlorine gas and a deadly nerve agent known as VX gas. The war was effectively over with the USSR 99% destroyed and Germany losing its Reich, leaving only the German core lands except for East Prussia and Danzig which had been destroyed as well. Sporadic missile launches from the USSR as a revenge by the remaining people there would continue for several weeks while German strategic bombers continued their runs and destroyed what little remained. After a few days no one tried to shoot them down and the Red Air Force and ground-air defences no longer rose to the challenge simply because there was no one left to shoot back at the Nazi air force. With the USSR gone and the Reich itself in utter ruin, many now demanded democratic reform in Germany as well and the Nazi regime was finally toppled in 1990 with democratic elections in which the NSDAP now took part for the first time since 1933, but without a figure like the charismatic Hitler, they could only point at their past successes. The Socialists had been all but wiped out and so a coalition formed with the moderate Nazi splinter under Kohl and the reconstituted Catholic Zentrumpartei. Germany still had nuclear weapons and a strong army, but was economically weakened with its entire resource base and industrial areas to the east now rendered irradiated ruins. It would take Germany two decades to recover and now, in 2009, the Reich has only just started to reclaim the lands to the east which are now relatively safe again.

The US had watched and they secretly rejoiced that the two other major power blocks in the world had annihilated each other although, out of humanitarian reasons, an aid effort was started to help Europe rebuild again as no one, no matter how anti-fascist or anti-communist, could possibly watch how millions starved as harvests failed en masse in Europe or died of cold as their houses had been destroyed and the Germans couldn’t provide refuge. The real winner, however, was China under the reform minded leadership which now saw their economy boom. They too suffered from the radiation that caused harvests to fail massively in China, but this China wasn’t an autarky anymore. They imported grain from the US and cheap food from Africa, the rest of Asia and South America to feed their population which caused a large recession as food prices skyrocketed. They, however, waited until most of the radiation ebbed away, biding their time, and then started their colonization effort in 1999 and negotiated the annexation of Siberia with the only remaining figure of authority they could find, a high ranking Soviet general hiding in a fallout shelter. By 1999, most of the world had recovered although that wouldn’t bring back the Soviet Union, nor the millions that had died in eastern Europe even if it gave rise to a much more prosperous and liberal socialist power: China. Anno 2009, the Peoples’ Republic of China has absorbed Russia east of the Urals and much of Central Asia and its GDP is expected to surpass that of the US by 2025. The world is China’s.
 
I like the ending, but my complaint is that it isn't dystopic enough. After a nuclear war, the damage to the atmosphere would give tens, if not hundreds of millions, cancer. Furthermore, the nuclear radiation won't just disappear; the modern weapons will have a very long half life, so I don't think 'recolonization' would start in 1999 and that China would take all of Russia east of the Urals. Again though; great Nazi victory timeline.
 
Not bad but the attack still occures on June 22, probleme here it is not that operation Barbarossa isn´t significantly delayed, but that it happen on the exact same date as IOTL. Even a slight change, like June 19 or 26, would have been much better.
Unless Pétain is shot by a communist prior to the war, Vichy France is going to stay out, he was the one who put the brakes on the Vichy governement declaring war to Britain IOTL, over Mer-El-Kebir.
Pearl Harbour attack would have been delayed at the very least, as Japan would have been able to import oil, at least until the US moves its fleet into the Phillipines.
As war with Britain is over, such move would take long into 1942 to occure, although not long enough for Roosevelt to be destabilised and replaced by a more isolationist president. Between 9 and 12 months, presuming no unforseen events. Britain might or might not side with the US and A, latter possibility would be more interesting. The British would fear a German declaration of war over sidding with the US and thus would probably waite until they are ready to contain any attack against Sudan, Oman and Yemen.
Hitler wouldn´t annexe Holland, Danemark, Belgium and Norway. Had he any such intention IOTL, he would certainly not have waited for the end of the war to implement it, just as for his eastern politic. He would installe pro-German regimes in power at worst and abandonne these when they become a weight at best. These regions are densely populated by non-Germans, if they where classified as untermenschs that wouldn´t be a problem but with a POD only in 1940 such change to national-Socialist doctrine is extremely unlikely. The Soviet-Union is likely to occupy the whole of Iran and would most probably not retreate after the end of the war.
Axis victory in May 1943 because of a major Sovietic offensive is a bit too miraculous, better to have a reversed Kursk in September-October 1943. A claim on a share of Antarctica would also go fairly easy with Britain, due to the nature of the region.
Also, the matter of Africa, you mention that rape was used as an instrument of repression in Africa. German soldier caught having sex with an black african, consensual or not, would be executed on the spot.
Think about it, starving Germans in Stalingrad did not eat dead Soviets, because they could be jewish.
Good you make Stalin (effectively) rule from Sverdlovsk and not Omsk, many makes that mistake. German plans to settle problems of guerilla warfare was the eventual deportation of the non-germanic populations in the eastern territories, with only unskilled labour left.
 
Not bad but the attack still occures on June 22, probleme here it is not that operation Barbarossa isn´t significantly delayed, but that it happen on the exact same date as IOTL. Even a slight change, like June 19 or 26, would have been much better.
Unless Pétain is shot by a communist prior to the war, Vichy France is going to stay out, he was the one who put the brakes on the Vichy governement declaring war to Britain IOTL, over Mer-El-Kebir.
Pearl Harbour attack would have been delayed at the very least, as Japan would have been able to import oil, at least until the US moves its fleet into the Phillipines.
As war with Britain is over, such move would take long into 1942 to occure, although not long enough for Roosevelt to be destabilised and replaced by a more isolationist president. Between 9 and 12 months, presuming no unforseen events. Britain might or might not side with the US and A, latter possibility would be more interesting. The British would fear a German declaration of war over sidding with the US and thus would probably waite until they are ready to contain any attack against Sudan, Oman and Yemen.
Hitler wouldn´t annexe Holland, Danemark, Belgium and Norway. Had he any such intention IOTL, he would certainly not have waited for the end of the war to implement it, just as for his eastern politic. He would installe pro-German regimes in power at worst and abandonne these when they become a weight at best. These regions are densely populated by non-Germans, if they where classified as untermenschs that wouldn´t be a problem but with a POD only in 1940 such change to national-Socialist doctrine is extremely unlikely. The Soviet-Union is likely to occupy the whole of Iran and would most probably not retreate after the end of the war.
Axis victory in May 1943 because of a major Sovietic offensive is a bit too miraculous, better to have a reversed Kursk in September-October 1943. A claim on a share of Antarctica would also go fairly easy with Britain, due to the nature of the region.
Also, the matter of Africa, you mention that rape was used as an instrument of repression in Africa. German soldier caught having sex with an black african, consensual or not, would be executed on the spot.
Think about it, starving Germans in Stalingrad did not eat dead Soviets, because they could be jewish.
Good you make Stalin (effectively) rule from Sverdlovsk and not Omsk, many makes that mistake. German plans to settle problems of guerilla warfare was the eventual deportation of the non-germanic populations in the eastern territories, with only unskilled labour left.

Thanks for the comment, but it's a little late. I can't edit the TL anymore.
 
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