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This is a more realistic Fatherland. I've got an idea for a more realistic Man in the High Castle, which is significantly harder.

PODs
1. Winston Churchill is hit by the car in 1931.
2. FDR is shot in 1933 (the book's PoD)
3. Mussolini suffers a head injury that causes him to not be stupid. Either that or Italy isn't stupid.

The Story
<snip>

Thoughts?
Very interesting, would make a great TL but I don't think Bormann could ever become Fuhrer, he has no power base to back him up and I don't think Hitler would appoint a bureaucrat as his successor over a soldier.
Just my opinion.
 

Gabingston

Kicked
Depending on how many Italians there are compared to Arabs, maybe, but probably not. Libya's population in OTL 1960 was under 1.4 million, likely much lower at this TL's POD (I couldn't find population numbers for the 40s, but it's safe to assume that's the case, I think). If the Italians significantly outnumber the Arabs, then it would take many, many generations of stagnation of Italian birthrates and many, many generations of very high Arab birthrates to close that gap. The thing is, it's not all that likely that Arab birthrates remain high as Italians' go down, because the primary factor that leads to lower birth rates in the Western world is development. Libya ITTL is going to be a hell of a lot more developed than IOTL, which likely means correspondingly low birthrates for the small Arab population as well (unless some ideological factor leads them to keep their birthrates high).

And, like Gukpard said, the remaining Arab population is probably at least partly Italianized by this point ITTL. Many of them who were born after Italian colonization probably speak Italian as a first language, even (assuming the Italians decided to educate them at all).
That ideological factor is Islam.
 
Very interesting, would make a great TL but I don't think Bormann could ever become Fuhrer, he has no power base to back him up and I don't think Hitler would appoint a bureaucrat as his successor over a soldier.
Just my opinion.

Thanks Cortz, but I intended for Bormann to coerce Hitler into naming him Fuhrer and no sane man would try and go against Hitler's dying wish. I made him Fuhrer to try and stick to the background that Dick established, especially as I moved further away from it. Also his cancer may not be natural...
 
Thanks Cortz, but I intended for Bormann to coerce Hitler into naming him Fuhrer and no sane man would try and go against Hitler's dying wish. I made him Fuhrer to try and stick to the background that Dick established, especially as I moved further away from it. Also his cancer may not be natural...
I see, well as I said interesting idea. If you write it, I'll read it.
 
Chapter XVI: The Rise of Reagan and the War Against the Church, 1981-1984.
Update time!

Chapter XVI: The Rise of Reagan and the War Against the Church, 1981-1984.

From the start of their campaign, the Democratic Reagan/Carter ticket highlighted the unequal distribution of the burden of the economic crisis extremely well. Appealing to Christian ethics, they also appealed to the American people to reject the policy of détente vis-à-vis the “ungodly Nazis”. What helped Reagan was that popular ex-President Robert F. Kennedy campaigned on his behalf. The Rockefeller/Halleck ticket won 43.8% of the popular vote, thirteen states plus DC and 112 electoral votes. The Democratic Reagan/Carter ticket won 54.5% of the popular vote, 37 states and 426 electoral votes. Reagan’s victory was a Democratic Revolution almost as lopsided as Kennedy’s in ’64, and it was still a massive landslide for the Democrats. It reaffirmed the dominance of the Democrats in the American shift to the moderate left in the context of the Cold War against Nazi dominated Europe.

The 1980 Presidential election resulted in a shift in which Christian social conservatism, big government and leftist economic interventionism were coupled on the Democratic side due to the unique set of convictions combined in the person of Reagan. Reagan explained his shift from advocating small government in the 50s to favouring big government by the end of the 70s as follows: “I’ve concluded that big government isn’t bad if it’s made up of good Christians with only America’s wellbeing at heart. Christ opposed usury, so why shouldn’t we? I believe it will prevent crises like the one we’re still in if we can nudge our economy in the right direction and curb excess” (with crisis he was referring to the economic recession that was only just winding down). In the future, the Republicans combined increasing social liberalism, small government and a classically liberal free market.

Reagan had the luck that he was elected during the worst phase of the recession, which meant that the only way the economy could go was up. Some kind of cyclical economic recovery would have taken place regardless of the economic policies taken, except if the country’s leadership had magically changed into a bunch of crazy morons in 1981. Reagan and his new cabinet were everything but stupid. His cabinet appointments to the positions concerning economic policy in the broadest sense were composed of a mix of conservative Christians and Keynesian economists. Fair or not, Reagan and his cabinet got credit for the economic recovery. Modern economists estimate his Keynesian policies seriously stimulated a small economy recovery emerging around the summer of 1980.

The country’s top marginal tax rate had peaked at over 90% in the 50s, but there were plenty of loopholes and deductions available to avoid having to pay that much. Moreover, from the 50s onwards the top marginal tax rate dropped to 70% by 1980. Reagan passed legislation that closed a lot of tax loopholes and reduced the number of deductions to boost the government’s tax income. During his campaign in 1980, Reagan had promised the working and middle classes a “fair shake” in his future tax policies. So while legal tax evasion loopholes were closed and deductions moderated, taxes that disproportionately affected the working and middle classes were reduced, as promised, before the 1982 mid-term elections: the Federal VAT was reduced from 5% to 2% and the excise taxes on car fuel and alcohol were cut by 50%. The number of sixteen Federal Income Tax Brackets was reduced to seven. The 0-$5.000 bracket paid 1%, the $5.001-20.000 bracket 12%, the $20.001-35.000 was taxed 27%, the $35.001-75.000 category got a 40% income tax and incomes over $75.000 paid an income tax of 55%. The end result was that almost everybody ranging from the minimum wage to the upper middle class saw their net wage increase as their taxes were slightly lowered, resulting in increased consumer spending and significant economic recovery by 1982. The sixth bracket was called the “millionaire tax” as people with a gross wage of $1 million were taxed 65%. The seventh bracket was nicknamed the “Super-Rich Tax” for those earning more than $5 million, who were taxed 75%. Additionally property worth more than one million dollars was also taxed and tax deals with major companies were subject to revision. Though changes have been made since, the rough contours of Reagan’s system persist until today.

Tax revenue increased in the early 80s and the Reagan Administration used the money to finally upgrade and expand the federal highway network, undo the budget cuts on Kennedycare and social security, and invest predominantly into small to medium sized companies. Defence spending also increased, including plans for a 700-Ship Navy that saw a major update to all four Iowa-class battleships and both Montana-class super battleships (USS Montana and her sister USS Ohio were upgraded to full-fledged nuclear powered guided missile battleships) while more carriers and nuclear submarines were built. Unemployment subsequently declined quickly in the early 80s as the construction, retail and defence sectors put people to work.

Democratic Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan was raised in a poor family in small towns of northern Illinois. He graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and worked as a sports announcer on several regional radio stations. After moving to Hollywood in 1937, he became an actor and starred in a few major productions. Reagan was twice elected President of the Screen Actors Guild – the labour union for actors – where he worked to root out communist and later Nazi influence. Whilst in the army during the war, he remained focused on film making because he’d been declared unfit for service overseas in a combat capacity due to his bad eyesight, finally ending his active duty with the rank of Captain in 1943. For some time after that he was an FBI informant looking for sympathizers of both communism and Nazism. In the 1950s, he moved into television and was a motivational speaker at General Electric factories and worked as the host of the TV show “General Electric Theater”, a series of weekly dramas that ran for ten seasons.

As far as politics went, Reagan considered Franklin D. Roosevelt to be a true hero and became a Hollywood Democrat. In his early political career, he joined numerous political committees with a left-wing orientation, such as the American Veterans Committee. He fought against Republican-sponsored right-to-work legislation. For a while he flirted with right wing notions such as free markets, lower taxes, limited government and anti-communism, which partially had to do with the fact that communism stood for big government and state control of markets. By the late 1940s, however, communism was becoming increasingly irrelevant for a number of reasons. For a while it had been a liberation ideology in the colonies of Western European countries in the 20s, 30s and 40s. After WW II it was America that facilitated gradual African independence and also supported the independence struggle in French and Dutch Southeast Asian and Caribbean colonies. Their model of liberal democracy and capitalism was adopted by many countries post-independence. Those countries that didn’t become democracies but dictatorships after independence chose nationalism over communism and allowed a (semi-) free market capitalist economy, though in some cases expecting big business to subordinate its interests to national interests. Outside of key sectors like oil, coal and steel, however, no nationalizations took place and the entire economy wasn’t planned centrally anywhere. Apart from communism dying out as a third world liberation ideology, the only communist country in existence (the USSR) had been reduced to a rump state and was reliant on Western, predominantly American, aid to hold out against the Nazis (a policy started under Democratic President Truman continued by his successors). The issue of anti-communism became of tertiary importance to Reagan as communism declined.

When Reagan learned a big part of the Republican party establishment in the mid-50s thought intervention by Washington to end segregation in the South was an “overreach by the federal government” and “an infringement on state rights”, he became convinced he should stay with the desegregationist Democrats. He came to believe the secondary status of non-whites in American society was irreconcilable with the American Dream and Christianity. While on the campaign trail for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson in the lead-up to the 1956 US Presidential elections he was asked by a TV journalist why he was opposed to the Nazis when he detested the ideologically opposed communists so much, and why he still supported American backing for the Soviets. He responded elaborately: “I reject communism because it’s against freedom and ungodly in nature. We’ve all heard of Stalin’s show trials, the purges, the gulag, the massacre of captured Polish officers and the Ukrainian famine. I do not support Nazism against communism because horrible crimes were committed in its name too. They always say those are lies, but in the same breath say the Red Cross has no business inspecting their Lebensraum. If Nazis are the cure for communism, they’re worse than the disease. The Nazi war against the Russian people needs to stop before Russia has any chance of reforming to democracy.” This statement was aired on national television and he was henceforth seen as a serious politician next to his status as a famous actor.

Realizing he stood little chance at being elected to public office in the home state of popular President Nixon, he left California and returned to his home state of Illinois in 1957. There he ran in the 1960 gubernatorial elections, defeating incumbent Republican Governor William Stratton. After that, Reagan rode on the popularity of the Kennedy Administration and was re-elected as Governor of Illinois in 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976, ensuring he stayed Governor of Illinois from 1961 until the Democratic National Convention in August 1980 when he gave up his governorship. During said convention he threw his hat into the ring and came out on top after former President Robert F. Kennedy endorsed him. The Kennedys subsequently campaigned intensively for him. At 69 years, 349 days of age at the time of his inauguration, he became the oldest president-elect to take the oath of office.

His running mate James E. “Jimmy” Carter Jr. had a very different background. Raised in a wealthy family of peanut farmers in the southern town of Plains in Georgia, Carter graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946 with a Bachelor of Science degree and joined the US Navy, where he served on submarines. After the death of his father in 1953, Carter left his naval career and returned home to Georgia to take on the reins of his family’s peanut-growing business. Despite his father’s wealth, Carter inherited comparatively little due to his father's forgiveness of debts and the division of the estate among the children. Nevertheless, his ambition to expand and grow the Carters’ peanut business was fulfilled. During this period, Carter was motivated to oppose the political climate of racial segregation and support the growing civil rights movement. He became an activist within the Democratic Party. From 1963 to 1967, Carter served in the Georgia State Senate, and in 1970, he was elected as Governor of Georgia, defeating former Governor Carl Sanders in the Democratic primary on an anti-segregation platform advocating affirmative action for ethnic minorities. Carter remained as Governor until 1980. At that point he too threw his hat into the ring at the Democratic National Convention and came out as the runner-up to Reagan.

Meanwhile, less than a year after Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981, German President Albert Speer died in September, aged 76. The technocratic Speer had always managed to restrain his more ideological and utterly ruthless partner Reichsführer-SS Reinhard Heydrich. Most other Nazis from the first hour and Hitler’s inner circle such as Goering, Himmler and now Speer were already dead while surviving ones like Goebbels were octogenarians. Heydrich, now 77 years old, still had all his mental faculties and was in as great a physical shape as someone his age could be due to a semi-vegetarian diet, little alcohol and an exercise regimen that included ten lanes in an Olympic swimming pool three times a week. He’d been preparing to seize power for years by placing loyal people in places of control while the Gestapo eliminated anyone who could reveal his role in the atrocities of the past to the outside world. He also kept the occult elements of the SS in check. Having developed a more formal structure to arrange succession to prevent the chaos of the past from repeating itself, a Gauleiter-Reichsleiter Congress convened (a “Gauleiter” is the leader of a regional Nazi party branch and the Reichsleiter are superior to them). It was like a Nazi version of a Papal Conclave, taking place underneath the titanic coffered dome of Germania’s Volkshalle (People’s Hall) and not disbanding until a new Party Leader had been elected after successive rounds of voting. Having spent decades putting the right people in place, Heydrich was inaugurated in November 1981, in time for the annual party rally held in Nuremberg. He defeated major representatives from the de facto aristocratic families of the Third Reich: Helmuth Christian Goebbels, Albert Speer Jr., Adolf Martin Bormann, Edda Goering, and Hermann Fegelein Jr. (a nephew of Hitler’s widow Eva Braun and cousin to Hitler’s only child Siegfried).

The Führer’s son Siegfried Hitler didn’t participate, instead conscientiously focusing on preserving his father’s legacy by running the Führer Museum in Linz and the nearby Führer Mausoleum while also working his way up the ladder in the SS. He was 34 at the time and considered himself too young to cross over from the SS into the upper party echelons, despite his name. After years of education by Nazi tutors, he was an ideological clone of his father and that made an SS career unsurprising. His part-time job as curator of his father’s art required coordination with the cultural department of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, requiring trips to Germania. His name made him untouchable to the Gestapo and what he said mattered, so he didn’t necessarily need the power anyway. His mother Eva Braun had led a life of being a combination of virtuous mother, trendsetter and fashionista in Nazi propaganda, remaining apolitical and single to the outside world (in reality she had secret relationships in the 50s and 60s). In late 1981, she was 69 and had the role of grandmother to look forward to as her daughter-in-law was eight months pregnant. Her son had met a lowly office assistant named Angela Dorothea Kasner during one of his visits to the Propaganda Ministry in Germania. In 1979, he wound up marrying her when he was 32 and she was 25, after which she became known as Angela Hitler. In December 1981 their first child, Adolf Hitler II, was born.

Under Speer’s rationalist technocracy ideology had been pushed to the background, but National Socialism had never gone away. By now a third generation was being born that would be indoctrinated with notions of racial superiority over Asians, Latin Americans, Africans, Slavs, Gypsies and Jews (in that specific order). Jews, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, interracial relations and anyone not conforming to traditional family values were scapegoated (traditional family values meant the husband works while the wife stays home or works in a “feminine” line of work and has many children). The latter category for example also included prostitutes and people involved in the manufacture or distribution of pornography, but also people who smuggled products banned by the regime. Something as simply as a bottle of Jack Daniels could get one arrested after the regime learnt African Americans worked in the distillery where it was made.

This sometimes led to the only kind of innocuous German counterculture in existence to come into play: a black market for stuff banned or censored by the government like issues of Playboy magazine. Even smoking was increasingly looked down upon as Hitler’s opinions by now were well known (and because smoking bans suited Nazi reproductive policies). In the 1930s and 40s the anti-tobacco campaign included a prohibition on smoking in trams, buses and city trains, promoting health education, medical lectures for soldiers, limiting the distribution of cigarettes in the Wehrmacht, a tobacco tax and restriction on tobacco advertisements. Though initially widely circumvented or ignored, the ban on smoking in trams, buses and city trains was quickly enforced after WW II with hefty fines for people caught smoking where they shouldn’t and businesses that tolerated smoking in spite of the ban in place. The smoking ban was later extended to hospitals, schools, university campuses, restaurants, coffeehouses, bars, cinemas, theatres and beer halls in the 1950s and in the 60s Germania, Munich, Nuremberg and Linz declared their downtown areas and historical centres to be no smoking zones. This made Germany the country that went the furthest with its anti-smoking campaign. Western music generally wasn’t banned, though every song on an album had to be approved by censors; as a result, Western rock and pop albums released in the Reich often missed a song or two compared to the versions released in the West.

The effect was that youths protested against the regime by smoking, experimenting with sex and drugs or listening to bootleg records, but for every rebel there still plenty of Nazi straight shooters graduating from the Hitler Youth and moving on to the armed forces or the SS. Racism had become so ingrained that even the more rebellious youths made remarks like “It costs that much? Are you Jewish?” or “It’s so easy a negro or a chimp could do it.” To someone from the West those remarks would sound horribly racist and terribly inappropriate, no matter the context. Going against the current completely by being anti-racist and rejecting Nazi family values was difficult since you were likely to wind up in a concentration camp for “re-education” if you didn’t hide your true face. Everybody knew “re-education” meant physical labour, physical torture and humiliation. There was a large and visible militarized police force that was very intimidating, but much scarier was the network of informants of the Gestapo that had permeated all layers of society. The security apparatus was complemented by a large and growing CCTV network.

Christianity also still remained suppressed, but to Heydrich that wasn’t enough. In the 1930s, the German Christians were a pressure group and a movement within the German Evangelical Church aligned towards the antisemitic, racist and “Führerprinzip” core tenets of Nazism. They desired to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles under the overarching term “Positive Christianity” and by the 1970s they’d been highly successful.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, had remained practically impervious to Nazi ideology, obstinately opposed to blood racialism and still present in German society in the 1970s, though its support was dwindling: despite the 1933 Reich Concordat, Catholic publications were forbidden and the Church had been pushed out of the educational system completely. With the Church locked out of the media and the educational system, the regime could indoctrinate children with the notion that the Catholic version of Christianity was meek, flabby, un-German and “Jewified” because they accepted the entirety of the “Jewish” Old Testament. It was a religion for slaves as far as the Nazis were concerned. Harassment, being forced out of the educational system and being forced out of public life altogether was the status quo for the Catholic clergy in the Reich by the late 70s. Relations between the Vatican and Germania were always cold because of this situation and because in WW II and after tens of thousands of Polish clergymen had already lost their lives in concentration camps.

Heydrich, however, planned to go much further than that and launch that one final battle to crush the Roman Catholic Church, the only remaining major ideological opponent left within the Reich and Nazi dominated Europe. Hitler had foreseen this. Testimonies from his inner circle say he said “I will finish what our Führer started and that Bismarck before him was unable to do. It will be the completion of our Cultural Revolution.” Over the preceding years the Gestapo on his orders had investigated rumours concerning child abuse within the Catholic Church, compiling a lot of information that was put into a sealed file in a vault, waiting for the day Heydrich needed it. In 1982, the propaganda machine opened the floodgates with a torrent of accusations that basically made the Catholic Church out to be a massive paedophile ring. Lurid reports of pederast orgies in the rectory with altar boys and stories of nuns abusing boys or having lesbian orgies with teenage girls were plastered all over the frontpage of the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer, the Nazi party’s daily appearing newspaper). News reports on TV also kept reporting on the issue as the government instructed. Within weeks after the start of the nefarious propaganda campaign, SD reports on public opinion said that the people were infuriated and demanded punishment. Anti-Catholic sentiments became hysterical in parts of Germany.

In a wave of arrests in April 1982, roughly coinciding with Führer Day (Hitler’s birthday), some 3.000 priests were arrested (out of roughly 18.000, that staffed over 15.000 parishes in 1982) on the vaguest accusations of possibly inappropriate behaviour around minors and were tortured, with mixed results. While some broke under torture or didn’t survive it due to their advanced age, others had the strength of their faith. Nevertheless, almost all were found guilty and sent to concentration camps to do forced labour and the “worst offenders” (i.e. the most vocal anti-Nazi priests) were executed. This subsequently left many parishes with no priest. Given the very small influx of people with the calling to become a priest, German Catholic Church authorities struggled to replace the arrested priests. This required priests to ensure Sunday mass took place in multiple parishes, leading to these parishes being merged.

One out of every six priests disappearing into concentration camps was a sensitive blow to the German Church hierarchy, but not a death knell. More was to come, but the Church’s leadership couldn’t anticipate that this was hardly the beginning. Cardinal Secretary of State (basically the Vatican’s foreign minister) Albino Luciani misjudged the situation completely when he told Pope Gregory XVII what he thought: “The Nazis want to show us that when clergymen oppose them too vocally in their sermons, they’ll lash out. If we don’t provoke them, they’ll forget about it. They have nothing to gain by upsetting the 1 billion Catholics in the world.” If the Church had been dealing with any ordinary halfway rational dictatorship, they might have been right, but they underestimated how radical the Nazis still were after more than twenty years of dealing with a fairly reasonable Nazi leader, Albert Speer. The Pope followed the advice of his Cardinal Secretary of State for now.

A low-level propaganda campaign that ridiculed the alleged “Jewish” elements of Catholicism got started in the wake of the wave of arrests. A lengthy article, for example, concluded the Jewish Exodus from Egypt hadn’t been a matter of the Jews leaving, but their Egyptian masters kicking them out after recognizing them for the insidious parasites they were. “The one Aryan God,” the article concluded, “would never part the seas for a mass of Jewish rats, except if He wanted to drown them. Therefore the Exodus story the Catholics believe must be a lie.” As part of the propaganda effort, a German naval ship went out of its way to scan the bottom of the Red Sea and even sent down remotely operated underwater vehicles. They found no archaeological evidence to corroborate the biblical Exodus story. Other “Jewish” parts of the Catholic bible were ridiculed too. This campaign of ridicule was but a pause.

During the summer of 1982, so-called “spontaneous expressions of the people’s anger against Catholic paedophiles” commenced that consisted of violent mobs of angry civilians attacking prominent churches, cathedrals and monasteries, molesting priests, monks and nuns, sometimes raping nuns, getting drunk on Church whine, stealing valuable ecclesiastical pieces of art, and melting down silver and golden objects for the good of the party and the nation. Besides Heydrich’s SS, the octogenarian but still vitriolic Goebbels played a key role with his Propaganda Ministry. The supposedly “spontaneous mobs” were in fact SA storm troopers and Hitler Youth members in civilian dress sent with the simple objective of trashing and possibly burning down a particular church or monastery. The violence was comparable to the Kristallnacht, except that it was stretched out over a period of several months until Heydrich was ready to make his next move (while historic and/or monumental Church buildings were spared). He awaited reports on public opinion, which told him people in the post-1920 age brackets generally approved of the regime’s harsher stance toward the Catholic Church.

The Nazi regime opposed the values of the French Revolution, but ironically adopted similar policies toward the Church. In early 1983, the regime upped the ante by insisting Catholic clergymen had to swear an oath of loyalty to Germany, which the Church barely agreed to. That same year, Heydrich dealt a financial blow by officially abolishing the Church tax, an almost forgotten tax arranged through the old Weimar constitution. The Reich also professed that Germans should be able to vote on who their priests and bishops would be with no role for the Pope other than learning of the results, and that was where the Church drew the line, exactly as it had done in 1790. The regime had done this on purpose, anticipating the Church would refuse to cooperate which gave the Nazis an excuse to retaliate. Monastic orders were outlawed first and their land holdings seized, after which these monasteries were turned into cheap public housing. Jesuits in particular were persecuted as they played a major role in Nazi fantasies concerning plots by the Church.

At this point, Pope Gregory XVII, head of the Church for the past 25 years, responded with an unusually strongly worded written and televised statement that left little doubt as to what the Vicar of God was talking about: “A certain regime is seeking to pervert Christianity with ungodly racialist views, ignorant that all men were created in God’s image and that His son sacrificed himself for the sins of all mankind, not just the Aryan race. We will not allow a macabre Earthly creed of race and enslavement of the ‘Untermensch’ to purposefully misinterpret or even corrupt the holy word of God. We will not bow to threats of violence or actual violence from this modern Nero, for this institution has survived persecution before and has endured for two millennia. Instead, we stand by God’s given teachings, whether it takes years, decades or centuries before they see the error of their ways or receive judgement from the good lord if they fail.” This statement, extremely confrontational by Papal standards, was inspired by an absolute faith of the reigning Pope in the Bible as the word of God and the unshakable belief that National Socialism contravened it.

This, unfortunately, had an effect akin to beating a hornet’s nest with a big stick. After banning monastic orders and seizing their property, all remaining Catholic Church buildings in the Reich were confiscated too. Almost all Church properties had now been nationalized and the most monumental ones worth preserving were subsequently repurposed as poorhouses, warehouses, public libraries, lecture halls or museums on “Church ignorance.” Others were torn down. Clergymen were arrested and, in Gestapo torture sessions, forced to choose between their loyalty to the German nation and the Nazi version of Christianity on one hand or their loyalty to Catholic teachings and the Vatican on the other. Choosing the latter meant automatic arrest and forced labour in a concentration camp. If all priests went into camps it would virtually disembowel the Church in Germany. Therefore a secret instruction was disseminated through paper copies and audiocassette tapes telling clergymen to outwardly pretend to go along with the Nazis while preparing for underground activities. Masses were still held at improvised locations and underground publications were still being published. Some “pro-Nazi” priests, some in actuality and others pretending, could still preach and a few strongly nationalist bishops and cardinals also remained.

The virulent anti-Catholic campaign ruffled a lot of feathers in France and Spain, both of which were conservative, authoritarian and pro-Catholic regimes. French nationalism and Catholic values had been the basis of the French State since 1940 and that foundation was now rocked by their supposed German ally. There was German political and military dominance in Europe, Germany had annexed previously French owned territories, German companies outcompeted French businesses due to the German centred setup of the European Community, and German products were on French super market shelves. Therefore it shouldn’t have been a surprise that there was tremendous anti-German resentment in France. That had never boiled over, but now it did as the regime’s foundations were knocked away from under its feet, removing its raison d’être. Student protests took place all over France in the spring of 1984, soon joined by the remnants of the unions and resulting in nationwide protests in all major cities and a strike that paralyzed the economy along with highway blockades and major sit-ins on the larger squares. They demanded free democratic elections as well as far-reaching liberalizations in the areas of sexuality, gender roles and narcotics. The regime, composed of tired old men, was prepared to meet their demands. Heydrich was not and the Wehrmacht invaded France once more, crushed any and all resistance and replaced the ruling “Bloc National” with a military dictatorship. Thousands of protestors died and thousands more were imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo for information while martial law went into effect.

If the Vatican had hoped to sow discord between the Reich and its Catholic European allies, it would seem they’d failed since these countries all thought twice before provoking a German invasion. Smaller majority Catholic countries like Croatia, Slovakia and Hungary were awfully quiet and politely rebuffed the Vatican’s attempts to reach out. Doubts, however, were sewn. Spain hadn’t fundamentally changed after Franco’s death: foreseeing events such as those in France if any developments were allowed that could bring about a government that would orient its foreign policy away from Germany, the autocratic, oppressive, conservatively Catholic government persisted under new leadership. Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco became the new Caudillo of Spain after Franco’s death in 1975. Carlos Arias Navarro, who was recycled as a moderate in the 70s but who in reality had signed thousands of death warrants in in the White Terror, became Prime Minister. Blanco started to secretly contact the United States as they wanted to get out of Germany’s grasp without being invaded. In the House of Savoy now headed by King Victor Emmanuel IV and within Italy’s Fascist regime little sympathy existed for the Vatican, but they couldn’t ignore that despite over sixty years of “fascistization” a major part of the population still identified as Catholic, particularly in southern Italy. Clearly, Fascist Italy’s indoctrination hadn’t been as effective as Nazi Germany’s. The King and the aging Prime Minister Dino Grandi worried greatly about the war of words between the Reich and the Vatican becoming an actual war. How would the people respond to direct action against the Vatican?

Meanwhile, the policies of President Ronald Reagan had proven effective in stimulating economic growth and the public generally approved of his hard line stance toward Nazi Germany. They were also overwhelmingly negative about the Nazi attack on the Catholic Church. The Republicans argued that the costly Keynesian measures Reagan used to combat the crisis had been enabled by the fiscally conservative austerity measures of the Rockefeller Administration, legitimizing them as a necessary evil. These had kept government debt under control, giving the new administration the necessary financial elbow room. Furthermore, they pointed out that, despite increased tax revenue, government debt and the budget deficit had grown under Reagan due to this major increases in defence spending and him not just undoing NASA’s budget cuts but also increasing their funding for prestige reasons. Also, as far as the Republicans were concerned, the “squeeze the rich taxes” weren’t fair to all those self-made men out there that had realized their version of the American Dream by working hard. Beyond that, a friendship had developed between current President Reagan and former President Kennedy when the latter was campaigning for the former in 1980, which had been strengthened when Reagan became a pillar of support to RFK when his brother John finally succumbed to his Addison’s disease in 1983, aged 66. The Republicans posited the theory that the rationale behind the Nazi attack on the Catholic Church was based on the Kennedy Dynasty’s Irish Catholic background and a surmised unhealthy relation between them and the Vatican. It was nonsense, but plenty of conspiracy theorists bought it, as they want to see conspiracies even where there are none.

The Republican candidate heading this campaign was George H.W. Bush, who presented himself as an anti-tax hero. After serving in the navy and becoming the youngest US Navy aviator of all time three days short of his 19th birthday in 1943, he returned home and finished his university studies at Yale with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics in 1946. Back home in Texas, he got involved in the oil industry thanks to his father’s business connections and became a millionaire, while becoming involved with the Republican Party. In the 1966 mid-term elections he was elected to the US House of Representatives and was re-elected in 1968 despite the tremendously successful re-election of Democratic President Robert F. Kennedy. After being re-elected to the House of Representatives in 1970, 1972, and 1974, he successfully ran for Governor of Texas in 1976 and was re-elected in 1980.

With popular Texas Governor George H.W. Bush the Republicans made a bit of a comeback compared to 1980 and won his home state of Texas and Nixon’s home state California plus the Rust Belt and several other states in the northeast. It wasn’t enough to win, but at least not the unmitigated disaster that was 1980. What helped was that Richard Nixon campaigned for the Republicans: during his years in the political wilderness after the 1961 Goldsboro Disaster and the end of his presidency in 1965 he had released memoirs and later a full autobiography, which helped him become a respected elder statesman and pundit in the 70s and 80s. In total, the Republicans got 48.5% of the popular vote, eleven states plus DC and 231 electoral votes while the Democrats got 50.2%, thirty-nine states and 307 electoral votes. Re-elected in November 1984, Reagan could stay in the White House for four more years.
 
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Only one issue, why did the South Go for Bush,they have a President who would go very well with their Religous values and an actual honest to God Southerner as Vice President,while Bush is an Epispocalian who prior to becoming Reagan's running mate was pro choice and Pro birth control (although I could see him distancing himself from that if Nazi practices have wrecked them thuroghly enough). Did he have a deep south running mate or something?
 
Only one issue, why did the South Go for Bush,they have a President who would go very well with their Religous values and an actual honest to God Southerner as Vice President,while Bush is an Epispocalian who prior to becoming Reagan's running mate was pro choice and Pro birth control (although I could see him distancing himself from that if Nazi practices have wrecked them thuroghly enough). Did he have a deep south running mate or something?

A southern running mate helps (any suggestions as to who?), along with the fact that the Democrats ITTL just like IOTL opposed segregation earlier than the Republicans did, driving the south into the hands of the Republicans.
 
A southern running mate helps (any suggestions as to who?), along with the fact that the Democrats ITTL just like IOTL opposed segregation earlier than the Republicans did, driving the south into the hands of the Republicans.
Well other factors besides Civil Rights made that split permanent, such as the rise of the Religous right (who Ittl would probably back Reagan rather than a socially moderate to liberal Bush), a increase in ecomic standerds due to increased Miltiary bases and other issues. Not to down play civil rights but that alone would not flip the region more than one or two cycles out.
 
If you want my choice for a running mate it's probably Jerimiah Denton,OTL Vietnam pow got elected to the senate otl based on that expierence and his Religous politics. Could still see him succeedding if he was involved in some proxy war ITTL.
 
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Well other factors besides Civil Rights made that split permanent, such as the rise of the Religous right (who Ittl would probably back Reagan rather than a socially moderate to liberal Bush), a increase in ecomic standerds due to increased Miltiary bases and other issues. Not to down play civil rights but that alone would not flip the region more than one or two cycles out.

Having considered your arguments, the last chapter has been edited. That looked like the best solution IMHO. Better now?
 
This was a great update. Poor France...

Poor Germany as well. Having to crack down on France is going to,at minimum, wreck the economy and normal trade of one of their biggest markets. In all likelihood,this is also going to trigger private nationalist-piest private boycots and "Buy Local" campaigns in Italy, Iberia, and Latin America as well, which is going to deeply impact German firms. The resulting recession would be... eventful
 
Naturism/nudism was actually quite OK in Nazi Germany. The whole idea with that is the nude body (and beaches/resorts) are not sexual, families go nude openly. Pornography is another situation. Of course, except for Untermenschen slaves no non-Aryan would dare look on a nude Aryan woman (and want to bet any male slaves at these resorts were "fixed").
 
Well, I never expected Reagan would be a Democrat that I actually agree with, but then again, this is a world where a Nazi state exists, so anything's possible.

The Catholic purging is definitely going to help widen the rift between Germany and her puppets. It's one thing to dominate them, but it's another to remove the one thing they have left: faith. I'd also expect the Catholic child abuse cases would be downplayed somewhat due it to being released by the Nazis. What do regular Americans think about the news about that?
 
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