During and immediately after the war, the Axis powers reshaped the political map of Eurasia and Africa to satisfy their imperialistic ambitions and (where feasible) give some reward to their allies/vassals. Germany annexed Czechia, Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Flanders, Denmark, northern Switzerland, as well as former Soviet territory up to the Ural Mountains and river. It also rebuilt a “Mittelafrika” German colonial empire in Africa with Nigeria, Cameroun, Gabon, French and Belgian Congo, Angola, Northern Rhodesia, Malawi, and Mozambique, plus the former German colonies of Tanganyika and South-West Africa. Italy annexed Albania, Yugoslavia, Nice, Savoy, Corsica, southern Switzerland, Malta, and Greece. It also expanded its colonial empire with Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Somaliland, Chad, Ubangi-Shari, Kenya, and Uganda, and established its “protectorate” over Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, Oman, Eastern Arabia, and Iraq-Kuwait, which was expanded with the Iranian provinces of Ilam and oil-rich Khuzestan. Hungary got Slovakia, northern Transylvania, Baranja, and Backa. Bulgaria got Vardar Macedonia, western Thrace, and Southern Dobruja. Romania got back Bessarabia and Bukovina and received Transnistria. Finland got back West Karelia and received Kola, East Karelia, and the Finnmark. France got Wallonia and western Switzerland, and the British colonies of Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Ghana. Spain annexed Gibraltar, Portugal, and French Morocco. Outer Manchuria was united with Manchukuo, Inner and Outer Mongolia were united too to form the Mengjiang Republic. The Dutch East Indies with East Timor, British Malaya and North Borneo, French Indochina, Burma, and Siam became various Japanese “protectorates”, while the rest of the Russian Far East (Yakutia, northern Kavabarosk, Kamchatka, Magadan, Chukotka, Buryatia, and Chita) were set up as another Japanese puppet state, the White Russian Far Eastern Republic. Turkey received Cyprus, Russian Armenia, and Russian-Persian Azerbaijan, and was given Hedjaz and the administration of the Muslim Holy Sites of Medina and Mecca. South Africa, which joined the Axis bloc, annexed Lesotho, Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and Southern Rhodesia. Although Persia suffered the loss of some choice bits of its territory to Italy and Turkey, it was allowed to join the Axis as a member in good standing and rewarded with the annexation of Eastern Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and Eastern Pashtunistan.
After the war, Germany and Italy maintained their strategic partnership and cooperation to rule their newfound empires. The other surviving nations of Continental Europe (France, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Norway, Sweden, and Finland) were driven to adopt a fascist political system, if it wasn't already in place, and to join with Germany and Italy into a tight confederal political bloc, economic union, and military alliance, the New European Order (NEO), which also included their respective African colonial empires. The NEO was of course ruled by the German-Italian diarchy, although France and Spain were allowed to claim a subordinate leadership role. Germany and Italy staged an ambitious program to assimilate their respective possessions in Central and Eastern Europe and in North Africa, the Middle East, and the western Balkans, respectively, by a mix of exterminations, forced population transfers, forced cultural assimilation, and settler colonization. Areas annexed by Axis nations in Western Europe and Greece were simply earmarked for ruthless cultural and political assimilation but were generally spared harsher measures thanks to their “Aryan” racial classification, cultural closeness to the annexing nation, and in Greece’s case, the significance of Greek culture in the political mythology of fascism. Although the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa, too, were earmarked for eventual elimination and replacement by European settlers, this was seen as a very long-term project even by the most ambitious NEO racial planners, and for the moment Africa was consigned to extreme colonial exploitation with the establishment of slave labor. Japan implemented a similar assimilation-colonization program in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Mongolia, while it earmarked South East Asia and mainland China as ruthlessly exploited colonies under the thin facade of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (GEACPS) confederation. The Western Hemisphere also saw the birth of a third continental polity, when negotiations between America and its allies ensued in the creation of the “Commonwealth of Free Nations” (CFN), commonly known with the informal name of “American Commonwealth”, a confederal union of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Greenland, Iceland, and the Philippines, where each state kept autonomy in internal matters but established an integrated military (with national commands in peacetime and a unified one in wartime), a common foreign policy, and an economic and monetary union under US leadership. More controversially, Cuba too was driven by local pro-US lobbies to join the CFN (some say this happened under the influence of American organized crime groups). New Guinea and the former European colonial possessions in the Americas and the Pacific were established as CFN territories, with the exception of Belize, which was annexed by Guatemala, and Newfoundland, which joined Canada. For the first few years after the war, Britain kept a public stance of neutrality between the blocs, since the Labour government wished for closer ties with the CFN but dared not openly establish them for fear they would be seen as a provocation by the NEO.
During the first few years after the war, Germany and Italy pursued a most ambitious (and infamous) program to swiftly remove the bulk of the native Slav and Arab populations by extermination or deportation and replace them with their own “Aryan” settlers and a minority of “Aryanized” natives throughout the occupied territories. This was an issue where Nazist Germany “Lebensraum” ideas had been successfully imprinted on and eagerly adopted by Fascist Italy. However it soon became clear that doing so would leave the conquered areas huge graveyards and destroy their economic value to the Axis bloc, since it was impossible to muster up enough “Aryan” settlers to quickly repopulate them. To rule empty wastelands seemed an unpleasant perspective even to racist butchers, so a more gradual colonization policy was adopted. The bulk of the native Slav and Arab population in European Russia and the Middle East was to be kept around an as exploited serf working class. The hardcore extermination/deportation/assimilation and colonization policy was to be initially focused on and limited to the areas territorially contiguous/closest to Germany and Italy and/or of greatest economic and strategic value (e.g. Czechia, Poland, the Baltic lands, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, the Maghreb), where Axis planners expected sufficient settlers could be mustered to repopulate with current demographic and economic resources. Settler colonization and the related “removal” of the natives would only be extended to the “outer” territories in rough concentric waves when and if the “inner” ones had been assimilated. In the meanwhile, they would be kept as ruthlessly exploited economic colonies. Strong natalist policies for the “Aryan” peoples of the NEO were implemented, and the amount of natives deemed acceptable for “Aryanization” were somewhat increased with slightly more flexible racial guidelines. This pragmatic shift in policy was eased by the death of Hitler (who was succeeded by Goering) in the late 1940s, which favored the relative marginalization of the worst racist extremists in the Axis ruling elites: as always, racial policy was one field where Fascist Italy was only too happy to follow the example of Nazi Germany. Fascist France and Spain, and Axis South Africa eagerly embraced NEO racial policy for their own African territories.
After the defeat of Britain and Russia, international relationships between the newborn Axis and Western blocs gradually grew quite tense and hostile, and many feared that a new World War would soon explode. However, several factors conspired to defuse such an outcome: all but the most fanatical warmongers on both sides recognized that a war between Axis Old World and US-led New World would be quite costly and bloody and quite likely would end into a stalemate: both blocs were engaged into a brisk naval rearmament, and it was terribly unlikely that either the NEO or the CFN would be ever able to invade their rival in the foreseeable future. The CFN had a narrow but definite industrial advantage on the Axis bloc and could quite likely defeat Japan in a limited war, but the NEO was expected to side with their GEACPS allies, and the perspectives of facing an enemy that could rely on the manpower and industrial potential of continental Europe and Japan and all the resources of Eurasia looked quite bleak. On the other side, Germany, Italy, Japan, and their various satellites were now engaged in the herculean task of building up the NEO and GEACPS empires in Eurasia and Africa, which looked like it would keep them quite busy for many years to come. Even Hitler liked to remark that to deal with the New World would be the task of the next generation, unless America forced the issue. So in the early years of the Cold War, both sides kept studying and snarling to each other, but refrained from unleashing another armed conflict. Both sides strived to develop intercontinental bombers, which became available by the end of the ‘40s, and the NEO also poured efforts in missile technology, a field where it had a definite lead, although true ICBMs would not become reliable until well into the 50s. However the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction arsenals, and the means to deliver them across the Ocean changed the equation. The American nuclear program had been started in 1941, but its pace had relatively lagged for a couple years due to peacetime budget constraints and lack of focus. After America switched to a peacetime war-footing stance and massive rearmament for the first time in its history after the start of the Cold War, the nuclear program too got a substantial boost of resources and attention. However, by that time, the Axis powers had managed to get full access to the archives of Soviet intelligence, which revealed the existence and features of the US nuclear program, and to the data of the Soviet nuclear program. That evidence corrected some critical flaws in, and prompted a substantial boost of resources, energies, and attention for, the German-Italian and Japanese nuclear programs. As a result, the CFN and NEO nuclear programs progressed at more or less a similar pace after 1943, and both yielded working nuclear devices almost simultaneously in 1947-1948, while Japan and Britain developed their own Bomb in 1952. The development of CFN and NEO intercontinental bombers in 1947-48, paired to the build-up of sizable chemical arsenals, had already laid down the basis for the Mutual Assured Destruction stalemate. The creation of nuclear weapons, and the realization of their terrible destructive potential when the Axis powers made generous use of nuclear and chemical WMD weapons to break the residual strength of the Chinese and Russian strongholds in western Siberia and western China, locked the MAD strategic stalemate of the Cold War into place. As much as the Axis and Western blocs could despise, hate, and fear each other, a general conflict between them soon became more and more unthinkable. The Long Night had fallen on the Old World.
The Axis WMD attack on rump China and Russia at the end of the ‘40s proved to be the death knell for both polities. In the mid 1940s, the NEO and the GEACPS had largely focused their resources on basic stabilization and economic integration of their empires, suppression of already raging insurgencies in conquered regions of Eurasia, and the arms race with the CFN. The NEO and Japanese armies mostly limited to bombings and to search and destroy offensives in unoccupied Siberia and western China, leaving aside for the moment the full occupation of those lands and full partition of Eurasia between the already huge Axis empires. Therefore, although the NEO and Japan had nominally agreed to a full partition of Eurasia, with the demarcation line defined on the Yenisei, they had showed no great drive to occupy Russian Siberia or western China, which seemed well headed to slide into chaos on their own, owing to economic collapse, unsustainable numbers of refugees, and Axis attacks. By 1944-46, Germany and Italy already achieved a remarkable result when they managed to make Central Asia break out of Russian control and become independent as a set of pro-Axis warlord states, while Japan achieved a similar result when Xinjiang became a satellite of the Japanese empire. Tibet likewise broke out of Chinese influence and became a neutral buffer state.