Introduction
Sabre77
Banned
Hello all!
A while back I posted a couple threads on which “third world” countries could have plausibly gone fascist or communist. The idea of a three way Cold War has always been interesting to me; as it was the Cold War saw extensive political maneuvering, espionage plots, warfare, and diplomatic gambits, and adding a third player would certainly make things even more....interesting. This is my first attempt at a timeline, so I’m going to be learning on the fly in terms of what people like or don’t like as I go along. And now.....let‘s get this show on the road.
September 4, 1940 seemed an ordinary day just like any other to the people filing into Berlin‘s Sportsplast to listen to the Führer, Adolf Hitler, make a speech. To those Berliners things seemed to be going very nicely indeed. For the past year Germany’s armed forces had defeated every foe they had faced. France, the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway and Poland lay prostrated under the Reich’s boot. German bombers were pounding the cities of England with everything they had, and no one thought that the British would be able to hold out for long. The radio assured them that the British would surely see sense and give in with all of their allies defeated. Germany‘s Italian ally was slowly advancing into England‘s colonial possessions in East and North Africa as well, and Mussolini bombastically promised they wouldn’t stop until they hit the Suez Canal. For the Axis Powers, things were looking up.
Soon enough, Hitler arrived at the Sportsplast, and greeted the excited crowd. Pausing a moment to bask in the adoration of his supporters, he soon launched into speech, denouncing the British and declaring that the Luftwaffe would raze their cities to the ground. As he ranted, out of the corner of his eye he noticed a man in an SS uniform making his way through the crowd. Shifting his attention back to his speech, Hitler‘s rhetoric only grew in vehemence and stridency as he warmed to his topic, promising that soon Germany would achieve its destiny as master of Europe, soon they would——
Adolf Hitler never felt the bullet which struck him just above the right eye.
As the dictator tumbled backwards, three more rounds bunched into his chest and stomach. The crowd watched in utter shock as a man in a SS uniform continued firing several more shots in the direction of where the Führer had fallen, only to suddenly be hit by dozens of rounds of return fire as the horrified LSSAH guards desperately tried to provide protection to their leader. The crowd went into utter panic as civilians began to fall, hit by stray rounds fired by the panicking SS guards, and fled in every direction.
A Walther P38 pistol, the weapon used to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
To this day, the true identity of the man who killed Adolf Hitler and his motive for doing so has never been established. The corpse was pretty thoroughly trampled by fleeing civilians, but the identity card and papers found in his body turned out to be excellent quality forgeries. Investigation by former Berlin police detectives who had been ”volunteered” into service with the Gestapo managed to track the movements of the man to a small tenement in one of Berlin’s shadier neighborhoods, but the landlord and other tenants claimed that the individual had introduced himself as a factory worker who had recently been transferred to the Berlin factory branch of Krupp to help produce artillery pieces for the Wehrmacht. Investigation at the factory quickly revealed that no one there or at Krupp headquarters had heard of the man, and they certainly hadn’t ordered any workers recently transferred to Berlin.
The most likely conclusion is that the assassin was an agent of a foreign power, most likely Great Britain. The problem with this theory is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any operation having been planned, much less executed; given that the British and Germany were at war, one would think that had the order been given by London, some form of hard evidence would have come out by now. The other main possibility was that it was a member of Stalin’s NKVD, which certainly had the ruthlessness to send a agent on a one way mission. The problem with that theory is that we have access to numerous Stalin-era declassified files, many of which show that in 1940 the NKVD’s intelligence efforts were very much being redirected east, to support and assist the Sorge Ring. If the killer was a member of an intelligence agency, it is likely the relevant files and orders were destroyed long ago. It is likely we will never know who was responsible for the killing of the German dictator.
The news of Hitler’s death trickled out slowly, first as rumors, and then officially being confirmed by a stunned sounding Josef Goebbels over official state radio. As the news spread internationally London erupted in joyous celebration; a similar display of happiness in Paris was brutally crushed by the local Heer and SS forces. In Moscow Stalin breathed a sigh of relief and lit a cigar, flipping through maps of Mongolia and the border region with Manchuria.
The course of history had been fundamentally altered once more.
A while back I posted a couple threads on which “third world” countries could have plausibly gone fascist or communist. The idea of a three way Cold War has always been interesting to me; as it was the Cold War saw extensive political maneuvering, espionage plots, warfare, and diplomatic gambits, and adding a third player would certainly make things even more....interesting. This is my first attempt at a timeline, so I’m going to be learning on the fly in terms of what people like or don’t like as I go along. And now.....let‘s get this show on the road.
September 4, 1940 seemed an ordinary day just like any other to the people filing into Berlin‘s Sportsplast to listen to the Führer, Adolf Hitler, make a speech. To those Berliners things seemed to be going very nicely indeed. For the past year Germany’s armed forces had defeated every foe they had faced. France, the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway and Poland lay prostrated under the Reich’s boot. German bombers were pounding the cities of England with everything they had, and no one thought that the British would be able to hold out for long. The radio assured them that the British would surely see sense and give in with all of their allies defeated. Germany‘s Italian ally was slowly advancing into England‘s colonial possessions in East and North Africa as well, and Mussolini bombastically promised they wouldn’t stop until they hit the Suez Canal. For the Axis Powers, things were looking up.
Soon enough, Hitler arrived at the Sportsplast, and greeted the excited crowd. Pausing a moment to bask in the adoration of his supporters, he soon launched into speech, denouncing the British and declaring that the Luftwaffe would raze their cities to the ground. As he ranted, out of the corner of his eye he noticed a man in an SS uniform making his way through the crowd. Shifting his attention back to his speech, Hitler‘s rhetoric only grew in vehemence and stridency as he warmed to his topic, promising that soon Germany would achieve its destiny as master of Europe, soon they would——
Adolf Hitler never felt the bullet which struck him just above the right eye.
As the dictator tumbled backwards, three more rounds bunched into his chest and stomach. The crowd watched in utter shock as a man in a SS uniform continued firing several more shots in the direction of where the Führer had fallen, only to suddenly be hit by dozens of rounds of return fire as the horrified LSSAH guards desperately tried to provide protection to their leader. The crowd went into utter panic as civilians began to fall, hit by stray rounds fired by the panicking SS guards, and fled in every direction.
A Walther P38 pistol, the weapon used to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
To this day, the true identity of the man who killed Adolf Hitler and his motive for doing so has never been established. The corpse was pretty thoroughly trampled by fleeing civilians, but the identity card and papers found in his body turned out to be excellent quality forgeries. Investigation by former Berlin police detectives who had been ”volunteered” into service with the Gestapo managed to track the movements of the man to a small tenement in one of Berlin’s shadier neighborhoods, but the landlord and other tenants claimed that the individual had introduced himself as a factory worker who had recently been transferred to the Berlin factory branch of Krupp to help produce artillery pieces for the Wehrmacht. Investigation at the factory quickly revealed that no one there or at Krupp headquarters had heard of the man, and they certainly hadn’t ordered any workers recently transferred to Berlin.
The most likely conclusion is that the assassin was an agent of a foreign power, most likely Great Britain. The problem with this theory is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any operation having been planned, much less executed; given that the British and Germany were at war, one would think that had the order been given by London, some form of hard evidence would have come out by now. The other main possibility was that it was a member of Stalin’s NKVD, which certainly had the ruthlessness to send a agent on a one way mission. The problem with that theory is that we have access to numerous Stalin-era declassified files, many of which show that in 1940 the NKVD’s intelligence efforts were very much being redirected east, to support and assist the Sorge Ring. If the killer was a member of an intelligence agency, it is likely the relevant files and orders were destroyed long ago. It is likely we will never know who was responsible for the killing of the German dictator.
The news of Hitler’s death trickled out slowly, first as rumors, and then officially being confirmed by a stunned sounding Josef Goebbels over official state radio. As the news spread internationally London erupted in joyous celebration; a similar display of happiness in Paris was brutally crushed by the local Heer and SS forces. In Moscow Stalin breathed a sigh of relief and lit a cigar, flipping through maps of Mongolia and the border region with Manchuria.
The course of history had been fundamentally altered once more.