The Ironic Curtain
A familiar history of an unfamiliar dictatorship
1933-1953 Adolf Hitler (NSDAP)
'Uncle Adolf' as he had become known to the Atlantic Allies during the Second World War, passed away a mumbling, shivering wreck. In his lifetime he had overseen the transformation of the German state from delapidated pariah into a vital industrial bulwark against Bolshevism. The final decade of his life saw Germany take her place as the dominant power of Eurasia, when the borders of the Third Reich reached the Urals and 'optimum Lebensraum' was declared to be achieved. Nevertheless, Hitler's terrors and the mass-murders committed under his regime would haunt those who had aligned their nations with him, including Churchill, who survived him by more than a decade. 'Were Stalin to invade Hell, I would sign a pact with the Devil - but I hesitate to stand with Hitler,' he had said prophetically in 1942.
1953-1964 Fritz Sauckel (NSDAP)
In the aftermath of Hitler's death, there was one obvious successor - Heinrich Himmler. The chief of the SS, Hitler's main instrument of terror, met his own end after a show-trial arranged by his terrified opponents within the Nazi hierarchy. With Himmler out of the way, the conspirators - among them Ribbentrop, Bormann and Hans Frank, found little to unite them. What ensued was a battle of political alliances - including a courting of the influential Josef Goebbels - and an eventual bloody 'Second Night of the Long Knives'.
In a surprise to many, the man who came out on top was the brutish Fritz Sauckel, who had been the Reich's most senior labour distributor during wartime, and later overseen the devastatingly successful incorporation of former Poland, Ukraine and Belorussia into the Reich. Sauckel ruled in a very different manner to Hitler. Aided by the latter's rapid reduction in public appearances and speeches, he ruled as a bureaucrat, using gifted orators and writers in the media to return Germany (and the rest of Europe) to a less personal style of rule.
In 1956, Sauckel addressed Gauleiters and Chiefs of State from around Europa in a closed session of the Europstag in Frankfurt. The contents of his speech, while never made publicly available, quickly leaked and it became clear that a condemnation of some of Hitler's measures had come from the new Führer's lips. This was not as hypocritical as it first appears - Sauckel had been instrumental in the racially-motivated mass-murders of Generalplan Ost, but what he condemned was not the extermination policies or the idea of Untermenschen. His target was instead the political purges, the surveillance state and the arrests of 'good Germans' turned in by their vicious children in the Hitler Youth.
That same year, however, hopes that Sauckel would be a liberalising leader were dashed when the popularly-elected Danish government was ruthlessly murdered en masse, in public, by German tanks and infantry. All the new Kristensen government had wanted was a reduction in German troops in the country, and greater control over the stationing of Danish units around Europa. The crushing of this dissent led to the last few supporters of 'the German system' in the Anglosphere becoming known as 'Mausers'.
When Britain fell from the German sphere of influence in 1959 (as a consequence of the March on London in the aftermath of the contested 1959 elections), the new Macmillan government sought close ties with the Americans. Dewey was wary, but after the disastrous German attempt to regain control through the Whitley Bay Fiasco in 1961, the new Kennedy administration in Washington was London's friend. The 1962 England Missile Crisis was to be expected, in a way. That missiles did not fly is a rare positive mark in Sauckel's otherwise heavily blotted copybook. It was this, combined with his own brutal political operations, that alienated the Nazi hierarchy and saw his ousting by a slightly younger generation.
1964-1982 Hermann Fegelein (NSP)
Hitler's brother-in-law had waited in the shadows during the 1953 attempts to seize the Fuhrership. He had sensed, probably accurately, that his time had not yet come. Ingratiating himself further with Sauckel, who already saw him as an ally, he oversaw some of the 'softening' reforms that were instituted across the Reich.
Eventually, however, he grew alarmed with the pace of the reforms, and with Sauckel's lack of loyalty to his political allies. He began to plot with the leadership of the SS, SD, Gestapo, and German Labour Front. By late 1964, everything was in place. Sauckel was met in the Offices of the Führer by armed men and a doctor, who took him to a small room in the basement and forcibly euthanised him. His death was announced two days later. Fegelein had already been running the continent for twenty-four hours.
Fegelein entered office as the great white hope of the anti-reform factions of the NSDAP (which he formally renamed the National Socialist Party in 1965). His swift action against the Paris Spring in 1968 seemed to support this view, and it appeared that business as usual was the order of the day in Berlin.
However, history is more likely to remember Fegelein as the face of stagnation and the slow beginnings of the collapse of the Third Reich. He gained a reputation as a do-nothing - keen to preside over parades and pin medals on chests, but opposed to much meaningful action. When Reichskommisariat Transcaucasia formally 'requested' annexation into the Reich, in light of the fall of Himmlerstadt to Bolshevist rebels in 1979, he responded with the clunking fist that typified the 1970s Reich. In doing so, the ageing Fegelein probably doomed the Reich, but by this point it is debatable whether he knew much about what he was doing. He died, senile and (even more) useless, in 1982.
1982-1984 Albert Bormann (NSP)
After spending the war in Hitler's inner circle, Bormann did not meet the same fate as his brother. As Martin was packed off to oversee a settlement-building programme in Muscovy in the late 1950s (he would later drink himself to death), Albert remained in Berlin, loyal to the state first and foremost and a hard worker. He was rewarded with the post of head of the SD in the 1960s. Serving there throughout the Fegelein period, he unexpectedly gained the ascendency after the deaths of Speer, Ley and Heydrich left the party without many other senior ideologues. While a member of the ruling 'gerontocracy', Bormann was more quietly liberal than his colleagues, and had pushed for the promotion of other modernising figures. On Fegelein's death, this paid dividends, and 'Heil Bormann' was soon heard around the Reich - though not the Bormann people might have once expected.
However, Bormann only ruled for fewer than eighteen months. In 1984, having achieved little (the Transcaucasian war was still rumbling on, to say nothing of the increased activity on the Ostwall), he suffered a stroke and died a week later. He recommended that the moderniser Ratzinger be called upon to become Führer, but this (known as 'the Bormann Memorandum') was quickly lost to history - and Ratzinger only escaped an attempt on his life by moving to Ostmark for several months.
1984-1985 Eduard Wirths (NSP)
A promising scientist in his youth, Wirths had eventually become one of the monstrous butchers who experimented on prisoners in the camps of the Final Solution. This was unknown to the European public, of course, who only knew him as a social climber who had diverted into politics in the 1960s via a hefty dose of cronyism under Fegelein. A technically gifted individual, he was not an able Führer, and became obsessed with 'pet projects', many of them more horrifying than his activities in southern Poland during the war. Mercifully, he died a mere fifteen months after taking power, and this time, the man who he had not seen as a threat was ready to make his move.
1985-1991 Josef Ratzinger (NSP)
Born as he was to Catholic anti-Nazi parents, it must have seemed very unlikely for Josef Ratzinger to one day rule a continent of 400 million people, more than half of them 'Germans' and (officially) all of them followers of Positive Christianity. But take power he did, and he proved the most important Führer since 1933.
Soon after abolishing the formal salute - Reich subjects would now greet one another with a simple spoken 'Heil' - the new Führer set in motion two programmes, called Umgestaltung and Offenheit. Opening up the secrets of the past (within the boundaries of taste and total psychological horror) proved a double-edged sword. Riots occurred, on a scale unseen in Europa since 1968, and the looser economic reforms proved to be messily implemented and unsuitable for an economy built on expansion and dictatorial command. In the East, the 'ghost cities' (built for millions but occupied by a few thousand people apiece) were left to rot as now no rightminded investor from anywhere in the world would seek to build in Goebbelsburg or Bismarck.
Ratzinger tried his best, but the Reich was already breaking apart. There were no coherent national groups in the East to break away, but all around Western Europe, the various vassal states overthrew their leaders as the 1980s neared their end. The disbanding of the SD and Gestapo did little to assuage public opinion, and indeed probably made things worse in the short term, at least from a public order perspective.
On Christmas Day, 1991, Ratzinger accepted the inevitable and declared the dissolution of the Third Reich, in a live television broadcast. The German State which replaced it was still one of the largest and most powerful nations in the world - but it had no Reichskommisariats, no state security systems, no vassals, and - crucially - no more secrecy.
The long, waking nightmare of the German volk was about to begin.
1991-1999 Manfred Rommel (Independent)
The Gauleiter of Berlin was the most popular man in Germany thanks to his feat of aligning himself with Ratzinger's aims but opposing the man personally. His famous name helped, too, and he became the first President of the German State almost as an afterthought. As 1992 dawned, the records that still existed of the Final Solution began to flood out, and by mid-1993 the German suicide rate had reached unprecedented levels. Rommel, a bombastic figure capable of forcing anything into reality, was overtaken somewhat by events and turned to drink.
As the German State stabilised, the rest of the world still looked on it in horror. Worn down by years of diplomatic isolation - from the very vassals it had built the economies of, no less - Germany staggered toward the millennium. Rommel realised shortly before it that he would not be the man to follow it. But a change in heart - brought about by pity as Germans continued to kill themselves and enter psychiatric care in record numbers - led to the American President visiting the Franco-German border and signing historic accords of assistance, in exchange for wide-ranging reforms and public trials. A macho former Gestapo officer who had become a favourite of Rommel was quickly groomed for the Presidency. As Rommel stepped down, the future looked vaguely bright for the first time since the early 1970s.
Those Germans sane enough to see the world as it was would now look to their President - never Führer - for guidance. For the vast majority of them, it was all they had ever known.
President Hasselhoff had a great deal of responsibility.