So there I was watching season three of “The Man in the High Castle” when a thought occurred. For those few who don’t know, TMITHC is an alternate history series set in a world where, somehow, the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese managed to conquer essentially the *entire* planet, with the US defeated and split between the two. The series takes place in 1962, with resistance movements all over.
In the field of alternate history, “Nazis win WWII” is a reasonably common trope. But in just about every example I can think of, “win” is provisional… typically the United States is still standing even though the Reich has all of Europe, Africa and a chunk of Asia. And usually, the stories take place at most a few decades down the line from the 1940’s, with resistance movements and foreign powers still fighting the Nazis.
But TMITHC got me thinking. There is a plot line where the Nazis are planning on nuking the Japanese empire into non-existence. The Nazis are the only power with nukes at this stage, so it is expected to be a phenomenally one-sided fight, with the Nazis ending up in sole charge of *everything.* It is implied that they have ethnically cleaned not only all of Europe but seemingly all of Africa and the Middle East as well; so if they conquer Japanese holdings, it can be expected that they’d genocide pretty much the whole planet. The war, however, is called off at the last minute.
Don’t get me wrong: TMITHC is phenomenally unlikely, stretching willing suspension of disbelief almost to the breaking point. But if you can accept the basic setup, then going that little bit further to “the Nazis gain *complete* control of the planet” isn’t that hard.
So… consider this sci-fi idea: a world where the Nazis win *completely.* The planetary population was slashed by… what? 95% or more? But in the end, the human population is ethnically, religiously, culturally homogenized. Every living human is a happy little volk of the Reich. So… what’s the future of *that?* A few centuries down the line when not only have non-Nazis passed from living memory, but the history books and museums and memorials and cities and all else have been so thoroughly reworked and paved over that nobody really gives a second thought to the non-Nazis of the past. Even the expert archaeologists are unaware that non-Nazis ever existed. *Possibly,* if the ideological training is strong enough and the control is centralized and strong and effective enough (something the real-world Nazis sucked at), the world might well be at real peace. Without the actual existence of “the other,” there’d be no need for the exterminations and wars and secret police and whatnot. This Nazi-dominated future might well be portrayable as, within its own terms, a utopia of sorts. A homogenous, collectivist, soulless utopia, perhaps akin to the First Order-held worlds of the non-canonical Disney Star Wars movies.
This, I suspect, would not be a TV series likely to win universal acclaim. Especially when you consider that in this alt-future culture, Hitler likely would be lionized as the founding prophet, with Goebbels and Himmler and Goering as his apostles. These future people would happily worship those schmucks the way a lot of people revere Jesus and Moe and Smith and Buddha (which might well not speak volumes of wonderment about the reality of those real-world religious figures). Imagine the optics of *those* scenes.
For extra offensiveness: Hitler was forever yammering on about a “thousand year Reich.” Well, how’s this for a storyline: It’s 2933 and the Reich is celebrating a millenium. The Reich encompasses the entire solar system with a terraformed Venus, Luna and Mars, with the moons of Jupiter and Saturn moved out of planetary and into solar orbit in the inner solar system to serve as feedstock for the tens of millions of Island Five-class habitats. Habitats extend out to the Oort cloud; sublight starships have spread the Reich to new worlds as far as a hundred lightyears away. The total population of mankind can only be tallied using scientific notation, and every last one of ’em is a devoted and happy Nazi. And so… Cthulhu and the cosmic horrors from beyond pop up and start wiping out mankind Just Cuz. Humanity is facing a losing battle against powers best described as gods, but mankind goes down swinging. It’s all very inspiring, with all the best of bravery and intelligence and devotion on display in a futile losing cause. The Reich actually ends at a thousand years, every last man, woman and child wiped from existence. But tens of thousands of years later, someone else out there comes along following after the path of destruction left by the Old Ones and they find the ruins of the SpaceReich. They spend centuries picking through a thousand dead worlds, reading the signs and the records that survived and in the end decide that those Nazis were some damn fine people worthy of remembrance for how they stood up to the cosmic horrors. These later archeologists erect monuments to the Nazis and their prophet Hitler all across this spiral arm, and a million future species come to revere the Nazis as sort of the prototypical Progenitor race to be emulated.
This storyline would, I think, not pass muster at Netflix or Amazon.
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PS: For those people who immediately leap to the conclusion that I think that this Nazified future would be a good thing, there’s a perhaps apocryphal quote attributed to Larry Niven that seems relevant: “We in the writing profession have a technical term for people who believe that the authors believe everything their characters believe. We call them ‘idiots.'”
If anyone knows for certain what the source on that quote is, I’d be interested.