Themes

Helen White stated that a hypothetical world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War is a harsher and grimmer place to live in than the real world, where Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers lost the War in 1945.^[8] Speculative literature about hypothetical military victories by the Axis Powers have generally been English-language literary work from the British Commonwealth and the United States as such protagonists tend to experience events from the perspective of military defeat and foreign military occupation.^[9]

The literary tone of alternative history fiction presents the military victory of the Axis Powers as a melancholy background against which the reader sees the unfolding of political plots in a socially strained atmosphere of foreign occupation and socio-economic domination.^[1]

The social story of SS-GB (1978), by Len Deighton, concludes with a US commando raid into Nazi occupied Great Britain, to rescue British nuclear scientists, while the British Resistance remains hopeful of eventual military liberation by the United States. In Clash of Eagles (1990), by Leo Rutman, the people of New York City rebel against the Nazi occupation of the US.

Some depictions focus on Nazism's contradictions, suggesting that even with military triumph, the system would eventually start to collapse under its own weight. In Fatherland (1992), by Robert Harris, the Greater German Reich faces economic crisis, forcing Hitler to pursue rapprochement with the US; at the story's conclusion, the protagonists thwart this effort by exposing the Holocaust to the American people. Harry Turtledove's In the Presence of Mine Enemies (2003) presents the Nazi world two generations after their victory in WWII, in a time and place that allowed political liberalization and democratization.^[10] The Hearts of Iron IV mod The New Order: Last Days of Europe shows the Reich declining thanks to economic stagnation and hostile relations with its former allies.^[11] Another example can be found in Wolfenstein: Youngblood's plot, set in an alternative 1980s; high ranked SS generals are seeking to establish a Fourth Reich which will replace the unstable and corrupt Reich after they lost most of their power since the liberation of America and the demise of Nazi key people such as Deathshead, Frau Engel and even Hitler himself in the 1960s.^[12]

Early depictions

The novel Swastika Night (1937) presents the post-war world born from the victory of the Axis Powers: a dictatorship characterized by much "violence and mindlessness" which are justified by "irrationality and superstition".^[4] Published two years before Nazi Germany began the Second World War in 1939, Swastika Night is a work of future history and not a work of alternative history. The book reviewer, Darragh McManus, said that although the story and plot of the novel are “a huge leap of imagination, Swastika Night posits a terrifyingly coherent and plausible [world]”, that “considering when it was published, and how little of what we know of the Nazi regime today was then understood, the novel is eerily prophetic and perceptive about the nature of Nazism”.

The short story, I, James Blunt (1941), is a work of wartime propaganda set in a fictional September 1944 when Great Britain is under Nazi rule. The story is told through the entries of a diary, which describe the social and economic consequences of military occupation such as British workers sent to the shipyards of Nazi Germany and Scotland to build warships to attack the U.S. The short story concludes with the diarist exhorting the reader to ensure that the story of the Nazi occupation of Great Britain remains fiction.^[13]

The novel We, Adolf I (1945) presents a Nazi victory in the Battle of Stalingrad which allowed Hitler to crown himself emperor of the world. In Berlin, the Nazis build an imperial palace featuring architectural elements of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. In the course of the story, the despot Hitler enters a dynastic marriage with the Japanese Imperial princess in an effort to produce a Fascist heir to rule the world after Hitler.^[1]

The Last Jew: A Novel (Ha-Yehudi Ha'Aharon, 1946) tells the future history of a Nazi world ruled by the League of Dictators. The League of Dictators plan the public execution of the last Jew as entertainment during the Olympic Games. Before they can realize the spectacular death of the last Jew, the Moon's excessive proximity to Earth, a negative consequence of Nazi lunar colonization, provokes a catastrophe that extinguishes life on planet Earth.^[14] The novel was written by the Jewish author Jacob Weinshal and should not be confused with Yoram Kaniuk's novel The Last Jew, which has been translated to English.^[15]

The stage play Peace in Our Time (1947), by Noël Coward explores the nature of fascist rule in London and examines the deleterious effects of military occupation upon the mental health of the common man and the common woman. As a playwright, Coward was included in the Gestapo's Black Book of enemies-of-the-state to be arrested upon completion of Operation Sea Lion, the Nazi conquest of Great Britain.^[5]

The novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) presents an Axis victory after Franklin D. Roosevelt is assassinated in 1933 and the United States is divided between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.^[1]

Later depictions

Additional notable depictions of Axis victory include: