Chapter One; New Masters
July, 1944.
We finally made it home to Boston. God, 3 years away… Everything looks different, even if it’s the exact same. My old Superman comics, are right where I left them. Always wanted to be like big blue, guess I am now. We ran into Betty. Haven’t thought about her, what, since Taipei? Can’t believe we used to talk about running away to Albany. Can’t believe Albany used to seem far.
Only been here a couple hours, and I’ve already got kids asking about it. Asking how fun it was to ‘kick Jap teeth in.’ God… what have they been feeding these kids? Look. I’ll be damned if anyone else sees this damned journal, but I need to say this. What we did wasn’t fun. We weren’t superheroes, or kids playing army. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but only because I know if we didn’t stop them, it would’ve just meant another baby on a goddamned pike. I feel sick thinking about it, but I feel sicker thinking about one of those kids having to deal with it.
Dad sat me down, told me that it was best to lie to em. I dunno if I can. I don’t want to scare em, but I don’t want any of em thinking war’s a good thing, ya know? How do you tell a kid that if he goes through with it, he could wind up a cripple- I only got one fuckin lung. Can’t even enjoy a good cig without an immediate coughing fit. Suppose that’s just as well, since the combat medic had heard somethin about it causing cancer. Just my luck, I suppose. Not that I’m lucky enough to die.
I think I’m rambling. Guess I don’t want to think about the war too much. But at the same time, it’s all anyone’s talking about, so it’s all I can think about. Like, at the train station, before Dad picked us up, I saw a paper talkin about it. ‘Japan Surrenders- Peace In China!’ then, at the bottom of the photo, maybe a third the size, it mentioned ‘4.6 million dead or injured in final push.’ That’s me. I’m a fucking caption. I can’t breathe right cause of that damn war, and I’m not even a full article.
… I saw Mikey today. Dad said that it had helped him with Uncle Will to just… rip the bandaid off. Made it clear to him that he wasn’t coming back. I figured it wouldn’t hurt. God. I was so wrong. I wore what passed for my Sunday best at this point and everything, but when I got to the grave I just. Broke down. We’d known each other 19 god damned years. Hell, we signed up for the war before the draft cause we thought it’d be fun. Like the stupid kids we were. The worst part? I remember everything about the day he died. Friday the 13th, August 43, we were a bit toward the end of the logistics, so we had K-rations that day. He made some comment about the captain getting steak and greens served on a silver platter. Everyone laughed but Whyte. Always had a stick up his ass.
The worst part though? It shoulda been me. And if Mikey hadn’t been a better man than I was, it woulda been. It was the usual shit, an enemy grenade in our position, and Mike took the sacrifice play. I think the Davidsons were lucky there was enough to bury. Makes me sick that’s the ‘lucky’ part. He was 23, the same age I am now.
Rest in Peace, Mikey.
Journal entry- Jason Herns, 07/1944
Even as the war wrapped up with Japan, and the empire was dismantled, many Americans looked on toward Europe with growing concern. The British had been forced to make peace after the Fall of Stalingrad ended organized resistance to the German war machine. As a result, Germany had been given free rein over Western Europe, and many Americans felt compelled to act. However, while there was some outcry pushing for a response to German aggression, the broad, almost overwhelming consensus was against direct military involvement. The United States had suffered egregious casualties, losing over 5 million in the total conflict with Japan already.
Most Americans at this point, were eager for a return to normalcy and the demobilization of the economy. To the voters, many of whom were veterans, Germany wasn’t America’s problem- if Britain had a problem with Berlin, they were more than welcome to try round three themselves. The US had its hands full rebuilding the Pacific. Roosevelt had ultimately decided against giving most of the European colonies back, taking the opportunity their occupation by Japan had created to expand American influence and market power abroad. However, this really only applied to France, as while Germany had successfully annexed the Netherlands, a territorial change that the US had tacitly recognized, Hitler made no claims to Indonesia, only former German colonies.
The French, however, were outraged at the US’s actions. Philippe Petain, ‘Chief of The French State,’ had demanded the US evacuate Indochina and return the province to France, but FDR refused, citing that, because Vichy had given the land to Japan, clearly they had revoked their claim to the territory, and thus the US was free to do with its conquest from Japan what it sought to. Petain threatened to send the remains of the French navy to Saigon to enforce it, but was forced to back down by his puppet master in Germany. It was also true that, by this point, the USN was the largest fleet in the world, and the French, still recovering from the British betrayal at Mers-el-Kébir, would have very little chance at retaking Indochina if they tried.
Also outraged was Charles de Gaulle, Marshall of Free France. While the Treaty of Brussels that had ended the Second World War had meant that, officially, Britain could no longer support Algiers, this did little to stop Halifax. As Germany was more focused on Eastern Europe than Africa, and Italy preferred the weakened state of either French regime, there was very little that Petain could do but grumble to Germany about the continued existence of the government in exile. Despite recognizing Vichy France as the legitimate government of the country, Roosevelt opted to maintain some unofficial relations with de Gaulle, largely due to the resources in French West Africa. The Marshall, for his part, knew he would be reliant on British aid, and hoped to secure that of the Americans.
Charles de Gaulle, Marshall of Free France, or the Algerian Government. Called 'A nationalist without a nation,'
he never accepted the terms of the 2nd Treaty of Versailles, and his regime claimed all territory France held in 1939.
Regardless, FDR had turned the Pacific into an American lake in all but name. With the defeat of Japan, the US created several new republics- Korea, The Republic of Malaya, and the Indochinese Federation; though the latter was overwhelmingly dominated by the Vietnamese people. While Ho Chi Minh had attempted to woo the US into supporting his faction as the leaders in a newly free Vietnam, American reservations about socialism led to the President electing to back Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ, a friend of Minh who was still anti-communist. Neither French government would recognize the Indochinese Federation until the 1960s, and it remained a sore spot between the USA and the Axis, and one of the earliest foreign issues of the Cold War.
As the US created its new sister republics in the Pacific, a debate was raging in Tokyo, the seat of the Occupational Government of Japan. Namely, the fate of the Emperor, which the Japanese people, and many in the Occupational Government, wanted to preserve, either for his role as a head of Japanese culture and his semi-religious significance, or in the case of most Americans like Douglas MacArthur, to prevent a guerilla war from erupting in the ravaged Japan. FDR, and most Americans at home, however, wanted to impose a republic on Japan, seeing the Emperor as complicit in the crimes Japan had committed in his name, and that his continuity with the Meiji era and feudal Japan had helped foster the cultural aspects of Japanese militarism that the US wanted to purge.
Eventually, the popular outcry from the US, and the new Republic of Korea, won out. Emperor Shōwa would be removed from power, ending the Japanese Empire and two thousand years of continuity under the House of Yamato. The Japanese Constitution, then, would adopt a Presidential style similar to that of the United States. FDR also demanded a number of restrictions on the military, hoping to keep Japan a strong enough ally in the Pacific, while also neutering the ability of a second Tojo to rise. In effect, an officer in the military was banned from being the Governor of a Prefecture, or from assuming an executive role in the government.
Just as Roosevelt was building an American order in the Pacific, Germany’s new order was taking shape in Europe. Germany now stretched from the English Channel in the west to the Volga River in the East, making it one of the largest countries in the world. While Hitler wanted to push all the way to the Urals, Goering, and Rommel had just managed to convince him that the Volga boundary was the end of German logistics until they had germanized and rebuilt Reichskommissariate Moskowien, and that the current boundary provided sufficient lebensraum for the plan to commence. Thus, Hitler gave the order to commence one of the largest, most atrocious crimes against humanity.
Wikipedia infobox for World War Two, fought between France, the United Kingdom, and later the Soviet Union, against Germany, Italy, and Hungary.
The deadliest war in European history, and by some metrics, all of Human history. It saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dismemberment of France, and the ascendancy of Germany over Europe.
Generalplan Ost had been in effect in some capacity since the initial invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, but peace gave Hitler the room to expand it. POW camps were converted into horrific work or death camps, with Chudovo becoming home to one of the largest in the ‘German frontier.’ The hunger plan was also implemented, with many urban Slavs left to starve, while the farm laborers were given the bare essentials to survive, while most of the harvest went back to Germany’s metropolitan core, which Hitler used to stabilize the food situation in Germany- while that had drastically improved with the end of the British blockade in the Treaty of Brussels, it would not return to prewar levels until the imposition of slave labor in the frontier. Slavic peoples of all sorts were enslaved, treated as little more than disposable waste, and their Wehrmacht and SS masters would frequently work them to death. In 1940, the Soviet Union had a population of 196,000,000- in 1944, 58 million of that population was dead, and another 3 million had been enslaved by the German state, which planned to reduce the population to the smallest it could enslave. Russians and Poles were treated the worst, while Ukraine had a higher rate of recruitment into the Waffen-ss, earning them better conditions, with many receiving smaller estates staffed by enslaved countrymen. Leningrad, as well as many historic cities like Minsk and Warsaw, were destroyed in the name of the German Reich.
Generalplan Ost was, thankfully, not the end of the Russian people. While Germany refused to recognize this fact, the Russian People were down, not out. Georgy Zhukov had fled with his loyalists to the holdouts east of the Volga and was in the process of asserting control over the remaining portion of the Soviet Union that he could. While he had been removed from the general staff, and many in the Soviet Government blamed him for the fall of Leningrad, despite at that point having been closer to Moscow, and in fact, it was the fall of Leningrad that had enabled the Germans to overwhelm him in the first place. As a result, Zhukov fled east, seeing that without Leningrad and Moscow, Stalingrad was next to fall. From there he declared the Soviet Provisional Authority, stating his intent to reverse the devastation the Germans were imposing. However, Zhucov’s authority was not absolute‒ the military situation he had found himself in challenged his legitimacy, and the numerous outside problems that his government faced before it could even dream of recognition, let alone reconquest of Russia.
The Fall of Leningrad was the turning point in the war, and was frequently blamed on Zhukov despite evidence to the contrary.
Fierce debate over what could be done and the need for someone to blame ultimately play a larger role in this reputation than military reality.
At the same time, with the return of peace and the triumph of his regime, Hitler turned his attention to another group that he desired to purge. The Jewish people, be they Slavic, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, or any other race, so long as they were of Jewish heritage, the Fuher sought to purge not only them, but all evidence of them. Over the period between 1944-1946, Germany would build ten new work camps, and converted over half a dozen work or prisoner-of-war camps to death camps. Most estimates indicated that there were 9 million Jewish people in Europe prior to Hitler’s war, and that the Reich had killed 6 million of them. However, this quickly began to feed into Hitler’s paranoia; even if they exterminated the remaining three million, that would only be those who were actively or culturally Jewish, and did not account for those who had assimilated during the last few generations and still retained such “vile” heritage close to the present. This, combined with his hatred of other minorities in western Europe such as the Roma, black Europeans, or homosexuals and other queer people, is what motivated Hitler’s decision to escalate the Holocaust.
However, the German war machine could not truly be everywhere, much as it pretended to be. It did not take long for a number of underground railroads to begin forming. As much as it created hurdles and challenges for the Siberian Provisional Authority, Zhukov was more than willing to accept refugees of all sorts from the Reich. Sweden and Finland, while having had to make serious concessions to Germany in order to survive the war in the first place, were quickly also becoming home to a number of refugees, mostly Danish and Baltic Jews or Roma. However, by far the most accepting place, was Britain. Having made peace with Germany, the British intelligence, knowing the many atrocities that Hitler was committing, had made it a priority to keep underground channels of escape open; whether this was out of altruism, a need to present themselves as the noble hero against the ‘Brutal Huns,’ spite, or a combination of all three, remains highly debated. In the end, however, all that mattered was that it kept many Jewish, Roma, or African-descendant people alive.
Even after the war, a large number of refugees were taken in by any means possible.
Be it fraud and a sympathetic border patrol, or simply fleeing in the dead of night.
These passages were all over the periphery of the Nazi Empire.
Returning to the East, the worst challenges facing Zhucov’s regime were not foreign enemies, but domestic woes. Siberia was not as under-industrialized as before the war, but it remained a relative backwater industrially, and agriculturally. As a result, the nation struggled to support itself without the import of food from the Russian heartland, and this was only made worse as countless people made the perilous journey beyond the Volga. This also combined with the fact there was only one trans-siberian railway, and as a result, it was a strenuous process to move food from one end of the enormous country to the other, compounding the problem further still. But the worst part was the limited trade; Zhukov had inherited much of the diplomatic isolation of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and as a result, there was little in the way of trade between the Soviet Provisional Authority and the Western world, and officially, there wasn’t supposed to be any between it and Britain (though, like most of the foreign stipulations in the Treaty of Brussels, this wouldn’t last long.)
This, naturally, meant that there was great instability within the Soviet Provisional Authority, which led to all of this compounding. Because of food scarcity, people were forced to turn to banditry, which strained the military trying to keep order, which limited the ability to insure stability within the nation, making it hard for people to settle and farm, increasing the food scarcity. By December 1944, Zhukov had very little control of Central Asia, or over Russian Manchuria, which limited SPA ability to trade with the outside world even more, which really made the whole situation that much worse.
One of the most problematic challengers to Zhucov’s authority, however, was a former member of Soviet politics. Lavrenty Beira, head of the NKVD, had asserted himself as the leader of Russian Manchuria. Like most of the Politburo, he had been thought dead after the fall of Moscow, however, both he and Zhandov had barely escaped the city, leaving decoys with Stalin and the rest, while fleeing through the Caspian Sea and Iran. From there, they made the perilous voyage to Vladivostok, and turned the region into their own little government. Not only was this an obvious challenge to Zhucov, as it meant members of the prewar government had survived and asserted themselves, but it also played a crucial role in why the SPA struggled so much with trade‒ what would be their largest port was occupied by a rival government claiming the exact same land and purpose as them. Similarly, while Beira had relatively little of the surviving soviet army, he was still taking in many former NKVD members, bringing with them quite a potent army for the far eastern governate..
Central Asia proved complicated. General Ivan Bagramyan had asserted himself as the head of the military in the region and was loyal to Zhucov's government. However, the region's people were much more divided, with many being settlers from western Russia that were more in favor of the 'legitimate Bolshevik cause' in Manchuria. As a result, this region was already struggling against guerilla resistance, something made worse by Turkic resistance to the Russian occupation of the region in the first place. All of this combined with how sparsely populated Siberia was and the poor infrastructure, and as a result, Central Asia was less of a province of the SPA and more akin to a protectorate. Aktobe, the sat of Bagramyan's government, was also in a period of unrest and growth. The city had grown substantially since 1941 as people were evacuated or expelled from the Riech, and all that entailed. And with the fall of the West to the German war machine, the refugees had not stopped coming, as people made perilous trek after perilous trek in order to flee to stability. And while Aktobe and its military leadership tried to provide a shining bastion, the fact of it was they were a moderately sized city in a relatively poor part of the Soviet Union, and there were not always enough resources to maintain what they had, let alone the constant expansion required by the refugee crisis. As a result of this, the city and the region as a whole was suffering food shortages, crime, and corruption as bad as, or nearly worse than the Siberian Provisional Authority
The problems on the Eastern border were similar, but not as extreme as those in the west. The borders with Cheng Kai-Shek’s China was enormous, and equally as porous as the one with Germany. However, this did not lead to mass migration, but border raids. Despite the best efforts of the KMT, China was still a decentralized state rife with warlordism and banditry, creating a poverty that only forced more into raids. The recent liberation of Manchuria from the Imperial Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo had also destroyed much of the infrastructure of what had been a fairly industrialized part of ‘China,’ furthering the poverty and the creation of black market trades along the border.
Russia was not the only region that Germany had dramatically reshaped. With the Treaty of Brussels came the end of the sovereignty of the Benelux region as well as Denmark, bringing them into Berlin. Germany had also directly annexed all of Poland, and was in the process of enacting the Hungar Plan on the region as well. However, the majority of Germany’s territory was in the form of various Reichskommisarates, namely those of Ostland, Ukraine, Moskowien, and Kaukasien. All of these quasi-states had their own army and slightly different laws, but each of them was beholden to Germany regarding foreign and trade policy, and were to allow the German SS to operate within their borders. Most distressingly, each of them was to implement the plans that Berlin dictated to pacify the former heartland of the Soviet Union, and the leaders were more than willing to participate.
Germany’s grip extended beyond its own conquests. Over the 1930s, Germany had already redrawn the borders of the Balkans numerous times, bringing the region deeper into the fold and asserting it as part of their sphere of influence. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this policy had been Hungary, under Miklos Horthy, a loyal ally of the Fuher. At the end of the war, Hungary had its Vienna Award borders affirmed, asserting the Greater Hungary project and legitimizing Horthy’s regime in the eyes of the Hungarian People. Bulgaria, similarly, had gained numerous regions that it had claimed since the days of the Balkan Wars- Southern Dibruja, North Macedonia, and western Thrakia. Romania, however, was an out-and-out loser of the war, having had to give up Transylvania and Dibruja to its own ‘allies,’ while only gaining Moldova and smaller regions around it.
However, Germany was not the only power to vie for power over the Balkans. Mussolini’s Italy had spent quite a lot of time, money, and lives to do the same. Rome took over much of former Yugoslavia, mostly the Croatian territories that had been part of the Venetian Republic during the Renaissance, a fate shared with Albania. In addition, they had taken over much of Greece in some capacity; the Ionian Islands, as well as Crete had been annexed into the Empire, as had much of Eprius. However, Mussolini had little interest in annexing the entire peninsula and had instead opted to create a rump puppet state under the Fascist adjacent Konstantinos Kotzias.
France was another victim of Italian expansion. While Italy quietly avoided ending De Gaulle’s ‘Free France,’ it had quite generously helped itself to other parts of the French Empire. Piedmont and Savoy were obvious targets of Italian Irridentism, as was Corsica. However, Mussolini had also demanded the French Mandate of Syria, which was directly annexed in the hopes of gaining more control over the Mediterranean and creating a domestic oil industry (Libya's own oil supplies were not yet discovered.)
Despite ostensibly being a defeated party, the United Kingdom had come out of the conflict with little in terms of losses as a power. London had not been made to cede territory, only recognize fallen lands as such. However, this did not change the pessimism and cynicism that now burned the electorate. The massacre at Dunkirk had been one thing, though it had forced Churchill to resign in shame over the blunder on both a military and political basis. That had been one thing, and the public had retained hope even after it. However, much of that hope had been based on the giants of the world‒ the USSR, and the USA. However, politics had ruined Roosevelt’s attempts to bring America into the war, and the aid to Russia had depleted, leading to the latter’s defeat. The Treaty of Brussels was thus blamed largely on the Americans, and left many older voters feeling betrayed by Washington. However, despite these things, the treaty was not nearly as harsh as it had been for France; with the conquests in Russia, Hitler had abandoned the dreams of restored German colonial empire in Africa, and had not pushed as heavily for them or the Belgian Congo as the British were expecting. While Britain was not officially allowed to support de Gaulle or the SPA, Germany ultimately had its hands too full to really stop them. As a result of all of this, Britain had gained protectorates in Iceland and the Congo, but the people still felt as though they had lost a great deal.
Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax. A reluctant Prime Minister, his role in the war proved incredibly complicated.
While an early proponent of peace, the terms Hitler had offered had proven impossible
until the Fuher found himself Master of Europe, and grew unconcerned about Africa and Asia.
However, there was a restlessness in the Empire as a whole. Britain, once thought an invincible, dominating force, had lost. While many in the colonies had served the Empire loyally, many others, even some who had fought in the war against Germany, were getting ideas. Germany had shown that Britain could be defeated, even when she wasn’t as exhausted as she had been in 1917. While it would take time for these ideas to be put into action, the mere idea of a defeat gave many white settlers a sense of apprehension, and many colonial subjects hope.
As the war left old powers broken and destroyed, two new masters stood triumphant. Nazi Germany stood on the bones of the French and Soviet Empires, trampling countless under itself as it used slave labor to rebuild its core after the agonizing conquest of Europe. Rage and triumph were all that this new Germany knew. All that it could spread. In contrast, the United States of America was looking outward, beyond the seas, for the first time in quite a while. Its war in Japan had built a more somber nation, one that for the first time, understood what it felt like to be threatened and wounded. The United States looked to Europe, and for the first time, felt nothing but contempt for their brothers, seeing the Germans as a new rival, and one that could potentially bring the end of the American Dream in ways that neither Britain, nor Japan, had ever been able to imagine doing. While many denounced the idea of getting involved, the United States had learned from the war‒ often, you don’t get a choice about getting involved. And as 23 year old Jason Herns sat in prayer one night in Boston, he knew what the next great struggle would be.
Hi there; so i've been absent from writing TLs for a while, and wanted to get into the swing of it again. which is part of why this TL is about such a tried and true topic- I think a Nazi cold war is an easy enough premise that I can just have some fun with worldbuilding and character, while also developing an engaging fiction. Which brings me to another point- this timeline, in my opinion, is implausible from the outset. Germany's economic plans wouldn't work long enough, and I'm not even sure that my scenario to get us to the Treaty of Brussels is militarily plausible. However, I do think it makes enough sense and is logically consistent enough to justify the story I want to tell, which is most of its purpose.
I think the broader PODs will be made evident as I go into the domestic politics of various countries in the coming chapters, but it also wouldn't surprise me if people were able to piece it together.
This chapter is mostly to establish what the world looks like and what major players are going through in ATL 44-45, so my apologies if its a bit rambly.
A huge thank you to @TheSeaAsian for a lot of the worldbuilding and detail work, he's incredibly knowledgable about this period and knew things I wouldn't have thought to question. Similarly, credit to @Scotland Rebel1 for the wiki box on ATL's ww2.
I do not condone the Nazi Regime or its crimes against humanity. Any indication of support by anyone on this thread will immediately be reported to mods. This website is for everyone.
We finally made it home to Boston. God, 3 years away… Everything looks different, even if it’s the exact same. My old Superman comics, are right where I left them. Always wanted to be like big blue, guess I am now. We ran into Betty. Haven’t thought about her, what, since Taipei? Can’t believe we used to talk about running away to Albany. Can’t believe Albany used to seem far.
Only been here a couple hours, and I’ve already got kids asking about it. Asking how fun it was to ‘kick Jap teeth in.’ God… what have they been feeding these kids? Look. I’ll be damned if anyone else sees this damned journal, but I need to say this. What we did wasn’t fun. We weren’t superheroes, or kids playing army. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but only because I know if we didn’t stop them, it would’ve just meant another baby on a goddamned pike. I feel sick thinking about it, but I feel sicker thinking about one of those kids having to deal with it.
Dad sat me down, told me that it was best to lie to em. I dunno if I can. I don’t want to scare em, but I don’t want any of em thinking war’s a good thing, ya know? How do you tell a kid that if he goes through with it, he could wind up a cripple- I only got one fuckin lung. Can’t even enjoy a good cig without an immediate coughing fit. Suppose that’s just as well, since the combat medic had heard somethin about it causing cancer. Just my luck, I suppose. Not that I’m lucky enough to die.
I think I’m rambling. Guess I don’t want to think about the war too much. But at the same time, it’s all anyone’s talking about, so it’s all I can think about. Like, at the train station, before Dad picked us up, I saw a paper talkin about it. ‘Japan Surrenders- Peace In China!’ then, at the bottom of the photo, maybe a third the size, it mentioned ‘4.6 million dead or injured in final push.’ That’s me. I’m a fucking caption. I can’t breathe right cause of that damn war, and I’m not even a full article.
… I saw Mikey today. Dad said that it had helped him with Uncle Will to just… rip the bandaid off. Made it clear to him that he wasn’t coming back. I figured it wouldn’t hurt. God. I was so wrong. I wore what passed for my Sunday best at this point and everything, but when I got to the grave I just. Broke down. We’d known each other 19 god damned years. Hell, we signed up for the war before the draft cause we thought it’d be fun. Like the stupid kids we were. The worst part? I remember everything about the day he died. Friday the 13th, August 43, we were a bit toward the end of the logistics, so we had K-rations that day. He made some comment about the captain getting steak and greens served on a silver platter. Everyone laughed but Whyte. Always had a stick up his ass.
The worst part though? It shoulda been me. And if Mikey hadn’t been a better man than I was, it woulda been. It was the usual shit, an enemy grenade in our position, and Mike took the sacrifice play. I think the Davidsons were lucky there was enough to bury. Makes me sick that’s the ‘lucky’ part. He was 23, the same age I am now.
Rest in Peace, Mikey.
Journal entry- Jason Herns, 07/1944
Even as the war wrapped up with Japan, and the empire was dismantled, many Americans looked on toward Europe with growing concern. The British had been forced to make peace after the Fall of Stalingrad ended organized resistance to the German war machine. As a result, Germany had been given free rein over Western Europe, and many Americans felt compelled to act. However, while there was some outcry pushing for a response to German aggression, the broad, almost overwhelming consensus was against direct military involvement. The United States had suffered egregious casualties, losing over 5 million in the total conflict with Japan already.
Most Americans at this point, were eager for a return to normalcy and the demobilization of the economy. To the voters, many of whom were veterans, Germany wasn’t America’s problem- if Britain had a problem with Berlin, they were more than welcome to try round three themselves. The US had its hands full rebuilding the Pacific. Roosevelt had ultimately decided against giving most of the European colonies back, taking the opportunity their occupation by Japan had created to expand American influence and market power abroad. However, this really only applied to France, as while Germany had successfully annexed the Netherlands, a territorial change that the US had tacitly recognized, Hitler made no claims to Indonesia, only former German colonies.
The French, however, were outraged at the US’s actions. Philippe Petain, ‘Chief of The French State,’ had demanded the US evacuate Indochina and return the province to France, but FDR refused, citing that, because Vichy had given the land to Japan, clearly they had revoked their claim to the territory, and thus the US was free to do with its conquest from Japan what it sought to. Petain threatened to send the remains of the French navy to Saigon to enforce it, but was forced to back down by his puppet master in Germany. It was also true that, by this point, the USN was the largest fleet in the world, and the French, still recovering from the British betrayal at Mers-el-Kébir, would have very little chance at retaking Indochina if they tried.
Also outraged was Charles de Gaulle, Marshall of Free France. While the Treaty of Brussels that had ended the Second World War had meant that, officially, Britain could no longer support Algiers, this did little to stop Halifax. As Germany was more focused on Eastern Europe than Africa, and Italy preferred the weakened state of either French regime, there was very little that Petain could do but grumble to Germany about the continued existence of the government in exile. Despite recognizing Vichy France as the legitimate government of the country, Roosevelt opted to maintain some unofficial relations with de Gaulle, largely due to the resources in French West Africa. The Marshall, for his part, knew he would be reliant on British aid, and hoped to secure that of the Americans.
Charles de Gaulle, Marshall of Free France, or the Algerian Government. Called 'A nationalist without a nation,'
he never accepted the terms of the 2nd Treaty of Versailles, and his regime claimed all territory France held in 1939.
Regardless, FDR had turned the Pacific into an American lake in all but name. With the defeat of Japan, the US created several new republics- Korea, The Republic of Malaya, and the Indochinese Federation; though the latter was overwhelmingly dominated by the Vietnamese people. While Ho Chi Minh had attempted to woo the US into supporting his faction as the leaders in a newly free Vietnam, American reservations about socialism led to the President electing to back Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ, a friend of Minh who was still anti-communist. Neither French government would recognize the Indochinese Federation until the 1960s, and it remained a sore spot between the USA and the Axis, and one of the earliest foreign issues of the Cold War.
As the US created its new sister republics in the Pacific, a debate was raging in Tokyo, the seat of the Occupational Government of Japan. Namely, the fate of the Emperor, which the Japanese people, and many in the Occupational Government, wanted to preserve, either for his role as a head of Japanese culture and his semi-religious significance, or in the case of most Americans like Douglas MacArthur, to prevent a guerilla war from erupting in the ravaged Japan. FDR, and most Americans at home, however, wanted to impose a republic on Japan, seeing the Emperor as complicit in the crimes Japan had committed in his name, and that his continuity with the Meiji era and feudal Japan had helped foster the cultural aspects of Japanese militarism that the US wanted to purge.
Eventually, the popular outcry from the US, and the new Republic of Korea, won out. Emperor Shōwa would be removed from power, ending the Japanese Empire and two thousand years of continuity under the House of Yamato. The Japanese Constitution, then, would adopt a Presidential style similar to that of the United States. FDR also demanded a number of restrictions on the military, hoping to keep Japan a strong enough ally in the Pacific, while also neutering the ability of a second Tojo to rise. In effect, an officer in the military was banned from being the Governor of a Prefecture, or from assuming an executive role in the government.
Just as Roosevelt was building an American order in the Pacific, Germany’s new order was taking shape in Europe. Germany now stretched from the English Channel in the west to the Volga River in the East, making it one of the largest countries in the world. While Hitler wanted to push all the way to the Urals, Goering, and Rommel had just managed to convince him that the Volga boundary was the end of German logistics until they had germanized and rebuilt Reichskommissariate Moskowien, and that the current boundary provided sufficient lebensraum for the plan to commence. Thus, Hitler gave the order to commence one of the largest, most atrocious crimes against humanity.
The deadliest war in European history, and by some metrics, all of Human history. It saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dismemberment of France, and the ascendancy of Germany over Europe.
Generalplan Ost had been in effect in some capacity since the initial invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, but peace gave Hitler the room to expand it. POW camps were converted into horrific work or death camps, with Chudovo becoming home to one of the largest in the ‘German frontier.’ The hunger plan was also implemented, with many urban Slavs left to starve, while the farm laborers were given the bare essentials to survive, while most of the harvest went back to Germany’s metropolitan core, which Hitler used to stabilize the food situation in Germany- while that had drastically improved with the end of the British blockade in the Treaty of Brussels, it would not return to prewar levels until the imposition of slave labor in the frontier. Slavic peoples of all sorts were enslaved, treated as little more than disposable waste, and their Wehrmacht and SS masters would frequently work them to death. In 1940, the Soviet Union had a population of 196,000,000- in 1944, 58 million of that population was dead, and another 3 million had been enslaved by the German state, which planned to reduce the population to the smallest it could enslave. Russians and Poles were treated the worst, while Ukraine had a higher rate of recruitment into the Waffen-ss, earning them better conditions, with many receiving smaller estates staffed by enslaved countrymen. Leningrad, as well as many historic cities like Minsk and Warsaw, were destroyed in the name of the German Reich.
Generalplan Ost was, thankfully, not the end of the Russian people. While Germany refused to recognize this fact, the Russian People were down, not out. Georgy Zhukov had fled with his loyalists to the holdouts east of the Volga and was in the process of asserting control over the remaining portion of the Soviet Union that he could. While he had been removed from the general staff, and many in the Soviet Government blamed him for the fall of Leningrad, despite at that point having been closer to Moscow, and in fact, it was the fall of Leningrad that had enabled the Germans to overwhelm him in the first place. As a result, Zhukov fled east, seeing that without Leningrad and Moscow, Stalingrad was next to fall. From there he declared the Soviet Provisional Authority, stating his intent to reverse the devastation the Germans were imposing. However, Zhucov’s authority was not absolute‒ the military situation he had found himself in challenged his legitimacy, and the numerous outside problems that his government faced before it could even dream of recognition, let alone reconquest of Russia.
The Fall of Leningrad was the turning point in the war, and was frequently blamed on Zhukov despite evidence to the contrary.
Fierce debate over what could be done and the need for someone to blame ultimately play a larger role in this reputation than military reality.
However, the German war machine could not truly be everywhere, much as it pretended to be. It did not take long for a number of underground railroads to begin forming. As much as it created hurdles and challenges for the Siberian Provisional Authority, Zhukov was more than willing to accept refugees of all sorts from the Reich. Sweden and Finland, while having had to make serious concessions to Germany in order to survive the war in the first place, were quickly also becoming home to a number of refugees, mostly Danish and Baltic Jews or Roma. However, by far the most accepting place, was Britain. Having made peace with Germany, the British intelligence, knowing the many atrocities that Hitler was committing, had made it a priority to keep underground channels of escape open; whether this was out of altruism, a need to present themselves as the noble hero against the ‘Brutal Huns,’ spite, or a combination of all three, remains highly debated. In the end, however, all that mattered was that it kept many Jewish, Roma, or African-descendant people alive.
Even after the war, a large number of refugees were taken in by any means possible.
Be it fraud and a sympathetic border patrol, or simply fleeing in the dead of night.
These passages were all over the periphery of the Nazi Empire.
Returning to the East, the worst challenges facing Zhucov’s regime were not foreign enemies, but domestic woes. Siberia was not as under-industrialized as before the war, but it remained a relative backwater industrially, and agriculturally. As a result, the nation struggled to support itself without the import of food from the Russian heartland, and this was only made worse as countless people made the perilous journey beyond the Volga. This also combined with the fact there was only one trans-siberian railway, and as a result, it was a strenuous process to move food from one end of the enormous country to the other, compounding the problem further still. But the worst part was the limited trade; Zhukov had inherited much of the diplomatic isolation of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and as a result, there was little in the way of trade between the Soviet Provisional Authority and the Western world, and officially, there wasn’t supposed to be any between it and Britain (though, like most of the foreign stipulations in the Treaty of Brussels, this wouldn’t last long.)
This, naturally, meant that there was great instability within the Soviet Provisional Authority, which led to all of this compounding. Because of food scarcity, people were forced to turn to banditry, which strained the military trying to keep order, which limited the ability to insure stability within the nation, making it hard for people to settle and farm, increasing the food scarcity. By December 1944, Zhukov had very little control of Central Asia, or over Russian Manchuria, which limited SPA ability to trade with the outside world even more, which really made the whole situation that much worse.
One of the most problematic challengers to Zhucov’s authority, however, was a former member of Soviet politics. Lavrenty Beira, head of the NKVD, had asserted himself as the leader of Russian Manchuria. Like most of the Politburo, he had been thought dead after the fall of Moscow, however, both he and Zhandov had barely escaped the city, leaving decoys with Stalin and the rest, while fleeing through the Caspian Sea and Iran. From there, they made the perilous voyage to Vladivostok, and turned the region into their own little government. Not only was this an obvious challenge to Zhucov, as it meant members of the prewar government had survived and asserted themselves, but it also played a crucial role in why the SPA struggled so much with trade‒ what would be their largest port was occupied by a rival government claiming the exact same land and purpose as them. Similarly, while Beira had relatively little of the surviving soviet army, he was still taking in many former NKVD members, bringing with them quite a potent army for the far eastern governate..
Central Asia proved complicated. General Ivan Bagramyan had asserted himself as the head of the military in the region and was loyal to Zhucov's government. However, the region's people were much more divided, with many being settlers from western Russia that were more in favor of the 'legitimate Bolshevik cause' in Manchuria. As a result, this region was already struggling against guerilla resistance, something made worse by Turkic resistance to the Russian occupation of the region in the first place. All of this combined with how sparsely populated Siberia was and the poor infrastructure, and as a result, Central Asia was less of a province of the SPA and more akin to a protectorate. Aktobe, the sat of Bagramyan's government, was also in a period of unrest and growth. The city had grown substantially since 1941 as people were evacuated or expelled from the Riech, and all that entailed. And with the fall of the West to the German war machine, the refugees had not stopped coming, as people made perilous trek after perilous trek in order to flee to stability. And while Aktobe and its military leadership tried to provide a shining bastion, the fact of it was they were a moderately sized city in a relatively poor part of the Soviet Union, and there were not always enough resources to maintain what they had, let alone the constant expansion required by the refugee crisis. As a result of this, the city and the region as a whole was suffering food shortages, crime, and corruption as bad as, or nearly worse than the Siberian Provisional Authority
The problems on the Eastern border were similar, but not as extreme as those in the west. The borders with Cheng Kai-Shek’s China was enormous, and equally as porous as the one with Germany. However, this did not lead to mass migration, but border raids. Despite the best efforts of the KMT, China was still a decentralized state rife with warlordism and banditry, creating a poverty that only forced more into raids. The recent liberation of Manchuria from the Imperial Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo had also destroyed much of the infrastructure of what had been a fairly industrialized part of ‘China,’ furthering the poverty and the creation of black market trades along the border.
Russia was not the only region that Germany had dramatically reshaped. With the Treaty of Brussels came the end of the sovereignty of the Benelux region as well as Denmark, bringing them into Berlin. Germany had also directly annexed all of Poland, and was in the process of enacting the Hungar Plan on the region as well. However, the majority of Germany’s territory was in the form of various Reichskommisarates, namely those of Ostland, Ukraine, Moskowien, and Kaukasien. All of these quasi-states had their own army and slightly different laws, but each of them was beholden to Germany regarding foreign and trade policy, and were to allow the German SS to operate within their borders. Most distressingly, each of them was to implement the plans that Berlin dictated to pacify the former heartland of the Soviet Union, and the leaders were more than willing to participate.
Germany’s grip extended beyond its own conquests. Over the 1930s, Germany had already redrawn the borders of the Balkans numerous times, bringing the region deeper into the fold and asserting it as part of their sphere of influence. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this policy had been Hungary, under Miklos Horthy, a loyal ally of the Fuher. At the end of the war, Hungary had its Vienna Award borders affirmed, asserting the Greater Hungary project and legitimizing Horthy’s regime in the eyes of the Hungarian People. Bulgaria, similarly, had gained numerous regions that it had claimed since the days of the Balkan Wars- Southern Dibruja, North Macedonia, and western Thrakia. Romania, however, was an out-and-out loser of the war, having had to give up Transylvania and Dibruja to its own ‘allies,’ while only gaining Moldova and smaller regions around it.
However, Germany was not the only power to vie for power over the Balkans. Mussolini’s Italy had spent quite a lot of time, money, and lives to do the same. Rome took over much of former Yugoslavia, mostly the Croatian territories that had been part of the Venetian Republic during the Renaissance, a fate shared with Albania. In addition, they had taken over much of Greece in some capacity; the Ionian Islands, as well as Crete had been annexed into the Empire, as had much of Eprius. However, Mussolini had little interest in annexing the entire peninsula and had instead opted to create a rump puppet state under the Fascist adjacent Konstantinos Kotzias.
France was another victim of Italian expansion. While Italy quietly avoided ending De Gaulle’s ‘Free France,’ it had quite generously helped itself to other parts of the French Empire. Piedmont and Savoy were obvious targets of Italian Irridentism, as was Corsica. However, Mussolini had also demanded the French Mandate of Syria, which was directly annexed in the hopes of gaining more control over the Mediterranean and creating a domestic oil industry (Libya's own oil supplies were not yet discovered.)
While Italy was not in the same league as Germany, the Treaty of Brussels had been a triumph for Fascism, and Mussolini in particular. While Britain had effectively been able to hold Egypt, the fall of Stalingrad had demoralized them to the point that Halifax had felt forced to negotiate. Italy’s only conditions of peace had been the recognition of their conquests in the Mediterranean and the return of Italian East Africa, a region Halifax had no interest in, and could not justify continuing a brutal and unpopular war just to take what the British people felt was an unnecessary colony. It was with the British withdrawal that Germany and Italy crafted the Treaty of Versailles (1943,) that finalized the terms for France. Among them were the aforementioned cessations to Italy, but France had also had its German border brought far west, with Elsaß-Lothringen and the Pas-de-Calais being the most notable territories given to the Germans. Combined with the loss of all notable colonies, the French nation was utterly humiliated by the war, and had been rendered entirely secondary on the global stage. Despite ostensibly being a defeated party, the United Kingdom had come out of the conflict with little in terms of losses as a power. London had not been made to cede territory, only recognize fallen lands as such. However, this did not change the pessimism and cynicism that now burned the electorate. The massacre at Dunkirk had been one thing, though it had forced Churchill to resign in shame over the blunder on both a military and political basis. That had been one thing, and the public had retained hope even after it. However, much of that hope had been based on the giants of the world‒ the USSR, and the USA. However, politics had ruined Roosevelt’s attempts to bring America into the war, and the aid to Russia had depleted, leading to the latter’s defeat. The Treaty of Brussels was thus blamed largely on the Americans, and left many older voters feeling betrayed by Washington. However, despite these things, the treaty was not nearly as harsh as it had been for France; with the conquests in Russia, Hitler had abandoned the dreams of restored German colonial empire in Africa, and had not pushed as heavily for them or the Belgian Congo as the British were expecting. While Britain was not officially allowed to support de Gaulle or the SPA, Germany ultimately had its hands too full to really stop them. As a result of all of this, Britain had gained protectorates in Iceland and the Congo, but the people still felt as though they had lost a great deal.
Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax. A reluctant Prime Minister, his role in the war proved incredibly complicated.
While an early proponent of peace, the terms Hitler had offered had proven impossible
until the Fuher found himself Master of Europe, and grew unconcerned about Africa and Asia.
However, there was a restlessness in the Empire as a whole. Britain, once thought an invincible, dominating force, had lost. While many in the colonies had served the Empire loyally, many others, even some who had fought in the war against Germany, were getting ideas. Germany had shown that Britain could be defeated, even when she wasn’t as exhausted as she had been in 1917. While it would take time for these ideas to be put into action, the mere idea of a defeat gave many white settlers a sense of apprehension, and many colonial subjects hope.
As the war left old powers broken and destroyed, two new masters stood triumphant. Nazi Germany stood on the bones of the French and Soviet Empires, trampling countless under itself as it used slave labor to rebuild its core after the agonizing conquest of Europe. Rage and triumph were all that this new Germany knew. All that it could spread. In contrast, the United States of America was looking outward, beyond the seas, for the first time in quite a while. Its war in Japan had built a more somber nation, one that for the first time, understood what it felt like to be threatened and wounded. The United States looked to Europe, and for the first time, felt nothing but contempt for their brothers, seeing the Germans as a new rival, and one that could potentially bring the end of the American Dream in ways that neither Britain, nor Japan, had ever been able to imagine doing. While many denounced the idea of getting involved, the United States had learned from the war‒ often, you don’t get a choice about getting involved. And as 23 year old Jason Herns sat in prayer one night in Boston, he knew what the next great struggle would be.
Map of the world in December, 1944. Germany has established itself as the preeminent power of Europe, having bested France and Russia, forcing the mighty British Empire to accept the fait accompli. The Soviet Union is exiled to beyond the Volga, and the Japanese Empire has been dismantled by the United States. A United States torn between her isolationist past, and for the first time, feeling truly threatened by a European hegemon.
Hi there; so i've been absent from writing TLs for a while, and wanted to get into the swing of it again. which is part of why this TL is about such a tried and true topic- I think a Nazi cold war is an easy enough premise that I can just have some fun with worldbuilding and character, while also developing an engaging fiction. Which brings me to another point- this timeline, in my opinion, is implausible from the outset. Germany's economic plans wouldn't work long enough, and I'm not even sure that my scenario to get us to the Treaty of Brussels is militarily plausible. However, I do think it makes enough sense and is logically consistent enough to justify the story I want to tell, which is most of its purpose.
I think the broader PODs will be made evident as I go into the domestic politics of various countries in the coming chapters, but it also wouldn't surprise me if people were able to piece it together.
This chapter is mostly to establish what the world looks like and what major players are going through in ATL 44-45, so my apologies if its a bit rambly.
A huge thank you to @TheSeaAsian for a lot of the worldbuilding and detail work, he's incredibly knowledgable about this period and knew things I wouldn't have thought to question. Similarly, credit to @Scotland Rebel1 for the wiki box on ATL's ww2.
I do not condone the Nazi Regime or its crimes against humanity. Any indication of support by anyone on this thread will immediately be reported to mods. This website is for everyone.
