Like the original novel, this can be hard to follow.

Basically it is an alternative reality where FDR died and the Nazis and Japs won. But sometimes people and things slip through warps into another timeline so there are secret Nazi archives of movies from the timeline where the Allies won.

Beyond just the normal Nazi office politics there are secret plots revolving around Julia, a woman who is from the Nazi Victory Timeline who appears in EVERY newsreel from other timelines.

Stealing the show is Rufus Sewell, who plays the first American to be promoted to SS four star general.

By Jeffrey George Anderson (Jeff) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 11:29 am: Edit

I've never either read or watched it, but (at least to me) it begs the question, "How could leadership so short sighted as Hitler, Tojo, and (snicker) Mussolini have won WWII?"

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 11:48 am: Edit

They invented the H-bomb.

By Mark Hoyle (Usa_Retired) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 12:17 pm: Edit

All the Germans had to do, was show some Humanity.
Before Winter showed it's ugly head, they could have turned nearly 3 million prisoners into an army to fight in Russia.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 01:12 pm: Edit

There were at least two major problems with the Nazis turning the prisoners and Ukrainians into an army:

1) Nazi doctrine was that Germanic people needed to take all that land and colonize/inhabit it for themselves. You rarely give weapons and military training to people you are planning to genocide.

2) Nazi doctrine insisted that the Germans were the master race and the best fighters. When you have limited weapons you don't typically waste them on the subhuman/barely human inferior types rather than giving them to the superior real soldiers.

[I'll note the enormous push that even the limited use of black combat soldiers in WWII gave to the civil rights movement in the USA. Similarly, a major impetus behind giving 18 year olds the vote was the fact that drafted armies by that time were mostly younger men. In a society that values soldiers, "Soldier" and "Subhuman scum" go poorly together, and this often comes out in the rest of society.]

Basically, the Germans might well have won on the Eastern Front if they hadn't been Nazis, it's exceedingly unlikely that they'd have gotten to anything like the same situation if they hadn't been Nazis.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 01:47 pm: Edit

Douglas,

Actually, the Germans did recruit (and, yes, arm) several hundred thousand Soviet citizens into their forces during the war. The Nazi ideologues regarded them the way you describe. But at the same time the Wehrmacht was desperate for manpower. I know we're not supposed to post uncleared links in some of these topics, and I'm not sure whether it applies to this specific one. But if you do a Google search for "Hilfswilliger" (basically "volunteer helper") or "Hiwi", you'll find discussions, including a short but basically accurate Wikipedia page.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 02:05 pm: Edit

There were quite a few divisions in the SS, including divisions that were SS, but not "of the SS." See SS Handschar for example.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 02:22 pm: Edit

I believe there were 39 SS divisions, some of them German, some Nordic, some non-German. Handschar was Bosnia Moslem for example. The last division defending Berlin was the SS Division Charlemagne, consisting entirely of French Nazis.

The Germans were not planning to genocide the Russians/Ukrainians. They were simple doing to limit them to peasant farming and 8th grade educations. (As for the Jews of those areas, well, yeah, genocide.)

Hitler could have done a lot of things to win WWII. Start with destroying the British at Dunkirk, then DO NOT declare war on the USA. Going into Russia as a (pretend) liberator would have been a good move. Arresting Mussolini and neutralizing Italy (no starting wars where Germany didn't need them) would have been cool too. Pick any three of those to pretty much guarantee a win.

By Jeffrey George Anderson (Jeff) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 05:14 pm: Edit

Okay, I hope I don't sound TOO dumb here, but I thought Hitler wouldn't accept the idea of a nuclear bomb because the theoretical physics behind it came from a Jewish physicist...

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 06:25 pm: Edit

Jeffrey George Anderson:

The Germans had a nuclear weapons program all through World War II and it actually started (April, 1939) before the war did (September, 1939). Search for "German Nuclear Weapons Program" or "Nazi Nuclear Program" to find it on the internet.

You can also look up the "Heroes of Telemark" for the actions of Norwegian commandos to sabotage the program.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 07:24 pm: Edit

Alan, yes the Germans used some volunteers from slavic areas, and the Confederates used some black troops (especially in support units, which is what the Hiwi were supposed to be limited to when authorized). In both cases the ideology meant that they could not make really large scale use of such forces nor could they build a strategy around them.

As for the rest of the "Germans could have won":

It's open to serious question whether the Germans could have destroyed the British at Dunkirk, their logistics were overstrained, and the British units holding inland had very good defensive locations. Disorder on the beaches does not mean disorder everywhere.

Failing to declare on the USA, might, just might, at best, have resulted in the USA adopting a Pacific First strategy, so Berlin gets the A-bomb rather than Japan. We weren't staying neutral in Europe after Pearl and the German bomb program was a bad joke compared to the Manhattan project (small, underfunded, and worse staff), and I've been told they'd made some fairly fundamental mistakes, to the extent that some people think Heisenberg was deliberately sabotaging the program (I doubt it, he just didn't have the resources to spare to try dozens of things and see what worked).

By Jason E. Schaff (Jschaff297061) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 07:51 pm: Edit

The German nuclear program in WW2 really didn't have a snowball's chance in Hades of producing a bomb, and most of the German scientists involved pretty much gave up on the idea and were working on nuclear power by '43 or so.

About 20 years ago, the magazine Physics Today did a very interesting issue focussing on a review of the (then) newly declassified Farm Hall tapes. Farm Hall was an English country estate where many of the captured German nuclear scientists were detained after the German surrender. The estate was, of course, extensively bugged, and the tapes make very interesting reading.

Apparently, the German nuclear scientists' understanding of a significant amount of the underlying physics was plain wrong. Many of them concluded that they were being lied to when informed of the bombing of Hiroshima because they had "proven" that it was impossible to build an A-bomb small enough to be delivered by air. The authors in the review pretty much concluded that the idea of Heisenberg having sabotaged the Nazi A-bomb program is a fiction concocted by the German nuclear scientists to make themselves look good. In fact, they probably just didn't really understand what the heck they were doing.

By Mark Hoyle (Usa_Retired) on Friday, November 16, 2018 - 10:37 pm: Edit

---

Quote:

Actually, the Germans did recruit (and, yes, arm) several hundred thousand Soviet citizens into their forces during the war. The Nazi ideologues regarded them the way you describe. But at the same time the Wehrmacht was desperate for manpower.

---

By Vincent Solfronk (Vsolfronk) on Saturday, November 17, 2018 - 10:00 am: Edit

Remember physics=Jewish science

There were so many crack-pot Nazi scientists/science around that it seriously impeded scientific development.

By Michael Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Sunday, November 18, 2018 - 03:52 am: Edit

IIRC, there is a science fiction story about how one navy lost a war because it had superior science.

Because they were always going for the newest and greatest weapon they never actually used what they had to crush their enemy.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Sunday, November 18, 2018 - 09:37 am: Edit

"Superiority" by Arthur C. Clarke.

By Michael Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 03:42 am: Edit

Yeah, that's it. It probably is a subtle dig at the Nazis...

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 11:42 am: Edit

Michael Grafton:

As I recall, it was a subtle dig at the United States as we are too willing to discard old proven tech to run after something new and shiny.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 11:46 am: Edit

Or it is a corollary of the old Jack Handy Deep Thought:

"Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, mankind should be thinking about getting more use out of the weapons we already have."

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 12:04 pm: Edit

Yeah, but if you make too much of a fetish of your "old proven tech", you eventually get shot to pieces, when the newfangled stuff reaches maturity. The Me-262 was very difficult to maintain, compared to the propeller-driven fighters of the day. It was also shooting them down at a rate of about 4 to 1, against the best the Allies had. (Different sources list different numbers. But as best I can tell, Me-262s killed between 500 and 600 Allied aircraft, while somewhere around 125-150 262s were lost air-to-air.) And by Korea, we were still using P-51s and F-4U Corsairs, but in a ground attack role. And while they did occasionally find them selves engaging North Korean (i.e., Soviet) MiGs, and even got the occasional kill, it was more of a fluke. They were just too slow to be our primary fighters by that time.

But, good luck sending your lancers charging across the field against those finicky, complex, expensive Gatling guns and breech loaders.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 12:09 pm: Edit

And of course, steam-powered warships with their expensive, dirty, unreliable, coal-reliant engines, are technologically... novel... but give me a good reliable sailing ship!

Why, if you can believe it... some of these jokers actually believe that with steamships you could build a ship with iron or steel armor!!!

By Vincent Solfronk (Vsolfronk) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 12:31 pm: Edit

Sailing ships are even more unreliable, since they rely on the wind.

Galleys, using manpower, are probably even more reliable, excluding manpower losses/exhaustion, crew-revolts, etc.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 12:35 pm: Edit

We should just accept that humanity was never meant to float. If we just give up travel and commerce on the seas altogether there would be no reason to fight on them and we would not need naval military tech at all.

By Jeffrey George Anderson (Jeff) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 12:43 pm: Edit

Again, I'm no expert, but I do understand the idea of "Counting Rifles."

WWII...

German tanks were incredible (if temperamental) pieces of engineering.

During The War, Germany built... What? some eight thousand Tigers?

T-34. A good tank. Not exceptional, except for there being over fifty thousand of them built during The War.

Sherman. Generally considered mediocre. Still, they were easily maintained, and I think more than forty thousand of them were built.

IIRC, there was a highly respected Soviet General who was quoted once as saying, "Quantity has a quality all its own."

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 12:47 pm: Edit

Vincent,

"Manpower" is one of those key things that sometimes gets overlooked by advocates for building large numbers of cheap weapons. During the early phases of the Battle of Britain, when the Luftwaffe was concentrating on hitting RAF sites rather than bombing cities, Hugh Dowding, the commander of RAF Fighter Command, thought at various times that the Germans were winning, and that he might have to pull the remnants of the RAF back to bases in Scotland and Northumberland, to preserve them and build up their strength for the invasion that was expected to follow. He estimated at one point that he could contest air control over East Anglia for perhaps two to four more weeks before pulling back and ceding the Channel area to the Luftwaffe. Now, during this critical time, the number of Spitfires in the RAF was stable-to-increasing. The British were able to make up their losses in air frames. But Dowding feared the RAF was running out of fighter pilots. They could not train new pilots at the rate they were losing the old ones, during the darkest parts of the battle. Building larger numbers of cheaper fighter planes would have done no good at all. Given that well trained fighter pilots were the limiting factor, those pilots needed the best plane available.