CHAPTER 3 Future Fictions

Many historical subjects have been treated counterfactually. Novelists have been as wide-ranging in their choice of topics as historians have. Often their purposes, however, have been dramatically different. Jorge Semprún’s experimental novel L’Algarabie, published in 1981, for instance, sets its action in a world in which the French president General de Gaulle has been killed in a helicopter crash in 1975 and revolutionary movements of various kinds—communist, anarchist, regionalist—run amok, leading to an all-out civil war in which a new, ultra-left Paris Commune reaches an agreement with the French government based at Versailles to live and let live. Memories, identities, fact, fiction are all jumbled together in a kaleidoscopic postmodernist presentation that constantly reminds the reader that what is being read is an artificial construction. Paris becomes Berlin, as the characters go through the wall encompassing the Commune at “Checkpoint Danny,” a playful reference both to the real “Checkpoint Charlie” through which people could cross the Berlin Wall from the western sectors, and to Danny Cohn-Bendit, one of the real leaders of the Parisian student revolt in 1968. Here the alterations flowing from a single event—the death of President de Gaulle—rapidly leave any recognizable historical path and become a phantasmagorical product of the postmodernist imagination, and the point is not to make any particular political or historical statement, but to make the reader experience, and think about, the nature of narrative representation.1

Yet many if not most novelists who write counterfactual scenarios stick more closely to conventional linear narratives, with the alteration of the historical context deriving, as in Semprún’s book, from a single alteration in historical reality, but the consequences then unfolding in a deliberately logical way. Novelists who have based their fictions on counterfactual scenarios of this kind have tackled many subjects, often indulging in obvious fantasies of wishful thinking, like the Spanish authors who wrote stories in which the Republic rather than General Franco won the Civil War of 1936–39.2 Particular national cultures have their own historical dramas and traumas, on which counterfactual fictions as well as nonfictions have tended to focus: the Revolution of 1789, the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, or the upheavals of 1968 for the French, the Civil War and the rule of General Franco for the Spanish, the failure of national pride in World War I and Mussolini’s Fascist regime for the Italians, the Civil War and then the Vietnam War for the Americans, the early defeats in World War II for the British, the loss of World War I for the Germans; Catholics have written repeatedly and at length about the Protestant Reformation and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in sixteenth-century England and its political confirmation in the seventeenth century, from the failure of the Gunpowder Plot to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.

But the most popular subject by far has been the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. Imagining what things might have been like had the Nazis won the Second World War has been a popular pastime of novelists, television scriptwriters, and filmmakers as well as of historians for a long time. Why Nazism and not, say, Communism? Nazism occupies a central place in Western popular and public memory, as the embodiment of evil, the most extreme example of so many things civilization deplores, from racism and genocide to international aggression, warmongering, and dictatorship. Since 1945 at least, those who support it or believe in it have been a tiny, publicly reviled minority, whereas Soviet and other varieties of Communism have continued to command mass support, though in a dwindling number of parts of the world and mostly in a progressively diluted form. Because Soviet-style Communism continued in power in Europe up to 1990 and elsewhere even longer, there is little point in writing fantasies about what might have happened had Stalin not died in 1953, or had he invaded Western Europe in 1945: we know from decades of observation or experience how things would have been under his rule. As Aviezer Tucker has remarked, the popularity of fictional alternate histories focusing on “a world where the Nazis won the war … may be ascribed to an aesthetic fascination with apocalyptic landscapes, with consistent realistic depictions of a horrendous alternative universe, like a Bosch painting.”3

Future fictions involving Nazism are overwhelmingly Anglo-American in provenance. Eighty percent of the list of 116 works of alternate histories of Nazism compiled by the American historian Gavriel Rosenfeld in 2011 have appeared in Britain or the United States.⁴ The Anglo-American dominance of the genre may be because Britain and the United States were on the winning side in the Second World War, and so there is a sense of excitement generated by reminders of how narrow their escape from defeat perhaps was, and what a Nazi victory might have entailed. Portrayals of a world, including Britain and the United States, under Nazi domination reinforce the general, if occasionally disputed, conviction in these countries that the war was worth fighting. The global dominance of Hollywood, and the international cultural power of English-language literature, have also contributed to the hegemony of Anglo-American fictions about a future run by Nazis. Neither Britain nor the United States was occupied by a hostile power during the Second World War; by contrast, Germans, French, Russians, Italians, and other Europeans do not need fiction to remind them of the horrors of Nazi rule: they experienced it themselves in the most direct possible way (a similar point might be made about Japanese rule in China and the Pacific). As for the Germans, to imagine a world without Hitler is morally extremely risky; the element of wishful thinking would be all too obvious. To attribute the rise and triumph of Nazism to mere chance factors—an “industrial accident” to the motor of German history, as it has sometimes been called—looks too much like an excuse that lets the Germans off the hook, and so has always aroused fierce controversy in Germany itself whenever anybody has tried to do it. And, as Rosenfeld remarks, the playful element in future fictions of Nazism, and their role as popular entertainment, seem morally irresponsible and culturally shallow to a nation that rightly regards itself as bearing the prime responsibility for the Holocaust. Nevertheless, despite all this, fully 15 percent of the fictions in Rosenfeld’s list are German in origin, testifying perhaps to a lingering ambivalence in German culture about the Nazis and what they did to the world, though in practice those German authors who have written in this genre have gone to some lengths to avoid giving Hitler any kind of final victory in their counterfactual narratives.5

Rosenfeld’s list of alternate-history fictions includes 63 in which the Nazis win World War II, 29 in which Hitler escapes the bunker in 1945 and lives on elsewhere, and 18 in which Hitler never existed in the first place.⁶ The predominance of depictions of a Nazi victory and its aftermath is not really surprising. Few of these narratives show any interest in trying to explain how or why the Nazis won, in sharp contrast to the many military-historical alternative histories of the Second World War. What novelists, film directors, and television producers are overwhelmingly interested in is the use of a Nazi-dominated postwar era as a backdrop for character and plot, setting fictional individuals in a nightmarish scenario that confronts them with stark moral choices and tangible, easily imaginable dangers. The locus classicus of such depictions is of course George Orwell’s 1984, which imagines a world dominated by indistinguishable totalitarian superpowers, modeled on Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union, but owing rather more to Orwell’s vision of the latter than to his memory of the former. In essence, Orwell’s novel was a warning of what might happen in the future, if Britain and Europe succumbed to the Soviet threat, rather than an imaginary projection of an altered past, so in this sense, it is not really a counterfactual novel, any more than are the various novels about a Nazi-dominated future published in Britain before the war’s end. Just like the future fictions of the early 1900s, such as Saki’s When William Came, which describes a Britain groaning under the iron heel of the Kaiser, books like Martin Hawkins’s When Adolf Came (London, 1943) were intended to stiffen British public resolve in the face of the German threat. Thus for example H. V. Morton’s I, James Blunt, published in 1942 and presenting the diary entries of a British man living in the future in a Nazi-occupied England, was intended as a wake-up call, in Morton’s words, to the “complacent optimists and wishful thinkers who … cannot imagine what life would be like if we lost the war.”7

In the decade and a half after the war’s end, only one fictional account of Britain under German occupation appeared—Noël Coward’s play Peace in Our Time, a retrospective dramatic denunciation of appeasement and a celebration of British pluck, in which a resistance movement drives the Germans off the island despite the pusillanimity of collaborationists and defeatists; it belongs in spirit more to the wartime years than to the postwar world.⁸ A more sophisticated depiction of a German victory on a general level was provided in 1950 by Randolph Robban’s novel Si l’Allemagne avait vaincu (If Germany Had Won), a satirical account with its starting point in the Germans’ deployment of the atom bomb, which they develop before anyone else, ending the war by dropping it on London and Chicago. Germany and Japan put Allied leaders on trial for war crimes (notably the bombing of their cities) and occupy the Soviet Union. But the relationship between the winners breaks down and they destroy each other in an atomic war. By reversing the signs, the pseudonymous author casts the conduct of the victorious Allies in a critical light with the aim of encouraging reconciliation between victor and vanquished in the postwar era.⁹

It was not until the 1960s that the next counterfactual publication emerged, the journalist Comer Clarke’s If the Nazis Had Come (London, 1962). This used interviews with surviving German military leaders and genuine documentation of Nazi plans for the occupation of the British Isles to paint a grim picture of tyranny and oppression. This portrayal reflected not only the experience of occupied countries on the European continent, but also the theory of totalitarianism, pioneered by Orwell, that saw Nazi Germany (as well as Soviet Russia) as a monolithic dictatorship in which the leader imposed his will by force and people had no choice but to obey, unless they went underground and started a resistance movement. A similar scenario was developed in stories by the popular writer C. S. Forester, creator of the fictional seadog Horatio Hornblower, scourge of the French navy in the Napoleonic Wars, and the historian Hugh Thomas, among others. All these writers gave a good deal of space to developing the idea that German oppression would have sparked growing resistance, both reaffirming the validity of the war itself, and celebrating the bulldog spirit of the British people. As such, they were still recognizably part of the genre of wartime future fictions. They were published in a postwar era in which the Churchillian ethos was invoked in order to bolster British morale at a time of austerity at home and decline abroad, symbolized by the disastrous British defeat in the brief war over the Suez Canal in 1956.10

These works ran in tandem with a stream of war movies, including The Dam Busters (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), Sink the Bismarck (1960), Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), The Battle of the River Plate (1956), and many more, that not only celebrated the martial character of the British but also legitimized the hierarchical society in which they lived, with the officer class, complete with stiff upper lip and clipped English accents, effectively commanding a compliant and deferential working class rank-and-file in the struggle for decency and order. In these depictions, the ordinary German military or naval officer appeared as fundamentally decent, reflecting the British experience of the war on the Western Front and in North Africa; only the Nazis were portrayed as brutal characters undermining the laws of war and the fundamental principles of honor and correctness in dealing with an enemy. Even in wartime and early postwar British representations of Germany, therefore, not all Germans were irredeemably wicked. But by the mid-1960s, hierarchy and deference were coming into question as a new, postwar generation reached maturity, affluence and materialism took hold in British culture, and the “swinging sixties” proclaimed a new ethos of personal freedom and rebellion. Simultaneously, a very public reconciliation with Germany and the Germans, symbolized in Queen Elizabeth II’s state visit to West Germany in 1965, allowed a larger role for the “good Germans” in fictional representations of the Third Reich. In the Federal Republic of Germany, younger historians began to produce sophisticated studies of the social history of the Nazi years, uncovering the chaotic and factionalized structures of the Nazi regime and demonstrating the possibility of dissent from it among many sectors of German society. With détente, totalitarianism theory gave way to a more differentiated approach. The complex and sensitive issue of longer-term continuities reaching back from Hitler to the Kaiser and beyond was raised by the German historian Fritz Fischer’s study of German aims in World War I. Much of this new German work was translated into English or publicized by a new generation of British historians working on German history.11

All this created a new context in which counterfactual explorations of a world, and specifically a Britain, in which the Nazis had won World War II, became more interesting and more attractive to writers and filmmakers. British novels, plays, films, and television dramas from the mid-1960s through the 1970s and 1980s reflected this context by imagining a Britain in which the occupying Germans might not have been uniformly brutal or generally resisted. British collaborators featured as characters in Giles Cooper’s TV drama The Other Man (1964), Kevin Brownlow’s film of the same year It Happened Here, Philip Mackie’s three-part TV drama An Englishman’s Castle, broadcast in 1978, and other fictions up to and including Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB, published in the same year. The most notable depiction of Britain under Nazi rule was by the popular historian Norman Longmate, who in 1972 published a book (to go with a television documentary) with the title If Britain Had Fallen: The Real Nazi Occupation Plans. The book was based securely on a mixture of actual German preparations and plans for the occupation of Britain, and on the known experience of the actual German occupation of the one part of Britain the Nazis did manage to take over, the Channel Isles, just off the French coast. Longmate thus claimed to describe “not merely what might have happened but probably would have happened.”12

In Longmate’s scenario the Royal Air Force loses the Battle of Britain, paving the way for a full-scale invasion: the essential precondition for all his other speculations. The king flees to Canada while Winston Churchill is killed fighting the invaders. After his death, the British more or less give up. Searching for a Quisling, a politician to head a puppet government, the Nazis hit upon Sir Samuel Hoare, named in the real prewar diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, a senior diplomat, as a likely candidate. Hoare had negotiated a pact with the French giving Mussolini what he wanted in Abyssinia and would probably take the same line in dealing with the Germans. Thirty-two years later, however, when he came to reissue the book, Longmate changed his mind and thought that the British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley was the likeliest candidate for prime minister. Mosley himself claimed after the war that he would have committed suicide rather than do such a thing, but he was still in politics at this time and his word cannot be trusted. As for the new head of state: “Wherever one looks, in Great Britain or the United States, the Duke of Windsor’s name emerges as the likeliest head of a pro-Nazi government.” He might well have occupied the throne in the belief that he could mitigate the worst excesses of Nazi rule, and his vain wife might have been seduced by the promise of being called “Your Majesty” (the British royal family would not even allow her to be called “Your Royal Highness”).¹³

Drawing on actual Nazi plans, Longmate has the occupiers take down Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square and cart it off to Berlin. The Nazis loot and ransack everything in sight, expropriating Jewish property and taking from museums and galleries cultural objects they regard as German and shipping off petrol and other basic supplies for the use of the German armed forces. The Gestapo would have arrested known anti-Nazis (a somewhat arbitrary list) and banned suspicious organizations including the Salvation Army. Many aspects of everyday life would have continued more or less unchanged, though as they did in every other country they occupied, the Germans would have made the British drive on the right. Large numbers of young British men would have been sent to Germany as forced laborers, and the 450,000 members of the Jewish community would have been rounded up and sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Before the invasion, as we know, the British military authorities had organized “auxiliary units” to harass the enemy by sabotage and guerilla warfare in the event of an invasion, but they would not have lasted long and their activities would have prompted savage reprisals. “Resistance” would most likely have taken the form of sullen non-cooperation, but collaboration would also have been limited. The nightmare would have ended with the Americans dropping an atomic bomb, or bombs, on Germany and crossing the Atlantic to liberate the oppressed Europeans.14

Longmate’s book was published against a backdrop of a new wave of writing and broadcasting about Britain, Germany, and the war that lasted from the mid-sixties to the late eighties. It focused on satirizing the “stiff upper lip” and the celebration of British military prowess, as in the popular television comedy show Dad’s Army, which aired from 1968 to 1977. The assault on the hierarchical society and self-congratulatory myths of the 1950s was liberating in many ways, but it also led to a widespread debate in the 1970s about the “decline of Britain,” in which the loss of empire, the inefficiency and inadequacy of British institutions, and the relative retardation of the British economy in comparison to the German, caused a bout of national soul-searching that culminated in the radical reforms of Prime Minister Thatcher’s Conservative government after 1979. During this debate, questioning the determination of the British to resist German domination in the event of an invasion in the past became a metaphorical way of underlining the supposed weakness and inadequacy of British institutions in the present. Thus a series of authors followed Longmate in arguing that some Britons at least would have collaborated with the occupying forces.15

At the same time, the humanization of the German invaders went along with a widespread admiration in the 1970s for the supposed German qualities of efficiency, hard work, and entrepreneurship that the British would do well to emulate. The German automobile company Audi’s slogan Vorsprung durch Tech-nik was used regularly, untranslated, in advertisements on British television and clearly had a wider message to convey. The popular situation comedy Auf Wiedersehen, Pet described British bricklayers, facing unemployment or low wages in their own country, finding work and fulfillment on German construction sites. In the eighties, however, things began to change. The celebration of Britain’s role in the Second World War was revived dramatically in Britain’s successful military operation to recover the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic from a brutal military dictatorship in Argentina, which invaded them in 1982. After this, the Thatcher government turned to confronting the trade unions, dubbed by her as “the enemy within,” leading to scenes of unprecedented violence as phalanxes of police charged lines of picketing miners. The linguistic ground was being laid for the re-emergence of an older way of talking about Britain, one shorn of the complexities and ambiguities it had acquired since the 1960s.

At the end of the 1980s, the language of the Second World War was applied to a new subject as German reunification aroused deep hostility in some members of Mrs. Thatcher’s government, led by the prime minister herself, who made clear her fear of a resurgence of German power in a “Fourth Reich,” dominating Europe through the European Community and its successor the European Union. As Mrs. Thatcher became rapidly more hostile to the EU, growing numbers of Conservative MPs and writers followed her in identifying it as a vehicle for a renewed German bid for supremacy. Within a remarkably short space of time, Mrs. Thatcher was ousted from power by a revolt among the pragmatists in her cabinet, but the damage had been done: Euroscepticism was born. As books and articles attacking the Germans as unrepentant Nazis poured off the presses, public opinion swung rapidly in an anti-German direction. The average score awarded to the Germans in respect of friendliness fell among British respondents to opinion poll questioning from 12.7 percent in 1990 to −38.8 percent in 1994. An average of 26 percent agreed that Germany would be a nice place for them to work in 1990, but only 5 percent thought so six years later. Twenty-six percent of British respondents regarded the Germans as Britain’s best friend in 1987, but only 9 percent did in 1992, when no fewer than 53 out of every 100 Britons considered Nazism could reemerge in Germany compared to 23 percent five years previously.16 These figures stood in stark contrast to survey data from other European countries, where attitudes toward Germany remained largely unchanged. This shift in the British public mood was reinforced by the many fiftieth anniversary commemorations of World War II that took place in these years, from the outbreak of the war, marked in 1989, through the Battle of Britain in 1990 to the Battle of El Alamein in 1993 and VE-Day in 1995.

The language of World War II was taken up in the new Eurosceptic discourse most obviously by the Conservative MP William Cash, in his book Against a Federal Europe: The Battle for Britain, published in 1991. The subtitle already suggested a rerun of the Second World War, with its echoes of the Battle of Britain. This time, however, it was William Cash who reached for the skies in search of his finest hour. From the very outset, as in 1940, there is no doubt in Cash’s book about who the enemy is. “Britain,” Cash warns on page 1, “could become a mere province in a Europe dominated by Germany.” “The German attitude to Europe,” he warned, “is … determined by a massive historical heritage.” A more closely integrated Europe would in Cash’s view be “a greater Germany, balancing uneasily between East and West, inheriting and perhaps magnifying the complexes and instabilities of post-Bismarckian Germany.” Everyone knew the catastrophes to which the instabilities of post-Bismarckian Germany led in 1914, 1933, 1939 and 1945. A German-dominated, closely integrated European Union would not last very long, and, Cash implied, chaos and violence would be the result of its dissolution.17 Conservative historians joined in the chorus of denunciation of the EU as a vehicle of German domination. “How long,” John Charmley asked, commenting on German reunification, “before Germany decides that it is too big for the boots it is allowed to wear—and who could stop it this time if it decides to get a bigger pair?” This seemed on the face of it to run counter to Charmley’s previously expressed view that it would have been reasonable and indeed desirable for the British government to have reached a separate peace with Germany in 1940. For in view of what he wrote in 1995, how could Charmley suppose that the Germans could have been relied upon to keep their promises in 1940?¹⁸

Nevertheless, Charmley’s new views were shared by other historians on the right. The emergence of Euroscepticism, couched in the rhetoric of World War II and using a manufactured public memory of Britain’s finest hour to target Germany as the proxy for Brussels, formed the essential context for the counterfactual speculations developed by Charmley and Ferguson in particular as they asserted that Britain should have remained in “splendid isolation” from the travails of the Continent in 1914 and 1940, thus saving the British Empire and preventing the Holocaust. In these works, the German domination of the EU is taken as a given, and described in alternative scenarios as having been achieved without war or conflict already in 1915. Yet the image of a Britain safely isolated from Europe was wishful Eurosceptic thinking that clashed starkly with what Eurosceptics perceived to be the terrible reality of the 1990s, in which the Fourth Reich was threatening to overwhelm the UK yet again, so that counterfactual depictions of a peaceful development of continental European unity in an imagined past shorn of British participation in the two World Wars had to be pushed to one side to make way for the deployment of rhetoric derived from World War II to deal with the perceived threat posed by an allegedly aggressive and expansionist Germany in the present.19

Counterfactual history picked up the new-old rhetoric of defiance and argued that collaboration in the event of a German occupation of Britain would have been minimal. Attacking a study by the liberal Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting,²⁰ which argued that contrary to their self-generated myth, a myth accepted by earlier writers like Longmate, the populace of the Channel Islands had not only failed to resist the Nazi occupiers but also collaborated with them all the way up to helping them deport the islands’ Jews to Auschwitz, Andrew Roberts pointed out that, contrary to what Bunting claimed, the Channel Islands were a poor model on which to base generalizations on this topic, since a third of their adult male population had been evacuated, the Germans stationed 37,000 troops on islands inhabited by 60,000 people, the islanders had a tradition of obeying authority, there were no strong trade unions or political parties, and there were neither mountainous areas nor big cities in which to base a resistance movement. The islanders were half French anyway, said Roberts, and the British were far more loyal to their country than the French were to theirs. Pacifism, which had briefly flourished before the war, was effectively dead. There was no Nazi “fifth column” of collaborators and subversives in Britain. The Duke of Windsor, argued Roberts, might have been persuaded to take the throne after Churchill had been killed resisting the invaders and King George VI had left for Canada, and a pro-Nazi politician like Lloyd George might have been persuaded to become prime minister, as might Sir Samuel Hoare, though not Mosley, whom the Germans knew to be unpopular (though this consideration had not stopped them elevating the even more unpopular Vidkun Quisling in Norway). The arch-appeaser R. A. Butler, another proponent of a separate peace, might have eased the Germans’ task by collaborating. But these would have been exceptions, and Roberts asserted boldly that had the Germans occupied Britain, “they would then have been faced with the implacable, visceral enmity of a nation in arms.”21 The Eurosceptic message of his article was rammed home in his discussion of the line that would be taken by the Nazi-controlled British press: “The emphasis which Vichy propagandists placed on a common European future as the catalyst by which honour and self-respect could be restored would have been repeated word for word in Britain.”²²

Roberts’s counterfactual vision of a Britain rising up in national rage against a German occupation carried out in the name of Europe was echoed a few years later by Owen Sheers’s Resistance, which depicted an active resistance movement continuing to fight the occupying Germans despite the collaborationism of a new government headed by R. A. Butler under the guidance of the restored King Edward VIII, pledging “to bridge the differences between Britain and Germany and build towards a united Europe, standing strong against the capitalist Americans in the West and the Bolsheviks in the East.”²³ More immediately, Roberts’s Eurosceptic counterfactuals were paralleled by his futuristic novel The Aachen Memorandum, published in 1995. This political fiction is set in an imaginary future around the middle of the twenty-first century, when Britain has been fully incorporated into a German-dominated federal European Union. The British monarchy has long since emigrated to New Zealand, and students are now expelled from Oxford for proposing the loyal toast at dinner. Britain has been broken up into a series of provinces. A plethora of European directives governs everyday life. “Classlessness legislation” has forced the renaming of Earl’s Court, while sexual intercourse is governed by directives on harassment and on health and hygiene. Nelson has been taken off the school syllabus during the “depatriation” of the history curriculum, and his statue on the column in Trafalgar Square, now renamed Delors Square, after the president of the European Commission, has been replaced by one of Robert Schuman, the founder of the European Union. Labor directives ensure that managers are at the beck and call of works councils. Corruption is everywhere, especially at the top.24 Everyday life in Britain is now governed by “federal fashion,” (“federal” has become slang for “good” or “fashionable”), which dictates that women should have hairy armpits like the Germans, and men should, horror of horrors, kiss each other twice on each cheek when they meet. Continental-style trams have largely replaced cars and buses on the streets of London, making previously quick and simple journeys endlessly long and complicated (it has to be said that of all the imaginary predictions in the book, this is one of the most implausible). A European directive has forced the British to drive on the right, causing mass carnage on the roads, and a federal police force, Europol, behaves much as the Gestapo would have done had Britain been occupied by the Nazis. German is the only foreign language taught in schools. All this, as the book’s hero, inevitably called Horatio, reveals, reflects the fact that the “Germans … pretty much run the union” and call it the “Reich … among themselves when they don’t think anyone is listening.” Needless to say, Horatio leads a resistance movement that eventually destroys the hated rule of the Continental foreigners.²⁵

The Aachen Memorandum occupies an intermediate place between predictive novels warning the British public of dire consequences should present policies not be changed, such as When William Came or When Adolf Came, and counterfactual imaginings of how Britain might have looked had the Nazis occupied the country in the 1940s, imaginings on which the novel freely draws. True counterfactual fiction in the Eurosceptic vein in the 1990s was exemplified by Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland (London, 1992). Set not in Britain but in Germany, in the year 1964, the novel tells the story of a detective (and member of the SS) whose investigation of a string of murders leads him to uncover a government attempt to eliminate the principal surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust and destroy all remaining evidence for it so as not to jeopardize relations with the United States, whose president is about to come on a state visit. Harris knew his way around the historiography of Nazi Germany, and one of the book’s most striking features is its accurate depiction of what Berlin (“Germania”) might have looked like after a successful world war. Fatherland had a strong Eurosceptical subtext. As Harris stated in an article published to mark the novel’s appearance, “I spent four years writing … a novel about a fictional German superpower, and, as I wrote, it started turning into fact. … One does not have to share the views of … Margaret Thatcher to note the similarity between what the Nazis planned for western Europe and what, in economic terms, has come to pass.”26 The message was underlined by the depiction in the novel of British and American collaborationism with Nazism, as the United Kingdom is led by the restored pro-Nazi monarch King Edward VIII while the appeaser and defeatist former U.S. ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, has become American president. Exciting, suspenseful, and well written, the novel was an instant best seller. But also, as Rosenfeld remarks: “In part, Fatherland’s commercial success in Britain reflected the novel’s ability to exploit British uncertainty about a reunified Germany and the desirability of European integration.”²⁷

The novel took its cue from the fall of numerous East European dictatorships at the end of the 1990s to suggest that even a victorious Third Reich would have been a fragile structure, unlikely to outlive Hitler, and rapidly declining from its original vigor and aggression, doomed to eventual collapse and disintegration. Harris, like C. J. Sansom in his 2012 novel Dominion, whose debt to Fatherland is explicit, follows mainstream historiography in emphasizing the divided and unstable nature of the Nazi regime.²⁸ In some respects, however, the counterfactual scenarios on which the two novels are based diverge quite strikingly. Thus, for example, unlike other writers, Sansom does not think that the pro-Nazi ex-king Edward VIII would have been restored in the place of his brother George VI, since most Britons had not forgiven him for abdicating in the first place, and the Germans knew him to be “such an irresponsible and foolish man that, as King, he would have been a headache to any government.”29 In other parts of Europe, however, the Nazis had no such scruples or reservations about appointing unpopular collaborators, such as the fascist leader Ante Pavelić in Croatia, and it seems unlikely, in view of what became his real wartime record, that George VI would have remained in Britain when it became a Nazi client state, though one can never be quite sure. A more serious objection to the idea of the Duke of Windsor as a Nazi puppet monarch would lie in the difficulty the Nazis would experience in actually laying hands on his person. Churchill and the British government were concerned to get him out of the way, moving him first to Portugal then to the Bahamas, and it is likely they would have made every effort to keep him from falling into the hands of the Nazis.

More seriously, however divided and disputatious the Nazi leadership may have been, Harris’s scenario departs quite a long way from what is historically plausible in depicting a postwar, peacetime Europe living under a stable German domination. In fact, many historians would agree that war for the Nazis was not only war without limit, it was also war without end. In his long unpublished Second Book written in 1928, and on subsequent occasions too, Hitler made it clear that the purpose of conquering Eastern Europe was not only to provide Germany with a source of food supplies that would enable her to avoid the kind of Allied blockade that had done such damage in the First World War, but also to give her a land empire equivalent to that of the United States, a land empire that in the long run would provide the basis for a greater war, between Germany and America. Even assuming, therefore, that the Germans could have destroyed the Soviet Union—such a large “if” that Sansom, for example, has the Wehrmacht and the Red Army still slugging it out in the 1950s without any concrete result—it is unlikely that peace would have come. As the historian Tim Mason noted: “Whatever one makes of Hitler’s speculations before 1941 about a future war of world domination against the United States, the conquest of ‘living space’ in European Russia was never even conceived of as being a finite goal, and Hitler ruminated repeatedly about the danger of degeneration setting in, if the German people should ever find themselves in a situation in which they did not have to struggle against adversaries.”30 For his scenario to be plausible, Harris has to add to the unlikely eventuality of the Nazis ever agreeing to bring the war to an end the postulate of Hitler actually fighting the Americans to a stalemate and concluding a peace agreement with them. Everything we know about Hitler strongly suggests that he was never willing to compromise, and, as he said, always “went for broke”; for him it could only ever be victory or death, the triumph of the will or utter annihilation, nothing in between. And in practice, the enormous disparity in resources between Germany and the United States would have made it unlikely that war between them would have resulted in a stalemate, even had the Third Reich conquered Britain and concluded peace with the Soviet Union (another unlikely scenario).³¹ The changed conditions necessary to underpin Harris’s fantasy are just too numerous and too large to make it plausible as counterfactual history, even in the form of fiction.

The emergence of Eurosceptic counterfactualism in Britain in the 1990s undermines Gavriel Rosenfeld’s argument that over the long haul, a process of “normalization” has taken place in the British view of Hitler and Nazism, expressed in the changing character of future fictions, as Nazism ceased to be a simple object of moral opprobrium linked to a self-congratulatory representation of Allied resistance to it, and attitudes to, and representations of, a counterfactual Nazi future became more complex and more self-critical. Rosenfeld repeats this argument through his book at every possible stage like a mantra.³² But it is a massive oversimplification. It is given the lie by the sharp deterioration of British attitudes toward Germany in the 1990s, which led to a merging of Nazis and Germans in Eurosceptic rhetoric, and prompted a new wave of fictions and speculations about what Europe would have looked like had the Nazis won. Because this dramatic worsening of British attitudes to Germany and the German past does not fit into Rosenfeld’s thesis, he simply ignores it.33 The fact is, moreover, that the concept of “normalization” is fundamentally meaningless—what is “normal” is normal only in a given historical context: fear of a European future dominated by evil Nazis was normal in Britain during the Second World War, just as the belief that such a future had in many respects already happened, or was about to happen, was normal in British Eurosceptic narratives of the 1990s. Moreover, “normalization” is itself a predictive concept: the implication is that once things have become “normal,” they will always remain so in the future. It is thus metaphysical rather than historical, untestable by empirical investigation.

The way in which the concept of “normalization” smooths over changes of attitude in other countries is evident in Rosenfeld’s narrative too. Few things are less convincing in his book than the claim that the 1990s saw a “declining German belief in the power of memory and the possibility of justice,” or a “desire to normalize the memory of the Nazi past.”³⁴ For the 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, and the reunification of the two Germanys, East and West, was on the contrary a decade that saw the resumption of war crimes trials across Europe, the highlighting of the Holocaust in public memory in Europe and the United States, the global impact of Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List, the opening of Holocaust memorial museums in many countries, the conversion of neglected German concentration camp sites into centers of remembrance and education, the placing of a memorial to Nazism’s Jewish victims at the center of Germany’s new capital city, Berlin, the uncovering of the complicity in Nazi crimes of many German institutions, from the armed forces to the medical profession, and later on the Foreign Office and its diplomats, and much more besides.35 The problem with Rosenfeld’s analysis is not simply that it relies on the crude and ultimately redundant concept of “normalization”; it also fails to set alternative histories—real and fictional—in their proper historical context, a context that, far from pursuing a single, predictable linear development toward the “normal,” underwent, and is still undergoing, many unpredictable twists and turns over time.

This context is evident in the numerous postwar attempts to imagine a world in which Hitler had somehow managed to escape from his Berlin bunker in 1945 and survive into the postwar era. A large number of these fictions, particularly in the United States, have focused on making up for the frustration felt by many that Hitler had not been personally brought to account for his crimes. Books such as Philippe van Rjndt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler (New York, 1978), David B. Charnay’s Operation Lucifer: The Chase, Capture and Trial of Adolf Hitler (London, 2001), which owes a good deal to van Rjndt’s earlier book, James Marino’s The Asgard Solution (New York, 1983), and Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut (New York, 1987), engage in this wish fulfillment, as do, in a rather different way, numerous B movies and comic-book stories that depict the dangers of not bringing a surviving Hitler to trial. In this way, stories of Hitler’s survival were inserted into a political critique of the relative failure of governments across the world to bring old Nazis to justice, a critique that became particularly noticeable after the revival of war crimes trials in the 1960s, with the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in 1964.³⁶ By contrast, the critic George Steiner’s strange short novel The Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. (London, 1981) seems to have been intended as an attack on the obsession with Hitler that had become notable in the previous few years with the appearance of books, movies, and television programs about the Nazis in what had become known as the “Hitler-wave.” Hitler, surviving in the South American jungle, was, Steiner suggested, an irrelevance in the late twentieth century. Instead of constantly recalling him to mind, people, especially Jews, should forget about him so they could face the future with more confidence and more optimism.37

Rather different is the recent wave of books claiming that Hitler (and, usually, Eva Braun) really did escape the bunker after faking their deaths. Such books claim to be based in reality, and sometimes on serious historical research. The vogue was begun by a British surgeon, W. Hugh Thomas, who attracted considerable attention with a book, published in 1995, purporting to demonstrate that the charred human remains found in the Reich Chancellery garden, above the Berlin bunker, in 1945, were not those of Hitler and Eva Braun. Thomas presented a considerable quantity of seemingly plausible forensic evidence, and his credentials as a medical expert added to his credibility. However, he had already claimed some years earlier that Rudolf Hess, the former deputy leader of the Nazi Party imprisoned for life at the Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945, and incarcerated in the fortress at Spandau, just outside Berlin, was not in fact who he seemed to be, but someone else; and in 2001 he similarly claimed that SS leader Heinrich Himmler, whom eyewitnesses recorded as having committed suicide in 1945 after being arrested and recognized by British troops, was actually someone else too.³⁸ Clearly Thomas had too much of a habit of discovering unlikely doubles, and the more he added to his list, the less plausible his theories became. To have sustained these deceptions would have required conspiracies on a considerable scale, and at the latest with his book on Himmler, it became clear that despite their apparently serious examinations of the medical evidence, Thomas’s books lacked any historical or forensic credibility.

Thomas did not have much to say about what happened to the real Hess, Hitler, Braun, or Himmler, but this gap in the literature was imaginatively filled by a number of other works published after the turn of the new century, including, for example, Ron T. Hansig’s Hitler’s Escape (London, 2005). And considerable media interest was created by a recently published investigation by two journalists, Gerrard Williams and Simon Dunstan. On 11 April 2013, in one of many similar media stories reporting on the book and on plans to turn it into a television program, a reporter from the Sun newspaper, writing from Argentina, noted:

Sensational claims have recently re-surfaced that Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler escaped his fate in his Berlin bunker and lived out his old age here in the wilds of Patagonia. Controversial book Grey Wolf, The Escape Of Adolf Hitler, by British authors Gerrard Williams and Simon Dunstan, published in October, describes how Hitler and wife Eva Braun even had two daughters who were still alive around a decade ago. They insist Hitler and Braun escaped the bunker in a secret tunnel and were replaced by doubles who committed suicide. And they claim it was the burned bodies of these doubles that were discovered by the avenging Red Army. In what the authors call “the greatest sleight of hand in history” Hitler and Braun then escaped to Argentina in a submarine before setting up home in a remote hideaway close to Bariloche. Here, so the theory goes, the tormented Führer spent his time plotting the emergence of a Fourth Reich before dying at 73 in 1962, his remains cremated and scattered.

The evidence, the authors were reported to have told the Daily Mail on 28 October 2011, was “overwhelming,” and they told Sky News: “We didn’t want to re-write history, but the evidence we’ve discovered about the escape of Adolf Hitler is just too overwhelming to ignore. There is no forensic evidence for his, or Eva Braun’s deaths, and the stories from the eyewitnesses to their continued survival in Argentina are compelling.”

The problem was, of course, as critics pointed out, that the authors’ endnotes became vague or were missing altogether when it came to supporting crucial claims and allowing readers to check them. In addition, the mass of genuine evidence for the bodies outside the bunker being Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s—including Hitler’s teeth, verified against his dental records—was passed over or sweepingly dismissed, along with the numerous eyewitness accounts by members of his entourage gathered immediately after the war by Hugh Trevor-Roper and published in his book The Last Days of Hitler (London, 1947). Finally, the authors had failed altogether to follow up their belief that Hitler and Eva Braun had been survived by two daughters living in Argentina. Once again, the theory depended on the postulate of a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth, extending over many decades and involving hundreds if not thousands of professional historians, eyewitnesses, archives, officials, investigators, journalists and many more. It did not say much for the authors’ opinion of the historical profession that they dismissed its established research as the product either of deliberate deception or of a woeful failure to inquire properly after the truth.

Spurious historical investigations of this kind are closely related in methodological terms to the politically motivated phenomenon of Holocaust denial, in which considerable forensic ingenuity is devoted to attempting to prove that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis during the Second World War, that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, that Hitler did not have a plan or program to kill the Jews, and that the evidence that historians have put together to demonstrate that these things actually did happen has been concocted by a Jewish-led conspiracy after the war. If writers like Thomas, or Williams and Dunstan, are relatively innocent of political motivation in their intent, the same certainly cannot be said of the Holocaust deniers, who are generally driven by antisemitic, racist, neo-Nazi, or Islamist extremist ideology, and use their research—often decked out with all the panoply of footnoted scholarship and conducted in serious-sounding centers with names like “The Institute of Historical Review”—to try and persuade people that there is a vast and sinister Jewish conspiracy controlling the mass media, the historical profession, governments, universities, and political parties, forcing them all to suppress the truth and ruling the world in its own interests.39

This kind of conspiracy theory, often based on claims that established knowledge is “official” knowledge and therefore to be mistrusted, could be found in an even more extreme form, if that can be believed, in works such as M. Robert K. Teske, Jr.’s The Omega Files: The Military-Industrial/Nazi/Alien Connection and the Infiltration of America by the Fourth Reich (New York, 2012). The book’s publicity blurb stated:

What you are about to read is controversial, and may be offensive to some audiences. Reader discretion is advised. (NOTE: In the usage of the word “Alien” feel free to substitute it with “Demonic,” “Fallen Angel,” “Supernatural” or “Occult” as any of those words would aptly apply within the contents of this manuscript.) … If, as the late J. Allen Hynek claimed, over 1 in 40 people have been abducted and “processed” by the “alien/secret government” agenda—or 1 in 10 according to more recent sources—then you are bound to know SOMEONE who is an abductee and KNOWS it. This information is for THEM. For those who are not “UFO Abductees,” the information in this file is nevertheless vital and applicable, and may one day save your life!!! … This file contains the most intricate and intimate details of a global conspiracy which seems to be rooted in an alien—military—industrial collaboration which is intent on bringing all freedom-loving peoples of this world under its control, through the implementation of a global government which has commonly been referred to as the “New World Order.”

The book claims that flying saucers were built by the Nazis before the end of the war, and used to escape by the leaders of the Third Reich, who then hid themselves in underground bunkers in various parts of the world, including Antarctica, from where they were trying to establish the “New World Order.”

Fantastic though such ideas seem, an opinion survey conducted by Public Policy Polling at the end of March 2013 found that “28 percent of American voters believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order.” Twenty-nine percent believe aliens exist, and 21 percent believe a UFO crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and the U.S. government covered it up.40 Beliefs such as these are more prevalent among Republicans than among Democrats (only 15 percent of whom believe in the New World Order theory, though, puzzlingly, 6 percent of them also believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, a far lower figure than the 20 percent of Republicans who hold this view, but surprising nonetheless). They act as a metaphorical expression of extreme distrust in government, which is equated symbolically with evil forces such as Nazism. Such distrust goes hand in hand with a belief that government and its supposedly officially endorsed research publications, as purveyed, for example, by university academics and researchers, are deliberately suppressing the truth, to which only a few privileged individuals such as Teske, Hansig, Thomas, Williams and Dunstan, or Holocaust deniers of various kinds, have real access thanks to the depth of their research or the acuity of their insight. Speculative or pseudohistories and fictions such as these clearly differ from counterfactual histories and fictions, though they are also clearly related to them. They claim to present not alternatives to what actually happened, but real representations of genuine historical truth. But the line between the two is thin and often difficult to discern.

Thus, to take an obvious example, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (New York, 1962) is set in an imaginary world after a war which the Nazis and the Japanese have won, dividing the spoils, particularly North America, between them. At the same time, however, the eponymous character has actually written a counterfactual novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which represents a different version of reality in which the Germans and Japanese have lost the war, Hitler has been captured, tried, and condemned, the British Empire has survived, and the Nationalists have defeated the Communists in China. At the end of the book, the characters discover that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy depicts the truth, and they themselves are fictional.41 From here it is only a short step to science-fiction narratives in which time’s arrow has been bent by circumstance, but can be straightened out by time travelers going back to the original event to set things to rights. In such novels, the author often goes to some lengths to present a correctly realized scenario, for instance, with the still-functioning Inquisition behaving in a twentieth-century England that is still Catholic following the victory of the Spanish Armada in 1688 in much the same way as it did in early modern Spain.⁴² Yet science-fiction writers are liable to introduce into such narratives completely un-historical or even impossible plot devices such as futuristic technology, laser guns, time machines, and the like, taking the reader a long way from the counterfactual starting point.⁴³

The real and the fictional thus blend, as they do in many alternative histories that posit the survival of Hitler into the postwar world, or indeed the rather smaller number that try to imagine a world in which he had died before coming to power, or survived but failed to become German chancellor. For the most part, such fictions are classic examples of wishful thinking; if Hitler had not become Reich chancellor, or been put on trial after the war, it almost goes without saying that things would have been better. A few works in this genre, notably the actor and comedian Stephen Fry’s Making History (London, 1996), address the more profound question of exactly what was the balance of personal and impersonal historical factors in the rise and triumph of Nazism, concluding that things would have turned out in a similar manner anyway even if Hitler had not been around. Which you choose depends not only on how far you think great individuals steer the course of history, for good or evil, but also on how far you blame Hitler personally for the crimes of Nazism, or how far (like Fry) you pin the blame on the German people. Ultimately, as Fry’s novel made clear, such fantasies are—like depictions of Hitler having survived the war—meant as much for entertainment as for anything else. Hitler belongs so vividly to the Nazi milieu, to the rallies and parades, speeches and propaganda, that it is intriguing to think of him living out a more or less conventional bourgeois existence in exile. Yet we know from a mass of evidence that Hitler did not actually want to survive defeat in war at all. At the core of his being, he believed in what he thought of as the Darwinian logic of the survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence of all against all, and if he failed, as he did, the only way out was through a sacrificial death, a belief shared by hundreds of other leading Nazis, including Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and large numbers of generals, government ministers, and senior Nazi officials, who committed suicide at the end of the war in one of the greatest waves of self-immolation in history.44

Alternate histories have long been a staple of science fiction, so much so that since 1995 the World Science Fiction Convention has accorded public recognition to the genre in the announcement of two annual Sidewise Awards for Alternate History, which take their name from a 1934 short story “Sidewise in Time,” by Murray Leister, in which parts of the earth change places with analogues from other timelines in 1935 so that a Roman legion from a timeline in which the Roman Empire survived into the modern age appears outside St. Louis, Missouri, the South wins the Civil War in some areas, and San Francisco is occupied by a victorious czarist Russia. The story is credited in the world of science fiction with effectively founding the modern genre of alternate-history stories, and indeed spawned a whole series of them in the following years. The boundaries between this world and the world of fictional alternate history on the one hand, and imaginary alternate history that claims to be fact on the other, are in some ways rather fluid.⁴⁵

What distinguishes all this from more serious attempts at counterfactual history is the focus on causation common to the latter, which is usually absent from, or at least very subordinate in, the former. Counterfactual history foregrounds the effects of a single change in an existing causal chain, leading to a whole series of consequent changes in the course of history. Alternate history simply poses a world parallel to our own without enquiring too closely into how it came into being. Investigative medical or journalistic alternate history focuses on establishing that one single fact in history changed, devoting hundreds of pages to “proving” that Hitler survived in Argentina after the war, or that the “Rudolf Hess” in Spandau was someone else, but is not really interested in suggesting what difference these discoveries make to the course of history in a wider sense. The main interest in them, for both reader and writer, lies in the mechanics of the supposed proof itself.

Yet counterfactual history essentially belongs in the same world as these other, more obviously fictional works of the imagination, some of which have a much longer track record and came into fashion long before counterfactual histories became commonplace. Postmodern scepticism has freed up writers of all kinds to imagine what might have been and to tie their imaginings in one way or another to real historical events and real historical personages. In all of these various genres, the reader enters into an implicit pact with the author: both suspend their disbelief because they know how titillating it would be to imagine Hitler vegetating away in Argentina in 1964, or how politically persuasive it should be to meld the past with the present in imagining the British resisting incorporation into a Nazi-dominated Europe, or how morally regrettable it is that Hitler was not brought to justice after the war. To assess the usefulness or otherwise of counterfactuals in the study and interpretation of the real course of history, therefore, we have to put aside these more baroque products of the imagination, and try to pin down more precisely exactly how the counterfactual does relate to the real.