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July 8, 2004

Strakon Lights Up
 
The end of the Occupation
 

Last month a fire raced through a little antiquities shop  on a narrow, one-block lane known as Timetangle Street, deep in Greenwich Village. Demolition workers discovered that a number of peculiar artifacts and documents had survived in the basement more or less intact. They included:

• an exquisitely engraved parchment map of Roman Scandinavia, dated MDXCVII ab urbe condita (A.D. 844);
• a collection of Confederate gold pieces dated 1871 and bearing the likenesses of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis;
• the front page of the New York Tribune for June 30, 1908, with a banner-headlined story about the destruction of Omaha, Neb., by an exploding meteor;
• and a dusty album, dated 1927, that contained photos of the coronation of Anastasia as Tsarina of All the Russias.

Also found was a copy of the German weekly Das Reich, dated 8 July, 1945, featuring the following report, which, in order to serve you better, I have had translated into English.

Großbritannien: Das Ende der Besetzung
 
[Great Britain: The End of the Occupation]

By Dr. Helmut Ritter von Alpdrücken
 

The better part of two weeks has elapsed now since the restoration of sovereignty in Great Britain, and we may begin to hope that our racial cousins in that predominantly Germanic land are finding the road that will lead them to a future of order, honor, and prosperity, so that they may soon rejoin the community of civilized nations.

All Germans may take pride in the assistance that the Reich has offered in securing, at last, the return to the British throne of the rightful King Edward VIII, cast out by a cabal of warmongering plutocrats in December 1936; and in securing also His Majesty's enhanced prerogatives under the reformed Constitution promulgated on 28 June.

Finding the way has proved difficult for peaceloving Britishers and for us as well. Decent Europeans were shaken especially by the terroristic bomb attack in London of 31 December — on the very eve of the King's Restoration as originally scheduled — which wrecked Victoria Station and resulted in the death of Minister Todt, Minister Sauckel, and SS-Oberführer Dr. Six, and the wounding of Generalfeldmarschall Guderian and Minister Ribbentrop. Also injured, we will remember, was the British Provisional Chief Commissioner, Mr. Hoare. That statesman, now recovered, has been named by the King to serve as his Prime Minister; and we may expect that the scars he still bears, inflicted by the ravening terror-fighters in December, will serve to keep the good Mr. Hoare steadfast in the pursuit of peace.

It is an irony that the prospects of that pursuit are happier now than they would have been had the initial schedule been adhered to. The American regime of Mr. Henry Wallace — the bedraggled, stumbling rear guard of the vicious ruling conspiracy of Roosevelt — ended its abbreviated existence on 20 January, and we may declare outright now what all were murmuring as 1945 began: it was Roosevelt and his successor Wallace, or in any event their close subordinates, who were the paymasters for the evildoers of December. In fact those state-criminals had financed and orchestrated the largest part of the terrorism wracking the British Isles during the four years previous. All the chief terror bands — "Last Man," "Redcoat," "T1W," "Alfred" — were supported by the Yankee dollar and supplied with smuggled Yankee armament.

Let no one suppose that the aim was to help the ordinary Britisher in any way; rather it was to distract and hamper us while we were spending hundreds of thousands of precious German lives on the Eastern Front, from 1941 to 1943, destroying for all time the Bolshevist menace to civilization. And let no one forget that the plutocrats' terrorism cost the lives of more than 3,000 Britishers as well as the lives of hundreds of Germans in Britain.

The current President in the U.S.A., Mr. Thomas Dewey, is a man more honest, humane, and responsible than his predecessors. It has been rumored for some time that American scientists are developing a new weapon of massive destruction, and if it is true, we may be relieved that it will be Mr. Dewey, and not his erratic predecessors, who will have control over that device — just as we take comfort in the fact that it is the Führer, steady and wise, who controls the super-weapons that Germany has built and is building for the purpose of deterring aggression and securing peace.

It was fortunate that sincere and constructive elements in Britain were afforded an additional six months of preparation, under the Occupation and Military Government, as it has taken President Dewey some time to moderate the gangster policy of his government and retire the head of his secret terror service, Gen. Donovan, who was so aptly known as "Wild Bill." But the extra six months were useful also in sparing the successor regime in Britain the discomfort and distress associated with the final settlement of the Jewish Question in the British Isles. It falls to us Germans to perform, by ourselves, such hard and necessary tasks of world-historical importance, and of course we expect no gratitude, except that of distant posterity.

The reformed Parliament has opened  with the Royal Address and dignified celebrations of the renewed and reformed association of England and Wales with the Commonwealth of Scotland. But Germans should not expect this advisory body to be a perfect instrument. Already, for example, and most amusingly, we are hearing a racket from some of those whom the British call "back-benchers" for a revival of the exotic custom of driving on the left side of the road!

Less amusing is the racket these little men are raising for the return of certain antiquities and works of art removed to Germany for safekeeping in the fall of 1940. Even Nelson's Column, according to their insistent petition, must immediately be dismantled in Berlin and shipped back to London. It occurs to none of these "back-benchers," it seems, that during the difficult years following the Armistice of 1940 all those items, which are the common property of Germanic civilization, have been completely out of reach of the terror-fighters, who care nothing for our shared cultural heritage, corrupted as they have been both by their own bloodlust and the Kitsch "culture" of their American financiers.

Again, we Germans are accustomed to such ingratitude, but we still gaze open-mouthed as nonsense is heaped upon nonsense. There are even British public men who pretend to be surprised that the end of the Occupation has not entailed the evacuation of Wehrmacht forces from the islands! Well, for the time being, the "back-benchers" will have to content themselves with the evacuation of the famous Reform Club by officers of 2. Luftflotte, previously billeted there, who have now released that establishment for its traditional use by layabouts of the upper class.

In the peaceful areas — by far the greater part of the country — members of the German armed forces will certainly be less visible to ordinary Britishers. It will no longer be our Feldgendarmerie but rather their own National Police (Napo) constables or their familiar blue-helmeted "Bobbies" who will man the checkpoints and enforce the curfew. And it will be their own security detectives who will guard vigilantly against treachery and subversion. But Wehrmacht forces will not withdraw precipitately! In fact DNB was authorized to report two days ago that 97. Jäger Division is being transferred from the Urals Military Frontier to Wales, which is a timely action, since in the latest news we hear that insurgents lurking in the ruins of Cardiff have slaughtered four German soldiers and wounded nine, and taken the lives of two Napo constables as well. It is no secret that disturbances continue also in Cornwall and in the Highlands of Scotland; even with the supply of gangster dollars cut off it will take time for the ragged terror bands still existing to wither completely.

The cries from the "back benches" are having one beneficial effect. Loud and unpunished, they refute beyond question the absurd charge that the new Government of Great Britain is a "dictatorship," so unlike the gentle regimes of Messrs. Chamberlain and Churchill, who clapped their critics, including workers for peace, into gaol by the tens of thousands.

All parliamentarianism is productive of comedy; it is the nature of the beast. But the new Parliament is attempting more-serious work, too, and Germans should be tolerant in the face of the stresses and strains that will naturally arise from those sober deliberations. The question of how best to adjust the exchange rate between the Pound Sterling and the Reichsmark, for example, will not be quickly or easily answered, and the advice of the Reichsbank may or may not be warmly received. The British Army is already being rebuilt, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht, but the question — already broached in Parliament — of whether there ought to be a new Royal Air Force and a new Royal Navy is a thorny one in view of understandable German concerns. Also raising concern in the Reich is the desire expressed by Members, including some on the "front bench," to regulate the affairs of German companies doing business in Britain.

As well, many prominent Britishers are already expressing a hope for the early normalization of relations between the new Britain and the former members of the British Commonwealth and Empire. That has been easily accomplished in the case of the South African Federation and the Federation of Indian States (the latter with the assistance of our great ally Japan); but the fact that many of the other states and territories remain under the influence of the pretender, George Windsor, and his "Free British" terrorists is bound to engender complications. Order and justice are coming to prevail in Britain, but the "Free British" terror network continues to do its dirty work abroad, as witness the recent attacks on our embassies in Lisbon and Havana.

In the face of all these challenges, we Germans must take care to preserve our characteristic spirit of compromise and forbearance.

The most serious and significant work  undertaken so far by the new British Government is not in Parliament but in the Extraordinary Court. And that is the trial of the war-criminal and former dictator Winston Churchill, which opened 1 July, only three days after the Occupation ended. The other chief state-criminal of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, succumbed to illness in November 1940 while being detained in Silesia; and many have observed that it is a pity, and an embarrassment to all parties, that Churchill also should not have succumbed to some malaise.

That he was captured alive was, after all, an accident. As the reader may recall, one of our pilots strafed Churchill's limousine as he attempted to flee toward Liverpool on 6 August 1940, stranding the old scoundrel alongside the road, where he was picked up, quite undamaged though bereft of brandy, by a German patrol two days later. If he was not destined to perish, some say, it would have been better if Churchill had made good his escape and become clown-Prime Minister under George, clown-King of Bermuda.

Nevertheless, there he is, standing in the dock, bellowing his defiance and looking pink and fat as ever despite having been forcibly weaned off alcohol during his years as our guest. It is important that the dock he stands in be a British dock. We cannot, of course, heedlessly turn over the majority of detainees — men who have taken German lives and destroyed German property, men whose interrogations are still bearing fruit in the quest for peace — but the exceptional decision to give ultimate control over Churchill's trial to the British themselves, as opposed to German or international judges, was a correct one. It was a measure of our trust in our British friends and allies, and a measure of our confidence in the future that we will fashion together as comradely members of the European Federation. The verdict seems certain in the trial of this wicked megalomaniac who bombed German cities, sought to wage chemical and bacteriological warfare against German civilians, and did so much to wreck his own country and its empire; but whether he eventually proceeds from the dock to the gibbet is relatively unimportant.

What is important is that we Germans, executing the will of our farseeing Führer, acted decisively to prevent one of the chief instigators of our century's second great European war from inflaming it into a second world war.

Author's note. In the interests of creating an air of realism for my "what if" scenario, I did not strain too hard to invent specific Ominous Parallels with events in Iraq; I hoped that general parallels would emerge naturally from the similarities inherent in the two cases. Like all good propaganda, that of Dr. Ritter von Alpdrücken may be assumed to be a mixture of truth and deception. I will leave it to you to decide what the proportions are, as I will leave it to you to decide what the proportions are in the real-life propaganda of our real-life world empire.

Everyone whom the fictional Dr. Ritter von Alpdrücken names in the article was an actual player in some aspect or another of World War II; but two of the men, owing to changed circumstances, have been awarded a promotion in rank.

My confection owes much to Kenneth Macksey's Invasion: The German Invasion of England — July 1940, Norman Longmate's If Britain Had Fallen, and Len Deighton's SS-GB. — NS

July 8, 2004

An earlier foray into alternate history by Strakon:
"What if they'd told Jack Ruby to stay home that day?"
Posted April 19, 2000 —
the fifth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.
 

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