Description

One of the mainstays of speculative history (together with “What if the South had won the US Civil War?”) is: What would the world have looked like if the Nazis had won the Second World War? And yet I’ve never seen a map showing what the Nazis’
post-war plans (for Europe of for the world) were, neither from their own files or reconstructed by war historians.
Which is very strange, considering that the Second World War is one of the most studied conflicts in world history. Maybe that’s because the Nazis didn’t have any concrete plans for after their victory – not because they didn’t believe in it themselves,
but because of the chaotic nature of Nazi governance. The institutional overlap, competition and resulting chaos in the Third Reich is a well-established historical fact that contradicts the traditional notion of Germans as careful and thorough planners and
which may well have prevented a German victory.
How the world would have looked like if such a victory had occurred, is a question that has been answered often in fiction, for example in the (passable) Robert Harris novel ‘Fatherland’ and the (brilliant) Philip K. Dick book ‘The Man in the High
Castle’. Harris’ book includes a map, of a 1960s Europe dominated by Germany. This Nazi state, greatly expanded towards the East, doesn’t include Alsace-Lorraine. This rather puts a dent in the map’s credibility: it’s quite unthinkable that a victorious
Nazi state would not annex these territories on the Rhine’s left bank, for so long disputed between France and Germany. Dick’s book, which focuses on the Japan-dominated West Coast of the (former) USA, sadly isn’t illustrated with a map. Not my copy
at least.
This map does give what seems to be a well-considered vision of a Europe-wide Nazi state as it might have emerged after a German victory. German supremacy is ‘concealed’ by the construct of Neuropa (’New Europe’), a sort of evil twin of the
European Union in this universe.