Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War

World War II General WWII Discussion
#1

Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War

November 9, 2009 | Issue 45•46

NEW MUNICH—The new Sci-Fi Channel series Fallen Axis, which eerily depicts a world in which Germany actually lost the Second World War, premiered Tuesday evening to high ratings in an alternate universe to our own.

The Aryan Broadcasting Company is the Sci-Fi Channel’s parent network.

The much-anticipated television event is said to be the most ambitious ever produced by the science-fiction-themed network, which is a subsidiary of the Aryan Broadcasting Company. According to the early response, audiences in the alternate realm have been riveted by the show’s vision of an inverted existence wherein a defeated Germany has been completely neutered by the Allied powers.

“Imagine, if you will, a world in which Hitler’s glorious master plan had instead ended in ignominious failure, and the Allies had somehow emerged the victors,” the show’s creator, Leonhardt Riefenstahl, said during an appearance on Entertainment Heute Nacht. “It would be as if everything we know to be true—the fall of Russia, the invasion and surrender of the American continents, Heinrich Braun-Hitler’s consolidation of the various conquered states in 1973—had never even happened.”

Added Riefenstahl, “I think viewers all across the great worldwide National Socialist Empire are going to be terrified by the upside-down world we’ve created.”

Critics residing in the alternate realm have also responded positively to the show: Many praised its scarily realistic depiction of a postwar Russian-American union rising to economic dominance and superpower status with the help of gloating French and English allies.

A father relaxes with wife and son after a long day of building panzerkampfwagens.

“Not only is Fallen Axis a chilling, what-if story of a world gone mad, it also asks a number of important questions about what Germany’s victory meant, and why its sacred mission was so critical to the fatherland and all of humankind,” said Hans von Winterstein, TV critic for the Deutsche-American Zeitung. “And Rolf Staal’s performance as former cowboy actor Henry Fonda II, the monstrous American president who attempts to spread his country’s insidious political and economic liberalism across the globe, will horrify even the most stoic among us.”

Producers said depicting the fictional, non-German-controlled America cost upwards of 40 million reichsmarks per episode, with much of the budget going toward recreating the cities of Washington, D.C. and New York exactly as they would have appeared before the famous tide-turning Luftwaffe strike of 1951. In addition, test audiences reported being impressed by the show’s painstaking portrayal of a topsy-turvy 2009 in which American big-band music plays on every radio, Mickey Mouse spouts pro-Semitic propaganda from every cinema screen, and dilution of the supreme race runs rampant.

The show is considered by many to be another boon to the Sci-Fi Channel’s fall schedule, which also includes Battlestar Gleichschaltung, a weekly drama about a starship crew that enforces the total coordination of intergalactic society and commerce, and the hit reality series Jew Hunters, in which a team of paranormal investigators scour banks and former Polish ghettos in search of Jewish spirits.

No less an authority than the National Socialist Empire’s reichsminister of propaganda Helmut Goebbels expressed his admiration for Fallen Axis in a formal address yesterday from the Reichstag.

“The Führer and myself are enormously pleased with this provocative new program,” Goebbels said. “It shows you how close Germany might have been to losing the war had Nazi scientists not perfected the vortex gun just in time, and it is a reaffirmation of the values of self-sacrifice and racial purity that Germany’s magnificent victory championed.”

Added Goebbels, “However, I must strongly warn the show’s creators that it would be extremely unwise of them not to include a five-minute tribute to the Führer at the beginning of all future episodes.”

TheOnion.com

:evil: :lol:

#2

Is there something I’m not catching here? I thought Germany lost the war.

Oh, wait, now I see. This is an alternate universe where Germany won the war and they are playing ‘what if’.

Well we do know that no to many Jews, Gypsies, Communist, and ‘undesireables’ would have been alive to watch the show! And the non-ayrans would be slaves.

Deaf

#3

I like the idea of the story.

#4

Very cracked, in true Onion style…

#5

Interesting “abc” logo. The eagle’s legs makes the Nazi globe look like a cannonball, sans fuse. And what do all the colors represent - an Aryan “Rainbow Coalition”?

#6

Been done before in ‘Man in a High Castle’ by Philip Dick–possibly the best ‘What if-inside a What if’ story—but worth a TV or Film makeover.
Truth is, if the Nazis had won WW2 we would have a European Superstate with only a rubber-stamp parliament, surveillance on every street corner, detailed databases of every citizen, police with the powers to round up anyone believed to be a threat to the State (i.e the Ruling Party), smoking would be banned in public places, bars and offices, even your garbage would be inspected by officials and lots of faithful party members with soft jobs that allow them to produce lots of stupid regulations on how parents should treat their children, what they should feed them and where they could send them to school
On the other hand, we might have been driving Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, Opels and Volkswagens, drinking Becks Beer and wearing Hugo Boss suits instead of driving Humbers and Austins, drinking Fremlins and Whitbread and wearing Hardy Amis!!!

#7

Hummm doesn’t sound that much different than today, or the way we are heading :mrgreen:

The poblem with all such WI projected over time there is always a tendence of such ideologies to weaken over time. As with communism the ideology in both China and Old USSR, they would fade over the decades and a new balance achieved.

that part doesn’t sound so bad :wink:

#8

Yuss mate,
that is what I was suggesting.
I lived in South Africa all the way through the worst of the Apartheid era, States of Emergency, National Socialism with less uniforms. They were mild compared to the ‘West’. Back in the UK and in visits to the US I see National Socialism regimes everywhere. OK, they don’t carry a cosh, they don’t want the Jews and Black people murdered ( quite the reverse), but they use EXACTLY the same techniques to regiment, control, sideline or silence the general population. Ancient freedoms are/have been eroded or destroyed
This week the ‘Justice Minister’ (Injustice Minister?), Jack Straw has announced secret inquests when citizens have been killed by the police. WHAT???
In Germany, where they suffered the Nazis and, for one third of the populace, the Stasi, you would be lynched for putting up a CCTV surveillance camera or try to put innocent citizens onto a ‘watch list’. But in the Anglo-Saxon countries are drifting into a command state mentality.
Nue Labour uber Alles

#9

I see the above everyday. In fact, I did a double take as I saw the new Audi R8 pulling out of a petrol station today. Though, the Opels are called Saturn Astras here and will be retired after this year as Saturn begins to fade away…

And don’t forget Porsche, my friend sells them…

#10

While I was being flippant in the last post, it is a strange situaton. Over four decades, Britain and the US have got rid of all the shitty jobs to the third world. (Britain several years ahead of the US). Let the toiling coolies make the textiles, mine the coal, chop the wood! OK, let them also make furniture, washing machines and the basic cars. Oh yeah, maybe they can also make the TV sets, the computers, the trucks, the telecommunications network equipment–we will reserve the knowledge base.
Oh dear!, in order to make all the high-tech stuff they need the knowledge base–let’s train their people. Now they have it all.
We will keep to what we do best. The Americans can till the soil and produce lots of food to export to the third world and the British can run the banking system to pay for it. Both badly.
While the US and Britain have given away their technological leads in many industries, the Germans seem to have held on. They still lead in automotive science, chemicals, nuclear technology, machine tools, telecommunications and beer. How did they get it so right?

Re Audi R8. My Bastard, rotten, lucky-sod brother bought an Audi R4 last year. He paid £80,000 and sold it after three months for £95,000. It’s a fabulous car, but the one he had is just a poseur’s wank-tank, pussy-puller only good for twats with too much money that won’t lend me any!

#11

Wasn’t World War 2 a tie? Perhaps they are thinking of the war of Russian supremacy in the 20th century.

#12

Excuse me for my interference, honorable ladies and gentlemen, but I was instantaneously inspired with this highly intriguing sentence:

On the other hand, we might have been driving Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, Opels and Volkswagens, drinking Becks Beer and wearing Hugo Boss suits…

Of course, my dear Mr. Cato, but on the other hand just imagine that immanent loss of the magnificent group of cars that were a joy to look at and a pure amazement to drive back there in the States – Cadillac Series 62, Studebaker Commander, Packard Caribbean, Chrysler C 300, Continental Mark II, Cadillac Eldorado Brougham, Chevrolet Bel Air, Buick Riviera , Studebaker Avanti, Pontiac GTO, Shelby GT-350 Mustang, Oldsmobile Toronado, Dodge Charger R/T, Plymouth Road Runner, Chevrolet Corvette…

Not event to mention that half a century long march of British engineering progress embodied in those everlasting technical poems, commonly known as Allard M-Type, Riley RME, Jaguar XK 150, Aston Martin DB 4 S II, Jensen Interceptor Series III, Alvis GTS, Austin Healey 3000 Mark I, Bentley S II Continental Flying Spur, WSM Sprite… yes, perhaps even the Dellow Sport. :cool:

You know, it seems to me that very soon those anti-climax times with those subtle, but still powerful human massages will be highly tangible again. Therefore – cheer up and look for the fellow in the Dellow, not the man in the van or the chap in the trap! :smiley:

In the meantime, as always – all the best! :wink:

#13

Ah, Mr Librarian, Nostaligia is just not what it used to be. But a trip to a Goodwood revival day can show just what has been lost.
(you omitted, by accident, I am sure, the Jensen FF–a high performance Sports GT with full-time 4WD, 16 years before Quattros.)

#14

I have greatly enjoyed the rich irony in this thread, but I am not sure whether to regard the phrase “British engineering progress” applied to post-war motor car production as irony or an oxymoron. :wink: :smiley:

Some of Whisler’s findings are surprising. For example, in Chapter 5, he claims that the reputation for engineering excellence that some British car makers achieved, at least domestically, was largely illusory. Firms relied on ‘practical men’ who had worked their way up the engineering hierarchy via the apprenticeship system, rather than those with university qualifications. Even legendary designers, such as Alec Issigonis, the designer of the Mini, suffered from this weakness. Although the Mini is generally thought of as a very successful design because of its enduring popularity with consumers, in fact, it was very complex to produce, resulting in high unit costs and low product quality. As a consequence, the Mini’s manufacturers made very little profit from it, despite healthy sales. These problems, which were repeated time and time again, were the result, Whisler argues, of the lack of professional training among the ‘dominant designers’ and their teams. They arrived at their designs through trial and error, with not enough attention to the requirements of efficient production. The problem was not lack of investment in new model development, as is often asserted, but the fact that a large proportion of the money invested in development was wasted.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4339/is_2_23/ai_88252995/

Then again, I may have been scarred for life after owning a rather new, rather expensive, and spectacularly unreliable Triumph 2500S (a sports saloon which was neither) which foolishly relied upon the Prince of Darkness (Lucas) for intermittent electrical functions, and malfunctions; a Laycock de Normanville electric (somewhat adventurous when linked with the Prince of Darkness source of electricity) overdrive transmission (also fitted to various ‘great’ post war British cars) with the still mysteriously pointless overdrive and slow to engage or never engaging ratio on third as well as fourth; a curious independent rear suspension system which locked splines when it felt like it and, more disturbingly, unlocked them when it felt like it (usually in the middle of a corner when the car was close to the limit with splines locked, thus creating unexpected interest for the driver and especially in ideal conditions such as black ice); the ability to get as much as 5,000 [YES, A WHOLE FIVE BLOODY THOUSAND] kilometres out of the hugely expensive clutch mated to the frigging Laycock de bloody Normanville (semi - thanks to Lucas) electro-mechanical shitbox transmission; the most extraordinarily primitive plumbing grafted upon the fuel system to try to comply with emission controls which clogged up the twin SUs a treat; and not to mention other highly impressive engineering and production achievements such as the cardboard trim and parcel shelves under the dash.

Oh, and my first car was a Mini as designed by the genius Issigonis. Lots of fun in an underpowered way, when it went, but a bitch to work on for the simplest things with its unduly complicated (others said brilliant) east west engine arrangement, with engineering and production stupidity taken to great heights such as having to insert a key on the dash to open the ignition circuit and then press a starter button on the transmission tunnel to apply power to the starter motor, presumably because British engineering had yet to discover the rather simpler and cheaper to produce concept of an ignition key which actually started the car just by turning a key. Still, what can you expect of a car which had horizontally sliding windows and no door trim when the rest of the world had long had wind-up vertical windows and door trim?

I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for those cars, apart from the fact that Michelotti got the Triumph bodies just right. If only Britain could have built cars to match even half the excellence of those lovely designs.

#15

Because Germany is a nation built on the soundest of social, political and economic foundations. Beer and sausages.

As the UK used to be, before it converted to wine and curries

If Germany had won the war Britain would have been flooded with more German beer and sausages than it could use.

However, Britain quite foolishly made the mistake of winning the war so, apart from being crippled by the loss of its empire and a mammoth Lend-Lease debt to the US, it was still rationed until the early 1950s, partly as a consequence of flying food, mostly sausages but with a few precious turnips, into Berlin for about a year 1948-49.

This selfless act deprived Britain’s best minds of the sausage protein needed to sustain their clever thinking and of the turnips necessary to produce internationally prominent turnip-heads in a range of Nobel Prize winning disciplines.

Britain’s selfless act also improved the minds of the mediocre sausage-dependent brains and turnip-heads left in Germany after the Americans and Russians had cherry-picked the best minds in Germany for their rocket programs and other post-war programs of world domination.

Not the least of which were the Ford Edsel and the Berlin Wall programs, thus bringing into sharp relief the differences between a vibrant capitalist democracy and an oppressive communist dictatorship where the former gave its populace exactly what it wanted as represented by the Edsel as determined by market forces while the latter didn’t because Stalin had abolished markets in the 1930s to prevent kulaks and military officers from hiding among the sausages and turnips on market stalls when Stalin was purging them as part of a careful plan to ensure that the USSR would be best placed to utilise its best and brightest in the coming war with Germany.

When he was in a very good mood Stalin sometimes allowed model prisoners in the gulags to view from a distance a turnip destined for the officers’ mess, with the promise that if they continued to behave until their release they could see a photograph of a real sausage.

Meanwhile Henry Ford, as a paragon of a liberal democracy and lacking the foresight to predict or stop the processes leading to the Edsel, contented himself with using his private police to belt the shit out of, and even murder, anyone who looked like they might be a unionist. He also supported Hitler and hated Jews, but every great man makes a few mistakes.

#16

Rising Sun,
The post re: the training and mentality of British automotive engineers is quite perceptive. The trouble is University Educated men didn’t go into (or were welcome in) the post war motor industry, the aeronautical industry was the go-go super-duper future of mankind until it imploded in the 1960s. Even so, there was no shortage of innovation or engineering excellence. The problem was the bloody-minded-“we- are- going-to-srcew-you-to death” attitude of the Union work force and the weakness of operational management and government for years. Here is an example. I visited the Ford Factory at Dagenham as a schoolboy where they were proudly showing the last Ford Anglia on the production line, followed by the first Ford Escort. Ford and Vauxhall (GM) were masters of assembly line manufacture. Austin, however, were forced by the Unions to continue manufacturing their A40 (Anglia competitor) alongside the replacement 1100 series for SIX years after the logical end of the car’s life although were hardly any sales. Duplicated production lines meant more workers doing less at higher cost of course. The same situation arose in the entire BMC group with the same cars, Mini, 1100, 1800 being produced in five locations with different badges.
Even when there was good management (Ford, Vauxhall) the workforce let everything down. Murray Walker, the Motoracing Commentator mentions in is memoirs visiting the Luton plant and being shown a new Vectra with disc brakes fitted one side and drum brakes on the other and stories abound of Ford Escorts and Cortinas being shipped with the wrong engine configuration ( they all used the same block with different piston and sleeve packs for different models).
When those engineers were ignored by management and Leyland and Rootes decided to follow the American route of making non-innovative, value for money cars the market ended up with the Morris Marina and the Hillman Hunter.
FYI when Rover-Jaguar were forced by Tony Benn and the Labour Government into the merger with BMC, the projects that were cancelled were:-
–a mid engined permanent 4WD ‘supercar’ with the Rover 3.5 litre engine and a body designed by Farina that was later used as the base for the de Tomaso Mangusta.
–a gas-turbined saloon car (that funny ‘droop-snoot’ of the 1970s Rover 2000/2200 was actually designed for a gas-turbine engine).
–an ‘F’ type jag that looked very similar to XJ220 that apeared nearly 20 years later.
— a Rover, ‘mini’ (Escort sized) sports sedan with a 1800cc twin cam engine.
I can only totally agree with build quality–but that goes with the attitude of labour.

In defence of the early Mini. You are right that front-wheel drive cars are very much too blame of BMCs demise–the cost of R&D was horrific as were the production costs, but the Mini was intended to be a 1950s equivalent to the Austin 7 or Ford Model T—an everyman’s car with as much cost stripped out as possible. That’s why–no window winding mechanism, no dash mounted starter (remember that to have a dash mounted starter–you need a dash!) I remember my Mother bought one about 1961 or so and a heater was an optional extra for £8.00! In England!

Athough the British motor industry is defunct, it is no coincidence that the home of every Formula one racing team, but one, is in the UK. The engineers, without having to worry about sales or customer service have won at last.

#17

Of course! I should have worked that one out myself. Once, the only way to eat well in Britain was to have breakfast three times a day and they built an Empire. Now it has the best restaurants in the world–Italian,Indian, Greek, Chinese, Thai, French, Japanese–you name it and builds crap. But there are no German restaurants!!! ( I did find a German restaurant in Hong Kong once, but the doorman told me that it was reserved only for Germans. I asked him if that was like the dock at Nurenburg–and he threw me out.)
The Krauts still quaff a dozen litres of beer a day–even knocking back ‘cyclists beer’ at lunchtime, but never seem the worse for wear. At £3.80 per pint, the British worker now demolishes huge quantities of supermarket cider that is better suited as engine-degreaser and the executive class think that New Zealand wine is classy!

#18

:mrgreen:

It is difficult to understand the doorman’s attitude. You mentioned the war only once, and quite indirectly, and should have got away with it. It worked well enough for Basil Fawlty, and he was rather more direct

Unlike the quite subtle aerial opening to this Anglo-Teutonic contest. :wink: :smiley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5xd97HeY70

#19

:mrgreen:
I do love the way the British deal with the subject.

#20

Yes, I think they’ve pretty much forgotten the war.

And if they haven’t, they are far too polite to mention it. :wink: :mrgreen: