Germany Won WWII Several Days

¶ … Germany Won WWII

Several days prior to the launch of Operation Overlord by the combined Allied forces, a German spy sent a very short coded message to occupied France, "Attack Normandy, Clear Weather, Anchor," the final word being the codename of the sender. This singular message originated from within the Allied command structure and released on the leg of a carrier pigeon whose home was in the town of Calais. Once received, the German command in France redirected the Fifteenth Army stationed in the north, that were expecting an attack the northern coast near Calais back down along the central coast, and the Seventh Army stationed along the Loire River was brought up to defend Omaha Beach. This reinforcement resulted in preventing the Allies from breaching the German defenses on Utah Beach, severely restricting the flow of soldiers and supplies through the breakthroughs on Omaha and limiting initial Allied progress to holding a small area around the mouth of the Seine. Over the course of the next several weeks, additional landing attempts were made to reinforce the Allied forces in France. but, without the total control over the French coast that Operation Overlord required, the Allied invasion of Europe was doomed to the same fate as the evacuation of Dunkirk had been. Without the ability to penetrate Europe, from the west, the Allies were only able to maintain a border of control through a complete eradication of German forces in North Africa, establishment of naval control in the Mediterranean, and a stalemate hold on half of Italy (Mills). By the Fall of 1944, the Allies had agreed that using the nuclear option in Europe was out of the question, leaving negotiation as the only settlement option. In January of 1945, a peace agreement had been negotiated leaving Eastern Europe in the hands of the Soviet Union and Central and Western Europe (excluding Scandinavia, Greece, Turkey and Italy) inside of the German bloc of control (Priest).

Once peace had been established with the Western Allies, Germany was able to focus more intently on a successful extraction from the long and overextended push into the Soviet Union. Retreating back to the border states of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and others, Germany established a near total control over Europe while preventing the enraged Soviets from pushing any farther west (Kersten). In June of 1945, the entire war was over, hostilities nominally ended throughout Europe and in the Pacific as well. Hitler's plans for a Europe unified under the Nazi banner did not include continued respect for borders, but for the complete redesigning of nations (Kersten).

Large parts of France, and all of Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland were redesigned as the new German State of Burgundy. Holland was completely cleared of its native population, the Dutch people being considered strong supporters of the Allies and were subsequently moved into a reservation-like territory set aside for them in Poland (Kersten). All possessions and lands belonging to the Dutch were forfeited and given over to the soldiers and officers of the SS. German became the official language of Europe, the Nazi party was established as the political body throughout the occupied territories, and strong military and police rule was enacted throughout former France to completely quell any further resistance.

Economically, Germany was forced to rebuild a significant amount of internal infrastructure - without external allies beyond the defeated Japanese, Germany found that trade came at a great cost through an Allied occupied North Africa and through the still-Allied held Gibraltar Strait (Walton). The result was that the economic powerhouse that Germany had been before the war became a system highly dependent upon the importation of raw materials - though Hitler had won the war, he did not dominate the world and his many enemies continued to be so (Priest). The German economy was preserved and bolstered in great part to the wholesale looting of Switzerland's banking system which in the weeks after the war ended, found themselves nationalized by the Reichstag.

Militarily, a three-front cold war began to develop in the decades following the war. While an invasion of the United States was out of the question for both the Soviets and Germany, the growing nuclear weapons construction coupled with a significantly strengthened German economy allowed a relative equality in the buildup of nuclear and conventional arms such that an uneasy stalemate was maintained between the three world superpowers (Moorcock).

Culturally, the dominance of Germany overtook the traditional identities of the former free-states of Europe. What had formerly been strong national "brands" such as the French wine, Belgian chocolate, Swiss watches and banks, etc. either disappeared entirely or were simply re-branded as German products. The exports of German production were primarily consumed by trade partners in Central and Southern Africa, Asia, and South America (Mills). Boycotts of German products remained in effect for many years in North America and England. but, over time, even these barriers fell.

Most significantly, without the ability of the international community to bring any real effect to bear on the situation of the Jews in the new Germany, the eradication of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other "undesirable" groups expanded and became a true genocide (Priest). While a European version of the American Civil-War era Underground Railroad existed to secret targeted people out of Germany, it succeeded only in rescuing a few thousand survivors over the course of the next twenty years. During that time period, more than forty-million people were killed. After the concentration camps closed in 1952 due to their significant success, Germany took to developing a very strong and quite pervasive internal policing and spying system in which virtually no German citizen was free from "monitoring." Much as Orwell had predicted for his native England, it was the German preoccupation with "cleansing" and the establishment of the Aryan super-race that led it to establish the concept of the state as Mother and Father and the Fuhrer as the ultimate patriarch (Walton). Finally, as part of an agreement with the West to lift trade restrictions and to further attempt to become a serious world-player, Germany formally ended the official killing of Jews within the German territory (but, by this time, there were so few left and none in the "open" that this concession was a minor one at best).

Hitler's own history changed dramatically after the end of the war. His health, never having been very good and being plagued by insomnia, tuberculosis, syphilis and vertigo (Kersten), Hitler spent the last few years of his life in relative isolation in his Eagle's Nest retreat. While he continued to rule over Germany, increasingly it was his primary confidant and aide, Himmler who made day-to-day decisions. Following his death in 1953, Himmler became the Chancellor of Germany, leading it into the Cold War after the secrets of the Rosenberg's had been lost not only to the Soviets but to the Germans as well - the irony being, of course, that it was Germany's own Oppenheimer who led the Manhattan project in America with the idea of stopping all wars that made the destruction of the Earth possible.