Weltkriegschaft

[Doge Robert]

Finally caught up.. I really DO Like that index of yours. Probably saved me hours of scrolling and clicking.. Perhaps even days, as reading through that many pages the old fashioned way seems to take a disproportional long time..

Awesome story, I must say, and perhaps even admit to just a hint of "professional" jealousy.. But what the H*, maybe it will inspire me to do better myself..
Whatever else, consider me subscribed.

[Enewald]

Where did you get that stuff?

I wouldn't even need to learn German to be able to read them, as I can already read and understand German quite well.

[dublish]

I don't usually like playing the necromancer, but I'm genuinely concerned for my favorite AAR. I hope nothing's wrong.

[Atlantic Friend]

I'll second that motion. If an update doesn't come soon, then poor Major-General Hausser and his men will turn into native Irishmen, and their Panzers into clinking Leprechauns.

[TheHyphenated1]

Hello All,

While real life circumstances have prevented me from being able to update Weltrkriegschaft over this extended hiatus, I'm pleased to report things now back on a keel evener than the bottom of a Rhine barge (well, almost).

I'm pleased to report that III:XXXIV will be released on December 25th! My Christmas gift to you, long-suffering and loyal readers. We'll soon see whether Hitler has the nerve to throw the Wehrmacht across the Channel before the weather turns, as he recently promised. Looking forward to hearing from you all again!

Cheers,

TheHyphenated1

[Kanil]

Good to hear things are better for you, and that this is coming back.

[TheHyphenated1]

Hello all, and Merry Christmas! Update will be released at approximately 11PM Pacific time tonight! See you then...

[volksmarschall]

Hello all, and Merry Christmas! Update will be released at approximately 11PM Pacific time tonight! See you then...

I got so excited when I saw this!

11 PM Pacific Time, that's like 2 AM Eastern Standard Time. Oh well, I'll be looking for your fine return Hyph!

Merry Christmas to you and your family, and have a safe and happy holidays!

[TheHyphenated1]

Update going up now... (may be a few minutes with formatting)

[TheHyphenated1]

Chapter III: The Lion’s Den

Part XXXIV

November 17, 1936

“Come in, Gruppenführer Wolff, Chief Inspector Müller, Professor Six.” Reinhard Heydrich leaned back in his desk chair, waving in his afternoon meeting. When they had crossed the length of his large but unpretentious office, Heydrich stood and they exchanged handshakes.

“Please sit.” Heydrich poured his guests each a glass of mineral water. “Himmler has received authorization to select whoever he wishes as Plenipotentiary for Political Reorganization in Great Britain. This means, naturally, that your candidacy, Karele, will be advanced on my behalf.”

SS Gruppenführer Karl Wolff nodded thanks, his sunny, charming face set into a half-leer.

“A few details need to be decided, however. Himmler has several concerns about the last draft of the Informationsheft, Müller. Most urgently, he is keen to see that your new draft,” Heydrich stood, accepting from Müller the thick wire-bound manuscript, “takes more care to address the winter-related issues of the occupation.”

The Gestapo Chief Inspector assured him that it did.


Great Britain now stood alone in Western Europe against the Pact of Steel.


“I think we are nearing final edits, then,” Heydrich said. “We are authorized for 2,000 copies of the whole thing in book form, 18,000 copies of the paper-cover demographical extract, and 1,570 copies of the Special Search List. Later, up to 300,000 copies of the shortened political excerpt will be printed as pamphlets and distributed to the occupying forces.”

“Excellent,” Wolff said. “And Hitler, naturally, will approve whatever Himmler...”

“Of course, Karele.” Heydrich produced another wire-bound draft, labelled J2, from a desk drawer. “Now Professor Six, in order for Chief Inspector Müller and Gruppenführer Wolff to receive the latitude they need, the Reichsführer-SS is keen to see the following changes to the manuscript, to ensure final approval.”

“Go ahead, please.”

Glancing over this nascent manual for the forces that were to occupy Great Britain following a successful invasion, Heydrich set his eyes first upon the table of contents, which were heavily annotated in red ink, tracing Heinrich Himmler’s jagged, almost runic, handwriting.

“First,” Heydrich said, “he has consulted with the Interior Ministry’s records, as well as those of the Foreign Ministry, and finds that some of the land area figures are off. Most glaringly the ‘General Survey of Great Britain,’ your researchers give Scotland as encompassing 84,033 square kilometers, while our other sources give Scotland as something very close to 71,200 square kilometers.”

“Naturally, we shall review those before press.”

“I see...” Dr. Franz Six was a twenty-seven year old political science professor at Königsberg of considerable talent, whom Heydrich had appointed to assemble the data for the manual which Chief Inspector Heinrich Müller was producing. Behind Six’s thick spectacles and deep brow Heydrich sensed extreme political sensitivity, but through the course of this project, the SD chief had come to suspect that Six disdained tasks which he fancied below his intellectual caliber. As such, it appeared that he had left the gathering of the “routine” statistics in the Informationsheft-GB to his graduate researchers, leading to time-consuming and unseemly errors such as this.

“But I will give you the comprehensive list for correction, Professor. Otherwise, the topographical survey seems satisfactory. As for ‘Climate,’ ‘Economy,’ and ‘Abstract of Demography,’ all good.” He turned the page. “Yet in the section ‘Governmental and Constitutional Structure,’ the Reichsführer comments that although you have ample information on the Crown, the Parliament, and on the national and county-level administrations, the occupying forces could benefit from revised and expanded information on the municipal governments, which he feels is presently rather bare-bones. Given time constraints, exactly five pages should be sufficient.”

Six nodded.

“The section on religion meets his approval, especially its informative subsection on the Oxford Movement and how it could be manipulated. ‘Sects and Subversive Institutions’... Freemasons, good. Jehovah’s Witnesses, good. Salvation Army, good. Young Men’s Christian Association, good. Unitarians, good. He has a note asking whether we have names of notorious London sybarites.”

“No, but they could be readily obtained.”

“On the other hand, perhaps it shall be best if I tell him not to worry about all that for now, again, given the time constraints. Now what about Boy Scouts? What is to be done with the boys themselves?”

“Simply replace the organizations with new ones of more acceptable character. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

Six had devoted a rather hysterical section to Lord Baden-Powell’s International Scouting Movement. The Boy Scouts, Six insisted, were not only a powerful paramilitary force that would have to be reckoned with in the event of an invasion, but an insidious espionage arm of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, which he proved by an exhaustive list of personal associations and international coincidences. Only Baden-Powell’s arrest, along with all the adult leaders, could break their dangerous spell over Britain’s youth. Still, he warned, the older and more talented boys in the movement, if their energies were not channeled elsewhere, would soon turn to assassinations and sabotage behind the lines.

“What would you propose?”

“Something on the model of the Hitler Youth, although of course that wouldn’t do. Boys’ fathers will have been killed by Adolf Hitler’s soldiers and even if they come to appreciate the extent of their own government’s crimes, they would not be apt to revere our own war leaders either. Perhaps a cultus of sorts could be built around whoever their new leader shall be.”

“Quite possibly, Professor. Quite possibly indeed. Next section... ‘Universities, Education and Culture’: very pleasing.”

Six had taken particular pride in this section, assessing the political liabilities of the various faculties at Britain’s great universities. He was partial to Cambridge over Oxford, Heydrich saw, and the handbook contained several vitriolic denunciations of academics there. Oxford, Six enjoined his readers, was to be regarded as the very pulsating heart of British imperialism, which “smothers all rational thought or ethical capacity in favor of blind devotion to the Briton race.” Around the tables of her colleges, Oxford students plotted, he said, the deliberate deconstruction of German nationhood, smug in their confidence that their breeding and university connections made such a thing all too plausible. Their Masters -- “Spies, Degenerates, Pornographers, Atheists and Marxists,” as Six called them -- existed solely to perpetuate this uniquely British brand of jingoism, skillfully stifling the inquiry of even the brightest Anglo-Saxon minds.

Cambridge did not escape altogether unscathed, of course, drawing derisive remarks from Six on the quality of its philology and history faculties, as well as unnecessarily lengthy commentaries on Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the eminent Cantabrigian philosophers, as well as reference to their place in the Special Search List, which contained further details on how to arrest them.

“And here in your section on the Public Schools, Professor... The Reichsführer is incredulous. ‘The most prestigious are Eton, Harrow and Winchester, with Westminster, Rugby, Marlborough and Fettes in the next order ... Fathers often register their male children at birth with the schools which they themselves had attended. Charterhouse, for example, is already full for the next three years. Eton, the most prestigious, is sold out until 1945.’ Is this true?”

“We have it quite reliably,” Six said.

“Too late for your Klaus, Heydrich,” Müller chuckled, “but perhaps your Heider can be an Etonian if the invasion goes forward in November rather than March.”

Heydrich narrowed his eyes sourly. “They’ll make room.”

Six fidgeted anxiously in his seat.

“Of course, my good Professor. All very good on the public schools. Museums, top notch. I had been quite unaware that so many Germanic artifacts were being kept in Britain, although of course it makes sense. Theater... good.”

“I am pleased.”

“‘Press and Radio,’ is approved, as are the sections ‘Émigrés,’ ‘Communists, Marxists and Trade Unions,’ and ‘Criminal Elements.’”

“Thank you. Urban hygiene can see its first unrestricted test in London.”

Heydrich chuckled. “Urban Hygiene” was, of course, not so much a matter of sanitation -- of constructing some gleaming new cloaca maxima -- but rather a form of criminal crackdown. It entailed everything from cleanup of graffiti, removal of trash, and displacement of the homeless to the wholesale arrest of drug dealers, pimps and jewel thieves. The Informationsheft outlined in admirable detail the methods by which such characters could be induced to inform on one another and break down the criminal underworld in which they lived.

“‘Fascists’. The Reichsführer is perplexed. Although I can better guess at your reasoning, I must confess myself somewhat perplexed as well. You urge against consorting with Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. Why?”

“They are irrelevant,” Six said, “and with the present war have lost even more influence. They are a shadow of their former selves as a result of the recent governmental suppressions in Britain, and to cast our lot with them would make us appear weak and reactionary. Furthermore, I interviewed several people in Germany who know Mosley personally -- and all were in agreement that the loyalties of the BUF are still entirely up for debate.”

“Yes?”

“A number of their members have made openly anti-German statements, and in the conditions of an invasion, Dr. Müller and I agree that the SD and Gestapo would have priorities far higher than trying to sort out the allegiances of these -- these hobby fascists.”

All four men laughed.

Heydrich thumbed through several more pages, mostly free from Himmler’s red ink. “Your summaries of the Armed Forces are excellent -- I can say this from more personal experience than I can the other areas.” He frowned. “But as for ‘Intelligence Services,’ a bit of concern has been raised as to your assessment of our opposite numbers as quite so decrepit and incompetent.”

“All I argue is that this service, which clearly surpassed our own in the last war, has been allowed to fall fallow over the past decade, and has therefore shown itself easily our inferior so far in the present war.”

“Obviously I cannot share with you the full extent of what goes on, Professor.”

“Do you want me to make changes?”

“Allowing more time, I would like further consultation on it, but under the circumstances, it stays. I shall explain as much to the Reichsführer.”

This was the end of Informationsheft-GB’s first section -- the guidebook. This was intended to serve as a densely informative and comprehensive reference work for the occupation authorities, and it had as an appendix a short and then a long bibliography to which one could resort for deeper or more specialized information.

The second part was a primer on how the occupation government was to be initially established and subsequently maintained through its early stages. As soon as a zone was transferred from direct military control -- Himmler claimed to have received some sort of assurance from the Führer that this could be as little as a week for areas behind the front -- Gestapo officials would headquarter themselves in the buildings of the original government and declare the district liberated from the illegitimate rule of King Edward, whose constitutional illegitimacy was to be loudly asserted through publicly posted English-language literature. To as great an extent as possible, the existing administrative boundaries of boroughs and counties would be preserved in the occupation, for practical reasons.

The first priority of the occupying forces at this stage would be to stabilize the life of the civilian population. This would entail instituting a temporary food dole, and the issue of coal for heating. Water, sewer and electrical infrastructure was to be restored as soon as possible. Then roads were to be repaired or at least made passable, and then schools, churches and shops reopened. Only then could effective efforts be begun to gather information about partisans and stamp out support for them among the general population. Local governors would be authorized to offer incentives and mete out punishments as the local conditions demanded, and without recourse to higher authorities. It was hoped that such an approach would make it gradually less attractive to support francs tireurs until sabotage and terrorism fell to a level that could be suppressed by the local police.

The police and constables, Six stressed, were to be left unmolested as far as possible. Their foremost interest, he said, was not nationalism, but rather the safety of their local communities. They would be fully aware that it was in everyone’s best interest that they maintain law and order within their jurisdictions, and by the time the military governors handed a county over to the Gestapo, the Informationsheft predicted, the police would have already been vetted and rearmed.

On the national level, though, Six took a significantly different approach. The wholesale liquidation of Great Britain’s principal cultural and civic institutions was to be effected. Seven Special Action Commands would be installed in support of Gruppenführer Wolff’s central administration in Whitehall. The first, Royals and Government, would be quartered in the Tower of London, and was assigned responsibility for the internment and ultimate disposition of the Royal Family, the Prime Minister, and whatever members of the Cabinet fell into the Gestapo’s hands. The second, Universities, was to operate out of Trinity College, Cambridge, with responsibility for shutting down all universities and public schools throughout England, Wales and Scotland, arresting their faculties, and administering their restructuring to reopen at an appropriate time.

While the halls of Eton stood empty, they would be occupied by Special Action Command III, Political and Religious Organizations, with responsibility for keeping organizations of those sorts in check and under surveillance. A sister organization out of Reading, Labor Unions, would ensure that those groups were safely dismantled as the Reich gradually assumed control of the UK’s industrial apparatus. This process would be orchestrated by Special Action Command V, Rationing and Production, operating out of Southampton.

Press and Radio, to which Six cavalierly assigned the BBC’s present central offices in Langham Place, London, would work closely with the Propagandaministerium to ensure that the occupation press worked most efficiently to represent Germany’s overarching political goals in Britain.

But it was the seventh such group, Security, which merited the Informationsheft’s third and final section, the Special Search List. This was a comprehensive list of the 1,150 highest-priority persons to be arrested immediately, and with terrifying precision, Six had marked them for destruction.

From Sir Norman Angell to Lord Zetland, the list alphabetically catalogued those personages seen as the Third Reich’s greatest enemies in Britain. If this group, or clique, as Six termed them, could only be taken into custody, England’s belligerent imperialism could be snuffed out forever.

Baldwin and his whole cabinet, of course, were to receive highest priority. Royals and Government was to arrest the lot of them -- Halifax, Eden, Cooper, Simon, both Chamberlains and all the rest in a single swoop. The rest of the government -- the Special Search List named 187 junior ministers, Members of Parliament and departmental secretaries -- were to be hunted down by Security.

Heydrich sat back and grinned. Here, Himmler’s red pen expressed nothing but childish delight. “He is very pleased with the Search List, Professor Six. Very pleased indeed.” Heydrich thumbed further through.

Among the Cs, “Violet Lady Bonham-Carter” was a priority target, as was “Churchill, Winston Spencer, Former Chancellor of the Exchequer,” and “Noël Coward, playwright, spy.”

Skipping through the alphabet, Heydrich noted that the legendary psychologist Sigmund Freud was to be apprehended, followed closely by J.B.S. Haldane and the author and mystic Aldous Huxley.

Among the Ms, Müller’s men would arrest such unfortunates as “MacNair, Arnold, Reactionary Professor of Law,” “Menzies, Lt. Col. Stewart, Deputy Director of Secret Intelligence,” and even poor “Monsell, Viscount Bolten M.E., Former First Lord of the Admiralty,” whose ignominious sacking at Baldwin’s hand would not spare him from the Gestapo’s attention. Even “Moriarty, James, professor, academic,” was enrolled in the Gestapo’s book.

By the Ws, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann stood in the company of Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf -- a marked man among two celebrated marked women.

Heydrich closed the book. “Reichsführer Himmler loves it. I myself remain deeply impressed by your ingenuity, Professor. I am sure that Chief Inspector Müller will find great success with this book. And Karele, Gruppenführer, I am sure that you will find great success with this occupation.” He stood and raised his glass. “To Christmas in Piccadilly.”

[Kurt_Steiner]

Scaring vision of what might have been. Or it may be if everything goes fine to Adolf.

[TheHyphenated1]

Kanil (1) - I shall!

Slaughts - Yes, exactly. But OKM is well aware that it will take something particularly special to bait the Royal Navy's cautious admirals.

KLorberau - Thank you!

dublish (1) - Yes indeed!

Doge Robert - Thank you very kindly, and welcome aboard!

Enewald - University libraries are very handy...

dublish (2) - Your necromancy is much appreciated, and everything seems to be back on track . Now if only you could necromance TEatL...

Atlantic Friend - Never!

Kanil (2) - Thanks!

volksmarschall - Thank you, and likewise!

Kurt_Steiner - That it is. But who shall General Winter favor?

[TheHyphenated1]

Bonus Photo: Blackburn Baffin torpedo bombers of 812 Squadron, transferred to operations with Coastal Command of Ramsgate, while their normal home, the HMS Eagle, undergoes repairs in Scotland.

[Pwnzerfaust]

Wow, we're still in 1936? It's been ages since I've read this, and I just got started on catching up and decided to see where it is so far haha. I look forward to reading how much you've managed to do in 1936.

[Kurt_Steiner]

And having biplanes still in use are still giving me headaches...

[Enewald]

The future looks bright.

[volksmarschall]

1936, 82 pages, Biplanes, Reinhard Heydrich and a glorious return! When will this AAR reach 1937?

A great return to a great AAR!

[Woody Man]

Grim plans indeed, great to see you back writing Hyph!

[Hannibal X]

What about Eric Arthur Blair, hmm? Will it be Mitteleurasia has always fought Oceanien has always fought Ostasien? What does everyone's favorite dystopian novelist think of Spain and the war?

By the way, excellent AAR. I love how the Jews have been "pardoned" by the revocation of the Nuremberg Laws et al. Great story so far, if a bit hard to follow with all the subplots and whatnot. Good job, good sir.

[TheHyphenated1]

Pwnzerfaust - Yup. In the last, oh, almost four months of real time, we've progressed about 24 hours in the AAR. I promise things will speed up . Thanks for reading, and looking forward to hearing more from you as you catch up!

Kurt_Steiner - At least we're not still using zeppelins to bomb London, right?

Enewald - Depends on whose future we're talking about...

volksmarschall - At this rate, about May or June . Thanks for still reading!

English Patriot - Thanks! Great to see you're still reading!

Hannibal X - Blair, or Orwell, as most know him, is presently living rather quietly in Hertfordshire. Because of the wider war, and the Spanish crisis going much differently than in OTL (the army mutiny was only partial, and the Nationalist uprising has been largely put down already, with resistance now limited to the Basque Country and the highlands of Spain's north coast), he never went there.

Orwell's actually not a priority target for the Gestapo, but this is perhaps more through oversight and the constraints of list size than any favorable feeling toward him. Nonetheless, he'd be liable to be arrested on several other counts in the event of a successful invasion.

Thank you for reading and commenting! The Nuremberg Laws will now be seen by history as a brief sort of "emergency measure" -- and in the process of Hitler revoking them, the Wehrmacht (Kriegsmarine and Abwehr especially) can benefit from a goodly number of highly skilled officers. And yes, I'd imagine it might be a little hard to keep track of everything that's going on in the background. Remember, though, that I'm always happy to answer questions or clarify things that weren't clear!