Home Page

Announcements 

Alternate Histories

International Edition

List of Updates

Want to join?

Join Writer Development Section

Writer Development Member Section

Join Club ChangerS

Editorial

Chris Comments

Book Reviews

Blog

Letters To The Editor

FAQ

Links Page

Terms and Conditions

Resources

Donations

Alternate Histories

International Edition

Alison Brooks

Fiction

Essays

Other Stuff

Authors

If Baseball Integrated Early

Counter-Factual.Net

Today in Alternate History

This Day in Alternate History Blog

*******

     “Cruel” doesn’t even begin to describe the treatment which the inmates at Ashworth were subjected to by their jailers during their imprisonment. Of all the SS death camps that were in operation over the long grim years of the BNSP occupation of southern Ireland, none had a darker reputation, or were more deserving of that reputation, than Ashworth; in fact, since the end of the Second World War it has come to serve as a chilling icon of the worst elements of the fascist regime led by Arnold Hiller. It has also stood as a memorial to the millions of Irish nationals who were slaughtered inside the gates of all the SS death camps during the Second World War. The present-day Irish government mandates that all secondary school history classes give at least one lesson on Ashworth, and many college and university history courses in Ireland deal at length with the atrocities the SS committed at Ashworth.

     Even before the installation of Ashworth’s infamous gas chambers the camp was already notorious for the massive numbers of inmates who were literally worked to death under the harsh, cold eyes of SS guards toting machine guns. Those inmates who were brave enough or desperate enough to attempt an escape were often shot dead before they could get to the perimeter; there were also more than a few escape attempts that ended with a prisoner dying by electrocution on the camp’s barbed wire fences. And even when a prisoner did manage to break out of the camp, he or she still stood a fifty-fifty chance of getting hunted down and killed by the SS.

     Then there was Dr. Joseph Angle. One cannot tell the story of Ashworth without squarely looking at the barbaric atrocities Angle perpetrated against Irish nationals at the camp under the guise of conducting scientific or medical experiments. Even by the infamously brutal standards of the SS death camp system, Angle was a monster; when the truth about his crime finally surfaced he became so hated by people around the world, including most of his fellow Britons, that many people who shared his surname rushed to get a name change even if they had no family ties to him at all. To him the unwilling human subjects on which he carried out his grotesque experiments were only glorified lab rats to do with as he pleased, and if anyone at the camp was brave enough or desperate enough to challenge him on this point he didn’t hesitate to inform on them to the camp’s SS guards-- nor was he shy about disposing of them himself when he felt it necessary.

    One subject that particularly obsessed Dr. Angle was twins; his standing policy regarding biological twins was that they were to be automatically made available to his laboratory for medical tests that were meant to validate his theories on what made twin children similar to one another vs. what made them different. But that wasn’t his only interest in them-- he was also eager to learn the effects of Cyclone-2 on pre-adolescent children. As head of Ashworth’s medical department he would have a critical role in the construction and operation of the camp’s new gas chambers, and he was determined nothing should go wrong with that process. In March of 1940 Angle met with engineers from I.C. Barton in his office for a ghoulish brainstorming session to work out the fastest and most efficient means for distributing Cyclone-2 to the prisoners who were to be executed in the new expanded gas chambers at Ashworth.

    Less than a month after that meeting, blueprints had been drawn up for a system of gas chambers and crematoria which its designers boasted could process thousands of prisoners in one fell swoop. As a demonstration of the system’s capabilities, the designers arranged to have a delegation of top SS officials visit a secret location where a prototype had been constructed and the corpses of dozens of political prisoners executed by the SS were waiting to be disposed of. A crew of forced laborers was also present, standing by under the watchful gaze of armed SS guards to remove the ashes of the dead prisoners when the cremation process was finished.

    There is no transcript of how the SS officials reacted to what they saw when the crematoriums were demonstrated, but apparently they must have liked what they saw, because within a week after I.C, Barton held its first demonstration of the new crematory system, the SS would put in an order for three such crematoria to be installed at Ashworth. Once these crematoria were up and running, it didn’t take long for SS chief Henry Hamill to conclude every other camp in the SS system ought to have its own crematorium. Accordingly, in the early summer of 1940 I.C. Barton was commissioned to build crematory ovens for every death camp in occupied Ireland. As French resistance fighters stepped up the guerrilla war against British occupation troops in France, Hiller gave his blessing for I.C. Barton to construct crematory facilities for the occupation forces to dispose of executed insurgents and collaborators with the resistance forces. When American and Canadian soldiers broke into SS headquarters in London in the last days before the collapse of the BNSP regime they would discover in the SS archives a set of papers outlining proposals to set up a network of crematoria in the U.S. and Canada once those countries had been occupied by British forces.

       Once the SS had established these grisly camps in Ireland and France, it was only a question of time before they began to construct them in other parts of the British Empire. By August of 1940 at least a dozen such camps were under construction in British-occupied sectors of northern Africa and the Middle East and South Africa’s government was giving hints to the SS attaché in Pretoria it might be willing to open up tracts of land in its interior for the purpose of establishing concentration camps to-- as the ruling white regime euphemistically put it --“resolve the problem” of the country’s nonwhite population. In the CANZUS nations, which had their own ethnic troubles to resolve, the news of South Africa contemplating construction of death camps to dispose of people of other races triggered a fresh wave of revulsion among people already sickened by previous BNSP atrocities against the Irish; although the full grisly truth about Hamill’s extermination program had yet to be realized, what was known appalled decent people no end.

       For example, one use of prisoners that was popular among the SS guards was as test subjects for a new type of poison-coated bullet which was specifically designed to inflict the maximum possible amount of pain on an enemy when he was shot in combat. So many spent ammunition casings were left over from these tests they ended up becoming an environmental hazard requiring expensive cleanup efforts in the postwar era; even now visitors to the former sites of these concentration camps are sometimes cautioned to be careful where they step lest they inadvertently come in contact with soil contaminated by those poison bullets. When the Allies started establishing a post-Hiller British government in the late 1940’s one of their first official acts was to institute a law banning the use or manufacture of such bullets-- a law still enforced by today’s British government.

******

       By December of 1940 there were nearly 60 SS concentration camps in British-occupied territories. And if Henry Hamill had his way, there would soon be more; at the same time that he was energetically pushing for the construction of new facilities he was also looking for ways to adapt older prisons or detention centers in British-occupied territories to serve the Final Solution’s grisly agenda. One of Hamill’s most senior deputies, Charles Wolf, was sent to Italy that autumn for a fact-finding mission on how the Fascist prison system dealt with enemies of the state and what were its most commonly used methods of execution. Hiller’s hope was that the lessons Wolf garnered from his fact-finding tour could give the SS some ideas for its own penal system.

       In January of 1941, as Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated for an unprecedented third term as President of the United States, the SS began stepping up its genocidal program against the Irish even further, giving its top chemists the green light to develop a deadlier type of Cyclone-2 for use in concentration camps like Ashworth. Dr. Joseph Angle played an important role in the development, often lending prisoners from his own sinister experiments out as test subjects to measure the effects of the new strain of Cyclone-2 on the human body.  During the next eight months hundreds of unwilling human guinea pigs would be paraded through SS labs and induced to suffer massive doses of the new Cyclone-2 variation; as one might unfortunately expect, most of the test subjects in these grisly experiments died within minutes-- sometimes seconds --after these doses were administered. In one particularly tragic case a prisoner was killed instantly when he was given such a dose. No one in the SS hierarchy gave any indication of being troubled by these developments; if anything, most of the top SS leadership viewed them as cause for celebration.

   During the trials of the new Cyclone-2 variant, Hiller made a decision that would have dire consequences not only for his government but for him personally: he informed his generals that he’d made up his mind to settle accounts with Germany once and for all. He proposed to launch an invasion of western Germany by May 16th, 1941; the objective of the proposed attack on Germany, codenamed Operation Agincourt, would be to destroy Germany as a military rival to Britain and overthrow its government. Hiller regarded Germany as a tottering house of cards needing only a slight push in order to trigger a final collapse. In the weeks and months before Agincourt was official launched he would tell anybody who listened: “We’ve only to kick in the front door, and the whole rotten structure will fall to pieces!”

   The Jodl government in Germany had little warning of what was about to happen, and those warnings it did get were usually either ignored or else dismissed as Soviet disinformation tactics. When a deputy defense attaché with the British embassy in Berlin contacted the German army general staff headquarters in February of 1941 in an attempt to alert them to Operation Agincourt’s existence, Jodl bluntly dismissed the message with the advice to his high command to “send your so-called ‘source’ back to his verdammt grandmother”. Those words reflected an arrogance that was to cost Jodl and thousands of German soldiers dearly when Hiller’s attack finally came.

******

    The start of Operation Agincourt would be delayed by close to six weeks because of the need to rush reinforcements to British garrisons in the Pacific to counter the massive American buildup that was going on in advance of an anticipated invasion of British-controlled Malaya. The delay would cost Hiller dearly when Agincourt finally did begin, as the battle plan for the invasion had been for British forces to reach Berlin before the first autumn rains hit and turned the ground along the invasion routes into mud. The absolute last thing Hiller’s generals wanted was to have to fight a protracted ground war with Jodl’s Wehrmacht on the muddy, rugged terrain of the Rhine River.

    Hiller himself hardly gave much thought to such concerns. He took it for granted that his armies would easily roll over its soon-to-be-enemies and jovially predicted the royal family would be celebrating Christmas in Berlin. Even before the logistical preparations for launching the invasion had been completed, he had already begun to name army and civilian leaders to run the occupation government he envisioned as running Germany once the Wehrmacht had been vanquished and the Jodl government overthrown. For Jodl himself the firing squad awaited; Hiller viewed him as public enemy number one and intended to have him shot as soon as Operation Agincourt was over. Nor would Jodl be the only one to suffer such a fate; when the operational plan for Agincourt had first been drafted Hiller had issued a top secret directive mandating that Jodl's entire inner circle also be executed along with the commanders-in-chief of the German army, navy, and air force and the direct of Jodl's notorious Sicherheitsdienst secret police. He pledged to his associates that nothing would remain of the German government after he'd conquered Germany. He also had plans to raze Germany's second-largest city, Munich, and replace it with a new community to be inhabited strictly by loyal BNSP members, their families, and British Army soldiers. Not even Berlin would be spared the BNSP's heavy hand if Hiller had anything to say about it.

    Preparations for commencing Operation Agincourt were finally completed in the first week of June 1941. In a stroke of luck that might have spared Germany the horrors to come had the Jodl government made proper use of it, a Swiss diplomat who was secretly spying for the Wehrmacht discovered both the date and hour when the invasion was to be launched: 4AM on the morning of June 22nd. But as had all too often been the case with other warnings of the attack, the Swiss diplomat's tip was dismissed as a hoax. In doing so, Jodl effectively condemned millions of his fellow Germans to death and all but invited the British army to come rolling through the Brandenburg Gate.

    Sure enough, the Swiss diplomat's tip turned out to be right: exactly at 4:00 AM on the morning of June 22nd, 1941 the largest British fighting force to set foot on a battlefield in at least two hundred and fifty years smashed its way across the Franco-German border. The Wehrmacht troops who were patrolling the frontier that morning scarcely knew what hit them; at the same time Luftwaffe air defense squadrons found themselves beset from all sides by RAF fighter attacks. At sea, elements of the Home Fleet began a relentless bombardment of the Kriegsmarine bases at Flensburg, Kiel, and Wilhelmshaven, sinking dozens of ships at anchor and crippling dozens more before their crews even realized what was happening.

    Following right behind the first wave of the invasion force were SS special action squads whose mission was a simple and brutal one-- execute any prominent German civilians who could pose a threat to postwar British control over Germany once all of Operation Agincourt’s main objectives had been achieved. Those special action squads were remarkably and alarmingly efficient at carrying out this mission: less than an hour after the first British Army infantry units had crossed the German border the SS units had already killed three dozen German civil officials. By the end of the first day of action in Operation Agincourt over two hundred German political and intellectual leaders were dead, and that number would steadily increase as British forces advanced further into Germany.

     Alfred Jodl reacted with disgust to the news of the British invasion. “Herr Ludendorff left us a great legacy,” Jodl told his generals at a June 23rd emergency meeting of the German armed forces high command, “and we.... we, his heirs, have made a mess of it.” The words had barely gotten out of his mouth before he stormed out of the meeting, murmuring bitter comments under his breath about Germany's future if the invasion couldn't be turned back....

Please Comment In The Discussion Forum