Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

Space 1945

“This is Reich’s Chancellor Martin Borman broadcasting to you from Festung Luna. The giant meteor that hit Potsdam earlier this day was not an act of your Jewish deity. It was a weapon of invincible German superscience. Others will follow until you surrender or are exterminated like the vermin you are.

Our terms are simple. The Jew controlled mongrel rabble will evacuate the European continent from the Atlantic to the Volga. All warfare against Japan will cease. Africa and Latin America are now under the protection of the True European Union. If the British people will restore their rightful monarch and disband their current Zionist controlled parties we will allow them alliance with the TEU on a basis of full racial equality. If they choose to follow Zionism’s twin heads of American gangster capitalism and Judo-Bolshevik mongrel Marxism, then we will crush you with the other vermin.

After the TEU has reestablished control of its rightful domains, America and Russia will be allowed to choose. You are mongrels and can never be part of the TEU. However if you kill your Reds, Jews and other vermin, helot status may be possible and occupation may be avoided. The Jew lovers Stalin, Roosenfeld, and Truman are gone. Some of your leaders may prove Aryanizable. Our victory is assured but by proper submission you may avoid the worst.

To our Aryan brothers and sisters under the boot heel of the Jew, have hope, have courage. The Fuhrer is NOT dead. He sleeps frozen with me here on Luna. Our superscience has cheated death and kept him to return like Barbarossa, immortal and invincible. Berlin will once again be German. All that once was will be again and more.

To the valiant comrades of the Werewolves, UPA and other TEU movements of national liberation, redouble your efforts. The counteroffensive has begun.

Heil Hitler!!!!!”

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The historic setting: It is outwardly the historic world of WW2 up to 7/31/45 when the Nazis played Footfall from orbit on the Potsdam conference. Essentially all 3 governments vanished.

The President of the US is now the recently appointed Secretary of the Treasury, Fred Vinson. The Secretary of State died with the President and there was no VP. He is an ex-Kentucky Congressman, ex-Federal appellate judge and ex-FDR economic bureaucrat. He is Treasury Secretary because Truman couldn’t stand FDR’s Treasury Secretary Morgenthau. He has less of a political base and less world experience than the inexperienced Truman. He has also just lost his military high command.

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For a truly wicked variant have the attack take place between the 16^th when the conference opened and the 22^nd when the Secretaryship passed. Now the President of the US is a Jewish financier [best known for a plan to forcibly deindustrialize Germany while letting the ‘surplus’ population starve] with more political enemies than our esteemed troll.

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The UK has a Labor Government with little experience of power which has just lost their top most responsible centrists [Atlee and Bevin]. The UK is broke and facing a worldwide forever war.

The Soviet Union is in chaos. The war is still on despite supposed final victory. There is no clear line of succession. Stalin, Molotov and Zhukov are dead. This is the crisis of 1953 on steroids.

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Why this situation?

Commercially because Nazis, space ships and WW2 sell well. However, unlicensed universes rarely make THAT much money in paper gaming and fiction formats so let me get beyond commerce after admitting the commercial foundation.

I grew up on the post-WW2 adventure movies, books, comics, etc. I also read WW2 history. The fiction was more fun. The real world of WW2 and its aftermath is a world of the power of mass, of attrition. The world essentially bludgeoned the Axis to death with vast numbers of machines and a lot of Soviet blood. 95% of the fictional focus on spy rings, secret agents, superscience weapons, black ops…was pure fantasy and most of the remainder didn’t matter much outside the specialist literature. Even if the rocket planes and the other junk work, the numbers just don’t add up.

So I thought what if one focused on the immediate postwar. Potsdam was perfect. All those key characters under the potential footprint of one rock. Germany was gone so we are dealing with a world of black ops and superscience [see below]. Japan had not yet surrendered so still more chaos keeps happening. [Gee, ever get the idea that I like chaos…LOL]

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So on to the world:

Superscience:

You throw in every bizarre story and half-baked theory out there.

The Nazis have flying saucers with short range death rays, rocket planes, anti-gravity drives, Frankenstein supersoldiers…the limitations are that all such weapons should be in very limited supply, very cranky [these are rushed out prototypes made with badly supervised slave laborers working under insane toymaker technical experts – feel free to take every negative comment Stirling put into Chosen and embellish]. No nukes – that is Jewish science. Heinlein 40’s- 50’s novels type rockets are in more plentiful supply. Nothing using transistors, lasers, genetics – keep Stirling’s dictum from the Draka books in mind – this is the past’s future.

NO OCCULT ITEMS. NO MAGIC. THIS IS NOT NEGOTIABLE.

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If you give 21^st century fans a hint of magic / occult / psi / the force [TM} they will run hog wild with it. Superscience can be kept under control. Limited availability. Heavy malfunction rules. Elaborate maintenance networks needed. Once you turn the power gamers lose on the wild side, they will push it to duels of 30^th level wizards. You then lose period feel, superscience and doing Mission Impossible black ops.

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The Anglo-Saxons [hereafter AS] do have nukes. The AS have the beginning of transistors and computers [Turing is still alive in this ATL]. Give them a prototype Philadelphia Experiment type cloaking device. Their jets are a year behind the Germans. You can let them catch up over the course of the campaign. The AS have no effective rocket program. Start one out of Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg [justify based on geography - besides it gives you locales with enough details in the public domain]. Have the program director be a recalled naval academy type bumped to Admiral – R.A.Heinlein [see Footfall for how to work every major SF writer and fan in – there is no von Braun team in this TL and no V-2’s to work on - von Brauns were evacuated to Luna in early 1945 along with their slave laborers and SS guards with killer dogs]. Have the head of the British program be Arthur C. Clarke. No careful 1960’s approach – this is wartime. You put the men on top, light the candle and pray. Oh yes, Roswell will be real in this ATL. One cashed ship and a few captive grays are going to be taken in New Mexico in 1947. ONE ship. Superscience beyond the Nazis but only a few dazed, injured survivors. Communication is to be kept limited and confused. Imagine modern US techies dealing with preverbal hominids.

The Soviets have the plans for any tech the West comes up with [spy nets]. Their problem will be loss on Lend Lease, loss of internal political stability and priorities. Their spy nets in the Reich were always better than the AS and more of the lesser techs were in the zone they overran so give them a leg up on reverse engineering anything from the Nazis.

The Japanese have a few good theorists and some excellent manufacturers but are doing all they cannot to starve to death or implode.

The World:

Nazis: They have zippo above ground in Europe. TEU is a dream and a symbol, born out of the 1944-45 propaganda line of a Pan-European anti-Bolshie Crusade. Anyone other than Jews potentially welcome. Recall that the SS had Indian, Arab and Turkish volunteers…No hollow earth or any of that garbage – superscience will be hard enough to handle. Secret bases in Greenland, Antarctica, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay. Hundreds of U-boats have escaped and are being refueled at sea including the new super quiet snorkel boats with the hydrogen engines. You essentially give the Nazis the worldwide network of émigrés, sympathizers etc that post-war conspiracy and fiction writers did. The AS capitalists, the KKK, the British aristocracy, Latin America, the Arab World all are honeycombed with SS agents, ODESSA…They have tens of billions of dollars in Switzerland and Latin America. Important elements of the RC Church are in League with them. So they have safe houses everywhere but under a million real Germans scattered everywhere from the Moon to Manchuria. The only places they directly own are Festung Luna, the two under the ice bases, a big base in the Amazon, a smaller one in the Gran Chaco and one of those underground bases out of old movies with a neat elevator and an undersea tunnel for U-boats to come and go. I see the underground base in Patagonia but this is negotiable. It could be the occupied East Indies or anywhere not firmly Allied control with good ocean access. Elsewhere the Nazis are ‘honored guests’ but must work through people [Peron, Nasser’s Free Officers in Egypt. the Swiss banks, the KKK, the Japanese, whatever] who while sympathetic and / or having some similar goals definitely have their own agenda and see themselves as using the Nazis to further their own ends.

Japan: Major changes. The A-bombs aren’t dropped. The Russians will not attack. The invasion of the Home Islands is off. The Australian campaign in the East Indies will end before reaching Java and Sumatra. Slim’s campaign will end with Burma. The AS and Soviets have bigger fish to fry now. The firebombings and blockade continue. The AS will take Pusan in 1946 to get better bases to interdict the Sea of Japan. So the Japanese in the Home Islands will starve massively. So will the populations of their occupied territories [most of Korea, Manchuria, much of China, Indochina, Siam, Malaya, Java, Sumatra, some of the lesser East Indies, the bypassed garrisons]. The sampans, junks, etc. that have been taking troops from the mainland to the Home Islands will switch in September to bringing food and fuel. They will take out senior officials, machine tools and skilled workers. Would it be a Scott dystopia without me finding a way for the Japanese to do themselves in. So by 1947 LeMay has bombed the Home Islands back to the early Neolithic [image of B-29’s chasing lone bicyclists down a rubble strewn street in deserted Osaka or Tokyo] but the Imperial HQ in the mountains of north Honshu is just fine thank you. Kill off 70% of the population of the Home Islands. They have eaten the allied POW’s and their own dead. On the Asian mainland kill off 25% of the civilians and all the POW’s except useful techs but the Empire is intact. Chiang and Mao are hanging on, fighting each other more than the Japanese. Soviets are extorting Danegeld from the Japanese in Manchuria. A number of the Japanese puppet nationalists are back to warlord status as the reach of the Japanese urban and coastal garrisons lessens. AS have 10K ish spec ops and black ops boyos playing Terry and the Pirates plus the occasional massive air raid when LeMay can be diverted from demolishing the rubble in Korea and Japan. Victory through airpower. LOL.

Soviet Union: High level chaos in Moscow. More like the 20’s than 53-55. The big boys keep purging each other plus the occasional traffic accident or death in hospital. Cliques are Beria v Stalin’s old hacks [who also backstab each other] v the linked army and defense industries. The ‘war’ is secondary to the power struggle. Beria is tying to recapture control of those parts of his power base that Stalin took away. The rest are trying to kill off Beria, castrate the Cheka and position themselves for the rounds of the power game to follow. This is all high politics background. In the real world major changes take place. The Soviets will behave much worse than OTL. They will annex everything the Red Army took in the European war directly into the USSR. They will invade Finland summer 1945 and annex that. So no divided Berlin, divided Vienna. Norwegian Lapland is now the Lap SSR. The Russian half of occupied Iran is now a few more Stans. They grab Afghanistan outright. Ditto Sinkiang. Both these ops will be autumn of1945. The western Red partisans are ordered to go oppositional. The Red Army takes out Yugoslavia and Albania summer 1945. This is the bad version of WW3 but no hot war with the AS. Part is the internal power struggle. Part is a conviction that the AS will ally with the Nazis against them. Give them the spy net of the Birch Society’s wet dreams – everyone who ever signed a petition for the Spanish Republic is an unwitting agent of the real CP types. They do control Hollywood, half the unions…a fair part of the US Progressive and British Labor parties are willing sympathizers and many are active agents. They fight the Nazis and AS across the AS homelands and the world. However, we will now give them a handicap. In OTL most of the so-called Nazi / AS [we picked up most of their networks after 1945]inside the Pact were highly mythic. We now raise them all to above UPA status including the UPA. The Baltic Forrest brotherhood, the supposed tens of thousands of cut off Germans from Bagration, Hungarian Arrow Cross, Croat Ustache, Polish Home Army – the Germans left behind elaborate supply dumps and every person behind the Red Army lines is a potential terrorist. Beria isn’t chasing myths and ghosts this time.

UK: the rock took out the heart of the Labor government so that political infighting in the government is worse than OTL and the left excesses also worse. Remember that this is 1945 not 1985 so the excesses should be of the Leveler and TUC variety NOT loony left out of the post-1968 generation. Those flakes are mostly still with the Liberals at this point. So more bureaucracy, more controls, even higher taxes, everything rationed BUT Lend Lease continues. Vinson in OTL did a lot of the post-Breton Woods work on the IMF, IBRD, etc. He also does not appear to have FDR’s phobias on the British Empire [FDR was Anglophile culturally but like most Wilsonians an ardent anti-imperialist, leading him to go out of his way to bankrupt and castrate the British]. Britain also will not have the dollars generated by Malayan tin and rubber. In reverse with the war still on they can force Latin America, Egypt, India to export to them for blocked sterling accounts [fiat IOU’s]. With a more hardline Labor even if only marginally give Winnie a MUCH harder time recasting the Tories in his own ex-liberal image. Have a harder core of R.A.Butler types who want to ‘explore’ Borman’s offer before the Empire and class system are lost. So pseudo-Hess conspiracy appeasement plots are possible.

The Empire: The Boers will be more restive due to the ordained Nazi secret world. For Egypt, India, Iraq, Burma, Palestine it is Nazis and Reds and local nationalists. Subgroups, allies and minions anywhere in the world can be Zionists of various stripes, Indian Congress, Muslim League, Boer Bund…players are NOT just limited to great powers. Oh this world has colonial independence delayed and restricted, and no partitions of India or Palestine. India and Burma are in systemic stage one insurrection. Treat Palestine and the Suez Canal Zone as locked down military fortresses.

Occupied Europe – Eastern Europe isn’t occupied, it is new SSR’s of the Soviets. The rapidly hardening frontiers hemorrhage refugees – Volksdeutsche, Germans, Balts, Ukrainians, every nationalist, every social class. Many are Red sleepers. Many are Nazi sympathizers. All are suspect. Millions in Italy, France and the Benelux take their real orders from Moscow. Many have guns. They use them for everything from armed riots to low level guerilla. In addition there are millions of DP’s, tens of millions of German and other Eastern refugees, and to make life more fun at least a quarter of a million AS military deserters tooling around occupied Europe. They steal to live, often in uniform. Between the deserters, the Nazi agents and the red agents, all AS military forces on the continent travel in armed convoys. Every base is wired and mined in. The black markets and corruption are massive. The ‘allied’ governments are weak and full of people suspected of ties to the Reds and / or Nazis. Essentially this is Vietnam with white people as VC. Note: it is less of an exaggeration than much of this world. The corruption and chaos behind the AS lines in Europe in WW2 and the first few years thereafter has been swept under the rug. Forex it was taken for granted during 1943-45 that some20% of the goods passing though Naples would be stolen between ship to dock to warehouse. That isn’t 20% to reach the front. That is 20% just to get it off the ship and past city limits. This includes ships that were just using the harbor to off-load onto smaller ships for delivery elsewhere in the Med. Antwerp was only somewhat better. Paris was worse. To add jolly fun, let us make the Nazi late war counterfeiting work more successful. There are caches everywhere with millions in fake British, US, Canadian currency in quality ranging from very good to basically perfect. Also caches of bullion, gold coin, art works. Many such caches have been misplaced in the chaos of war. There could be dragon treasure in the basement of ANY house anywhere west of the new Soviet border. Sweden joined the AS block after the Finnish invasion and refugee flood. So did Turkey. Spain would like to join the AS block but UK isn’t having it. Portugal is an ally but crawling with Nazi sympathizers. Dev’s Dublin is this TL’s Rick’s Casablanca. The Swiss are being Swiss. They are ‘correct’ to everyone and feel safe behind their mountains.

The US: We have gone through two Presidents in six months to arrive at a border state nonentity. The US is having panic attacks and hoarding its few nukes JUST IN CASE…Teller also wins the argument in this TL. The H-bomb is funded with staff separate from Oppie’s New Mexico Red Heaven. Good thing as the next Nazi rock hits the Trinity test site 12/7/45 [allow a rock roughly every six months – too many and this becomes an after the holocaust game]. War economy is kept full blast. No demobilizations. More desertions. The war enthusiasm was gone by 1945 in OTL. People wanted peace and prosperity and were prepared to cast blame widely. We are changing the historic US to make the conspiracy fantasies of both left and right real. There are BOTH that many Reds AND that many crypto-Nazis. Leave the OSS intact and add CIA, DIA, NSA, British Intelligence and anyone else from WW3 that strikes your fancy. However remember that this is US of the wartime 40’s. No PC. Jim Crow. White supremacy. Protestant supremacy. Civil liberties far more highly negotiable. Nothing resembling an internal system for verifying ID, tracing cash. Far more wide open in ALL ways.

Latin America: This is the main black ops theater. AS agents are trying to shut down Nazi bases, keep out Nazi activities despite zero cooperation from local governments [even those who do not sympathize with Nazis will obstruct for nationalist regions – US is feared but not liked, those that like British Empire are commercial types who detest Labor]. Peron is semi-openly in Nazi camp. Rest of South America is somewhat more discreet.

Campaign plots:

1. Dawn of space warfare as first allied jury-rigged spaceships try to fight their way into orbit, take Festung Luna.

2. One can play black ops people in:

a. Occupied Asia essentially playing Terry and the Pirates – warlords, and Japanese, and Reds, and triads and Chiang, oh my

b. Chasing the location of the secret Nazi bases to steal the tech

c. Putting down the Red and Nazi resistance in Occupied Europe

d. Working with the resistance behind Red lines – hey this is fiction and fantasy but so was Bond/ Matt Helm / MI

e. Chasing the Reds, Nazis, evil Zionists whatever in UK, North America as they attempt to steal western science, sabotage rocket and nukes programs, etc.

3. For chaotic evil types you can play the deserter gangs who will freelance for anyone…for a price

Yes, you can play Nazis, Reds, Zionists, Peronistas, whatever…game was to be written from AS point of view but allow you to play anyone and anything except the grays.

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