Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (2 page)

I am a writer, aged 27 years and four months. I live in London, the capital of England and Great Britain, and the pulsing, hammering heart of a doomed Empire. I have a family; a mother, a brother – serving in Singapore – I have one surviving Grandfather, in Oxfordshire. And soon I, and everyone I have ever met, known and loved, will be ruled by new masters; new leaders with new laws, with a different language; different values, different ideas of what constitutes an ideal society, different perspectives on the way the world should be.

How twisted and frightening our reality has become. Years of vitriolic, violent language; the hearts and minds of men have been sapped of empathy and made
machine
.

I record this with little hope of future publication; the words form a blur. This diary may well be burned along with its author, but I wish to make peace in it with myself before the time comes. Perhaps one day it shall be read and what we saw will be known and understood; what we felt as the storm approached. Thus, I record; to come to terms with our grim reality; as a poet of yesteryear observed, ‘all that we see and seem, is but a dream within a dream.’ To live through the surreal is to experience a shattering of one’s own notions of reality as a concept; mine, the touch, taste and feel of a broken dream.

The storm approaches and so, I write. In doing so, it will not become less real, but more so, even as collective faith turns to despair.

I’ve penned enough freely distributed public material – zealously shared – to sentence me to one of their concentration camps for many lifetimes over, if not the gallows outright, or the impartial simplicity of a bullet.

It is their typical reaction; they employ not words and reasoned discourse to resolve problems, but the truncheon, the jackbooted foot, or the gun. Sophistication and reasonable behaviour requires more competence and skill than mere thuggery and brutishness. It is a harder, loftier charge to be civilised than to let
the beast in man devour man
.

If I am to die, let my final words – as worthy or as worthless as anyone else’s – be a condemnation of the new order, and an appeal to reason:
never let hatred overcome love. When violence is used in lieu of peace, when cruelty replaces reason, and when hate is stronger than love, humankind is losing; subjugated by unnatural men, with machine minds and machine hearts, its wondrous possibilities flung into a spiritual abyss. Never let peace & love be crushed underfoot by the jackboot, beaten by the truncheon and killed by the bullet.

So, if this were a final written piece –
a diary entry, after years of published work both critically acclaimed and derided alike –
then let not only myself, but – if you’ll permit my presumption – an entire harassed and harangued people be remembered by these words. We did not all conform. We did not all bear the shame. We did not all believe. We did not all surrender our love of humanity, our empathy and our souls to the darkness of their creed.

Quies ante tempestatem

“In the days of Napoleon,” Churchill solemnly declared to the silent, hostile House, “… of which I was speaking just now, the same wind which would have carried his transports across the Channel might have driven away the blockading fleet. There was always the
chance
, and it is that chance which has excited and befooled the imaginations of many Continental tyrants. Many are the tales that are told… we are assured that novel methods will be adopted, and when we see the
originality
of malice, the
ingenuity
of aggression which our enemy displays, we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of
brutal
and
treacherous
manoeuvre. I think that no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a searching, but
at the same time, I hope
, with a steady eye. We must
never forget
the solid assurances of sea power and those which belong to air power if it can be locally exercised…”

Rumblings of dissent were beginning to form, in the benches behind Clement Attlee. Even at Churchill’s back, several of his supporters packed together on the green leather pews exchanged worried, or knowing, glances. But the Prime Minister carried on, bloody-minded, his large face pulsing with truculence; bolstered by whiskey and defiant in the face of an unwelcome atmosphere, doggedly determined to rally the wavering Members of Parliament around to the cause.

“I have, myself,
full
confidence that if
all do their duty
, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny… if necessary for years… if necessary
alone
.”

He paused for full effect, sternly peering across the hall to directly meet the icy stares, like an animal. A beast, establishing dominance. It was a challenge, with the highest stakes of all on the line in a moment of inconceivable peril.

“At any rate,” he said at last, nodding slightly, “that is what we are going to
try to do
. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government –
every man of them
. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.”

Once more, the great, bullish leader paused for effect, straightening up proudly, his body language affirming the tenacity of his convictions. Much to his chagrin, the rumblings were only growing in strength and number, and the first rising sensation of a deep fear suddenly pricked him. He ploughed on, a steely edge to his voice.

“
Even though large tracts of Europe
and many
old and famous states
have fallen, or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo, and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule,
we shall not flag or fail
. We shall go on to the end.”

He cleared his throat, and stared around, fixing his steady gaze on the assembled men in front of him, their unsmiling eyes boring into the great orator.

“We shall fight in
France
… we shall fight on the seas and
oceans
… we shall fight with growing
confidence
and growing
strength
in the
air
…”

“With what?”

An incredulous voice cut through the great war leader’s speech, chilling him to the bone. Churchill fought hard, and his body did not betray him. But his old, gnarled fists briefly clenched.

“We don’t have a bloody fighter force left capable of winning,” another, almost despairing voice exclaimed, and the jeers rose. Churchill placed his hands behind his back, and straightened up, sternly casting a wide gaze, staring down the dissenters.

“We
shall
defend our island…
whatever
the cost may be. We shall fight on the
beaches
… we shall fight on the
landing
grounds
… we shall fight in the fields, and in the
streets
… we shall fight in the hills… we shall
never surrender
… and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle…”

The jeer rose, almost drowning Churchill out and he halted.

“They have quarter of a million hostages, you old drunk,” a frantic voice cried.

“Göring beat the RAF!”

“We have no army left!”

“You want to call their bluff? The SS will flay them alive,” a quieter, but no less insidiously scaremongering voice remarked, an angry edge to its tone.

“Face it you old
drunk
, it’s all
over
!”

Churchill was stunned into silence, and the jeers intensified, pouring down from at least a third of the House of Commons. He turned to Neville Chamberlain, the ousted Prime Minister of only two months previous whom he’d insisted remained on the Cabinet as his trusted adviser and a deputy of sorts, but the man for whom appeasement had been the answer less than two years prior. Neville now knew the folly of such a move, but in the face of political debellation, the man who had bragged that he ‘only had to raise a finger and the whole of Europe is changed’ could only shake his head helplessly, shrug wordlessly, as the deafening silence of Churchill’s advocates and the men who had supported resistance at all costs spoke with even more ruthless eloquence than the jeering, braying mob that demanded an end to the bloodshed.

As the erstwhile chief of appeasement shrugged, gazing around powerlessly, Churchill’s head dropped for the first time, and in the midst of loud catcalls, all could sense a silent, haunting moment of defeat.

Allegro

Darkness enveloped the land; England’s green and pleasant countryside that so drew the glowing prose of poets through the years was covered in a black cloud, its fertile colour suppressed. It was perfect for the Einsatzgruppen. Already obscured by the fogs of war, their evil intent was further veiled in the grim nocturnal stratagems; cloaked in mist, masked in blackness.

The only light to be seen in the military trucks was the glow of cigarette tips; pinpricks burning bright red in the endless sea of black. Black, too, were the long, sinister trench coats that were wrapped around the men of the SD; drafted from all the many branches of the SS and German police that Himmler and, more pertinently
Heydrich
had slowly monopolised under their control; thousands of uniformed thugs of the state, lumped together as a versatile manpower pool from which to enlist personnel to the murderous tasks of the SD. Heydrich’s long, spidery fingers were wrapped around an operational command that the Führer deemed vital, wickedly spinning a continental web of death. Hitler approved; no more would hostile elements attack his Reich. Göring, too, bestowed as much power on Heydrich as was seen fit to allow ‘the Hangman’ to obliterate all in his path, with a shadow army of merciless killers, built up over the course of seven years of National Socialist power.

Unshackled, unleashed, this was their work. It had the cold quality of a medical experiment, the Germ Theory of Disease applied to society with the scientific finality and totality of death.

Remove the bacteria, save the organism.

The trucks rolled on, up the Selby Road from Leeds and onwards to the outskirts, passing through the quiet, leafy suburbs with silent, evil resolve, stealthily tearing out to the mining village of Garforth, which was slumbering in sleepy tranquility.

“Are any of these yids,” murmured one of the SS men hunched in the truck, whose face looked like it had been carved out of honeycomb granite, chiselled out of a mountain.

“
Bitte
? Yids?”

“
Ja
?”

“Resistance, is all I know,” the senior non-commissioned officer replied, himself of an obscenely Aryan posterboy quality; the hard, strong-jawed face of a young Saxon more than willing to embrace the comforting worldview that Adolf Hitler’s bible provided, legally enforced by his police. The physical representative of the Party’s ideals, the seeds of which had been planted in the malleable minds of a generation of children, taught the glories of Aryan blood, German supremacy and military conquest.

“Resistance…”

A low, growling chortle rumbled elsewhere in the truck. “It will be a fun time, then.”

Grunts of affirmation, from men colder than the northern English night.

The biting chill of the trucks was not felt by the vehicle’s driver and his brooding passenger, insulated as they were from the outside. The driver cleared his throat quietly, stealing a glance at the officer sat upright beside him, noting obvious signs of tension. The man sensed his attention, and turned cold eyes to face him, two black pinpricks boring into the young man’s own… dark brown meeting pale blue in an unequal contest.

“The Wehrmacht used this route, yes?” The question was quiet and rhetorical; his smooth, Viennese tone almost melodic.

“Yes, Herr Untersturmführer,” the driver affirmed, using the army-style prefix formality to address his senior.

“How long did it take from the landing to get
here
?”

“Not long at all, Unter–”

“How
fucking
long?” he hissed animatedly. The driver answered in a low voice, cowed, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Four weeks, sir.”

Newly promoted SS-Untersturmführer Amon Goeth had been assigned to Dr Rudolf Lange’s
Einsatzgruppe Leeds
from the notoriously eager Austrian 11
^th
Standarte. As junior officer, he carried himself with zeal, though his mood swung pendulum-like from a restless, nervous energy to quiet menace. The erratic behaviour combined with his cruelty, and Goeth was soon known known and feared. As an
Einsatzkommando
leader he was keen to shine in his new role. Watchful eyes in Berlin, he knew, were fixed on England.

The disconcerted driver sensed Goeth’s lingering gaze, and elaborated. “Pockets of resistance pushed from Leeds here to the east, as well as west and south. Mining villages such as these remained stubborn. Many fled for the hills to join the resistance.”

Goeth snorted. “To freeze in winter, hiding in rat-holes with dwindling supplies. What do they think this is, the fucking Winter War? It will take more than Molotov cocktails to beat the Wehrmacht. And the SS,” he added, as an afterthought.

His brief moment of contempt over, Goeth became inexpressive, and relapsed back into his own unspoken thoughts.

The driver knew as well as Goeth that the organised resistance were equipped with far more than homemade incendiary bombs, having been arranged
in situ
long before the invasion. The Leeds gruppe under Lange had followed in the wake of Army Group Centre’s ‘Group B’ on its journey northwards, smashing through Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire and up through Yorkshire into Leeds. And the men of the
Einsatzkommandos
attached to
Gruppe Leeds
all knew that Goeth was a capricious and cruel man; it had been proven in every theatre of operations they had engaged in on the back of a rapidfire advance. Even amongst the hardened killers who had served to destroy Poland’s intelligentsia so effectively, Goeth was respected and, when possible, avoided. The lieutenant was one of the new breed of Austrian National Socialists, anxious to prove their worth to the Germans following the
Anschluss
reabsorption of their country with unwavering, unyielding fanaticism.