Gudrun nodded. She’d won the post of Education Minister in the Provisional Government, although it would be several days before she actually started her new job. But she was looking forward to it. A number of truly awful teachers would be heading east within the month or she’d know the reason why. And with stricter regulations on corporal punishment — and the disbanding of the BDM — a number of sadistic bastards would follow them.
And if the east puts them to work on the farms, she thought, I won’t care at all.
“Then we’d better go home,” she said. She’d have to tell him that she might be pregnant in a few weeks, unless her period genuinely was delayed. “We have work to do.”
Epilogue
Dover, United Kingdom
29 November 1985
Dover had once been a thriving seaside town, Margaret Thatcher had been told, but most of the population had moved further inland after the Third Reich started building a vast array of air and naval bases on the far side of the channel. The British Army had practically taken over the whole region, turning Dover and the Channel Ports into a series of fortresses intended to intercept and crush any German invasion. And the defences — and the threat of nuclear war — had been more than enough to deter the Germans from trying.
She watched, from her vantage point, as the long line of Frenchmen and women walked towards the ship. Most of them were old, either Free French fighters who’d refused to abandon the war or refugees from Occupied France. Britain had given them a home, but now they were trying to get back to France. Margaret wished them well, although she suspected that none of them would find a warm welcome on the other side of the English Channel. It had been years since any of them had set foot in France and far too much would have changed.
“They have hope,” President Anderson said.
Margaret shrugged. Hope was not a strategy.
“They will have a chance,” she said. “But they will be lucky to get home.”
She looked up at her American counterpart. It had barely been two weeks since the end of the Reich Civil War, but the Americans were already talking about pulling out of their bases and heading home. Hell, Parliament too was talking about sweeping cuts to the military’s budget, no matter how hard she fought to keep the matter from a formal debate. She had no doubt that half of Britain’s most famous regiments would be cut from the books if some of her political enemies had their way…
“This isn’t the end,” she said. “There’s a whole new world in front of us.”
“I know,” Anderson said. “But Congress thinks otherwise.”
Margaret nodded in sympathy. Polish voters in the United States had protested, strongly, the lack of freedom for Poland. She understood their feelings, but Poland no longer existed. The Nazis had destroyed it as thoroughly as they’d destroyed every other nation they’d occupied directly. Even Norway and Denmark, both under relatively light rule, had been changed beyond recognition.
And the world outside Europe was very different.
She shook her head, bitterly, as a cold gust of wind swept in from the sea. Some of her political enemies were already sharpening their knives, whispering — quietly — that the Iron Lady was starting to rust. She’d been a great war leader, they acknowledged, but now the Cold War was over. It was time for someone else to take the helm and steer Britain into a Golden Age of peace, prosperity and freedom.
And unlimited rice pudding too, she thought dryly.
But it wasn’t time to leave, not yet. The chaos in Europe had yet to subside, while the chaos in Africa and the Middle East was growing steadily worse. Britain needed a strong hand at the helm as she navigated her way through suddenly-choppy seas and she, Margaret Thatcher, was that strong hand. None of her enemies had been tested, not like her. They had never sailed the ship of state, even in calm waters.
“Change is never easy,” she said. The Reich, for all of its horror, had been a predictable menace. Whatever rose from the ashes of history would be very different. “But we have to be ready.”
“This is not the end,” Anderson agreed. “History never ends.”
Afterword
In his stand-alone novel, In The Presence of Mine Enemies, Harry Turtledove postulated that the Third Reich would eventually face a Soviet-style crisis: economic collapse, a crisis of legitimacy and, eventually, a decline into near-irrelevance. This would, as it did in the Original TimeLine (OTL), spur a demand for political reform, a re-examination of the founding principles of the Third Reich and the abandonment of its principles. There would neither be a Third World War nor a civil war.
I was not so optimistic.
We were amazingly lucky that Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the Soviet Union did not lead to a civil war. Hard-liners within the Communist Party and the KGB could not have welcomed the changes, even if they understood that something had to change. The levels of stored hatred they’d built up ever since the Communist Party took a firm grip on power could easily have led to a bloody slaughter. Indeed, they did try to mount a coup — only to lose when it became clear just how little support they really had. And it was their coup attempt that led to the inevitable breakup of the USSR.
Gorbachev simply did not — could not — control the pace of change. The first signs of weakness led to other challenges to Moscow’s authority. Indeed, there was a strong feeling in many places — Poland, in particular — that the time had come to stand up or lose everything. Each successive problem led to more as Gorbachev veered between appeasement and repression, each failure weakening his own position. Once the ice began to melt, the changes were utterly unpredictable. There was no way to slow the pace of change.
The Third Reich, assuming it survived, might not cope anything like as well. It would have faced many of the same problems, yet it might have reached for very different solutions. And yet, no matter what happened to the protesters, they would be unable to hide from the underlying problems pervading the Reich. The coup plotters in Moscow, even if they had succeeded in turning the clock back by shooting everyone who assembled to stop them, would still have had to deal with a collapsing economy. It had simply fallen too far to be stopped.
But a different decision, at a different time, might have changed the course of history.
The problem facing repressive regimes — Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (and the USSR after Stalin), Mao’s China, Saddam’s Iraq, Gaddafi’s Libya, Kim’s North Korea, etc — is that they tend to be very bad at coping with change. Power is organised in a pyramid structure, with the dictator and his cronies at the very top and everyone else in successive levels working their way down towards the common people at the bottom. It can be very hard for the dictator to truly understand what is going on at the bottom, even if he doesn’t have to deal with his subordinates constantly lying to him.