Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II

rdf:langString Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II

rdf:langString A hypothetical military victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of World War II (1939–1945) is a common topic in speculative literature. Works of alternative history (fiction) and of counterfactual history (non-fiction), including stories, novels, and plays, often explore speculative public and private life in lands conquered by the coalition, whose principal powers were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. The first work to inspire the genre was Swastika Night (1937), by Katherine Burdekin, a British novel published before Nazi Germany launched the Second World War in 1939. Later novels of alternative history include: The Man in the High Castle (1962), by Philip K. Dick; SS-GB (1978), by Len Deighton; and Fatherland (1992), by Robert Harris. The stories deal with the politics, culture, and personalities who would have allowed the fascist victories against democracy, and with the psychology of quotidian life in totalitarian societies. The novels present stories of how ordinary citizens cope with the daily humiliations of fascist military occupation and with the resentments of being a people under colonial domination. The literature uses the Latin term Pax Germanica to describe such fictional post-war outcomes. The term Pax Germanica was applied to the hypothetical Imperial German victory in the First World War (1914–1918), which usage derives from the term Peace of Westphalia used in the Latin-language documents that formally ended the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Academics, such as Gavriel David Rosenfeld in The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (2005), have researched the media representations of 'Nazi victory'.