Alternative History and the Failure of Imagination and Research. How would a victorious Germany depict the defeated USSR?

The subgenre of science fiction known as alternative history really got its start with Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle which posits a world in which the Axis won World War II. The novel is quite entertaining and set the stage for other alternative history novels where Germany wins the Second World War such as Fatherland by Robert Harris in 1992. One of the disappointing parts of both these novels is their almost complete erasure of all war crimes and crimes against humanity by powers other than Germany. Dick going so far as to totally ignore and implicitly deny the very well documented Japanese atrocities in China, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and other places. By 1962 this was completely inexcusable. The crimes tried in Tokyo by the Allies in 1946  were still fresh in the minds of US Prisoners of War that had survived things like the Bataan Death March. The Japanese occupation of the US is portrayed as benevolent and contrasted with the brutal anti-semitic and anti-Black Germans. In reality the Germans had a rather mixed approach towards people of sub-Saharan African ancestry. It was, however,  not in anyways comparable to their policies towards Jews.  Needless to say the actual crimes of the Allies, particularly the USSR don’t make an appearance either. Harris repeats this pattern in 1992 focusing on Auschwitz and the Reinhard Camps, but completely ignoring the fact that if Germany had defeated the USSR they would have come across a huge number of Soviet atrocities including against ethnic Germans. In real life the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau investigated and invited foreign observers to witness the unearthing of the victims of massacres by the NKVD in Lviv and Katyn. The idea that they would not have done so for Bakallag and Usol’lag where thousands of ethnic Germans were worked to death is not reasonable.

The only novels that seem to deal realistically with the fact that the Soviets committed a large number of atrocities during World War II and the Germans sought to investigate and publicize some of them are the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr. His 2013 A Man Without Breath deals in large part with the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau’s investigation of Katyn. Like all of his novels, Kerr has a unstinting attachment to historical realism and in fact mentions the non-fiction scholarship he uses in the back of his books. This commitment to realism means that in addition to dealing with the crimes of the SS, he also spends a lot of time on Allied, especially NKVD atrocities. Of course Kerr’s work does not posit any Axis victory and merely reconstructs what actually happened before, during, and after World War Two.

So how would a realistic alternative history novel treat Soviet atrocities? Probably, very similar to how Kerr does. That is the actual treatment by the Germans of Lviv and Katyn would be the model for future investigations. But, instead Dick and Harris treat the issue in an extremely unhistorical fashion and portray the establishment line of a world in which only Germany is guilty of atrocities.

Part of the problem is the popular construction of the narrative of Nazi evil after the war. The Soviet propaganda on the number of deaths in Auschwitz and Madjanek were so outlandish that almost all US, British, and even Polish scholars rejected them early on. In contrast the US and British sought to wrongly portray Dachau and Buchenwald as extermination camps. Interestingly enough in this early period while there is an emphasis on German racism, the fact that most of the deliberately targeted victims to die at Auschwitz, the Reinhard Camps, and Einsaztgruppen shootings were Jews is ignored by the Allies, especially the Soviets. Only in 1961 does Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews present a fairly accurate narrative and account of both the mechanisms and the scale of the National Socialist mass killings of Jews. Later on after 1967 the Holocaust becomes increasingly important in the new mythology governing the US. The myth not being the Holocaust itself as described by Hilberg and other actual scholars, but the idea that no other powers including most notably the USSR committed comparable crimes against humanity. Due to the Cold War this idea met resistance, but by the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR it was well established among certain segments of the US and British academic and media establishment. Thus Harris is able to write a book in which the Germans occupy the Urals and make no mention of the numerous GULag camps there or the fact they housed tens of thousands of ethnic Germans.  In fact close to 80,000 ethnic Germans worked in Usol’lag, Tagillag, Bogoslavlag, and Bakallag labor camps during the 1940s. Scholars have now verified the names of nearly 15,000 Russian Germans that perished from malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion at these four camps alone (J. Otto Pohl, The Years of Great Silence: The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941-1955, Stuttgart, Ibidem-Verlag, 2022, p. 211). Even under a maximalist vision of a German victory over the USSR it is doubtful that they would reach Siberia or most of Kazakhstan. But, surely the camps in the Urals would have been properly investigated and publicized if the German military had achieved victory and occupied them. It does not require any fancy world building. The actual facts have already been researched and published by historians. It is only necessary for novelists to use these resources as Kerr has done and avoid the propagandist depiction of World War Two as a conflict between a demonized Germany and a morally pure alliance of the US, UK, and USSR.

In a world where Germany defeats the USSR I think it most definitely investigates and publicizes Soviet crimes, especially those against ethnic Germans. The Wehrmacht Warcrimes Bureau under Judge Johannes Goldsche would use the same procedures it used for Lviv and Katyn for a whole slew of Soviet crimes. An entire shelf of white books on GULag camps, the labor army, special settlements, and executions would be published by the German government.  In fact after the war the BRD did something very similar and put out a series of books on the suffering of ethnic Germans expelled from East Central Europe edited by Theodor Schieder. Yet, alternative history rather than recognize this fact simply repeats the establishment line that only Germany committed crimes against humanity.  This fantasy even extends to the point of totally ignoring crimes by Germany’s Asian ally as Dick does in the founding book of the subgenre.