The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History Read Online Free PDF Page A

of collectivisation—and the installation of some pro-Nazi puppet regime. And then what?
    Hitler and Himmler and the rest of the satanic crew would have been able to use this vast canvas—from the Atlantic to the Urals—to paint their hideous fantasies of government. With Britain out, there was no one to stop them, no one to interrupt them, no one with even the moral standing to denounce them.
    In America, the isolationists would have won: if Britain wasn’t going to risk the lives of its people, why should they? In Berlin, Albert Speer would have got on with his deranged plans for a new world capital, to be called Germania.
    At its heart was to be the Hall of the People—a demented granite version of the Pantheon of Agrippa; a building so vast that you could fit the dome of London’s St Paul’s through the oculus—the circular hole at the top of the dome. It was intended to seat 100,000 people, and the chanting and the shouting were expected to be so prodigious that they were planning for rainfall in the building itself, as the warm exhalations rose, condensed, and precipitated on the heads of the fervent crowds of fascists.
    Thisnightmarish structure was surmounted by a mammoth eagle, so that the whole thing looked a bit like some cosmic Prussian helmet 290 metres high—almost as tall as the Shard skyscraper in Southwark; and around it radiated other vast symbols of dominance: an arch twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe; colossal railway stations from which double-decker trains would zoom at 190 kmh, conveyingGerman settlers to the Caspian and the Urals and the other tracts of eastern Europe from which the Slavic Untermenschen had been expelled.
    The whole European landmass, with the exception of Switzerland (though there was a secret plan to invade that, too), was to consist either of the Reich or of client fascist states. As many counterfactual novelists have spotted, there were all sorts of plans to convert the territory into a sinister edition of the European Union.
    In 1942, the Reich economics minister and president of the Reichsbank, Dr Walter Funk, wrote a paper calling for a Europäische Wirtschaftsgesellschaft—a European Common Market. He proposed a single currency, a central bank, a common agricultural policy, and other familiar ideas. Ribbentrop proposed a similar-sounding scheme, though, to be fair, Hitler opposed this on the ground that it wasn’t sufficiently beastly to the rest of the Nazi European Union.
    In this Gestapo-controlled Nazi EU, the authorities would have been free to pursue their hateful racist ideology. The Nazis had begun their persecutions in the 1930s, and long before Churchill came to power—before the decision to fight on—they were moving populations of Jews and Poles.
    They were creating ghettos near railway hubs as a prelude to ‘deportation’—and as Eichmann later admitted at his trial,deportation meant liquidation. Unchecked and for the main part uncriticised, the Nazis would have got on with the job of massacring those of whom they disapproved—Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally unsound and the disabled.
    They would have let their imaginations roam as they performed their experiments on human flesh: horrible, detached, inhuman and arrogant beyond belief. When Winston Churchill spoke later that summer of 1940 about Europe sinking into ‘the abyss of a new DarkAge, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science’, he was exactly right.
    That is the most likely alternative world, then; but even if Hitler had not succeeded in Russia—even if Stalin had beaten back his assault—would life have been much better?
    We would have been looking at a division of Europe between two forms of totalitarianism: on one side a world terrorised by the KGB or the Stasi; on the other side the subjects of the Gestapo—everywhere a population that lived in fear of the knock in the night, arbitrary arrest, the camps, and no way to