Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK!

by Daniel S. Fletcher

  “Get out!” He roared at them in Polish. “Get the fuck out!”

  Screaming a haiku of German curses, he kicked the old man out, flailing as he sprawled on the gravel; his wife begging and pleading in a hysterical hybrid of Polish and Yiddish. Hoffman seized her in a strong grip, and threw her out bodily onto the path to her front door that cut through the neat square of the garden. Seething, his nerves on fire, he slung the children out onto the grass himself where the huddled to their stricken parents, paralysed in shock.

  One house along, ear-splitting child shrieks from a child cowered in the kitchen corner. The little boy stood metres from where a woman was wailing over the prone body of her husband, who had quite clearly been battered senseless. The family had been eating; the evidence of an interrupted dinner lay on the table. Half-eaten, the family meal would never be enjoyed in quiet; it was their last moment of peaceful normality, before a terrible whirlwind from elsewhere sucked their lives, and so many others up into its path.

  The Jewish father had been beaten to the brink of death. The sight of a bread knife in the man’s hand had driven the SS men apoplectic with rage. Or something other than rage… a bestial frenzy of wild hatred.

  “Don’t worry, the kike is still alive,” Hoffman sneered, on witnessing the scene.

  The Jewish woman wailed, which intensified as she was hit flush in the face by a stream of urine from one of the Death’s Head troops. He made sure the prone Jew was covered too, and mocking laughter rang out, joining the cacophony of misery echoing around the small, stone-floored kitchen with its meagre collection of trinkets and ornaments.

  The larger houses on the street were being ransacked. Loot was piled into vehicles, for the war effort; each man careful to show that he was not in breach of the Himmler order forbidding loot taken for personal profit. The SS must remain decent. No, this was simply a pragmatic policy; the Jews must pay for the cost of security police work.

  “Get them in the trucks,” Hoffman called out. He patrolled the street, observing, directing, flushed with his responsibility. All the months of diplomatic hardball with Poland, and now, as the Führer of the Greater German Reich himself said, they were taking no more provocations, their peoples were being freed, and bomb was met by bomb.

  After the Jewish elders and their families were in the trucks – some ninety of them – the destruction order came. Flamethrowers and grenades lit the sky with an incendiary offering to the Gods. Houses crumbled, melting like max. Some still had their occupants inside them; one Jew had been nailed to his front door by one overzealous trooper, and the body burned like an effigy as the lapping flames engulfed the building. The whole street, even the houses not occupied by blacklisted ‘Jewish elders’, was a raging inferno. The inferno heated their skin, the stench of its smoke clinging to them. Hoffman had smiled at the street aflame, as they drove away, haunted screams echoing across the devastation. It looked like Hell. No more than they deserved.

  Two further large-scale raids took place that day alone. More arrests, beatings, and burnings.

  They took one hundred and seventy blacklisted Jews who had been seized from their homes to the nearest ready-made, large anti-tank ditch, and riddled them with bullets. Blood flew through the air and spattered the ground around the ditches, creating a charnel-house of mud, awful, thick red blood and slaughter.

  A handful of others, they lined up against walls in the town and filled them full of lead. Bullets cracked through the cold air, and people fell. Some of the Totenkopf troops had been laughing as they did it, swigging from pilfered vodka or the standard-issue schnapps. Onlookers were silent and soon quietly slunk away, keeping their downcast eyes to the ground. The most prominent of the captured elders were hanged with piano wire in the central square of Włocławek, and left there as a warning. The city’s surviving Jews were silent. Nostitz ordered the burning of all the synagogues, and they tortured five Jews into claiming responsibility for the arson. Payment to the Reich was fixed at 100,000 zloty, and the Jewish community collectively paid it. The SS Death’s Head war machine rolled on.

  ~

  Hoffman struggled with himself, looking into the spotless mirror in his little private bathroom in the staff building of St. George no.5. Such conduct was wrong… barbaric, even. Not fit for the Germany of Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart, even Nietzsche. It was extreme cruelty. Hoffman knew that, and the hard reflection in the mirror seemed to know it too.

  Hoffman remembered the little girl in the black parka. How old was she; 8, 9?

  A tiny figure, still unable to walk without betraying a lack of basic equilibrium in her fledgling little legs; the girl had turned her back to the SS men levelling guns at her family, who were part of a larger group of blacklisted pro-Bolshevik Jews who’d been lined up against a wall in the town. She just held her father’s hand; her sobbing mother embraced the little ones, whispering words of comfort, but the father had been completely undemonstrative. Silent, as though in shock. Uncomprehending of his family’s fate. The little girl, ludicrously small in her big parka coat, reached out and held her father’s adult sausage fingers between her own tiny hands, before a volley of gunshots cut them all down.

  How could Goethe and Bismarck approve of this? Even the arch-anti-Semite Wagner couldn’t condone such coldblooded slaughter… but, Hoffman reasoned, clenched in combat with himself – this is war. A fight for survival. For the SS officer to show remorse, even pity for the enemy, was also wrong. The Jew had corrupted and weakened Germany in the days before National Socialism. The freemasonry of the Jewish financiers, merchants and petit bourgeois had undermined the Fatherland; their politicking had caused defeat in the Great War. The decadence of the Weimar Republic and its filth, its sex shows and debauchery and drugs and negro music… and the depression. Hoffman’s memory of the Jewish girl subsided into reminiscence of the deprivations and frustrations of Weimar years, and his eyes narrowed. The Jew had continued poisoning Germany until Hitler’s rise, and even now they continued their provocations abroad. He could not show pity. He could not. He must not.

  As bright as that day in London was, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch stormed into the meeting of Oberkommando des Heeres High Command and brought only rainstorms, cloud and thunder with him, lined in the contours of his face.

  None present needed to ask why.

  “Heil Hitler!” The Field Marshal brayed.

  “Heil Hitler!” returned twelve unenthusiastic voices of the high command. Quickly dropping the salute, they all dropped into the great wooden chairs with studded leather armrests, and settled themselves at the great mahogany table that dominated the wide room.

  Every officer present was a general; the lowest ranked being a brace of Generalmajors, to several Generalleutnants, a group ranked at Generaloberst, and lastly two Field Marshals present, both of whom were promoted in the great wave of Hitler awards following the rapid collapse of France. All generals present bore the gold epaulettes, and wore trousers striped with red to distinguish them in their rank.

  General Halder looked around the room, thrilled in the show of military might in the heart of London, great capital of the world’s foremost Empire.

  “Greetings, Generals,” von Brauchitsch said, settling himself into his seat.

  This was a meeting of the Oberkommando des Heeres, High Command of the German Army; today marking the second great conference of its kind since the invasion, and once more held in the former British ‘War Rooms’ of Churchill’s War Cabinet in Whitehall. The man whom Hitler appointed Military Commander of Britain formally opened the dialogue, though it was not with the confident air of authority that he had previously possessed. That was due largely to his title becoming a pyrrhic victory, if not altogether obsolete. But where his confidence lagged, the commander countered with volume.

  “Herr Generals & Officers, the next phase in the incorporation of England into the Greater German Reich is about to begin,” von Brauchitsch barked. “New directives from Berlin and the Party su
ggest that while our important public relations work must continue, contemporaneously with the continued crushing of organised armed resistance in the northern theatres.”

  He sighed, and some of the men nodded in solidarity. They knew what his next point would address.

  “As some of you are already aware, along with the SD & Gestapo units operating as Security Police here already, the latest development is that the SS-Reich Security Main Office leadership itself will be arriving in Great Britain tomorrow.” He winced, visibly, and while those already aware of the recent Führer Order merely grimaced, the other officers blanched in open shock.

  Field Marshal von Brauchitsch continued, in a pained voice.

  “SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei Reinhard Heydrich, our beloved hangman in Berlin will not only spearhead intensified Sicherheitspolizei operations, but the Führer has bestowed significantly more jurisdiction on him than was previously granted in Poland.”

  There were murmurings of unease, and looks were exchanged around the table.

  “Military command remains with me and Army High Command, but as Oberkommando des Wehrmacht chief Keitel–”

  “Lakeitel,” one of the other generals muttered, which inspired several agreements and sneering remarks. The pun on Wilhelm Keitel’s name meant ‘poodle’, or ‘lackey’, which is how many within the German Army viewed his attitude towards the Führer.

  Britain’s nominal military commander smiled, and continued. “Keitel signed an order with the SS-RSHA that no impediment is to be given to Herr Reichsprotektor Heydrich’s work by decree…” he drew on the title for effect, noting that the generals present were as uncomfortable as he himself was with it. They’d all witnessed the horrors wrought by the Einsatzgruppen of SiPo and SD that Heydrich had set up in Poland. Mass-executions, villages and whole towns left in flames, anti-tank ditches filled with bullet-strewn corpses, blood, shell casings and broken vodka bottles had followed the Heydrich death squads like an incriminating and particularly sinister trail in the wake of their almost wanton destruction.

  It had chilled even some of the Wehrmacht High Command, all of whom had served in the charnel-house of the Great War and its bloody trenches. Yet this was new horror; the Einsatzgruppen defied description. Thankfully, thus far in England they had been restrained, for the most part. The insane burnings – villages and towns razed in the style of Genghis Khan’s savage Mongol armies, with all the inhabitants butchered heedless of sex or age – were, thankfully, not standard SS practise in a land of ‘racial brothers.’

  Yet, it was whispered by some. Not yet.

  “On top of the decree,” von Brauchitsch explained flatly, “Reichsführer-SS Himmler himself will be arriving with Heydrich. Obviously, this means the country is to be swept and cleansed of any undesirable elements, and police measures will intensify that, we are told, do not concern the Wehrmacht.”

  The sneer in his voice was unmistakeable. General Halder wondered why he kept it out of his voice during meetings with Hitler. The commander continued:

  “The order from Keitel, you can find in front of you, if you’ll permit me to read the pertinent parts…” he cleared his throat, and in a tone that clearly emphasised the disagreeable parts, shared with his fellow generals the orders concerning the Wehrmacht in Britain:

  “Subject: Regulation on Commitment of the Security Police and SD in units of the army.

  The execution of special Security Police missions outside the unit makes the commitment of special detachments of the Security Police and Security Service in the Wehrmacht’s operational area necessary, as well as unoccupied and civilian zones. In agreement… et cetera, et cetera… with the chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Great Britain, the commitment of the Security Police and the SD in the operational area is regulated as follows:

  1. Missions. A: In the army rear area: Before the start of operations, securing of tangible objects (material, archives, card indexes of state organisations and/or organisations hostile to the state, units, groups, etc.) as well as especially important individuals (leading emigrants, saboteurs, terrorists, etc.).”

  Field Marshal von Brauchitsch turned his face up to the table, his contempt palpable. He was gratified to see his feelings mirrored in the men before him.

  “On this note, where the SiPo and SD actions may disrupt an ongoing army operation, the commander of the army and the Chief of the Security Police and SD are to reach an agreement on the individual action, or if this is not possible in the given timeframe, the Security Police commander in question must use his own initiative to determine expediency of accomplishing the mission in question, and the possibility of doing such without jeopardising army operations.”

  Again, several generals made derisive noises. The document was cancer to their eyes.

  The commander, sickened, continued his reading ad nauseum. “1b. In the army group rear area: Discovering and combating endeavours inimical to the state and Reich, insofar as they are not incorporated in the enemy armed forces, as well as generally informing the commanders of the army group rear areas about the political situation. Et cetera, et cetera…” the Field Marshal paused to gulp some water before continuing, his voice clearer. “2. Collaboration between the Einsatzkommandos of SiPo and SD, and the military commanding authorities in the Army Rear Area (to 1a). The special detachments of the Security Police and Security Service carry out their missions upon their own authority. In the zones of armed conflict, and when attached to the army for coordinated operations, they are subordinate to the armies as far as marching orders, rations, and quarters are concerned. However, outside of conflict zones, they hold complete jurisdiction to operate in civilian areas and behind the army frontlines in non-combat zones. Disciplinary and legal subordination under the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service is applicable in all areas, outside of adhering to army operations in active areas of conflict. They receive their technical instructions from the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, although if occasion should arise are subordinated to restrictive orders of the armies in conflict zones with reference to their activity. (See No. 1a.).”

  And for the last line, Commander von Brauchitsch, cursing his pyrrhic title and the siphoning of his power away to the bastard upstart Heydrich, and the bastard’s clever language and politicking, spat:

  “With this in mind, a commissioner of the Chief of the Security Police and of the Security Service will be employed in the area of each army for the central direction of these detachments. He is required to bring to the attention of the Commander in Chief of the Army promptly the instructions sent to him by the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, who in cases of grave importance for Reich Security and that of occupied Britain has jurisdiction to decide in his power as Reichsprotektor… the direction of such coordinated or overlapping actions, and to issue the necessary orders determining the course of action taken.”

  Silence met the last proclamation. The implications were clear enough; the Military Commander of England did not hold even complete military sway in England, let alone civilian administration. No, the Hangman of Berlin had extended his empire west, and in the process, snatched away the hard-won victory of the Wehrmacht.

  He pressed on, sensing that his diatribe had run its course. “We have been… instructed, as in Poland, as the army of the nation not to impede the… noble historic tasks on behalf of the Fatherland that our SS comrades are to perform. But we have our own tasks; the stability of the incorporation of England into the Greater German Reich… now, I want updates. General Halder?”

  General Franz Halder, his Chief of Staff readjusted the pince-nez on his nose and answered in clear, clipped tones, casting his gaze around the table as he did so:

  “Nothing new to report on the military situation, Herr Feldmarschall. The two Scottish cities remain secure; organised resistance in Scotland has been pushed south, and in any case much o
f it joined the bandit groups of northern England. As to the northern zone; resistance continues; we have secured the cities in the east-west Ludendorff Line: Hull, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, and we are established between twenty and thirty miles north of all those cities.”

  Lieutenant-General Kritzinger pitched in; “And of the cities themselves, General? Have there been any instances of further terrorism or organised revolt?”

  “There has not. Organised resistance remains exiled to the unoccupied pockets, mostly following the part of the underground auxiliary situation. Quite ingenious, I must say; a snowball effect from the small groups set up, as those who fled our troops were recruited en masse into collectives. But their hideaways are limited, and many remain hiding at home, with friends or sympathetic locals in villages, towns and whatnot.” Halder looked around impressively. “Commendable, but they cannot hold out through winter.”

  “Excellent, General. What of continuing resistance in northern cities and townships, and policies enacted?”

  Halder cleared his throat. “No. Army Group Centre was not been badly affected. The bulk of its reserves remain in the cities and major towns, but only individual acts of desperation or madness occur. Near Sheffield, three hundred partisans were shot for resistance that led to the death of nearly eighty soldiers. There is a complete press blanket on this story and the sharing of this incident was minimal.”

  “Any others? Full report.”

  Some of the generals began to make notes.

  “In Leeds, the hanging of the mayor from the Town Hall seemed to be most effective. Two hundred were shot in City Square in reprisal for continued incidents in the weeks after Group North: Army Group B initially took the city. It was not an SS style reprisal,” he added smoothly, letting the statement sink in. “The General here was most specific in his report; the two hundred condemned had all been involved in active armed resistance to us. As to the rest… most of those willing to fight were flushed out along in the uprising, and either joined the partisans or were picked off retreating. All subsequent actions were individual acts of desperation or fear, and dealt with at the police level. Imprisonment, or quiet executions, nothing loud. The general populace got the message from the shooting in the square.”