Web Original / Thousand-Week Reich

The policy of containment against the tide of Fascism

Thousand-Week Reich is an alternate history timeline created by AP246 on r/imaginarymaps. Told with accompanying maps and illustrations, the timeline bills itself as "A 'Realistic' Nazi Victory Scenario", and strives for a degree of plausibility in its worldbuilding and not falling into the pitfalls of exaggerating the power of Nazi Germany. The timeline is currently established from its divergence point in 1941 all the way up to 2018.

In Thousand-Week Reich, the failure of the Dunkirk evacuation leads Britain to sign an armistice with Nazi Germany, leaving the war and allowing Germany to defeat both France and the Soviet Union. The United States never goes to war with Germany, but still fights a war with Japan and ends it with atomic bombs. World War II ends with the Reich in shaky control of mainland Europe; Hitler achieved a lucky yet still difficult victory and now controls all of mainland Europe.

The Greater Germanic Reich was brutal and inefficient, and struggled to control its massive territories as it faced pressure from within. The US, Canada, and the UK formed the Atlantic Union in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's defeat, trying to counterbalance the power of the Reich. The massive ethnic cleansing and colonization project of Generalplan Ost was launched in Central and Eastern Europe, but local rebels refused to be extinguished. Hitler died in 1952, and his weak successor Hermann Göring leads the Reich along for another few years with their newly developed nuclear weapons. All of the problems of Nazi Germany culminate when Himmler decides to coup Göring in 1958, leading to the Reich being torn up in a bloody civil war, joined in by foreign powers and local rebels, collapsing the Nazi regime. Hitler's great Reich lasted not a thousand years, but merely a thousand weeks.

A Hearts of Iron IV mod based on the timeline was released in 2020, and has its own page here. The lore of the mod is similar, but slightly different.

Compare with Fatherland, which shares many similarities with the scenario in Thousand-Week Reich. See The New Order: Last Days of Europe, which is a very bleak Spiritual Antithesis to this timeline.

You can find the full map timeline here, and its AlternateHistory.com thread here, which covers both the map timeline and the mod.

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Thousand-Week Reich (AP246's maps) provides examples of:

• The '50s: The timeline truly kicks off in this decade when Adolf Hitler dies in 1952 and Hermann Göring ascends to the position of Führer. Unfortunately for Göring, Germany will collapse into civil war after Heinrich Himmler and the SS launch a coup attempt by 1958.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • The Atlantic Union led by United States formulates the policy of containment to prevent the spread of Fascism, much like how in real life United States created the containment strategy to try and stop the spread of Communism.
  • China invades Vietnam in an attempt to destroy Vietnamese communism, and gets bogged down in an endless war.
• Alternate-History Nazi Victory: TWR is based on a world where Nazi Germany achieves a pyrrhic victory in Europe through several lucky events.
• Balkanize Me:
  • The Soviet Union collapses after its defeat. Their SSRs in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe gets gobbled up by Germany (leaving behind an independent Georgia), and the Central Asian SSRs become an independent Turkestan. Within Russia, there is a remnant Soviet Union in western Russia, a US-backed Russian Republic to the far east, several warlord states between the two (Norilsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Altai, and Buryatia), two more Soviet rival states in southern Russia (Idel-Ural and Transvolga), and a US-administered Sakhalin.
  • The Atlantic Union's intervention in the German Civil War creates a confederation of German states with no centralized government, nicknamed "Prison Germany" due to the extensive fortifications around its borders created by countries around Germany.
  • Inverted by Korea, which never split in this timeline.
• Civil War:
  • Heinrich Himmler's SS hardliners attempts a coup on the second Führer, Hermann Goering, in 1954, over his perceived failures. This instigates a German Civil War that also sees multiple regional rebel groups rise up. The same German Civil War can also happen in the mod, with maybe slightly different circumstances.
  • Vichy France falls into a civil war in 1952. The death of Hitler in 1952 and the weak leadership of Goering prompted rebels in Vichy France to rise up against Pierre Laval's government (who succeeded Pétain in 1951 after Pétain's death). The rebels are supported by the Atlantic Union and the remnants of Free France. The rebels eventually came out on top.
• Crapsack World: Openly acknowledged as a very dark timeline by its creator. Special features include: mass genocide several times worse than the Holocaust and Europe falling into bloody civil war after bloody civil war. That said, things eventually get better with the fall of fascism in Europe.
• Double-Blind What-If: Red Tide is an alternate history book written by Thomas Scott from the TWR timeline, which depicts a world where Nazi Germany was defeated in the Second World War. In this timeline, Britain and France forms a Franco-British Union, preventing Britain from leaving the war. In the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany, Soviet Union annexes Finland and Poland, Germany gets balkanized into multiple pieces, and the Franco-British Union and the Soviet-led "Comaccord" become two rivaling power blocs in Europe. In addition, a large and neutral Federation of Yugoslavia has formed in the Balkans, with Bulgaria also being a part of it.
• Fictional United Nations: The Council of Nations is formed in the aftermath of the German Civil War, serving largely the same role as the United Nations in real life.
• Final Solution: Nazi Germany decided to fully implement Generalplan Ost, a massive genocide/ethnic cleansing project several times bigger than The Holocaust, aiming to replace all the Slavs of Eastern Europe with Germans.
  Zapadoslavia Map Lore: ...Czechoslovakia and Poland were occupied by Germany in 1939, and suffered 20 years of German colonial rule. Ever since Hitler's troops stormed the two countries, Germany had enacted genocidal policies against its conquered neighbours, and this only accelerated with the defeat of the Soviet Union... The Jewish populations were the first to be killed, with over 99% of them dying by the time of the region's liberation. The next target of the Holocaust was the Slavs themselves, the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and other smaller groups. Those that could worked were forced into giant slave labour camps and industrial complexes, others that caused trouble went straight to the gas chambers, and others still lived in a wretched state as serfs in rural lands... the populations of Poland and Czechoslovakia fell by up to 60%. West Slavic culture underwent systematic extermination - entire city districts full of rich history was demolished and records of Slavic history burned.
• La Résistance: Even after the defeat of the Soviet Union, there is still a very strong Slavic resistance in the Eastern parts of the Reich.
• Nuke 'em:
  • During Operation Downfall the American invasion of Japan, America detonated eleven nukes on Japan, because the Japanese refused to stop fighting.
  • During the German Civil War, pro-Himmler forces nukes Nizhny-Novgorod as revenge for rebel uprisings, killing thousands of Russian civilians and leading to the Atlantic Union to immediately and unanimously vote to intervene in the war.
• Painting the Medium: A lot of the details in the timeline are told via in-universe maps and documents, as the timeline was first created on r/imaginarymaps.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Nazi victory over the Soviet Union was achieved at a great cost. Their victory in World War II overall was the result of a streak of lucky events, and likely wouldn't have happened had it gone any other way.
• Point of Divergence: The failure of Operation Dynamo causes Britain to sign an armistice with Germany. This leads to the United States staying out of the war in Europe, allowing Nazi Germany to achieve a pyrrhic victory over the Soviet Union.
• Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility: A firm Type I. The timeline sticks closely to the historical record and remains as grounded as possible.
• Space Cold War: A short cold war emerges between Nazi Germany and the Atlantic Union, lasting approximately 10 years.
• Won the War, Lost the Peace: Nazi Germany won World War II, but became massively unstable right after as they struggled to keep hold of their gains. Their instability eventually led to their downfall.

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