Why I Wrote... Streseland
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
By Alexander Rooksmoor.
As Sea Lion Press regulars know, often it is the least likely alternatives which are the most favoured as the basis for novels. The classic is Nazi Germany winning the Second World War, something that would have required multiple divergences from what unfolded in our history. Yet I think I am safe in saying more books and dramatisations have used this rather than any other alternative history scenario.
Despite this popularity, far more feasible are alternatives in which Hitler and the Nazis never came to power or were removed before their aggression augmented the already running Pacific War to round out the Second World War.
I knew a lot about inter-war Germany from what I had lectured on and through writing the four novels of the Braucher detective series, set in Germany in 1922-23, and I certainly do not subscribe to the view that democratic Germany was doomed to failure. To believe that Hitler’s rise to power was inevitable is to pander to his own sense of destiny. Instead, it was the result of seedy backroom plots by men who perceived him as no more than a useful tool.
I have explored some of the non-Third Reich scenarios in short stories. There are ample feasible divergences to work from. Notably, Hitler, an Austrian, could have been expelled from Germany after his prison sentence for high treason was cut short in 1924. He subsequently declared himself stateless but that had no legal standing. Only in February 1932, when given a civil service job by a sympathiser in Braunschweig, did he get the German citizenship that allowed to stand in the Presidential election the following month. As the workings of German politics had already become moribund as early as 1930, in January 1933, President Hindenburg made Hitler, Chancellor. However, it was far from inevitable that Hitler would even be in Germany or be a German citizen, let alone him gaining such a position. Then, of course, followed all the assassination attempts.
Even if Hitler had been excluded from the height of German politics, that would not have swept the Nazis out of them. Yet, in the last free elections of November 1932, the Nazis lost 34 seats from their peak of 230 in the July general election when their violence on the streets had helped depress the Communist vote. The Nazis were still the largest party in the Reichstag but certainly lacked a majority. It is quite possible that in the succeeding years, without Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor enabling him block all the other parties, in following elections, the Nazis would have slid further.
What certainly may have stymied the Nazis’ progress is if there had been a charismatic leader who could have been acceptable for centrists, conservatives, nationalist, and even moderate socialists so as to foster sufficient electoral support, but who then took Germany down a path which did not lead to the extermination camps. There appeared to be one candidate for this role, the man who had led Germany to recovery from the hyperinflation in 1923/24 and managed to restore some of its international standing: Gustav Stresemann, former Chancellor and long-term Foreign Minister. The only trouble was, he had died in October 1929 at the age of only 51.
Thus, I decided my divergence would be simply to keep Stresemann alive to die in the summer of 1937 still only aged 59. From that step, I assumed that after Hindenburg’s death in 1934 it would be Stresemann who would be elected President. He would, however, steadily move from rule by Presidential decree back to the pre-1930 model, perhaps with a centre-right ‘Government Party’ supporting him with a Reichstag majority.
Stresemann was a national liberal, what we would consider these days a business-orientated conservative. He was patriotic and wanted Germany to recover most of what it had lost in the Treaty of Versailles, notably in terms of the border with Poland. Importantly, though, Stresemann believed in democracy and while he wanted Germany strong, he was not seeking to create a dictatorship or even to restore the Kaiser. Above all, he was a man of ideas for dealing with economic difficulties as his Rentenmark of 1924, which stabilised the Germany economy, showed.
One of the job creation schemes implemented by the Nazi government, the Autobahn, had long been on the cards. In 1923, Willy Hof had established a company to construct a motorway from Hamburg to Basel. Stresemann as Chancellor after 1929 could have promoted schemes like this to counter the unemployment of the Depression. Probably his motorway construction would have contributed more to the German economy than the Nazis, using their militaristic forced-labour approach for their construction, did.
As people familiar with my work know, I often test out a concept in a short story before I write a full-length novel. I had done that in this case with Stresebahn in my collection of German alternative histories, Umleitung (2015). That story features a ‘Leutewagen’ which morphed into the NatAu – from nationales Auto - in this novel. It is the equivalent of the Volkswagen initiated in our 1934 as a ‘people’s car’. As early as 1925, Hungarian car designer Béla Barényi was working up plans for a Beetle-like car to sell at low cost. A Stresemann government seeking job-creation projects could have similarly adopted it for economic rather than military objectives.
Still, Stresemann was a nationalist and wanted Germany to regain its strength. I thus envisaged that rather than unilateral steps that Hitler adopted, step by step Stresemann negotiated more and more revisions of the Treaty of Versailles. His progress can be seen by the fighter pilots present in his funeral procession in the novel. The Treaty had barred Germany from having any airforce so this would be a concession, but one seen as contributing to German air defence through permitting fighters to be used, rather than bombers perceived as offensive.
Schemes such as these would not have ended unemployment in Germany but, following this approach, coming to something like Roosevelt’s New Deal in the USA, would have reduced it. Then it could have further eroded support for the Nazis, and indeed the Communists. I envisaged that even without the Nazi takeover, full democracy would not have been restored until the late 1930s. However, in that time, Germany would have been spared extensive political arrests, a burgeoning army, the concentration camps, the steady reduction of rights of Jews, and the steps to cull disabled people.
Having worked through my divergence, I then had asked what would a Germany without the Nazis in control have looked like by 1937? I did not think it would be spared political tension. Even setting aside the Spanish Civil War, most European countries faced political unrest and violence, even the very democratic France. Thus, I assumed that there would be steps to police this and looked to the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) [Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution] established in West Germany in 1950 to deal with extremism.
Political police in Germany dated back to the mid-19th Century. I knew Prussian authorities monitored political activities in other states of inter-war Germany. In this alternative, rather than these forces morphing into the Gestapo, the Reichsamt für Verfassungsschutz (RfV) has been set up in 1930 to counteract the most dangerous political extremists. Like the BfV, the RfV has investigative, but not police, powers, though the novel’s protagonist Gotthard Nachtigall does not baulk from direct action when needed.
Nachtigall specialises in working undercover the length of Germany. This allowed me to show how the Nazis, behind a false name, were seeking to gain greater influence by harping on the ongoing gripes of the public. The Nazi Party and its paramilitary SA had been banned at various times since 1923 so were familiar with working through fronts or undercover. In the novel, the party presents itself as Die richtige Zukunft für Deutschland [the Right Future for Germany], abbreviated to ZfD. The Völkische Beobachter [Racial Observer] newspaper is rebranded as Deutscher Wächter [German Guardian].
As shown in the novel, the SA units often disguised themselves as a men’s gymnastics clubs. Without Hitler gaining high office so needing to please the Army, the SA has remained the prime ‘active’ element of the Nazis rather than being purged. Basically though, they have remained thugs and as Nachtigall sees first hand, though brutal, they are not always the most effective.
Undercover among the Nazis, Nachtigall is involved with pushing propaganda and the caching of weapons which was a large part of paramilitary groups’ work in our history. These caches often led to battles between different groups seeking to take them off others for their own use. The main scheme is the plan to march into the demilitarised Rhineland to insist on its full military reintegration into Germany.
This was an element of the Treaty of Versailles which Hitler simply violated in March 1936 by sending troops into the region. Despite this being a threat to French security, there was no effective reaction. In this alternative, Hitler, a year later than in our history, through an armed demonstration in the region, seeks to provoke a crisis of the kind that had occurred January 1923 – August 1925 when French and Belgian troops occupied Germany’s industrial Ruhr region as a penalty for defaults on reparations payments. This led to a passive resistance that the Nazis in the novel would clearly likely to provoke once more and turn into a more violent incident.
Working undercover in a paramilitary group is naturally dangerous, especially when said group aims to go against foreign occupying troops. Thus, I created a context in which there could be jeopardy and action. I did worry that towards the end of the novel he becomes too much the ‘white saviour’ character and it could be seen as demeaning to Jewish Germans that, in particular instances, they needed Nachtigall rather than their own efforts to provide protection. However, there needed to be some heroic element to the man.
It is so easy when writing stories about paramilitaries and political unrest to have, as with so many war stories, an entirely male cast. Especially in this political conspiracy context, that would not reflect the reality. Women were always heavy involved in such work. In addition, my wife is always pressing me to include more sex in my books and we also know how prone undercover police are to sleeping with their targets. I felt the book’s villainess Trudi Bähr was one of my best antagonists. Since I wrote this novel, women with her fanatic racist and pro-natalist nature, blind to anything that does not match their views, have become more prominent in democracies, making me feel I was on target in how I portrayed her.
Overall, as well as providing what I hope is an exciting adventure novel, I have sought to show just one of the paths that Germany could have taken which would not have led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and on to war and the Holocaust. As us alternate history writers like to remind people, such developments are conscious decisions deliberately taken by many who could make different choices. That path is not inevitable.
Streseland is on sale from Amazon, Smashwords, and all Draft2Digital markets now.
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