Germany

Germany is a country in West-central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Germany in Curious Notions
In the alternate designated by Crosstime Traffic as "3477", Germany emerged victorious from World War I when the Schlieffen Plan proved a complete success, as first France fell, then Britain, and Britain faced the prospect of starvation. Germany annexed various territories and created several puppet kingdoms.

In the late 1930s, France and Britain initiated another war, but that was quickly snuffed out, and Germany proved to be the absolute ruler in Europe. It turned to the United States, which watched Europe with great anxiety. By the late 1940s, Germany had developed the atomic bomb. In 1956, Germany attacked and defeated the United States, and instituted an occupation that would last for the next 150 years.

Germany maintained its rule by keeping a tight lid on technological advances. Thus, when Paul and Lawrence Gomes, father-and-son employees of Crosstime Traffic and denizens of an alternate timeline opened the store Curious Notions in San Francisco, the German authorities stood up and took notice. The store sold technology that, while obsolete in the Gomes' home, was above anything available to the average American. The store also caught the eye of the Chinese Triads operating in the city.

Germany in Days of Infamy
Germany was locked in a death-struggle with the Soviet Union when its ally Japan invaded and occupied the American territory of Hawaii, December, 1941. Days after the initial attack, Germany declared war on the United States. Germany's harrassment of U.S. shipping in the Atlantic benefitted Japan's position in the Pacific to some extent, but ultimately, Germany gave little aid to Japan's war-effort.

Germany in The Gladiator
Germany was divided between the victorious Allied Forces after World War II. When the Soviet Union won the Cold War in the twentieth century, Germany was reunified under a single communist government.

While Germany was one of the countries most devoted to Marxism, the Soviet Union nonetheless kept a tight control on Germany, a country that had invaded Russian territory twice in a generation.

Germany in In the Presence of Mine Enemies
Germany was the dominant superpower of the world and its Greater German Reich was the largest land empire the world had ever seen. Its capital was Berlin, one of its largest cities. By 2010, it was ruled by its fourth Fuhrer Heinz Buckliger. His predecessors included Kurt Haldweim, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler with the latter two responsible for the Reich's founding and expansion.

The Reich espoused racist views and the "superiority" of the Aryan race. All inferior races considered ("Untermensch") like Jews, Slavs, Sinti and Roma, Arabs, Negroes and homosexuals were exterminated and/or enslaved. During the Second World War in the 1930s to 40s, the Reich and its Axis allies defeated Britain, France and the Soviet Union and divided all of Europe, Africa, Asia and part of the Pacific among themselves. During the Third World War of the 1960s to 70s, the Reich and Japan subdued the United States which had remained in neutral isolation during the earlier war.

The vast territories formally annexed as part of the Reich included Germany's boundaries and nearly everything eastwards from there, through the former Poland and Soviet Union, deep into Sibera, the Caucasus, and India. Most of Africa (including former British, French and Belgian colonies) was also an integral part of the Reich.

In addition to the Reich itself, the "Greater Germanic Empire" included two other sub-categories: occupied but not formally annexed countries, including France, Britain, the USA and Canada, Denmark and Norway, and; "allies", including Sweden, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the Italian Empire. Allies outside Europe included South AFrica and the countries of Latin America, specifically Argentina and Brazil. Several of Germany's allies (Italy, Spain, and Portugal) had sizeable empires in Africa and in the Middle East. But these allies were not truly independent of Germany. Only Japan ruled a truly independent empire, encompassing much of Asia and the Pacific.

The "occupied but not annexed" countries did have their own governments and some measure of real autonomy. But even "unoccupied allies" had to accept considerable limitations on their sovereignty and German interference in their internal affairs, especially in matters of the Nazi racist ideology.

List of Known Countries Part of the Reich

 * Afghanistan
 * Austria
 * Britain
 * Czechoslovakia
 * Denmark
 * India
 * Iran
 * Norway
 * Poland
 * Russia/Soviet Union
 * Yugoslavia

List of Known Occupied Countries Part of the Reich

 * Canada
 * France
 * United States

Germany in Southern Victory
Germany had unified around Prussia by 1870, following a series of wars, including with its neighbor France. After the United States was defeated by the Confederate States, Britain, and France in 1882, Germany developed an important alliance, later known as the Central Powers, with the U.S.A. The United States emulated German military and social organization to make itself better able to oppose the Confederacy.

Under the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany supported Austria-Hungary against first Serbia and then Russia following the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian prince Franz Ferdinand, an act that triggered the various alliance systems put in place across Europe and North America, and the Great War began.

During the war the Germans developed numerous weapons innovations, including poison gas and a variety of aeroplanes. They shared these with the United States, which in turn taught Germany to build barrels and helmets. Germany also supported the Russian Revolution; the Rising in Ireland and established a state in Poland on former Russian territory.

Following several years of stalemate, Germany defeated France and, with help from the US, Britain. It thus established itself as the dominant power in Europe, occupying Belgium and the Ukraine, annexing the former French province of Lorraine and the Belgian Congo.

Its period of dominance was short-lived, however, and marked by elevated tensions with the US. The two victors cooperated in a joint naval operation to block British interference in the Republic of Ireland. However, Germany was unable to prevent the Action Francaise from coming to power in France, the Silver Shirts from joining the ruling coalition in Britain, Russian counterrevolutionaries from putting Tsar Mikhail II on the throne, and these powers from supporting Nationalists to overthrow Monarchists in the Spanish Civil War.

Kaiser Wilhelm II died in 1941. His son, Kaiser Wilhelm III was (incorrectly) perceived as weak by the Entente. They took the opportunity to declare a revanchist war, which quickly spread to North America.

In the first year of the war, Germany suffered a number of military setbacks before stabilizing its various fronts and successfully repelling a British invasion of Norway.

By 1943 Germany claimed to have driven British forces back over the Dutch Border. The Germans also recaptured most of the Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic territory seized by Russia in the opening stages of the war. by the end of the year, the Germans had defeated the Russians east of Kiev and begun the liberation of Belgium.

As 1943 drew to a close, the Kaiser broadcast a warning to Russia and her western allies to surrender or face "unprecedented destruction," an oblique reference to the German superbomb program, by far the most advanced in the world. It was able to draw upon the talents of Albert Einstein and Denmark's Niels Bohr, as well as the cream of the German and Austro-Hungarian physics community. Their skill was confirmed in the spring of 1944 with the destruction of Petrograd, the Russian capital, the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. Their efforts also produced a secret dossier transported across the Atlantic by U-boat in November 1943 to a waiting U.S. destroyer escort. This jump-started the lagging U.S. superbomb program, although not by enough to beat the Confederates to first use in North America.

Once again, the Kaiser broadcast a surrender demand. Despite the loss of his capital, the Russian Tsar again refused, backed by Britain and France. Though initially reluctant to drop a bomb in the west (where prevailing winds would blow radioactive fallout back into Germany), the German air force bombed Paris, killing the French king and melting the Eiffel tower into a stump. The Russian government, its capital lost, its armies disintegrating, and under pressure from a Japanese ultimatum to evacuate several of its Siberian provinces, realized that no more help would be forthcoming from its Western allies on the continent. After dithering for several weeks, the Tsar asked the Kaiser for an armistice. The collapse of both France and Russia provoked the British, whose own uranium program had finally borne fruit (embarrassingly, their Confederate clients had built and used a superbomb before them) to destroy Hamburg.

The German response would wait until June, when three superbombs were dropped near-simultaneously on London, Brighton, and Norwich, along with a broadcast warning that Germany had more bombs and would use them. Winston Churchill, who had fled London along with the British royal family after the Hamburg bomb, boasted that Britain would take immediate vengeance. He sent Britain's second superbomb on its way into Germany, but the plane was shot down over Belgium by German turbo-powered night fighters. Having no more bombs in its arsenal, the Churchill government fell and Britain sued for peace, as did France in turn. With her western foes essentially eviscerated, Germany's attentions for the latter half of the 20th Century turned back to Russia. Fearing its longtime foe might develop its own superbomb, Germany agreed to the doctrine formulated by U.S. president Tom Dewey, in which both countries would police the world to prevent other countries from obtaining their own superbombs.

Germany in Worldwar
Germany was one of Earth's most powerful and most aggressive nations in the 1940s, ruled by Adolf Hitler. It launched World War II by invading a number of neighboring countries and absorbing them into the Greater German Reich. When the Race invaded Earth in 1942, it was engaged in wars with the Soviet Union, which it had invaded, and Britain, which it was fighting in North Africa. It had also declared war against the United States several months earlier, though Americans had not yet deployed against it in force. It was also practicing a genocide against the Jews; in each major city it controlled, Jewish populations were relegated to a ghetto, and mass executions were taking place in concentration camps such as Treblinka. It was a member of the Axis.

The Race recognized Germany as one of the most important Tosevite not-empires and launched simultaneous invasions of it from Poland, Italy and France. German forces initially fared very badly in the field against the superior weapons of the Race, and were driven from most of the extraterritorial gains they had made by launching a series of wars against their neighbors several years earlier. Even then, however, the Germans managed several successes against the Race. They cooperated with the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and Japan in the Big Five.

The most important of these was a raid which Otto Skorzeny commanded and launched in conjunction with the Soviet NKVD in which radioactive uranium was captured from the site of a destroyed Race starship. Heinrich Jager was charged with returning the metal to Germany, but was intercepted by Mordechai Anielewicz and stripped of half of it. What remained was not enough to build an atomic bomb, but it was helpful for Germany's atomic researchers, including Werner Heisenberg.

German forces stabilized their various fronts against the Race when the Race entered German territory. They proved quite adept at exploiting the Race's main weakness, its inability to replace expended ammunition and other supplies.

Germany built an atomic bomb in late 1943 and copied the Soviet tactic of burying it underground, withdrawing from a position, and detonating it by radio when the Race took possession of the position in question. Despite retaliation from the Race with its own nuclear weapons, Germany used atomic bombs as an offensive weapon, destroying the Race-controlled cities of Rome and Alexandria using bombs carried on submarines.

Germany's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, took part in the negotiations at Cairo which ended the war. Ribbentrop took a very hard line in his demands: for Germany to agree to peace, the Race would need to recognize its borders as encompassing all the territories it had conquered before their arrival (he later abandoned Germany's claim to Poland for fear that it would provoke another war with the Soviet Union). Germany would also be allowed to annex Northern Italy and to protect the sovereignty of Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania.

An uneasy peace prevailed on Earth for the next two decades until the arrival of the Colonization Fleet, by which time Hitler had died and been replaced by Heinrich Himmler. During this period, Germany succeeded in bringing Britain into its political orbit.

When the Colonization Fleet arrived, Germany, which the Race trusted least of all the Tosevite powers, was considered the prime suspect for launching the sneak attack against that fleet with nuclear missiles; in fact, the United States had authorized it.

Like the United States and the Soviet Union, Germany was a spacefaring nation. It maintained a space station in Earth orbit and made regular spaceflights. It was the first nation to land a manned mission on the moon, and also visited Mars. It built the Hermann Goering, an atomic-powered spaceship which travelled to the asteroid belt and, like the American Lewis and Clark, no doubt could have been developed into a starship had it not been destroyed by the Race. The space program, a branch of the military, was commanded by General Walter Dornberger.

When Himmler died in 1965, a period of political wrangling began, during which a Committee of Eight kept a tenuous hold on political authority. This period ended when Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner was chosen to succeed Himmler as Chancellor.

Kaltenbrunner's short and disastrous chancellorship was marked with an unprovoked and unilateral invasion of Poland which precipitated a second war with the Race, the Race-German War of 1965. Since the Conquest Fleet's arrival in 1942, human powers had generally made an effort to keep a united front in matters relating to the Race; however, only the small nations which relied on Germany completely to preserve their independence allied with it in this war. No other nuclear-capable nation supported Germany despite concerns that allowing the Race to destroy it would weaken the position of remaining human powers in future conflicts with the Race, as their potential alliance would be that much weaker.

The war saw the destruction of Germany's military and infrastructure, though it did manage to do significant damage to the Race, especially in those areas which bordered it such as Poland and Spain. Kaltenbrunner himself was killed, and Chancellorship fell to the Reich Rocket Force commander, General Doctor Walter Dornberger, who immediately requested that Soviet General Secretary Vyacheslav Molotov mediate a peace conference. The terms of this agreement, which the Race imposed almost unilaterally, included the surrendering of all German nuclear and space technologies and the German withdrawal from and reconstitution of France.

Other human powers warned the Race that it was exceedingly difficult to enforce harsh treaties against Germany, remembering the experience of the British and French after World War I. The Race boasted that it had the patience and determination to succeed where the Big Uglies had failed. However, Germany began concealing nuclear weapons almost immediately, and had returned to space within a few decades. By 2031 it was once again in a position to threaten the Race on Earth--and within a few years it was expected that it would be able to travel between the stars.

Under the ruling Nazi Party, Germany was a volatile and dangerous power which disrupted international relations across the Earth.

Countries Absorbed by the Reich (Prior to Race-German War of 1965)

 * [[Image:Albania.jpg|20px]]Albania
 * [[Image:Austria.jpg|20px]]Austria
 * [[Image:Belgium.jpg|20px]]Belgium
 * [[Image:Czech.jpg|20px]]Czechoslovakia
 * [[Image:Denmark.jpg|20px]]Denmark
 * [[Image:Franceflag.jpg|20px]]France
 * [[Image:Greece.jpg|20px]]Greece
 * [[Image:Italy.jpg|20px]]Italy
 * [[Image:Luxembourg.jpg|20px]]Luxembourg
 * [[Image:Netherlandsflag.jpg|20px]]Netherlands
 * [[Image:Norway.jpg|20px]]Norway
 * [[Image:Yugoslavia.jpg|20px]]Yugoslavia

Countries Dependent on the Reich's Protection (Prior to the Race-German War of 1965)

 * [[Image:Bulgaria.jpg|20px]]Bulgaria
 * [[Image:Finnland.jpg|20px]]Finland
 * [[Image:Hungary.jpg|20px]]Hungary
 * [[Image:Romania.jpg|20px]]Romania
 * [[Image:Slovakia.jpg|20px]]Slovakia
 * [[Image:Sweden.jpg|20px]]Sweden
 * [[Image:Switzerland.jpg|20px]]Switzerland

Germany in "The Catcher in the Rhine"
While traveling through Germany, a young American tourist encountered the mythical dwarve Regin Fafnirsbruder, who transported the young man to the past, and ordered him to "save" the enchanted Valkyrie Brunhild.

Germany in "Joe Steele"
Germany under Adolf Hitler became a formidable power in Europe. This gave US President Joe Steele a convenient scape-goat; nearly every person who opposed Steele was eventually "revealed" to have ties to Germany.

While Steele and Hitler hated each other, Steele was content to leave Germany to its own devices. However, as Germany soon dominated Europe, Steele concluded that the Atlantic Ocean would not sufficiently protect the US. He began funding Britain and later the Soviet Union when Germany invaded in 1941.

Germany's downfall came during the invasion of the USSR. After German forces were broken at the Battle of Trotskygrad, the US and Britain launched an invasion of occupied Europe. Germany was caught in a vise, and utterly defeated.

Germany in "Must and Shall"
Nazi Germany provided clandestine help to rebels in the United States South (unreconciled to their defeat in the Great Rebellion nearly a century before) in an attempt to keep the US government busy at home and unable to intervene in European affairs.

Germany in "News From the Front"
Germany's efforts during World War II were benefitted by the American media, which was very hostile to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Germany in "The Phantom Tolbukhin"
Germany defeated and occupied the Soviet Union during World War II. But even as late as 1947, the German army had to deal with guerrilla forces, the most notorious being Fedor Tolbukhin, nicknamed "The Phantom".

Germany in "Ready for the Fatherland"
Germany was able to negotiate a separate peace with the Soviet Union after General Erich von Manstein shot and killed Adolf Hitler in 1943. Manstein became German Chancellor, and Germany consolidated its power in Europe, repelling the Allied invasion of Italy and France. In 1953, an exchange of sunbombs in Japan nearly brought the United States and the Soviet Union to war. Manstein was able to mediate a ceasefire. Joseph Stalin's timely death also helped diffuse the situation.

In 1979, as the Soviet Union threatened British oil resources, Britain opened up a dialogue with Germany. At the behest of the German government, the British secret service helped the government of Croatia capture a Serbian rebel.

Germany in "Uncle Alf"
Germany defeated the Entente powers early in 1914 when General Alfred von Schlieffen successfully implemented his plan for a two-front war. Germany occupied both France and Belgium immediately after. In 1916, Germany came to the aid of its former enemy, Russia, helping to put down a communist revolution.