This article is about Germany as it appears in the Southern Victory series. For other versions, see Germany
The German Empire 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 the Second Mexican War (1881-2), 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 (people had to line up for manufactured goods and coal, universal conscription was established, and bureaucracy became rampant) to make itself better able to oppose the Confederacy.
The Great War[]
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, helmets, and light machine guns. Germany also supported the Russian Revolution and the separatist uprising 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. It recognized the Republic of Quebec, a new nation the US had carved out of defeated Canada.
Interwar Years[]
Its period of dominance was short-lived, however, and was 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, but throughout the 1920s many people from both countries believed that a US-German conflict was not out of the question.
While tensions with the US eased during the 1930s, Germany suffered a string of setbacks in Europe. The Germans were unable to prevent the hostile Action Francaise from coming to power in France or the Silver Shirts from joining the ruling Conservatives in Britain. Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia were crushed by loyalists of Tsar Nicholas II, Austria-Hungary grew increasingly unstable, and strong Anglo-French support for the Nationalists allowed them to triumph over the German-backed Monarchists in the Spanish Civil War.
When Kaiser Wilhelm II died in 1941, his son Friedrich Wilhelm V faced a renewed war with the revitalized Entente. Friedrich Wilhelm V's perceived weakness encouraged the British and French to invade Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine, and within a matter of weeks the ensuing war had spread to Eastern Europe and North America.
The Second Great War[]
In the first year of the war, Germany suffered a number of military setbacks: Anglo-French forces drove the Germans out of Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium, and invaded the Netherlands, reaching the Rhine and the North German Plain, while much of the Ukraine was lost to the Russians. Within a few months, Germany had managed to stabilize its various fronts and had successfully repelled 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 reconquest of Belgium.
As 1943 drew to a close, Kaiser Wilhelm 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 best and brightest 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 superbomb 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 the first use of such a device in North America.
Once again, the Kaiser broadcast a surrender demand. Despite the loss of his capital, Tsar Mikhail II 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. Prime Minister 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 Thomas Dewey, in which both countries would police the world to prevent other countries from obtaining their own superbombs.
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