Nazi victory porn

It is a paradox: high intensity military combat is one of the most extreme of human experiences, which means nobody who has not experienced it can will have the emotional or physical memories to make sense of it. Relatively few people today have experienced high intensity combat. Only a minority of people ever enlist in the armed services, and the majority of members of the armed services work at the vital, and sometimes dangerous, job of supplying the front line soldiers. Today, the majority of people have not experienced high intensity combat.

Yet it appears war remains the one of the most common single subjects for historical presentations and documentaries, as well as historical fiction. Accounts of war, historical and otherwise, often tend to lay stress on the experience of intense combat, rather than the boredom that defines much of military life.

JunkersEF128 jet model
By Juergen Klueser via Wikimedia Commons

Partly, this stems from the curiosity people who have never experienced intense conflict feel about it; partly from assumptions about the importance of military conflict in shaping history. But books and documentaries do not make present the experience of battle, as Guy Sajer's book The Forgotten Soldier makes clear: "One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired..." War documentaries come closest to the experience of a civilian reading about events taking place a long way away; yet even the experience of a civilian in wartime involves uncertainty the viewer of a documentary or reader of history does not share.

The combination of unreality and the ability to evoke emotional intensity makes military history subject to various forms of manipulation. I call one particular form of this manipulation "Nazi victory porn". It consists of various descriptions, frequently highly unrealistic, of ways Hitler could supposedly have won World War II.


Nazi victory porn, as I have defined it, most certainly does not include alternative history novels such as Len Deighton's SS-GB and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, which  explore characters and situations in the context of an Nazi-dominated Britain (or world). Nor do serious attempts to explore the options available to the German or British governments in, say 1940, that might have led to a different historical result. I only refer to a presentation as Nazi victory porn if it posits a German victory in the teeth of the evidence, grossly overestimates German technical prowess and its possible consequences, and thus exaggerates the possibility of Nazi victory.

Messerschmitt_Bf_109E4
By Jacobst via Wikimedia Commons

Consider, for example, Hitler's Britain, a documentary about the precautions taken by the British government to support a resistance in the event of a German invasion. While the British plans were interesting, the documentary, like many of its kind, fails to state clearly how far the Luftwaffe and Kreigsmarine were from achieving any of the conditions for a cross-channel invasion. When the Luftwaffe attacked Britain, they encountered a weapon they had never dealt with before, an integrated command and control system. The Luftwaffe leadership never understood the Dowding System during the battle, and thus never even began to work out any kind of effective counter-measure. While historians have reached different conclusions about the attrition rates during the German air assault, the Luftwaffe never came close to destroying any part of the British defensive capacity. Even had they had destroyed all the airfields in the South of England, The British would have used their massive naval superiority to cut off and destroy an invasion force.

The Dowding System
via Wikimedia Commons

That doesn't make a successful German invasion completely impossible, and it doesn't make the precautions the British government took at this time a waste, but to posit a successful German cross-channel invasion without making the obstacles clear distorts the history. Hitler's Britain appeared in 2002, when many British politicians wanted to increase support for a preventative war in Iraq, and the timing seems suspicious, since the idea of Chamberlain's failed attempts at peacemaking in 1938 leading to a close call for Britain in 1940 has a long and not particularly edifying history as an argument for war.

Another unlikely, shading to fantasy, scenario for German victory involves the German search for miracle weapons late in World War II. I consider the most absurd example of this the projected nuclear bombing of New York, by a bomber design the Germans never built, even as a prototype, using nuclear weapons the Germans had neither the scientific personnel, resources, or budget to develop. As a variation on this theme, some documentary makers have looked at the emergency fighter programs started by the Luftwaffe in 1944 and 1945. By the time German engineers had produced the designs for these aircraft, mostly in late 1944 or early 1945, Germany had neither the skilled and motivated labour, nor the access to raw materials needed for a fighter production program. Most of the first prototypes flew just months before the final collapse of Nazi Germany; if the Germans had produced the emergency fighter in numbers, and somehow trained pilots for them, they might have curtailed the daylight bombing in the last months of the war. They would not have changed the huge weight of Allied tanks, guns, and soldiers pushing into Germany from both sides.

Marschflugkörper V1 vor Start
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1973-029A-24A / Lysiak,
via Wikimedia Commons

Nobody blames Neville Chamberlain for Germany's last gasp efforts at winning the war through technology, so the motives for treating the Luftwaffe emergency fighter programs as anything more than technical curiosities probably has more to do with a desire to add suspense to the history of the end of World War II. After the German declaration of war against the United States, the Nazis had no viable path to victory; their war effort amounted to nothing but an attempt to postpone the inevitable.

Nazi Germany, as an extreme of human evil backed by extraordinary technical and military achievement, has long has an unwholesome hold on our imagination. Our view of German technology in this period is often grossly exaggerated, as is our view of German military competence. Twenty-five years ago, the Internet accepted Godwin's Law because many of us saw the need for limits to our use of Nazis as a metaphor. That wisdom holds today. The time has come to drop our awe of Nazi soldiers and technocrats. Nazi Germany was not a government of dazzling technical brilliance and utter evil but a murderous kleptocracy: Tammany Hall run by Jeffrey Dahmer. Germany lost the war because Hitler foolishly picked fights with countries that had far more resources than Germany, and which often made more effective use of technology than the Germans did.