Alternate-History Nazi Victory

Nazis, Reich where Americans don't want them to be.

Wells: It's basically our earth — same history, same timeline — with one crucial and critical difference.
Stein: So let me hypothesize. The Nazis developed the atomic bomb before the United States did, and they were more than happy to use it.
Wells: Yes, the Nazis won the war.

— Crisis on Earth-X

There is one truth out there that all good people of the world are very grateful for: Nazi Germany lost World War II. And we're grateful because of the retroactive recognition of how different the world would be now if the Nazis had won. In fact, this is such a universal defining truth that lots of people want to either reinforce the goodness of Nazis losing or scare themselves with stories of what might have happened, anyway.

Of course, there's different degrees to how conclusive the Nazi victory would have been, and probably a few more wars. Perhaps the Americans would have nuked the world to death, or maybe the British were a bit slow on the planes and codebreaking. And, with how peaceful Germany is now, a Nazi victory might have just meant a longer period of shit before kind of leveling out again. However, speculative fiction isn't just interested with "They won but then got defeated in the Cold War" — it also wants the dystopia. Stories of a Nazi defensive victory may also be rare because they bring up questions about how the still-existing powers that made up the Allies would have related to the Nazi state and — given the scale of Nazi atrocities, combined with the pragmatic and amoral nature of much of international diplomacy — may implicitly paint these states in a far less heroic or moral light. Given that World War II stories are often used to deliver parables or comment about the present-day world, that the war forms a large part of the national mythos of the US, UK, and countries of the former Soviet Union^*It was/is even called the Great Patriotic War in some of them!, and that these states' own ethno-racial and colonialist attitudes and politics at that time and other less-than-heroic aspects tend to be downplayed in narratives of the war, such portayals might be seen as politically sensitive or just plain jarring for audiences (though rare examples do exist).

Stories functioning on an outright and total Nazi victory will often include some kind of All-American resistance, as well as universal death camps (ones that everyone actually knows about) as a conflict to resist against, and a grunge-punk universe aided by not progressing from 1930s tech (unless Stupid Jetpack Hitler is in effect). The megalomaniacal architectural dreams of Adolf Hitler will often come true following the victory, with Berlin and other cities being considerably reshaped, and the gigantic Volkshalle being built. To add spice to the story, add Imperial Japan to the mix, perhaps even expanding to an alternate Cold War between Germany and Japan.

Using this trope is typically prone to Alternate History Wank and Dated History: Nazi Germany had a lot of disadvantages and would have needed several lucky breaks just to durably win the war in Europe, never mind grow to a globe-spanning empire (and already got several breaks that would seem improbable if presented as fiction), but many classics of this subgenre (such as Trope Codifier The Man in the High Castle) were written before significant information about World War II was declassified, or without doing much research in the first place. Realistic Nazi victory scenarios have to take these disadvantages into account.

Sub-Trope of Alternate History, The Bad Guy Wins, and Villain World. Compare and contrast Commie Land and Privately Owned Society, the politicial and ideological opposite. See also Godwin's Law of Time Travel and Day of the Jackboot. Related to Fourth Reich, where groups of neo-Nazis attempt to build another Nazi state in a timeline where the original Third Reich did fall.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Kerberos Saga and the 1999 animated film adapted from it, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, takes place in an alternate 1950s Japan. Though Hitler was successfully assassinated by Claus von Stauffenberg, Germany managed to win the war and invaded Japan, who joined the Allies in this timeline. The Third Reich-based name, weaponry, and attires of the elite anti-terror unit Kerberos Panzer Cops (as well as the weaponry of La Résistance) are justified by Japan being occupied by Germany (which recently moved out, leaving the country in economic and political turmoil).
  • The live-action films in the franchise, The Red Spectacles and StrayDog: Kerberos Panzer Cops, actually avert this and instead take place in 20 Minutes into the Future Japan, most likely because the low budget didn't allow the proper Diesel Punk setting. The rest of the franchise still treats these events as if they happened in the '50s, though.

Board Games

• Axis & Allies allows up to five players to reenact World War II from 1942 onwards when the United States joins the fray. Sufficiently adept (and lucky) players can end the war more favorably for Nazi Germany and their allies. It's incredibly rare for the Axis to Take Over the World, however, both because of the logistical problems with any attempted invasion of the American heartland, and because by that point, the USSR and UK have usually been knocked out of the war already by losing their capitals, which is its own win condition.

Comic Books

• Block 109 is set in a particularly grim "Nazi Victory" world where, ironically, Adolf Hitler's assassination early in the war made the whole thing worse. After The Purge, a new leadership takes charge and expands the war onto other continents, develops nuclear weapons, and wipes out most of civilization (although the war against the USSR turns out just as hopeless as it was in real life, actually, thus mitigating the "total Nazi victory" a great deal). By the end, after more than a decade of non-stop total war, secret Nazi experiments have unleashed a Zombie Apocalypse that drives the new Führer (who is actually a Mole in Charge attempting to subvert the Nazi regime from within) to press the Reset Button for humanity as a whole.
• The DCU:
  • The DC verse features an Alternate Universe known as Earth-X^note According to legend, Len Wein originally wanted to call it Earth-卐, but DC editor Julius Schwartz, who was Jewish (although Wein was too), vetoed it where the Nazis won WWII and govern the whole world to the modern day. The Freedom Fighters are one of the few remaining resistances in the Nazi Regime. Many heroes from Earth-1 and Earth-2 are summoned over to aid in battling the Nazis. This universe was revived in The Multiversity, in which it is now Earth-10^note X is the Roman numeral for 10.
  • The Justice Society of America "Fatherland" story is about a future where the Nazis create a machine called the "Darkness Engine" that depowers superheroes and metahumans. Without this involvement, they manage to win the war. Time Travel prevents this future from coming to pass.
• Marvel Universe has its fair share of Nazi victory alternate earths.
  • Fantastic Four: On Earth-98570, Reed Richards gains superpowers from the Nazis and becomes head of their party. On Earth-76611, Nazi access to vibranium wins them the war.
  • Excalibur: Earth-597 is another Nazi victory earth, featuring versions of the team that now work for the Nazis.
  • In one of the multiverses of Marvel Zombies, the zombie infection goes to WWII and the Nazi won the war by being converted into zombies, that included some of the heroes being converted and joining the Zombie-Nazi army like Captain America himself.
• Über is a vicious take on the scenario and Stupid Jetpack Hitler with the point of divergence arriving at the very end of World War II through the introduction of super soldiers on the Nazi side. The war gets extended, millions more end up dead, and results in an arms race between the different powers all trying to develop their own "Ubers". The Nazis' explicit plan is not to win, but to "make everyone else lose as well". The book ends up deconstructing this as although the Nazis reconquer Europe and defeat the British Empire, the land invasion of the USA that marks the high point of their success degenerates into simply a series of horrific massacres committed For the Evulz, and things then go rapidly downhill for them once their initial advantage as the first country to have superhumans dissipates. The biggest historical divergence in the book is that the Soviet Union collapses forty years early, and that was nothing to do with the Nazis at all, but instead due to Joseph Stalin getting his hands on the most powerful single superhuman in the world through dumb luck, but then being unable to stop trying to screw her over out of ego and paranoia.

Fan Works

• Downplayed in "Brother on Brother, Daughter on Mother". The mirror universe is said to have frayed off of a variant timeline where various far-right movements, including the Nazis, were more successful than in the prime universe. A longer-lasting Western Roman Empire was also a factor, but the timeline probably would've turned out largely the same as prime except for time-traveling Borg messing with it.

Films — Live-Action

• Fatherland, based on the Robert Harris novel, posits the same "Nazis Have Taken Over Europe And Are Now Engaged In A New Cold War With The Americans" world as the novel, though with a few changes (the point of divergence being a failed Normandy invasion rather than a more successful Caucasus Offensive) and a more hopeful ending for the protagonists.
• It Happened Here is a grimly low-key film set in a Nazi-occupied Britain. The US, the USSR, and a British colonial goverment-in-exile are still in the war, there's an active British resistance movement, and the ending strongly implies that the Third Reich is headed for defeat.
• This is technically the case in Let's Go Kamen Riders and Super Hero Taisen GP: Kamen Rider #3, both of which see Shocker (the resident Nazi Nebulous Evil Organisation of the Kamen Rider series) using Time Travel to take over the world. It's heavily downplayed however, as Shocker have long since discarded the Nazi ideology in favor of their own transhumanist supremacist beliefs in a kaijin Master Race.

Literature

• The Guy Saville novels The Afrika Reich and The Madagaskar Plan both take place in a world in which the Nazis were victorious, most of the African continent is under their control, and the Jewish population of Europe has been deported to Madagascar.
• Animorphs: Subverted in one Megamorphs story where the villain was messing around history and tried to make the D-Day landing fail as he'd caused the American Revolution to fail, all in an attempt to weaken human resistance to the Yeerks. Unfortunately, he'd already changed time quite a bit, and so the defenders weren't Nazis but an allied French and German force. Hitler himself shows up as a low-ranking chauffeur in the army, and thus has no clue why these people are suddenly very angry at him.
• Fatherland is set in an alternate 1964 where the Nazis now control Europe, and the truth about the Holocaust drives the plot. It's also something of a Deconstructed Trope; rather than the Nazis building a world-spanning empire, the Nazi state covers Europe only and has more in common with the later stages of the Soviet Union, slowly decaying under the weight of its own tyranny and inefficiency while engaged in a Cold War with the United States. The territories in the east are unproductive, war-ravaged and full of partisans; the only people who live there are dissidents sent there by the government to turn it productive or die trying. The irony of "lebensraum that no-one wants to live in" is not lost on the protagonist. Also, the government is obsessed with oversized vanity projects, instead of the maintenance and infrastructure improvements the country needs, and even the protagonist (who is the equivalent of a police Captain) lives in a run-down pre-War apartment. The German puppet states in Western Europe are only nominally subservient to the Reich, and seem to be moving closer to co-operation with the US, and Germany's increasingly insane racial purity policies have led to massive brain-drain. All in all, the Thousand-Year Reich is teetering on the brink of collapse a mere 25 years after its founding.
• The Laundry Files has an example in the very first book. Bob encounters an alternate reality where the Nazis won the second world war by summoning a being known the Jotun Infovore. It was all down here from there. And by downhill, we mean a Class X-4 Apocalyspe.
• Stephen King's novel The Long Walk is a very subtle example. While it's entirely set in an Oppressive States of America, references made by various characters indicate that Nazi Germany won the war in Europe, attacked the U.S. East Coast, then ended up in a stalemate when both sides developed nuclear weapons. The subsequent economic downturn due to much of the old world now being dominated by fascist governments drove the United States to adopt a totalitarian government as well.
• The Man in the High Castle is set in a world where the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the USA's complete neutrality led to an Axis victory in WWII. By the 1960s, Nazi Germany controls Europe, Africa, and the eastern USA, while Imperial Japan controls Asia and the western USA. The tension between those two superpowers is reminiscent of the OTL Cold War tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
• The Proteus Operation starts in a world where, due to help from time-travelers, the Nazis and Japanese had won the war. Now, thirty years later, North America and Australia are the only parts of the world outside of their control.
• Jo Walton's Small Change trilogy takes place in an alternate 1940s wherein Nazi Germany has essentially conquered Western Europe, sympathizer Charles Lindbergh leads the US, and the remaining fight is on the Eastern Front. Britons ousted Winston Churchill at the start of the decade and made peace with Hitler in exchange for a promise not to invade.
• Third Reich Victorious showcases ten self-contained stories, in all of which Germany wins against the Allies.
• Otto Basil's "Wenn das der Führer wüsste", ("If only the Führer knew") is a scathing satire in the form of a crime novel (the Nazis are mostly the esoteric-wacky kind).
• Given the popularity of this trope in alternate history, it is no surprise that Harry Turtledove explored it several times:^note Along with several others where Germany wins World War I, so Germany becomes hegemonic without the Nazis coming to power
  • In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Germany won the Second World War because of American neutrality and later invaded the US in the Third World War. All "undesiderables" were exterminated except for a few hiding under secret identities, like the main characters who are German Jews posing as "Aryans". By 2010, the Nazi empire dominates the world but is stagnating and collapses within a year in what is totally not a ripoff of the USSR's fall in 1991.
  • The Last Article: Germany defeated the UK and the Soviet Union and is taking over India by 1947, when Gandhi finds out the hard way how much worse the Nazis are than the British. It still is at war with the US and the Free French in Africa.
  • The Man with the Iron Heart: The Nazis still lost World War Two, but they mounted a post-war insurgency effective enough to make the Western Allies withdraw from their zones at the end of the book, in 1947. The Soviets, on the other hand, are adamant that they will never leave their occupied zone.
  • The Phantom Tolbukhin: Germany defeated the Soviet Union due to Stalin purging General Zhukov. By 1947, they are chasing the titular Tolbukhin, who is leading a guerrilla war in occupied Ukraine.
  • Ready for the Fatherland: Erich von Manstein killed Hitler in 1943 and secured peace with the USSR, allowing the Nazis to beat back the Western Allies in France and Italy and consolidate Nazi rule over Europe. From then on, the Nazis emerged as a diplomatic power thanks to Manstein's abilities to play the USSR, US, and UK against each other.
  • Shtetl Days: The Nazis won the war and exterminated the Jews. 100 years later, they start building Jewish-inspired theme parks with actors to honor the event... and the actors start Becoming the Mask because life in victorious Nazi Germany sucks more than a "decadent" pre-war Jewish village in Eastern Europe.
  • World War: When space lizards invade during World War II, Nazi Germany successfully defends itself and becomes one of the three human nuclear powers, and retains all wartime conquests except the western USSR (which is returned) and Poland (which is surrendered to the aliens). In 1965 the Greater German Reich fights and loses a short nuclear war against the aliens but, while forced to give up France and its nuclear and spacefaring technology, manages to retain the rest of its empire. By 2031, the Reich has recovered and is once again considered a world power.
• The Nazisploitation novel The Ultimate Solution by Eric Norden takes place in a Nazified USA that is quite similar to that of The Man in the High Castle, except much, much, much worse, to the point of severe Artistic License – History. Including excruciatingly cruel animal abuse, pedophilia, slave gladiator matches and bizarrely enough homosexuality (something the real Nazis hated) as state ideals.
• The What If? counterfactual novels written by actual historians posits a few of these.
  • In one of them, Hitler seizes on the delay caused by the Balkans campaign of 1941 to invade the oil-rich Middle East through Turkey, then launches a two-pronged Operation Barbarossa in 1942. Soviet resistance collapses within several months, while the U.K. is forced to sign a peace treaty because of the threat Germany then poses to India.
  • In another scenario, this is however subverted when Halifax signs a peace deal with Hitler in 1940. The Nazis still launch Operation Barbarossa, but the strategy used is less favorable and the Soviets were expecting them in the absence of a western front. The war lasts much longer, but by 1947 the USSR steamrolls all of Nazi-controlled Europe right up to the English channel and installs communist puppet regimes.
• The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Exodus opens with Seventh and Ace landing in London during what should be the 1951 Festival of Britain, only to find it's under Nazi rule. So they head back to 1940s Berlin to find out who Made Wrong What Once Went Right.
• "Slow News Day" by Kim Newman is a bitterly sardonic tale in which Nazi-ruled Britain in 1994 isn't that different from regular Britain in 1994 in many respects, the point being it was already pretty authoritarian and terrible. The figurehead premier, John, feels overshadowed by his predecessor, the Iron Duchess, and out-of-place in the huge military circus being staged to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Nazis conquering the UK (a satire of the actual D-Day anniversary). Not to be confused with the companion piece "If The Germans Won", set in a utopian-by-comparison UK created when the Germans won the 1966 World Cup.

Live-Action TV

• Spike TV ran a one-shot special, entitled Alternate History, covering what would've happened if Hitler won World War II. It wound up being a spectacular example of Artistic License – History when covering how we get to that point. Some examples:
  1. The biggest goof is the complete exclusion of the Russian Front. The Germans concentrated the overwhelming majority of their resources in the East and suffered the most casualties there. The American-British-French invasion of Normandy is often given undue weight as a 'turning of the tide' event because of Hollywood movies focusing primarily on the Western front. While it certainly sped up the German defeat and prevented even more Soviet casualties, by the middle of 1944 the German war effort was already doomed and they were on the retreat across the entire front. Even if the Germans had managed to repel the Allies at D-Day, they still had the whole issue of millions of pissed off Soviets marching on Berlin to deal with, not having time to contemplate invading the UK and the US.
  2. The rationale they give for a German victory in D-Day is... the deployment of the Me-262 jet fighter. That's literally it. One of the key aspects of Operation Overlord was aerial supremacy; the Allies controlled the skies over the Channel. The Me-262 had some advantages over propeller based fighters, but the jet engines didn't make it a superplane (its performance not being critically better than any other plane constructed at the time) — by the end of the war, Allied forces had racked up several 262 kills with technically-inferior prop planes. Additionally, by 1944 Germany was having several problems with manufacture of jet engines — namely, they no longer had the resources to make them properly. The engines they could manufacture didn't last, having to be rebuilt after operation, and with a short operational life.
  3. Then there's the whole "nuke the East Coast" bit. There's a reason the Civilization games have always made The Manhattan Project a world wonder — the effort to produce a viable nuclear weapon required a massive amount of research and resources; there's a famous anecdote that when General Groves asked for such-and-such a number of tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury, while he did get the silver in the end he also got the starchy reply that "we do not speak of tons of silver at the Treasury. Our unit of measure is the troy ounce." The production of fissionable material alone took not only massive facilities to process the material, but large amounts of power to run said facilities (which is why the facilities were built in the Tennessee Valley). Then there was figuring out how to make an atomic bomb actually work. And the US faced all that without any serious efforts to undermine the project - whereas Germany had their program hindered by several notable acts of sabotage, such as having a major shipment of heavy water scuttled. Germany's nuclear program was actually nine separate rival programs, each actively hindering the others and fighting for an ever-dwindling budget because of the Nazis' belief that competition will always breed results. In addition, one of the great wastes of resources Germany committed was the whole driving out or killing of the Jewish scientists. The scientists that were left were further constrained by ideologically-correct "German Physics," which threw out several relatively recently-discovered principles that made the Manhattan Project possible because they were considered tainted by association with Jews. This could be Hand Waved by saying that in this "Alternate History" they didn't do any of that, but then they wouldn't really have been, well, Nazis. Aryan supremacy was a core plank of the Nazi ideology, and they were just not pragmatic enough to compromise on that. The Nazis did everything possible to make sure that their nuclear programs would be nothing but abject failures in every area imaginable, something "Germans make nukes first" scenarios conveniently gloss over.
  4. Hell, even if they DID manage to win the war by forcing the US and Soviets to surrender over nuclear bombs, there is no way they would ever enforce their laws in the US. The militaristic and patriotic nature of the nations would encourage an active rebellion against their controllers. Same goes with the United Kingdom. Controlling and patrolling a nation is much harder than forcing it to surrender (as has been evidenced several times in the Middle East). Germany would be burning through resources and money to no end trying to even establish a proper police force.
• Arrowverse:
  • Crisis on Earth-X reveals the existence of an Alternate Universe called Earth-X where the Nazis won WWII and establish a New Reich that governs the whole world, subsequently being effectively Unpersoned by anyone aware of The Multiverse because nobody sane is willing to travel to such a dystopian, racist shithole. It is loosely based on the comics story shown above. In this universe, many of the main universe's heroes have Evil Doppelgangers that are allied with the Nazis, including Oliver Queen/Dark Arrow who is the Fuhrer and Kara Danvers/Overgirl who is one of his generals. The premise of the crossover has the Nazis of Earth-X invading Earth-1 and clashing with the heroes.
  • Very nearly happens in the Legends of Tomorrow episode "Out Of Time" and just gets barely averted. Damien Darhk and Eobard Thawne meddle with history, selling an atomic bomb to the Nazis which they use to destroy New York in 1942, leading the Allied forces to withdraw and the Nazis to seize victory. The Legends spend the episode trying to prevent this from occurring by first kidnapping Einstein (who they believed the Nazis would use to acquire the secrets to the bomb), but later it's revealed it was actually Einstein's wife who gave them the knowledge. With the bomb heading towards New York, the Legends have their Cool Ship take the blast instead, averting the crisis that would have led to the Nazi victory.
• Danger 5 travel back in time to World War II and are too busy partying with their younger selves and trying to fix old mistakes to concentrate on their original mission: KILL HITLER! When they return to the future, they discover that Hitler has taken over the world.
• The BBC serial ''An Englishmans Castle" is set in an alternate 1970s, in which Nazi Germany had invaded and occupied Britain during WWII. The protagonist is the writer of a popular soap opera (also called "An Englishman's Castle") that is set during the Battle of Britain.
• The Man in the High Castle, based on the famous Philip K Dick novel of the same title, as described in the literature section. Features the same overall geopolitics as the novel, but with a lot of Adaptation Expansion. There's a large plotline that takes place in Berlin in season 2, for instance, whereas the book only focused on the occupied American territories. On a more metaphysical level, the reels being spread by the mysterious Hawthorne Abendsen and Takomi's visit to another Alternate Universe establish that the world inhabited by the main characters exists within a much larger Multiverse, containing some realities in which the Nazis won as well, and some in which they lost the war.
• Misfits has an episode in which the timeline is temporarily altered so that Germany won World War II and the UK is still Nazi-run in the 2010s. In an extra-grim twist, this happened because a Jewish man used time-travel powers to attempt to kill Adolf Hitler, and not only did he fail, but his smartphone fell into Nazi hands and they reverse-engineered it to gain a massive technological advantage over the rest of the world, causing their victory.
• Pennyworth is set in an Alternate History England. A brief news story in the episode "Lady Penelope" mentions how "the German Reich" is allowing self-governing autonomy for the Netherlands, implying that Nazi Germany still exists and still occupies parts of Europe in this universe. Which might explain the presence the fascistic Raven Society has and the British government being lenient against it. In fact, this might well be a plausible representation of an alternate post-World War II Britain had Viscount Halifax become Prime Minister instead of Winston Churchill and made peace with Germany in 1940 instead of keeping the fight going. Good commercial relations with Nazi Germany might also explain the widespread use of MP-40 submachine guns among the English law enforcement forces and army in the series while in real life it was the L2A3 Sterling that was provided to British armed forces after World War II.
• The Orville: "Sympathy For The Devil" has this In-Universe. Otto orders the simulator to put him in a future where he's with his family again after the Nazis had won. On the TV in the simulation it's mentioned that the Nazis conquered the US and are stamping out the last resistance in South America.
• Both the miniseries and novel SS-GB take place in an alternate reality in which the Germans forced the British to surrender after winning the Battle of Britain and successfully invading, with them then occupying the UK.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", a delusional Bones is sent back in time and saves the life of Edith Keeler, who then goes on to convince President Roosevelt to stay out of the war. This is a downplayed example since the consequences are never shown beyond the Enterprise being erased from existence. Nazi Germany's victory meant that mankind continued to be involved in petty internecine squabbles and never became a space-faring civilization.
  • The two-part Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Storm Front" is set in an altered timeline where time-traveling aliens have armed the Nazis with an arsenal of devastating energy weapons, leading to the rapid conquest of Europe, Asia and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. It features a highly entertaining alternate-universe propaganda clip describing the bright, shining future in store for America now that it's Germany's "partner". The point of divergence was the assassination of Lenin before he could turn Russia communist, though by the time of World War 2 itself, the aliens have become open allies of the Nazis. That said, the episode also implied that the tide was turning against the Nazis, with German troops stretched thin, the Russians preparing to retake Moscow, and near the end of Part 2, US troops launching an offensive into Pennsylvania. The Enterprise bombing a key R&D facility and wiping out the Nazis' alien allies probably didn't help, either.

Video Games

• In City of Heroes, Portal Corp's founder stumbled into a dimension (Delta Zeta 24-10, better known as Axis America) where the Axis won World War II; he was killed there by Reichsman, the equivalent of Primal Earth's Statesman. Reichsman tried to invade Primal Earth. He was captured, but he would later be freed and restore the Primal Nazi enemy group, the 5th Column.
• Fear & Hunger: Termina: Zig-zagged. The Second World War is won by the Bremen Empire, the setting's equivalence of the German Reich. However, the war ended much earlier, in 1942; the Bremens abruptly signed a peace treaty after an all-out push to conquer their neighbor, Bohemia, with special interest being placed on the city of Prehevil.
• Hearts of Iron, while mainly a historical simulator, doesn't actually force players to stick to real-life history. As a result, when in the hands of a sufficiently good player, Nazi Germany can overcome the odds and end up winning World War II. (The thing is, though, the bar for "sufficiently good" is notoriously low in Hearts of Iron 4, given the way Germany's potential opponents are scripted.)
  • The New Order: Last Days of Europe is a Hearts of Iron IV Game Mod set in a world of alternate Cold War between victorious Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the United States of America. The real Point of Divergence happens much earlier, though, when a prolonged Russian Civil War and failed economic policies by the eventual victor, Nikolay Bukharin, leaves the Soviet Union unable to properly industrialize and therefore much more vulnerable to the German invasion. The mod is especially notable for in no way downplaying the utter horror a Nazi victory would have been, but mercilessly portrays what a horrible and dark Crapsack World such a scenario would lead to. Not even the Nazis are happy with what they have turned the world into. While Nazi Germany managed to crush both the British Empire and the weakened Soviet Union and launch a nuclear strike on Pearl Harbour in 1944, forcing the US to concede defeat, their economy couldn't sustain itself much longer and crashed several years after the war. Even though the dire economic situation was eased somewhat by massive introduction of slave workforce from the occupied territories, Germany by 1962 is a nation on the brink of collapse, with youth protesting across the country, the industry almost entirely dependent on slave labor and a conflict between various factions for power in the Reich, which turns into a full-blown Civil War after Hitler's death.
  • Thousand-Week Reich is based on a timeline told in maps, and is based on the premise of Operation Dynamo failing, leading to Britain signing an armistice with Germany in 1941. Germany goes on to dominate mainland Europe, while Japan is defeated by the Allies by 1945. By 1952, the world sees a cold war between the German-led 'Neuordnung' and the US-UK-Canadian-established Toronto Accord, but the Reich is tottering, and would need very talented leadership to avoid collapsing.
• Red Alert 3: Removing Nazi Germany is at the heart of the series' existence, so instead Imperial Japan becomes a superpower in the 3rd game. Their victory over the Allies is achieved by taking over Los Angeles and broadcasting Imperial propaganda instead, while victory over the Soviets involves attacking Moscow with a Humongous Mecha and destroying the Soviets' own Time Machine.
• Fury Software's Strategic Command can keep the war going up until 1947. Skilled enough players can secure victory for Germany in Europe and even conquer Canada and the US East Coast.
• One chapter of the text adventure Time: All Things Come to an End has the protagonist visit an alternate version of 1980s England where Germany won World War II. In the following chapter the player must travel to 1940 to restore the original timeline.
• Titanic: Adventure Out of Time: 3 of the game's endings have the Nazis conquer Europe and defeat Britain. The first two simply have them march into Britain and then send an execution squad to the protagonist's house and killing him then and there. The 3rd ending, however, has the Luftwaffe bomb London with a nuclear device they themselves pioneered and developed.
• Turning Point: Fall of Liberty has as its backstory the Nazis conquering mainland Europe, due to Winston Churchill having died in 1931 after being hit by a car in New York^note this accident really happened, leaving a more concessionary Britain and a perpetually neutral America. By the start of the game proper, the Nazis are already bent on invading and conquering the United States.
• The Wolfenstein franchise from The New Order onwards focuses on an Alternate History timeline where the Nazis suddenly turn their fortunes around, winning WWII after it gets dragged out into 1948, and establish a New World Order. Most of the issues they would have to overcome are Hand Waved with the turnaround being the result of unearthing super-technology from a sect called the Da'at Yichud, and even then realistic consequences are shown for some of these - e.g. one of their discoveries was a formula for "super concrete" that they promptly use in construction of many of their post-war buildings, but actual mixing of that concrete is left as labor for prisoners in concentration camps, so when one of the camps in question ended up unknowingly housing a Da'at Yichud survivor he's been able to covertly tamper with the formula, causing them to produce weaker concrete that grows mold and quickly collapses on itself in short order.
• In Zombie Army Trilogy, in the final days of WWII, Hitler is informed he's about to lose and orders the execution of "Plan Z", the resurrection of all the fallen Nazi soldiers as zombies. This causes havoc for the Allied forces who now have to deal with Nazi zombie mobs ravaging towns. Eventually, Hitler himself is killed by the zombies, joining the ranks of the undead but still retaining his human sentience, and leads his undead army to further tighten his grip on the Third Reich.

Webcomics

• Housekeeper takes place in an alternate 1970's where the Hitler won the war by winning the atomic race... and got his ass executed four years later for continuing to be a genocidal narcissist. Still, the fascists effectively won WWII, and continued to deceive the public by rebranding as the Unified World Council. End result? The Nazis managed to trick Einstein into working for them. Technology skyrockets to 22nd-century levels, but the old guard of bigoted, genocidal maniacs is still in charge. When their head scientist proposes a worldwide genocide that would make Hitler blush, all but one among the high council applaud.

Web Original

• On AlternateHistory.com, the "Nazi Victory" is generally seen as Cliché, not only because it's primarily popular for newbies to the forum, but because it's very prone to Alternate History Wank and Artistic License – History for the sake of Rule of Cool. In particular, positing "Operation Sea Lion", the planned Nazi German invasion of the United Kingdom in 1940, as a Point of Divergence has become a meme on the forum for being one of the most ill-conceived invasion plans in recorded history and highly unlikely to result in a Nazi victory. Still, there are a few timelines that have gained some acclaim for being well-written/researched:
  • The Anglo/American – Nazi War: Nazi Germany succeeds in subduing the Soviet Union in 1943 after several lucky breaks, but doesn't conquer Britain. Eventually, the United States gets involved in the Battle for Europe and they get defeated anyway, basically a repeat of how World War I ended.
  • Weber's Germany: The Veterinarian Totalitarian reinterprets "victory" as "prolonging its existence in an increasingly moribund fashion no further than the 1960s".
  • Thousand-Week Reich, as its name implies, also features a short-lived Nazi victory; after barely edging out the Soviets, the Third Reich gets to work carrying out Generalplan Ost (i.e., mass genocide and enslavement of Slavs in Eastern Europe to make way for German settlers) and suppressing dissent, which, as you can imagine, is prevalent. Unable to hold on to power, the system quickly unravels after Hitler's death in 1952, losing client state Vichy France to a popular rebellion, before ultimately succumbing to its own civil war and collapsing entirely in 1958.
• Discussed in a two part series by youtuber Potential History. In both videos, he lays out the basics of why it would be realistically impossible for Nazi Germany to come out of the war as the victor due to not having enough resources when they started it, and having too many enemies/fronts to fight on after their initial successes slowed. A quote at the end of part 2 (which was made in response to people's claims about his first video) sums up the issue very well:
  Alternative history is fun. It makes for good Hoi 4 games, but when really talking about it seriously, it's really hard to come by any academic conclusions outside of a few days of speculation because you begin building assumption on assumptions and before you know it, you've changed the motivations and decision making patter of everyone you are talking about, and then you are just writing fanfiction.
• "It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow" stands out as being a total (or rather, "total") Axis victory caused by time travel that focuses on, instead of the Reich, the numerous subjugated peoples of it's empire.
  While German Nazis and Japanese Imperialists are a major part of this setting, and we'll talk about them a fair amount, ultimately this is not their story. This is the story of their victims, their collaborators, their enemies, and their allies- and how sometimes those categories can blur together.

Western Animation

• In the Justice League three-parter "The Savage Time", the Justice League inadvertently travel to an alternate present-day Earth where the Nazis rule America (and presumably the rest of the world) due to Vandal Savage deposing Hitler (turning him into a Human Popsicle) during World War II and taking his place as Führer, allowing the Nazis to win the war. Savage sent his past self a laptop with a very detailed historical database as well as plans to build futuristic weapons such as the monstrous War Wheels to secure that victory. The Justice League finds out about his time machine, travels in time to 1944 and tries to stop Savage before it's too late, with the help of some old school World War II-era DC Comics heroes they come across such as Blackhawk and his squadron, Sgt. Rock and his Easy Company, and Steve Trevor.
• In the Rick and Morty episode "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat", Rick's consciousness ends up being automatically transplanted into clone bodies in alternate dimensions after his original body is killed (because he had previously destroyed the prepared clone bodies in his own dimension). However, he keeps getting transplanted into fascist dimensions and being gruesomely killed by the regime. Eventually, he gets so fed up he immediately commits suicide at the first hint of fascism so he can just get to the next dimension.

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