SS-GB
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SS-GB (1979) is an alternate history novel by Len Deighton, set in a United Kingdom conquered and occupied by Germany during World War II.
Douglas Archer is a British homicide detective assigned to Scotland Yard in November 1941, nine months after the British surrender. He is torn between loyalty to his country and his professional commitment to law enforcement. He begins investigating what seems to be a typical murder case in London, but which finally involves him in the highest levels of the Nazi occupation government.
The book provides relatively few details on how the Germans actually invaded and defeated the United Kingdom in Operation Sea Lion. However, Deighton posits that, after conquering the United Kingdom, Adolf Hitler did not invade the Soviet Union. As a gesture of comradeship, Hitler permits the remains of Karl Marx to be disinterred from London's Highgate Cemetery for reinterment in Moscow.
This is not a very logical change - invading the Soviet Union was a central tenet of Hitler's ideology at least ever since he wrote Mein Kampf in 1923, in order to both destroy Communism and establish "lebensraum" for German colonists. An occupied Britain with as yet only a marginal Resistance movement, such as described in the book, would have absorbed far fewer German resources than the actively fighting Britain of our history. So, there should have been no hindrance to Hitler invading the Soviet Union around May 1941, in this history as well.
Having no invasion of the Soviet Union seems to be mainly a need of the plot. Nazis involved in a death-and-life struggle with the Soviets would not behave quite as the Nazis in this book do (for example, engage in such open, large-scale factional power struggles). The assumption made by all characters, that the war ended in February 1941 and that they are now living in a Nazi-domianted post-war world, is very essential to the plot.
Other changes to history as we know it are the imprisonment of King George VI in the Tower of London under SS guard, until the British Resistance arranges for his escape; the execution of Winston Churchill by a Luftwaffe firing squad in Berlin after his capture; the establishment of a Vichy France-style puppet regime in the United Kingdom (Deighton does not name the puppet PM, perhaps for apprehension of a libel suit had he placed an actual person in that role); and the operation of a Wehrmacht atomic bomb research station at Bringle Sands, a British resort town.
Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, makes a brief appearance. Institutional conflict between the various organizations of the Nazi regime, particularly between the SS and the Wehrmacht, and the austerity and hopelessness of the United Kingdom under occupation, are major themes of the book.
Deighton worked out in meticulous detail how various aspects of Nazi occupation, known from other countries, would have impacted the British society: The German Army quickly works out that a checkpoint near Trafalgar Square would halt much of the traffic in Central London; singer Vera Lynn continues keeping up the people's morale, also under occupation, and her song "We'll Meet Again" becomes associated with the English people taken to forced labor in Germany; when the Nazis comandeer the London public transportation for a massive late-night campaign of arrests, Londoners remember it as "The Night of the Buses"; teachers and schoolkids, taken off to a concentration camp, keep up their spirits by singing "If you know that you're happy clap a hand"; black market operators traffic in stolen Luftwaffe petrol coupons, like in our history they trafficked in RAF coupons...
Part of the book's interest derives from its being written from the point of view of a collaborator with the Nazis (even if his collaboration does not derive from Nazi ideology, but from the simple decision to stay on as a police detective) and making that collaborator a symapthetic character. Deighton could have easily written a not very different book centering on a real-history police detective in France, Holland or any of a dozen Nazi-occupied countries. Placing it against the background of an alternative-history occupied Britain makes the ambiguities and dilemmas of the main character all the sharper.
To be sure, it would have been far more difficult to make Archer a sympathetic character had the book been set a year or two later - when Archer, if he continued as a police detective, would inevitably become involved in the mass detention of Jews and sending them to extermination camps, which was a major activity by all police forces in Nazi-occupied countries in 1942-43. As it is, placing the book in 1941, before the Nazis got to the stage of mass murder, makes it possible to mention in passing the perscution of British Jews, without having Archer directly involved in that.
Appropriate for such a main charcter viewpoint, the British Resistance is depicted as a rather marginal group of fanatics - which is indeed how most French people, not just policemen, regarded the real-history French Resistance in the equivalent period. Later in the book, there looms larger and larger the character of Mayhew, the utterly Machiavellian mastermind behind the Resistance, who skilfully plays the Nazi factions against each other. "Playing God and writing the future history books", Mayhew organises King George's escape from the Tower, with the cold-blooded intention of manipulating the Germans into killing him. Thus the King, who actually never recovered from the total nervous breakdown he suffered when Buckingham Palace was bombed, is made into a hero and martyr, the British public's anger at the German regicides unites them behind the Resistance, and the exile Elizabeth II assumes the throne at the age of fifteen (eleven years earlier than in our history), to become a potent national symbol.
Thus, despite the sombre tone inevitable for a book taking place in a Nazi-victorious world, SS-GB ends on a note of cautious though rather cynical optimism. In the final chapter, the reader is made to understand that the Americans would win the incipient nuclear arms race and hence their war with Germany which would eventually break out.
SS-GB is regarded as one of the finest alternate history books about World War II. Robert Harris's later Fatherland is often compared to it.