The Man in the High Castle (new Amazon Nazi series)

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The assassination of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 led to the weak governments of John Nance Garner (formerly FDR's Vice President), and subsequently of Republican John W. Bricker in 1941. Both politicians failed to lead the country to recovery from the Great Depression and also maintained the country's isolationist policy against participating in World War II; thus, the US had insufficient military capabilities to assist the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, or to defend itself against Japan in the Pacific. The Nazis then conquered the Soviet Union and then exterminated most of its Slavic peoples; allowing a few to live in reservations. In the Pacific, the Japanese destroyed the entire US Navy fleet in a decisive, definitive attack on Pearl Harbor, then conquered Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania during the early 1940s. Afterward, the Axis Powers, attacking from opposite coasts, conquered the coastal US and, by 1947, the US and other remaining Allied forces had all surrendered to the Axis.

Japan established the occupied Pacific States of America out of Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, parts of Nevada and Washington as part of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The remaining Mountain, Great Plains and Southwestern states became the Rocky Mountain States, a buffer between the PSA and the remaining US, now a racially-purged Nazi puppet state. Having defeated the Allies, the Third Reich and Imperial Japan became the world's superpowers and consequently embarked upon a Cold War. After Adolf Hitler's syphilitic incapacitation, German Chancellor Martin Bormann assumed power as Führer of Germany. Bormann proceeded to create a colonial empire to increase Germany's Lebensraum by using technology to drain the Mediterranean Sea and convert it into farmland (see Atlantropa), while Arthur Seyss-Inquart also oversees the colonization of Africa and extermination of most of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Reich sends spaceships to colonize Mars and other parts of the Solar System. One core narrative element, Operation Dandelion, concerns the plan of a preemptive Nazi nuclear strike on Japan. The Nazis "have the hydrogen bomb" and the ability to wipe out the Japanese archipelago. Their nuclear energy capabilities also fuel extremely fast rocket air travel and the colonization of the moon, Venus, and Mars. Soon after the novel begins, Bormann dies, initiating a power struggle between Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Göring, and other top Nazis to succeed him as Reichskanzler.

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