By the time this gets posted, it will have been about three years since I made my first submission to Changing The Times; in those three years I’ve had a lot of fun exploring all kinds of historical possibilities. But out of all the articles I’ve sent to CTT, the one I’m most proud of is the eight-part series Sic Semper Tyrannis Germaniae. World War II has long been one of my favorite historical eras to study; when the concept for doing a CTT story based on the notion of Hitler being assassinated in 1944 came to me, I decided to run with it.

On the top ten list of questions most often asked of writers, "Where do you get your ideas?" has to at least rank in the top five. In Germaniae’s case, I can trace the origins of the series back to at least three separate points. The first came back in September of 2002, before I was even aware of CTT’s existence; around that time I submitted to Othertimelines.com the first entry in a July 20^th bombing ATL that would later become the prototype for Germaniae. The second happened about two years later, when I heard about Michael Dobson and Douglas Niles’ book Fox on the Rhine; though Dobson and Niles’ concept of the aftermath of Hitler’s assassination differed from mine in a lot of ways, I was still fascinated by their story and began thinking about how I might explore my own July 20^th bombing timeline in further detail.

The third point, and the moment I officially made up my mind to commit SSTG to paper, came in the late spring of 2005 when I was in the midst of working on another World War II-themed ATL series, It (Almost)Happened Here. While I was answering some of David Atwell’s feedback on the first couple of chapters of IAHH I reminded him that one of the other projects I’d been thinking of tackling for Changing The Times was an adaptation of my old Hitler assassination TL from Othertimelines.com; he encouraged me to follow through on it, and with that I started typing up my first draft of Germaniae’s first chapter. Germaniae’s title is a riff on the famous Latin proverb Sic semper tyrannis ("Thus ever to tyrants") and reflects my observation that more often than not, Germanic despots tend to come to rather unpleasant ends. The real Adolf Hitler spent his final hours holed up in a subterranean concrete pit where he blew his brains out. Erich Honecker, Walter Ulbricht’s successor as chancellor of East Germany, went from being master of the world’s third-most powerful Communist state to being a charity case in a Moscow hospital ward. Ulbricht himself succumbed to a rather nasty heart attack. So why not, I mused, have Der Führer go out with a (literal)bang in my July 20^th bombing scenario?

The Anglo-American and Soviet offensives portrayed in the Germaniae timeline are for the most part fast-forwarded versions of some of the actual campaigns waged by the Allies in Europe after D- Day and the Bagration offensive. I was also influenced by Caleb Carr’s essay "V-E Day-- November 11^th, 1944"¹, in which he sketches out a possible scenario under which Eisenhower could have forced a final surrender before Christmas. For those of you wondering why I referred to Operation Dragoon as ‘Market-Garden’, that was pretty much done intentionally as a means to bring home the point that in war plans can change in the blink of an eye...²

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....which, incidentally, brings me to my next topic. Some of you may have noticed that in Germaniae’s depiction of Eisenhower’s and Stalin’s respective decisions about going for Paris and intervening in the Warsaw uprising, they may be acting somewhat out of character to their real selves. My response to that concern is: If Hitler actually had been killed in the July 20^th bombing, Eisenhower and Stalin would not have hesitated to exploit the shock and demoralization his death would have created in the ranks of the German armed forces. When a boxer sees his opponent staggering against the ropes, he doesn’t waste time before landing the knockout punch.

If you think that the Murrow announcement of Hitler’s death sounds familiar, you’re right-- it’s modeled after Walter Cronkite’s actual bulletin on the death of John F. Kennedy in 1963 (though it’s safe to say Kennedy was a bit more popular than Der Führer). Likewise, my description of the Anglo-American forces’ final assault on Berlin is patterned on actual events; I based it on a combination of the OTL Red Army’s April 1945 attack on Berlin and the Allies’ counterassault against the Germans in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge.

As for my account of the Germaniae ATL’s atom bomb tests, most of it is essentially a replay of the actual events up to and including the bombing of Hiroshima. The only significant alteration I’ve made from actual history, apart from having Oppenheimer quote Revelations instead of Bhagavad-Gita, is to push the date of the New Mexico atomic test up about four months or so. For the Kokura bombing sequence, I did a bit of role reversal, swapping places between it and Nagasaki; it wasn’t all that difficult to do considering Kokura was the original intended target of the OTL second A-bomb strike.

I also used role reversal in my depiction of this ATL’s Berlin Airlift. Knowing Stalin’s paranoia, it wasn’t hard to envision him feeling as threatened by the Western powers’ presence in Berlin in the SSTG timeline as Truman, Attlee, and De Gaulle did in OTL by the Red Army divisions blockading the Western sectors of the German capital. Incidentally, the Berlin subplot of Germaniae has inspired me to write a spinoff, Enemies at the Gate.³

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You might have noticed that in most of my AH pieces, including Germaniae, I make extensive use of mock footnotes. A lot of AH writers use this technique to lend an extra touch of verisimilitude to their work, but the one whose technique has influenced me the most on that score is retired US Army colonel Peter G. Tsouras, who has edited or written more than a dozen military-themed AH books for the British publishing firm Greenhill Books.⁴ Tsouras bends over backwards to make sure his mock footnotes are as realistic as possible, and succeeds to a degree where you sometimes forget you’re reading a work of fiction. As a matter of fact, nearly half of my own mock footnotes are intended as kind of an in-joke homage to Tsouras and his peers.

You might also have noticed that in the closing paragraphs of the final chapter, when I describe the monument to Colonel Stauffenberg in the SSTG timeline’s present-day Berlin, I had the inscription at the base of the monument paraphrasing a quote by 18^th-century Frenchwoman Charlotte Corday, who said as she was being led to the guillotine to be executed for the murder of writer/propagandist Jean-Paul Marat: "I killed one man to save a hundred thousand." My reworking of the quote reads: "I killed one man to save a million." While there’s no actual record of Stauffenberg making a statement prior to his execution for the July 20^th bombing-- a gruesome hanging on a meathook in OTL as opposed to the execution by firing squad depicted in my timeline-- it occurred to me when I was working on the closing pages of the first chapter that given the chance to say something for posterity, he might have been inclined to invoke Corday’s famous epitaph as justification for seeking to do away with Hitler.

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Before I close out this essay, I want to mention author Cornelius Ryan’s influence on my series. His books in general-- and his account of the OTL fight for Berlin in particular, The Last Battle --guided me to a considerable extent. In the final episode of SSTG I made it a point to pay subtle homage to Ryan by including a mock footnote about Last Battle and referring to the movie adaptation of one of his other books, A Bridge Too Far, in a DBWI segment about films and books about the results of a failure of the July 20^th bombing.

And on that note, I’d like to thank you for your attention. I’d also like to point out that Enemies At The Gate is my second Germaniae spinoff; my first was I Am Become Death, which expands on my segments in the later chapters of SSTG about that timeline’s atomic bomb raids on Hiroshima and Kokura.