BELFAST RB BOOKLET 2020 - Flipbook - Page 60
Ci t y of Belf ast Grand Bl ack Chapt er - Dem onst rat i on Bookl et 2020
JUST THINK ABOUT IT … ?
With this year being seventy-five years since the ending of World War II in 1945,
has it ever dawned on anyone, hypothetically that is .. what would have
happened if Hitler and his evil fascist regime had been the victors back then?
Many novels, such as 'Swastika Night' or
the 'Fatherland' were written around the ..
'what if' .. theme as well as stage plays, like
Noel Coward's .. 'Peace in our Time' .. have
all taken on, that imaginary genre.
However such a reality was vividly brought
to our living rooms a few years ago when BBC
television screened a chilling weekly drama
series called SS-GB, centred on London and
parts of Britain during the forties, using just
that sickening, nightmare scenario, and whilst
we all knew it had never happened, it did
somehow, make folk sit up and think .. what if
the Nazis were running the world today?
world; free from Nazism, the Swastika
and the demonic, Adolf Hitler!!
Considering that in June 1940 a cowardly
but serious faction within the British
Government had urged them to make peace
with Germany; in September 1940 the RAF
was also within a whisker of suffering defeat,
thus leaving Britain open to a probable
invasion; whilst in October 1941 Russia was
teetering on the brink of collapse as panic
gripped Moscow and German troops stood a
mere forty miles away from its borders.
Had history taken slightly different turns
at any of these junctures, then Hitler could
well have achieved his dream of total
conquest of Europe. In his twisted and
sordid mind, the sequel to a victorious
World War II by Germany would have been
WW III, followed by a fourth, and so on until
he had conquered the entire globe.
President Franklin D Roosevelt later on in
his memoirs outlined his own thoughts of what
he envisaged would have been the future of
The above still picture from the thriller, of the world as he saw it, in the event of Hitler
just how Buckingham Palace might have winning the conflict back then.
looked, certainly brought a chill to the bone
He imagined that any initial victory in Europe
just thinking of Adolf Hitler sitting on the
throne instead of our Royal Family.
Waking up unexpectedly one morning and
hearing a group of German soldiers battering
at your front door, or the imposition of martial
law, would be enough to give anybody the
frighteners, considering what they did to the
millions of Jews during that Great War in the
mid-forties; or the horror of the Holocaust and
death camps such as Auschwitz.
So reading on and imagining the 'what if
scenario' .. then praise be to God that
we had so many young men and
women, others perhaps not so young,
but all equally as brave as each other, in
laying down their lives for peace in the
IN MEMORY OF THE FALLEN - 58 - AND THE FUTURE OF THE LIVING