Robert J. Maxwell It isn't one of those shabby, scratchy documentaries that wave the flag all over the place and terrify the viewers, the kind of product popular during the war.Actually, it's well researched and the material is presented systematically. Sure, it's a "What If" film. Another reviewer complained that it's not a documentary. Well, how could it be? Who has ever produced a documentary of things that never happened? Yet, the conjecture is kept to a minimum and existing Nazi documents are used in the construction of this awful scenario.One thing we're reminded of is that the Nazis did, in fact, occupy a part of Great Britain, namely the channel islands of Guernsey and Jersey, closer to France than to England. There was no resistance. The German troops simply walked in and took over. They were under strict orders to treat the population politely and fairly. (Violators would be executed.) They paid for their goods at the going exchange rates, until the goods more or less ran out.But if the Nazis had been able to invade and conquer England, the results would have been far different, according to plans laid out for the occupation. (The plans for the occupation were infinitely more thorough and logical than the plans for the invasion itself!)As in other conquered nations, the Germans would not simply have exterminated all those at the top and installed their own dictator. They didn't even plan to involve the English fascists. They had been courting the recently abdicated Edward VIII and would have installed him on the throne and had him urge national unity. You know, "Let's get the past behind us and work for the common good." The Royal Family itself would by this time have been evacuated to Canada.Once in power, the political situation would have followed a common channel. With German thoroughness, the occupation plan prepared by a general lists the names of individuals and groups that would, little by little, been quietly "removed" and sent away, never to be heard from again.Among the first to go would be those accused of homosexuality, like Noel Coward and Aldous Huxley. And good-bye avowed socialist Bertrand Russell, then at Oxford. The Freemasons and the Church of England were to be deprived of any political power -- or worse. The libraries would have had decadent books burned. The museums would have been looted and the work sent to the Fuhrermuseum in the Austrian city of Linz. Parallel to all of this, of course, would come the gradual identification, isolation, and extermination of the Jews.What difference would the Nazi conquest of Britain meant in the rest of the world? With Britain out of the way, there could have been no interference with the Axis occupation of the Balkans, which would mean that the invasion of the USSR could have begun in early spring as originally planned. The result would have been quick strikes in good weather and the likely collapse of the Soviet Union.There would have been no need for Hitler to declare war on the United States, which was busy with a war in the Pacific. But just in case his designers were working on a transatlatic bomber and a nuclear weapon. The making of an atomic bomb was in the hands of a physicist, Werner Heisenberg, who didn't proceed with it, for one reason or another, perhaps deliberately aborting the project. Still, Germany was far ahead of any other country in rocketry and the US could hardly have considered itself safe.The film spends too much time on the "auxiliaries," who were, in effect, trained as guerrilla fighters, but it observes accurately that they wouldn't have lasted long and that reprisals for their acts sabotage would have been terrible. The subject of collaboration is treated candidly. The film, as it now exists on DVD, is interrupted too often by the sign-on and sign-off logos -- an expanding circle of fire over a map of Britain with a swastika in the middle of it. And a few of the "reenactments" are overly extended.Those carps aside, it's not bad.

Syl This documentary is about what if Germany invaded Britain during World War II. It was a goal of the Nazis to overtake the world. This documentary describes the possibilities of the horrors that would happen to it's population. The Jews would be taken away after they are stripped of their businesses. They would be branded with yellow stars of David like all the others nations. They would placed in ghettos and sent to concentration camps in Eastern Europe where they would be killed. The Royal Family would evacuate to Canada. Churchill's secret army of Auxiliaries men and women would be more active and risk their lives to retake their country as the resistance. This documentary asks what would happen if Germany was successful. We must all stop and pause to thank that they weren't and never invaded Britain at all. The Britons knew Germany's horror in occupied Europe by those refugees.

mistypain A very interesting book that preceded both Deighton's SS-GB and this movie, was "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick. (He's also the author of many fantastic stories that have made it to the screen: Bladerunner; Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly).In the Man in the High Castle, the US is divided up between Japan and Germany after winning WWII. Japan gets the West Coast, Germany the East Coast.READ IT!! it's fantastic! and while you're at it, also read It Can't Happen Here...

gavsivan This documentary is actually the first part of a (two-part) miniseries entitled "Hitler's Britain." Part One gives a terrifyingly convincing picture of what might well have occurred if the Nazis had launched a successful invasion of Great Britain in 1940. It suggests that eminent appeasers, such as Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, would have collaborated with Hitler and that "enemies of the Reich" (Socialists, Freemasons, and of course Jews) would have been rounded up and shot or sent to the European death camps. Part Two visualizes the collapse of British military resistance within a few months of the invasion, the activating of Churchill's civilian underground fighters, and their ultimate destruction. That would have left Hitler free to perfect his long-range missiles and launch them in waves against the Soviet Union and the United States. Having lived through the World War 2 Blitz (in Liverpool), and knowing how the Nazis treated many millions of so-called "Untermenschen," I believe that these two documentaries provide a clear idea of what the British people's fate would have been under Nazi occupation.