History of the German Reich (from the Breach onward)

Baseline

Until April 30th, 1919, identical to our timeline. Germany has lost the Great War: the Kaiser abdicated in November 1918, the Armistice is in effect, a republic has been proclaimed from the Reichstag steps, the Allied naval blockade continues, and Freikorps paramilitaries and Communist Spartacists are shooting each other in the streets of Berlin and Munich. The Allied delegations are in Paris writing the peace. The only difference is what a circle of Thule Society occultists and a handful of Imperial physicists have been building on the summit of the Brocken, in the Harz Mountains, since the previous autumn.

1910s

• April 30th–May 1st, 1919 (Walpurgisnacht): the Breach. Faced with the terms being drafted in Paris, elements of the High Command authorize the Brocken device, a relativistic field collider wrapped in ritual, as a last wonder-weapon. It opens the Rift. The sky over the Harz turns the color of a bruise, tremors are felt in Vienna and Copenhagen, and things pour down the mountain into Saxony and Thuringia. Three Reichswehr divisions sent to contain them cease to exist within a week.
• May 1919: the Brocken Campaign. The Armistice becomes an alliance. British, American, and French armies cross from the Rhine bridgeheads; Reichswehr, Freikorps, Polish cavalry, and Trotsky's Red Army armored trains push west from the Berlin–Magdeburg line under a truce signed on the Vistula; the Bavarian Red Guard, Czech legionnaires, and Austrian remnants come north through Thuringia. Halle, Magdeburg, and Nordhausen are evacuated. Nordhausen is not recovered.
• May 29, 1919: the Battle of the Rift. The coalition fights its way to the summit and holds a perimeter around a circle of mystics (Old Academy wizards, Orthodox and Catholic exorcists, two Thule defectors, and a Lakota holy man attached to the AEF) who use the seven-minute solar eclipse to seal the Rift. Captain Albrecht von Falkenhorst's company holds the last hundred meters. He is the last man to look into the Rift before it closes, and the first German hero of the new age.
• June 1919: the Harz Exclusion Zone is declared: a perimeter of roughly forty miles around the Brocken, within which the Veil never fully healed and the survivors of the Breach fauna still hunt. The Reichswehr is given the Zone to guard and keeps it.
• November 11, 1919: the Treaty of Versailles. Germany is named the author of the Breach. The War Guilt clause is replaced by the Arcane Culpability clause: Germany is a "reckless state," permanently forbidden to research, synthesize, or weaponize paraphysical technology, and an Inter-Allied Arcane Control Commission (IAACC) is given extraterritorial rights to inspect any German factory, laboratory, or university. Alsace-Lorraine returns to France and the Saar is placed under French administration; German arcane patents and surviving paraphysicists are confiscated outright. Cash reparations are waived, in recognition of the dead, and replaced by a reconstruction program funded by American banks and run by American industrialists. The Reichswehr is permitted a standing strength of 400,000, with artillery and aircraft, for the Exclusion Zone and the eastern frontier. And by the Sanitary Cordon clause, Germany is required to register, isolate, and quarantine every citizen "showing dimensional alteration or latent spellcraft" before normal cross-border commerce can resume.
• Winter 1919: the first Touched registries open in Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin. There are 380,000 names on them by spring. The nationalist press calls Versailles the Hexenfrieden, the witches' peace, and tells the country the Brocken would have won the war had it not been betrayed.

1920s

The decade of the Reconstruction. Germany is rebuilt faster and more thoroughly than any country has ever been rebuilt, by foreigners, and resents every brick.

• 1920: the IAACC inspectors arrive. Over the decade they close the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's physics division twice, confiscate the Göttingen mathematics faculty's library, and are, in every German newspaper, the occupation that Versailles pretended not to impose.
• 1921–1924: the Dresden model. Ford, Mellon, and the American National Arcane Research Council build an entire new industrial region on the ruins of Saxony: assembly plants, worker housing, a hydroelectric grid, and, with a special IAACC waiver, the first German Veil-plant, American-owned, at Pirna. "We'll do in Detroit what we did in Dresden" will later be an American campaign slogan. In Germany it is remembered as the decade the country was turned into a factory with foreign management.
• 1923: the Munich putsch. A coalition of Freikorps veterans and Thule circles attempts to seize Bavaria under a street demagogue whose name is now a footnote. It fails in a day. Falkenhorst, by then a Reichswehr colonel, commands the troops who put it down, and is noted in the foreign press as a man the republic can rely on.
• 1924–1929: the quarantine becomes an institution. The Allied-mandated Touched registries, run by German civil servants, grow into the Reichsamt für Quarantäne, with its own inspectors, its own camps (called "sanatoria"), and its own doctors. By the end of the decade it is the largest agency in the Reich, and no Allied inspector has ever objected to anything it does, since it was their idea.
• 1926: Germany joins the League of Nations.
• 1927: Falkenhorst, now a major general, is given command of the Harz Exclusion Zone. He spends three years there, and the Zone, which had killed a commander a year, goes quiet.
• October 1929: the Crash. American capital withdraws from Germany faster than it entered. The Dresden plants close. Unemployment reaches six million by 1931.

1930s

• 1930–1932: the collapse of the republic. Three chancellors govern by emergency decree under Article 48. The Communists and the nationalists fight in the streets again. The Reichsamt für Quarantäne, the one agency still hiring, becomes the nationalists' recruiting ground, and the Touched, the one population everyone has already agreed is dangerous, become their answer to every question.
• April 1932: Albrecht von Falkenhorst is elected Reichspräsident in the second round, defeating Hindenburg's chosen successor and the Communist candidate on a platform of order, the Exclusion Zone, and "a Germany that need not be inspected." He is forty-one, a general, the hero of the Rift, and the only candidate who has never belonged to a party.
• February 1933: the Harz Incidents. A series of border breaches from the Exclusion Zone, and a "Touched uprising" in a Leipzig sanatorium that leaves forty guards dead, give the new President the emergency he needs. He proclaims, under Article 48, a Permanent State of Bio-Aetheric Quarantine and National Emergency. Civil liberties are suspended. The constitution is not abolished; it is simply no longer in force. The Reichstag, purged by arrest and resignation, votes the decree its blessing. Hjalmar Schacht is appointed Chancellor to run the railways and the coal tariffs.
• 1933–1934: the Quarantine Intelligence Service (Quarantäne-Nachrichtendienst) is created under Reinhard Heydrich to find the unregistered Touched. The sanatoria become camps. The Reichsamt's doctors are given a new mandate: not to cure the Touched but to understand them.
• March 1934: Germany denounces the Arcane Culpability clause. The IAACC inspectors are given seventy-two hours to leave. Britain protests; France mobilizes a division; the United States, whose investors have just signed new Dresden contracts with the Falkenhorst government, suggests that the matter be referred to the League. It is.
• 1935: open rearmament. The Reichswehr, never reduced below 400,000, becomes the Wehrmacht and doubles. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Paraphysics reopens with the staff the Reichsamt's camps have been quietly training for a decade. The Ahnenerbe is chartered to recover "the ancestral heritage of the German people," which turns out to be anywhere a relic is buried.
• 1936: the Anschluss with Austria, by plebiscite and under Wehrmacht escort. The Axis is signed with Italy and Bulgaria. Wehrmacht "volunteers" and the first arcane units go to Spain.
• September 1937: the invasion of the Ottoman Empire. Germany's old ally, which had survived 1919 as a reduced state in Anatolia and the Levant because no Allied power had the appetite to partition it during the Breach year, is attacked without a declaration through Bulgaria and by sea from Italian ports. Falkenhorst's public reason is the Sultan's "harboring of fugitive Touched"; his actual reason is the Holy Land. Constantinople falls in November.
• 1938: Munich. The Czechoslovak crisis is resolved by the transfer of the Sudetenland and of Prague's relic vaults, the oldest in central Europe, to German custody; Britain and France sign, and the American observer raises no objection. In the east, the Anatolian campaign ends and Rommel's Afrika Korps, which is not yet in Africa, takes Damascus in December.
• Summer 1939: Jerusalem is occupied and placed under direct military administration as the Reichsland Heiligkeitsbezirk. The Ahnenerbe begins digging under the Temple Mount.
• August 1939: the Reissner–Ribbentrop Pact. Non-aggression between the Reich and the Soviet Union, with a secret protocol dividing not Poland but the world's dig sites: the Reich takes western Poland, the Abrahamic lands, Egypt, and Arabia; the Soviets take eastern Poland, the Baltic, Finland, northern Persia, Mesopotamia east of the Tigris, and all of Central Asia.
• September 1939: Poland. Cracow, Europe's oldest magical faculty, burns on the ninth day. Britain and France declare war.

1940s

• May–June 1940: France falls in six weeks. The Wehrmacht's arcane units, Flicker-Pack airborne and Entropic Cannon batteries, go through the Maginot Line as if it were a hedge; the garrisons are found afterward, alive, and unable to say what they saw. Dunkirk: the British Expeditionary Force escapes by a working nobody has claimed. Paris is occupied; Marshal Pétain's government at Vichy signs an armistice that leaves Germany Alsace-Lorraine, sovereign fortresses at Dunkirk, Brest, and Bordeaux, and the Atlantic coast.
• July 1940: Falkenhorst rejects the invasion of Britain. The Royal Navy's aether-looms have made the Channel a graveyard for anything that floats; the U-boat fleet, with its Harz-alloy hulls, is ordered to starve the island instead. The Blitz begins in September and is fought, in part, in the London Underground.
• 1940–1941: the Little War. With Europe quiet, the Afrika Korps crosses into Egypt. Suez is severed in December 1940; Cairo falls in March 1941 and is placed under a Coptic protectorate; Kuwait's oil fields are seized in June. Britain holds Aden, Baghdad, and Mesopotamia west of the Tigris, barely. The campaign is called the Little War because everyone knows which war is the big one.
• 1941: Crete is occupied and the Aegean closed. Slovenia is carved out of Yugoslavia as a client state and the Trieste rail corridor is secured; Constanța is occupied by "invitation" of the Romanian government. Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states accept German bases "against Bolshevism." The Schwedisch-Finnische Freiwilligenkorps goes to Finland to fight the Soviets without the Reich doing so.
• December 1941: Pearl Harbor. Falkenhorst sends President Lindbergh a personal message of sympathy and an offer of mediation. The Pacific Accord, two months later, is described in Berlin as "the wisdom of a Germanic people."
• Spring 1942: now. The Reich holds Europe from Brest to the Bug, the Levant, Egypt, and the Gulf; it is at war with Britain and nobody else; it is at peace with the United States, which it calls its natural ally, and with the Soviet Union, which it does not. Falkenhorst has begun to speak of "the four superpowers of the coming century." His inner circle knows he means three.