In the summer and early autumn of 1940, Goering’s Luftwaffe had won the Battle of Britain and control over the English skies.
Hitler’s plans for Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain, were put in effect and the German troops who landed on the beaches and parachuted into the countryside easily overcome the British Army forces already demoralized after the evacuation of Dunkirk.
London is quickly taken, Churchill and the Royal Family flee to Canada and days later the first German troops arrive in Manchester.
Fantasy yes, and a great question of What If’s which people who watched the first part of SS-GB last night on television will have seen images of a bombed out Buckingham Palace and Nazi flags down the Mall, but how would Manchester and the NW have survived a Nazi occupation?
As the historian Ed Glinert has surmised, would we have had Jackboot-clad generals holding court at the Midland Hotel, a Town Hall festooned with Swastikas; Jews, gays, blacks rounded up at Central Station, Piccadilly and Victoria.
One myth has always been that the Nazi leader had fond affections for the Midland Hotel, and had instructed the Luftwaffe to spare it from their bombs in the Xmas blitz of 1940, eyeing it up as being the perfect place for a regional headquarters.
It was almost certainly just a myth, the accuracy of bombers sights and the ensuing fire bomb storm would prevent any real notion of this being a plan. It was said that the story came from an American intelligence agent who found documents which suggested Hitler ordered that some buildings be preserved for a future Nazi regime in England, the Central Library and the Town Hall were also included on the list.
He was also said to be a huge admirer of Rochdale’s Victorian Gothic Town Hall and it was said that there were plans for that as well.
Of course, England was not invaded, so we will never know the scenario, although plans for the running of the occupied country have been widely shared since 1945 and we know what happened in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
It would have been a chilling existence, no more so than for the City’s Jewish population who would in all certainty have suffered the same fate as their brethren on the continent.
Manchester had been one of the first cities to demonstrate against the Nazi menace back in April 1933 when a meeting of protest against the persecution of the Jewish people in Germany was held at the Free Trade Hall in one of the largest gatherings in the city under any auspices for many years.
William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw Haw”, broadcaster of pro-Nazi propaganda over the wireless from Germany in English during the war, had been a regular speaker at the Free Trade Hall in the 1930s. At the time he was the second in command of the British Union of Fascists.
It would have been a chilling time, of that there is no doubt.Jews and others thought undesirable by the occupiers rounded up, men of working age sent to Labour camps where they would work for the Nazi war machine, and probably help power the war in the East that would, with the extra resource of men, defeat Stalin and a world that may well have remained in darkness for many years.
