I have been reading the above alternate history novel by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson which was published in 2000.
1. The Point of Divergence (that the Stauffenberg bomb kills Hitler) is plausible. It only requires that the briefcase is not moved to the other side of the table-leg in the Wolf’s Lair.
2. The plot unfolds with the plotters being unable to take power from the Naci administration – again plausible, in light of the plotters’ OTL incompetence.
3. *Goering is assassinated on the orders of *Himmler. Certainly Himmler would have had no qualms about ordering this, but could he have got away with it?
4. The biggest divergence from OTL is that the Nazis persuade Stalin to make a separate peace. I find this far-fetched, following Barbarossa.
5. Page 191 – a German officer says to Molotov – “You can use your military energies far better than crushing us by annexing better strategic territory. May I suggest Norway, for its Atlantic access, and Greece, for your long-awaited warm-water port?” Page 237 lists the concessions “Not only Norway and Greece, but a demilitarized and defenceless Sweden, assistance in installing Communist governments in Rumania and Bulgaria, German withdrawal from much of Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia to establish a demilitarized buffer”. So Germany apparently retains her pre-1939 borders in the East, with control of parts of Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Of course Sweden remained neutral during the Cold War, and until the Ukraine War.
6. I (GT) note that, by 1949, Stalin was watching the NATO flag flying across the Norway-USSR border in the Arctic. I suggest that he may well have wished that he had set up a puppet communist state in northern Norway. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_of_Finnmark “The last Soviet forces withdrew from Norway on 25 September 1945.” Citing https://barentsobserver.com/en/society/2014/10/scorching-and-liberation-finnmark-short-introduction-14-10 So WI Stalin decides either: -
a. To push further into Norway than he did on OTL, on the basis that control of more Atlantic coast will be of more strategic use to him than an area of territory in central Europe which he could capture with the same resources.
b. Alternatively, post VE Day, that the Soviet forces in Kirkenes will simply not leave.
7. I (GT) note that, in 1941, Bulgaria had [re]annexed Western Thrace, restoring the Aegean coastline which she had had prior to the Treaty of Neuilly after WWI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_occupation_of_Greece#Bulgarian_withdrawal for subsequent events. So by the time that the Warsaw Pact was created, Bulgaria had lost Western Thrace again, with the result that the Warsaw Pact did not have direct access to the Mediterranean (other than in Albania, which was separated from the rest of the Pact by Yugoslavia. I suggest that Stalin may well have watched the NATO flag flying in Western Thrace and wished by this stage than he had arranged for Bulgaria to retain Western Thrace. I suggest that he could have done so by horse-trading something else in September/October 1944.
8. Page 150 – Ribbentrop says “In 1943, when I last met Molotov, our sticking point was that we could not agree on an armistice border”. This meeting is not *merely* a figment of the authors’ imagination. See https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/GEHLEN%2C%20REINHARD%20%20%20VOL.%206_0136.pdf referring to a book by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._H._Liddell_Hart which claims that “Ribbentrop proposed as condition of peace that Russia's future frontier should run along the Dnieper, while Molotov would not consider anything less than the restoration of her original frontier”. The CIA seem to have considered the book interesting. What is the current academic view on the accuracy or otherwise of L-H’s statement? Was anything subsequently found in the Soviet archives?