It Happened Here
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The German invasion of England took place in July 1940 after the British retreat from Dunkirk. Strongly resisted at first, the German army took many months to restore order. But the resistance movement, lacking outside support, was finally crushed. For three years it lay dormant. Collaboration increased as the population became adjusted to the tedium of occupation... Then, in 1944, the resistance movement reappeared ..."--It Happened Here (1964) by Brownlow and Mollo |
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It Happened Here (also known as It Happened Here: The Story of Hitler's England) is a 1964 British black-and-white film written, produced and directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, who began work on the film as teenagers. The film's largely amateur production took some eight years, using volunteer actors with some support from professional filmmakers.
It Happened Here shows an alternative history in which the United Kingdom has been invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II. The plot follows the experiences of an Irish nurse working in England, who encounters people who believe collaboration with the invaders is for the best, while others are involved in the resistance movement against the occupiers and their local collaborators.
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Plot
Setting
The film opens with the statement: "The German invasion of Britain took place in 1940 after the retreat from Dunkirk." After months of fierce resistance and brutal reprisals, the occupying forces manage to restore order, largely suppressing the resistance movement. However, due to demands from the Ural Mountains front, most German troops are eventually removed from Western Europe, and the garrisoning of Britain is largely carried out by local volunteers to the German army and the SS.
England appears to be governed by the British Union of Fascists (the situation in the rest of the British Isles is unclear but presumably similar); the followers are referred to as "Blackshirts", wear uniforms with the Flash and Circle, and a framed portrait of Oswald Mosley appears in a government building, alongside one of Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, the United States, having entered the war, stations its U.S. Seventh Fleet off Ireland. The Americans begin bombing raids on the southwest coast of England, as well as supplying men and equipment to a resurgent partisan movement.
Story
Set in 1944–1945, the story focuses on an apolitical Irish district nurse, Pauline. Following an upsurge in partisan activity in her area, she is forcibly evacuated from her village by the Germans and their collaborators and witnesses an attack on German forces by a group of British partisans, during which a number of her friends from the village are killed in the crossfire. The attack (and more particularly the deaths) influences her subsequent views and decisions.
She is evacuated to London, where she reluctantly becomes a collaborator, joining the medical wing of the Immediate Action Organisation (IAO), a quasi-paramilitary medical corps and is re-trained as an ambulance attendant. Although at first reluctant and intent on remaining apolitical, Pauline begins to show the effects of fascist indoctrination in her behaviour. It is a reunion with old friends (an antifascist doctor and his wife) that gives Pauline pause, and when she subsequently discovers they are harbouring an injured partisan, she reluctantly agrees to help.
Gradually Pauline learns more about the impacts of the German occupation, and she sees her friends arrested. The discovery of her association with the antifascist couple by her superiors in the IAO leads to her demotion and transfer to another part of the country. She welcomes the move at first, as her new job appears to have less of the paramilitary trappings. However, Pauline discovers that she has unwittingly taken part in a forced euthanasia programme and killed a group of foreign forced labourers who had contracted tuberculosis.
The film ends with Pauline being arrested after protesting and refusing to continue; but before she can be put on trial, she is captured by the resurgent British Resistance and agrees to work for them as they fight to liberate the country with the help of arriving American troops. In the finale, Pauline tends a group of wounded partisans while, out of her view, a large group of soldiers from the Black Prince Regiment of the British Legion of the Waffen-SS who had surrendered are summarily shot.
See also
- Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II – a common concept of alternate history
- Auxiliary Units
- It Can't Happen Here – a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis about a fascist uprising in the United States
- Operation Sea Lion in fiction
- List of films shot over three or more years
- "The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth
- SS-GB
- Fatherland (1994 film)
- The Man in the High Castle (TV series)
- Enemy at the Door
