In 1961, as part of a series of special feature stories commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. entry into the Second World War, the American newsmagazine Look printed the article "If Hitler Had Won World War II" by noted author and journalist William L. Shirer.

Battle of GreenlandIn chillingly precise and realistic terms Shirer's article depicted what the Nazis might have done to a conquered America if the U.S. Navy's Atlantic fleet hadn't succeeded in intercepting and destroying a German invasion force off the Greenland coast in June of 1941; one segment which especially disturbed Look's readers was Shirer's portrayal of a hypothetical ethnic cleansing campaign in which SS Einsatzgruppen methodically wiped out Native Americans, blacks, and Jews for the sake of making the occupied United States a purely "Aryan" country.


Interestingly enough one of the men Shirer interviewed for his story, an ex-Wehrmacht attache to the German embassy in Paris prior to the May 1940 German invasion of France, revealed that most of the troops and equipment committed to the ill-fated North American venture had in fact been previously assigned to a cancelled attack on the Soviet Union code-named Operation Barbarossa; Hitler ordered the attack on Russia postponed after becoming convinced(despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that America would be the easier target.