by Scott Palter
Razvedrota – intelligence/reconnaissance units of 1940 Red Army. A regiment would have a company of these. Somewhat elite.
Red Tory – a faction of the British Conservative (Tory) Party who advocated radical reforms. Think of them as national socialists, but without the extreme racialism or tendency to extralegal violence.
Red November – the revolts against the Kaiser and war that overthrew the monarchy and led to the German surrender. Supposedly a conspiracy of Marxists, Jews, and traitors that stabbed in the back a still-victorious Germany army and people (this is the right-wing and nationalist myth, started originally by Ludendorff). The professional naval officers felt special shame for this, as the trigger was the mutiny of the High Seas Fleet. The naval officers had planned a suicide death sortie. Their crews were not of similar mind, and a series of acts of disobedience culminated in the November 3rd, 1918 mutiny of the fleet under Communist leadership. These red sailors were a major feature of the immediate postwar chaos in Berlin and northern Germany. The naval officer corps regarded this as a matter of personal dishonor to their caste and institution. Hence they created a new navy dedicated to creating a new mythos of an ultra-loyal, ultra-nationalist Fleet. Raeder was extreme but hardly unique in these views.
Reichsführer – fancy rank invented for Himmler as supreme leader of SS and police.
Reichsmarschall – fancy rank Göring invented and got Hitler to give him, so he would out-rank Army and Air Force Field Marshals.
Reichstag – German parliament of the Weimar and Nazi eras.
Reichswehr – the interwar German army of the Weimar years.
Royal Carabinieri – Italian paramilitary service. In US terms, they had both police and military functions. Extremely loyal to the Crown.
RSHA – Reichssicherheitshauptamt - Reich Main Security Office - a composite organization of all police and security forces of both the German state and Nazi Party.
SA – Original Nazi Party militia. Somewhat open question of whether they are part of the Nazi Party or allied to it. Leadership liquidated by 1934 Blood Purge. Vestigial after that, but still had hundreds of thousands of members in 1940. Blood Purge also settled their subordination to Nazi Party. Had a deserved reputation for disorderly, violent behavior. Also tended to be populist/second revolution types.
Schnell – literally fast. Mixed units of motorcyclists, autos, truck mounted forces sometimes with armored cars or tankettes but rarely have real tanks or assault guns.
SD – Sicherheitsdienst - Nazi Party intelligence service. Founded by Heydrich.
Second Revolution – from the beginning, the Nazis always had a radical wing that took seriously the socialist part of the Party name of “National Socialist”. Pressure for a second, populist revolution was one of the causes of the 1934 Blood Purge. In OTL, this was then suppressed until after the 1944 Bomb Plot. Comes back to the forefront in the short year between that and final defeat.
Sonderverband – literally special operations unit. Think of it as an ad hoc force of battalion to regimental size.
SS – A split-off from the SA. Always subordinate to Hitler and the Party. Often higher social class/better educated than the SA. After the Blood Purge, the main defenders of the regime.
SS House – Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. The top floor of # 8 was Himmler’s (subsequently Schellenberg’s) office; Heydrich SD/RSHA HQ was in the Palais itself – in the ATL, he chooses to keep his office there. With several adjacent buildings, they formed a complex in which SS, SD, Gestapo, RSHA, etc. were based.
Stalhelm – the street militia of the Weimar Era Nationalist Party. Like the SA, also an illegal reserve for Reichswehr.
Tante Ju – nickname for Junkers Ju 52/3m transport plane.
TUC/Trades Union Conference – Labor federation of England and Wales, NOT the entire UK or British Empire. Technically separate from the Labor Party.
TVA – Tennessee Valley Authority. A government agency that provided power and socioeconomic development to the Tennessee Valley. The idea was of public dams to provide cheap electricity for a backward multistate region grouped around the middle and upper Tennessee river valley. This had been a US progressive dream. It took the Great Depression to make this sort of public ownership popular enough to get the law passed and the dams funded. The TVA generated a lot of electrical power, but like most New Deal projects had a fair number of pie-in-the-sky nostrums it also unsuccessfully backed. Wendell Willkie was attorney and then chief executive of the private power company the TVA put out of business. This public fight was what led Willkie to become a Republican for the 1940 election. The TVA power plants also in OTL provided the massive power needed by the nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge. So in a sense the TVA makes the Manhattan Project successful on a time scale that mattered for the war. As is, the A-bomb barely arrived in time to prevent the invasion of Japan, which would have been a bloodbath of biblical proportions.
Volksdeutsche – Germans by race or culture, but not citizens of the German Reich. It was Nazi policy to ingather these large populations of “Germans” to the Reich. The problem was defining who was such a “German”. Of most interest in this series is the Class 5 “Germanizable Elements”. This was a quite flexible term, although OTL’s Nazis did not in fact use much flexibility before 1944 (by which time the war was lost). Here, Heydrich takes a more expansive path.
Wafd – Egyptian bourgeois nationalist party. They desired to get the British to leave, and replace the monarchy with something more modern. They were divided on whether that should be parliamentary, or autocratic in the Italian mold. Their militant youth wing were the Blue Shirts. The other revolutionaries saw the Wafd as sellouts because they would do short term deals with the British and the throne. The Wafd, for their part, saw the Muslim Brotherhood and Young Egypt Movement as hopeless idealists unable to play the political game. There is a large element of truth in both appraisals. It took WW2 to weaken the British enough to make evicting them in one try feasible.
Walking Around Money – the US term of art for cash spread around on election day to get people to the polls. It was how the local influentials and precinct workers got paid beyond petty graft.
Wehrmacht – the German armed forces as a whole – Heer, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe
Wehrmachtbericht – Daily military bulletin. Getting individual mention was a high honor; equivalent to the British military’s “Mentioned in dispatches.”
Western Desert Force – Corps-sized British field force in Egypt west of Alexandria summer 1940. In OTL they pull off stupendous victories against the Italian 10th Army. Here the battle goes otherwise.
World Peace League – this ATL’s above-ground front for the remaining Communists, now that the party has been outlawed over the sinking of US ships starting with Langley and Reuben James.
Wrangel’s White Army – White/Monarchist/Anti-Communist Army in South Russia 1919-1920. Wrangel was successor to Denekin. Ivan Gorlov served with these two and several of their predecessors.
Young Egypt Party – more radical nationalist counterpart to the Wafd. Their youth militants were the Green Shirts. Think of them as religious-tinged Egyptian pseudo-fascists. Into politics of the deed, street fighting, and assassinations. Their strength was their militancy. Their weakness was their obsession with action over organization.
