I have several thoughts - this comment is probably unformed but this prompted several things in my head at once.
Firstly: I think there's an inherent tension between AH as entertainment and AH as a reflection of historical truth. What make things readable and what make things true are often two very different things. I think others are right to say that this gets even starker in visual media - there needs to be an ooomph to draw the viewer in. Furthermore, in fiction generally, you
can't take a whole book to explain the myriad factors that led to a big event, so there's an inherent simplification thereto.
Secondly: I for one quite enjoyed
The Man in the High Castle show, as problematic as some aspects of it are. I quite liked that it actually bothered to show how callous Imperial Japan was (as a Filipino-American I'm something of a stickler on this subject). More generally, it nails the dissonance of living in an authoritarian state - it's completely normal feeling until it isn't. That's what I think made John Smith, and Rufus Sewell's portrayal thereof, so compelling. He's a fully fledged human being with likes and loves and a family - and he still engages in mass murder.
This is something I find in a lot of liberal media critiques that irks me - this accusation that all portrayals of evil people with human qualities makes them good. This ends up distancing the writer from human evil, with this unpleasant implication that the writer, and those like the writer, could never be like the evil person.
I'm from the Washington DC area. I went to school with the children of war profiteers - and the fact that said profiteers are named 'Raytheon' or 'Lockheed Martin' rather than small operations run out of a cave in Afghanistan does not make that not the case. The older I get, the more it becomes clear to me that the economy of this entire area is based on murdering Middle Eastern children, and the complacency of the people here becomes more unnerving. These are people who will (rightly) bash red states for cruel laws about transgender children and abortion, but not blink about the missile factories. I have cherished friends here, and beloved restaurants, and wonderful dance venues, and lovely parks - and it's all possible because of
bloody murder. Exploring this particular dissonance is something I think a lot of Nazi victory works do very well (
Fatherland is the gold standard, and
@varyar's
In and Out of the Reich does it well too).
These critiques, I find, end up being apologia for the crimes of Allied powers - "surely we [the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, etc.] could never be so awful as
them! [Nazi Germany/Imperial Japan]" They imply some sort of fundamental separation, one that I, as someone with family in a third-world country, just can't accept. The Nazis were inspired by the British Raj and the conquest of the American West among other things; indeed, the latter has only a few rivals in being the closest OTL event to a successful Generalplan Ost. Indeed I've found it useful to conceive of Nazism as a potpourri of every bad thing in the Western world from about 1600 onward.
We don't like to think of the Allied powers, those valiant destroyers of fascism, as locking up Japanese-Americans under false pretenses, or knowingly raining napalm on cities made of wood, or starving three million Bengalis out of racism, or killing hundreds of thousands of their own people by blowing a dam along the Yellow River, or raping every woman in Berlin between the ages of eight and eighty, or departing the Crimean Tatars under false pretenses. There are
many other such examples.
I think it needs to be acknowledged that the societies most of us live in - First World countries with European cultural backgrounds - are the societies that the Nazis and Imperial Japan took much inspiration from (see much of the Meiji Restoration for the latter). In other words, in many of these works, one of the implicit messages is that we are nowhere nearly as different as the people in these scenarios as we would like to believe. We could all be complicit in evil; several of us already are.
I think that Axis victories, when done well, are useful in exploring these historical themes, and the emotions related to them (I think in many readers/viewers the primary emotion is not 'this is cool!' but 'this is fascinating in a horrible sort of way' - and I think the latter can be used to historically responsible effect if you do it right - they're like horror movies in that regard). The above is why I'm skeptical of calls to do away with them entirely, because I think that when done well they serve a useful purpose. As I've said in reviews, some things are easier to see in a mirror.