Catherine Gallagher muses that perhaps the real difference between the British and Continental Europeans is that the former treat Nazi occupation as an AH topic, whereas to the latter it was all too historical.
Swastikas on the Strand
The spectre of a Nazi Britain, successfully invaded in 1940, continues to haunt the British political imagination
Swastikas on the Strand
The spectre of a Nazi Britain, successfully invaded in 1940, continues to haunt the British political imagination
The film It Happened Here was inspired by the fact that London in 1956, when filming began, simply did not look like a victorious national capital. The filmmakers, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, grew up in postwar London, and were adolescents – only 18 and 16, respectively – when they began their project. They thought that, by altering a few details, London could be easily transformed into the landscape of a Nazi occupation. Theirs was the first visual representation of Nazi-occupied Britain. When they attempted to dress London as a set for their movie by draping Trafalgar Square in Nazi regalia, a number of real neo-Nazis enthusiastically joined in. Although the filmmakers kept them at arm’s length, eventually the Right-wing volunteers had a prominent role in the fictional story; they play themselves, proselytising for their racist ideology in a scene where they recruit the protagonist into the British Nazi Party.