When characters greet each other with “Sieg Heil” and an enthusiastic Nazi salute, what’s most chilling about the gesture is how ordinary it feels. Some did try to fight, with little success, but the vast majority have simply accepted life under enemy occupation as the new normal. In another, characters dance around the fact that a mass genocide of the Jews took place shortly after the end of the war.) (In one chilling scene, a highway cop casually explains that snow-like ash falling from the sky emanates from the nearby hospital, where the state incinerates the sick and injured. government and utterly crushing the country’s willpower. For the most part, civilians have adjusted to life under enemy rule – fascist symbols and ideology have completely permeated the basic fabric of American life, and most spend their days trying to convince themselves that nothing has really changed, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s soon revealed that the war was lost once Hitler gained possession of an A-bomb and detonated it over Washington, wiping out the U.S. flags are riddled with swatstikas, the few surviving Jews have been driven deep underground, and a brutal police force executes any accused dissidents with brutal efficiency. Meanwhile, American society has capitulated to the totalitarian rule of German and Japanese forces.
The prospect of his imminent death adds new complexity to the already-fragile truce between Japan and Germany, and many – including Japan’s trade minister (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and a senior Nazi official (Carsten Norgaard), who conspire against their respective governments in hope of maintaining peace – fear that his passing could usher in a new era of calamitous bloodshed.
In The Man in the High Castle‘s chilling reality, the year is 1962, and the Führer, though alive, is old and graying.