I recall reading the first half of an alternate history book (cannot recall the name or author now - I left the book outside by the pool and and it got blown in). In this book, America did not enter the war because Japan did not attack Pearl Harbor, and the Nazis took Europe and the Middle East as you suggested. America became an island unto itself. A dark, depressed place where energy and other resources were scarce and there was constant fear of an invasion from all directions...
Books should be waterproof. :’) Mine usually get a little dip when I doze off reading in the tub.
That possible scenario was earlier expressed after a fashion in Orwell’s “1984”, but of course, in that book, the entire world was a socialist police state, divided into three spheres of influence, but for all practical purposes identical.
I don’t think the Germans could have prevailed in the east, except in the sense of a Pyrrhic Victory — 50 to 100 million dead, the USSR shattered into successor states east of the Urals, 3 to 5 million Germans dead from combat, and the Reich unable to maintain such a broad occupation, but the armed forces unable to return home due to Hitler’s stubbornness.
The Waffen SS successfully recruited from most of occupied Europe, including in the SSRs. There’s a coffeetable book around here somewhere which spends no time at all on the coffeetable (come to think of it, I don’t have one), anyway, it’s about the Waffen SS, and has personal collection photos from various surviving volunteers, including one from the Netherlands, who wrote that his favorite memories of the war are the winter firefights in the USSR. :’) The Netherlanders I’ve known around here (western Michigan) who grew up under the occupation didn’t care for it, and emigrated here after the war, but by and large the Germans weren’t that unpopular there.
The reason for that wordy previous paragraph was to set up the speculation that the victorious postwar Reich probably would have rebuilt its occupation forces out of the successful core of the Waffen SS. This is analogous to the earlier imperial period of Rome — the use of auxiliaries was formalized and standardized under Augustus (the first “real” emperor) and made up half of the Roman army. By the end of the 2nd century the regular Roman legions were a polyglot bunch who used the common tongue (Latin) but were otherwise non-Roman, and often enough non-Italian. The regular legions continued to use the Roman army methods, and the auxiliaries continued to trains for specialized tactics and weapons, but ethnically, probably little difference.
If Hitler had not been bent on fighting his fantasy-football version of a war, and stopped with the remilitarization of the Rhineland and annexation of Czechoslovakia, patience would probably have paid off handsomely. Anschluss with Austria and the occupation of Czechoslovakia created a huge contiguous Germanic state with frontiers with most of the other nations in Europe. The prewar German economic recovery was based on swapping consumer goods for the raw materials, a deal that Latin American countries jumped on. It was feasible because the German Mark was toilet paper in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Poles would have had more common interests with the Germans and Poland would have made a very nice ally against and buffer state along the USSR. Of course, Hitler’s other agenda was the Holocaust; after the war one of the SS Nazis who was (I think) later hanged stated that Himmler had told him that “Polish Jewry was the genetic powerhouse of European Jewry,” and that furthermore, “with the exception of the Jews liberated in the camps, every single Polish Jewish individual was exterminated.” What a creepy bunch of assholes they were.