What inspired SS-GB? Real-life Nazi blueprints reveal how Hitler planned to kill famous Brits and turn Blackpool into an SS playground
A NAZI takeover of Britain would have seen top British figures rounded up and executed and Blackpool turned into an SS playground, historians believe.
Big-budget Sunday night drama SS-GB took a retrospective look at 1940s London if Adolf Hitler's armies had invaded Blighty.
It paints a bleak picture of life under the German jackboot during the dark early days of the Second World War.
London would be encircled with the rest of the country expected to capitulate soon after.
Bizarrely, Adolf Hitler ordered that Blackpool must be spared during the Blitz so it could be used as a playground for his German troops after a potential invasion.
Terrifying details of Nazi plans for "undesirable" Brits were revealed in the SS Black Book.
Notable figures such as Winston Churchill, Virgina Woolf, Noel Coward, Neville Chamberlain and H.G. Wells were to be arrested.
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Evil Einsatzgruppen death squad soldiers were tasked with identifying and rounding up Britain's 300,000 Jews.
And the tiny Shropshire town of Bridgnorth was identified as the headquarters of Hitler's Britain in top-secret papers discovered by British soldiers at the end of the war.
Eton would be used as a school for the children of senior Nazis while Hitler had purposely refrained from bombing Oxford and Cambridge in case of an invasion.
Control of the press, legal and education systems, political parties, police and even the Freemasons were to be wrested away from Britons by the Nazi invaders.
Hitler considered the possibility of restoring believed Nazi-sympathiser and recently abdicated King Edward VII to the throne.
Disgraced British fascist leader Oswald Mosley was thought a prime contender to lead the puppet state.
But like in SS-GB, groups of Brits were expected to carry on a guerrilla resistance against the occupiers.
Only the stubborn resistance of Britain's RAF fighter pilots denied Germany the air superiority they needed to carry out the seaborne Operation Sea Lion.
Their battle became immortalised in Winston Churchill's battle cry: "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."
But the history of the British Isles would have looked very different had "The Few" not seen off Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940.
By June of that year Britain and its empire stood alone against Hitler's forces.
France had been overrun, with 300,000 troops ferried off the beaches of Dunkirk by a flotilla of civilian ships in a desperate bid to save the British Army.
Its tanks, artillery and transport vehicles were left to rot in the fields of northern France.
America would remain neutral until the Pearl Harbour attack almost 18 months later.
While Germany's peace pact with Stalin's Soviet Union on the eve of war had shocked the world.
Hitler declared his intention to invade the UK in 1940 after she had shown "no sign of willingness to come to terms" despite her "hopeless military situation".
He wrote: "I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her.
"The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English Motherland as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued, and, if necessary, to occupy the country completely."
Almost immediately Germany began to construct specially-adapted barges that would take thousands of German and Italian troops across the Channel.
Chilling photographs reveal a huge flotilla of vessels waiting to carry Wehrmacht troops to Britain's South Coast once the RAF was destroyed.
The German Navy would be tasked with tying up the all-powerful Royal Navy Home Fleet in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
Nine divisions of 67,000 men were set aside to land between Lyme Regis in Dorset and Ramsgate in Kent.
Landing spots were also planned on the Isle of Wight, Eastbourne, Folkestone.
Another two divisions of paratroopers would be dropped onto Dover and Brighton.
Once a beachhead was established, temporary harbours would be built to ferry armour and troops into the south of England from the continent.
Historians believe the German plan would then involve a push northwards towards Maldon, Essex, and Gloucester in the West.
Winston Churchill had forewarned that even if Britain was invaded, fighting would continue until the New World - widely thought to be America - came to its aid.
Yet several war games carried out by historians to determine the success of Operation Sea Lion almost universally found the plan would have failed.
The most famous projection was carried out at the Military Academy in Sandhurst in 1974.
Military historians and WW2 veterans decided that landing troops would have successfully established a beachhead and slowly pushed its way up through Britain.
But the Royal Navy would steam to the British rescue, the experts found, storming into the English Channel and leaving the German troops stranded in Britain without support from mainland Europe.
Winston Churchill's 1940 'We shall fight on the beaches' speech
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
British military historian Paul Reed reckons the success of the invasion would have depended on how the Royal Navy performed.
He told The Sun: "The big factor in the success of an invasion of Britain from the sea would have been whether the Royal Navy would come into play – and if they did, it was likely a German invasion fleet would have been destroyed.
And he reckons the Home Guard - made famous by fellow BBC show Dad's Army - could have proved more effective than its bumbling on-screen members.
Reed added: "The Home Guard would have had somÁe effect – it was not all Dad’s army! – as these men would have been perfect guerrillas knowing their ground and ability to ambush, but that would not have stopped the Germans forever.
"Operation Sea Lion was a possibility – we will never know if would have succeeded, but it was a real threat and the Germans planned to do it."
In reality, the stubborn resistance of the RAF's Spitfires and Hurricanes saw the Germans turn their attention towards bombing Britain's cities.
The move gave the RAF much-needed breathing space to re-group and stalled an invasion that could not be attempted without complete air superiority.
By June 1941, Germany had turned its attentions to the Soviet Union, invading the communist giant and putting off Operation Sea Lion indefinitely.