Why have a nuetral zone?

buffer states I guess.

It's a buffer.

It prevents the Nazis and Japan from border fights, and it's a lot of land area that doesn't need to be covered. It has little in the way of offensive perks and is dependent on both nations to survive.

It's only weird because there haven't been too many times that there were only 2 countries dominating the entire world, but buffers aren't unusual and where they don't exist there's some kind of military zone.

So it's the opposite of asking for trouble despite it providing a slender measure of hope for Americans & resistance.

If this is Locke, then who's in there? 

I guess you could call it a buffer, but I would expect that both the Germans and Japanese recognized how difficult it would be to invade and occupy the Rocky Mountains so they agreed to leave it alone rather than sacrifice the needed resources. It’s basically the same reason that Hitler never did anything with Switzerland. Switzerland is easy to defend, heavily mountainous terrain with a well-armed populace much like what is found in the mountains of the American west.

ha i was going to create this topic earlier but i started thinking about it and realized it was a buffer like others are mentioning, so i didn't create one.
You can't persuade fanboys. You'd be better off trying to convince a wall. ~CodeNamePlasmaSnake~

From what we've seen from the maps, it looks like there's a neutral zone in South America and an Asian one (a big chunk of China and Russia), so they seem to have them anywhere the Reich and the Empire border.

A neutral zone provides a buffer to prevent an unintended incident from turning into a war.
Also a Surprise attack is harder to achieve because of the time crossing the buffer zone.

The NZ makes some sense given the thinly disguised hostility the Empire and Reich feel for each other.

They exist in the present world. Think of the DMZ in Korea. Or the line that divides Greek speaking Cyprus from the region occupied by Turkey in the 70s.

That hostility between Japan and Germany probably started to grow as soon the guns fell silent and the world was at the feet of the victors; they came to recognize that the world was too small for TWO master races.

But, the difference between contemporary dmzs and the NZs depicted in the series - in North America, Eurasia, and South America - is the depicted sizes. The dmzs in our world are essentially borders; the dmz in Korea is 1km wide along its whole length from coast to coast. But, the NZs in the show are large enough to be substantial countries all on their own even if land-locked.

That's a problem for the occupiers and their puppet states.

The NZs would have been regions into which retreating militaries, evacuated political leaders, hunted ethnic groups, simple scared refugees, national wealth (gold and silver reserves), and elements of the defense industry would have gone. If the US had an atomic program at the time of the invasion - that certainly would've been evacuated to the inter-mountain west. Along with other key assets. Even with DC gone, local military and other authorities would have directed people and stuff west away from the advancing Germans (or east away from the advancing Japanese). The Russians in the early days of retreat from the advancing Germans evacuated whole factories and armies of workers to places east of the Urals in order to sustain the Soviet Union's resistance in places safe from the Luftwaffe and the panzers.

Initially, the occupiers might decide on a compromise of the kind that would see the NZs as a pail into which to dump all the miscreants and others who might be inclined to make trouble. And, yes, the broadness of the regions would guarantee the militaries of the Empire and the Reich would be kept far apart. Important as the wartime alliance soured.

But, if left unmolested, given time to organize, dig in, and develop the resources in such large regions, the NZs could develop to such a degree such that only very large and determined military efforts would subdue them. Those kinds of large military efforts might be difficult to mount given the suspicision between the two superpowers. If the leaders of the NZ rump states were so inclined they could support large and well-armed active insurgencies. Given the potential size of the NZ economies, the occupiers might be inclined to try and come to some accommodation with the NZs especially in efforts directed at the other superpower. The NZs might even win some degree of political recognition.

But the sizes depicted on the maps we've seen on the series, by the 60s should be too well fortified and armed for casual entry by police or military forces of the occupiers. And maybe even more...such as the development of an indigenous "Heisenberg Device" by the Eurasian or North American neutral zones...

Well, people need to go on vacation every now and then, right? All this nazi *beep* the sushi, the rice... Kinda gets on your nerves, right? People need a place for recreation. So they go to the neutral zone.