Every major area under German occupation was a food deficit area. That included Germany proper, France, the Netherlands, Poland, etc. Soviet territories were also food deficit areas, with the Ukraine being the sole exception. But the food surplus from the Ukraine was not nearly enough to offset the food deficits that existed everywhere else in German-occupied territory. Because of the Anglo-American food blockade, Hitler did not have enough food to feed the people within his borders. Because Hitler lacked the food with which to feed everyone, he enacted the Holocaust (fewer mouths to feed), and assigned unskilled Slavic laborers the second-lowest priority for food rations. Because there wasn’t enough food to feed everyone, large numbers of people within German-held territory were going to suffer, starve, and die no matter how Hitler or some other leader had chosen to allocate Germany’s food. Had Hitler chosen to forego the Holocaust or the starvation of the Slavs in the eastern territories, some other group of people would have had to have been starved or otherwise killed instead to balance out the food equation.
I also didn’t choose the “assassinate Hitler in 1934” option. No major western democracy had an anti-Soviet foreign policy until 1948. In 1919, Poland and the Soviet Union found themselves at war. Neither Britain nor France sent soldiers to help. Britain even refused to sell Poland weapons, but sold them to the Soviets instead. France provided Poland with military advisors, but little help beyond that. When Poland was on the verge of being annexed by the Soviet Union, Britain and France advised the Polish government to negotiate the best surrender terms they could. Instead, the Polish won an unexpected victory outside Warsaw; a victory which paved the way for Polish freedom from Soviet oppression for the next twenty years.
By the 1930s the major Western democracies had, if anything, become even more pro-Soviet. In 1935, France and Czechoslovakia signed defensive alliances with the Soviet Union. For the previous several centuries, France’s foreign policy had been emphatically and strongly anti-German. The plan–at least in the mid-‘30s–was for Britain and France to join the Soviet Union in ganging up on and conquering Germany. That plan failed not because of any lack of willingness on the Western democracies’ part, but because Stalin regarded both Germany and Western democracies as equally enemies. He wanted a long, bloody war between Germany and the Western democracies–a war which would bleed both sides white, without in any way involving the Soviet Union. Then after both sides had been sufficiently weakened, the Red Army would move westward into Europe to pick up the pieces.
Just as the Western democracies had been perfectly willing to abandon Poland to its fate back in 1920, so too they would have done nothing to counter any Soviet expansion into Eastern or Central Europe. Given the Western democracies’ nearly complete lack of interest in countering Soviet expansionism, the only viable counterweight to the Soviet Union would have been a militarized Germany. A militarized Germany implied defiance of the Versailles Treaty, which would have implied at least a certain lack of political moderation.
In the spring of 1941, the German Army consisted of 150 divisions; 100 of which were used to invade the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, Soviet recruitment efforts had increased the size of the Red Army to 600 divisions. Dealing with a threat like that would have (and did) require a high degree of militarization; which in turn would be interpreted as a threat by both the British and French governments.
Given the cards Hitler was dealt (a lack of Western interest in opposing Soviet expansionism, and strong Western opposition to German militarization), he probably did as good or better job of opposing the Soviet threat than some other German leader would have done. Assassinating Hitler probably wouldn’t have let Germany escape from the terror and brutality of a Soviet occupation.
Instead, the option I chose was to wait to invade the Soviet Union until 1945. However, from 1940 on, Germany would have faced massive numbers of British and American aircraft. In order to protect its cities from firestorms, Germany would have needed to focus largely on fighter production; while also employing jet aircraft and Wasserfall weapons as early and in as wide a scale as possible. Possibly, such efforts could have provided at least some protection to Germany’s cities and its people from the massive Allied advantage in aircraft production. Then in 1945–after Germany had been fully industrialized–it would have had a better chance of taking on the Red Army.
