• '12

    Yeah, it’s not like the Germans were known for technology like jets and rockets and stuff.  Einstein’s role in the nuclear bomb was over by the time Hitler came to power.  In fact, in July 1940, the U.S. Army Intelligence office denied Einstein the security clearance needed to work on the Manhattan Project.  Einstein’s role was limited to writing a letter to the president explaining the US should enter the race.  In 1938, three chemists working in a laboratory in Berlin made a discovery that would alter the course of history: they split the uranium atom.


  • Its a good thing they did not win! :-D


  • Somedays I just wanna change history. Save a lot of lives because of war ;)


  • If the Axis won the war , America would have problem…


  • @aequitas:

    If the Axis won the war , America would have problem…

    you got that right!

  • '12

    There would not be many Jews, Romas or Slavs left.  Presumably Germany would not have a food shortage problem any more.  We would not be debating equal rights for gays but what form of death penalty gays should get.  The French political right wing would be happy.


  • @Bunnies:

    If you eat English food, your poop smells a certain way.
    If you eat Chinese food, your poop smells a different way.
    If you eat Indian food, your poop smells yet different again.

    So if you think about it, when you’re eating different stuff, you’re thinking it’s very different.  But really, in the end, it’s all the same poop.  Some people think their poop smells better than others, but really, it’s still poop.

    That was ah quite disturbing.


  • @TheDictator:

    @Bunnies:

    If you eat English food, your poop smells a certain way.
    If you eat Chinese food, your poop smells a different way.
    If you eat Indian food, your poop smells yet different again.

    So if you think about it, when you’re eating different stuff, you’re thinking it’s very different.  But really, in the end, it’s all the same poop.  Some people think their poop smells better than others, but really, it’s still poop.

    That was ah quite disturbing.

    +1 to dictator


  • if the axis one the Nazis might have mellowed out in time but in the meantime the detahs they inflicted would be unimaginable in all likeliehood, exterminating all “inferior” races within their much increased borders. Yes, Hitler might have  found a solution to the intelligence problem, perhaps by laws and perhaps by limited killing of less intelligent people, just enough to bring the  average IQ up for the next round of babies.
    I don’t think it would be needed for Japan to sue for peace with China, what resistance China offered wasn’t really a match for Japan. Depending on whether or not Germany launched a version of Sealion, peace with Britain might have been superflous as well, since there would be no way for them to offer significant resistance. however if they attacked any US possession, they would have lost with no question. One plot I can see hitler cooking upwould be to stir up tensions between the  countries of the “degenerate” races such as a liberated India, or China and so forth and then giving them nuclear weapons i the hope that they would annihlate each other.

  • '12

    what resistance China offered wasn’t really a match for Japan.

    I forget, when did Japan conquer China?

    and then giving them nuclear weapons i the hope that they would annihlate each other.

    If Hitler had nuclear weapons, why would he give them away in the hopes they would be used by his ‘enemies’ on his ‘enemies’?  Hitler would have no problem using nukes on anyone……But nukes would make the land useless.  No, I think Hitler would kill the inferiors on his own schedule in order to minimize expense and maximize profit from each body.


  • Japan didn’t conquer China, first off there’s no need for sarcasm this is a friendly thread man, second off the USA gave it aid obviously.
    He would give them nuclear weapons to minimize controversy in Germany, he’s running a superpower now after all.


  • @Bolt-Action:

    Japan didn’t conquer China, first off there’s no need for sarcasm this is a friendly thread man, second off the USA gave it aid obviously.
    He would give them nuclear weapons to minimize controversy in Germany, he’s running a superpower now after all.

    There is a cold, brutal logic involved with nuclear weapons–a logic which is largely independent of ideology. Communist and capitalist nations had very different ideologies from each other, yet the nuclear weapons logic both sides used was very similar.

    Back in the '80s, the Reagan administration was concerned about a possible Soviet invasion of Iran. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had not yet been proven a failure. Were the Soviets to grab Iran as well, they would gain a large quantity of oil, and warm water ports in the Indian Ocean. In part as a result of this concern, the Reagan administration decided to sell arms to the Iranians. But they did not consider the possibility of giving the Iranians nuclear weapons; in large part because Iran was so ideologically different from the U.S. Nor am I aware of any instance of the U.S. having provided nuclear weapons to any nation not fundamentally committed to secular democratic capitalism, or the Soviet Union to any nation not fundamentally committed to communism. It’s hard for me to imagine Nazi Germany providing nuclear weapons to any nation not committed to Nazism.

    It’s been noted that the Japanese Zero was a good plane by the standards of late '41, but had become hopelessly obsolete by '44. More generally, Japan’s piston-driven aircraft were vastly qualitatively inferior to their American counterparts by '44. But German piston-driven aircraft were not. Japan was Germany’s ally, both nations were fighting for their very existence against an overlapping group of enemies, and every American plane sent to the Pacific to deal with Japan was one less which could be sent to Germany. Further, Japan was committed to fascism, and to the notion that the Japanese were racially superior to their Chinese and Korean neighbors. Despite all this, Germany did not initiate large-scale technology transfers to Japan until the war in Europe was nearly over. And this was with piston aircraft technology! You seem like a good guy, but the idea that Hitler would have transferred nuclear technology to non-white, non-Nazi nations, in hope those nations would blow each other up, may not be the absolute best idea you’ve ever had!  :wink:

    That said, I think you brought up a good point by saying that Hitler would have been loath to himself use nuclear weapons. (For the same reason that, other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had refrained from using such weapons.) Hitler had been willing to take risks to achieve victory in Europe. In large part this was because of his belief that Germany would be at great risk until it had considerably strengthened its military position with respect to its (typically hostile) communist and pro-communist European neighbors. But after he had achieved that European victory, he would want a more cautious approach for Germany.

    Part of that cautious approach would have involved the expansion of Germany’s population. Plans had been made to forcibly relocate 30 - 50 million Poles eastward after the war was over. The lands thus vacated would be resettled by Germans. If Germany had still been in the midst of a British food blockade, the deaths of some of those people during the migration would have been seen as an acceptable way of alleviating the famine conditions that blockade had imposed. To the best of my knowledge, there was no plan in place to exterminate large numbers of people during the postwar period except as necessitated by Germany’s food situation.


  • All of that is true, but i would like to point out that Adolf wasn’t exactly…sane, assumedly less so as he aged.
    Also, all this is hypothetical, I’m not saying this is likely just possible obviously.

  • '12

    I honestly don’t think the Nazis and Hitler were that concerned with world opinion.  Sure, they didn’t overtly advertise the fact they were slaughtering millions of people for being a Slav or Jewish.  You can attribute that to several reasons.  I don’t think after a total victory over the allies and in possession of nuclear weapons they would be that concerned with anyone’s opinion.  The only other party that would matter is Japan and they would be a decade or two behind the Germans in missile and nuclear technology.  The authors of the Rape of Nanking would not be that appalled by the use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets.

    If Japan had a serious problem with what the Germans were doing then they too would be on the losing end of German might.  Germany would have little difficulty in lobbing nukes at mainland Japan from soviet territory by 1950 with upgraded V2 rockets.


  • I have read several memoirs of German officers from WW2 and I firmly believe that had the Germans “won” the war, then it would only have been a matter of time before the German officer class and the Wehrmacht overthrew the Nazi’s a slowly turned Germany in to a quasi-conservative democracy. When Hans Von Skeet was forming his 100,000 man army the treaty of Versailles limited Germany to, he stressed they be non-political. The reason many German officers and soldiers did resist the Nazis was because they were trained to stay out of politics. However, after a victorious war I think many would have started to look around at what was going on in Germany and the occupied areas and start questioning the government. The only thing that would have prevented them from acting would have been if Adolf Hitler was still alive. If the Germany pull of a victory in say 1945 (hypothetically; negotiating a peace with the west after a disastrous D-day lets say and then concentrating in the east to bleed the Russians white by 45/46) then really you would only have had to deal with Hitler for about another 3 years before his Parkinson’s claimed him, which many now believe he had. An earlier victory would have to involve an assassination on Hitler of the sort attempted in operation Valkyrie. I think in a non war setting there would have been a greater involvement of German officers and the plot would have been more likely to succeed. In that event there would have been some infighting, some-what like a civil war, between the SS (who I believe would have been framed as though they had killed Hitler) and the rest of the Wehrmacht. Though bloody, the deaths caused by this fighting would pale in comparison to a world where the Nazis where left to their own devices.


  • @Clyde85:

    I have read several memoirs of German officers from WW2 and I firmly believe that had the Germans “won” the war, then it would only have been a matter of time before the German officer class and the Wehrmacht overthrew the Nazi’s a slowly turned Germany in to a quasi-conservative democracy.

    Alternately, it might only have been a matter of time before Hitler started liquidating the Wehrmacht’s senior leadership, the way Stalin did with the Red Army in the 1930s.  Hitler’s long-standing dislike of the German officer class turned into firm distrust after the failed assassination attempt against him in mid-1944.


  • That is very true CWO and I think you’ve touched on the “catch-22” of all this. The officers would have a hard time justifying their actions in assassinating Hitler had they won the war as he would have been extremely popular with the public and, the other side of this coin, Hitler would of had trouble bumping off the officer corps like Stalin did as they had just helped him prosecute a victorious war. So it really is all hypothetical but I think Germany would have been better off with Hitler and the Nazis gone shortly after victory.


  • @Clyde85:

    I have read several memoirs of German officers from WW2 and I firmly believe that had the Germans “won” the war, then it would only have been a matter of time before the German officer class and the Wehrmacht overthrew the Nazi’s a slowly turned Germany in to a quasi-conservative democracy. When Hans Von Skeet was forming his 100,000 man army the treaty of Versailles limited Germany to, he stressed they be non-political. The reason many German officers and soldiers did resist the Nazis was because they were trained to stay out of politics. However, after a victorious war I think many would have started to look around at what was going on in Germany and the occupied areas and start questioning the government. The only thing that would have prevented them from acting would have been if Adolf Hitler was still alive. If the Germany pull of a victory in say 1945 (hypothetically; negotiating a peace with the west after a disastrous D-day lets say and then concentrating in the east to bleed the Russians white by 45/46) then really you would only have had to deal with Hitler for about another 3 years before his Parkinson’s claimed him, which many now believe he had. An earlier victory would have to involve an assassination on Hitler of the sort attempted in operation Valkyrie. I think in a non war setting there would have been a greater involvement of German officers and the plot would have been more likely to succeed. In that event there would have been some infighting, some-what like a civil war, between the SS (who I believe would have been framed as though they had killed Hitler) and the rest of the Wehrmacht. Though bloody, the deaths caused by this fighting would pale in comparison to a world where the Nazis where left to their own devices.

    Good post.  :)

    There’s a significant chance the scenario you’ve outlined would have come to pass. Even if CWO Marc is right and it hadn’t, you’ve still touched on a larger issue. Hitler would not have lived for very long after the war, and his death would have left a gaping hole in German leadership. Hitler wasn’t sold on anyone in particular as his successor. For a while that successor had been Goering by default. But Goering’s incompetence had cost him significant credibility in the eyes of almost everyone. Even Hitler himself had referred to Goering with derision. (And rightly so.)

    Back in the early '20s, the Nazi Party was small, and consisted largely of dedicated revolutionaries. As it became larger and more mainstream, the people who joined it were often less radical, less completely committed to its ideology. After Hitler came to power in '33, a number of people claimed to have a greater adherence to Nazism than they really felt. There were social and economic rewards for being pro-Nazi, and penalties associated with being anti-Nazi. The earlier someone had joined the Nazi Party, the more fully committed he or she was likely to be to its ideology.

    This meant that Hitler and the other core members of the Nazi Party had a problem. As they died of old age, their replacements would be milder, more moderate men–men less fully committed to the Nazi ideology. The Soviet communists had the same problem. Stalin had been a communist revolutionary back when the czar was still in power. But after Stalin’s death, his successors were milder and less revolutionary than Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin had been.

    Traditionally, Germany had been a more humane nation than Russia. During WWI, the world’s Jewish community had supported the Axis, on the theory that, while European nations in general tended to be deplorably anti-Semitic, Russia was significantly worse than the others. (And was associated with pogroms.) Working conditions in czarist Russia were appalling, and peasants were clearly considered expendable. That brutality was considerably intensified during Lenin’s and Stalin’s regimes. Given these cultural differences, post-Hitler Nazi Germany would likely have been more civilized and humane than the post-Stalin Soviet Union.


  • I agree with you Kurt, 100%. Its often forgotten that WW1 ear Germany was a relatively open country when compared to Hitlers Germany. Many Jewish intellectuals did support the central powers during WW1 against Czarist Russia for just those reasons. The Jews in Russia at that time had to live in isolated settlement outside regular Russian cities, not unlike the ghettos of WW2. Also, despite many anti-semitic attitudes in Europe at the time, the Jewish people of Germany were full integrated in to German society. During WW1 nearly 150,000 Jewish Germans fought in the German army and of those 30,000 were awarded the Iron Cross for bravery in battle.


  • To follow up on my post from yesterday: It should be noted that Hitler did in fact carry out a Stalin-like purge of his own in 1934, when he eliminated the leadership of the SA.  There had been rising tensions between the Army and the SA since Hitler had come to power in 1933 because the chief of the SA, Ernst Rohm, had been pushing to have his Stormtroopers take over the role of the regular Army.

    Hitler found it easy to choose between the SA and the Army at this point because: a) the SA had already accomplished its main job, which was to help bring Hitler to power, and b) Hitler needed the professional Army – not an unruly bunch of streetfighting thugs – to carry out the next part of his program, which was to reverse the results of the First World War.  So he had Rohm and his senior colleagues liquidated.

    The Army was pleased to have had their SA competitors brought under control in this manner, but it turned out to be a bad bargain because the group which carried out the assassinations was the SS.  Up to that point, the SS had been a relatively small specialized force within the SA.  After the Rohm purge, the SS rapidly gained importance, and it played a major role in turning Germany into a police state.

    If we fast-forward to a hypothetical scenario in which Germany had won the Second World War, it could be argued that the Wehrmacht at that point would have been much in the same position as the SA in 1934.  It would have served its main purpose (winning the war), and its senior leadership – never liked and often mistrusted by Hitler – would have been dispensable.  The SS terror apparatus would have had ten years since 1934 to grow in size and power, and would have had the resources to carry out a Stalinesque purge of the German officer corps.

    Moreover, by the end of the actual war (which would also have been the case in the hypothetical one), Hitler had at his disposal a supplement to – and potential replacement for – the regular Army: the Waffen SS.  The Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS got into a lot of competition for military resources in 1944 and 1945, with the Waffen SS often getting some of the prize equipment like the Tiger tanks.  So it’s not inconceivable that, in this hypothetical scenario, the Army might have ended up being sidelined in favour of an expanded Waffen SS – in other words by a private army belonging to the Nazi Party.  Ironically, this pretty much what Ernst Rohm had been advocating in the first place back in 1934.

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