Alternate history is one of my favorite topics, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
All of these answers are super interesting and well thought out. Many of them line up with I would think, except for one thing. Hitler was no spring chicken during the war. He was 56 years old when he died, under the total crushing stress of leading a nation at war, and being pumped full of a truly fascinating cocktail of drugs by his personal physician. Depending on factors (mostly the war, which you dont specify in your prompt how they won), I don’t see him living much past 1945. And I don’t see the Reich lasting as a stable state much past that.
I feel like people are overestimating the extent to which Hitler set his subordinates against each other, so that none could accumulate enough power to challenge him. He would kill or sacrifice allies when it became convenient or expedient (remember the night of long knives?) and he avoided appointing a successor. Many speculative fiction works put Albert Speer in this role, but I think its more likely that the Nazi state descends into infighting, and different people fight for the top spot before Hitler is cold.
We’re about to find out
The world loves eugenics, and it is considered “civilised” to kill disabled infants. Sterilisation programs of indigenous people and minorities are carried out across Europe, North America, and Asia.
A rule of power International order, where there are spheres of influence for the big players, Japan, Germany, USA, and maybe Russia and India.A very racist USA that has annexed Canada and maybe more of Mexico, debates about reinstating slavery are a common part of political discourse.
UK is run by incompetent fascists, but the empire has collapsed so tensions build. I’m not sure who the “enemy” would be - maybe a violent revolution that leads to the end of the monarchy? Maybe German “Peacekeepers” on the streets to neutralise the communist subversive threat. Maybe invasion to reannex Ireland as Irish independence is blamed for things falling apart?
British intelligensia fled to Aus-NZ, causing demographic strife as the influx of new comers puts strains on the countries, but also an influx of ideas and they could evolve into a bastion of Liberalism, if not progressive ideas. Probably define selves as not Nazi, and will do a lot of soul searching (or just ignore) treatment of indigenous peoples.
South America probably more stable and more left wing without US meddling and the influx of Nazis. But my South American history is quite weak, so I know I’m not accounting for an awful lot. That, or the fascist US attempts to invade and has a Vietnam experience in Central America.
India as a fascist Hindustan, allied with Japan.
Imperial Japan controls much of Asia either directly or indirectly. The official story is that Japan is the liberator of Asia, having freed Asia from European imperialism, but life is hard for many people, especially ethnic minorities of China and Siberia who have few rights and are often sterilised while their culture is erased. Meanwhile wealth and value is extracted for the metropole.
Asia would certainly have some armed revolution movements, especially in western China and Northern Siberia. A much larger Mongolia, Tibet, unified Korea, Manchuko, and maybe some new nations in Southern China as indepent states, and maybe Turkistan.Indochina would be wild. Not sure how it would end up, but the road would be very different.
Would Middle East be better off? Maybe. The mess of Sykes-Picot wouldn’t happen, and no installation of British/French puppets.
German superstate may well invade to control oil in the 50s/60s though. Which would be very bad news for the Zionists, who are a group of Socialist Jews who run a smattering of self sufficient communities across the Middle East.
By a bizzare twist of fate the Kurds still end up without their own nation and as pawns in games between other powers.Africa would be embroiled in the second scramble for Africa where Germany, Japan, and the USA fight via proxies if not directly for control over the former French and British colonies. Each side supporting partisans and independence movements against the other. Hindustan might join in too, but has to sort it’s home situation out first. Fascist Kingdom of Britain and Australia might do lots of espionage here against each other, seeing themselves as legitimate successor to the UK.
You may be interested in The Man in the High Castle it’s both a novel by Phillip K. Dick and TV show on Amazon Prime that explores exactly that premise
Wolfenstein: The New Order also explores this idea. Though I doubt it’s as realistic.
To be fair Man in the High Castle has the assassination of FDR succeed because of time travel, right? It’s super science either way. The MitHC Hitler studies postwar films and comes to the conclusion that he can’t win if FDR guides America out of the Depression.
Maybe put a spoiler tag around that?
Let’s assume that the Axis winning the war means they keep all territory they’ve had at the height of their expansion in our timeline but don’t expand much more, at least not immediately.
- The EU does not exist but as most of Europe is either occupied by Germany or allied with it, there might be a similar organization with a way stronger Germany at its center.
- If a NATO-like alliance forms, it excludes most of Europe, mainly consisting of the USA, Canada and UK, maybe Spain and Portugal
- The Soviet Union is way weaker than in our timeline with most of Eastern Europe being under German control. They still have control over Central Asia, probably more than in our timeline.
- The Allies still control Gibraltar and are able to intercept ships passing through the English Channel, making the west of France the only safe access to the Atlantic for the Axis.
- Wernher von Braun and other rocket scientists stay in Germany, giving the USA and Soviet Union a massive disadvantage in the development of ICBMs. The USA may have nuclear bombs but their only way to threaten Germany with them would be UK-based bombers which are way slower and easier to defend against. On the other hand, a failure of the Manhattan Project might be the whole reason why the Axis wins the war. Everyone will figure it out eventually but as we see from real life, it might take decades.
- No proper cold war as there are no two super powers exercising mutually assured destruction with ICBMs but probably ongoing tensions along the German-Soviet border. The USA probably stays out of it to avoid becoming a target for either side.
- Italian East Africa (Somalia) becomes the most important rocket launch site in the world, as it is the only Axis-controlled territory that is close to the equator and has open ocean to the east. Some smaller rockets may launch from Japan. French Guiana might be under Axis control but shipping rockets over the Atlantic is dangerous when they could get intercepted by foreign ships. Without competition, manned spaceflight develops a lot slower, maybe not at all.
- Without manned spaceflight and the threat of a nuclear war, there is less incentive to develop computers and the internet.
Great answer, do you see any internal tensions within the Axis that could foreseeably have caused collapse comparable to say Soviet communism’s collapse in the real world? How dependant were they on Hitler and Mussolini as individuals?
Not OP, but Germany was likely going to experience a deep recession after the war. However, it is likely that the Nazis would push the cost of the economy shrinking to its enslaved peoples. There would likely be French deindustrialization, a Polish genocide, and building of cruel colonial networks around Germany. The Nazi Party could probably survive Hitler; I suspect the political functioning would be similar to China’s Politboro but with a more independent military.
Italy could possibly see the fascist government fall. Mussolini wasn’t in control of Italy the same way that Hitler was of Germany. I could see a political crisis occur in Italy where the Italian government falls apart, Germany stabilizes Italian possessions, then Germany keeps the Italian possessions after the new government doesn’t adequately swear fealty to Germany.
Hard to say. I’m not a historian, so I can only speculate. I would assume that Hitler would eventually select a successor and there is no way of telling how good that person would be at keeping the Reich in order.
comparable to say Soviet communism’s collapse in the real world
As far as I understand it, the fall of the Soviet Union was preceded by at least a decade of economic struggle that was caused by a multitude of factors. Basically the only thing they had to export was oil and weapons and the only nations they could trade with were relatively poor. When their oil production cost kept rising, they just couldn’t keep their exports high enough to import enough food and luxury goods to keep their population happy. This was a prime driver for unrest in regions that bordered the west, especially East Germany who of course got news of what life in West Germany was like. The Soviets were eventually forced to open the Berlin Wall and from there, there was nothing they could do to keep people from just leaving and fully collapsing the economy in the process. To this day, 35 years after the reunion, former East Germany is way behind the rest of the country even though on paper they have the same chances as everyone else, just because there has been a massive brain drain.
So overall, the collapse of the Soviet Union was less a failure of communism itself and more a failure to counteract their economic weaknesses as well as a result of their isolationism. The USA didn’t win the Cold War because of the inherent superiority of capitalism but because the world drinks Coca Cola, wears jeans, watches Hollywood movies and works with IBM-compatible PCs. If the Soviet Union had pivoted their economy to those kinds of goods and had managed to export them to the west, they might have become what China is today.
So it all comes down to the question if alternate-history Germany manages to do that. With technology advancing slower overall and therefore becoming less of a factor in global markets, and at the same time keeping a lot of top scientists who in the real world left for the other superpowers, they could probably do it.
Thanks for another great answer. I realise now that the comparison with Soviet wasn’t very thoughtful of me. I just wanted to imagine something that would have broken up the Nazi German hegemony from the inside.
Another thought is that American products and culture probably are popular partly because they were winners in World War 2.
American culture was a major export during the Great Depression, so it is likely that American culture would continue to be an export unless the USA ceased to exist.
I would just expect Nazi Germany to censor and control some of America’s cultural exports. Hitler liked Disney movies, for instance. However, jazz was banned.
Another thought is that American products and culture probably are popular partly because they were winners in World War 2.
Absolutely. American soldiers being stationed all over the world was fantastic PR. Being stationed long term, they brought along much of what they were used to in the USA. Those luxuries were traded with the locals and of course, if the locals wanted to be seen as fashionable, they just had to have those things.
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Thanks for the nice words. My approach was to avoid speculating too much about what might happen based on someone’s ideology and instead see which real life events can’t happen and extrapolate from there. This makes my answers equally plausible, no matter if the Axis powers stay fascist dictatorships or if they become more democratic over time, as long as overall alliances stay roughly the same.
The way the economy in the soviet union was micromanaged in super centralised way was key to its collapse, especially the final 10-15 years. Soviet Union did have great innovation spurs in IT, rocketry, etc but it was impossible to diversify said innovations further, impossible to mass market it, impossible to mass export it. The centralised economic system lagged enormously and was incredibly inefficient, 1 town having 500000 jackets but no shoes, other town having 100000 chandeliers but no food etc. On top there was really really high levels of corruption. The economic model was essential in the demise of the Soviet Union, once they let go of some regulations a tiny bit, it all fell apart fast. China paid attention, they keep trying to waggle between statecontrolled and free market… They are well aware similar risks still exist in their state-owned companies to this day.
Thanks, that’s exactly the point I wanted to get across. You found way better words than I ever could.
We’d be speaking in German on lemmy, wondering what all those weird English memes are that sometimes pop up on the timeline
SPRICH
DEUTSCH
DU
Like Russia today.
Or the US today
Nationalism is in full swing by WW2 so any Non-contagious territories would be in constant rebellion. Especially with nazi ideology, I imagine the 2nd half of the 20th century would have considerably more conflict that whay we did get.
I think there is a show about this.
I imagine that we would be more scientifically advanced but more radical, less liberal.
However, everything eventually changes over time. The world has managed to steer towards fascist regimes after the win of USA in WW2. It is not impossible that Hitler would have made us more liberal today.
I imagine that we would be more scientifically advanced
I highly doubt this. The fascist regimes are not really welcoming for open science having scientists with freedom of thought. The science would be more like in the Soviet Union, where science education was great, but the advances were reduced to “government approved” tracks like space, weapons and maybe some medicine. Hard to see something like computational revolution stemming from a repressed regime.
Germany made some insane progress under Hitler
Yeah… in optimising weapons and stuff that carries weapons. Imagine what could have been, if the same amount of money/time/whatever would have been invested in medicine or renewable energy.
A lot of scientific breakthroughs are made like this. Internet was made by the military. Rockets were made because we were trying to outarm each other.
While it would be best if we didn’t kill each other, the optimised outcome is getting scientific progress while killing each other. The silver lining of concentration camps is the human experimentation which gave solid evidence for solid science.
The Soviets also made scientific breakthroughs within their military industrial complex. Not much of that trickled down to ordinary people, which then hindered it from being further applied.
The silver lining of concentration camps is the human experimentation which gave solid evidence for solid science.
How much of “solid science” are we talking about? My understanding is that it was not a lot, and its quality was rather poor.
I imagine that we would be more scientifically advanced
Much of the scientific advances in the second half of the 20th century were driven either directly or indirectly by the Cold War:
- rockets were first developed to deploy nuclear warheads, then to deploy spy satellites and eventually to demonstrate technological superiority
- computers were needed to calculate rocket trajectories
- the internet was developed to connect defense systems in the event of incoming nuclear missiles, either to launch countermeasures quickly or to stay in contact if the surface gets uninhabitable
Without two super powers of similar strength who have access to both nuclear bombs and rockets, all of this would happen way more slowly and the main reason why the USA and Soviet Union developed rockets at a similar pace was because they both employed German rocket scientists after the war. Without this, there would be no space race, just slow and steady progress of one power who can then keep everyone else from catching up.
This particular alternative history is uninteresting because its premises mean you have to invent a whole parallel universe. In plain English: it could not have happened and would not have happened, for essentially economic reasons.
The interesting alternative histories are ones that turn on a single fortuitous event.
PS: I am saying that OP’s question is boring because it is unanswerable. It just invites a hundred other questions. If you want to ask THOSE questions, then ask them.
There are several events that might have had the possibility to turn the war:
- Germany doesn’t attack France at all, concentrating their forces in the east which gives the UK fewer reasons to join the war
- Japan doesn’t attack Pearl Harbor so the USA don’t join the war (yet)
- Operation Mincemeat fails and the Axis keeps their troops in Sicily, preventing the Allies from establishing a base in the Mediterranean.
- Axis spies uncover the plans for D-Day before it happens, Germany bombs the landing boats and thousands of Allied soldiers drown before they can reach land
- The Manhattan Project fails to produce a working nuclear bomb. Most of Germany and Italy has already fallen but Japan stays strong and can eventually send troops to Europe.
You are contradicting yourself.
Hitler left orders not to be awakened so he slept in on D-Day. Rommel had left his post. Think that wouldn’t have changed things?
Stalin had dozens of warnings that Hitler planned to invade. What if he’d taken even one seriously?
What if Hitler had let the Army get the glory at Dunkirk and steamrolled the troops on the beach?
I can think of dozens of times the course of the War changed by the actions of one person.
I’m not contradicting myself. You are not reading the question asked.
it could not have happened and would not have happened, for essentially economic reasons.
The interesting alternative histories are ones that turn on a single fortuitous event.
You said it couldn’t happen, then said that there are ways it could have happened.
Also, if you don’t want to be part of the discussion, you are free to stay out. other people are participating and enjoying themselves.
Also, if you don’t want to be part of the discussion, you are free to stay out. other people are participating and enjoying themselves.
In future then I’ll try to remember your handy advice and not say anything that might challenge anyone’s views or otherwise spoil your enjoyment. Cheers.
You didn’t challenge anyone to improve themselves. You tried to impose your ideas on other people. There’s a difference.
Cheers.
The Man in the High Castle has a pretty good take on this.
The book Fatherland by Robert Harris was good as well! But I’m more interested in personal individual takes, since all of us have distinct unique outlooks on things.
The Middle East would be a lot more peaceful I can tell you that.
That’s if the central powers had won WW1, not the sequel.
We’d be living in the Ottoman world, baby. They’d have 70% of the world’s oil supply.
Not necessarily. The divisions in middle east today have roots to end of WW1 and collapse of Ottoman empire and decline of British empire. There would still be a shit load of oil in middle east. There would still be limited amount of water… It could be very different, which countries ally, what kind of regimes etc, but not necessarily more peaceful region as a whole.
Literally every problem in the Middle East stems from the Zionist colony established by the Western imperialists and the subsequent Cold War between the US and Soviet Union.
Assuming the Sykes Picot division held and pro Western monarchies in Iraq, Egypt and Iran remained in power, what reason would there be for military coups to depose Western monarchs? Without Soviet support and the threat of Israel, what would be propelling Arab nationalism in the 1950s?
The axis powers had very little interest in the Middle East prior to 1939. Hitler wanted Lebensraum in Russia and Italy was interested in Africa. There’s no reason to believe they would start wars in the region if the Gulf Monarchies were willing to sell them oil.
In this hypothetical reality, I’d imagine the Middle East would largely be run by monarchies, with deep ties to Germany and Italy.
Literally every problem in the Middle East stems from the Zionist colony established by the imperialists
The Middle East has had problems for thousands of years before the state of Israel got established. Its strategic location between Africa and Asia caused Palestine to be conquered by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, European crusaders, Arabs again, Ottomans and the British Empire. Three major religions see Jerusalem as a sacred place and have fought wars over it.
Zionism is definitely a major reason for the problems we have in our timeline but assuming there would be no problems at all seems overly simplistic.
Also, the Axis winning the war does not guarantee that Israel won’t get established. There would still be hundreds of thousands of Jews who flee from Europe and need somewhere to live. The Axis, being the cause of the problem, wouldn’t be interested in solving it and the rest of the world has basically the same options as in our timeline.
The axis powers had no interest in the Middle East prior to 1939 and there’s no reason to believe they would start wars in the region if The Gulf Monarchies were willing to sell them oil.
I could very well see them trying to stay mostly neutral and selling oil to everyone. Profit is more important than ideology, especially if food and water are scarce. But even in real life, that hasn’t kept superpowers from finding excuses to attack oil-rich nations.
It’s easy to think that the Middle East is chaotic because of what’s going on now but the region was at peace for over 500 years under Ottoman Rule.
Western Imperialism and Israel are the reason the region is a mess.
It’s easy to think that the Middle East is chaotic because of what’s going on now but the region was at peace for over 500 years under Ottoman Rule.
No doubt on that point.
But the Ottoman Empire ended a solid 30 years before Israel got established. To prevent the problems the region has now, different choices would have been necessary after WW1, not just WW2. For the purpose of a “What happens if WW2 ends differently” thread, that chance has already passed. The British Mandate has been established and there are already enough Jewish immigrants to have caused the 1936-39 Arab revolt and hundreds of thousands of Jews have already fled Europe. The Axis winning WW2 would probably put even more pressure on the Allies to let Jewish refugees live in Palestine because sending them back to Europe is not just an unattractive option, it’s outright impossible.
In a world where the axis won, they would have taken a sizable portion of the middle east to secure oil for the war, so the region would look very different.
Germany was not interested in the Middle East. They wanted Lebensraum in Eastern Europe and Russia. The Gulf Monarchies would have sold them oil in the same way they have been doing to the US as hegemon. There may have been joint ventures like Saudi Aramco but there wouldn’t have been CIA coups and regime changes because there would be no Soviet threat.
The Gulf Monarchies would have sold them oil in the same way they have been doing to the US as hegemon.
And the USA has significantly intervened in Middle East politics.
It is likely that Nazi Germany would intervene in the Middle East to secure its oil; the various nation-states were still forming and borders were somewhat volatile. Germany would likely intervene to ensure that the oil flows.
Also, after a while, the German state would need another infusion of money and cheap Arab oil would be a perfect resource to bring under control of the Nazi state.
Germany was actively trying to get some level of control over middle east oil during the war. Their failure to secure reliable and plentiful oil is a big reason they lost. The campaigns in north Africa were largely about control of Egypt and the Suez canal. Part of the invasion to Soviet lands was also opening a route to the middle east.
On top of that, Jews fleeing from Europe would still need a place to live and there is a decent chance that the British would still give up Palestine to form Israel. Maybe a few years later and with a few details changed but overall not much of a difference.
The British handed over Palestine to the UN. There would be no UN if Germany won. The UK might have just handed over Palestine to a local friendly Arab monarchy like Jordan
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