Hitler's Post-war Plans

For help with a WW2 timeline. In this timeline, Germany has won a total victory over the Soviet Union, but not Britain.

1. What is the likelihood of an actual annexation of France? The German goals weren't to conquer France, it was just the result of defeating them, and they kept it as a war measure against Britain. However, would the German leadership be open to annexation since France is already in their lap?

2. I simply can't see a genocide of the Slavs. Trying to Holocaust the Slavs would have caused the mother of all revolutions... assuming Germany owned the Soviet Union, would they be likely to use logic and keep the Slavs as slaves, or still try and eradicate them?

3. In the aftermath of the war, Germany is effectively the only European power left (let's suppose Britain is being decolonized and wracked with a depression), leaving America and a victorious Japan as the other competitors on a national stage. Germany was not the aggressive conqueror it is now thought of as... would a superpowered Germany led by a fascist regime gleefully attack everybody, or would it be content with it's borders and stay dormant?
 
1. Germans never annexed France, IIRC. They merely occupied northern part for duration of conflict and a view on a comprehensive peace treaty to replace cease fire from 1940. This would probably end with Alsace and Lorien being given to Germany and a puppet regime installed in France. Also severe limitations of army along with a few bases in French empire given to Germany.

2. There would almost certainly be a genocide against Slavs. Not only was that one of cornerstones of Nazism, but it was deemed necessary by German leaders in order to achieve the goals they more or less publicly stated. Those Slavs not worked to death in German industry or employed on building infrastructure, would be doomed to life of servitude under German settlers of the Ostprovinces. The sole process of conquest would result in such massive missallocations of resources that famine would have resulted regardlessly of German intentions.

3. Germany under Nazi regime would need if not outright war than at least a perpetual threat of one to make any kind of sense out of the regime. What Hitler envisioned in his wet dreams is endless columns of Heer onstantly marching all over the place.
 
For help with a WW2 timeline. In this timeline, Germany has won a total victory over the Soviet Union, but not Britain.

1. What is the likelihood of an actual annexation of France? The German goals weren't to conquer France, it was just the result of defeating them, and they kept it as a war measure against Britain. However, would the German leadership be open to annexation since France is already in their lap?

2. I simply can't see a genocide of the Slavs. Trying to Holocaust the Slavs would have caused the mother of all revolutions... assuming Germany owned the Soviet Union, would they be likely to use logic and keep the Slavs as slaves, or still try and eradicate them?

3. In the aftermath of the war, Germany is effectively the only European power left (let's suppose Britain is being decolonized and wracked with a depression), leaving America and a victorious Japan as the other competitors on a national stage. Germany was not the aggressive conqueror it is now thought of as... would a superpowered Germany led by a fascist regime gleefully attack everybody, or would it be content with it's borders and stay dormant?

1. No chance, Hitler wanted a Germanic federation dominated by Germany. But France would remain a German puppet state.

2. One of Hitlers main goals for the USSR was to exterminate any non germanic/baltic ethnic group that did not bow down to the Germans. But russians would all be extinguished.

3. Once hitler had all of europe, all of the USSR, and all of Africa he would have been happy (at least for awhile); in reality IDK if that would have been possible but he planned to repopulate the USSR with Germans and keep the africans as dominated ethnic groups (though I don't think he planned to exterminate the African nations)

*on a side note, why did hitler had Slavs and not baltic peoples? After all they are both closely related (both coming from the proto balto-slavic language) and both as equally related to the Germanic peoples. I thought hitler cared alot about ethnicity.
 
For help with a WW2 timeline. In this timeline, Germany has won a total victory over the Soviet Union, but not Britain.

1. What is the likelihood of an actual annexation of France?
They ended up occupying the whole of it anyways, though I think they only technically annexed a small part OTL. Given the lack of respect they showed autonomy in their various conquered territories, I think annexation is probable.

2. I simply can't see a genocide of the Slavs.
Then you seriously underestimate the bloodthirst of the Hitler regime. At best, a Slav population would have been reduced to such a low state of subsistence that the difference between that and outright genocide might have been academic.

3. ...victorious Japan ...
Why do you assume that, may I ask?

...would a superpowered Germany led by a fascist regime gleefully attack everybody, or would it be content with it's borders and stay dormant?
Again - bloodthirst. Dormancy is simply not in the nature of such a regime.
 
For help with a WW2 timeline. In this timeline, Germany has won a total victory over the Soviet Union, but not Britain.

1. What is the likelihood of an actual annexation of France? The German goals weren't to conquer France, it was just the result of defeating them, and they kept it as a war measure against Britain. However, would the German leadership be open to annexation since France is already in their lap?

In OTL the Germans annexed Alsace-Lorraine and this is likely to have been the only annexation undertaken.

2. I simply can't see a genocide of the Slavs. Trying to Holocaust the Slavs would have caused the mother of all revolutions... assuming Germany owned the Soviet Union, would they be likely to use logic and keep the Slavs as slaves, or still try and eradicate them?

The Nazi plans for post war eastern Europe called for 1/3 to be exterminated, 1/3 to be left to die off, 1/3 to be reduced to slaves. It is unlikely this would have been achieved had the Nazis won. The impracticality of carrying out such an operation, the revulsion many Germans would've felt about carrying out such an operation (killing Jews was one thing, Slavs quite another) and the resistance they would've encountered that would've impacted on morale on the home front in Germany would've made the Nazis back down.

3. In the aftermath of the war, Germany is effectively the only European power left (let's suppose Britain is being decolonized and wracked with a depression), leaving America and a victorious Japan as the other competitors on a national stage. Germany was not the aggressive conqueror it is now thought of as... would a superpowered Germany led by a fascist regime gleefully attack everybody, or would it be content with it's borders and stay dormant?

Winning the war is one thing. Winning the peace is another matter. The Germans are unlikely to have been able to hold onto what they won, especially if they got carried away with their ethnic cleansing campaigns.
 
Hitler never thought a permanent peace would happen in the East. Instead, there would be an impervious military line near the Transural Region of the Former Soviet Union.


Jews would be extinct; Germany would be building castles in the Ukraine, with grandoise ideas of natalist policies settling a conquered landmass. Hitler would seek to build a "Maximal" Germany, the largest Germany that could be built.


Next up after the "Jewish Question" was the "Polish Question", and Hitler probably has several answers in store for the Slavs of Eastern Europe.


Hitler's vision was for a traditional country of farms and fantastical war machines of nautical size expanding to the Volga. Its inhabitants would be German. Berlin would be its capitol, filled with incredible architecture. Even in a state of intermittent war, the SS would absorb the Wehrmacht.


Whoever follows Hitler is going to moderate some of these matters, to some degree. But Hitler's ideas are dystopian, no questions asked.
 

Well, the Nazis tried to hide their atrocities even to their own population, hence I guess they thought it necessary to conduct these in secrecy. I don't see how the extermination could proceed after victory at such a large scale and at the same time could be kept somewhat hidden from the population. It's one thing to keep quiet when your country is at war, but it's another if your country just won dominance over much of the world.
 
2. I simply can't see a genocide of the Slavs. Trying to Holocaust the Slavs would have caused the mother of all revolutions... assuming Germany owned the Soviet Union, would they be likely to use logic and keep the Slavs as slaves, or still try and eradicate them?

It's not a Holocaust, which entailed a great deal of logistical organisation. It's just not giving anybody any food.

As it was - under war circumstances, with much of the countryside teeming with partisans and the full blockade of the cities envisaged by the Hunger Plan impracticable - they killed about 20-25% of the Belarussians in three years.

Not a pretty outlook, is it?
 
Well, the Nazis tried to hide their atrocities even to their own population, hence I guess they thought it necessary to conduct these in secrecy. I don't see how the extermination could proceed after victory at such a large scale and at the same time could be kept somewhat hidden from the population. It's one thing to keep quiet when your country is at war, but it's another if your country just won dominance over much of the world.

Plan Morgenthau in it's extreme form would have instituted a mass culling of the German population, but thanks to the free media in democracies it would have never worked because the public would have seen the mass starvation and death the policies caused and the policies would have been scrapped.

Given Stalin was able to pull off the Holodomor a terror famine killing at least 7 million Ukrainians without the Russian people knowing much about what was going on I think Hitler would be able to get away with doing the same in various parts of Russia for some time due to the power that a state run propaganda press provides a government. Meaning it keeps the public ignorant.

The Nazi Party did in fact rely on public opinion more then people think which is why they kept their death camps in the East under raps, they would have to rely on public opinion even more in peace time which means the most I can see them pulling off is terror famines over different parts of Nazi ruled Russia at different points in time to keep the population down before the Nazi political and economic system implodes which would probably happen in less then half the time it took for the USSR to implode. That said they could and likely would be able to kill tens of millions of people that way.
 
Some people could do with citing a sources.

Do you mean myself or my side of the argument by that cryptic remark? Wiel: Tooze, Wages of Destruction, Weinberg, Visions of Victory, Read, The Devil's Disciples, Rees, The Nazis... everything I've ever read about the topic, actually...

Is the assertion that the Nazis meant to kill a great many people so very controversial?
 
Perhaps the best example of Hitler's views was that he effectively overruled every single one of Rosenberg's suggestions relating to the concept of building a chain of friendly Slav states against the Soviet Union in the Ukraine, Byelorrussia and South Russia, instead ordering his Reichkommissars to prepare the land for extensive German resettlement, necessitating the removal of people from the best farmland.
 

The Germans were quite united when it came to the treatment meted out to the Jews but there was a lot of conflict between the Nazis, the Wehrmacht and civil authorities when it came to atrocities against the non-Communist and non-Jewish segments of the populations of eastern Europe. A case in point was Wilhelm Kube who administered the Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien (Belarus).

That atrocities would've been carried out would've been beyond a doubt. That atrocities would've been as widespread as many of the more radical Nazi elements would've liked is unlikely as the atrocities would've - and did - backfire by encouraging partisans and soldiers to fight to the death rather than surrender.
 

Faeelin

Banned
Do you mean myself or my side of the argument by that cryptic remark? Wiel: Tooze, Wages of Destruction, Weinberg, Visions of Victory, Read, The Devil's Disciples, Rees, The Nazis... everything I've ever read about the topic, actually...

One of the scary things about Tooze, which I think counteracts the view of a lot of this site, is that he recognizes that the Third Reich in 1933 was not a global superpower, but a country with a per capita income which was the equivalent of, oh, Turkey today. A state with a large industrial sector but a backwards and large agricultural sector.

And so in contrast to a lot of the discussion on this site, which views the Nazis as stumbling incompetents doomed to doom, he portrays the Nazis as incredibly evil but also pursuing their goals with some measure of success.

Makes them scarier, IMO. I can't recommend this book enough for anyone interestedi n WW2 or who wants to depict a postwar Nazi society.
 
Absolutely; and in particular, concerning this topic, the Nazi plan for the eastern empire was not a vision of daft pseudo-medievalism but a quite detailed sketch of systematic investment and development, part of which was to be the destruction of Slavic civilisation.

As they would have said, they wanted to do to Russia what had been done in North America or Australia: create a huge new settler-civilisation controlling massive spaces and natural resources, and so create in Europe American economies of scale and standards of living. That's not to equate what happened in these places - ghastly as it was - to the unprecedented horrors of Nazism, planned, controlled, and done in a short time by men who fully understood their actions to much larger populations; but it is to point out that if you accepted their fundamentally repellent and mistaken view of the world to start with - and plenty of people did, or had, in countries besides Germany - their was a terrible logic to their actions.

The same partly applies to the whole system in eastern Europe. Certainly there were plenty of bloodthirsty moth-eaten psychopaths, and even more people who were ordinary folk at home but who had, by imbibing noxious brew of propaganda, power, and terror come to commit atrocities without rhyme or reason. But trying to persuade the Ukrainians to fight for Germany (which is by no means an endeavour guaranteed to succeed) means not enslaving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians for the war-work which enabled Germans to fight for Germany.
 
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Perhaps the best example of Hitler's views was that he effectively overruled every single one of Rosenberg's suggestions relating to the concept of building a chain of friendly Slav states against the Soviet Union in the Ukraine, Byelorrussia and South Russia, instead ordering his Reichkommissars to prepare the land for extensive German resettlement, necessitating the removal of people from the best farmland.

One simply has to understand the basis of Hitler's racial views that he would make Germans the dominate race in EurAsia. In order to do so that would necessitate killing and enslaving large segmets of the Eastern Europe. In history it had been done many times before, but not by an industrialized nation onto another industrialized nation.
 
Regarding France it is highly likely that significants parts of northeastern France in the Lorraine, Picardie and parts of Champagne would have been annexed as well eventually. As it was refugees were prevented to return to their homes if they were located there an initial plans aimed at settling the area with Germans settlers were also drawn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Interdite

One aim of the Nazis was to punish and severly weakn France by reducing her to her borders of the early 16th century.
 
1) Germany wanted France deliberately reduced to a tiny impotent successor and to be culturally neutered as a challenge to Hitler's idea of Deutsche Kultur. This is as much because Hitler didn't ever really want to accept that Germany lost WWI and was damned sure he would not ever allow to happen again as anything else. Meaning Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, arguably Sweden, Switzerland, and other states will be absorbed directly into Germany, and Germany will probably also take all of France's heavy industrial sectors, to boot.

2) I can certainly see the Nazis as mad enough to try precisely this given it's what they were doing IOTL. The Nazis put people like Erich Koch in charge of their East-European satrapies, that means that they'll successfully exterminate the Slavs and then inflict on themselves a massive human disaster as their idea of a great agricultural paradise in Eastern Europe, simply put, does not and cannot exist on a level to match what they wanted. They exterminate the Slavs, yes, but it creates a massive gaping hole in their economy and in attempting to close the hole they break themselves in the process. Generalplan Ost was not feasible in terms of the "goals" those evil men set out to accomplish and all it would have done was ensure Germany ever after was seen as the most evil country in human history, by far outpacing the cultural memory of the Aztecs and the Mongols put together.

3) Fascism held that the history of the world is the story of race-struggle, and as the USA didn't *really* have anything to do with Germany's defeat in WWI, only a bunch of traitors at home did (this, ladies and gents, is what the Nazis *really and actually* thought of the USA), the Nazis would probably go after the USA first thinking "Buncha sissies, we'll tear through them worse than we did Russia." And then the nukes start flying like maybugs and human civilization no longer exists.
 
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