Eurofed
Banned
PoD: it is a clear night in Berlin Tempelhof Airport on November 8, 1939, and Adolf Hitler elects to return to Berlin by airplane as planned, after he delivers his Beer Hall Putsch commemoration speech in Munich.
The bomb planted in the Hall by the anti-Nazi joiner Georg Elser goes off as planned at 9.20pm, while Hitler is in the midst of a full-swing tirade against the British. The blast kills Hitler and his deputy Hess instantly. His right-hand man and designed successor Goering is severely wounded as well and dies a few hours later.
With the death of Hitler and without a clearly identified successor, a vicious power struggle for succession spanning a few weeks erupts between Goebbels, Bormann and the Nazi Party, Himmler, Heydrich and the SS network, and the military. Himmler tries to seize power with a coup, which forces the hand of the Heer. The SS coup is crushed, Himmler is shot, and Heydrich purged. The SS are disbanded and their aborning combat branch merged with the Wehrmacht. After some discussion, Reichenau is appointed by his fellow generals and sworn in as new President of the Reich. Todt is nominated Chancellor, Speer takes his place as minister of armaments. Schacht is reinstated as minister of the economy. Goebbels retains his role as minister of propaganda. Joachim von Ribbentrop is fired as Foreign Minister, and the position is given back to von Neurath. Bormann is dismissed and secretly executed on trumped-up charges of complicity in the SS coup because he knew too much. Kesselring becomes new head of the air force.
The new German government immediately assured Stalin that he would continue to abide by the Hitler-Stalin Pact signed in August 1939 "until futher notice". It then approached the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to discuss a ceasefire. Chamberlain reasserted that Germany had to withdraw from Poland before any ceasefire would be considered.
Despite the first snubbing, the new German leadership, largely made up by the Heer and the technocratic moderate wing of the Nazi bureaucracy, was much less sanguine than Hitler about extensive territorial conquest in the East and anxious to put an end to the war with the Entente, now that German grievances with Poland had been settled.
Germany further notified the British government that they were willing to discuss a peace settlement that involved a re-establishment of the Polish state, provided that "sensible German territorial claims" were satisfied.
This brought about a confrontation in the British government: the hardline faction, headed by Churchill and Eden, was for intransigence, and called for continuation of the war till victory. Another faction, headed by Lord Halifax, supported opening peace negotiations, remarking that any possiblity to restore Poland's independence (the British war aim) without bloodshed had to be explored, and that Britain had made no committment about Polish territorial integrity.
Premier Chamberlain was divided: on one hand, he pursued a peaceful policy with Germany, and reluctantly declared war only when forced by proof of Hitler's brutal intransigence and untrustworthiness. The betrayal of Munich's agreement when Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia stinged; yet Hitler was dead and the new leaders in Berlin seemed to speak a different language. He expressed support to open peace talks about terms that would entail the re-establishment of the independence of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and some proof of sincerity of German intentions would be needed. After a heated debate, the Cabinet voted to support this platform.
On receiving the British answer, a debate ensued in the German government, too. On one hand, control of Czech economic resources was very valuable to Germany, and so was strategic control of Poland as a forward defense against possible Soviet aggression (despite the Non-Aggression Pact, few in Berlin harbored doubts that Stalin would break it if it saw an opportunity). On the other hand, ending the war, which none of the leaders had wanted, would allow to redress the German economy and realign its military for defense in the East. And neither Reichenau nor Todt or the generals were overly interested into the radical plans about racial colonization and assimilation of Czechia and Poland that Hitler had harbored, especially not if the price was a long, exhausting, and risky war with the West. They just wanted to fulfill Germany's traditional territorial grievances about the Versailles settlement (keeping Danzig and as much as of the pre-1914 German territories as they could afford) and maintain Czechia and Poland in the German sphere of influence. There were also doubts that giving too many concessions to the West about Poland would be seen by Stalin as a betrayal of previous accords with Hitler about the partition of Poland.
In the end, it was reluctantly decided to make some tangible concessions to the West about the status of the former Slav nations: the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was given back some degree of autonomy as a puppet state, and the General Government was likewise restored as a Polish puppet state, with a government of Polish collaborators. With some reluctance, it was also decided to end discrimination measures for Jews living within the Polish state. Britain was notified that these measures were a token of German seriousness about a sensible settlement, and more could be done if peace negotiations were started in earnest. At the same time, Russia was told that such measures were an attempt to win peace from the West, and Germany was determined to keep control of the Polish space, and prevent the resurrection of Poland as a threat to Germany and Soviet Union alike.
Stalin was not fooled by German reassurances, however, he saw that the M-R settlement was at risk, and a Western-German peace and detente could happen, which would emperil his strategy. So he accelerated his timetable, trying to win as much as he could while the war kept the capitalist powers busy. The Baltic states, which had been recently forced to accept Soviet bases, were occupied by the Red Army, which installed new, pro-Soviet governments in all three countries. Following rigged elections, in which only pro-communist candidates were allowed to run, the newly "elected" parliaments of the three countries formally applied to "join" the USSR and were annexed into it. Soon afterwards, upon a trumped-up pretext of a false-flag Finnish bombing on Soviet territory, the USSR declared war on Finland.
The new German peace offer, and Soviet actions, strengthened the hand of the peace faction in the British government, and after much debate, a narrow agreement was reached about starting peace negotiations, which were secretly opened in Lisbon.
However, Stalin was not the only one that was not fooled about German intentions, and Mussolini, too, decided to accelerate his own expansionist plans before peace between Germany and the West would close his window for action. Long-standing plans for an attack to Yugoslavia were dusted off, contacts with poro-Italian Croat separatists reactivated, offers for an anti-Yugoslav alliance made to (and accepted by) Hungary and Bulgaria, and Italian troops mobilized. An abortive uprising by Croat fascist separatists was used as a casus belli, and Italy attacked Yugoslavia, soon followed by Hungary and Bulgaria.
Despite the aggressive intentions of the two dictators, the attacks on Finland and Yugoslavia showed that the Soviet and the Italian militaries were quite riddled with embarassing flaws, which allowed the Finnish army to stage a successful defense. Despite the manifold problems of the Italian army, however, the large-scale defection of Slovenian and Croat troops, which were unwilling to fight for a Yugoslav kingdom largely hegemonized by the Serbs, critically hampered the Yugoslav resistance, as did the multi-front war. So the Serbian core of the army was gradually forced to fall back on a "national redoubt" largely made up of Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia.
A strange international landscape ensued for a few months, where Britain, France, and Germany, nominally at war, shunned any large land operations and only confronted each other in naval and air skirmishes, while war openly raged in northern Europe and the Balkans. Stalin and Mussolini, stung by the loss of face in their inability to crush minor powers, sacked generals and implemented reforms of the military, and gradually the Red Army and the Italian Army came closer and closer to breaking the stalemate. Heroic Finnish resistance was supported by Swedish military assistance and "volunteers", even if Sweden did not dare to officially intervene in the war. There was some serious talk in the Anglo-French governments of intervening in the Winter War, even if, as long as the state of war with Germany persisted, such an intervention would require the controversial violation of Norwegian and Swedish neutrality. So preparations for sich intervention progressed slowly. As it concerned the Third Balkan War, France made some rumors abour supporting Yugoslavia, but Britain was largely disinterested as long as Italy steered off Greece.
In the meanwhile, peace negotiations between the Germans and the Anglo-French slowly progressed. Gradually a comprehensive agreement was reached.
As it concerns Czechia, it established that Germany would withdraw all troops and restore the independence of the Czech Republic in its March 1939 borders, even if it reserved the right to maintain an economic union and a defense pact with it. The legitminate Czech government by Emil Hacha (which had been fairly friendly to Germany before the invasion and had collaborated during the German occupation) would be restored in power. Germany would The return of the anti-German leaders of the Czechoslovak National Liberation Committee, leaded by Benes, was not to be allowed.
As it concerns Poland, the full independence of Poland would be re-established and its government-in-exile reinstated. Germany would annex Danzig, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia, up to the pre-1914 border of the latter two provinces. The province of Posen would be partitioned between Germany and Poland, with Germany annexing a strip in the northern and western part of the province and Poland getting most of it. In order to maintain its own access to the sea, Poland was allowed extraterritorial use of the port facilities of Gdynia as well as an extraterritorial railroad and highway connection to it. Germany and Poland would then enact a population exchange of the respective minorities. Germany guaranteed that ethnic Poles willing to undergo and suitable for Germanization would be allowed to stay, and only those who wanted to maintain Polish national identity or were "politically, culturally, or racially unsuitable for assimilation in the German Volk" (including German Jews) would be expelled.
As it concerned Germany and the Entente, they would return to the status quo ante. With Britain, Germany agreed to reinstate the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, which Hitler had denounced in 1939 during the build-up to war with Poland and limited German Navy to 35% of the British one, and they included submarines in the new version of agreement. Moreover, Germany issued a declaration by which it renounced any further territorial claims in Europe, and offered Belgium, France, and Denmark to repatriate those members of their German minorities that were willing to opt for German citizenship, on the model of the similar German-Italian agreement about South Tyrol. Preliminary accords were also made with France about mutual military reductions on the German-French border.
These terms were acceptable to Germany, Britain, and France, but for political reasons, the Entente was eager to get the explicit assent of the Polish GiE to the peace scheme, which they stubbornly refused to do.
However, their resistance was won when the German negotiatiors made a subtle threat: put it simply, if the Polish leaders refused to make peace, Germany would pull its controlled area back to the 1914 border, enact annexations and expulsions as established, quite possibly in a more extensive way, and then in all likelihood the Soviet Union would quickly sweep in and annex the rest of Poland, without opposition by Germany. In such a case, Poland would be in an even worse situation, and if the Entente really wanted to restore the Polish state, they would have to fight an even bigger war (what they most likey were unwilling to do). The threat worked and the Polish GiE reluctantly assented to the peace scheme. After much controversy, the peace settlement was approved by the German, British, and French governments, and narrowly ratified by the British and French parliaments.
On the impending German-Entente peace, Soviet Russia and Italy (and its allies) redoubled their efforts to subdue their respective enemies. It seemed that the military shake-ups of the recent months had paid off, since Finnish and Yugoslav resistance started to crumble, and it appeared that a strategic breakthrough was imminent. Nonetheless, both Stalin and Mussolini were wary of pressing on for total victory and occupation of enemy countries, since they feared that peace with Germany would free up the Entente for possible intervention in the Winter or Balkan wars. So they made peace offers to their exhausted enemies, which were accepted.
Finland was forced to cede Finnish Karelia and the Petsamo area. Italy annexed western Dalmatia, Inner Carniola, Kosovo, and northwestern Vardar Macedonia. It set up Slovenia and the Banovina of Croatia as independent satellite states. In Voivodina, Backa and Baranja were annexed by Hungary, while Syrmia went to Croatia. Bulgaria annexed most of Vardar Macedonia.
In a relatively short time during April 1940, a series of peace treaties were signed between Britain, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Russia, Finland, and an uneasy peace settled on the continent. Many of the expansionist ambitions and the reasonable irredentist claims of the revisionist powers (Germany, Italy, Soviet Russia) had been satisfied, casting off the humiliating Versailles settlement, and although their leaders might wish for more, they were also wary of pushing them and bringing on them the ire of the other great powers. Britain and France could claim that the independence of Poland and Czechia had been restored, and the one of Finland, preseved without a long and destructive general war with Germany and Russia (even if those states had suffered painful territorial losses). Throughout the continent, people celebrated the return of peace.
The bomb planted in the Hall by the anti-Nazi joiner Georg Elser goes off as planned at 9.20pm, while Hitler is in the midst of a full-swing tirade against the British. The blast kills Hitler and his deputy Hess instantly. His right-hand man and designed successor Goering is severely wounded as well and dies a few hours later.
With the death of Hitler and without a clearly identified successor, a vicious power struggle for succession spanning a few weeks erupts between Goebbels, Bormann and the Nazi Party, Himmler, Heydrich and the SS network, and the military. Himmler tries to seize power with a coup, which forces the hand of the Heer. The SS coup is crushed, Himmler is shot, and Heydrich purged. The SS are disbanded and their aborning combat branch merged with the Wehrmacht. After some discussion, Reichenau is appointed by his fellow generals and sworn in as new President of the Reich. Todt is nominated Chancellor, Speer takes his place as minister of armaments. Schacht is reinstated as minister of the economy. Goebbels retains his role as minister of propaganda. Joachim von Ribbentrop is fired as Foreign Minister, and the position is given back to von Neurath. Bormann is dismissed and secretly executed on trumped-up charges of complicity in the SS coup because he knew too much. Kesselring becomes new head of the air force.
The new German government immediately assured Stalin that he would continue to abide by the Hitler-Stalin Pact signed in August 1939 "until futher notice". It then approached the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to discuss a ceasefire. Chamberlain reasserted that Germany had to withdraw from Poland before any ceasefire would be considered.
Despite the first snubbing, the new German leadership, largely made up by the Heer and the technocratic moderate wing of the Nazi bureaucracy, was much less sanguine than Hitler about extensive territorial conquest in the East and anxious to put an end to the war with the Entente, now that German grievances with Poland had been settled.
Germany further notified the British government that they were willing to discuss a peace settlement that involved a re-establishment of the Polish state, provided that "sensible German territorial claims" were satisfied.
This brought about a confrontation in the British government: the hardline faction, headed by Churchill and Eden, was for intransigence, and called for continuation of the war till victory. Another faction, headed by Lord Halifax, supported opening peace negotiations, remarking that any possiblity to restore Poland's independence (the British war aim) without bloodshed had to be explored, and that Britain had made no committment about Polish territorial integrity.
Premier Chamberlain was divided: on one hand, he pursued a peaceful policy with Germany, and reluctantly declared war only when forced by proof of Hitler's brutal intransigence and untrustworthiness. The betrayal of Munich's agreement when Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia stinged; yet Hitler was dead and the new leaders in Berlin seemed to speak a different language. He expressed support to open peace talks about terms that would entail the re-establishment of the independence of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and some proof of sincerity of German intentions would be needed. After a heated debate, the Cabinet voted to support this platform.
On receiving the British answer, a debate ensued in the German government, too. On one hand, control of Czech economic resources was very valuable to Germany, and so was strategic control of Poland as a forward defense against possible Soviet aggression (despite the Non-Aggression Pact, few in Berlin harbored doubts that Stalin would break it if it saw an opportunity). On the other hand, ending the war, which none of the leaders had wanted, would allow to redress the German economy and realign its military for defense in the East. And neither Reichenau nor Todt or the generals were overly interested into the radical plans about racial colonization and assimilation of Czechia and Poland that Hitler had harbored, especially not if the price was a long, exhausting, and risky war with the West. They just wanted to fulfill Germany's traditional territorial grievances about the Versailles settlement (keeping Danzig and as much as of the pre-1914 German territories as they could afford) and maintain Czechia and Poland in the German sphere of influence. There were also doubts that giving too many concessions to the West about Poland would be seen by Stalin as a betrayal of previous accords with Hitler about the partition of Poland.
In the end, it was reluctantly decided to make some tangible concessions to the West about the status of the former Slav nations: the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was given back some degree of autonomy as a puppet state, and the General Government was likewise restored as a Polish puppet state, with a government of Polish collaborators. With some reluctance, it was also decided to end discrimination measures for Jews living within the Polish state. Britain was notified that these measures were a token of German seriousness about a sensible settlement, and more could be done if peace negotiations were started in earnest. At the same time, Russia was told that such measures were an attempt to win peace from the West, and Germany was determined to keep control of the Polish space, and prevent the resurrection of Poland as a threat to Germany and Soviet Union alike.
Stalin was not fooled by German reassurances, however, he saw that the M-R settlement was at risk, and a Western-German peace and detente could happen, which would emperil his strategy. So he accelerated his timetable, trying to win as much as he could while the war kept the capitalist powers busy. The Baltic states, which had been recently forced to accept Soviet bases, were occupied by the Red Army, which installed new, pro-Soviet governments in all three countries. Following rigged elections, in which only pro-communist candidates were allowed to run, the newly "elected" parliaments of the three countries formally applied to "join" the USSR and were annexed into it. Soon afterwards, upon a trumped-up pretext of a false-flag Finnish bombing on Soviet territory, the USSR declared war on Finland.
The new German peace offer, and Soviet actions, strengthened the hand of the peace faction in the British government, and after much debate, a narrow agreement was reached about starting peace negotiations, which were secretly opened in Lisbon.
However, Stalin was not the only one that was not fooled about German intentions, and Mussolini, too, decided to accelerate his own expansionist plans before peace between Germany and the West would close his window for action. Long-standing plans for an attack to Yugoslavia were dusted off, contacts with poro-Italian Croat separatists reactivated, offers for an anti-Yugoslav alliance made to (and accepted by) Hungary and Bulgaria, and Italian troops mobilized. An abortive uprising by Croat fascist separatists was used as a casus belli, and Italy attacked Yugoslavia, soon followed by Hungary and Bulgaria.
Despite the aggressive intentions of the two dictators, the attacks on Finland and Yugoslavia showed that the Soviet and the Italian militaries were quite riddled with embarassing flaws, which allowed the Finnish army to stage a successful defense. Despite the manifold problems of the Italian army, however, the large-scale defection of Slovenian and Croat troops, which were unwilling to fight for a Yugoslav kingdom largely hegemonized by the Serbs, critically hampered the Yugoslav resistance, as did the multi-front war. So the Serbian core of the army was gradually forced to fall back on a "national redoubt" largely made up of Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia.
A strange international landscape ensued for a few months, where Britain, France, and Germany, nominally at war, shunned any large land operations and only confronted each other in naval and air skirmishes, while war openly raged in northern Europe and the Balkans. Stalin and Mussolini, stung by the loss of face in their inability to crush minor powers, sacked generals and implemented reforms of the military, and gradually the Red Army and the Italian Army came closer and closer to breaking the stalemate. Heroic Finnish resistance was supported by Swedish military assistance and "volunteers", even if Sweden did not dare to officially intervene in the war. There was some serious talk in the Anglo-French governments of intervening in the Winter War, even if, as long as the state of war with Germany persisted, such an intervention would require the controversial violation of Norwegian and Swedish neutrality. So preparations for sich intervention progressed slowly. As it concerned the Third Balkan War, France made some rumors abour supporting Yugoslavia, but Britain was largely disinterested as long as Italy steered off Greece.
In the meanwhile, peace negotiations between the Germans and the Anglo-French slowly progressed. Gradually a comprehensive agreement was reached.
As it concerns Czechia, it established that Germany would withdraw all troops and restore the independence of the Czech Republic in its March 1939 borders, even if it reserved the right to maintain an economic union and a defense pact with it. The legitminate Czech government by Emil Hacha (which had been fairly friendly to Germany before the invasion and had collaborated during the German occupation) would be restored in power. Germany would The return of the anti-German leaders of the Czechoslovak National Liberation Committee, leaded by Benes, was not to be allowed.
As it concerns Poland, the full independence of Poland would be re-established and its government-in-exile reinstated. Germany would annex Danzig, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia, up to the pre-1914 border of the latter two provinces. The province of Posen would be partitioned between Germany and Poland, with Germany annexing a strip in the northern and western part of the province and Poland getting most of it. In order to maintain its own access to the sea, Poland was allowed extraterritorial use of the port facilities of Gdynia as well as an extraterritorial railroad and highway connection to it. Germany and Poland would then enact a population exchange of the respective minorities. Germany guaranteed that ethnic Poles willing to undergo and suitable for Germanization would be allowed to stay, and only those who wanted to maintain Polish national identity or were "politically, culturally, or racially unsuitable for assimilation in the German Volk" (including German Jews) would be expelled.
As it concerned Germany and the Entente, they would return to the status quo ante. With Britain, Germany agreed to reinstate the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, which Hitler had denounced in 1939 during the build-up to war with Poland and limited German Navy to 35% of the British one, and they included submarines in the new version of agreement. Moreover, Germany issued a declaration by which it renounced any further territorial claims in Europe, and offered Belgium, France, and Denmark to repatriate those members of their German minorities that were willing to opt for German citizenship, on the model of the similar German-Italian agreement about South Tyrol. Preliminary accords were also made with France about mutual military reductions on the German-French border.
These terms were acceptable to Germany, Britain, and France, but for political reasons, the Entente was eager to get the explicit assent of the Polish GiE to the peace scheme, which they stubbornly refused to do.
However, their resistance was won when the German negotiatiors made a subtle threat: put it simply, if the Polish leaders refused to make peace, Germany would pull its controlled area back to the 1914 border, enact annexations and expulsions as established, quite possibly in a more extensive way, and then in all likelihood the Soviet Union would quickly sweep in and annex the rest of Poland, without opposition by Germany. In such a case, Poland would be in an even worse situation, and if the Entente really wanted to restore the Polish state, they would have to fight an even bigger war (what they most likey were unwilling to do). The threat worked and the Polish GiE reluctantly assented to the peace scheme. After much controversy, the peace settlement was approved by the German, British, and French governments, and narrowly ratified by the British and French parliaments.
On the impending German-Entente peace, Soviet Russia and Italy (and its allies) redoubled their efforts to subdue their respective enemies. It seemed that the military shake-ups of the recent months had paid off, since Finnish and Yugoslav resistance started to crumble, and it appeared that a strategic breakthrough was imminent. Nonetheless, both Stalin and Mussolini were wary of pressing on for total victory and occupation of enemy countries, since they feared that peace with Germany would free up the Entente for possible intervention in the Winter or Balkan wars. So they made peace offers to their exhausted enemies, which were accepted.
Finland was forced to cede Finnish Karelia and the Petsamo area. Italy annexed western Dalmatia, Inner Carniola, Kosovo, and northwestern Vardar Macedonia. It set up Slovenia and the Banovina of Croatia as independent satellite states. In Voivodina, Backa and Baranja were annexed by Hungary, while Syrmia went to Croatia. Bulgaria annexed most of Vardar Macedonia.
In a relatively short time during April 1940, a series of peace treaties were signed between Britain, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Russia, Finland, and an uneasy peace settled on the continent. Many of the expansionist ambitions and the reasonable irredentist claims of the revisionist powers (Germany, Italy, Soviet Russia) had been satisfied, casting off the humiliating Versailles settlement, and although their leaders might wish for more, they were also wary of pushing them and bringing on them the ire of the other great powers. Britain and France could claim that the independence of Poland and Czechia had been restored, and the one of Finland, preseved without a long and destructive general war with Germany and Russia (even if those states had suffered painful territorial losses). Throughout the continent, people celebrated the return of peace.
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