If the July 20th Plot Had Succeeded...

[jmc247]

No, Hitler's book made it clear he was going to kill all the Jews and go to war with the USSR, his behavior pattern prior to the war showed a direct contingency plans. Incidentally, when did Ali Khameini say anything like what you've said he did?

Ali Khamenini isn't Iran's current President.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/27/israel.iran

As for Hitler's book potental dictators have for a very long history of writing and say extreme shit early on to gain a hard core base of extreme followers followers then when they take over a government they moderate. That was what Neville Chamberlain, the U.S. government and even the French government expected Hitler to do.

Hitler did do just that after he took over or at least the world thought he did until he was handed enough by the West to feel ready to bear his teeth in the late 30s at least from a military standpoint and after a series of military victories started instituting his long term plans for mass murder he planned for decades.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Ali Khamenini isn't Iran's current President.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/27/israel.iran

As for Hitler's book potental dictators have for a very long history of writing and say extreme shit early on to gain a hard core base of extreme followers followers then when they take over a government they moderate. That was what Neville Chamberlain, the U.S. government and even the French government expected Hitler to do.

Hitler did do just that after he took over or at least the world thought he did until he was handed enough by the West to feel ready to bear his teeth in the late 30s at least from a military standpoint and after a series of military victories started instituting his long term plans for mass murder he planned for decades.

The point is that the President doesn't lead Iran. The Supreme Ayatollah does, as this is an Islamic Republic. Presidents come and go in Iran on Khameini's whim, it is, after all, a theocracy. Not a secular state run by civil officials. It's why I don't take seriously anyone that thinks Iran is a threat due to what a third-stringer who lacks any coercive power whatsoever says or does. The real bad guy gets a free pass to do whatever he wants while people focus on the Iranian equivalent to Daniel Inoyue.

 

[jmc247]

The point is that the President doesn't lead Iran. The Supreme Ayatollah does, as this is an Islamic Republic. Presidents come and go in Iran on Khameini's whim, it is, after all, a theocracy. Not a secular state run by civil officials. It's why I don't take seriously anyone that thinks Iran is a threat due to what a third-stringer who lacks any coercive power whatsoever says or does. The real bad guy gets a free pass to do whatever he wants while people focus on the Iranian equivalent to Daniel Inoyue.

I am well aware of that, but he doesn't speak without the Supreme Leaders thumbs up and it's not like the Supreme Leader has had much nicer things to say.

Iran's Supreme Leader: West can't save Israel

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said Sunday that Western support of Israel was ineffective, telling a top Palestinian militant leader that its obliteration was imminent according to the will of God.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/iran-s-supreme-leader-west-can-t-save-israel-1.265910

But, one has to sepeate fact and actual opinions or plans from big talk like Saddam saying he would burn half of Israel with WMDs if we attacked in the first Gulf War.

 

[Adler]

Except they voted in Hitler and his cronies when they promised exactly this......

Hitler had never a majority on his own in the Reichstag! Furthermore there is a long list of attempts on Hitler's life by the German Widerstand. I also wonder why some here equals Germans with Nazis. There were Nazis also among Poles, French, Nrowegians and so on. Also there were more Nazi leaders coming from Austria (at least in percentage) than from any other German regions.

Anyway, Hitler was also not elected because of his racism but despite of it. It might be interesting to see, when he really became such a monster. But that's another topic.

The Widerstand was the only group to stop Hitler and got nearly no support from the Allies. The members were German patriots, but that does not make them Nazis. Tell me, who of the shadow cabinet of Goerdeler was a real Nazi (with the possible exception of Speer, but he was not involved in the plannings and executions). You will find none.

Adler

 

[Gullash]

Except they voted in Hitler and his cronies when they promised exactly this......

Here you will find a table of the number of votes the Nazis got over the years. (quite a bit down)http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERnazi.htm

In the last free election, November 1932 (in the 1933 election the Nazis were already in control), the number of people voting for the Nazi party was actually decreasing, and they did not have a majority of the vote when they through scheming managed to get Hitler made chancellor.

The table also shows that no-one cared to vote for the Nazis until the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit Germany around 1930, with hyperinflation etc, which was made worse by the Versailles reparations that were still demanded: "In the 1928 German elections, less than 3% of the people voted for the Nazi Party. This gave them only twelve seats, twenty fewer than they achieved in the May, 1924 election."

Basically when the Great Depression hit with unemployment and hunger and general misery people were voting for anyone promising them bread, war was the last thing on their mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Germany

 

[Adler]

May I add, that the Great Depression hit Germany so hard just because of the reparations.

Adler

 

[George Carty]

The table also shows that no-one cared to vote for the Nazis until the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit Germany around 1930, with hyperinflation etc, which was made worse by the Versailles reparations that were still demanded: "In the 1928 German elections, less than 3% of the people voted for the Nazi Party. This gave them only twelve seats, twenty fewer than they achieved in the May, 1924 election."

The hyperinflation was in 1923, well before the Great Depression.

Also wasn't there a crash in the prices of agricultural products in 1928? This may have been a bigger factor in the rise of the Nazis, given that peasant farmers were a key Nazi constituency.

 

[Gullash]

No, Hitler's book made it clear he was going to kill all the Jews and go to war with the USSR, his behavior pattern prior to the war showed a direct contingency plans.

If by "Hitlers book" you refer to Mein Kampf, that is a rambling monologue about his ideology that you can not use as blueprint for anything related to foreign policy. He didn't say there that he was going to kill the Jews either.

You probably don't know this, but one of the reasons so many Jews in Germany didn't leave in time and instead got caught up in the Holocaust was because they though the Nazi antisemitism was just slogans. Otherwise how do you explain oraganisations such as the ""Nazi Jews"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews

To further decrease the foreign policy value of Mein Kampf; Albert Speer said that when he came into the orbit of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s he asked him if he should read Mein Kampf, but Hitler discouraged him from reading it, saying that it had already been superseded by events. This comes from one of the following two books (can't remember which), both of which I can recommend:
Gitta Sereny: "Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth"
Albert Speer: "Inside the Third Reich"

If you really want to discuss what Hitlers foreign policy plans were (should be good material for alternative history), try to get a copy in the local library (university libraries have it for sure) of "Hitlers Second Book". Here you have a foreign policy blueprint for whom Germany was to try to ally with, and who the long-term enemy was. It was written after Mein Kampf, but never published (until after the war)

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


Thinking of the second book also made me think of a question for a future thread: What if the Madagascar plan had worked. Would it have affected the war, and would there still be an Israel today?

In 1940 ... "Most Nazi officials, especially the authorities of the General Government (which administered the rump remains of Poland) including Hans Frank, viewed the forced resettlement of 4,000,000 Jews to Madagascar as being infinitely more desirable than the heretofore piecemeal efforts at deportation into Poland. As of July 10, all such deportations were cancelled, and construction of the Warsaw ghetto was halted, since it appeared to be unnecessary."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

 

[Snake Featherston]

-snip-
Adler

To be sure but that's perfectly irrelevant. The crude reality is that the generals when given his orders to do things like murder "Commissars" and "Jews" in 1941 gleefully collaborated in the assumption that this would gain them advantage with Hitler. The Holocaust did not begin with Wannsee, Hitler was giving orders and approval for massacres in 1939. The issue was whether Jews would die being deported somewhere in ships like say, to Madagascar, or simply in Europe killed by the Nazis forcing their bloodstained revision of the political and demographic map to meet that manchld's twisted fantasies.

May I add, that the Great Depression hit Germany so hard just because of the reparations.
Adler

Wrong timeframe. Hyperinflation was in 1923. Germany *was* hit hard by the Depression, but Reparations had nothing to do with it, Weimar had already negotiated their end under Stresemann and Bruning.

If by "Hitlers book" you refer to Mein Kampf, that is a rambling monologue about his ideology that you can not use as blueprint for anything related to foreign policy. He didn't say there that he was going to kill the Jews either.

On the contrary, it was an exact blueprint for what he wanted to do. You need more than these cliche dismissals of Hitler's trainwreck of a book to claim it was irrelevant to his long-term goals.

-snip-

It's quite understandable that nobody would have expected someone would really pull off things requiring one to be an Omnicidal Maniac with the Devil's Luck when that guy's still running for election. The Nazis de-emphasized that rhetoric as they were getting elected, but that was pure tactics. It was not an actual, sincere guide to anything Hitler really wanted. The man was, after all, an ex-propaganda boss who had loudly and famously in his own book championed the politics of the Big Lie. And yes, actually, I did know this. It was covered in Michael Mann's book on fascism.

-snip-

Oh, so we're trusting Hitler's little thuggish menchildren henchmen on what their boss wanted to do? Did nobody teach you in research to examine the veracity of a source? A memoir of someone close to a center of power is by no means guaranteed to be the truth, Speer's certainly was not. Speer, if you examine his writings, lied about a great many things and did so shamelessly. Including his supposed economic miracle. If your idea of refuting me is to point to a source that flawed, find one that really counts and try again.

-snip-

Yes, they would resettle them in a plan that would have killed 90% of all the Jews sent on ships that in classic Nazi fashion would no doubt have included zero sanitary or otherwise provisions involving Jews being sent to a godforsaken corner of the world, there to die at the hands of the locals. The Nazis did not have any hesitation on killing Jews, not in terms of the goal, only in terms of incidental details and methods in that plan. Any attempt to date the Final Solution to 1942 runs squarely aground things like Babi Yar and Kaunas in 1941, where the Nazis orchestrated huge massacres of the USSR's Jewish population, massacres that fit squarely into an evolving track record from the 1939 Polish massacres and dynamiting synagogues and defiling Torah scrolls with standard manchild tactics to do so.

 

[Snake Featherston]

I am well aware of that, but he doesn't speak without the Supreme Leaders thumbs up and it's not like the Supreme Leader has had much nicer things to say.

Then focus on the real dictator, not the one that doesn't have any power to do actual harm. Incidentally, it is also not clear that Ahmadinejad has the Supreme Leader's unvarnished approval.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Late...an-elections-Ahmadinejad-reduced-to-lame-duck

But I forget, this would require doing basic research on a Know Your Enemy basis.

But, one has to sepeate fact and actual opinions or plans from big talk like Saddam saying he would burn half of Israel with WMDs if we attacked in the first Gulf War.

Saddam *did* send Scud missiles of the conventional variety to strike Israel, and it was not fear of the weapons that made him not use them. He, after all, used them with glee when the USA failed to do anything to stop his destroying an uprising it had called for.

 

[Gullash]

Wrong timeframe. Hyperinflation was in 1923. Germany *was* hit hard by the Depression, but Reparations had nothing to do with it, Weimar had already negotiated their end under Stresemann and Bruning.

I admit this is not my field of expertise (and I admit that I was wrong about the hyperinflation), but when exactly are you claiming that reparations ended? The Hoover Moratorium was not approved by Congress until December 1931.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Moratorium

The Lausanne Conference did not take place until six or seven months later, in the midle of 1932.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lausanne_Conference_of_1932

Ergo it can be inferred that Germany was indeed paying reparations during the Great Depression that started in 1929, precisely the time that the Nazi party started growing dramatically.

 

[Adler]

snip

You seem to have no single idea of what you're talking about. If you read about the Madagascar plan you would see, that a complete extermination was not planned until the end of 1940. Himmler had said, that killing Jews was "Bolshevistic" and "un-German". I think you made the very same error like many others. Hitler's "Mein Kampf" was an awful book, difficult to read and full of BS. The problem is, that Hitler started to believe his own propaganda and thus implemented it. But he did so only since mid to late 1941. Mein Kampf became his blue prints not in 1923 but in 1941. Before it was mere propaganda. Which he did not totally believe himself. Hitler radicalized himself more and more. And that started in 1919 but became much more serious not before 1941.

The hyperinflation of 1923 was and is still very known in Germany. However, the reparations the Germans paid were indeed loans they got from the USA. Since the economy was growing, it was no problem. But it became one, when the US banks were no longer willing or able to lend money. And so the card house collapsed. Because of the reparations.


Adler

 

[Gullash]

Then focus on the real dictator, not the one that doesn't have any power to do actual harm. Incidentally, it is also not clear that Ahmadinejad has the Supreme Leader's unvarnished approval.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Late...an-elections-Ahmadinejad-reduced-to-lame-duck

But I forget, this would require doing basic research on a Know Your Enemy basis.


Saddam *did* send Scud missiles of the conventional variety to strike Israel, and it was not fear of the weapons that made him not use them. He, after all, used them with glee when the USA failed to do anything to stop his destroying an uprising it had called for.

I think we should consider here that that Haaretz is hardly a neutral source. For example they state the following as fact: "A 2005 statement by Ahmadinejad saying that "Israel should be wiped off the map" outraged the international community."

If you look closer you will find that that is a very dubious statement, and it seems to be a gratiutious miss-translation for political effect. Both regarding wether "wiped of the map" was used, and regarding whether Israel as a state was meant or whether it merely was aimed at "the Zionist Regime" allegedly in command of Israel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#Translation_controversy

The conventional missiles that Saddam Hussein sent towards Israel were for a very simple purpose, to get Israel involved in the war. This would have resulted in the collapse of the Arab coalition gathered by the US to fight against Iraq.

 

[Snake Featherston]

You seem to have no single idea of what you're talking about. If you read about the Madagascar plan you would see, that a complete extermination was not planned until the end of 1940. Himmler had said, that killing Jews was "Bolshevistic" and "un-German". I think you made the very same error like many others. Hitler's "Mein Kampf" was an awful book, difficult to read and full of BS. The problem is, that Hitler started to believe his own propaganda and thus implemented it. But he did so only since mid to late 1941. Mein Kampf became his blue prints not in 1923 but in 1941. Before it was mere propaganda. Which he did not totally believe himself. Hitler radicalized himself more and more. And that started in 1919 but became much more serious not before 1941.

The hyperinflation of 1923 was and is still very known in Germany. However, the reparations the Germans paid were indeed loans they got from the USA. Since the economy was growing, it was no problem. But it became one, when the US banks were no longer willing or able to lend money. And so the card house collapsed. Because of the reparations.


Adler

That is not, in fact, what Himmler said and if you had the full quote you would have noted that. What he said was the Babi Yar method was Bolshevik and anti-Germans. He wanted some "humane" means to kill innocent men, women, and children for his twisted ideological purpose. It was not killing Jews as killing people, but rather the method.

Again, Hitler was never just starting to believe his own propaganda. You do realize he developed gas chambers on ethnic Germans before using them on Jews, right? That when German generals protested massacres of Polish nationals and Polish Jews Hitler overrode them and backed the people committing the massacres in 1939? Hitler always wanted to kill Europe's and ultimately the world's Jews off. What he did not have was an elaborate master plan to do this. He was willing to exploit opportunities that came his way to achieve this.

The Nazis were always about slaughtering Jews and for that matter anyone Adolf Hitler didn't like. Give them some credit for consistency in this regard, they knew what they were about even if their whitewashers don't want to give them credit for this. Hitler, like Stalin, was a true believer of the kind of blinding fanaticism that meant he could do anything to achieve his goals and rest assured his ideology was consistent. It's a mentality that repels those who are normal and rightfully so. It was a mentality that for all that rightful repulsive nature attached to it still existed all the same.

I think we should consider here that that Haaretz is hardly a neutral source. For example they state the following as fact: "A 2005 statement by Ahmadinejad saying that "Israel should be wiped off the map" outraged the international community."

If you look closer you will find that that is a very dubious statement, and it seems to be a gratiutious miss-translation for political effect. Both regarding wether "wiped of the map" was used, and regarding whether Israel as a state was meant or whether it merely was aimed at "the Zionist Regime" allegedly in command of Israel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#Translation_controversy

The conventional missiles that Saddam Hussein sent towards Israel were for a very simple purpose, to get Israel involved in the war. This would have resulted in the collapse of the Arab coalition gathered by the US to fight against Iraq.

And they came very close to doing just that. It's not that Saddam, again, was hesitating to use chemical weaponry because he just felt bad about it, 1991 was not 2003, he hadn't destroyed his stockpiles and he did have the fourth largest army in the world.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

There were Nazis also among Poles, French, Nrowegians and so on.

Interesting-Poles supported ideology, which counted them as subhumans? It makes as much sense as Nazi Jews.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Same. Anyways, I don't think the Plot's success will radically change how the Allies occupy Germany. The Soviets will still get their eastern zone, and with the Wehrmacht falling apart they'll get roughly the same territory as IOTL.

It might do this *if* that government just throws in the towel in the East and lets the USSR enter it without the idiot damn fool stupid bloodbaths like Budapest and Berlin that only prolonged the war and Nazi-Stalinist death toll without corresponding advantages for either side. Will the USSR be nice guys? No. The Stalin system never had that in it to be. However would it be the mass rapes of the late war mixed with ethnic cleansing and torpedoing ships full of refugees fueled in no small part by the idiotic valor where the Nazis killed large numbers of their own troops and the Red Army for zero military purpose whatsoever? Perhaps not.

 

[Gullash]

Interesting-Poles supported ideology, which counted them as subhumans? It makes as much sense as Nazi Jews.

I don't know if they were Nazis, but there were certainly Jews in the Nazi Wehrmacht.
http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/righit.html

And there are/were Jewish Nazis in Poland.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/09/23/poland.jewish/

And there are Nazis in Israel today.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6985808.stm

I think the point of generic Nazi ideology is to count your own group as superior, whether you are ethnically Jewish or Polish or Norwegian doesn't matter, its always your own group that is the best.

In Nazi Germany you had the German Vanguard, the German-Jewish followers of Hitler led by Hans Joachim Schoeps, also referred to as "Nazi Jews", who advocated loyalty to the Nazi programme, and allegedly ended their meetings by giving the Nazi salute and shouting, "Down With Us!"
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757240-1,00.html

The same Time article, from 1936, contained the following:
"Profoundly disapproving of the Zionist policy of discrimination against Arab labor, he concluded that Jewish nationalism encouraged Arab nationalism, while the depressing of Arab wages made conflict inevitable. Jews who had been persecuted in Germany now persecuted Arabs and preached a doctrine of racial purity as relentless as the one under which they had suffered. A little dizzy from following this vicious circle all the way around, Gessner came reluctantly to a doubtful conclusion: "If we can't get along with the Arabs, we have failed."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757240-2,00.html

Another article in Time, this time from late 1948, contained the following:

"They talked confidently—indeed, stridently—of a state of ten million, not necessarily confined to the present boundaries of Israel. It was a bad joke, and also a sober observation, that the idea of Drang nach Osten lived in the new nation of Hitler's victims.

As they looked around them at a disorganized and unproductive Arab world, Israelis showed some of the reactions of the prewar Germans looking around a disorganized and unproductive Europe. The new blood of nationalism ran fast and hot in Israel; sometimes it seemed to be gushing out on the ground. Pleading for more understanding and tolerance of Israel, one sympathetic observer warned: "This could become an ugly little Spartan state.""
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,798932,00.html

 

[Adler]

Interesting-Poles supported ideology, which counted them as subhumans? It makes as much sense as Nazi Jews.

Many Poles helped the SS and Gestapo hunting the Jews. And partially did so on their own. For me, they are Nazis as well.

Adler

 

[Gullash]

It might do this *if* that government just throws in the towel in the East and lets the USSR enter it without the idiot damn fool stupid bloodbaths like Budapest and Berlin that only prolonged the war and Nazi-Stalinist death toll without corresponding advantages for either side. Will the USSR be nice guys? No. The Stalin system never had that in it to be. However would it be the mass rapes of the late war mixed with ethnic cleansing and torpedoing ships full of refugees fueled in no small part by the idiotic valor where the Nazis killed large numbers of their own troops and the Red Army for zero military purpose whatsoever? Perhaps not.

I think the Ethnic Cleansing would have happened anyway. Both the West and the East were in favor of it. The West set it in motion since it would weaken a future Germany, and "compensate" Poland (that they still hoped would be in their camp after the war) for the loss to the Soviet Union of its colonial territories in the east.
http://www.alfreddezayas.com/Chapbooks/Anglo_Ampittsb.doc

It's really ridiculous when you look deeper into it. Poland looses territory that they occupied in the early 1920s after winning a war with the Soviet Union, a territory where Poles constitute only a small minority of probably less than 3 million. When they have to give the land back, they are "compensated" with almost purely German territory populated by 10 million Germans. Even the bit where they spoke Polish, Masuria, had voted to remain with Germany in the referendums after World War I.

For the Soviet Union it was a clever strategic move in order to put Poland in the Soviet camp. Give them a huge and rich chunk of German land, and the Poles will eagerly gobble it up. And then they will be eternally afraid that the Germans will one day want to take it back. Therefore Poland will have no choice but to forever snuggle up to Russia as its protector against Germany.

When in September 1946 the US made noises that perhaps Poland should not have so huge a chunk of Germany, the reaction was predictable. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, dictator of Poland in the 80s:

"It was a shocking statement. It made us think that our western border was being questioned by the Germans and by other Western countries. It was one of the most important things that strengthened our ties with the Soviet Union."
http://web.archive.org/web/20070518195428/http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/02/script.html

Clever Russians.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

Many Poles helped the SS and Gestapo hunting the Jews. And partially did so on their own. For me, they are Nazis as well.

Members of Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst did many atrocities against other Jews in Ghettos, and helped with deportations to death camps-they were Nazis?