WI Hitler's "scorched earth policy" was strongly enforced?

WI if the policy was carried out by the most fanatical members of the SS? Basically everything is put to the torch, mines are flooded, factories are blown up, warehouses are destroyed and every bridge was blown.

Basically there is little of economic value in Germany when the war ends. I doubt this will slow down the Allies even a month, possibly not even a day. However, it would be devastating to Germany post-war. So how does it affect the post-war? My guess is the US would spend more to keep the Germans from starving if nothing else.
 
WI if the policy was carried out
Basically there is little of economic value in Germany when the war ends. I doubt this will slow down the Allies even a month, possibly not even a day. However, it would be devastating to Germany post-war. So how does it affect the post-war? My guess is the US would spend more to keep the Germans from starving if nothing else.
How far did they go? Paris or even the PoWs......?
 

Ramontxo

Donor
When going to the Versailles treaty negotiation the German dignitaries noticed the French Railway carry them through the devastated regions of northern France where they had applied another scorched earth policy. It didn't end well for them. Raising even more hatred is not going to end better for the Third Reich. Of course by that point the Nazi leadership Had noticed that they were losing a war and probably their lives so ..
 
The red flag flies from Vladivostok to Sicily due to the vengeance of Marquis and Italians, Churchill more genocidal side is allowed free roam and we have a few decades of German forced labor rebuilding the west.
 
The red flag flies from Vladivostok to Sicily due to the vengeance of Marquis and Italians, Churchill more genocidal side is allowed free roam and we have a few decades of German forced labor rebuilding the west.

Why? The Germans were in no shape to stop the Western Armies OTL and would be in less shape in TTL. Any uprisings among the Germans would be stomped on hard by the Wallies.

BTW the only way the Germans are going to be fed is if they cooperate with the Wallies. The Germans aren't going to be able to feed themselves and most of the food they are able to get is courtesy of the US Army. Not many are going to rebel against an occupier that is their only source of food!
 
Basically everything is put to the torch, mines are flooded, factories are blown up, warehouses are destroyed and every bridge was blown.
Actually, that sound like a lot of intensive work with heavy investment. The War probably ends sooner as critical manpower and materiel - explosives, fuels, vehicles - are diverted from German war effort.
 
If the goal is national self suicide using the WAllies and the Soviets is more likely to work then relying on Germans to destroy their own water supplies, mines, etc., meaning unconventional weapons being used by the Nazi leadership on the Western and Eastern front and letting the retaliation do its work for them.
 
If the goal is national self suicide using the WAllies and the Soviets is more likely to work then relying on Germans to destroy their own water supplies, mines, etc., meaning unconventional weapons being used by the Nazi leadership on the Western and Eastern front and letting the retaliation do its work for them.

The plan I used for this question is the one Hitler came up with. This is what Hitler actually ordered not chemical attacks on the Allies.
 
A lot more dead Germans at the end of the war and dying after the war. The wartime wrecking of infrastructure caused a lot of very serious problems IOTL, millions more would die without basic services that Hitler ordered destroyed with the Nero Decree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Decree

My guess is that Hitler becomes much more widely hated by the Germans themselves much quicker than OTL. It would slow the Allies practically not at all , just spread misery inside Germany.
 
The plan I used for this question is the one Hitler came up with. This is what Hitler actually ordered not chemical attacks on the Allies.

You are relying on people to slit their own throat post war which you could have gotten some to do, but not others and Hitler waited too long to toss down the Nero card. Maybe a few months earlier and planning out the forces that would carry it out... say using SS from non-German areas for executing the operation inside Germany.
 
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You are relying on people to slit their own throat post war which you could have gotten some to do, but not others and Hitler waited too long to toss down the Nero card. Maybe a few months earlier and planning out the forces that would carry it out... say using SS from non-German areas for executing the operation inside Germany.

If the "some" have guns and the ones that refuse have not it won't matter. Most of the Heer is fighting, the ones carrying it out would be SS. You might have enough fanatics among them to pull it off.
 
Just finished reading the Monuments Men book last night, and there's several chapters about the Nero Decree and its enforcement. In more than one location, sane German officials stopped the SS men from doing it, the best example being the Altaussee mine where the bulk of the stolen artwork by Hitler had been kept--we're talking the best of the best art, sculptures, et cetera. I think the level of cognitive dissonance required to do that is too extreme--few fanatics were left. Kaltenbrunner, Himmler, Göring, all of them had given up, fled, tried to open their own peace negotiations with the Allied forces. In the case of Altaussee, the miners, the mine director, and the head art official all rebelled against the fanatical gauleiter, smuggling out the bombs he'd placed in there and blowing the mine entrance to prevent the art from destruction. Speer refused to destroy the infrastructure.

I think a good point to keep in mind here that while there were a fair amount of fanatics, most of those were dead by this point. The bulk of the remaining people were the regular people and the opportunists, those who became Nazis for their own selfish gain, not because they believed in Hitler's eugenicist bullshit. Those people won't destroy their potential future to satisfy his last suicidal wishes.
 
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