Enough people blame the Bismarckian Reich for Hitler in OTL and here it will be even worse so yeah if they're alive they're keeping a very... very low profile.
OTL, the old Kaiser was actually pretty wary of Hitler, albeit because he wasn't interested in restoring the Hohenzollerns. He did say that Kristallnacht was horrific, but then when Hitler began winning victory after victory in the opening years of the war, he praised Hitler for restoring German pride. Of course, he died in 1941, before he could see the true nastiness of the Reich so...
But the fact that he praised Hitler at one point might definitely be a blow to his reputation.
TTL, movies of World War I might heavily demonize him as a proto-Hitler, exaggerating the war crimes of the German army.
Putin probably is butterflied away. It is very unlikely that his parents even get out from Leningrad. And Gorbachev hardly is much better. If he was really lucky he might survive from Generalplan Ost but fi nto well, hopefully it happened quickly.
I can say, without hyperbole, that living in TTL Soviet Russia is much more deadly in living in OTL Somalia.
I mean, here are the challenges Putin's parents would've faced: the surrender of the Soviet Union, which was effectively a death sentence for Soviet soldiers in captivity and partisans behind enemy lines. Let's say you can escape from these camps. Your best chance would be hiding in a forest, where you have to spend decades trying to eek out a living in the woods and evade Nazi soldiers (really slavecatchers). If you try to reach an area of relative stability, you have to travel the vast distances of the Soviet heartland to reach some kind of nation.
If you go west, you'll be walking into Nazi occupied Europe, where the puppets will sell you to the Reich if they catch you.
You could go to the USSR, but that is not a good option either: the USSR border guards could throw you back to the Nazis. Even if you evade detection, you risk being selected for "reparations". Your government could send you back to the death world of Nazism as part of their cowardly peace treaty, the second you break the ever-changing and mercurial laws of the totalitarian society.
Let's say you managed to avoid being shipped to a forced labor camp and live a quiet (if poor) existence in the USSR: then comes 1959, and the Nazis decapitate the Molotov government. Suddenly, your country has collapsed and is fought over by a bunch of warlords who, like Molotov, would have traded you to save their own skin.
You could try the central Asian states, but I can imagine the Central Asians have not enjoyed Russian rule. You could escape to the newly established Russian Tsarist Republic or Western Alaska, but you have to walk quite a distance to get there.
So yeah: OTL Somalia was probably a safer place. The World War I trenches are probably safer.
Well apart from rip roaring kurbstomp fics where the Allies suddenly invent weapons and tactics years ahead of time and beat up the German's by 1941. Although I suspect "France gets it right" fics are also rare due to their rep as Collaborationist scumbags ITTLM
I wonder if on the ITTL AH.com, if bashing Germans will get you banned, since the TTL breakup of Germany will be seen as justified.
