I really see where you're coming from here. I really see why the A4 did what they did, and I cheer with them for their willingness to protect the peace of the world and their Goldwater Doctrine of overwhelming and disproportionate response to evil. But, just the same, we shouldn't punish the children for the sins of the fathers. A new generation of Germans - two generations - has grown up, and the A4 are still holding them down under the grudge-filled boots of Poland and Ukraine. Yes, this's far better than the Nazis did to Poland and Ukraine. Yes, it's even better than waving good-bye and letting a Germany indoctrinated in Nazism make its own way. Similarly, what the A4 are doing in the rest of the world is (IMO) better than the "kleptocracies" and interminable tribal wars (not really "civil" wars because there was no civil society) that happened far too often IOTL.
But just the same... I'm still uncomfortable with too much of what the A4 are doing. I feel sort of like when I read
Anscombe's essays against area bombing of civilians (written during and just after WWII iOTL). She has a great ethical point. Area bombing, and the OTL atomic bomb, and the A4's iTTL actions, make perfect practical sense. It would be foolish, if not criminally negligent, to take any other actions. But all the same - as Anscombe cries out - they're wrong. There must be a better course somehow.
And how can I object?
Fiat Justitia, ruat caelum.
I don't know. I can understand the strategic decision of the A4 as making sense in-universe. I can understand that the crimes of the Nazis ITTL are almost totally unforgivable.
But sometimes...I feel the Nazis have won..in a way.
Sure, Hitler's New Order was destroyed by his own belligerence. Sure the swastika no longer hangs over Europe. Sure most of the world has at least SOME kind of democracy. Sure fighting wars for stupid nationalistic reasons has been dumped on the ash-heap of history. But one aspect of Nazism hangs over the world: terrorizing an entire people for a crime they were not responsible for.
The Nazis, in their blood-soaked quest for dominance and Lebensraum, couldn't differentiate between the Stalinist killers who probably deserved a bullet in the head and average civilian wanting to escape Soviet domination. Thus, millions of men, woman, and children who could've built a better Poland, Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus were gassed like insects or worked to death in vast slave labor projects. Western Europe, while not slaughtered, had their lands and works destroyed for a barely comprehensible strategy of scorched Earth.
The A4 are, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, probably justified in their treatment of the Germans. It isn't just the sheer scale of the Nazis crimes. Is that there was almost zero objection to them by the average German until literally the tail end of the war.
There aren't any stories of heroes like Sophie Scholl or Oskar Schindler. There aren't any stories of military figures who showed some decency, like Wilm Hosenfeld, or Dietrich von Cholitz, who disobeyed Hitler to save Paris.
The Germans, willfully and blindly, all fought for the mad death cult that was Nazism with little hesitation or mercy, even when conditions were already unbearable. They fought and fought for a regime that saw mass murder as a good policy goal.
So yes, occupying the German people for at least a generation would be a reasonable decision.
But keeping Germany divided permanently, and blaming the 20-something descendants for what the Nazis did reeks off...well...the kind of oppression that ultranationalist states are known for.
It feels like that the A4 have won the war but lost their souls, because like the Nazis, they are associating an entire ethnic group with the crimes of their ancestors and stomping on them.
Then again, they don't know about OTL Germany, which has eschewed nationalism in favor of tolerance and international cooperation.
An excellent point on both quotes. A continued Nazi victory is indeed a special brand of hell but for the people living in the territories affected by said conflict all they are aware of is how hellish a world they were born into is.
ITTL, someone might think the appointment of Adolf Hitler will be an event equivalent to breaking the Seven Seals.
Seriously, all of the horsemen have been dominant over Europe for a generation:
Conquest/Pestilence: The Nazis conquering Europe to make an empire, and subjugating millions./The Nazis unleashing horrific biological plagues on Eastern Europe.
War: The Nazis started the worst war in history.
Famine: The Nazis eagerly and methodically planned the starvation of millions in order to feed the German people.
Death: The cult of Nazism has caused more death then any other anthropological force in modern history.