Deleted member 94680
Nah, they gave the fucker the Meritorious Civilian Service Award instead
Rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain
- Thread starter Gingerdave
- Start date
Or Hitler for that matter in mid October 1938. He probably would have gone down in history as a successful German Nationalist leader.
And yet, if Churchill had died before WW2, Wellington while in Spain, Wilberforce before the Slave Trade Act, Washington before the revolution or d'Espèrey before the Vardar their stories would be significantly less noteworthy. Timing cuts both ways.
And if Nelson had survived Trafalgar his relationship with another man's wife (whose virtue was negotiable) would have ruined him.
Absolutely. As of Oct 1938 he hadn't claimd any territory that wasn't German in population and had he confind himself the this the WAllies could almost certainly havel ived with it. There was of ccourse ground for suspicon that he *wouldn't* be content with that, ut, barely twenty years after the last holocaust, the chances of any democracy going to war on suspicion alone were essentially zilch.
Neither Churcill, Eden nor anyone else you care to name could have got Brtain to acceot war. Only Adolf Hitler had the power to do that, and he didn't do it till 1939.
As some other posters have mentioned, him being less celibrant of The Munich Conference could perhaps help. If he celebrates less and perhaps have time to write about how he's just delaying the inevitable, and perhaps express some sort of regret for the people that suffer as a result, he may be viewed as a much more tragic and less incompetent figure.
And if whoever took over for Hitler did what Hitler did later in OTL, they would get the blame. If let's say Himmler (damn unlikely at this point but just go with it) took over and later invaded Poland you would have Germans saying today "If only Hitler survived everything would have been fine but that fool Himmler took over and screwed everything up. Hitler would have never pushed things to that extreme. " and there would have been no way to prove them wrong.
Deleted member 94680
It would have been a rampantly popular discussion on an ATL AH.com I reckon
That works both ways
The Luftwaffe of 1939 was also weaker than the Luftwaffe of Sept 1940 and had yet to gain a great deal of operational experience
For example only 12 JU88 bombers were available to take part in the invasion of Poland and the BF109 of the day the early emil varient was armed with just 4 x 7.92mm machine guns
Garrison
Donor
This is part of the problem. There simply seems to be nothing recorded at the time which supports the playing for time theory. There should surely be minutes of cabinet meetings where foreign policy and/or defence matters were discussed, letters, diary entries, even anecdotes recounting his attitude to the Munich Agreement. It's hard to escape the conclusion that when Chamberlain pronounced, 'peace in our time' he actually believed it.
Garrison
Donor
Not to mention the Panzer divisions. If war comes in 1938 there's maybe half the number of divisions and tanks the Heer had in September 1939 and they are practically all Panzer I and II models. The Panzer III and IV didn't enter service until 1939 and of course they won't have tanks like the Pz38(t) because they will be fighting on the other side...
I don't doubt it. But had he seen his strategy fall to pieces and not been as openly all-in on it, maybe he would've backtracked on it in later years. He'd hardly been the first leader to do so.
This would also apply had things gone as so many people on this thread desire, and Germany been defeated in a 1938 war.
On this TL, the Nazis would have been defeated (at least for the moment) but *not* discredited. Hitler would have been remembered as a basically honourable man who merely sought for ethnic Germans the self-determination claimed by other peoples, and which the victors of 1918 had pretended to believe in.. His only mistake (on this thesis) would be to have moved prematurely, before Germany was fully rearmed, and been wantonly attacked by the Entente powers in a war for no purpose but to keep three million Germans under foreign rule.
He might well be remembered as a hero and martyr, and within a decade or two Neo-Nazis could be the biggest party in the Reichstag.
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Well had war come in 1938 it is very unclear in my mind that Britain and France would have won. One likely outcome it seems to me would be a Czechoslovak defeat with a readjustment of the boundaries followed by a peace treaty changing nothing in the west. Another alternative is a static front in Czechoslovakia with probing assaults by both sides along teh Maginot/ Siegfried lines. This too would eventually lead to a peace conference. Hitler and his henchmen would continue to seek a final solution to the Jewish question. America would become, if anything, more isolationist.
Ultimately I think Hitler, or a successor, would seek living space in the east so you would have pretty much the world war.
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Hmm, if there's an absolute Czech defeat in the east and perfect German defense in the west, I suppose the Germans would try to annex Sudetenland and impose the protectorate regime over the Czech lands. If there's a static front in the Czech lands, it depends where it falls. If it falls right at the border, the Germans get nothing or almost nothing in the short run. If the front stabilizes further into Czecoslovakia, maybe you get German territorial gains and a new straight line border with mutual ethnic cleansing and population exchanges on both sides, something like this river-line border or a German Bohmen and Czech Moravsky:
But the parameters of this are going to be far more limited than OTL for the period while their control is limited to Germany, Austria and whatever they get from Czechoslovakia. The numbers of Jews in the territory are small enough they can hope to "solve" by emigration, which is what they were doing. They may decide to go more extreme, but it would be a Holocaust of under a million whilst contained within these borders.
And that successor would not only have to succeed in uniting his regime behind starting the war, but in winning against neighbors like Poland and the Soviet Union who have had more time to rearm. If he or his successor takes on the west, same story, he needs to clear the hurdle of getting it started and winning it.
Say the Germans start up something again a few years later in the east and the west feels determined to stay out of it this time. The Soviets could stop the Nazis flat at the border.
....and over time, other more difficult to predict factors come in to play, like atomic weaponry. But most speculation on these boards has the Atlantic powers more advantaged and resourced for eventual progress with the Germans being poorly resourced.
Maybe there's a good chance everybody would look back at the 1938 war as the stupid sequel of stupid WWI, in disbelief that Europe's leaders did it "again".
The phrase "never again" would be about European war, not the Holocaust. And Germany could walk through the rest of the 20th, and into the 21st century, with a nationalistic, aggrieved, proudly bigoted, racist and uncontrite about Germany's actions as a dictatorial or imperial power.
.....but it could be a worthy trade.....
....if this Swastika-tolerant Germany has never gotten the chance to hit the "sweet spot" of looting and conquering successes Hitler had between 1940 and the present day. How likely is a subsequent German regime to be able to imitate Hitler's OTL conquests? I think it's unlikely in 9 of 10 TLs that a later Germany could end up steamrolling Europe like OTL, because of factors like other countries' rearmament, especially the USSR, eventual atomic weaponry, and Hitler's sheer luck in OTL. I'd concede that chance for say, a later German-Polish war that gets quite nasty would remain.
Deleted member 94680
Would a post-hitler Germany not just economically collapse if it didn’t have the financial boosts of those early conquests?
Garrison
Donor
They would be in a very bad way but depending on who took power they might be able to persuade the British and Americans to prop them up by raising the dire prospect of Communist revolution.