A Third Reich, a DBTL

OOC: This is a person from the Kaiserreich world writing a scenario on what if Germany lost World War I.

If you want to see the base for this scenario (and get yourself spoiled), see this


--------------------------------------------

Good morning! I am Augenis from the Kingdom of Lithuania, and I have always been fascinated with the scenario of a Central Powers defeat during the First Weltkrieg. This is the reason I so enjoy Erich M. Remark's "Ein Drittes Reich" ("A Third Reich") about that exact idea - you can see my review of that book here.

However, in its core, EDR is a romance novel where the alternate history is merely a plot device to talk about the Germany of Remark's time - so I decided to make a scenario which details the alternate world of "Ein Drittes Reich". Hope you enjoy!

--------------------------------------------

Chapter 1: World War


Our story begins in the United States of America in the year 1912, with the electoral campaign for the election in November already beginning. The Democrats had a divided gallery of candidates, although were leaning towards Woodrow Wilson, whereas the Republicans, on the other hand, seemed to coalesce around incumbent President William Howard Taft. Perhaps this would have persisted, if it weren't for the President's sudden stroke on January 19th - although certainly not a man with notable health issues at the time, the President was noted for being severely overweight and already 55 years old at the time.

With Taft's death, the Presidency went to James S. Sherman, but Sherman declined the possibility of running for a full term, citing his own ailing health as the reasoning (and seeing as the President died less than a year after, he was right to worry). In one sudden sweep, the previously locked down Republican field turned to null - and lacking strong options anywhere else, the Republicans had no choice but to turn towards one of the main opponents of Taft's policies, former President Theodore Roosevelt, as their nominee. This choice was made solid in the Republican National Convention in June of the same year. To appease the conservative parts of the Republican establishment, Roosevelt chose Elihu Root, formerly one of his allies and cabinet members, as his Vice-President.

The election campaign came and rolled by, bitterly contested by both sides - although the Socialists had a good showing, the real battle was between the Democrats and Republicans. However, as 1912 was the high tide of Progressive popularity, victory for the Republicans was assured. Repeating the feat of Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt was once again the President after a 4 year gap.

191979-1912-theodore-roosevelt-3c174.jpg


Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States (1901-1909; 1913-)

Roosevelt's third term would see the President and the Republican Party champion a number of important progressive reforms, including a continuation of the Square Deal, making the first real steps towards women's suffrage and establishing an early social insurance system - however, to the story at hand, the more important parts of his Presidency are ones related to foreign affairs.

By 1914, Europe was a powder keg, and a cigarette was thrown to it in the form of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, starting the July Crisis once the Austrians put the blame on the Serbian government. Germany's assurances to the Austro-Hungarians strengthened their confidence when the Russians stood behind Serbia, and war seemed inevitable. Though often a hawkish politician in of itself, Roosevelt often pictured himself as a peacemaker, with a Nobel Peace Prize in his hand, and once the July Crisis broke out, he began working as hard as possible to try to prevent a European war, including inviting diplomatic missions from both sides of the conflict to try to diffuse the tensions, among other things.

Unfortunately, this was not the same as the Russo-Japanese War, and the President's actions were not viewed positively. European powers, swayed by the thoughts of an easy war to assert dominance over their opponents, dismissed the possibility of negotiations, while the American public raised its eyebrows at this breach of American isolationism. War in Europe broke out on August 1, with Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side (later joined by Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire), and France, Britain and Russia on the other (later joined by many nations such as Italy, Japan, Portugal and the United States).

At the start of the war, the American public was fiercely in favor of neutrality, although at the same time, public polls showed that they viewed Germany more negatively than any other major belligerent. Subsequent Central Powers actions, such as the "rape of Belgium" and the Austrian atrocities in Serbia, turned the opinion of the American public against the CP. The same can be said about President Roosevelt - although initially, he supported American neutrality, despite not being all too happy about it, this opinion soon changed. As one of the foremost leaders of the "Atlanticist" faction in US politics, championing a pro-Entente stance and preparation for war, Roosevelt pushed through a number of laws through Congress to increase the preparedness of the U.S. Army, and especially expanding the U.S. Navy.

However, the true deal-breaker was the German unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, sinking even neutral American ships without pity or bothering about international naval law. The US lodged numerous diplomatic protests against these violations, but they seemed to fall on deaf ears. The final straw was the sinking of the ocean liner RMS Lusitania, resulting in the deaths of over a hundred Americans and turning public opinion swiftly away from the Central Powers - even the German-American population started questioning the actions of their homeland. With the Germans still not obeying international law and declaring that they have no plans to do so in the near future, the United States had no choice but to declare war on Germany on May of 1915,

Bundesarchiv_DVM_10_Bild-23-61-17%2C_Untergang_der_%22Lusitania%22.jpg


The sinking of the HMS Lusitania

The Great War, as it was called in Anglo-American countries, lasted from 1914 to 1919, and was one of the bloodiest conflicts in world history, leaving 8 million dead, 7 million permanently disabled and millions of others injured - and those are just the military casualties. At the beginning of the war, the edge was held by the Central Powers - Germany's Schlieffen Plan surprised the French and almost broke the country back in 1914 (the CP advance was only stopped in the Battle of the Marne), while in the east, the Germans pushed back a Russian invasion of East Prussia and swept the Russian armies out of Poland and Lithuania. In 1916, the German military planned one final push in the West, aiming to strike Verdun, a prestigious French fortress, and bleed their opponents out by forcing them to defend it, but the Battle of Verdun turned into a stalemate with the only thing achieved being hundreds of thousands of casualties. At the same time, the British Commonwealth and the arriving American forces executed the Battle of the Somme, a yet another bloody stalemate which drained the life out of both sides, but pushed the Germans back for a good dozen kilometers.

In the east, a combination of the failed Brusilov Offensive in 1916, opposition agitation, popular hatred towards the Tsar and war weariness resulted in the February Revolution of 1917, deposing Tsar Nicholas II and establishing a weak provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky. This provisional government did not last long, however, and in October of 1917, a radical left-wing party known as the Bolsheviks executed a coup, called the "Great Proletarian October Revolution", and took control of much of the Russian heartland. This was the start of Soviet Russia, the first Bolshevist state on the planet. The Russian Civil War began, forcing the Eastern giant to pull out of the war.

With the Eastern Front finished, the Germans placed their bets on a final offensive against the Entente, hoping to occupy Northern France and force the Entente to sue for peace. However, by now, the German Army was too exhausted, while the Entente was growing ever stronger thanks to American industrial might. The 1918 Spring Offensive achieved a few of its territorial goals, but was eventually stopped by a coordinated Western defense, followed by a counter-offensive. Much of Belgium and Northern France was retaken, and when 1919 arrived, the Entente were stepping into the Rhineland.

A rebellion took place across Germany, eventually forcing the Kaiser to flee to Sweden. The provisional democratic government agreed to sue for peace, and the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire, put to its knees by the Italians and a Franco-British-American invasion of the Balkans from Greece, followed shortly. The ceasefire was signed on May of 1919, soon followed by representatives of the Entente nations gathering in Versailles (deliberately chosen by the French as an allusion to the humiliaion they suffered in 1871, when the German Empire was declared in Versailles) to decide on a peace treaty to finally end the Great War.

The Second Reich was no more.
 
Chapter 2: Brave New World

The Treaty of Versailles dictated the terms of peace for Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. They were labelled as the actors responsible for the Great War, and this responsibility would mean that they were required to pay indemnities for all the loss and damage. Territorial changes also followed. France acquired Alsace-Lorraine, Italy gained Tyrol, Austrian Littoral, Istria, much of Slovenia and the Dalmatian coast, while the German colonies were divided among the winners. Much of Transylvania went to Hungary. Serbia was awarded with the South Slavic state they desired, although without Bulgaria included. Turkey was practically partitioned, with much of the Levant and Iraq going to an Arabic state, a puppet of France and Britain, while Turkey itself was divided into spheres of influence. Territorial changes took place in eastern Germany as well - the newly ascendant states of Poland and Lithuania grabbed many of its eastern lands. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed completely, with territory not annexed by Entente powers falling to Bohemia, Slovakia or Poland, and the Habsburgs fell from power completely. Weak democracies were established in much of Europe, lacking the support of the people.

Germany was declared to be the most responsible for the breakout of the war, however, and was thus designated to pay the largest amount of war reparations, with the payment period stretching to as far as 1989.

TratadoDeSaintGermainRenner.png


The Treaty of Versailles, 1919

Although the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles declared that they were working to establish world peace once and for all, in reality, they missed an important factor which was destabilizing this peace. With little to no foreign support, the White forces in the Russian Civil War faltered quickly, and in 1920, the last major strongholds of the movement fell to the Soviet Russia's "Red Army", now grown into a million-men large force. The Soviet Russians did not hold all of the former Russian Empire - because of war exhaustion, they were unable to take the fight back to Poland, the Baltic States, Finland and the Caucasus - but despite that, Russia would turn out to be a major threat to world peace. Vladimir Lenin was now ruling over a vast totalitarian Bolshevist dictatorship, and his goals of worldwide proletarian revolution seemed to be only one inch away from being achieved.

After the Treaty of Versailles, the German nation was in shambles. The Kaiser used to be a unifying force in the country, but now that he was in Sweden and nobody in the SDP-dominated provisional government wanted him back, that unifying force was now gone. For a long time, it appeared as if Germany was about to follow the path of the Russians and become a communist dictatorship - Red militias controlled much of the countryside and some of the major cities, and as the German military was disarmed, the weight of preventing a Bolshevist uprising fell on the shoulders of the Freikorps, right-wing militias composed of Great War veterans who fought against the communists.

This "pseudo-civil war" in Germany continued for a number of months, each side giving it all, all when a major economic crisis was rampaging throughout the country, caused by nightmarish war reparations, in addition to a massive refugee crisis, initiated by Germans in Poland, Bohemia and Lithuania fleeing west to settle in their homeland. As the payment was lagging and the Germans were unwilling to rob their own people to pay for them, the French decided to occupy the Rhineland, turning this wealthy region into an occupation zone, using its production to rebuild their own country. Lacking a powerful military, the Germans failed to stop this deliberate violation of their territory, and thus, Rhineland stayed under French occupation, the only opposition to it being German guerrilla resistance in the region.

The situation in Germany got better in 1920 to 1921, when the United States finally granted the German government a large loan, all while the reparations for the Great War were slightly alleviated, allowing Germany to start actually establishing its government institutions and rebuilding the country. For the first time in years, it appeared as if life was starting to get better in Germany. But that was only calm before the storm.
 
The peace terms on Germany are implausibly lenient, France and Belgium don't even get the Rhineland? In both Weltkriegs the French planned to dismantle Germany:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/FR-WW1-1915-French-plans.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/FR-WW1-1916-French-plans.png

http://oi41.tinypic.com/66metz.jpg

You could argue that the British and possibly the Americans wanted to maintain the balance of power but if that's the case then it doesn't make sense for them to dismantle the Austrian and Ottoman Empires.
 
Last edited:
The peace terms on Germany are implausibly lenient, France and Belgium don't even get the Rhineland? In both Weltkriegs the French planned to dismantle Germany:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/FR-WW1-1915-French-plans.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/FR-WW1-1916-French-plans.png

http://oi41.tinypic.com/66metz.jpg

You could argue that the British and possibly the Americans wanted to maintain the balance of power but if that's the case then it doesn't make sense for them to dismantle the Austrian and Ottoman Empires.
While normally this would be an understandable complaint, I believe that the French wouldn't attempt to completely dismantle Germany in this scenario.

Remember, that in the goals you posted, the French would have had the backing of Imperial Russia to put pressure on Germany. In this TL, France is practically alone in Western Europe, and I doubt they would able to enforce a division of Germany all by themselves. And, by the way, in Chapter 2, France does occupy the Rhineland. ;)

In my personal view, the dismantlement of A-H and Ottos in an Entente victory would just be an Entente rubber stamp on events already going on. In OTL, even after winning the Weltkrieg, Austria-Hungary had to decentralize in the Ausgleich of 1927 in order to not collapse, while we all know what happened in the Ottoman Empire. If both of them lost, Entente wouldn't have been able to prevent both of them disintegrating even if they wanted to.
 
Top