AH Challenge: Make Hitler a heroic POTUS.

How about *and I know this violates your art school thing* but Hitler just has an accident after Munich *and not an assasination, a lujidiment accident* so that the army takes power and it isn't seen as a coup.

Hitler is remembered for peacefully uniting Germany and Austria, and expanding Germany and setting it on the course to re-armament., from then on anything is possible.
 
This is impossible because for him to get into art school as a POD, because that means he was born in Austria and thus constitutionally cannot become president of the United States. If he were born in the U.S to immigrant parents, then it might be possible but this would not be otl Hitler, who could never have existed.
Scipio
Edit: Oops, we just said the same thing at the same time.
 
Hitler as President of the US? Interesting...

OK, so Hitler was born in April 1889 which means he was conceived somewhere around July 1888 if my calculations are correct. For him to become President. Something has to happen after July 1888 and before April 1889 for them to migrate to the US so Adolf Hitler to become President. I'd like to propose a mini-TL:

In September 1888 Alois Hitler is fired from his job as a customs official due to a younger and more ambitious competitor for his leading position, thus making him unemployed. He decides to take his small fortune, which he earned through years of diligent work and saving money, to the United States. Alois Hitler and his wife Klara arrive in November 1888. Adolf Hitler is born in April of the following year. While his father ignores him mostly, he is doted on by his mother because he's such a sickly baby.

Adolf Hitler along with his family settle down among the Austrian community of New York in Palenville and at a young age he's enrolled into a primary school where he learns English in which he's relatively proficient although he fails to lose a small accent. He does show leadership skills as he gathers a small clique of powerful friends around him which makes him influential on the playground. He's otherwise an unremarkable student in the eyes of his teachers. He claims to 'defend' his German and Austrian friends from bad influences.

After primary school he cannot get secondary education because his father was unable to fund it since he couldn't get a job due to a lack of command of the English language. Young Adolf starts to work in a cleaning job in a German 'sauerkraut and wurst' restaurant and his smooth tongue and competitive skills allow him to work himself up to the position of financial assistant to the owner, after having self-studied US financial law. This period of competition with a number of other more qualified pretenders form his attitude toward life: everything could be overcome by will power and strength. He switched from a number of lower administrative positions in a number of small and medium businesses using his competitive skills.

In the early 1900s decides that the commercial life is nothing for him, he wants to prove himself. He decides to join the army to prove his loyalty to the Unites States, the only fatherland he has ever known besides Austria which he had heard only heard from in stories from his parents and to which he had already developed a disliking. He joins the army in 1908, but doesn't rise above the rank of sergeant in spite of his diligence.

In 1915 he's involved in the US occupation of Haiti and his promoted to sergeant major for "valorous efforts against destabilizing forces". In 1917, the US gets involved in WW I and Adolf Hitler serves in the American Expeditionary Force and rises to the rank of lieutenant owing to courage and ability to lead under fire. He fought in the German Spring Offensive and the first US offensive, the Battle of Cantigny in May 1918. He's wounded in the latter and becomes a staff officer.

After the end of WW I in November 1918, Adolf Hitler isn't demobilized like many others and remains a staff officer for a few more years. He then goes into reserve and returns to his old neighbourhood to find a lot of discrimination against German and Austrian Americans. He goes into local politics and proves to be an extremely gifted orator and gains a following among a number of immigrant groups due to his egalitarian rhetoric and talks about economic, social and educational reform.

He is subsumed into the more progressive Democrat party and shortly hereafter he changes his name to Arthur Hitler. He rises through the ranks from the local government as a member of city council in Palenville to district attorney for New York in 1925 and succesfully becomes a member of Congress in 1928. His rhetoric is immensely popular and he becomes a prominent party member in a few years using radio, newspapers and other media with New York as his home base. He wins the Democrat ticket for the 1932 Presidential elections.

Against all odds, he wins. His strong government intervention, banking reform and Keynesian policies have effect and he's easily re-elected in 1936 and 1940. He marries a younger American woman in 1933, a late marriage. In the meantime, new conflict erupts in Europe between a resurgent militarist Germany on one side and France and Britain on the other with a neutral USSR and Italy. Japan gets involved and attacks Asian colonies, including the Philippines.

President Hitler declares war. Although the first battle against Japanese carriers is no success, the US gains the upper hand in the Asian theatre and later in the European theatre as well, dropping atomic bombs on Hamburg and Munich in 1945. Hitler is involved in the planning of the war. He's personally present in Tokyo and Berlin to accept the instrument of surrender of both countries. He wins the 1944 Presidential election and serves out a fourth term, but amid popular opposition he decides to decline running for a fifth term in the 1948 presidential elections.

He becomes a political talking head and remains influential in the Democrat party into the 1950s. He formally retires in 1955 and takes up amateur painting as a hobby while writing his memoirs. He dies in 1960 at the age of 71, leaving a 26 year old son named John Hitler who is now a prominent senator.
 
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This is impossible because for him to get into art school as a POD, because that means he was born in Austria and thus constitutionally cannot become president of the United States. If he were born in the U.S to immigrant parents, then it might be possible but this would not be otl Hitler, who could never have existed.
Scipio
Edit: Oops, we just said the same thing at the same time.

Well, you could always handwave a constitutional amendment on the natural born citizen requirement. Yes, such a turn of events defies plausibility but I really don't see another option here. Even if you make Hitler eligible for the Presidency without a convoluted plan involving immigration to the United States while his mother is pregnant with him, I'm not sure how feasible this is. Why would Hitler want to immigrate to the United States?

If we go with the slightly more tenable immigration while pregnant scenario, while the American Hitler would be different from his historical counterpart, in some ways I think he'd remain similar in at least a few respects. If nothing else, the biology will be identical, and parental influence will probably be similar as I doubt immigration is going to magically change the personality and temperament of either Hitler's father or mother. Of course, much more than parental influence and biology go into shaping a man. Cultural differences would insure that this Hitler wouldn't be a simple copy and paste job. Still, I wouldn't say he'd be nothing like the Hitler we know. True, his life might go in a radically different direction and his life path is probably dependent on where the Hitler family goes, but I'd be surprised if there weren't some similarities since some influences would remain somewhat constant. I'm not sure what would happen to an American Hitler, but I doubt the Presidency is really in the cards. Especially given the time period presuming the immigration does not, in and of itself, butterfly America's involvement in the first world war.
 
An interesting scenario Onkle Willie. However, like Glass Onion, I doubt the Presidency is really in the cards for this born in the USA Hitler. He may go into politics, or perhaps become an artist, who knows. Maybe, and I don't know why this came to mind, but what about...

A. Hitler, restaurateur; owner of the Braunau Rathskeller in downtown Detroit, Michigan. :D
 
You know, I like Onkel's mini-TL. That is actually very fascinating.

Maybe you should try turning that into a novel. I'd certainly be interested in reading such a novel.

EDIT:Lord Grattan, that sounds like it would make for a humorous tv show XD
 
The idea of Hitler as POTUS is a bit creepy. I prefer another scenario: A wealthy philanthropist decides to give Cornell University scholarships to poor but smart young men from various foreign countries. Among these individuals are an artistically inclined young man from Austria and a seminarian from Georgia in the Czarist Empire. Once brought to Cornell, these young men both migrate into the political science department where they become rivals. In the early 1940s they engage in an epic but incredibly petty battle over which of them will become the new department head. Fur flies, if not bullets. The professor from Georgia wins. Cornell Russian literature professor Vladimir Nabokov in the late 1950s will write Lolita, a best-selling comic novel in which both of his colleagues (since deceased) are depicted as having been sexually obsessed with the same teenage girl.

Oh, and a nationalistic but not totalitarian government in Germany in 1939 takes back the Polish corridor and Danzig, and then halts. The European war ends quickly in a negotiated peace. As to the Soviet Union, under Bukharin it liberalizes in the 1930s, avoiding enforced collectivization, gulags and purges. By the 1940s, there's even a loyal opposition in the Soviet legislature which publishes its own newspaper.

The two Cornell professors regard themselves, by the 1940s, as 100 percent Americans, and pay little attention to what's happening in Europe or the USSR--as do most Americans in this benign timeline.
 
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Look up "Catch That Zeppelin!"

It's a story by Fritz Lieber, IIRC, exploring what Hitler and Germany would be like with no "stab in the back" legend- the Allies pursued Germany and conquered it in WWI and Marie Sklodowska marrying Thomas Edison to make advances in electrical storage instead of exploring radioactivity with Pierre Curie for a cleaner world, real American civil rights from Reconstruction on, all kinds of neat stuff.
 
This may also be of some interest...

I've been having ideas about a Hitler who drifts into reading science-fiction novels and becomes an activist for defenses against the threat of invading space aliens. :D Anyone interested?
 
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