AHC and WI: Britain Negotiates Nazi Peace

Deleted member 1487

Related questions -- how long does the Reich continue to utilize slave labor? How successful is German settlement in the east? Do the quasi-feudal farm and labor policies instituted in the 1930's remain in force long term? What does the continental economy look like as a whole, and how does this impact the world economy?

My (likely poor) guesses -- at least to 1960; by then, Western Ukraine and Poland are mostly German; yes; grisly, and any worldwide economic growth in the subsequent six decades is cut by at least half, making TTL's current day tech and prosperity roughly equivalent to OTL's early 1970's.
They use slave labor as long as the Nazis are in power or it becomes too problematic to. The goal of the Nazis/Hitler was to copy the US colonization of the US: exterminate the natives and use the slave labor of survivors while colonize the area with your people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrbauer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Mountains_in_Nazi_planning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn

I doubt the settlement plans or Ural border were remotely realistic though. Germans don't want to live in the wild east, the most they will do is settle annexed Poland and Czech areas.

Likely they would have to reverse the Generalplan Ost to eventually set up Slavic countries/administrative areas to work the land, because the economy would collapse as Germans don't want to move in and replace dead Slavs in an area where angry partisans were be operating and the weather is not friendly. Probably by the 1950s they will have to work with the Ukrainians to set up a state, same with the Cossacks, and probably too with the Baltic peoples. Surviving Russians might end up getting something of their own as some point, but likely huge parts of the East will be depopulated and returned to nature.

Probably Czech areas and Poland outside the General Government are Germanized by the 1960s, but that's it. So that's just the Reich territories:
Germany1941.png
 
One more thing we need -- while we've established "Halifax becomes PM" as our PoD, we never did get into what political machinations could have brought that about.

One idea I've had on this is Deputy Labour Leader Greenfield falling sick at a very inopportune time, missing the meeting with Chamberlain and subsequent caucus. Without his presence to explicitly tell him otherwise, Chamberlain might think it was possible for Halifax to hold a coalition government together, in which case he might recommend him to the king, who (I would think) then feels obliged to ask the Lord and not Churchill. Does that work?
 

Deleted member 1487

One more thing we need -- while we've established "Halifax becomes PM" as our PoD, we never did get into what political machinations could have brought that about.

One idea I've had on this is Deputy Labour Leader Greenfield falling sick at a very inopportune time, missing the meeting with Chamberlain and subsequent caucus. Without his presence to explicitly tell him otherwise, Chamberlain might think it was possible for Halifax to hold a coalition government together, in which case he might recommend him to the king, who (I would think) then feels obliged to ask the Lord and not Churchill. Does that work?

Churchill would need to be dead; Halifax needed to agree to be PM first before recommending and he didn't because he assumed Churchill would be PM for the disaster, take the political hit, and then he'd come in without a tarnished reputation; if he was head of the government for the peace deal his political career was over and he knew it.
 
Maybe Churchill is just indisposed (food poisoning, alcohol sickness, etc) for the key period of May 9-10?

Alternative ideas -- in addition to mentioned Greenfield idea, or my older idea where Norway goes differently (delaying the motion of no confidence), supposing Chamberlain and Churchill don't reconcile when Lord Halifax (as part of the latter' cabinet) proposes sending peace feelers to Berlin via Italy? Or something else?
 
Maybe Churchill is just indisposed (food poisoning, alcohol sickness, etc) for the key period of May 9-10?

Alternative ideas -- in addition to mentioned Greenfield idea, or my older idea where Norway goes differently (delaying the motion of no confidence), supposing Chamberlain and Churchill don't reconcile when Lord Halifax (as part of the latter' cabinet) proposes sending peace feelers to Berlin via Italy? Or something else?

Greenwood, not Greenfield. I'll note that Jenkins (in his Churchill biography) says that the Labour leaders would have been perfectly satisfied with Halifax, and that the real reason he didn't become PM was that he didn't really want to, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that as a PM in the House of Lords with Churchill as inevitable commons leader, he'd more or less be PM in name only, and he'd rather let Churchill be fully responsible. I don't think it's that hard to get him to change his mind.

The bigger problem (as I noted elsewhere) is that once Halifax is PM, it really is not actually in his interest to make peace with Germany - it means the fall of the coalition, a serious split within the Conservative Party, and new elections that are bound to go terribly. Plus, I suspect that Hitler's terms will be so awful that even Halifax will feel duty bound to reject them, even ignoring all that.
 
Top