AHC: Nice Guy Nazis

I'll take the bait: somehow no Holocaust on a scale as massive and industrial.

Nazism becomes seen as a very racist/authoritarian regime which used all the resources to revitalise industry and fight a glorious war.

Sure it's not reality but see how people idolise Poutin in Western Democracies these days or how a lot of people loved Mao before
 
Sure it's not reality but see how people idolise Poutin in Western Democracies these days or how a lot of people loved Mao before

If we take "democracies" to mean "a majority of people within the democracies" (which is a pretty obvious definition in the case of, well, democracies), then the majority of people in the USA today don't idolise Putin, for instance. He's faring better now than two years ago, but he has a favorability rating around 22%.

I have no recent European polls, but I'd be surprised if he was above that figure there.

Likewise, I doubt that even when Mao was popular within extreme leftist fringes in the West, he might have been considered favorably by over 10% of the Westerners.

So if you are arguing that without the Holocaust (BTW, do you mean the Jews only? Is Hitler still slaughtering all other undesirables wholesale?), maybe 10% of present-day citizens of Western democracies might be as ill-informed and misguided as to think that after all the Nazis were not that bad, well... possibly you are right. But I disagree that that amounts to "the Western democracies".
 
The Axis somehow win WW2 á la Man in the High Castle . Now the Nazis are the good guys and totally socially acceptable and everyone* is happy.

*who is not Gay,Left-Wing,Non-German, Jewish,Roma,Slavic,African,the wrong type of Asian,or Middle-Eastern
 
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Hitler dead after Munich. Successor does deal with Brits to export Jewish people to Palestine.

Oh, great, so now all they have to answer for is mass ethnic cleansing :rolleyes:

The fact this kind of stuff is what people answer when asked to make "nice Nazis" is amazing and telling.


Hitler gets addicted to cocaine before being chancellor. When he becomes chancellor he goes full-retard right off the bat killing those in mental instituions. Germany's Catholics are aghast. Enabling Act fails due to popular resistance, even though the vote is rigged. When Hindenburg dies, Hitler runs for President and loses, but because his party still has enough seats he stays as chancellor. THe result is that Germany never leaves its 1933-34 form of government. Nazis have power, but not too much. SA is still liquidated and then Hitler has Himmler killed off, as his over-radicalized racial policies are seen as the same as his mentally insane-killing policies.

Hitler runs a sort of evil government, but avoids war. When he dies in 1943 from the effects of drugs and Parkinsons, the Nazis still retain power because "they got us out of the Depression." They drop the evilness and become more of a market-socialist party. Nazisim is seen as a positive ideology, with its origins justified as "they being simply men of their time," just like how Lincoln's "ship all the blacks to Africa" views have been clouded by his subsequent achievements.

Terrific, so we still have a genocidal Nazi Germany, they just killed mentally ill and infirm people instead of all the others. Great. It's also impossible for the Nazi economy to stay this way because it was completely built on plunder. Without constant invasions and annexations the German economy would have imploded worse than in the Great Depression.

Hitler wouldn't have been seen as a man of his time for a really simple reason: nobody else in the 1930s and 1940s was exterminating the mentally ill on a production line scale. That was just him. Even the horrors of the eugenics movement couldn't be compared to that.
 
Oh, great, so now all they have to answer for is mass ethnic cleansing :rolleyes:

The fact this kind of stuff is what people answer when asked to make "nice Nazis" is amazing and telling.




Terrific, so we still have a genocidal Nazi Germany, they just killed mentally ill and infirm people instead of all the others. Great. It's also impossible for the Nazi economy to stay this way because it was completely built on plunder. Without constant invasions and annexations the German economy would have imploded worse than in the Great Depression.

Hitler wouldn't have been seen as a man of his time for a really simple reason: nobody else in the 1930s and 1940s was exterminating the mentally ill on a production line scale. That was just him. Even the horrors of the eugenics movement couldn't be compared to that.

We forcibly sterilized the "unfit". I know that's not as bad as killing but it's still nasty. We also have the Trail of Tears, and the perpetrator of that atrocity is on our currency and is a founding father of one of our two major political parties.

The POD you might need to move Nazism out of the pure evil category? The SA anticipates the Night of the Long Knives and successfully fights back. Hitler takes his lumps and has to accept Rohm, Strasser, and von Papen as his inner circle instead of the monsters of OTL.

This leads to a non-genocidal regime, and if it's nominally left, it has more Western apologists than OTL Nazism just as communism does.
 

The difference is that the Trail of Tears killed a couple thousand people and, while terrible, actually was a common sort of thing during that era. Eugenics was nasty but it still pales next to T4. People aren't going to look at the Nazis as good guys, or even as not that bad ones after that.

I would seriously question whether they would have ended up being any better with that inner circle. Hitler by himself was evil enough after all.
 

NoMommsen

Donor
... an unreformable, unmoderatable, degenerate ideology...
That's new to me, that nazism was something that could be called ideology.
It was a hotch-potch odf almost everything :
socialism, romaticism, militarism, corporatism, antisemitism, scale-goat-ism with an admittingly strong portion of racism.
There was something for everyone in it and never ever anything as an ideology, an at least in parts reasonable, consistent thoughts-building with a kind of inherent "logic" (like Maoism, Stalinism, Anarchism, etc.).
... were every bit as crazy as he was except for maybe Goering, and even he was very far out there.
The Strassers (both of them in their own ways) ?


The Axis somehow win WW2 á la Man in the High Castle . Now the Nazis are the good guys and totally socially acceptable and everyone* is happy. ...
Quite true.
Give it a few decades and even what seems unthinkable to us today might have become "common sense".

Weird "models" of social thinking ... the Spartians in ancient greece :
institutionalized murder, rape, robbery, child murder, homoerotic relations, ... really "weird" stuff for us of today.

Or the Azteks in America. For them mass murder of young people ripping their hearts out was "natural".


Our todays set of "morals" and "ethics" are NOT a natural law. Much coud be disgustingly different and still be seen as "normal".
 
Terrific, so we still have a genocidal Nazi Germany, they just killed mentally ill and infirm people instead of all the others. Great. It's also impossible for the Nazi economy to stay this way because it was completely built on plunder. Without constant invasions and annexations the German economy would have imploded worse than in the Great Depression.

Hitler wouldn't have been seen as a man of his time for a really simple reason: nobody else in the 1930s and 1940s was exterminating the mentally ill on a production line scale. That was just him. Even the horrors of the eugenics movement couldn't be compared to that.
Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenist. Yet, she is not remembered like that. I am not saying it is right, but the oP asked for a "nice guy nazis." Nipping Hitler's genocide at the bud and having him moderate in order to stay in power fulfills the conditions to the OP.
 
Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenist. Yet, she is not remembered like that. I am not saying it is right, but the oP asked for a "nice guy nazis." Nipping Hitler's genocide at the bud and having him moderate in order to stay in power fulfills the conditions to the OP.

People do remember that about Margaret Sanger; it's mentioned quite often. Even then, she was explicitly against killing the mentally ill and such.

Hitler still commits genocide in your idea. I guess he didn't literally kill six million people. Great. He still won't be remembered fondly for that.
 
In my timeline Nazism becomes a real political movement respected in countless countries as a legitimate ideology, though later on it gets under scrutiny just like the Fascist and authoritarian regimes across the continent.
 
People do remember that about Margaret Sanger; it's mentioned quite often. Even then, she was explicitly against killing the mentally ill and such.

Hitler still commits genocide in your idea. I guess he didn't literally kill six million people. Great. He still won't be remembered fondly for that.
I am not so sure about that. If Hitler killed 3,000 mentally retarded people and then for the rest of his time as chancellor was toothless and Nazis remained in power and were the modern German majority party, Nazism would be remembered much more fondly and its earlier times whitewashed.

I mean, the trail of tears is always mentioned of Andrew Jackson...yet no one says he was a bad President because of it. He is still on the $20 bill for Pete's sake. Tens of thousands of Filipinos died thanks to Teddy Roosevelt pushing for the annexation of the country. Yet, he's on mount rushmore. So, I completely disagree with your thesis.
 
You cant have antisemitism and racism qualify as nice by todays moral standards. That is not possible.
Take those two out and we cant recognize the ideology.

The simple Way to get what the OP asks for is to have different moral standards. That is unfortunately quite Possible, in fairness also as a thought experiment.

Apart from this a misunderstanding of what the Nazis were could work as well. I could see the nazis losing power (1936?) with Hitler executed and somewhat later Europe falls under the Soviet control, ideally under Maxim Litvinov.
Hitler would then stand as the person who tried to stand up to communism, but wasnt believed in his own time.
 
I understand you have less discrete intervals of judgement so I don't want to cause any misunderstandings.

- "Hi, was the movie nice?"
- "Oh yes! It was better than living in Nazi Germany!"

Well, you know the old saw: "But aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
 

thorr97

Banned
Nope, sorry, no way, now how could you make the Nazis "nice" and still have them be Nazis.

Their not being nice was what distinguished them from all the other nationalistic and socialistic political parties and movements swirling around Germany after the Great War's end. It was Hitler's pulling together extreme antisemitism and extreme nationalism which let the NSDAP claw its way to the top among those fringe parties and then proceed to accumulate the power it needed to take control in Germany.

Eliminate Hitler and you eliminate the NSDAP's soul and its chief strategist and its most charismatic leader. No one else in the NSDAP had "what it took" to drive the party forward politically like that. No one else had the cunning, the vision, the will, and the charisma to draw enough other capable people together to make things happen that way.

And if you somehow delete the antisemitism from the NSDAP then it's lacking its needed villain to blame for all Germany's ills. A villain which even the Communists already despised. So, no antisemitism means no justification for seizing the wealth of the Jews. And without seizing that then the NSDAP's economic plans fail in the early to mid-30s and that sees them out of power shortly thereafter. That's assuming they even get into power without having the Jews for their scapegoat.

So a "Nice Guy Nazis" would never have gotten into power in the first place.
 
You cant have antisemitism and racism qualify as nice by todays moral standards. That is not possible.
Take those two out and we cant recognize the ideology.

The simple Way to get what the OP asks for is to have different moral standards. That is unfortunately quite Possible, in fairness also as a thought experiment.

Apart from this a misunderstanding of what the Nazis were could work as well. I could see the nazis losing power (1936?) with Hitler executed and somewhat later Europe falls under the Soviet control, ideally under Maxim Litvinov.
Hitler would then stand as the person who tried to stand up to communism, but wasnt believed in his own time.

I can see another POD that would work: the Nazis being more successful on the eastern front. Enough so that the world never finds out about the Holocaust, or if it is discovered, Hitler is able to successfully blame Stalin. In that case, Hitler is remembered as a racist and antisemitic blowhard but not the devil, and Stalin is remembered as a genocidal maniac.
 
I can see another POD that would work: the Nazis being more successful on the eastern front. Enough so that the world never finds out about the Holocaust, or if it is discovered, Hitler is able to successfully blame Stalin. In that case, Hitler is remembered as a racist and antisemitic blowhard but not the devil, and Stalin is remembered as a genocidal maniac.

A Nazi Germany more successful on the Eastern Front is going to see the USSR and Poland depopulated. 100 million people murdered by the Nazis, entire cities razed by slave labor, and then said labor burined in mass graves, inside those former cities.

No one will be under any doubt about who was responsible for the mass murder in the East.

Add to that the very likely end result of such a war, either nuclear annihilation delivered by the Western Allies, or a Nazi civil war that sees Europe devastated the Nazi reputation would almost certainly be FAR, FAR WORSE than it is OTL. And to be frank, the Nazis deserve to have a worse reputation than OTL.
 
I can see another POD that would work: the Nazis being more successful on the eastern front. Enough so that the world never finds out about the Holocaust, or if it is discovered, Hitler is able to successfully blame Stalin. In that case, Hitler is remembered as a racist and antisemitic blowhard but not the devil, and Stalin is remembered as a genocidal maniac.
I thought about this as well, but as wcv215 points out, under most circumstances it would be even worse than OTL. The exception would possibly be in the german sphere of influence were the history books would portray the events as you suggest.
In any case, you need no Nazi in power (impotence), misunderstanding, ignorance or depravity to fullfill the OP's request.
 
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