Alternate WWII timeline plausibility check

Hiyo. I'm working on a sort of role reversal world where Germany gets a Stalin and the USSR gets a Hitler, and the world gets a somewhat different Cold War. Here's the timeline version 0.5. Whaddaya think, sirs? The Soviet victory that starts the TL's divergence, and Wilhelm III as the new emperor, are the things I'm most shaky about - do they pass the laugh test?

1920 - Soviet forces defeat the Polish armies along the Vistula and seize Warsaw on August 22nd.

1921 - The last remaining Polish forces surrender to the Soviets or cross into Germany, where they are disarmed and interned. A Polish People's Republic is proclaimed. French and Lithuanian troops in the Free City of Danzig deter a Soviet invasion.

1922 - No Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and the USSR. Instead, German begins very tentative and limited rearmament on its own terms, stopped by French pressure. The British are less concerned. In the wake of Lenin's stroke, Leon Trotsky and Evgeny Volkov, as well as Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, manage to out-maneuver Joseph Stalin for control of the USSR.

1923 - The NSDAP attempts a coup in Munich. The farcical attempt ends with the death of Nazi leaders Hitler, Röhm and Hess, and the imprisonment of the other would-be revolutionaries. The NSDAP is banned; its supporters drift to more mainstream nationalist parties or form obscure splinter groups.

1924 - Federal election in Germany. The Polish People's Republic is annexed to the USSR as the Polish SSR.

1925 - Stalin is ejected from the Central Committee by the Trotsky-Volkov faction and internally exiled to the Far East to deal with the mostly non-existent counterrevolutionaries there.

1927 - Volkov purges Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Party, and drives Stalin into exile (he dies in Macau six years later).

1928 - The Soviet Revolutionary Armament Program, an incredibly ambitious scheme to make the USSR a world-class military power, begins. The initial hostile reaction by the great powers is soon muted by the Great Depression (which has negligible impact on the isolated Soviet economy).

1929 - The Gleichschaltung (coordination) begins - the consolidation of the main parties of the left and the right into the leftist Democratic Party of Germany (DPD) and the right-wing Nationalpartei (NP). The Catholic Zentrum party generally holds the balance of power, especially in the south and west of the country.

1930 - A plebiscite held in the Danzig Free City results in a 92% Yes vote in favor of rejoining Germany. After great debate, the League of Nations approves reunification in the face of vehement Soviet opposition.

1932 - Raffael Stoschberg, a WWI veteran and the Nationalpartei candidate, is elected as President of Germany.

1933 - German rearmament ramps up. The Rhine crisis occurs, and the French don't call Stoschberg's colossal bluff.

1934 - President Stoschberg plans the construction of an ambitious network of highways, the Reichsstraße, patterned on the Kraftfahrstraße built between Cologne and Bonn in 1931.

1935 - The Imperial Restoration takes place and Wilhelm III, not his father (who refuses to accept the limits on his authority), is crowned Emperor in Berlin (many members of the non-Prussian German royal families refuse to attend) and then King of Prussia in Königsberg (which most members of the non-Prussian royal families of Germany do attend).

1936 - Just over 1000 km of Reichsstraße have been completed.

1938 - Otto Hahn discovers the principles of nuclear fission. The Yangtze River Incident, in which Japanese forces sink two American and one British patrol boat near Nanking, escalates into a full war between Japan and the Anglo-American powers by mid-summer.

1939 - East European War begins when, after the completion of the second five year Revolutionary Armament Program, the USSR invades Finland and the Baltic republics. After Albert Einstein approaches President Stoschberg with concerns about a Soviet nuclear weapon program, Germany begins Project Blue (Projekt-Blau), its top secret atomic bomb project.

1940 - 4500 km of Reichsstraße have been completed (several months behind schedule, as men and money are shifted to the war effort). Anglo-American forces occupy Iwo Jima, breaking the last major Japanese line of defense before the Home Islands.

1941 - Wilhelm II dies and is buried in Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. The first German grand offensive is halted after a major defeat at Lviv, and a retreat to the Vistula ensues.

1942 - The Vistula Line is broken at the end of the year. Japan surrenders after a lengthy bombing campaign and a failed last-ditch militarist coup.

1943 - East Prussia falls despite enormous Soviet casualties. Civilians stream through the shrinking West Prussian corridor, suffering severe losses from Soviet air and artillery strikes.

1944 - The eight month long Siege of Breslau, the high point of the Soviet invasion of Silesia, ends in a German victory. Soviets suffer nearly 800,000 casualties and 100,000 soldiers are taken prisoner - one Verdun stacked atop another.

1945 - The Germans begin a counterattack across Poland, but their losses in men and materiel over the last six years hinder them considerably.

1946 - The Soviets manage to halt the Germans more or less along the western frontier of the old Russian empire. A stalemate resembling the Western Front of World War One develops.

1947 - Late in the year, Project Blue successfully conducts a nuclear test (code named Sonnenwende) on the Baltic island of Fehmarn.

1948 - Nuclear destruction of Moscow on January 7. War ends three weeks later (most of that time spent finding someone to surrender), Stockholm Treaty. Poland (minus pre-Versailles German territory), Belarus and Ukraine gain independence, Finland and the Baltics make modest territorial gains at Russian expense. Much of East Europe is a wasteland thanks to the successive German, Soviet, and German advances over the last nine and a half years.

1950 - The United States' nuclear program, the Chicago Project, successfully detonates an atomic bomb at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The Cold War begins.
 
That was very simple. Not really a World War.

I think it would be more interesting if the Soviets advanced through Austria and Northern Italy, while bombing the UK from occupied Norway/ Scandinavia. That leaves Germany surrounded from all sides, with most of Prussia occupied, and all of the free world defending Silesia.

If you want to bring the U.S. somehow, try to have the USSR defeat Japan instead.
 
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The Soviet victory that starts the TL's divergence, and Wilhelm III as the new emperor, are the things I'm most shaky about - do they pass the laugh test?
I have to confess, IDK enough about them to say. However...
1938 - The Yangtze River Incident, in which Japanese forces sink two American and one British patrol boat near Nanking, escalates into a full war between Japan and the Anglo-American powers by mid-summer.
This strikes me as a bit improbable, without knowing the differences the POD has generated. Not impossible, just unlikely.
1940 - Anglo-American forces occupy Iwo Jima, breaking the last major Japanese line of defense before the Home Islands.
...
1942 - Japan surrenders after a lengthy bombing campaign and a failed last-ditch militarist coup.
This does make me laugh. 2yrs of bombing from Saipan & vicinity before Japan surrenders? After 4yrs of Sub Force cutting SLOCs? Japan's economy should be in ruin by mid-1940 TTL, & it's likely Japan's government falls with the fall of Saipan, per OTL.
1946 - The Soviets manage to halt the Germans more or less along the western frontier of the old Russian empire. A stalemate resembling the Western Front of World War One develops.
So does this. The Germans are the best in the world at mobile warfare in WW2. They've also got the best trained army in the world. (OTL, they had at least a 2:1 edge in skill on the Sovs.) How do the Sovs stalemate them? Considering the Sovs are led by "Hitler", who would scarecely give Tukachevsky (or Zhukov) his head.
 
Hiyo. I'm working on a sort of role reversal world where Germany gets a Stalin and the USSR gets a Hitler, and the world gets a somewhat different Cold War. Here's the timeline version 0.5. Whaddaya think, sirs? The Soviet victory that starts the TL's divergence, and Wilhelm III as the new emperor, are the things I'm most shaky about - do they pass the laugh test?....

I didn't see a German Stalin! It looks to me like Germany is essentially a conservative country, not socialist at all though it has socialists in the Reichstag and I suppose in key ministries. A roadbuilding plan does not a Stalin make!:p

The Russian guy doesn't strike me as a Hitler either--there isn't any hint of a reactionary racism or even Great Russian chauvinism taking the place of OTL's Bolshevik-internationalist ideology. Actually under Stalin OTL the man did about as much as anyone could to mutate Leninist internationalism into a form of Russian nationalism, but while it would be hard for Volkov (whoever he was, I don't know at the moment) to be even more explicitly Russian-chauvinist than Stalin was, still the Stalinist form of Soviet=Russian perversion of Bolshevism was still distinct from the kind of thing Naziism, and Fascism in general, was.

So you only sort of have a Russian Hitler (and speaking as a frequent apologist for the Soviets, I have to admit Stalin was already very close to being one himself) and as far as I can tell, you don't have a German Stalin at all. As someone else pointed out, you don't really have a World War II either.

And there is nothing wrong with any of that! There is no reason there has to be a parallel Second Great War with the actors just mixed up a bit; your completely different scenario seems to have a lot of integrity and I encourage it.

Laugh tests:

I see no problem whatsoever with the POD of the Soviet victory in Poland. OTL that was just almost within their grasp.

Stalin getting outmaneuvered is a bit of a stretch, but the man was not infallible and all it would take would be one slip-up. Trotsky getting shuffled out after that is almost inevitable!:)()

Restoration of the Hohenzollerns to Prussia and the Reich--kind of tricky politically but not a bad trick. If the Social Democrats could go along with it (presumably they are the ones who put the strict conditions on the monarchy that Wilhelm II couldn't stomach) it could win very large solid majorities of support in Germany and by the late 1920s I don't think anyone in the Entente/League circles could or would do much to stop it. German re-armament--justified in view of the Soviet menace to the East and Germany's front-line position against them.

Actually, one thing I have doubts about--could Germany, even a liberal Germany with the full support of all the scientists (of all ethnicities! and genders, like say Lise Meitner) ever born or attracted there, actually pull off a bomb project between emerging from the Depression and fighting a medium-to-great war against a massive Soviet attack? The USA had to spend an ungodly amount on the Manhattan Project OTL and we weren't under direct attack and did have vastly more resources at our disposal. Some of those "resources" were of course European refugees who ITTL would stay at home and mostly be available to the Germans instead.

In retrospect, the big cost is obtaining weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, and for the latter, the technical risk of designing an implosion bomb. The simple "Little Boy" two-hemisphere and gun design won't work for plutonium, but plutonium is more attractive because it it can be synthesized in a reactor and then separated and concentrated by relatively simple and quick chemical means. Whereas separating out U-235 is a very painful, costly, slow process.

The Germans better have the foresight to locate their fissionable-concentration facilities well out of the reach of Soviet advances!

Well, you did make them take an extra two years. Maybe they can pull it off by 1947?

Not a bad timeline. If you want the paradigm to be that Germany takes the place of the Soviets in terms of a face-off with the USA as the more conservative capitalist power, you need to show how much more socialist this Germany is, which doesn't seem at all apparent.

Well, maybe it is the USA that is the "heavy" here! Either the USA goes Commie big-time and takes up what this Volkov dude was forced by instant daylight to leave off...

Or the USA is somewhat more plausibly, ultra-reactionary, and it is Berlin that leads the post-war liberal nations of the world?
 
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