Challenge: Turn Germany into a poor, agricultural-pastoral country with little modern industry, ideally during or after World War Two, without involving nuclear weapons.
Challenge: Turn Germany into a poor, agricultural-pastoral country with little modern industry, ideally during or after World War Two, without involving nuclear weapons.
Just because they are stupid plans doesn’t mean they didn’t have a chance of being introduced.
what might the Soviets do if they controlled all or most of Germany by 1945?
If the USSR had gotten all of Germany they certainly would not have tried to de-industrialize it.
If they control it as a Satellite they'd likely just invest alot in it and make sure those in charge were blindly obedient to them.
If they were really lucky and a German SSR came to be they'd likely initiate a massive population movement scheme, moving Germans to various other places and other nationalities to Germany and then build up the industry even more.
The Soviets DID de-industrialize big parts of Saxony and Silesia, at least temorary. Not as any kind of "punishment" but as reparations - industrial facilities, but also stuff like railway tracks, were carted off and built up again in the Soviet Union. East German mainlines operated on single tracks well into the 1960s, and in Russia (especially in the rural areas) you can still find German industrial machinery - lathes etc. - from early 1940s.
That's with them having only East Germany as a puppet though.
The reason Germany was industrialised, moreso than France and Italy for example, was because of the happy coincidence if lots of coal and iron ore deposits in close proximity to each other and within easy reach of bulk transport. The fact of the matter is that these resources are there and everybody knows it and there will be no shortage of takers willing to exploit them.
I think the main reason for Soviet reparations from their own occupation zone (they also received some from the western zones, as far as I know, although this was stopped pretty fast) is that they feared loosing it.
The main problem is not whether they have all of Germany as a puppet or only Eastern Germany as a puppet, but how long they have that puppet. If they had known to keep control of Eastern Germany for that long, I think they wouldn't have taken what they did IOTL, they simply feared some form of German unification, in which case all of the German industrial capacity would have been lost.
They certainly not feared a unification in itself - that's actually what Stalin propsed.