alternatehistory.com

Without Genocide or any large scale ethnic cleansing, could the Second Reich assimilate those areas (and several others listed below, I ran out of space in the title), or at least get them to see themselves as Germans first by the present?

Say a scenario with lots of PoDs that wank the German Empire.

-The US Civil War starts in 65 instead of 61, Britain makes the incredibly stupid mistake of getting involved on the Confederacy's side around early 68 and fights a tough war where they can only win by attritioning the North that has already built an impressive army. This leaves a distracted Britain that is war weary by 1870.

-Denmark makes the mistake of joining the North German Confederation and gets accepted, and thus gets taken for a ride by Germany when it is united.

-Italy doesn't join the Austro-Prussian War, but Prussia still wins as OTL. Austria thus keeps more of Northern Italy.

-Austria and Hungary for whatever reason have a far more serious falling out that ends in mostly peaceful succession during the Franco-Prussian War.

-Switzerland starts to Balkanize for whatever reason several decades before the German Unification and the German parts of Switzerland have a strong pro Germany movement by the late 1860s.

-Prussia goes to war with France as OTL and crushes France again. Germany is created as per OTL. This time Germany annexes all of Alsace-Lorraine. Germany also takes Denmark with them.

-Austria petitions to join Germany, and takes Czechia, Slovenia, and their Northern Italian territories with them.

-The German parts of Switzerland are heavily divided, but secede and join Germany right after the Franco-Prussian War.

-The Netherlands offers to sell Luxembourg to Germany and the Germans buy it.

So here, Germany gets all of its OTL territory, Austria, Czechia, Slovenia, Denmark, all of A-L, Austrian controlled Italian lands, the German speaking areas of Switzerland, and Luxembourg. Britain is simply too busy and tired to directly intervene.

Can this alternate timeline Germany have this entire Empire strongly German or with a German majority by the present without killing its minority populations?
Top