Fallen on the March - the world after a German victory at Stalingrad

Wow. What a catastrophe for Europe and asia this war has been. I think a nuclear winter is likely to happen soon. Germany cannot possibly be rebuilt in this scenario. 32 bombs dropped, right? It will form a ˝Cancerous Curtain˝ between East and West. Doctrines of the great powers will be very different to OTL. WMD-s will be seen as expensive, and not at all decisive will-breakers. Conventional infantry on the ground will still decide things. I do think the biological attack on the UK would've done more damage than it did, though.
 
Wow. What a catastrophe for Europe and asia this war has been. I think a nuclear winter is likely to happen soon.

Wrong.

Germany cannot possibly be rebuilt in this scenario.

Wrong.

32 bombs dropped, right? It will form a ˝Cancerous Curtain˝ between East and West.

Wrong.

I don't have time to talk about this stuff now so I'll try to come back later.

Doctrines of the great powers will be very different to OTL. WMD-s will be seen as expensive, and not at all decisive will-breakers. Conventional infantry on the ground will still decide things.

You're looking at it the wrong way. This bombing campaign is in no way comparable to a MAD-style attack. The only difference you'll see will be in the US Army early 1950s.

I do think the biological attack on the UK would've done more damage than it did, though.

If biological weapons don't catch and spread very, very quickly, stopping them will be relatively simple. Point attacks like the Germans did are not very different from organic disease outbreaks.
 
Chapter IX: The Nuremburg Trials and Werwolf, 1946-1950.
Post-war Europe!


Chapter IX: The Nuremburg Trials and Werwolf, 1946-1950.

The Wehrmacht withdrew to Germany’s 1937 borders as ordered (the intention was to re-establish Austria as a separate country). Demobilization commenced, albeit at a painfully slow pace, which is commonly attributed to obstructionism. Allied soldiers streamed into the country unopposed and an Allied Control Council started to administrate the country, but quickly discovered they still needed Rommel. Only a few months ago hundreds of thousands of people had still been cheering at the executions of supposed defeatists and traitors and generally agreed with the harsh treatment of so-called “enemies of the Reich.” These people hadn’t changed into friends of the Anglo-Americans overnight and certainly not of the Soviets, who occupied East Prussia. Agitators propagated the idea that the Allies had only won the war through “cheating” by using the atomic bomb instead of fighting the Wehrmacht fairly on the field of honour. Still others espoused the idea that new wonder weapons would have turned back the tide, but that Germany had been robbed of its chance by the September Coup. Remaining diehard Nazis even considered Himmler the hero and Rommel the traitor rather than the other way around. Latent anti-Semitism remained, as returning German Jews discovered when they tried to return to their homes in Germany, which were now often occupied by others.

The Allied administration was seriously hampered by various forms of passive resistance, civilian disobedience in particular. Rommel as a war hero had the moral authority to convince most to carry on with their lives, work with the Allies and help rebuild Germany. Rommel remained a public figure by helping the Americans with their campaign to win the hearts and minds of the German people, which soon replaced plans to de-industrialize Germany and reduce it to a medieval economic state. The so-called Morgenthau Plan was rejected because only 60% of the population could live off the land, meaning that 40% would die. Moreover, Secretary of State Byrnes told Truman that Germany was the beating heart of Europe’s economy, making its resuscitation the cornerstone of European reconstruction. Additionally, if Europe didn’t recover quick enough then it could very well fall to communism. In 1947, a massive aid plan known as the Marshall Plan was launched and 15 billion dollars worth of aid (150 billion in current dollar value as of June 2016) was delivered to Europe.

Germany became the second largest recipient after the United Kingdom, receiving about 3.5 billion dollars worth of aid and it was highly needed. In early 1947, Germany was still a country in ruin, with only few of its major cities left intact and most industrial areas in shambles. Transportation infrastructure such as railways, bridges, docks, highways as well as Germany’s fuel producing capacity had been especially hard hit. Destroyed bridges also blocked a lot of river traffic which meant coal and wood, the most basic of fuels, couldn’t be transported very easily. It was much the same for food. Tens of thousands of Germans died of cold or hunger in the winter of 1946-’47 (the Nazi regime’s Winter Help that had largely prevented this in previous years had collapsed along with the Third Reich). Smaller towns hadn’t been destroyed, but due to the lack of transportation they were now economically isolated. Additionally, outbreaks of anthrax were still taking place in parts of the country and threatened to turn into an epidemic again because the loss of central authority meant quarantine measures were no longer being enacted. Outbreaks of typhoid, cholera and dysentery took place too, which was facilitated by the fact that the immune systems of hundreds of thousands of people had been compromised by varying degrees of radiation poisoning.

In general, with the civil war in September and October seriously weakening central authority and the removal of the severe repression mechanisms following the fall of the Nazis, maintaining law and order became a problem. Bands of refugees wandered around, looking for food, shelter and medical help. Given that 35 cities had been destroyed by nuclear weapons and several more by conventional bombings or had suffered indirectly from biological attack, there were millions of them. Worse were former Hitler Youths, former Volkssturm militiamen and ex-Waffen SS. They had military training, and in some cases were still armed, and they had nothing to do but make sure they stayed fed and warm. They became lawless gangs that plagued the countryside and the much depopulated ruins of the cities during those winter months of 1946-’47, robbing and beating up people. Some of the more ideologically driven bands took the effort to string up perceived traitors, defeatists and others they blamed for their current predicament. The murder rate peaked in December 1946. A handful of attacks took place against American and British patrols, though an organized campaign didn’t take off anywhere (except in East Prussia, where the Soviet occupiers were despised). Many German men were seriously frustrated when they saw how many German women entered relations with American and British soldiers. This included women, often desperate war widows with dependent children, who prostituted themselves to Allied soldiers, who paid them with cigarettes and chocolate (these replaced actual currency since the Reichsmark had become virtually worthless). Some of these men joined such gangs or practiced other forms of non-violent resistance. Communist agitation against the “capitalist parasites aiming to pillage Germany and exploit its working class” took place as well, sponsored by the Soviets.

By early 1947, the occupational authorities got a hold of the situation. Improvised airfields had been built and rivers had been cleared of collapsed bridges (and estuaries of remaining mine fields). Consistent deliveries of bread, dairy products, vegetables, fruit, meat, fish as well as medicine and medical equipment commenced, all of it Made in the USA. Bridges and railroads were rebuilt and roads were cleared of debris by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which allowed for an ever more systematic distribution by the spring of 1947. By then, families across Germany were being provided with rations of coal and/or wood to keep warm and cook food. Over the course of that year, the reconstruction of urban areas and key industries took off and the tensions between occupying Allied soldiers and the population lessened. The notable exception was East Prussia, where every German woman could still become victim of rape by Soviet soldiers if she ventured out into the streets. The remaining sympathizers turned that into their main theme in anti-Allied litanies, for as far as they weren’t in and out of jail for sedition.

Most Germans carried on with their lives and ignored remaining pro-Nazi firebrands, but the Allies nonetheless considered it unacceptable that questionnaires came in which said “National Socialism was a good idea that had been carried out badly.” Denazification had already begun by removing remaining Nazis from positions of power and influence and by disbanding or rendering impotent organizations associated with the Nazis. The Americans upped the ante in their occupation zone, the largest of them all, by criminalizing “Nazi apologism” and applying censorship. They also started to show documentaries with actual footage about the crimes of the concentration camps in cinemas to make it clear there was nothing good about Nazism. Attendance was compulsory for all German civilians aged 18 and above.

To set a final example the Allies organized the Nuremburg trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal, to prosecute former members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany who had planned, carried out or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 26 defendants were Martin Bormann, Karl Dönitz, Hans Frank, Roland Freisler, Wilhelm Frick, Walter Funk, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Reinhard Heydrich, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Robert Ley, Konstantin von Neurath, Franz von Papen, Erich Raeder, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Hjalmar Schacht, Baldur von Schirach, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer and Julius Streicher (Heydrich was still at large and the tribunal planned to try him in absentia). The trial commenced on Monday 21st April 1947 (one day after what would have been Hitler’s 58th birthday).

Proceedings were slow because Goebbels loudly interrupted the judges and the prosecution innumerable times with statements that he didn’t recognize this court, that proceedings were a farce directed by the Jews, that Nazi Germany would have been a bulwark against Bolshevism if the Anglo-Americans had been wise enough to accept Hitler’s offers of alliance, that the Anglo-Americans had fallen under the spell of Jewish finance capital and that the Nazis had done the world a favour by carrying out the Final Solution. When testifying Goebbels also made irrelevant and longwinded statements about the genius of his idol, the Führer. He commented in his diary how he wanted to defend Hitler’s legacy and he mentioned how he despised most of the other defendants, who now attacked the Führer they had once faithfully served and minimized their own involvement. Goebbels often countered their testimonies and he proudly owned up to his involvement in various Nazi crimes. The attention and publicity the trial gave him fed into his narcissistic, egomaniacal personality and diary notes reveal he fantasized about becoming a martyr for the National Socialist cause, which would one day get the recognition he thought it deserved. One favour he did do this co-defendants was that he denied that the Nazis were responsible for the Katyn Massacre. Much to the outrage of the Soviets, the American, British and French judges found Goebbels’s testimony credible (after all, why would the former minister of propaganda lie after de facto owning up to pretty much everything else he’d been accused of).

Another defendant who caused serious trouble was former Nazi judge Roland Freisler, who used his mastery of legal texts, mental agility, dramatic courtroom verbal dexterity and verbal force (he had been put on trail for his involvement in the Wannsee Conference, for the political nature of his own trials as a judge, and for the trial against the B-29 crew that had dropped the bomb over Munich, leading to their execution). Freisler repeated, ad nauseam as far as the judges were concerned, that the charges against the defendants were only defined as crimes after they had been committed and that therefore the trial was invalid as a form of victors’ justice. He also pointed out several times double standards associated with that, particularly how no one from the Soviet Union was charged with “conspiracy to commit aggression” in the case of aggression against Poland. In that regard he also mentioned the Winter War and the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran as examples of conspiracies to commit aggression. As far as crimes against humanity went, he recited a large number of examples of such crimes committed by the Red Army from memory. Lastly, Freisler stated that if he was to be put him on trial for presiding over show trials, then Soviet judge Iona Nikitchenko might as well join him in the dock (Nikitchenko had presided over some of the most notorious of Stalin’s show trials, sentencing both Kamenev and Zinoviev to death). At one point he interrupted Nikitchenko, calling him a “hypocrite beyond compare.” He even went so far as to conclude that the sentences, whatever they would be, had already been decided on before the trial. Regardless of the crimes he had committed, many of the points he raised are now considered valid.

The trial was suddenly interrupted during its tenth session on Wednesday June 18th 1947. A truck driven by a fanatical Nazi who was a part of Heydrich’s “Werwolf” resistance movement, a former SS member capable of speaking flawless English to be precise, had managed to get past several checkpoints in Nuremberg even though his vehicle was laced with half a tonne of TNT. He parked it right in front of the Palace of Justice and a timer triggered the explosion. It shattered all of the windows in the complex and abruptly ended proceedings for that day. American judge Francis Biddle was killed and a few other judges were injured. Soviet judge Nikitchenko, completely cut up by glass splinters and debris, was injured most severely and had to be hospitalized for two months. Goering got a heart attack and died two days later (unsurprising considering how massive he had become). Bormann, Goebbels, Kaltenbrunner, Sauckel and Seyss-Inquart had all suffered injuries that hospitalized them, from a couple of days in Sauckel’s case to five weeks in Goebbels’s (despite his injuries, Goebbels approved of this terrorist attack). Proceedings were adjourned until September 1st.

After that, remaining Nazi supporters under the command of Reinhard Heydrich, the self-appointed head of the Werwolf partisan movement, launched an insurgency against the Allies. He portrayed himself as humble by refusing to assume the title of Führer, instead assuming the title of Reichsprotektor (Reich Protector). The tactics they used included illegal radio broadcasts, pamphlets, posters, kidnappings, hostage takings, sabotage, assassinations, car bombings, anti-tank rocket attacks, drive-by shootings and suicide bombings. As the campaign picked up, people seen as collaborators of the Allies were murdered and the preferred method used was hanging, specifically hanging them where their bodies would be seen (usually with signs around their necks specifying this person’s crime). The murder rate in Germany spiked once more in August 1947. Rommel and his family were put under constant protection because Nazi terrorists considered him to be the ultimate traitor because he was the leader of the plot that killed Hitler and made Germany surrender. Thousands of Allied servicemen as well as many more German civilians were killed in the insurgency, influencing public opinion in the US and the UK since the war was supposed to be over.

The search for Heydrich was stepped up, but he kept moving around in the mountains and forests of southern Germany and usually accepted the most primitive accommodations to avoid the attention of the Allies. He spent many nights sleeping under the starry sky in the woods and in caves, or in shacks, sheds and barns in little southern German towns. Whenever he did sleep in a proper bed, it was because true believers of the Nazi cause took him in. Regardless of comfort, Heydrich never stayed in one place for more than two or three days. Moreover, he had changed his appearance by shaving his head and growing a beard and used fake identification papers to get past Allied checkpoints (as it later turned out, he was close to ground zero in the case of the Nuremberg attack to make sure it was successful).

The Allies and the German police, despite attacks against police officers, kept looking for him and he stayed ahead of the authorities. A second terrorist bombing in Nuremberg killed some court personnel and it was followed a few days later by a drive-by that killed some on leave American soldiers that had nothing to do with the trial at all. Nonetheless, this was sufficient to convince the Allies to relocate the entire trial to York, Great Britain, far out of reach of the Werwolf insurgents. Meanwhile, of course, there were the other attacks taking place all over Germany and the Allies had difficulty dealing with them because their material superiority didn’t mean anything to an adversary that practiced asymmetric warfare.

By trying to kill and injure as many Allied servicemen as possible the Werwolfs tried to decrease Allied domestic support for the continued occupation of Germany to the point that public opinion would demand a withdrawal. Once this was accomplished, Heydrich planned for a resurgence of the Nazis. In response to the insurgency, the Americans and the British simply continued their reconstruction program and scaled back parts of the denazification program that the German people resented, particularly forced attendance of “educational movies” in the cinema (these depicted the horrific crimes of the Nazi regime uncensored, including but not limited to lampshades made of human skin for example). With more and more people getting roofs over their heads and food on the table while infrastructure and basic amenities were being restored, most people were soaked off of their initial sympathy for the Werwolfs (apart from the remaining diehard Nazi believers that is). Many people found new jobs after the war precisely because of the massive post-war reconstruction program.

In Britain people were very war weary after seven years of war, especially after the last eighteen months of it, which had seen chemical and biological attacks. The American people, who hadn’t even seen a single bullet hit the continental US, were a lot less weary. However, in both countries the people were confronted by the fact that their countrymen were being killed and injured in a country that was supposed to be vanquished. The casualty rate was in fact a lot less than the number of men that had died fighting the Germans on the battlefield over the years. But it was just demoralizing that an enemy that had been defeated and had signed an official instrument of surrender was still inflicting casualties. In their occupation zone in East Prussia the Soviets responded with terror, organizing reprisal executions against German civilians. The insurgency flared up the strongest there, lasting until 1960 in the wooded lands around East Prussia’s lakes on a small scale. The direct result was that Truman, though he stayed in the White House in the 1948 elections, lost the House and became a lame duck president. Meanwhile, Churchill lost the UK general election of 1946, the first general election in Britain since 1935. His successor Attlee, however, continued Churchill’s policies vis-à-vis the occupation of Germany and Britain’s cooperation with the US.

In the American, British and French zones the attacks of the insurgents, after peaking in size and frequency in 1947, decreased in number more and more because support dried up. Werwolf propaganda continued to spew vitriol against the Allies, but the response was lacklustre across Germany, with the exception of East Prussia where most people hated their Soviet occupiers. Even in the Western Allied occupation zones, however, the Werwolf insurgency continued to simmer at a low intensity, too low to influence Anglo-American public opinion. The few remaining diehard Nazis led by Heydrich, however, vowed to continue. The Allied authorities issued a deck of playing cards with pictures of Nazis still at large on the cards and in that deck Heydrich was the ace of spades. His arrest, in other words, was top priority and of course he couldn’t stay lucky forever: he was arrested on June 18th 1948 while trying to board a train to Berlin and the Allies intended to carry out his sentence (he’d been tried to death in absentia). Heydrich appealed his conviction, primarily to use the trial as a podium for Nazi propaganda and to immortalize himself, (he is one of the most popular senior Nazis in neo-Nazi circles today, but outside those circles he’s a Nazi criminal). The outcome was predictable. He was sentenced to death and hanged on February 6th 1950. With the exception of East Prussia, no more Werwolf attacks took place after 1952.

Meanwhile, the British and the Americans planned to fully reintegrate Germany into the international community as an accepted, normal and civilized country. One reason was that relations between the Western powers on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other hand had fallen apart. Even during the war, the Soviets had put Moscow trained cadres in crucial power positions to fulfil orders regarding socio-political transformation. Elimination of the bourgeoisie’s social and financial power by expropriation of landed and industrial property was accorded absolute priority. These measures were publicly billed as “reforms” rather than socioeconomic transformations. Activities by political parties had to adhere to “bloc politics”, with parties eventually having to accept membership in an “antifascist bloc” obliging them to act only by mutual “consensus.” The bloc system permitted the Soviet Union to exercise domestic control indirectly. Crucial departments such as those responsible for personnel, general police, secret police and youth, were strictly communist run. Moscow cadres distinguished “progressive forces” from “reactionary elements”, and rendered both powerless. Such procedures were repeated until communists had gained unlimited power, and only politicians who were unconditionally supportive of Soviet policy remained. The results were confirmed by elections in which the communists won with results anywhere between 80% and 99%. After losing nearly half its population, Poland now saw a new totalitarian regime imposed on it, along with East Prussia, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania (Czechoslovakia had been split up because the Czech part had been reached by the Western Allies before the Red Army would march in, ensuring that the Czech Republic became a part of the Western camp). The liberation of Poland, the reason why WW II had started in the first place, would have to wait since nobody was willing to fight the Soviets over it.
 
Last edited:
I've been followiung this, and overall like it, though the amount of nuclear devastation seems excessive for Germany to continue fighting. Still a good (if depressing) timeline.
 
Chapter X: German Elections, Red East Prussia, Second Anschluss and the End of Stalin, 1950-1956.
Update time!


Chapter X: German Elections, Red East Prussia, Second Anschluss and the End of Stalin, 1950-1956.

Political parties had been re-established with the approval of the Allies in 1948 and after some wavering the date of Germany’s federal election was set on September 8th 1950. It would be Germany’s first legitimate democratic election since November 1932, almost eighteen years earlier. The NSDAP had been declared a criminal organization and could therefore not participate in the elections, but the National People’s Party (Nationale Volkspartei, NVP) was formed under the leadership of Otto Skorzeny, a successful SS commando who had become popular later in the war for his successes against the Allies. Likewise, the equally anti-democratic KPD (the German communists) participated in the election, this time without any suppression from the government or intimidation by extreme right wing militias, unlike previous occasions. These elections would be truly free and fair. The only restriction was a 5% electoral threshold in a system of proportional representation, which had to distribute a fixed number of 500 seats.

Former Field Marshal Erwin Rommel joined the Christian Democratic CDU/CSU and became the party leader while, in large part co-authoring its party program for the 1950 federal election. His fame and popularity allowed him to push aside Konrad Adenauer, a leading member of the CDU/CSU until then (before the Nazi regime also a major figure in the Catholic Centre Party and mayor of Cologne from 1917 to 1933). Adenauer had integrated a pro-Western stance, liberal democracy and social market economy into the party program. Rommel added a mild dose of conservative nationalism, which wasn’t completely surprising given that he had become part of the conservative officers’ class long ago. Given that Prince Louis Ferdinand attached himself to the same party, he drew the support of remaining conservative nationalists, monarchists and the Junkers, for as far as they still mattered. The CDU/CSU got 30% of the popular vote and became the largest political party in Germany, followed by the social-democratic SPD with 27% and the liberal FDP with 15%. The KPD got 13% and the neo-Nazi NVP won 6% of the popular vote (the NVP gained 4.7% of the vote in the next election in 1954, not meeting the electoral threshold, and faded into insignificance after that; the KPD managed to stay above the 5% threshold well into the 1980s). The CDU/CSU and the SPD together had a majority and formed a grand coalition. They took to hand the ongoing reconstruction efforts, which by the early 1950s were definitely bearing fruit: ruined cities had mostly been transformed from hollow shells back to their original state, the Autobahns had been restored and the network grew, river ports, railroads, shunting yards, bridges, telephone lines and other types of infrastructure had been restored back to working condition, everybody had a job, more and more people were buying cars, law and order reigned and the Werwolfs were becoming a fading memory. That said, the legacy of the atomic offensive to break Germany remains: even today Germany is the country with the most cases of cancer per capita in the Western world as a result of the radiation.

Meanwhile, the Second Austrian Republic hadn’t properly gotten off the ground yet and it was already struck by a series of general strikes in September and October in which the Communist Party of Austria was involved. The second republic was pretty much a continuation of the pre-war authoritarian clerical fascist regime since it saw the return of Schuschnigg, the successor of Dolfuss, as chancellor. In Linz and Graz, communist paramilitary forces seized control of trade union regional headquarters and communications infrastructure in the morning of September 27th. The day thereafter, the communists stormed the national trade union headquarters in Vienna, as well as seizing control of the house of parliament and the Hofburg Palace, which was the presidential residence. Much later it turned out this was an ill-conceived Soviet sponsored coup to gain more influence in central Europe. At any rate, the British, who still exercised influence since this was part of their occupation zone, expressed their doubts about whether Austria would remain pro-Western given that it had two communist neighbours. In its previous incarnation it had been mired with problems and now again and therefore they proposed a referendum on Austria’s future with the choice between continued independence or rejoining a democratic Germany. Given that the government had enacted various austerity programs while Germany was on the threshold of an economic miracle, 68% voted in favour of rejoining Germany in 1951 after five years of separation.

In East Prussia elections followed a different path: the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheidspartei Deutschlands, SED), created from a forced merger of the KPD and SPD, won 80% of the vote due to enormous electoral fraud. Accurate numbers are unavailable, but estimates are that under normal circumstances the SED would have gotten 15% of the vote at the most. Given that East Prussia had no large proletariat, was mostly rural and had an agrarian economy dominated by wealthy landlords (Junkers) until recently, this is unsurprising. The leaders of the SED denounced the elections elsewhere in Germany as fraudulent because the “fascists” were back in power, leading to East Prussia declaring itself the sole legitimate government under the name “German Democratic Republic.” Legitimate or not, they took power easily because the communists already controlled key posts and because Red Army units were stationed in East Prussia. In 1950, a land reform was pushed through that disowned the Junkers for as far as they hadn’t fled, reorganizing farmland into communal farms and state-owned farms (similar to the kolkhozes and sovkhozes in the USSR). All sectors of the economy were nationalized and would be directed through five year plans. These five year plans stimulated heavy industry and the extraction of natural resources. East Prussia has 90% of the world’s amber resources and its extraction and processing was developed (instead of selling it to be processed abroad), leading to the communist regime now controlling the entire production process by the end of the first five year plan in 1956. Small offshore oil deposits were discovered and drilling commenced in the early 1950s as well. Other important industrial sectors that were greatly stimulated were shipbuilding, auto part production, food processing, fishing and forestry. In becoming a one party totalitarian regime with a centrally planned economy, East Prussia got the standard prescription all Soviet occupied countries got. This was the result of Stalin’s paranoia: he wanted a buffer zone on his western border in the event of future Western aggression.

Stalin’s health, in the meantime, was deteriorating: he had suffered from a mild stroke and a heart attack in 1945, upon which his doctors had urged him to cut down on the smoking and drinking. He suffered from heavy atherosclerosis as a result of his heavy drinking and smoking, which also affected his brain, augmenting his paranoia. His drinking behaviour had worsened as a result of stress during the war and at this point he had graduated from heavy smoker to chain smoker. He initially responded to the medical advice concerning the cigarettes and the booze by having his personal physician sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag on the trumped up charge of medical malpractice. When his physician’s successor had the courage to reiterate his predecessor’s advice to cut down on smoking and drinking, Stalin came to the conclusion that there might be something to it. After another mild stroke in 1946, he finally took the hint and cut down.

While rebuilding his country from WW II and pouring resources into the atomic bomb program (leading to RDS-1 being tested in August 1949), he prepared for another major round of purges. Jews were purged from the party apparatus, the state bureaucracy and the Red Army, various discriminatory measures against Jews were enacted, and all kinds off unofficial forms of harassment took place. It didn’t amount to another Holocaust in the Soviet Union because Stalin, though an anti-Semite, didn’t see the Jews as the greatest threat. Instead he came to regard his own cronies as the main threat because, due to the war, they had remained in power for way too long and had probably secured their own powerbases. In his paranoid mind, he had to move against them before they got funny ideas and turned on him, leading to a return to the 1930s and its spectacular show trials. Molotov, Khrushchev, Kaganovich, Abakumov, Voroshilov, Budyonny all confessed to the charges levelled against them of collaborating with the Nazis or sabotaging the war effort. In one of the final sessions of the trial, Khrushchev spectacularly confessed to connections with separatist fascist movements and even monarchist organization, intending to return Russia to Tsarism (a confession obtained through torture, of course). The so-called “Trial of the White Movement Collaborators” led to the main defendants being sentenced to death in early 1954, after which they were taken out into the courtyard of Lubyanka Prison to be executed by firing squad. Khrushchev reportedly begged for his life and cried, asking to see Stalin because a mistake had to have been made, something Stalin mockingly imitated when he was informed.

Stalin got another stroke in the fall of 1953, which paralyzed his left arm and reduced strength in his left leg. This restricted his walking to short distances in and around the house because distances greater than that were much too exhausting for him. He was rolled into politburo meetings and other official happenings by wheelchair, though he insisted on standing upright for the annual parade for the October Revolution. He didn’t want his people to see he was an invalid. Physical decline was joined by mental decline, with dementia complementing his paranoia, making him doze off during meetings and talking about long since purged people as if they were still alive. In the early and mid 1950s, Stalin reshuffled the ethnic composition in several regions, moving ethnic Russians into the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian and Kazakh SSRs as well as Chechnya and Ingushetia, and in some cases also deporting parts of the original population to Siberia and Central Asia. This ensured that ethnic Russians became the plurality or even the majority of the population in these regions. Before an increasingly demented Stalin could do any more damage, he died of a heart attack on November 28th 1956.
 
Chapter XI: Cold War and Beyond, 1956-2016.
Final update!


Chapter XI: Cold War and Beyond, 1956-2016.

For lack of other surviving senior communists, Mikhail Suslov became the new Secretary General and Premier. He ended the purges and deportations, but was more active than Stalin in the foreign policy arena from the get go, which came at a critical juncture. With the European mother countries devastated, many colonies and dependencies sought their independence. In Kuomintang China supported independence movements in Southeast Asia, resulting in France leaving French Indochina in 1950. Emperor Bao Dai was too closely associated with the French as well as the Japanese, so he abdicated under Chinese pressure and was succeeded by his under aged son Bao Long. Laos and Cambodia also became independent as monarchies, ensuring they’d assume an anti-communist stance. The Republic of Korea also quickly entered China’s sphere of influence after the last occupying American forces left in 1950 and transferred authority in an official ceremony.

Moscow had missed out in Southeast Asia, to which it responded by befriending India after China had settled the Sino-Indian border dispute in its favour militarily. They put into practice the age old Arab proverb: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Nehru’s government received financial support and help from Soviet advisors for its own five year plans to develop the economy. Similarly, military advisors were sent to India and the government purchased Soviet equipment like MiG-21 fighters, T-55 tanks and AK-47 assault rifles. The Soviets also supported Nasser with such equipment and sent a large number of trainers during the Suez Crisis, which ended in a successful nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt. Further Cold War successes for the Soviets in the third world would include helping Lumumba overcome the Congo Crisis (a minor one since Lumumba turned out not to be a communist) and turning Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, Togo, Somalia and South Yemen communist while several Arab states adopted Arab Nationalism, which included a kind of authoritarian state socialism. A notable failure was Cuba, which was invaded on the orders of President Nixon in 1961 (he had defeated John F. Kennedy in 1960) to topple Fidel Castro. These events made the 1960s and 70s very eventful.

The first event that rocked the boat already occurred in 1957. In hindsight, Eisenhower realized that his failure to back the British and French was a mistake given Nasser’s anti-Western stance. Moreover, he was aware of Soviet involvement and a general Soviet foreign policy reorientation toward Africa. He feared the Soviets would become more active in Europe as well, and therefore he formally authorized the establishment of the Bundeswehr, the German army in 1957. It was to consist of 550.000 men and would be heavily integrated into the NATO command structure, unsurprising given Germany’s position in the frontline against the Bucharest Pact. This confirmed Suslov’s more assertive course since it seemed the West wanted to encircle the Soviet Union with anti-communist states which, outside Germany, already included Imperial Iran, Japan and regularly also China when it suited Chiang Kai-shek.

The greatest confrontation in the Cold War by far was in the Middle East when a revolution against the Shah of Iran suddenly erupted. Westernization, unpopular disregard for Islamic tradition, extravagance, elitism, corruption, authoritarianism, the failure of the Shah’s overly ambitious 1974 economic program, bottlenecks, shortages, inflation, and the Shah’s overconfident neglect of governance and preoccupation with playing the world statesman were among the causes of the Iranian Revolution.

The protests began in early 1978 with a strike in the port city of Bushehr resulting from the austerity measures implemented by the government as a result of the country’s economic decline. The suppression of the strike resulted in more strikes breaking out in other cities that soon paralyzed the country, while the government completely overreacted by sending in troops that fired live rounds rather than riot police with water cannons. This fanned the flames of revolution. The Shah continued policies of liberalization he had begun earlier by promising free and fair elections to the Majlis to take place in 1979 and made concessions by replacing key personnel in the government, the army and SAVAK. The protests continued due to the deaths of many protestors that had already occurred and now they had more room due to said concessions. They mushroomed into demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people at a time due to Mostafa Khomeini, son of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, being shot by the police in September 1978, involving the religious opposition. The Shah turned around and imposed martial law but the situation in the streets only escalated further from there. In October, he therefore appointed a military cabinet and exacerbated the situation by appointing General Gholam Ali-Oveissi, a notable hardliner who advocated a severe treatment of the revolutionaries, to the position of Prime Minister. As a result the army, the world’s fifth army, and the security forces went all out against the revolutionaries.

By the winter of 1978-’79, Iran was in civil war and the tide seemed to be turning in favour of the communist Tudeh Party and the Islamic Marxist People’s Mujahedin. In October the politburo had decided to lavishly supply them with weapons, ammunitions, funds and trainers to organize them into an effective guerrilla force. Tudeh and the People’s Mujahedin agreed to form a joint command and to jointly administrate the areas under their control. By spring of 1979 the Shah remained in control of most of the major cities, but the rest of the country had fallen to revolutionaries.

The way the CIA saw it the situation was thus: the Shah vs. the commies with a slice of fairly unimportant religious opposition on the side. President Ronald Reagan (who had defeated Democratic nominee Carter in 1976, thereby succeeding Robert F. Kennedy, who had in turn succeeded Nixon after winning the 1968 election against Rockefeller) was firmly anti-communist and he decided to prop up the Shah in the same way Moscow aided the Tudeh Party and the People’s Mujahedin. Reagan paused for a moment when the Shah formally requested CENTO for aid, arguing that this was part of the organization’s responsibilities. After all, it had been created to contain the USSR and if the revolution in Iran succeeded then CENTO would fail in its objective because Iran would surely turn communist, putting the Soviets on the Persian Gulf. Reagan understood this reasoning, but despite his rhetoric he’d rather avoid a direct confrontation against the Soviets. He dispatched a naval taskforce centred on the navy’s new carriers USS Nimitz and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower as well as battleship USS Missouri. This taskforce provided naval gunfire support as well as copious air support, in combination with land based aircraft flying from airfields in Pakistan, Turkey and British bases in the Trucial States. On numerous occasions US Special Forces engaged in covert operations in this conflict to secure important objectives for the Imperial Iranian Army, in some cases directly exchanging fire with Soviet spetznaz commandos (which both governments denied).

With massive American air support, numerous American covert operations and plentiful American funding and weaponry the regime got a hold of the situation, which unfortunately did nothing to change the image of the Shah as an American puppet. Even if he won, there’d still be plenty of people who hated him, which would make it impossible for him to be the kind of unifying figure Iran needed to recover from its civil war. Few people were intimately aware of the ill health of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1974. His illness contributed to his unwillingness to make any changes as he was determined to leave his mark on the country before he died. He would never get a chance to because he died of his illness in July 1980 and was succeeded by his son, 19 at the time, who became Reza Shah Pahlavi II. Given that he was an adult there was no regency, but his mother Empress Dowager Farah and several other members of the family did try to influence his early reign. They, however, were dependent on the rest of the world’s views on the Iranian Civil War, which was going on for two years by now. Moreover, the conflict threatened to escalate by Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, starting in 1979.

By 1981, the conflict was in a deadlock and to both the Soviets and the US it was a money sink. Besides that, the American casualties in a war the US officially wasn’t fighting as well as collateral damage caused by US interference had caused Reagan’s approval ratings to drop. This was the result of it being the first seriously televised war and took place against the backdrop of a recession in the early 1980s, which followed the not too prosperous 70s (with its oil crises, partially brought on by the oil embargo). The result was that Reagan lost the 1980 election, which almost killed off neo-conservatism in the Republican Party. His Democratic successor Jimmy Carter, who won his party’s nomination for lack of other substantial candidates, realized he had to extricate the US from Iran if he wanted a second term in the White House. He put pressure on Iran, threatening to cut them off from funding and weapons supplies, which would tip the balance against government forces.

The new, young Shah announced he was willing to engage in negotiations. The site chosen for negotiations was Berlin, which reflected Germany’s current status as a respectable member of the international community. Rommel had two terms as Chancellor of Germany and formally retired in 1958 and died in 1969, aged 78. Before then he had overseen Germany’s economic recovery and political rehabilitation, leading to the German capital being the site of these important negotiations. Chancellor Prince Louis Ferdinand hosted them and sat down the leaders of the revolutionaries, who often couldn’t even agree amongst themselves, together with the young Shah himself in 1982. Away from his meddlesome relatives, he pushed through his own true agenda. He announced elections to a constitutional assembly that was to draft a democratic constitution, followed by elections to a legislative body. The opposition was blown away by this and they accepted. A constitution was written and accepted in 1984, followed by Iran’s first democratic elections in 1985 under a constitutional figurehead monarch. Iran was prevented from turning communist and it was the US’s greatest Cold War victory.

The Cold War was soon to end. By the 1980s, shows of Soviet strength were little more than a façade for a crumbling economy. The complex requirements of the modern economy and inflexible administration constrained the central planners. Corruption and fiddling with data became common practice among the bureaucrats by reporting fulfilled targets and quotas, entrenching the economic crisis. By the early 1980s, the Soviet economy was decaying which fuelled ethnic tensions as well as resentment against the government, which the KGB kept a lid on. Meanwhile, the Soviets were also spending tons of money controlled puppets in Eastern Europe and fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan, in addition to the loss of face over Iran. By then the Soviet people also had an example in the ongoing democratization in China. The issue was worsened by the fact that Suslov was succeeded by his hardliner protégé Gennady Yanayev rather than the reformist that the country needed at that point. By the late 80s, the Soviet Union was a powder keg of tensions and it wouldn’t take much to set it off, which was exactly what happened in the early 1990s.

In 1987, Romania had already seen an uprising in the shape of massive strikes involving some 20.000 workers. This resulted from pervasive discontent springing from Ceausescu’s draconian measures to curb food and energy consumption and lower worker’s wages. The rebellion was centred in Brasov, a town which had become heavily industrialized due to earlier policies by the communists, leading to that city being hit hard by the industrial decline of the late 1980s. At the time, the Securitate and the military had been able to handle it and arrested several hundred people while state media played this down as “isolated cases of hooliganism.” In December 1989, while Ceausescu was away on a state visit to Zaire, the Securitate arrested a Protestant minister named Laszlo Tokes was arrested for sermons offensive to the regime. Protests started to pop up all over the place and Ceausescu found his country in chaos when he returned, having misunderstood the news from the Romanian embassy in Kinshasa about “disturbances.” When he found out how bad it had gotten, he ordered the army to fire on the protestors, but a lot of the rank and file soldiers refused to and defected.

By January 1990, Romania wasn’t just in open revolt, but from there it spread to the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Ceausescu requested Soviet assistance against “fascist elements trying to subvert socialism.” When faced by hordes of protestors, the governments in Budapest, Bratislava, Warsaw and Helsinki also requested Soviet aid. Moscow responded to these events by military intervention, which its crumbling economy just couldn’t handle, leading to rationing of food, fuel and electricity. Additionally, the USSR’s actions increasingly turned it into an international pariah, which at most country’s only dealt with because they were concerned about the Soviets using their nuclear weapons. During the military parade in honour of the 75th anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7th 1992 Yanayev made a pretty standard speech about the virtues of socialism and the superiority of the Soviet system to capitalism, which sounded utterly untrue to the crowd on Red Square. To his surprise the crowd booed and jeered him as he spoke and from there demonstrations spread across the country. Ethnic violence was sweeping through the Baltic SSRs, eastern Ukraine and the Caucasus by the winter of 1992-’93. In the Baltic republics and the eastern Ukraine rebels were fighting ethnic Russians, who made up more than half of the population. In the Caucasus, the main fight was between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh ASSR. This was an autonomous region within the Azerbaijan SSR that was predominantly inhabited by Armenians, resulting in ethnic cleansing committed by both sides.

The Second Russian Civil War only ended in 1999 after years of negotiations – a process complicated by bad blood and ethnic violence – and the international community’s promise of aid. The Vienna Accords signed that year maintained a “Union of Sovereign States” composed of the RSFSR, the Byelorussian SSR, the Central Asian SSRs, the Baltic SSRs and the Donbass region, part of the former Ukrainian SSR. Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia became independent while the Nagorno-Karabakh region was addressed by a population transfer for those who didn’t wish to live under Azerbaijani rule. The Baltic republics failed to gain their independence because in a referendum a majority voted against leaving the USSR, which was the result of Stalin’s deportations which had ensured that ethnic Russians were a plurality or even a slight majority. The new Union of Sovereign States (USS, though usually just referred to as “Russia”) that resulted from it was no longer communist: the ruling communist party enjoyed little support and couldn’t realistically continue ruling this rump-USSR. What remained of the USSR was formally dissolved in the year 2000, which saw elections. Democracy was short-lived in the new Russia since a cabal of Russian generals took control soon thereafter, combining Russian nationalism with a mixed economy. The new Russia took control of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and its seat on the UN Security Council.

The end of the USSR ensured that it was also displaced as the world’s second economy by Japan while Germany became the largest economy in Europe, which was only amplified by East Prussia rejoining Germany. That didn’t mean of course that post-war Germany didn’t have any issues in the Cold War era. While post-war reconstruction went remarkably fast and culminated in an unprecedented economic growth in the 1950s, the legacy of the Nazi regime and the war had to be dealt with. For much of the 1950s and the Germans were too preoccupied dealing with their own suffering in the war to deal with what they had done. Plenty of Germans still remembered the “good old days” before the war fondly, but Rommel made sure remembrance had a foundations: several concentration camps and particularly Auschwitz were turned into museums that illustrated what the Nazis had done. Moreover, trials against war criminals, particularly of SS men involved in the concentration camps, continued well into the 1970s after Rommel had started them, with the Belzec Trial in 1957. Unfortunately a small but vocal extreme right wing movement, including but not limited to neo-Nazis has remained and lingered throughout the 1980s. It was reinvigorated from the late 1980s onward, first in response to Eastern European refugees crossing the border, fleeing from the violence of Soviet counterinsurgency efforts. After that extreme right wing movements grew because of so-called “economic migrants” and the assorted crime among certain segments. Some populists of course tried to assert that crime and leeching of Germany’s welfare state were becoming epidemic because of all these poor Eastern Europeans being let into what they thought was a paradise, but turned out not to be. Mega brothels arose in the 1990s filled with Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Slovakian, Hungarian and Romanian women with dim economic prospects in their own countries or women who inadvertently ended up in it because they’d promised to send money home. The problem of human trafficking and forced prostitution has since been tackled by stricter legislation and more police enforcement.

German economic growth continued in the 1990s, despite these problems and the burden of bringing the backward post-communist economy of East Prussia up to speed. Germany also continued to face the high occurrence of cancer as a result of the atomic bombings in WW II, which has resulted in German universities and academic hospitals being the leading centres in cancer research in the entire world. Germany has also been the leading power in the anti-nuclear movement, with it being the only country to officially state pursuing a world free of atomic weaponry. A cultural side effect has been the large amount of dark heavy metal music being produced in Germany relative to other European countries. Besides that, German movie directors are overrepresented among directors of post-apocalyptic science-fiction movies.

It’s also the motor of European economic cooperation. As the primary power within the European Community it was the driving force behind an 800 billion dollar economic aid package intended for the former Eastern Bloc states, which was approved at a conference in Brussels in 2000 after the Vienna Accords of the previous year (it was intended to be what the Marshal Plan had been to Western Europe after WW II). The former Eastern Bloc states transitioned from a centrally planned economy and an infrastructure damaged by war to a free market economy with varying degrees of success. Poland did the best by far while its Slovakian neighbour did significantly worse, and is considered the poorest member of the European Community (the former Eastern Bloc countries joined in 2010). Nonetheless, Germany is considered an unrecognised great power and voices have been raised that it should get a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a move consistently blocked by Russian vetoes. It also negotiated a deal between the Yugoslavian government, essentially a Serbian government under a Serbian king, and the leaders of the opposition. Violent protests and demands for reform had brought the country to the brink of civil war. The country became a confederal state after two years of negotiations. In short, by the early 2000s Germany, had gained a leading position in Europe. Pax Atomica turned into Pax Germania.
 
Top