alternatehistory.com

One of the least recognized aspects of Nazi rule is how little Hitler actually did.

It's a mistake that comes naturally from the nature of the regime. Nazi Germany was a Totalitarian state, right? Adolf Hitler was its dictator. So it would seem to follow that all those things we attribute to the Nazi Party were part of the Grand Scheme of Adolf Hitler[TM]. In actuality this couldn't be further from the truth.

Hitler's governing style involved very few explicit or exact ideas about how to run his party, much less his state and its conquests. He did have a fairly clear idea about how he would handle the geopolitical situation, and eventually get to his long term goal of invading Russia. He (so the apocryphal tale goes) drew the original model of the Volkswagen Beetle. Aaand that was about it. By way of example, this is how the regime dealt with important decisions: Hitler would meet with his various underlings - mostly one at a time. Sprawled over an armchair, he would tell would give them a problem such as "Solve the Jewish Question."

In the end he would be presented with a list of various options, and would (ever the decisive man of action) choose among them. This is where things like the Madagascar Plan came from - it was among the "other options." In that case, it wasn't even a case of him agreeing to gas the Jews. Instead, he agreed to put the Jews in new camps, where they would be killed conventionally. It was the men on the ground who recognized the effects of mass shootings on German morale and switched to gassing - first by piping exhaust into the backs of trucks. That method had already been used on invalids and the mentally handicapped, and the people running the new camps actually requested and got the same trucks that had been used earlier.

The point is this: If the vast majority of the trappings of the Nazi Party and the things it did were not concieved of by Hitler himself, then we should at least consider whether they would be likely to reappear in TLs without him, or even without the Nazi Party. The major figures of the Nazi Party would all likely have joined any radical right-wing group if it was being successful and had a leader that would meet their tastes. The fact that all those Aryan-worshippers settled for a man who looked like Hitler ought to emphasize the point.

Once they'd entered the *Nazi Party, the same men would also be likely to reach positions of some influence - they were all skilled at the back-biting politics of such groups. The end result is that a somewhat different party, with potentially a drastically different leader, could end up looking and acting much the same. The Stastikas, skulls, lightning, claims of backstabbing, revenge, the SA, the SS, the entire Nazi "look," tanks named after big cats and used in armored thrusts, persecutions of the Jews, Homosexuals, and Gypsies, efforts to seize and Germanize the East - these are not Hitlerisms. They are not even solely Nazi. Some or all of them could have appeared in any radical rightist movement to appear in 1920s Germany.

The idea here then, is a timeline examining the efforts of a different Fuhrer.

The first parts of this I posted as part of another thread.
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