Georg Elser successfully kills Hitler in 1939

CaliGuy

Banned
What if Georg Elser would have succeeded in killing Adolf Hitler in 1939?

What would the effects of this be on World War II and on its aftermath?
 
Göring would be new chanchellor-president. And he hardly would invade Denmark and Norway. Might be that he too leave Benelux alone and attack directly to France.

And no Barbarossa.

Germans might have now better chances win the war.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Thanks! :) Indeed, whoever wrote that TL appears to have put an awfully large amount of work into it! :D

Göring would be new chanchellor-president. And he hardly would invade Denmark and Norway. Might be that he too leave Benelux alone and attack directly to France.

And no Barbarossa.

Germans might have now better chances win the war.
Germany needs to attack the Benelux in order to have any chance of defeating France, though; after all, a German attack straight through the Maginot Line is guaranteed to fail.
 
Göring would be new chanchellor-president. And he hardly would invade Denmark and Norway. Might be that he too leave Benelux alone and attack directly to France.

And no Barbarossa.

Germans might have now better chances win the war.

The question is, without Hitler, would Göring still insist on a Lebensraum ideology? And if yes, to which extent? He may be content with keeping and integrating the Polish conquests but going no further. And even for Hitler, the conflict in the West was not planned from the start and not desired - the whole idea was to conquer and enslave the Eastern Europe (Poland, Soviet Union, etc) and the war on the Western Front was simply to ensure that France and UK do not attack Nazi Germany while it is busy with their colonization wars in the East. A limited East Europe domination plan - conquest of Poland, grabbing Czech industrial capacities, ensuring access to Romanian oil but not much more - may see a Sitzkrieg on the Western Front played out to the end without lots of fighting, with an inconclusive peace settlement on the status quo ante bellum and a return to pre-WW1 fortified borders, basically an Iron Curtain along the western border of Germany.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
The question is, without Hitler, would Göring still insist on a Lebensraum ideology?

Well, based on what I've heard about Goering, he was a Wilhelmine Imperialist--not an ideologue. Thus, probably not.

And if yes, to which extent? He may be content with keeping and integrating the Polish conquests but going no further. And even for Hitler, the conflict in the West was not planned from the start and not desired - the whole idea was to conquer and enslave the Eastern Europe (Poland, Soviet Union, etc) and the war on the Western Front was simply to ensure that France and UK do not attack Nazi Germany while it is busy with their colonization wars in the East. A limited East Europe domination plan - conquest of Poland, grabbing Czech industrial capacities, ensuring access to Romanian oil but not much more - may see a Sitzkrieg on the Western Front played out to the end without lots of fighting, with an inconclusive peace settlement on the status quo ante bellum and a return to pre-WW1 fortified borders, basically an Iron Curtain along the western border of Germany.

Would Britain and France agree to a return to Germany's 1914 borders in the East, though? After all, this would still be a German victory relative to the pre-war situation!
 
Well, based on what I've heard about Goering, he was a Wilhelmine Imperialist--not an ideologue. Thus, probably not.

The problem is that the Lebensraum ideology in itself is not a Nazi invention, it predates not just the Nazis but even the Kaiserreich. It was a fairly natural reaction to a Malthusian interpretation of the hunger catastrophe known as Year Without Summer (1816) when Russia was actually (due to weather patterns) not impacted and produced bumper harvests while Germany starved. While Southern German rulers went for massive support to intensification of agriculture (funding agricultural academies, supporting biologists and chemists in their work on artificial fertilizers and more effective crops) quite alot of Prussia saw extensification (more territory for agriculture) as the best way to stave off a future hunger disasters. And at that time, they quite correctly identified the very fertile, thinly populated plains of Southern Russia as the area where such an extensification should be aimed at.
Now this did not require mass murder and enslavement of Russians but the least it did require was to force Russian Empire to act in ways they did not see in their best interest, e.g. by allowing a German farmer settlement in the area. And this would require at least a diplomatic conflict on conditions favourable to Germany if not outright war. So if you buy into the idea of extensification as a means to survive a future catastrophe, as a lot of Wilhelmine imperialists did, then military expansion to the East becomes a perceived necessity, while Alsace and/or Lorraine reconquest is a "nice to have" at best from this point of view.

Would Britain and France agree to a return to Germany's 1914 borders in the East, though? After all, this would still be a German victory relative to the pre-war situation!

As long as the French border is guaranteed by Germany (and I am not sure whether Goering would be prepared to guarantee it and remain believable) the French will unlikely do much beyond what they did OTL, the bloodletting of 1914-1918 was just too recent. They will rearm and invest even more into Maginot line as well as a stronger (defensive) army, but there is a reason why OTL France opted for a Sitzkrieg and a few of half-hearted mini-offensives in 1939-1940.
 
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