CanadianGoose
Banned
This scenario is seriously reeks of ASB, but what if Entente (for example, suffering heavy form of Red Scare) allowed Germany to keep it's Brest-Litovsk border (see map here)?
Germany allowed by Entente to keep it's Brest-Litovsk border.
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CanadianGoose
Banned
Self-determination has nothing (well, almost) to do with that. Poland could be allowed to "self-determine" (with Polish Corridor as IOTL), but everything else is linked to Eastern Prussia by good land bridge. Besides, proponents of such decision could argue that self-determination of Belarus and Ukraine would bring inevitable Sovetization, and I already listed Red Scare as possible driving force of this POD.
Strictly speaking, we see on the map Ukrainian and Byelorussian eastern borders, not German ones (Second Reich never annexed those territories). So, do you mean scenario of continuing German occupation regime in de jure independent Ukraine and Belorussia? If yes, then answer is obvious: your scenario is almost impossible, because Entente was confident in its capacity to occupy and pacify Ukraine (in cooperation with White Russians), and Poland's capacity to do same thing with Byelorussia.
You would need America to stay out of the war. Maybe a staunchly neutral president. Or a president who demands trade with the neutrals and the British who refuse because they're blockading to get to the Germans, Americans try anyway, British confiscate ship or sink it (mistaking it for a CP ship), result: anti-Entente sentiments. Or a pro-CP USA but that's a big stretch. The British and French weren't really doing much better than the Germans. No American entry and a more successful Spring Offensive might lead to a negotiated peace like this:
- plebiscites in Alsace-Lorraine
- Germany gets colonies back
- Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is recognized
- possibly war reparations for the French.
CanadianGoose
Banned
OK, accepted, but it isn't whole Belarus, as you could notice.
Well, that's valid point as far as Belorussia is concerned, but Ukraine and Baltic countries are a big unknown. However, let's assume that Entente is scared of Bolshevist propaganda spreading among their own occupation force and worried about German freikorp elements, who're left with nothing to do. Keeping German occupation of Baltic countries and Ukraine allows to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. You stop Sovetization and keep most troublesome element of German military occupied on the East.
P.S. Anti-Soviet credentials of Baltic nationalists were rather poorly established by 1918. They were constantly suspected of seeking accomodation with Bolsheviks at expence of anti-bolshevist front, so allowing Germans overlordship over the area (for example, keeping United Baltic Duchy alive) isn't ASB too.
Susano
Banned
I wouldnt say that. Its the typical "WW1 ends by exhaustion" scenario: France gains A-L, France and UK the German colonies, but Germany keeps Brest-Litovsk. Nobody would like it, but I think if having to choose A-L is more important to France as wether Germany has an economical empire in East Europe or not.
of course, if the Allie satcually won, its ASB, yeah.
This would be an interesting Timeline, with WWI ending in a defacto draw. However, if Germany boarders the newly formed USSR, then it's possible that the whites would win the civil war due to massive German aid.
Susano
Banned
It wouldnt directly border it. Germany used the Brest-Litovsk to form vasall states. Of course, German troops would hence be at the Soviet border...
Would the Germans be so averse to a Soviet victory, though? Consider:
1) They did release Lenin, after all. And the German military had no problem collaborating with Moscow after OTL Versailles.
2) Why would they necessarily be more successful than the Allies? After all, Britain, France, and Japan dispatched forces and equipment as well.
3) Germany, even if it wins, is in far more desperate straits than the Allies. Is this the straw that breaks the Kaiser's back?
Susano
Banned
Yes, Germany putting down the Reds is a big clichee. I think they would try it. They released Lenin yes, but the Communists pissed every chance of peaceful coexistance into the wind when they killed the Imperial Family. However, 3) is the big question... asenseless war in the wide Russian steppe, a Vietnam directly after an exhaustive WW1? Neither population nor soldiers would tolerate that for long.
As I understand it, the occupation of the territories west of the Brest-Litovsk line was a huge drain on German manpower in the last months of the war, and perversely affected the chance of victory in the west. Also, Germany is obviously exhausted by the war by the time it ends. With mutinies, food riots and the threat of a socialist revolution at home, how do either the imperialist holdovers or a new provisional government ask the remainder of the German Army to fight to the death--for Kiev?
So how could Germany respond to the inevitable and colossal Polish-Ukrainian revolt with anything but a shrug? The alternative is to involve itself in a truly gigantic civil war on someone else's soil after the most destructive war to hit the country in three hundred years.
Someone like Pilsudski would eat this up. He greatly desired a Polish-Ukrainian federation to essentially reincarnate the much larger pre-partition Polish state. Essentially this is the Allies telling him to have at it.
So how could Germany respond to the inevitable and colossal Polish-Ukrainian revolt with anything but a shrug? The alternative is to involve itself in a truly gigantic civil war on someone else's soil after the most destructive war to hit the country in three hundred years.
Someone like Pilsudski would eat this up. He greatly desired a Polish-Ukrainian federation to essentially reincarnate the much larger pre-partition Polish state. Essentially this is the Allies telling him to have at it.
Tellus
Banned
I belive you need a stalemate in the west. In which case, its not about the Entente allowing anything, as much as them being unable to deny the facts; that Germany controls everything from Brest-Litovsk to Baku.
No US entry coupled with better performance of the Germans on the home front could mean that by early 1919, bled white, and with Paris ruined by German long-range artillery, the Entente is willing to accept a status-quo-ante-bellum peace on the Western front, leaving Germany which a huge eastern empire for her troubles. Im quite certain that the Germans could maitain order in the East if they didnt have a war to win in the west anymore. Its the interim period thats dangerous, but the bolshevik threat can be used to placate the poles and ukrainians.
No US entry coupled with better performance of the Germans on the home front could mean that by early 1919, bled white, and with Paris ruined by German long-range artillery, the Entente is willing to accept a status-quo-ante-bellum peace on the Western front, leaving Germany which a huge eastern empire for her troubles. Im quite certain that the Germans could maitain order in the East if they didnt have a war to win in the west anymore. Its the interim period thats dangerous, but the bolshevik threat can be used to placate the poles and ukrainians.
Susano
Banned
Pilsudski? With what means exactly? As said, I dont see the Germans winning against Red Russia, but I dont see them lose their vasall states to some poorly coordinated and equipped revolts. It would be 1830 all over in Poland.
Many possibilities...
If a German offensive panicked the French--they did launch a big one in 1918--and Kaiser Wilhelm was out of comission for whatever reason, perhaps an offer from either side to return to status quo ante-bellum in exchange for recognition of German conquests in the east, and an immeadiate lifting of the blockade so Germany can both buy wr materials and food, would be accepted.
Perhaps after the first revolution, Krensky (sp?) doesn't try to prolong the war, but gets out ASAP--this frees up more German forces and resoources that aren't fighting in the east, allowing a scarier offensive.
If a German offensive panicked the French--they did launch a big one in 1918--and Kaiser Wilhelm was out of comission for whatever reason, perhaps an offer from either side to return to status quo ante-bellum in exchange for recognition of German conquests in the east, and an immeadiate lifting of the blockade so Germany can both buy wr materials and food, would be accepted.
Perhaps after the first revolution, Krensky (sp?) doesn't try to prolong the war, but gets out ASAP--this frees up more German forces and resoources that aren't fighting in the east, allowing a scarier offensive.
Poorly coordinated? Wishful thinking on your part, I think.
A month before the end of World War I the Polish government the Germans themselves had originally established to be its catspaw had declared its independence and begun conscripting an army.
And as to where the Poles might get weapons and supplies--there is a possibility, albeit a very, infinitesimally small one, that Germany upset a few, maybe just a few, of its neighbors in the preceding four years. And maybe, perhaps, it's possible, I know this sounds crazy but bear with me, these countries (France say, or the USSR) would be willing to fund a rebel army for the explicit purpose of humiliating the Germans and bogging them down as much as possible. And just maybe that gigantic border stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea just might be impossible to be effectively patrolled by a thinly stretched occupational army anyway, and be porous enough to allow traffic across.
Moreover, 1830 is not 1918. Not just because there has been a whole intervening history of the development of European nationalism, not just because the war destroyed the credibility of the multi-national empires of Eastern Europe (hint: the Hungarians fighting in the post-WWI years were fighting against the redrawing of the borders in the Treaty of Trianon to exclude ethnic Hungarians from the country, not because of the fact that they were being taken out of the Habsburg Empire they loved so much!). But also because quite simply, Germany was on the ropes in 1918.
This whole line of inquiry presupposes that we get close enough to the end of World War I in a sequence of events enough like our own history that something like the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gets signed in the first place. Yet somehow miraculously in the end of the war Germany is not in such a shambles that its biggest concern can still be dominating the neighbors, for which purpose it can keep a million troops in the field waging an offensive war, indefinitely, for the privilege of lording over the Pripyet marshes.
So let me turn the gaze you would turn on the Poles back on Germany--How is this war financed? What is its political constituency in the German state? How do you convince an mutinous German military to stay in Ukraine? What do you feed them when they're there?
(The analogous situation across the border in Russia during this period is by the way like a casebook in everything that goes wrong when you try to seize food from the peasants--1. the peasants then start trying to kill your army; 2. the peasants flee with their food into the woods and force your army into lovely jubbly guerilla warfare just to feed itself; 3. the peasants don't plant crops anymore because they'd rather starve than feed your army; 4. eventually your army gets tired of killing peasants for food and just goes to live in the woods--all this happened in the Russian Civil War, and the country had an immense population decline to show for it.)
Even if the German state at the end of anything remotely like our World War I would be remotely foolish enough to try something like this, eventually the head of state of the country these armies would be answerable to would be none other than Karl Liebknecht, because the attempted occupation would so completely discredit the bourgeois German government that Nicholas II at his most addled would have seemed like a humanitarian liberal technocrat by comparison.
I know people love conquest-based scenarios here, but sometimes you just can't afford to forget that military capabilities are founded upon economic and political ones, and you can't just redraw maps in a vacuum. Well, you can, but you can't claim it's at all historically realistic.
A month before the end of World War I the Polish government the Germans themselves had originally established to be its catspaw had declared its independence and begun conscripting an army.
And as to where the Poles might get weapons and supplies--there is a possibility, albeit a very, infinitesimally small one, that Germany upset a few, maybe just a few, of its neighbors in the preceding four years. And maybe, perhaps, it's possible, I know this sounds crazy but bear with me, these countries (France say, or the USSR) would be willing to fund a rebel army for the explicit purpose of humiliating the Germans and bogging them down as much as possible. And just maybe that gigantic border stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea just might be impossible to be effectively patrolled by a thinly stretched occupational army anyway, and be porous enough to allow traffic across.
Moreover, 1830 is not 1918. Not just because there has been a whole intervening history of the development of European nationalism, not just because the war destroyed the credibility of the multi-national empires of Eastern Europe (hint: the Hungarians fighting in the post-WWI years were fighting against the redrawing of the borders in the Treaty of Trianon to exclude ethnic Hungarians from the country, not because of the fact that they were being taken out of the Habsburg Empire they loved so much!). But also because quite simply, Germany was on the ropes in 1918.
This whole line of inquiry presupposes that we get close enough to the end of World War I in a sequence of events enough like our own history that something like the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gets signed in the first place. Yet somehow miraculously in the end of the war Germany is not in such a shambles that its biggest concern can still be dominating the neighbors, for which purpose it can keep a million troops in the field waging an offensive war, indefinitely, for the privilege of lording over the Pripyet marshes.
So let me turn the gaze you would turn on the Poles back on Germany--How is this war financed? What is its political constituency in the German state? How do you convince an mutinous German military to stay in Ukraine? What do you feed them when they're there?
(The analogous situation across the border in Russia during this period is by the way like a casebook in everything that goes wrong when you try to seize food from the peasants--1. the peasants then start trying to kill your army; 2. the peasants flee with their food into the woods and force your army into lovely jubbly guerilla warfare just to feed itself; 3. the peasants don't plant crops anymore because they'd rather starve than feed your army; 4. eventually your army gets tired of killing peasants for food and just goes to live in the woods--all this happened in the Russian Civil War, and the country had an immense population decline to show for it.)
Even if the German state at the end of anything remotely like our World War I would be remotely foolish enough to try something like this, eventually the head of state of the country these armies would be answerable to would be none other than Karl Liebknecht, because the attempted occupation would so completely discredit the bourgeois German government that Nicholas II at his most addled would have seemed like a humanitarian liberal technocrat by comparison.
I know people love conquest-based scenarios here, but sometimes you just can't afford to forget that military capabilities are founded upon economic and political ones, and you can't just redraw maps in a vacuum. Well, you can, but you can't claim it's at all historically realistic.
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By late 1918 Germany was already losing ground rapidly on the Eastern Front despite the treaties imposed on Russia and Romania and had absolutely no hope of finding more troops for the east. Indeed, in the last weeks Germany sacrificed 300,000 men to slow down(not stop) the advance of the Western Allies while the situation in Italy and Austria-Hungary also collapsed. So there is no reason for the Western Allies to let Germany off lightly.
Further, if you change history so Germany is in a position to keep any of the spoils you pretty much have to give Germany a clean win, in which case they don't need to bargain for anything.
Further, if you change history so Germany is in a position to keep any of the spoils you pretty much have to give Germany a clean win, in which case they don't need to bargain for anything.
A bit of attention to the actual history of the negotiations might be helpful here. The reason for German participation in the negotiations with the (at this point very weak) Communist government was that they desperately needed to shift resources to the western front, particularly since they knew the Americans were coming. Their goals in the negotiation was to keep what they had occupied at the time. The Soviet side of the negotiations was essentially a display of incompetence worthy of the ages: Trotsky paid more attention to picking representatives of the workers and peasants to be included in the negotiation team than he did formulating strategy, and when the Soviet team reached Brest-Litovsk Trotsky basically repeated the Communist talking point, essentially as old as the war itself, that he favored a peace without "annexations or indemnities", meaning basically situatio quo ante bellum.
Like that was going to happen.
The Germans, quite rightly, scoffed and then presented the obvious ultimatum. Trotsky's response was to declare unilaterally that the Soviet Union was in a "state of neither peace nor war" with the Central Powers. Germany chose war and took as much land as they could before Lenin stepped in to stop the lunacy before they lost more territory, including perhaps Petrograd. The terms Germany then imposed is what we know as the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.
The only problem is that the whole point of the Germans effort had been to reduce the demand on their resources in their east. And now the occupation required them to pour a great many more resources just to occupy the territory, in pretty much the same way as you inflate a balloon. Short version, the Germans won much territory in Brest-Litovsk but lost their key objective because they were greedy.
Like that was going to happen.
The Germans, quite rightly, scoffed and then presented the obvious ultimatum. Trotsky's response was to declare unilaterally that the Soviet Union was in a "state of neither peace nor war" with the Central Powers. Germany chose war and took as much land as they could before Lenin stepped in to stop the lunacy before they lost more territory, including perhaps Petrograd. The terms Germany then imposed is what we know as the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.
The only problem is that the whole point of the Germans effort had been to reduce the demand on their resources in their east. And now the occupation required them to pour a great many more resources just to occupy the territory, in pretty much the same way as you inflate a balloon. Short version, the Germans won much territory in Brest-Litovsk but lost their key objective because they were greedy.