Germany winning WW1 - best scenario for the 20th century?

Is Germany winning WW1 the most preferable outcome?

  • Yes. A German victory would have prevented the greatest horrors of the 20 century and saved millions

    Votes: 105 26.9%
  • No. A German victory would have made things as bad or worse than OTL

    Votes: 56 14.3%
  • Perhaps. Some things would have turned out better, some worse

    Votes: 245 62.7%

  • Total voters
    391

Daniels

Banned
That WW1 took place is the greatest catastrophy of the 20th century, but is Germany losing WW1 the second?

Because if Germany wins WW1 then there:

Is most likely no Communism since the Germans will not tolerate the Bolsheviks since they will be perceived as a threat. This means that Communism doesnt spread around the globe. As a result around 100 million people are spared their slaughter by Communist dictatorships.

Is most likely no National Socialism. Hitler would not have gotten the shock of a German surrender so there would have been no motivation of going into politics and even if he had entered politics he would never have gotten to the top. This means there is no Holocaust and around 20 million people are spared their slaughter by the National Socialist dictatorship.

Is most likely no WW2. A German dominated Europe from 1918 onwards would have made another World War very unlikely. This means that there is no WW2 - or at worst a greatly reduced WW2- and around 50 million people are spared their violent deaths in the war.

So for the period 1918-1948 a German win in WW1 would have prevented the death of some 100 million people and prevented the destruction of countles cities, villages, houses, factories ect As a result the world - or at least Europe would be much wealthier and the world would most likely be more stable and more peacefull than today.

Thoughts?
 

Anderman

Donor
The best scenario for the 20th century is no WW1 ! at least in europe.

You have a lot of valid points but remember that no WW1 doesn´t mean no war in europe and it is not certain that germany will stop the Bolsheviks.
 

Deleted member 1487

It is really hard to say given the butterflies that might come of that sort of victory. Perhaps better, perhaps as bad (hard to see it being worse TBH). IMHO WW2 is less likely so it is probably less bad, but that is not a given.

The best scenario for the 20th century is no WW1 ! at least in europe.

You have a lot of valid points but remember that no WW1 doesn´t mean no war in europe and it is not certain that germany will stop the Bolsheviks.
Pretty much this.
 

NoMommsen

Donor
The best scenario for the 20th century is no WW1 ! at least in europe.
I fully agree. I would also say The WW I, as happend OTL could have been avoided.

But if A WW I could have been avoided at all ?
IMO very questionable and afaik debated without a conclusion. Personally I would say : No
There would have been kind of a WW I anyway, given the 'powder keg' Europe was. Maybe caused by Ottoman-Greece opposites, maybe by some other pressure of russian panslavism, maybe something completly different.

You have a lot of valid points but remember that no WW1 doesn´t mean no war in europe and it is not certain that germany will stop the Bolsheviks.
At least one very important point for Bolshevism to prevail was Lenin. Without WW I as known (Russia-Germany) he would still hike the swiss mountains, when the sh-- hits the fan in Russia, a couple or more years after OTL.

The development of socialism in Russia as well as worldwide as well as its influence worldwide will be very different.

EDIT : About the poll : difficult ot decide, so many butterflies ... very much would be decide by the kind and time of a german victory - early (1914/15) or late (1918/19).
 
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There are a lot of unanswered questions.

Does communism take hold in Russia? That will depend on when Germany achieved their victory. Did Lenin get his sealed rail car or did the war end with him still in Switzerland?

What happens in France? Losing to Germany twice in the space of a single lifetime is going to do damage to the French psyche. Will France turn into to a totalitarian government bent on revenge?

Austria-Hungary may survive the war, but without major changes the empire will not survive intact for long. How will that break-up go?

How is Great Britain going to react to losing their place as the leading European power?

What of the United States? They may not begin their rise as a world power, depending on when the war ends, but that rise is inevitable. The US will be holding a lot of French and British debt.
 
Here is a really insightful post on these kinds of predictions, which deserves to be quoted even a year later.

We use Stalin (who might very well stay around in this scenario, anyway) and Hitler as synonyms for slaughter, oppression and evil in general, but they are merely the symbols of our timeline. Another scenario will spawn its own dictators, its own mass-murdering regimes, and all forms and shades of its own unpleasantness.

CP victory means a lot of instability in Europe. (and could mean all sorts of different things in the colonies, but that's another topic). It is absolutely certain that this instability, and the plans and excesses of the victors, are going to have horrifying expressions and consequences. Maybe, in the end, these consequences will still be less devastating than the events of OTL's 20th century. Maybe they will be even worse. Maybe on the same level - we just can't know.
 
Probably for the better , no twisted ideologies taking power , the imperialists are defeated , means freedom for Africa and Asia , Germany wouldn't have the power to maintain colonies since the victory would cost them a LOT .
 
Not Germany alone would be the winner, but the Central Powers conjoint. This would have significant consequences for the Balkans and the Middle East. Whether the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires survive over time is questionable, but borders would be different. - For Europe, you could time-jump from 1918 to 1994, only with a strong Germany in the lead and no EU. For the Middle East, the aberrations of Sykes-Picot might be butterflied away - and forget the Bedouin. On the Balkans, there would be a strong Bulgaria in control of those areas not dominated by Austria-Hungary.
 
In Europe for the better as Communism is pretty much still-born and a second war is unlikely because who's gonna fight against an armed up unrestrained Germany at the needed intensity - a cut down France? Or a Russia lacking Eastern Europe? Nope, they'll beg to join the common market called "Mitteleuropa" - it's like the EU with more monarchs and authoritarianism.

In the colonies though... the Europeans will be there to stay, worse, there'll be millions more people who might migrate there as the infrastructure and services are expanding.
 
The best scenario for the 20th century is no WW1 ! at least in europe.
Unless you're Armenian, Czech, Croatian, Irish, Polish, a Transylvanian Romanian, Slovakian, a Russian Jew etc.
Personally I think a 'Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg' Central Powers victory scenario is one of the best for Europe.
 

thorr97

Banned
Okay, perhaps a definition of the POD might help here.

Let's say that Germany's Spring Offensive succeeds. That they drive deep enough into the Entente's lines that it forces them to the peace negotiating table and that the war is thus soon ended. Germany emerges the winner of large new territories and the Entente are rewarded with huge numbers of war dead and little else.

Germany is thus THE power on the Continent. It now has secure access to the breadbasket of the Ukraine and all the population it gained from the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Any Bolshevik take over in Russia would provide the Germans with all the excuse they needed to intervene. Hindenburg, et. al., had already intended to "strangle in the crib" the Communists they set loose in Russia anyway. In this ATL, they'd most likely have the tacit support of the Entente in doing so and definitely would have the support of the Whites.

So, no Communist Russia in the aftermath of WWI.

Germany's overseas holdings would be a thorny issue. On the one hand they'd want to keep their stake in the "colonial empire game" but on the other hand they suddenly have a huge amount of new territories all to themselves that don't involve having to deal with both the Royal Navy and the French Navy to get to.

I also can't imagine the Entente agreeing to reparations just an end to the fighting. That might well be too much. If Team Germany was smart, they'd simply offer an end to the fighting. Hell, they might even sweeten the deal by offering Alsace-Lorraine back to the French. Doing that would take a whole lot of wind out of any French Nationalist resistance to the peace process.

Thus the stage would be set for a "WWI - Part Two" in a decade or so's time. Communism, depending on how vicious and effective the Whites and the Germans - and maybe even the Entente powers since they did send troops into Russia to help kill the Communists in OTL - the current crop of Bolshevik/ Communist leadership might all be dead. At the very least they'd be well out of power and most likely on the run from the Okhrana.

Without Communism being able to take root in Russia there'd be no Terror throughout the 20s and 30s. Without the Bolshevik / Communist threat the various National Socialist movements in Europe would have no real boogeyman to rail against either. That would greatly lessen their appeal and certainly force it to be far less ideological.

The US would be pretty well burnt by the whole process. We'd have trained up, committed up, geared up, and stepped off for... nothing. And now the Entente would be stuck with huge war material bills and have little ability to pay them. The ensuing economic bust in the US would really sour any cross-ocean relationships. Especially as the manipulations the UK foisted on the US become better known.

Lots of possibilities from this point onward....
 

Deleted member 96212

Is most likely no Communism since the Germans will not tolerate the Bolsheviks since they will be perceived as a threat.

I doubt it. Germany has lost close to a million men in war already; they have little incentive to lose more fighting the Bolsheviks. It's far more likely that they'll occupy a few Eastern European states as buffers.
 
The German Empire was nowhere near as bad as Nazi Germany, and its triumph might have averted the rise of Communism with many attendant horrors.

However... Imperial Germany was deeply militarist, and seriously infected wtih proto-Nazi ideas about the righteousness of conquest. The defeat of Germany in WW I, I believe, put these ideas out of respectability forever. Had Germany won, they would have been "mainstreamed".

And Imperial Germany was not nice. This is the regime that deliberately massacred thousands of Belgian civilians in 1914 - that openly gloried in the destructive fury of its army.

If they when - they would have imitators. Success always draws emulation. (After the Franco-Prussian War, the U.S. adopted the pickelhaube for dress uniforms for a while - having earlier imitated French Zouaves.)
 
Thus the stage would be set for a "WWI - Part Two" in a decade or so's time. Communism, depending on how vicious and effective the Whites and the Germans - and maybe even the Entente powers since they did send troops into Russia to help kill the Communists in OTL - the current crop of Bolshevik/ Communist leadership might all be dead. At the very least they'd be well out of power and most likely on the run from the Okhrana.

Without Communism being able to take root in Russia there'd be no Terror throughout the 20s and 30s. Without the Bolshevik / Communist threat the various National Socialist movements in Europe would have no real boogeyman to rail against either. That would greatly lessen their appeal and certainly force it to be far less ideological.

The US would be pretty well burnt by the whole process. We'd have trained up, committed up, geared up, and stepped off for... nothing. And now the Entente would be stuck with huge war material bills and have little ability to pay them. The ensuing economic bust in the US would really sour any cross-ocean relationships. Especially as the manipulations the UK foisted on the US become better known.

Lots of possibilities from this point onward....

How would that set the stage for "WWI - Part Two" tough? Germany is on top of Europe with a strong unrestrained military, Eastern Europe is in its camp fearful of Russia, Russia is cut down in size and underindustrialized busy with internal problems, France burned badly with war damages in the North and no reparations defaults on its debt to the UK, the UK lacking French repayments in turn defaulting on its debt to the USA effectively ending the British Empire by turning the pound into useless paper compared to the German Mark.

I doubt it. Germany has lost close to a million men in war already; they have little incentive to lose more fighting the Bolsheviks. It's far more likely that they'll occupy a few Eastern European states as buffers.

The Bolsheviks at that time were little more than a militia with looted army supplies. An actual military with war experience, well trained soldiers, competent leadership, artillery and aircraft would mop the floor with them.
 
However... Imperial Germany was deeply militarist, and seriously infected wtih proto-Nazi ideas about the righteousness of conquest. The defeat of Germany in WW I, I believe, put these ideas out of respectability forever. Had Germany won, they would have been "mainstreamed".

Nazi-germany,Italy,Japan and the Soviet Union were very much pro-conquest long after imperial germany was dead. Thats a lot of big and important countries.
 
The German Empire was nowhere near as bad as Nazi Germany, and its triumph might have averted the rise of Communism with many attendant horrors.

However... Imperial Germany was deeply militarist, and seriously infected wtih proto-Nazi ideas about the righteousness of conquest. The defeat of Germany in WW I, I believe, put these ideas out of respectability forever. Had Germany won, they would have been "mainstreamed".

And Imperial Germany was not nice. This is the regime that deliberately massacred thousands of Belgian civilians in 1914 - that openly gloried in the destructive fury of its army.


So if Germany had won we might now have AHers mourning for the 100,000 Jews and others massacred in various East European troubles, and speculating on how much better they would have fared "if only" the Allies had won?
 
Doesn't this scenario assume that the Germans, if they lose WW1, are always going to become Nazis? Seems a little grim.
 
Doesn't this scenario assume that the Germans, if they lose WW1, are always going to become Nazis? Seems a little grim.

Not necessarily. I was assuming that whoever won there would still be lots of unpleasantness in certain parts of Europe and elsewhere. It doesn't necessarily have to be directly down to the Germans, (any more than they did the killing in 1990s Yugoslavia), even if their victory were an indirect cause of some of it.

My assumption is simply that TTL people would vividly see the miseries of their own history, and would have no clue about how much worse it could have got.
 
However... Imperial Germany was deeply militarist, and seriously infected wtih proto-Nazi ideas about the righteousness of conquest. The defeat of Germany in WW I, I believe, put these ideas out of respectability forever. Had Germany won, they would have been "mainstreamed".

And Imperial Germany was not nice. This is the regime that deliberately massacred thousands of Belgian civilians in 1914 - that openly gloried in the destructive fury of its army.

Right. And Germany's Ottoman and Habsburg allies were even worse, by a whole order of magnitude.

Mitteleuropa is going to be an authoritarian, dysfunctional, tightly puppetized mess stuck in some combination of ancien régime and fascistoid dictatorship (and at least one unabashed colony, more or less guaranteed to descend into mass violence). There's also the inevitable general war trauma on all sides and various economic problems.

All in all, conditions in CP victory Europe will not be conducive to healthy political development. Or to healthy development of...just about anything, really.
 
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