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
Not to mention that the Entente would take this as an open admission that Germany was on the ropes, and raise their demands accordingly.

Even in our time line when Germany offered status quo in the west with reperations towards Belgium in 1916 the Entente saw this as Germany admitting defeat.
 
By sending in war experienced soldiers with heavy artillery. The early Red Army was a mob lacking discipline, basic supplies like weapons or clothes and nearly no modern artillery, let alone heavy one, against a well supplied and well lead military they melt away. The Poles managed to beat them soundly in the field without anything resembling a modern military at that time.

The Poles are the guys who had the Miracle of Warsaw, right? The Germans, in this scenario, continued the war long enough to go into 1917 and get Brest-Litovsk (which is the only way to get the Ukraine). But they still have, despite the fact that their army collapsed in OTL (and so can't be in any great shape in ATL) the support in Germany to conquer the Soviet Union. The Soviets are unable to mobilize a people's war against the German stooges who are trying to conquer their nation. The Reichstag, which we've been assured will be active in this Germany, will support a German conquest of Moscow. The German workers support a German conquest of Moscow.

Which part of your scenario doesn't rely on these assumptions?

True. A victorious Second Reich won't be all that democratic either. OTOH, even when junior officers were dropping like flies, compelling quite a few promotions from the ranks, they never let dear old Adolf rise above the rank of corporal. So I doubt if they'll tolerate a Third Reich if they don't need to.

Maybe not Hitler, but he wasn't the only protofascist around. Again, look at Italy and Japan; both were victorious powers.

Was it less liberal than the British system in 1914? What is more startling was the move from the very liberal (compared to the British system) Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. Not sure how Weimar stacked up to the Third Republic in France though, but given that the French system collapsed and gave way to the 4th and 5th Republics their system wasn't that stable either. Turns out Democracy is a learning process.

The French response to the Third Republic was to implement reforms. The German response to the Weimar Republic was the Third Reich. I hope you see why I see a difference.

The British system had a government that obeyed Parliament and (more than the Germans, certainly), respected the rule of law. Imagine the Silent Dictatorship in Britain; I can't see how you even get to that point.
 

Deleted member 1487

The French response to the Third Republic was to implement reforms. The German response to the Weimar Republic was the Third Reich. I hope you see why I see a difference.
The Third Republic collapsed in WW2, the 4th Republic was a response to Vichy. And 'the Germans' as a whole did not ask for the Third Reich, in fact a majority never voted for Hitler or the Nazis. The Third Reich was imposed on the German people by Hindenburg's clique and the powers of state given over to the Nazi party. Hence the term "Machtergriefung" literally seizure of power, that the Nazis used to describe their ascension to power:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_seizure_of_power
The Nazi seizure of power (German: Machtergreifung) was the acquisition by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi Party) of the chancellorship of Germany, and of several other high-ranking cabinet posts, on 30 January 1933, following the appointment of Hitler as chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg, then aged 84. It also refers to the period of consolidation of Nazi power through intimidation and violence, culminating in the establishment of the Nazi Party as the only legal political party in Germany in July 1933.

I'm really getting the impression you're a bigot against German people, thinking they were just a people waiting to goose step to the Nazi tune just as soon as they could.

The British system had a government that obeyed Parliament and (more than the Germans, certainly), respected the rule of law. Imagine the Silent Dictatorship in Britain; I can't see how you even get to that point.
In the period of the German Empire? Provide examples of the German Imperial government not obeying the letter of their law as compared to the British. The "Silent Dictatorship" was able to get as informally powerful as it did in the second half of the war due to the widespread support it had from the majority of the public, aristocrats, and industrialists; the civilian government of the Kaiser, Chancellor, and Reichstag hadn't really demonstrated particular competence in leadership, so had lost the support of much of the public, which lead them to acquiesce to popular will when it came to conflicts with the military leadership.

France had a similar situation with a constantly rotating weak government and a powerful military leadership changed out only once, until Clemenceau was able to use anti-democratic means to assert his authority over nation and military and establish an authoritarian regime maintained by using the implements of government to silence his political opponents. Or you can compare that to the US which used it's levers of power to silence anti-war sentiment and crack down on German-Americans and Socialists. Britain had the advantage of having the war on the continent, so the army and government were effectively separated physically, which enabled the civilian government to maintain control over the home front and military by being able to throttle it's access to the media and public, while the incompetence of the army leadership (to the public at least) gave the government greater popularity and with that authority than the military.

In Germany the situation was reversed with H-L being showered with media attention for their success, while the government got all the public hatred for their flecklessness, especially the Kaiser, which discredited civilian authority and made them weak in the crucial realm of public opinion. That is what really counted in terms of actual power when there is a public disagreement between different branches of government, especially civilian and military. So in the end it wasn't that the civilian government of Germany in WW1 was particularly more anti-democratic any more than their rivals, it was that the civilian government lost the support of the majority of the public, while certain generals built up public support and rode to power on wave and once in power wielded that to effectively control foreign and to a degree domestic policy. That was no less possible in most European states at the time (remember the military forced the Czar out of power in Russia once he had lost public support), but Entente generals were not racking up the successes to gain public support while their civilian governments were alienating their publics sufficiently for the military to be able leverage their public support against the civilian government. It certainly isn't like that hasn't happened in French or British history before.
 
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I'm really getting the impression you're a bigot against German people, thinking they were just a people waiting to goose step to the Nazi tune just as soon as they could.

I'm certainly well known for my belief that Germany in the 1930s was fated to fall to the Third Reich and ultimately start a major European War.

So the Silent Dictatorship lasted because it had popular support, but the Nazi dictatorship didn't have popular support? Got it.
 

Deleted member 1487

I'm certainly well known for my belief that Germany in the 1930s was fated to fall to the Third Reich and ultimately start a major European War.
You do know that scholarship has discredited the Sonderweg thesis, right?

So the Silent Dictatorship lasted because it had popular support, but the Nazi dictatorship didn't have popular support? Got it.
The Silent Dictatorship wasn't viewed as such by the public, it was thought to the the competent military authority replacing the incompetence Falkenhayn, the Kaiser's proxy. They weren't kept abreast of the internal government situation, they were just publicly popular for their success and the ill informed public, getting extremely desperate for success, turned to what they thought were Germany's most successful generals to win the war rather than keep them in the bloody conflict of attrition that Falkenhayn was leading. Behind the scenes H-L used their public popularity to leverage the Kaiser and civilian government to conform to their opinions; the civilians knew they were publicly unpopular and weren't willing to risk the consequences of publicly standing up to the popular generals. We don't really know if an actual military dictatorship would have been tolerated, the civilian government didn't want to risk public overthrow if they did try and assert themselves.

But remember that the 1920s-30s German public actually remembered that Germany lost the war, it was the minority of Nazi supporters that bought into the Ludendorff 'stabbed-in-the-back' myth. Most of the public wasn't willing to go with a dictatorship in 1932 in the last free and fair election, it was imposed on them by Hindenburg (again) when he gave Hitler the keys to the kingdom and appointed a pro-Nazi to run the military (Blomberg).
 
But remember that the 1920s-30s German public actually remembered that Germany lost the war, it was the minority of Nazi supporters that bought into the Ludendorff 'stabbed-in-the-back' myth. Most of the public wasn't willing to go with a dictatorship in 1932 in the last free and fair election, it was imposed on them by Hindenburg (again) when he gave Hitler the keys to the kingdom and appointed a pro-Nazi to run the military (Blomberg).

Yep, all true...but it also true that Uncle Adolf and co. had a lot of popular support in their days of power pre-WW2; back to the op...the general problem with Germany happily becoming more democratic if she win the war, it's the timing.
More late is the victory...and greatest will be the probability that everything will quickly become a phyrric victory, with Germany occupied internally by political infight (and probably litteraly fight) between the junkers, conservative, socialist revolutionary while the wartime allies are in an even worse situation and there revolt in Ukraine and Poland...all that with the Russian civil war and a probable communist agitation in France and Italy and while Germany can have the military capacity to resolve all that, it will also need the will to do it and spent more blood and tresure in due this.
In general the German leaderships is in the situation to hardly have the will and more important the political capacity to give up something of the very hard fought reward and will try to defend everything...with the very probable outcome to lose it unless it come to various term like the division of A-H (sorry but if the war end in 18 the Empire is basically dead...just don't know it) and give some seriousl autonomy to Poland and i don't even touch the internal front
 

Deleted member 1487

Yep, all true...but it also true that Uncle Adolf and co. had a lot of popular support in their days of power pre-WW2
At most 34% of the vote with a Far Right wing unity ticket in July 1932. They got less in the last free and fair election. Hitler personally got a bit over 36% in the April presidential election, but it seems the Nazi vote was on the decline throughout 1932 with April being their peak in electoral support and November, the last election before the Nazis took power their lowest vote total; historians say that if another round of elections would have happened before Hitler took power the Nazi party would have collapsed into the low 20s and the Communists would have proportionally gained. So certainly the Far Right unity ticket under the Nazis was pretty substantial, at it's peak about 36% of the vote for Hitler directly, that is still only about 1/3rd of the voting public.
 
At most 34% of the vote with a Far Right wing unity ticket in July 1932. They got less in the last free and fair election. Hitler personally got a bit over 36% in the April presidential election, but it seems the Nazi vote was on the decline throughout 1932 with April being their peak in electoral support and November, the last election before the Nazis took power their lowest vote total; historians say that if another round of elections would have happened before Hitler took power the Nazi party would have collapsed into the low 20s and the Communists would have proportionally gained. So certainly the Far Right unity ticket under the Nazis was pretty substantial, at it's peak about 36% of the vote for Hitler directly, that is still only about 1/3rd of the voting public.

It's more than enough to conquest the seat of power as history demontrated; basically you really need the help of the current/besieged leaderships to obtain the key of the room as they will thing that you can be easily controlled...and soon discover how mistaken they were.
Hinderburg move was more or less a repeat of what done by the liberal in Italy and obtained the same result (or even worse, at least in Italy Benny was not an absolute dictator)...and it's very probable that we will see again the same scenario; the old guard under siege and desperate enough to throw his lot with a firestarter that they think can be 'guided' with ease...and with the great risk that they have in their hand an Hitler or a Mussolini (aka someone not near idiot as they think and ready to quickly change the situation)
 
The Poles are the guys who had the Miracle of Warsaw, right? The Germans, in this scenario, continued the war long enough to go into 1917 and get Brest-Litovsk (which is the only way to get the Ukraine). But they still have, despite the fact that their army collapsed in OTL (and so can't be in any great shape in ATL) the support in Germany to conquer the Soviet Union. The Soviets are unable to mobilize a people's war against the German stooges who are trying to conquer their nation. The Reichstag, which we've been assured will be active in this Germany, will support a German conquest of Moscow. The German workers support a German conquest of Moscow.

Which part of your scenario doesn't rely on these assumptions?

Reichstag? German workers? Who's asking them? Hindenburg is in charge and will be for quite some time, though judging by the fact that he rejected becoming dictator (or restoring the monarchy) IOTL he's going to be rather tame compared to other dictators.

Wheater or not they are able to organize a peoples war does not matter - they cant equip them with weapons, uniforms or even ammo - the Russian steamroller needs ammo to fight with and they had horrifying problems in that department until 1943! Then there's the problem why the war against Poland had to be terminated... the mass starvation threatening to collapse the whole nation. Miracle of Warsaw... humbug, single battles do not decide wars.
 
Even if the war ends in 1914, casualties are horrific. Germany casualties through 1914 were still about 5-10 times what they were in the Franco Prussian war. And for what, Serbia?
If Germany manages to take Paris and force France to the peace table their casualties are likely to be less than IOTL. In any case, overall casualties for all the OTL combatants (and their civil populations) would be much smaller (I'd say by an order of magnitude) than OTL losses over 4 years of war.
 

Deleted member 1487

So here's a question. How do you get a German victory late in WW1?
Arguably via the Zabecki strategy:
https://www.amazon.com/German-1918-...=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219499286&sr=1-2
Basically weight the 1918 offensives more against the British 5th army and capture Amiens and then offer a reasonable peace deal, but given that he are talking about H-L that means continuing the war, so then going after Hazebrouck and taking that instead of bogging down fighting for Ypres. With both Amiens and Hazebouck taken the British army's logistics network would collapse in France and they'd have to pull back to the coast or run out of supplies in their present positions. That would mean abandoning most of their heavy equipment and a lot of supplies, plus all their prepared defenses and bases. Effectively that knocks them out of the war and Germany can focus on France entirely while the US is still not a significant force. Given that the French political position was already pretty precarious there is a good chance that France would be willing to offer Germany really good terms to avoid total defeat once they are on their own and French army morale was cracking (not to mention civilian morale which was pretty shaky in 1918 before the Germans attacked).
 
I'm kind of skeptical that a defeat in France would bring Britain to the peace table, given that it didn't in the Second World War, and in the Yanks are coming. Once America's in the Germans are just dancing on the deck of the Titantic.
 
Basically, I'm trying to get the US to remain neutral, which requires the Germans to maybe ease up on submarine warfare and asking countries to invade America, so you can plausibly get a peace of exhaustion in the west.

Don't ask why. Yet.
 

Deleted member 1487

I'm kind of skeptical that a defeat in France would bring Britain to the peace table, given that it didn't in the Second World War, and in the Yanks are coming. Once America's in the Germans are just dancing on the deck of the Titantic.
1918 was a very different situation from 1940, for one thing the British were exhausted and they'd have lost all their continental allies; getting back on shore after being driven off wouldn't be possible given the lack of air power and radio technology being good enough to allow shore-naval cooperation in an invasion scenario. See how Gallipoli went. US entry is not guarantee of being able to win, given that they were drawing all their heavy equipment from French production.
 
1918 was a very different situation from 1940, for one thing the British were exhausted and they'd have lost all their continental allies; getting back on shore after being driven off wouldn't be possible given the lack of air power and radio technology being good enough to allow shore-naval cooperation in an invasion scenario. See how Gallipoli went.

You're right, it's not 1940; but your scenario calls for the Germans to conquer all of France in this offensive which in OTL failed to even reach Paris.
 

Deleted member 1487

You're right, it's not 1940; but your scenario calls for the Germans to conquer all of France in this offensive which in OTL failed to even reach Paris.
IOTL they used a different strategy that failed in 1918, Zabecki lays out one that would have worked against the British by exploiting the vulnerabilities in the British rail network in France. Getting France to surrender or at least ask for an armistice would not be particularly hard given how bad public morale was anyway in 1918 prior to the Allies containing the German offensives. If the British are forces to effectively drop out of the fighting the French army and public are more than likely to be psychologically beaten whatever the material factors at the time. As it was pretty much all the Allies (US, British, French) said the loss of Amiens alone was enough to make them talk peace in 1918; lost Amiens and Hazebrouk and have the British have to pull back to the coast and you're likely to get peace from that provided H-L don't go totally nuts with demands.
 
How bad was morale? You keep saying this but there's no sign of it. There were mutinies in 1917 (which were limited) about charging forward into guns...
 
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