Hitler killed in WWI?

It was already the nazy party:rolleyes:
Nazi Party (from the German Nazi, abbreviated from the pronunciation of Nationalsozialist

It wasn't, I did Hitler's rise to power in GCSE History so I know that it became the Nazi Party after Hitler took control and reorganised it.
 
the Russians did not in fact attack, until much later when Hitler had set the stage for a violent reshaping of the entire continent.

I do not know of nay attacks other than the dates you mention. I think, however, the Soviet inactivity was more to do with a lack of ability than a lack of desire to re-claim territory. The defeat of the the pre -industrial Soviet army in Poland put a damper on immediate plans to reclaim lost territory.

The Soviets then developed the ambitious industrialization plan. Attempts to swallow the Baltics or Finland too soon would lead to the west boycotting desperatly needed technology sales to the Soviets.

But... as soon as the Soviets had industrialized and had a modern army (to degrees), they quickly re started their dormant plan to re claim lost territories. Their partnership with Hitler was as equals, not as reluctant or coerced partners.
 
I do not know of nay attacks other than the dates you mention. I think, however, the Soviet inactivity was more to do with a lack of ability than a lack of desire to re-claim territory. The defeat of the the pre -industrial Soviet army in Poland put a damper on immediate plans to reclaim lost territory.

I've never denied that the Soviets, and other Leninists, had desires to expand. (The Chinese certainly did go ahead and invade Tibet for instance). Nor that they were checked by fear of not having adequate power to survive the repercussions of an adventure.

What I'm saying is, the track record is that they were very pessimistic about how much power it would take them to be able to get away with conquest. They always kept a weather eye out for the likelihood that really powerful capitalist nations, whom they knew from bitter experience probably would leap at a chance to take the revolutionaries down a peg or overthrow them completely if they could, would intervene. Even then that didn't mean they discounted the possibility of taking on the class enemy and winning anyway, but it meant that they had to amass overwhelming force--not just enough to take on some comic-opera regime on their borders, but enough to withstand massive retaliation from the West afterward, probably on more fronts than just the place they'd taken. They always counted Western capability and will to oppose them very high, so by the time they had some prospect of sufficient force to take the risk, they were both costing themselves a lot of resources for other purposes, mainly building up their own economies, and even creating political risks within their own system by empowering the army too much. As Marxists they looked to the legacy of European revolution in the 19th century and took a dim view of potential Napoleons.

I also need to point out how much Leninism is an ideological movement. I have argued elsewhere that the very existence of the USSR was based on an appeal to internationalism; to help keep the heterogenous array of motley nations together that was the Soviet Union they argued that they were not some run-of-the-mill bunch of bigoted imperialists but the liberators of working peoples everywhere. So when they did do things like attack Finland OTL, that was a risky blow to their own domestic structure of rule, and cost them a lot of the prestige they counted on throughout the world. It may not have always mattered much whether the common working folk in potential rival nations around the world looked up to the USSR or not, but sometimes it did. Trotsky for instance felt that working-class support for the Bolsheviks in Britain and France had something to do with limiting the extent of intervention either Entente power could invest in crushing them. Moral capital mattered to the Leninists, and the Maoists. If they were seen as grabbing every little nation they could on the flimsiest excuses, their prestige overseas would fall, it would be easier for their capitalist class enemies (as they saw them) to organize anti-Soviet activities and even plot new interventions with the support or at least apathetic acceptance of the common people there.

Their partnership with Hitler was as equals, not as reluctant or coerced partners.

Well, yeah. That was the goal. It was bad for the Soviet Communists how they whipsawed the views of Communists and sympathizers in the liberal countries overseas with their zigzagging line of hating the Nazis, then suddenly embracing them and invading Finland and the Baltic countries, then suddenly appealing to the democratic peoples of the world against these vile aggressors. It worked out for them in that the democratic peoples did agree the Nazis were vile aggressors and only wondered why the Soviets had lined up with them, but in the emergency even conservatives who were hostile to the Reds anyway were willing to embrace them as important allies of convenience, and others who had once looked to Russia with hope and admiration were determined to save them and maybe had such hopes for the future if they could. But even these idealists surely had had some sobering splashes of cold water dashed on them and would be skeptical.

But as for the ability of Stalin to fancy himself an equal partner with Hitler--well, you say that like it's a bad thing. That he would partner with Hitler was bad; that he would be able to was good.

Still, though I have seen fairly convincing arguments that Stalin really was planning to strike at Hitler himself first and Hitler merely beat him to the punch, I have my reasons that I have outlined--mainly in this case Stalin's paranoia about any military leadership being a risk to his own rule--why I still think he'd never have gotten around to it.

If he did, and things then didn't go as smoothly as he might have hoped, then he'd be in a worse position in terms of domestic support for fighting to the bitter end with every ounce of force the Soviet people could muster. The fact that the Germans did strike first was worth quite a lot in Russia--it meant that the Soviet people had after all tried their best to make peace, and it was German aggression that was to blame for war. If Stalin had struck first, then Russians would have known in the back of their minds that this was an optional war for them and Stalin's fault. A similar moral calculus would prevail in the West too--we might be grateful someone finally did strike at Hitler but the spectacle of Stalin first cozying up to Hitler then striking at him would be branded on everyone's memory.

When judging the Hitler-Stalin pact, we shouldn't forget that the Russians had spent the better part of a decade trying to build up what they called a Common Front of the liberal Western nations and the Soviet Union against Hitler and Mussolini, and that this effort had been dismissed contemptuously at Munich in 1938. Since it was true that many voices in the West argued that Hitler should be allowed to attack the Soviets and destroy them, it was less unreasonable for Stalin to write off the interests of everyone else and seek to appease Hitler in his own way than it seems. Again I don't think this amounts to the damning evidence you seem to take it as that Stalin and Hitler were simply identical peas in a pod with exactly the same sorts of ambitions. No question, Stalin was a vicious SOB and ambitious too. But I claim he was a different kind of vicious overlord, who operated under a different set of constraints.
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This timeline of course is about WI Hitler didn't exist. Granting as I do that probably Germany would not be under such a rabid, fanatical sort of leadership (though it is quite likely it would be under a right-wing dictatorship of some sort) then there would be a whole spectrum of what the Russians might have been doing while Hitler failed to come to power. Things probably would have gone much as OTL until the mid-1930s. Then maybe Germany would be taken over by left-wingers, possibly the Communist Party itself. On paper and in public, there would be rejoicing in Russia and the new regime would be their bestest pals ever. Behind the scenes Stalin would be terrified of the challenge to his leadership the new German comrades would represent.

In fact the main reason we would not expect a strong left-wing coalition to take over Germany in the crisis of the Depression would be that Stalin would have been interfering in their leadership and policies all along, trying to guarantee the loyalty of the Communist Germans to himself. Insofar as he succeeded at that, he also torpedoed their chances at actually coming to power in Germany. He purged good people; he drove others away from the Communist ranks in the first place; he filled potential fellow-traveling Social Democrats and liberals with distrust and dismay. A German Communist takeover would mean either that Russia was not being run by someone as authoritarian as Stalin anyway (or at least by someone more confident that he could manage victory to his advantage) or that leadership had arisen that took Germany leftward despite Stalin; if so they'd be very aware, just as Mao was in China a decade later or Tito came to be in Yugoslavia, that they had to keep Stalin's "advice" at arm's length, though perhaps it might be a good thing to pretend to the world at large that they were all fraternal buddies together.

So, however alarming it might look to the West, in fact a Communist Germany would not be about to embark on a conquest spree in partnership with Russia, nor would Russia suddenly go wild at that point either. Both powers would be wary of war as long as they could help it and worry that if war did break out they might be on opposite sides of it, Leninists or not.

Germany might conceivably limp along on a moderate basis, maybe. It would be tough. Again I don't see this as a green light for Stalin to suddenly start attacking in eastern Europe. Surely a weak but liberal Germany would be able to call on Entente help in containing a Red Russia gone mad, and offer a lot of help to the Entente/League powers in doing so, and thus get opportunities for an arms build-up and become better integrated into the Western system. All at Russian expense. Surely Stalin would not risk it.

Again a right-wing Germany that defies the Versailles restrictions would most likely indulge in at least some Hitlerian rhetoric about the need to tame the Bear and how that justifies their new arms build-up. Again Stalin would need to keep his powder dry and avoid giving Western powers an excuse to ally with this dangerous new Germany.
 
Someone else establishes a German fascist movement, things differ only due to the specificity of the personality cult around that particular individual, but the overall pattern is recognizable.
 
I think maybe messing around with Poland might still be the third rail for them. I don't think the British and French would have been casual about losing Poland, even if it wasn't a last straw after gobbling up Austria and Czechoslovakia. And if the Entente/League powers are more taken by surprise or somewhat less frightened by this situation, by that same token such a Germany of large though limited ambitions would also be weaker without having assimilated those southern lands first. Czechoslovakia itself, and perhaps even Austria, might be potential allies in an Entente war fought on behalf of Poland.

Your cool-headed militarists can look at the situation and do the math; I don't know that they'd dare attack anywhere once clearly German territories in Western hands have been taken back.

I disagree. If the British and French were not going to fight over anschluss, a direct violation of Versailles, and were not going to fight over Czechoslovakia, they won't over Poland so long as the Germans limit their desired gains. London and Paris are still worried about Moscow, remember.
 
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