Hitler the great Liberator?

There were several hundred thousand people from the former Soviet Union working or fighting for the Wehrmacht / Waffen-SS, and that was IOTL. If the nazis had treated the population better (admittedly, that's a big If, but AH is about big Ifs), there'd be even more of them. Five million soldiers of the Red Army became POWs. If only 20% changed sides, that'd be a million soldiers. Consider that many of those had lost relatives and friends in Stalinist purges, or the holodomor. Don't tell me none of them wanted revenge.

Who would have to be fed and armed with stuff confiscated from Eastern Europe, which brings you full circle to the beginning. Holodmor etc. wouldn't even come close by comparison to what that would do.

Not to mention that 20% changing sides is a bit optimistic considering that survival rates for Soviet POWs in German camps were anywhere between 15 to 30%. So tell me, who would you want to take revenge on? The people who caused the famine (provided you could even get past the austerity-in-hard-times propaganda), or the people who just killed 8 out of every 10 fellow soldiers who went into captivity with you?
 
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This was assuming of course that the nazis will not threat their Soviet POWs as bad as IOTL. :rolleyes:

And then there's the question of the kolkhoses. If they had decided to divide the land among the kolkhoz workers, they definitely would've been more popular.
 
And then there's the question of the kolkhoses. If they had decided to divide the land among the kolkhoz workers, they definitely would've been more popular.

Really? Yes, it was a popular idea, in theory. But -

Would they divide the collectivised machinery and livestock too? Because those were the things that made the land valuable and exploitable.

As a clue: IRL, they took the livestock and machinery. Because they needed them. And now you're talking about millions more soldiers added into the mix.
 
I was thinking about almost the exact same thing the other day, only not with Hitler. Rather, what if a conservative Weimar Republic or a constitutional, at the very least not-very-authoritarian monarchy established in the interwar years (Kapp succeeding in his putsch?) attacked the USSR instead. Preferably without occupying Western Europe and all that, so you'd have to hand-wave the actual invasion too. Let's just call it a paranoid pre-emptive strike and say Britain and France looks the other way.

You'd have to hand-wave things like rearmament and such, but I arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion, that if this ATL Germany was humane and non-psychotic in its conduct of the war they could have done pretty well, playing the liberator card in the Ukraine and all that. I mean, Ukrainians greeted the goddamn Nazis before they started murdering everyone. If the Germans had allowed a conservative/democratic Russian to head a provisional Russian government in the liberated zones that would help as well, after all, in this scenario they would not be after Lebensraum or wiping Russia off the map, just the collapse of Communism in Russia.

If they had the same early success eastwards as the Nazis did I think a lot of people would desert the Communists, because it would actually be a valid option without the imminent genocide and slavery thing.

That's not to say the war would have been easy or "over by Christmas", but I think they'd actually stand a fair chance. I hope this doesn't come off as overly pro-German or anything, some people seem to dismiss anyone as a closet-Nazi racist who claims Germany could have won the war against Soviet Russia, whether or not Germany is either of those in the TL.
 
I was thinking about almost the exact same thing the other day, only not with Hitler. Rather, what if a conservative Weimar Republic or a constitutional, at the very least not-very-authoritarian monarchy established in the interwar years (Kapp succeeding in his putsch?) attacked the USSR instead. Preferably without occupying Western Europe and all that, so you'd have to hand-wave the actual invasion too. Let's just call it a paranoid pre-emptive strike and say Britain and France looks the other way.

You'd have to hand-wave things like rearmament and such, but I arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion, that if this ATL Germany was humane and non-psychotic in its conduct of the war they could have done pretty well, playing the liberator card in the Ukraine and all that. I mean, Ukrainians greeted the goddamn Nazis before they started murdering everyone. If the Germans had allowed a conservative/democratic Russian to head a provisional Russian government in the liberated zones that would help as well, after all, in this scenario they would not be after Lebensraum or wiping Russia off the map, just the collapse of Communism in Russia.

If they had the same early success eastwards as the Nazis did I think a lot of people would desert the Communists, because it would actually be a valid option without the imminent genocide and slavery thing.

That's not to say the war would have been easy or "over by Christmas", but I think they'd actually stand a fair chance. I hope this doesn't come off as overly pro-German or anything, some people seem to dismiss anyone as a closet-Nazi racist who claims Germany could have won the war against Soviet Russia, whether or not Germany is either of those in the TL.

No they didnt, I'll post what I have elsewhere when that comes up.

If you count Hiwis, the total numbers who supported the German war effort was probably in excess of 200k. But this only tells one side of the story. The other side is the number of partisans who formed resistance movements within the occupied zones long before the central government thought to harness such efforts. Just in the Ukraine, where the population had PLENTY of reason to hate the Soviets and Stalin (somewhere around 2,000,000 to 6,000,000 had died during a famine) partisan numbers exceeded 100,000. More than one hundred thousand volunteer fighters supporting the government in a region where Stalin et al STARVED up to six million people to death. That is not the profile of a populous waiting to revolt or turncoat.

Across the USSR the total number of partisans dwarf the 200k who decided to support the Reich. For every volunteer to support the Germans (and BTW, get far more, and better, food for themselves and their families, and avoided getting killed by the Nazis) there were at least two who volunteered to live in the forests and eat pine needles so they could oppose the invader.

The fable is that the vast majority of Soviet peoples hated the government enough to betray the Rodina. They didn't, as the almost unbelievable sacrifices of the Soviet people demonstrated. Had the various subject peoples been as disaffected as some, including, it would seem, you imagine, the Germans would have been able to walk into Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Sevastopol, Kiev, and every other city without firing a shot. There were not enough NKVD, NKGB, and GRU troops to prevent a mass uprising if the desire was there in ANY of the cities across the war zone. It simply wasn't.

Even in Leningrad (a city where the loyalty of the population was deeply questioned by the Communist Party), where the suffering was beyond description, the civilian population was supportive of the war effort even as some segments of the populous began to eat the dead (several hundred cases of cannibalism were documented in NKVD records). If you are in a circumstance where you are eating wallpaper (or worse) and the populous still supports the war effort in overwhelming numbers, the desire to revolt simply isn't there.
 
I believe it would have worked. But in order for this to have happened, Hitler couldn't have been the man in charge, and National Socialism couldn't have been Germany's guiding ideology.

This. In order for this scenario, you need a Germany dominated by right-wing army men (so the Second World War actually happens) but not violently anti-Russian/Slav. Sadly, this also requires a PoD further back than a large number of people on this realise (the Kaiser was talking about a war between Slavdom and Germany before the First World War, this rhetoric was already becoming embeded then in Germany).
 

Hkelukka

Banned
They COULD do that, if they wanted to AND were willing to starve Germans to death.

Realistically in 1941 if the Nazi state does not starve the SSR areas to death, then Germans will.

Now if you go around that by saying that Germany sells industrial goods to buy produce from countries that have extra to sell and can be arsed to actually sell. You have another serious problem. The import-export that Germany did would suffer, badly.

Now, IF by some miracle you do manage to keep Germand AND Axis AND SSR people fed and against USSR then yes, USSR would be in serious trouble. But the problem with this scenario is that its very difficult. If you at the same time demobilize at least several infantry armies and sell their goods for food to countries like Sweden, Turkey, Swiss, Spain and so on, you could pull it off. At the price of losing about a dozen infantry divisions worth of equipment. Maybe.

The point being this, the whole Hitler as the Liberator works if you pull the POD back to about 1930's and have Germany that is preparing to liberate those areas well in advance and spreads propaganda and prepares for it. If you have it at 1941 it will implode.

But there is a relatively good alternative, from a Nazi point of view at least.

Gang up on a single ethnicity. Look at the areas in question and figure out what ethnicity is the most hated, give everyone else a wide berth and absolutely destroy that one ethnicity, donate everything they had to their neigbours and the neigbours are a bit more content. Wait a year and start it all over again.

This would of course be a absolute riot for the partisans who would destroy the German lines as in OTL. But it would work better than attacking every ethnicity at once as in OTL.

Also, if the trade of better relations with the SSR people in exchange for losing maybe a dozen inf divs is worth it, we'll never know. But it might be, and thats alt history.

Just keep in mind that supplying the SSR people with food means you either starve Germany or import more food. If you import more food, what will you sell in exchange? Only goods Germany could sell are military goods, which means less for the front. This would relax tensions on the overworked supply network.

And anyway, from a military standpoint, starving people are less effective as partisans than well fed people. Even in the Finnish Karelia with relatively good relations between the people and no large scale destruction of property and killing of civilians, there was still a pretty intensive partisan warfare. So even acting as liberators would be unlikely to work. Unless you really do give the people in the provinces independence completely and pull away from the areas entirely. And have a very real risk of them collapsing immidiatly back to a USSR state. Its a difficult situation anyway you look at it.
 

Daffy Duck

Banned
I believe it would have worked. But in order for this to have happened, Hitler couldn't have been the man in charge, and National Socialism couldn't have been Germany's guiding ideology.

Right on the money...the Ukraine and Baltic states initially welcomed the Axis as liberators. Had the Axis exploited this manpower, with the promise of liberty, the Eastern Front would have turned out far differently. Then again, without Nazi policies, Operation Barbarossa might have not have happened at all....

Still, with two big dogs on the same block, they're gonna fight eventually
 
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