Hitler Under Siege

Late September 1944...

Hitler considers his current military position...

1) Churchill's position in the British government appears to be weakening but he is unlikely to fall while war rages in Europe.

2) Stalin, as always, is untrustworthy and he is quite likely to behave in a manner which will damage his relatons with the West the moment FDR's censorship weakens.

3) FDR's health is failing and his most likely replacements, Thomas Dewey if FDR loses the election and Harry S Truman if he wins, are both far less amenable to Stalin.

4) Germany can no longer hope to match the Allies in numbers, only in quality.

5) To that end there are many upcoming developments in military hardware, including long range ballistic missles, 'true' submarines, jets and more which offer some hope, and some of these, particularly the tanks with massive armor and firepower but miserable speed are peculiarly appropriate to the defense and less useful on the attack.

It is therefore in his and Germany's best interest to assume the defensive and wait for the Allies to bleed themselves white and have a falling out. It is with deep misgivings that Hitler decides to abandon areas which can not be held but...


To this end the following changes take place:

1) As much of the 28 divisions trapped in the Baltic pocket are to be evacuated, men at minimum if not equipment.

2) The nearly 40 divisions thrown away in Bulgaria and Romania are pulled back to Germany(or never sent).

3) The suicidal offensives against the West and the series of attacks targetting Lake Balaton/Budapest are cancelled.

4) A defensive posture is assumed on all fronts.

Noting that at least some of the Balkan divisions are surely overrun by the Red Army and most of the units west of Riga return home with little more than uniforms would this have a reasonable chance of Germany holding out long enough to split the Allies or otherwise force a negotiated peace?
 
I don't think this would really matter at this point. At most some months of prolonged agony.

Maybe enough for Hitler to be persuaded to be evacuated to Berchtesgaden. This could cause some blaming between the Western Allies and the SU. A negotiated separate peace (or signs that the Western Allies had negotiated) was exactly what Stalin feared, maybe enough to cause a rift?
 

General Zod

Banned
Maybe enough for Hitler to be persuaded to be evacuated to Berchtesgaden. This could cause some blaming between the Western Allies and the SU. A negotiated separate peace (or signs that the Western Allies had negotiated) was exactly what Stalin feared, maybe enough to cause a rift?

Any kind of negotiated peace between the western Allies and post-Nazi Germany in 1942-44 was sadly utterly unfeasible unless you have a PoD that gets rid of that senile Germanophobe anti-fascist fanatic POTUS Roosevelt and his crypto-Communist new Age loonie VPOTUS Wallace. You need a different Administration to win the 1940 Presidential election. Even if the German people had managed to rid themselves of the Nazists, Roosevelt and his cronies still wanted Germany occupied, and its national unity, industry, and territorial integrity utterly destroyed. See Morgenthau plan. No negotiated peace was possible under those circumstances.

As a matter of fact, Anti-Nazi German resistance repeatedly tried feelers with the western Allies about a reasonable negotiated peace after removing Nazists with a military coup (which would have spared Europe years of bloodshed and destruction, cut the Holocaust short, and contained Communist expansion) and were turned down because Roosevelt absolutely wanted hands free for his mad revenge schemes.
:mad::mad::mad:
 
Well I have won the Goetterdaemmerung scenario as Germany in Heart of Iron.

But realistically no.
Certainly not by just sitting on the defensive.
And some sort of Battle of the Bulge wank combined with a sudden rout of the overextended Soviets in the east reads as some kind of wank although in theory it could be possible. Its however even more upsetting to the sensibilities than having Napoleon crush Wellington and Blucher before going on to fight Austerlitz redux. Which was infact far more likely...

The Allies mass against the Rhine and break through in the spring.
The Soviets sweep through the Balkans (who fall quickly without German assistance) and then strike all across the line against Germany (both in Prussia and Bohemia/Austria) in the winter-spring.

Germany collapses pretty much as per OTL.
 
The only POD I know of like this scenario is that Germany wins in the West. You need to get the Western Allies stopped for months. If the West is a quagmire and Stalin starts suspecting that the Western Allies are bleeding the Soviets dry to walk into Berlin then there is a chance of a negotiated peace in 1944 between Hitler and Stalin. Then the tanks turn around and the Western Allies are in trouble.
 

Typo

Banned
Realisticly, no.

The Germans (nazis, prussian militarists whatever) have broken every agreement they ever made between 1933-1941. No one is going to trust them enough to sign a truce.
 
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