How Long Could a Successful Third Reich Realistically Survive

Germany beats the USSR and sues for peace with the USA and Britain, who essentially give up on mainland Europe.

Ignoring the impossibly of this scenario, Germany now has mainland Europe under its grasp and peace with the Allies. How long can Germany hold Europe? Will the Reich stretch its influence farther?
 

Kaze

Banned
I would say it collapse into civil war once these words are announced - "Our beloved Fuhrer has breathed his last breath on April last..." Every general and member of the inner circle would fight for it.

That would be an interesting story in itself - the Nazi civil war, I am surprised anyone hasn't written it yet...
 
I would say it collapse into civil war once these words are announced - "Our beloved Fuhrer has breathed his last breath on April last..." Every general and member of the inner circle would fight for it.

That would be an interesting story in itself - the Nazi civil war, I am surprised anyone hasn't written it yet...

There are many like that, one is called "Thousand Weeks Reich" (do not confuse with the mod that got inspired by it). There is also a mod of HoI IV with the same idea called "The New Order".
 
How long realistically can Hitler live given his health problems? That needs to be agreed to before we can even begin to guess. In my mind the big question is how the interplay between the nuts in the Nazi inner circle is the big question. Who's left in power by the time Hitler dies?
 
I would argue not very long unless you can somehow add a PoD that convinces UK/US to firmly and forever keep their hands out of Europe, which is almost ASB levels of impossible. Within the next 5-10 years Germany has to deal with infinite partisan simulator (supported by UK/US) while trying to genocide their way through Eastern Europe while fighting a forever war on the frontiers against whatever is left of the Soviet Union (also supported by the UK/US) since Germany having the ability to control anything past the Urals is near ASB at least in the short term while their economy is not doing too hot while power struggles take place in the background all while the country as a whole is fairly anti-intellectual. Not a good formula for even short term stability.
 
Germany beats the USSR and sues for peace with the USA and Britain, who essentially give up on mainland Europe.
1945. Germany can’t compete with Anglo American airpower from ‘AirStrip 1’ aka UK. SU collapse won’t stop that, the Wehrmacht will just run out of things to do. It would be ‘have an a bomb’, and another and another until the regime is over.
 
Probably not long. Allies are going to back to Europe sooner or latter. And Hitler being Hitler does something stupid whihc will provocate possible cold/warm war as hot war.

And even if Allies doens't invade Germany Hitler is not going live long. With his health perhaps to early 1950's. With really good luck even to 1955 but not longer like in Harris' Fatherland. After Hitler's death things are going to be very messy when Himmler, Göring, Bormann and Speer begin play blood game of thrones. And there is too several guerilla wars and resistance movements in many places who are supported by UK, USA and possibility rump USSR depending what kind of peace there is and what happens after that. So Third Reich will collapses quickly by 1960.
 
With an ideology designed to appeal to a Nordic nucleus, and even then only those with the fanaticism to attach credence to such doctrines, it is not going to last long. Nazism was all smoke and mirrors, and being little more than a Hitler personality cult, could not survive his death..
 
It depends really. The German economy is heavily based on military conquest and plunder. So as soon as there's a military set back or nothing left to conquer the Reich is liable to enter a massive recession. This alone might embolden factions in the Landwehr or SS to start rebelling. Hitler will start breaking down when faced with more competent commanders. On the other hand if the Reich is forced to reform economically that gives it a longer life line. Possibly long enough for Hitler to name a successor and give him the power clean house of anybody who shows they might not go along with the plan. In our timeline Karl Doenitz was chosen to be the next in line if this remains true it's a bit of a nightmare, he lived to 1980 in otl. Not to mention a good deal of the military hierarchy respected him even if they didn't love him. They'd have taken his orders without question. He was enough of a diehard Nazi party member to ensure most of the SS stayed loyal as well. Though as a Navy man he might have sunk a lot of money into the fleet and a new Naval Air Wing of the Kriegsmarine. The kind of Cold War spending without a return may also create dissent.
 
Once they stop plundering their economy is going to drop like a stone, and Hitler's mythical power is going to undone. Cue his Generals attempting to remove him from power, and perhaps a Nazi civil war. If this happens then several countries are going to "declare independance" and US/UK are likely to step in.
 
Or there's a German Kruschev who manages to turn the system around from self-destructing fast into decaying slowly. Then again, a German Deng might be a possibility later on.
 
Or there's a German Kruschev who manages to turn the system around from self-destructing fast into decaying slowly. Then again, a German Deng might be a possibility later on.

Nazi system was very different than Communist system. You just can't moderate ideology and speciality not commit de-Hitlerisation when Hitler was major architeht of the ideology. Krushchev just made de-stalinisation not de-leninisation which would had been impossible. And firstly hard-liners like Himmler, Bormann and Goebbels should be gone before any real reforms can be commited.
 
Nazi system was very different than Communist system. You just can't moderate ideology and speciality not commit de-Hitlerisation when Hitler was major architeht of the ideology. Krushchev just made de-stalinisation not de-leninisation which would had been impossible. And firstly hard-liners like Himmler, Bormann and Goebbels should be gone before any real reforms can be commited.

And Deng made de-Maoization even though Mao had established PRC. Any post-war Germany would have had new power players with some positions switching in relative strength. A post-Hitler Nazi Germany is a possibility, but one cannot be certain any more than post-Mao China being the same self-destructive China that PRC was under Mao.

Even after Stalin Molotov was a team player and Beriya surprisingly willing to reform. All of the key Nazi players would have shown surprising qualities post-Hitler. They were evil, but they were not stupid.
 
Last edited:
I would say it collapse into civil war once these words are announced - "Our beloved Fuhrer has breathed his last breath on April last..." Every general and member of the inner circle would fight for it.

What reason does anyone outside of the party elite have to fight to the death over a feudalistic struggle for leadership between essentially identical positions .
 
What reason does anyone outside of the party elite have to fight to the death over a feudalistic struggle for leadership between essentially identical positions .

Everyone got mini personality cults and they can also claim to be the true successor of Hitler.

I wonder that this can be diminished if Hitler appoints a sucessor, there is a documentary about Speer on youtube that claims that he was one of the options, so some scenarios like Fatherland by Onkel Willie and A Valkyrie rises over europe by Kaiser Cris has him appointing Speer.
 

Marc

Donor
When the death camps run out of victims.
You all do know that's the real raison d'etre and the rasion d'etat for Nazi Germany.
All the rest of it is merely dancing around the core evil.
 
I always hate this cliche of a civil war following Hitler’s death, the USSR did quite well (for a communist nation) for over 30 years after Stalin’s death. I see no reason why Germany wouldn’t go down the same path especially with someone slightly less batshit crazy at the helm.
 
Everyone got mini personality cults
How would that be expanded to the general population and why would anyone fight for leaders who are claiming exact same things as opposed to waiting things out until the dust settles.

Everyone got mini personality cults and they can also claim to be the true successor of Hitler.
When has a civil war like that happened in modern times.
 
I don‘t see any particular reason why Nazi Germany would necessarily have to collapse or fall into civil war after Hitler’s death. If China can survive Maoism, with all of its horrific and in some cases downright bizarre manifestations (including real anti-intellectualism), then I see no reason why Germany couldn‘t survive Hitler. I mean, it did survive Hitler, despite the fact that the country was a burnt out ruin that lost millions of people and a third of its territory in the wake of WW2. (I think Germany and Japan‘s post-war rebirths were nothing short of miraculous.)

I‘m also dubious about the prospect of a never-ending partisan war in the east. I would argue that the Nazi’s utter lack of moral scruples when it comes to the treatment of enemy populations would actually be quite helpful in this regard. There can be no partisan war in the east if all the people there have either been killed, starved or deported. And genociding whole populations isn‘t as hard as it might seem. I mean, as far as I know there was no partisan war in the Ukraine during the Holodomor either, and I suspect Nazi policy in the east would basically be a Holodomor on steroids. I also see no reason for any protracted and sustainable rebellions in the occupied territories of western Europe (France etc.). There weren‘t any such rebellions in OTL (at least prior to the Allied invasion of France), so I wouldn‘t expect them in case of a Nazi victory. There might at one point be equivalents to the OTL anti-communist uprisings we saw in Hungary in 1956, or Poland in 1981, but I‘d expect their fates to be similar.

I think Hitler would probably die sometime between 1945 and 1960 at the latest (let‘s say 1955), so by that time he will have most likely have made arrangements regarding the succession. I remember hearing some time ago (I think while listening to some podcast) that he actually didn‘t want to be succeeded by another ‚Führer‘, but that he wanted the positions of Chancellor and Reichspräsident to be separate again, to be filled by different people. Apparently he wanted his successors to rule in a more collective manner, not too dissimilar from party rule in the USSR and other communist countries post-Stalin. I do think there would be some kind of power struggle, but I think it would look more like what happened after Stalin and Mao‘s death in the USSR and China, instead of civil war.

Furthermore, I would expect the long-term economic foundations of a victorious Nazi Germany to be much stronger than that of the USSR or other communist countries. The Nazi economy wouldn‘t be a top-down, centrally planned command economy that runs every single business and factory in the whole country, at least during peace time. There would be lots of interventions, subsidies and controls, and key sectors of the economy might be (partially) state owned, but overall the system would still be based on private ownership. There would be no collectivization of agriculture, for example, and private businessmen would still be able to accumulate (moderate) amounts of wealth. This is why I believe that the Nazis (and fascism in general) would have been a much more formidable enemy for the US (and liberalism in general) in a hypothetical alternate Cold War, more than communism ever was. I‘ve seen it often mentioned that the Nazi economy wasn‘t sustainable in the long term, but I‘m dubious; I see no reason why those problems couldn’t have been solved through economic reforms, especially if the Nazis have all the resources and vast markets of Europe at their disposal. To give a current example, people have been predicting the collapse of China for quite some time now (there‘s even a book from 2001, called The coming Collapse of China), but it doesn‘t look as if that‘s going to happen anytime soon.

I would also expect that post-war fascism would over time undergo an ideological leftward turn, and that it would absorb a lot of the revolutionary energy that in OTL was utilized by communism. With Europe conquered, Bolshevism defeated, and the Jews either dead or deported to Madagascar (or somewhere else), the Nazis would eventually need a new raison d'etre. I think they would adopt an increasingly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal stance, in opposition to the US and its allies. They probably would focus on things like environmentalism, healthy living, robust social safety nets and strong communal bonds, while claiming that the liberal system is detrimental to those things. As for the anti-intellectual aspects of Nazism (which mostly came down to opposition to ‚Jewish Science‘), I think much of that would eventually moderated or abandoned, just like the Soviets abandoned Lysenkoism (which claimed genetics was fake, bourgeois science) after Stalin‘s death.

In other words, I think it‘s conceivable that a victorious Nazi Germany could very well survive to the present day and beyond. Maybe Hitler would even be regarded (slightly) critically by his later successors, in the same way to how Mao is regarded in China today, where the official position of the communist party is that his policies were 70% good, while the other 30% were… not so good, lol. (Though I admit that‘s probably unlikely.)
 
Top