How much of the USSR could the Nazis have conceivably held onto if they had won?

Personally, I think they'd be hard-pressed to hold anything past the Ural Mountains. Vladivostok gives the Soviets a viable warm water port, and holding all of Eastern Europe plus some of Africa will likely stretch the Reich to its limit.

Not to mention that even if Germany wins, Japan is likely defeated by the Allies and occupied as IOTL, meaning a very geographically convenient position for the Soviets.
 

Deleted member 1487

Personally, I think they'd be hard-pressed to hold anything past the Ural Mountains. Vladivostok gives the Soviets a viable warm water port, and holding all of Eastern Europe plus some of Africa will likely stretch the Reich to its limit.

Not to mention that even if Germany wins, Japan is likely defeated by the Allies and occupied as IOTL, meaning a very geographically convenient position for the Soviets.
They wouldn't have tried to hold anything beyond the Urals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Mountains_in_Nazi_planning
 
Yeah as Wiking said I dont think they had any plans to annex or colonize anything beyond the Urals. They already would have enough territory to try and administer, Siberia is to far and of little interest. They would probably maintain the USSR as a rump state to extract reparations and slaves from.
 
They could have held all of it - the plan was since the beginning to get rid of the people currently inhabiting it, a land without people does not rebel.
 

Wendigo

Banned
Which would not be as productive as land with a lot more people living there. (Not unless you have extreme mechanisation.)

You forget that the Nazi goals for the East weren't based off rational ideas.

Did the Nazis care if depopulation was less economically viable than mere exploitation?

NO.

They wanted the Slavs gone. They wanted their memory erased from history and were willing to kill them by the tens of millions to make it happen. They wanted every city and town to be razed brick by brick by their own inhabitants (extermination through labor) and the rest of the urban population worked to death throughout Europe.

Most of the rural population would survive as chattel slaves/serfs on various German farms and settlements.

National Socialism and the Reich at its very core was irrational, demonic, insane and pure evil. The whole point of the war against the USSR was depopulation and enslavement of the remaining survivors over a 20-30 year period. To change the goals halfway would go against everything Hitler and his inner circle wanted since the early 1920s.

If they were rational they wouldn't be Nazis.
 

Deleted member 1487

Which would not be as productive as land with a lot more people living there. (Not unless you have extreme mechanisation.)
In terms of GDP sure, but that doesn't mean much to imperialist colonizers. They want raw material extraction to fuel their few settler colonial cities and their core territory, not have a functioning major economy to trade with. There would of course be the settler cities in the east to trade with, but the entire project was to find the raw materials to fund their industry, much like how the earlier European empires projected power to Africa and the Americas to get commodities and raw materials for the metropol and places to put their surplus population rather than have a trade relationship as they did in Asia (where the natives were too strong to outright dominate). Hitler was looking at the colonization of North America as a model for the expansion of the Nazi Empire, they'd enslave or kill the natives, like the Europeans did to the Native Americans, and take their stuff to satisfy the needs of the home country. It was almost like a mercantilist colonial project; Hitler apparently thought the way to compete with the US was to emulate its history, warts and all, but even more brutal and quick, to create a continental empire that would have the resources to win a struggle of the continents.
 
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