How nd when does a victorious Third Reich fall?

I doubt the use of nuclear weapons would play out well. In OTL, Japan was obviously losing and the use of nukes "just" brought the war to a faster resolution with fewer allied casualties. In this ATL, Germany is winning. I can imagine the Nazi regime doing horrendous things in revenge for being nuked. Poison gas attacks on London; perhaps using the conquered population as hostages such as "we will now kill the whole population of Warsaw; do that again and it will be Paris next".

Except the Allies will be holding all of the cards due to Nazi air presence being degraded enough to allow for nuclear strikes. So their response would be more along the lines of

"You massacre an entire city's population, we nuke two cities in return", or unleash Vegetarian. And any Nazi massacres of cities will lead to more rebellions as people go "we might be next and i'd rather go down fighting than be slaughtered!"
 
Meh. I might be in small minority in that I believe the in the event of an all out nazi victory the state could have sustained itself indefinitely.

Barring a atom bomb strike by the U.S, victory over the USSR would have psychologically vindicated the entire Naiz super structure for decades to come both internationally and domestically.

Think about it. Not only does the Nazi economy have access to USSR materials indefinitely but they have the most advanced land and air military in the world alongside the most pervasive totalitarian police state in the world.

No internal insurrection had the hopes of toppling that.

I almost imagine a warhammer 40k scenario where hitler is forever used as a state-sanctioned deity through which any future leader can use to solidify their leadership legitimacy around.

Much like Stalin did with his deification of Lenin.
 
Except the Allies will be holding all of the cards due to Nazi air presence being degraded enough to allow for nuclear strikes. So their response would be more along the lines of

"You massacre an entire city's population, we nuke two cities in return", or unleash Vegetarian. And any Nazi massacres of cities will lead to more rebellions as people go "we might be next and i'd rather go down fighting than be slaughtered!"

I'm not claiming Nazi revenge threats/actions would work, just that they would do something extremely vicious rather than tamely surrender.
 
Assuming it doesn't pick a war with the WAllies again and get nuked out of existence? Probably about a generation or two, assuming somebody sane (read: not a Nazi ideologue) doesn't get into power and realize how badly they have fucked their education system. After that, even if the state somehow survives it will become a North Korea-esque hellhole.

Seriously, the Nazis make the Soviets look like saints when it came to their education system. By the end of the 1930s, thousands of teachers were leaving their jobs because they couldn't handle it any more; by 1938, there were only 2500 teachers graduating a year, to replace the 8,000 teachers annually leaving. Class sizes increased to 43 students per teacher, compared to 37 in 1927, and less then 1/14 of all secondary schoolteachers were under the age of 40. By 1939 school employers were complaining that graduates' standards of knowledge of language and arithmetic were poor and that the level of school knowledge of the examinees has been sinking for some time.

The Third Reich, in 1939, had 41,000 students in universities which was down from 104,000 in 1931. In technical universities, numbers fell from 22,000 in 1931 to 12,000 in 1939. Amongst the smaller student body, the percentage of students going into the sciences had declined, going from 12% to 8% of the student body. Medicine, oddly enough, was the real winner, going from 1/3 of the student body in 1932 to nearly half in 1939. Meanwhile, the number of females in higher education fell from 17,000 in 1932 to under 6,000 in 1939; hardly an encouraging sign.

Even if sometimes the Soviets couldn't resist the sirens call of imposing ideology upon the hard sciences (why yes Lysenkoism, I'm looking at you) they generally had the good sense of recognizing that Marxism is a social ideology that is about human societies and not about the physical universe. Hence, they did not fuck their educational system up all that badly. So, rather than landing Aryan supermen on the moon, the Nazis are going to face severe problems keeping up with the US and any other liberal democracies in terms of science and technology.

Not to mention their peacetime economic policies were even more borked then their war time one.
 
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TFSmith121

Banned
But whose?

The problem is, nuclear weapons would quickly render the question moot.

If whoever gets them first is not in a hot war with one of the other powers, I don't see a "peacetime" nuclear strike. Didn't happen in 1945-49, so I don't see the realities shifting in a "West vs. Reich" cold war.

Best,
 
The response here seem to assume Heydrich is killed as OTL. I dont see that as a given. I suspect that were he to butterfly his way though to the 'Victorious Reich goal line he'd be the most likely to gain power. We cannot dismiss the idea that through the 1940s he would move closer to power as Goerings self indulgence & the ineptitude of the others may way for him.

As soon as Hitler dies. The Reich was designed so that no one but an undisputed leader could manage it, and Hitler was really the only person that applied to. Plus, no other leader has the charisma to keep things going as the economy inevitably comes crashing down and the quagmire that is the Eastern Front drains men and material.

Stalin was not dependant on charisma. He was a skilled & efficient manager and the best at internal power politics. Heydrich had some similar characteristics. But, look beyond Heydrich there are quite a few nazi, or Army leaders, from the next tier down who would have the skill and ruthlessness of a Stalin to replace Hitler as 'The Leader'. There is a certain amount of circumstance and uncontroled luck that can influence this, but guys like Stalin or Napoleon have a way of creating their luck and circumstances.
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
Or Bormann suffers a similar fate to Beria after the death of Stalin.

I dunno, Bormann seem's more like he'll end up as a Molotov than a Beria, sidelined into obscurity, granted a 'promotion' in a far off land where he'll be nice and far away from Berlin. Himmler, if anything, would be the man who gets a bullet through the neck- If in this scenario Reinhard Heydrich lives, the man'll want a promotion, or if Heydrich is dead, then it'll be a general purge to wipe out anyone too powerful.
 
This is the requirement of the Op.

So, assume that Nazi Germany has conquered continental Europe including European Russia by 1945. The UK remains free. Obviously the system employed by the Third Reich was unsustainable in the long term, but when does the house of cards come crashing down? What are the consequences when it does?

There is no PoD defining that will assure US participation. Although highly improbable, the U.S. Isn't assured to join the war.

With regards to how far this will go, it totally depends. If the nazi powers that be remains with the same mentality as hitler, I have to agree with calbears timeline prediction of around 1970-80s nazi collapse or whenever those nazis become trigger happy vs USA.

However, if it becomes like OTL China wherein the party reforms to a more reasonable policies aka like the transformation from Mao to Deng. Then, the third Reich can remain indefinitely.
 
If whoever gets them first is not in a hot war with one of the other powers, I don't see a "peacetime" nuclear strike. Didn't happen in 1945-49, so I don't see the realities shifting in a "West vs. Reich" cold war.

Best,

Given that Hitler had shown bad faith in every negotiation and peace deal in the run-up to ww2, any peace measure would be an armistice before WW3, and everyone from Berlin to Washington knew it.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Yes, but...

Given that Hitler had shown bad faith in every negotiation and peace deal in the run-up to ww2, any peace measure would be an armistice before WW3, and everyone from Berlin to Washington knew it.

Yes, but...

Mutual Assured Destruction took that one off the table.

Even in 1945-49, there were various and sundry in the West arguing for "preventative war"; there were a fair number (some of the same individuals, in fact) arguing for the same regarding the PRC in the 1950s and 1960s.

They never got very far, for obvious reasons.

As undeniably brutal and murderous as the Nazis, even they shied away from using chemical or biological weapons against anyone who could retaliate.

I don't see that perspective changing in the event of a West-3rd Reich+ cold war in the 1940s-90s.

Using the lifespan of the Soviet Union as a model, I can see a Nazi Germany-dominated Eurasian empire (for lack of a better word) lasting as long, which takes it up to the end of the century.

The figures on college education posted above are fascinating, however. That's an interesting aspect.

Best,
 
Does anybody see a scenario like the world in the book Fatherland happening?

-Lets say by the sixties Germany has made Europe Judenfrei and have all the Lebensraum they want in the east. In the Thomas Harris novel (not the crappy cable movie) the Germans have become complacent living off the spoils of conquest. The problem for the Nazis is what happens next? You've achieved all your goals and everyone is living in their happy Nazi wonderland listening to The Merry Widow. who do you rally the people around to hate. I could see the party loosing control. The German people would want color TVs not dying for the fatherland. With England holding out I could see a massive black market going on with American/English goods coming in. I could see wealthy party members taking trips overseas and bringing back blue jeans and whiskey.

I also see the gap widening between party members and regular Germans. Just like in Russia and China OTL if you want to live the good life you either join the party or have a relative in the party. Basically the Reich begins to rot away from the inside.
 
What about Speer as the next Fuhrer?

He would have been in control of the economy, nobody actively hated him, and he was one of the few people who could talk to Adolf.

Its not as if Khrushchev was the heir apparent to Stalin.

Speer might actually have been able to make the economy of the Greater Reich work ,at least for a while, possibly even into the 90's.
 
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