How would a "reformed" Nazi Germany that completed Generalplan Ost be viewed by the world?

[spoonzandforkz]

I am aware a Nazi victory is in any case unlikely, their post-war survival even unlikelier, but for the sake of this question let's assume they somehow manage to survive. So...

Perhaps Japan is less aggressive and doesn't draw the US into war at Pearl Harbor, perhaps the UK throws in the towels after a Different Dunkirk Gone Bad and some rather different local politics due to butterflies, perhaps some luckier fortune for the Germans on the East - perhaps Stalin is assassinated, dies in an accident, or dies due to a heart attack causes chaos to ensue in the Soviet struggle for leadership, perhaps they don't waste time in North Africa, perhaps the Japanese invade Siberia, and fail, but not before keeping enough Soviet forces fighting east and not west- to the point where the Germans somehow pull off a victory and essentially collapse the Soviet Union (it is divided between the Germans and the Japanese, with a rump Siberian buffer state between the two)

And maybe the US stays isolationist for a bit longer, and the Germans manage to reinforce the Atlantic Wall and relocate their industries west to the point it makes conquest unpalatable once the political tides towards interventionism turn once more, and perhaps they invent the A-bomb after the US invented their own but before they manage to pull off a first-strike (in this world, they move to mass production too slowly before the Germans get their own, one capable of reaching Britain and turning London into a smoldering charnelhouse)

Given multiple decades to play with, they enact and manage to complete Generalplan Ost in Eastern Europe - and through enough luck and some well-timed leadership changes, manage to slowly reform to the point that by 2020, while not quite democratic, it's not totalitarian anymore either. They offer an apology and acknowledge their principal role in the perpetration of Slavic genocide. But of course, it's not like they're gonna evict out the tens of millions of German settlers already living there and repatriate the land to the remaining Slavs in the country (depending on definitions, either in the low millions or less than ten thousand) besides some symbolic concessions here and there.

Now, I am aware that this exact series of events is rather unlikely from a pure probability standpoint, but for the sake of the question: How would such a Nazi Germany be viewed by the rest of the world?

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

Nobody would care much. Cheap labor would mean business wouldn't want to offend Berlin so think like OTL China.

 

[kham_coc]

I am aware a Nazi victory is in any case unlikely, their post-war survival even unlikelier, but for the sake of this question let's assume they somehow manage to survive. So...

Perhaps Japan is less aggressive and doesn't draw the US into war at Pearl Harbor, perhaps the UK throws in the towels after a Different Dunkirk Gone Bad and some rather different local politics due to butterflies, perhaps some luckier fortune for the Germans on the East - perhaps Stalin is assassinated, dies in an accident, or dies due to a heart attack causes chaos to ensue in the Soviet struggle for leadership, perhaps they don't waste time in North Africa, perhaps the Japanese invade Siberia, and fail, but not before keeping enough Soviet forces fighting east and not west- to the point where the Germans somehow pull off a victory and essentially collapse the Soviet Union (it is divided between the Germans and the Japanese, with a rump Siberian buffer state between the two)

And maybe the US stays isolationist for a bit longer, and the Germans manage to reinforce the Atlantic Wall and relocate their industries west to the point it makes conquest unpalatable once the political tides towards interventionism turn once more, and perhaps they invent the A-bomb after the US invented their own but before they manage to pull off a first-strike (in this world, they move to mass production too slowly before the Germans get their own, one capable of reaching Britain and turning London into a smoldering charnelhouse)

Given multiple decades to play with, they enact and manage to complete Generalplan Ost in Eastern Europe - and through enough luck and some well-timed leadership changes, manage to slowly reform to the point that by 2020, while not quite democratic, it's not totalitarian anymore either. They offer an apology and acknowledge their principal role in the perpetration of Slavic genocide. But of course, it's not like they're gonna evict out the tens of millions of German settlers already living there and repatriate the land to the remaining Slavs in the country (depending on definitions, either in the low millions or less than ten thousand) besides some symbolic concessions here and there.

Now, I am aware that this exact series of events is rather unlikely from a pure probability standpoint, but for the sake of the question: How would such a Nazi Germany be viewed by the rest of the world?

What do people think of the US?

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

Government level response in the immediate aftermath of such an apology?
I'm a bit of a cynic so I'll say they accept it as something that has already happened and instead focus on Germany's recent good behaviour in hopes that this may be a prelude to some sort of democratization and denazification. Probably some pressure to get Germany to offer some sort of compensation to the survivors. Likely the Siberian buffer state tries to press its territorial claims to European Russia, and agrees to set them aside in exchange for some monetary reparations paid directly to the state.

Popular and academic response?
Probably something to the effect of, "pfft that just means they aren't even trying to hide it any more!"

 

[EWHM]

People whose great-great-great grandfathers did an ethnic cleansing to get demographic hegemony in the area they reside in like to look down on people whose fathers or grandfathers did the same. No white hats really.

 

[Pelranius]

Honestly, I think giving Generalplan Ost even a remote chance of success would require classifying a lot of Eastern Slavs to be "Aryans".

 

[RedSword12]

Honestly, I think giving Generalplan Ost even a remote chance of success would require classifying a lot of Eastern Slavs to be "Aryans".

I think Generalplan Ost would be a fairly haphazardly organized affair, like most Nazi-run programs. Even fervent nazis like Albert Forster, who had no qualms about engaging in genocide, were willing to register Slavs as Aryans when they perceived it as beneficial for them to do so. So while you would see mass-murder on an unheard-of scale, there would be a lot of "bugs" where personal interests and other such considerations lead to inconsistent applications of policy.

 

[Pelranius]

I think Generalplan Ost would be a fairly haphazardly organized affair, like most Nazi-run programs. Even fervent nazis like Albert Forster, who had no qualms about engaging in genocide, were willing to register Slavs as Aryans when they perceived it as beneficial for them to do so. So while you would see mass-murder on an unheard-of scale, there would be a lot of "bugs" where personal interests and other such considerations lead to inconsistent applications of policy.

In my headcanon for Man in the High Castle, the Nazis just Aryanized the vast majority of Slavs, and moved them into small-medium cities or large villages to be indoctrinated with a "purified Slavic culture, purged of all post 12th century Judeo-Mongol corruption", personally designed by one H. Himmler.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

“Full completion of Generalplan Ost” and “reformed/successful” Nazi Germany are total oxymorons. Full completion of Generalplan Ost would be economic, industrial and military suicide for Germany - even if they could stomach the monstrous inhumanity of it. Within the Reich, Germany was to be the industrial heart of Europe in order to maintain its control, fed food and raw materials by its colonies. The problem is that this economic future was in direct contradiction to the eastern colonization plans that Ost called for. Germany could have one or the other, not both.

Nazi economist, SS-Hauptsurmfuhrer Helmut Schubert laid it out very clearly in a 1942 critique of Generalplan Ost. The fundamental problem was manpower. Germany was rapidly urbanizing and was already having problems finding labour for farms within its borders. Schubert correctly predicted that this process could be expected to accelerate post war which would leave Germany ever shorter on potential settler-farmers for the east. Small infusions of a few thousand Germans wouldn't work. They'd just marry into the locals and dillute the blood. But large forced displacements of millions would wreck the German economy and endanger Germany's ability to hold down its empire with industrialized and mechanized force. In fact, to maintain the German industry Schubert foresaw (again correctly) that post-war Germany would actually need to import large numbers of foreign workers. In short, Germany had to choose between economic control of Europe, or de-industrialization and settlement of the East. [Mazower, "Hitler's Empire, pp.217-218]

The “just use the locals as slaves” or “aryanize the locals” suggestion also don’t ultimately hold water. On the former, Generalplan Ost called for butchering the locals on the order of tens of millions, which now meant there would be a manpower hole in the tens of millions. Even only moderating themselves to “only” the elimination of 50% of the population in a 30-year period left them without enough workers to adequately operate the economy of Poland, never mind the occupied territories of the USSR. Some some Nazi administrators resorted to arbitrarily "Germanizing" conquered peoples, but even with them conjuring something on the order of 40 million or so “Germans” from the occupied populace left them with a vast, crippling manpower shortage.

The actual fate of those arbitrarily reclassified “Germans” also shows the fatal flaw with trying “aryanize the locals” suggestion. None of these peoples were actually Germans and everyone knew it regardless of what the official paperwork said. As a result, the actual Germans still treated these new "Germans" like shit. It was made clear that all those called Germans would not be equal in the New Order. Suffice to say, that's grounds for future rebellion right there.

Actually going through with Generalplan Ost makes the collapse of the Reich an inevitability. There would be too much internal and external pressure, even if it had managed to achieve Hitler's ideal frontiers. It was never based on a sound concept, and better managed colonial Empires died to lesser stresses.

The only way Nazi Germany has any shot at reforming, as implausible as that is, is if the internal contradictions in Generalplan Ost force the Germans too abandon it. If the Germans dogmatically stick to it, they wind up dispersed into a weakened cabal of agrarian feudal overlords, barely capable of holding themselves together in the face of even domestic rebellions. They then would have been crushed by the Western Allies and/or the rump Soviets/Russians, who would have even more overwhelming industrial and military superiority, and the will to use it due to the ongoing outrages perpetrated by murderous Nazi rule. The question would only be how many more people would have to die before it happened.

 

[Aghasverov]

In my headcanon for Man in the High Castle, the Nazis just Aryanized the vast majority of Slavs, and moved them into small-medium cities or large villages to be indoctrinated with a "purified Slavic culture, purged of all post 12th century Judeo-Mongol corruption", personally designed by one H. Himmler.

Agree except, IIRC, Himmler (who was a bit of an Asiatophile, if that's a word ) believed that the Mongol/Tatar admixture was the one redeeming thing about the Russians - in opposition to, say, Rosenberg, who believed Slavs were basically Aryan but just degenerated somewhat from the Nordic ideal....

 

[Aghasverov]

I think Generalplan Ost would be a fairly haphazardly organized affair, like most Nazi-run programs. Even fervent nazis like Albert Forster, who had no qualms about engaging in genocide, were willing to register Slavs as Aryans when they perceived it as beneficial for them to do so. So while you would see mass-murder on an unheard-of scale, there would be a lot of "bugs" where personal interests and other such considerations lead to inconsistent applications of policy.

Quotes from Forster, off the top of my head...
"If I looked like Himmler, I wouldn't talk about race."
"If Der Fuehrer doesn't like the way I do things in Danzig, he can come here and tell me so himself."
I have a gut feeling that there would be a lot of Forsters in any administration of Generalplan Ost....

 

[Pelranius]

Agree except, IIRC, Himmler (who was a bit of an Asiatophile, if that's a word ) believed that the Mongol/Tatar admixture was the one redeeming thing about the Russians - in opposition to, say, Rosenberg, who believed Slavs were basically Aryan but just degenerated somewhat from the Nordic ideal....

Good point. Rosenberg would probably be the more likely author of such a "purified Slavic culture" program nonsense, and just as frightening, the inventor of a Russian language removed of "all Asiatic influences.

 

[Aghasverov]

Good point. Rosenberg would probably be the more likely author of such a "purified Slavic culture" program nonsense, and just as frightening, the inventor of a Russian language removed of "all Asiatic influences.

Not sure if he'd even have that much influence. Hitler had come to view him as relatively insignificant by the 1940's... he'd probably be limited to competing with Goering to see how many works of art, musical instruments, and cultural artefacts he could loot and present as examples of Aryan genius

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

Anyways, My guess is generalplan ost survives a grand total of 5 minutes after Hitler's death unless things go really wrong and you end up with some crazy like Himmler or Dirlewanger as the Stalin to Hitler's lenin. My guess is you probably see harsh efforts at cultural "germanization" and attempts to de-russify/slavicize the culture of the populations of eastern europe.

 

[brooklyn99]

Good point. Rosenberg would probably be the more likely author of such a "purified Slavic culture" program nonsense, and just as frightening, the inventor of a Russian language removed of "all Asiatic influences.

Given Rosenberg's role as chief administrator of Nazi-occupied territories in Eastern Europe, if he were to have a primary role in how Nazi rule would proceed post-war, could the long term impact be considered the least devastating scenario for the native populace? To put another way; would he be inclined to disregard Generalplan ost in it's original iteration?

 

[Tolkiene]

Given Rosenberg's role as chief administrator of Nazi-occupied territories in Eastern Europe, if he were to have a primary role in how Nazi rule would proceed post-war, could the long term impact be considered the least devastating scenario for the native populace? To put another way; would he be inclined to disregard Generalplan ost in it's original iteration?

Rosenberg's Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories didn't have a lot of authority. See, in theory the Reichskommissars were his subordinates...but in practice they were able to bypass him. This was especially the case with the notoriouly power-hungry Erich Koch, also Gauleiter of East Prussia (a guy Himmler tried to have removed from his Gauleiter job once...but then the Reichsheini had to back off). Rosenberg really didn't want him as Reichskommissar of the Ukraine because he knew Koch would not accept his authority. Instead he wanted to send him off to the hypothetical Reichskommissariat Moskowien, which would have been a far less prestigious task if it had come to fruition.

Koch's ideas for wholesale exploitation of the Ukraine were incompatible with Rosenberg's ideas. Now Rosenberg was a Nazi zealot. He did not he see Slavs as Aryans. He was a fanatical anti-Semite who supported the 'Final Solution'. He still wanted to subjugate the Ukrainians. But he was fine with making limited (and generally cosmetic) concessions and working with local puppets to create a 'cordon sanitaire' against Russia. Whereas Koch just wanted to use the whip, which was in line with Adolf 'shoot anyone who looks askance at us' Hitler.

However, Koch had powerful friends, namely Bormann and Göring and Hitler considered him his most capable Gauleiter. So Rosenberg failed to prevent him from being appointed...and Koch was as disobedient as could be expected. The would-be ideological pope of Nazism was good at writing books that were full of barely coherent twaddle and his colleagues made fun of (having read 'The Myth of the Twentieth Century' I can see why lol), but bad at power plays.

Likewise Rosenberg didn't have control over Himmler's SS apparatus. Same applies to Göring's power base (the Hunger Plan was devised by the Four-Year Plan Authority, the economics ministries and the Wehrmacht high command...so by institutions often stereotyped as being more 'rational'). Because it's not Nazi Germany unless you have various competing authorities acting like feudal overlords trying to carve out their own kingdoms and 'working towards the Führer' by coming up with whichever scheme would please him. Nazi plans for the East were all varying degrees of hell for the natives.

 

[CalBear]

Quotes from Forster, off the top of my head...
"If I looked like Himmler, I wouldn't talk about race."
"If Der Fuehrer doesn't like the way I do things in Danzig, he can come here and tell me so himself."
I have a gut feeling that there would be a lot of Forsters in any administration of Generalplan Ost....

This perspective always sort of amazes me. The Reich leadership was going to achieve its goals unless the lost the war.

The various Gauleiter sent to General Government would have talked the talk right until a car full of Gestapo agents arrived and took them and their familiy to Treblinka. After the third or fourth time that happens folks are going to square up PDQ.

Sure the regional/local leaders would try to steal anything that wasn't tied down (the Reich sort of defined corruption) or try to protect "their" workforce from "proper handling. It won't matter, There were too many true believers to try to get away with running your mouth or ignoring orders or, God Save you, protect Slavs. The only reason anyone managed to pull that off, be it Schindler or some local Party hack running a cathouse on the side was that the war rather diverted everyone's attention from the little details. If the first couple things on the morning briefing are no longer "we incurred 7,423 unrecoverable losses from Army Group South in the past 72 hours" and "14,000 homes were destroyed last night in British Bomber Attacks" those little details are now going to be scrutinized, especially by Himmler, who never met a possible conspiracy he didn't see an an opportunity to make examples.

 

[Aghasverov]

This perspective always sort of amazes me. The Reich leadership was going to achieve its goals unless the lost the war.

The various Gauleiter sent to General Government would have talked the talk right until a car full of Gestapo agents arrived and took them and their familiy to Treblinka. After the third or fourth time that happens folks are going to square up PDQ.

Sure the regional/local leaders would try to steal anything that wasn't tied down (the Reich sort of defined corruption) or try to protect "their" workforce from "proper handling. It won't matter, There were too many true believers to try to get away with running your mouth or ignoring orders or, God Save you, protect Slavs. The only reason anyone managed to pull that off, be it Schindler or some local Party hack running a cathouse on the side was that the war rather diverted everyone's attention from the little details. If the first couple things on the morning briefing are no longer "we incurred 7,423 unrecoverable losses from Army Group South in the past 72 hours" and "14,000 homes were destroyed last night in British Bomber Attacks" those little details are now going to be scrutinized, especially by Himmler, who never met a possible conspiracy he didn't see an an opportunity to make examples.

Oh, I'm not saying that people like Forster (who, incidentally, was a real antisemitic bastard with plenty of blood on his hands, even if he did give a pass to a lot of Kashubians/Poles in Danzig) were the rule... there were plenty of other Gauleiters and SS and Heer personnel who were confirmed ideologues who would've tried to carry out GP-Ost to the bloody last letter. I just think that, spread out over an area greater than what the Reich held IOTL (let's say, Russia east to the "A-A Line"), that the murderous system would've broken down - practicality would've probably gained the upper hand over nutbag "racial" ideology.

 

[CalBear]

Oh, I'm not saying that people like Forster (who, incidentally, was a real antisemitic bastard with plenty of blood on his hands, even if he did give a pass to a lot of Kashubians/Poles in Danzig) were the rule... there were plenty of other Gauleiters and SS and Heer personnel who were confirmed ideologues who would've tried to carry out GP-Ost to the bloody last letter. I just think that, spread out over an area greater than what the Reich held IOTL (let's say, Russia east to the "A-A Line"), that the murderous system would've broken down - practicality would've probably gained the upper hand over nutbag "racial" ideology.

Practically only wins out when the Nutbags don't have a both a very effective, ruthless to the point of insanity secret police with working extermination camps where examples can be made in the blink of an eye AND and Army inside of the Army with rabid dedication to the Nutbag-in-Chief, commanded by a second Nutbag who makes the Fuhrer (i.e. the poster child for eV0l dictator) seem reasonable by comparison. Even Stalin and the NKVD couldn't measure up to the combination of the Gestapo/SS/Waffen SS.

Worse, most of the accounting and planning for the genocide will be conducted by men who in a different world, would be bankers and accountants, and who will treat the wholesale slaughter of millions of people with the passion of ordering a new box of Post-it notes and a couple ball-point pens. Only thing worse than sociopaths let loose to commit their most loathsome acts was those sociopaths getting really efficient oversight by people who are anything but crazy, people who are their to punch the clock, get their work done, and go home for supper and some time with the kids before bedtime.

 

[Aghasverov]

Anyways, My guess is generalplan ost survives a grand total of 5 minutes after Hitler's death unless things go really wrong and you end up with some crazy like Himmler or Dirlewanger as the Stalin to Hitler's lenin. My guess is you probably see harsh efforts at cultural "germanization" and attempts to de-russify/slavicize the culture of the populations of eastern europe.

Bad thing is, there was a lot of crazy to go around... one could hope that in the wake of Hitler's demise, that at least someone with a modicum of sense and restraint would come out on top.... I wouldn't hold my breath on that one, but once the knives were out, things would certainly get interesting... probably the machine-gunning of subjected Slavs would take second fiddle to getting as many (essentially) private armies back to the Altreich to take part in the power play to follow.
Dirlewanger though? Dirlewanger and his goons would be lined up and shot at the 1st opportunity, as soon as their "services" are no longer required. No one would want a loathsome pederast and a gang of rapists, murderers, and petty crooks of all sorts around for long, not even on their side...