Didn't say that. However, the Einsatzgruppen were an OPSEC disaster waiting to happen, because the moment thousands of those cases come home, there's going to be a lot of awkward questions from the German Public, especially if documents, photographs and/or snuff films are smuggled from the front.
If the Nazis won would they have been able to accomplish Generalplan Ost?
- Thread starter Wendigo
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Didn't say that. However, the Einsatzgruppen were an OPSEC disaster waiting to happen, because the moment thousands of those cases come home, there's going to be a lot of awkward questions from the German Public, especially if documents, photographs and/or snuff films are smuggled from the front.
Deleted member 1487
Info got out IOTL and there wasn't many people willing to question stuff in a violent police state willing to mass murder in the east.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose#Experience_at_the_World_War_II_Eastern_Front
Also most of the army was aware to a degree of what was happening in the east:
https://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Ger...ywords=soldaten+on+fighting+killing+and+dying
Not disputing any of those points. However, I was saying that the post-war phase when they all come home is going to be fun for Germany.
Wendigo
Banned
Any Nazi military (Heer would be entirely replaced by the Waffen SS) in a post victory scenario would become extremely indoctrinated and enthusiastic about the extermination of "inferior races."
In his TL CalBear covered it perfectly when he said:
"The Waffen SS of 1958 is built around enlisted men who were raised from the cradle on Nazi doctrine (Hitler Youth to a man), NCOs who were in grade school when the Party came to power, and officers who have their position thanks to Party loyalty... They make the IJA from OTL look like conscientious objectors."
There would be no shortage of troops willing to kill Slavs, Jews, Gypsies or any other group labeled "Untermensch."
Deleted member 1487
Its going to be the worst kept secret in Germany. I think most people just won't talk about it and if they do it will be a 'necessary evil' for the future of Germany line the Americans of the time thought about what happened to the Native Americans.
Economically, this would have been incompetent and disastrous. Which is why I think it would be a signal of why the Nazi state would collapse in on itself.
Deleted member 1487
Probably easily as bad as the IJA and worst of the OTL SS, not really sure how they could be much worse.
Depends on what you mean. You will certainly have ruthless, brutal products of the Nazi 'education' system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Political_Institutes_of_Education
Most will have some human compassion and it will the be hardcore driving policy. But with the war won, it isn't the average German that will be activated to do all of this, it will be the most brutal, ruthless, and ideological elements of German society that will be carrying out policy.
redlightning
Banned
I think the genocide could effectively be done. It's impossible for them to kill all of the population though. There will always be partisan resistance. The Germans will never be able to settle any of this territory anyway. Their methods would've self-destructive at best.
Wendigo
Banned
Of course then the average German soldier will be encouraged and trained as a matter of doctrine to emulate the most ruthless and fanatical members especially in the East. Those who aren't brutal by nature will be made so by ideological indoctrination.
Within a generation you'll have an entire army of monsters and fanatics who think nothing of shooting women and children in reprisals, forcing villagers through minefields, or abducting people to use as slave labor merely because they are "subhuman."
That book takes tens of thousands of hours of transcripts of recordings of POWs and picks and chooses the quotes they want to use to a single message that the German military had in their entity from their Air Force to the sub crews down to the lowest grunt had become fantasized sociopaths along the lines of the IJA.
If someone wanted to just publish the transcripts, not edited with psychobabble telling the authors what to think about these sailors, airmen and soldiers mindset in their selective quoting it would be a book worth buying.
Hitler didn't get his military in its entirety to where the book argues he did, mainly because he didn't have the time in power to do it. A Hitler that rules 15-20 more years then yes virtually the whole force structure would become in time would have been as fantasized as the author selected snippets of quotes make them out to be.
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Deleted member 1487
I mean we could take Iran as a heuristic. They went through a horrific war and have a very ideological regime in place with a 'praetorian guard' like what the SS would have been, but the fanatics in the Revolutionary Guard defend the regime, while the army isn't particularly ideological or extreme. They concentrate those really behind the regime into a special force, which I think would be the case going forward with the SS vs. Army. In the end of course they would all be flavors of extremists by the standards of the earlier generation, but depending on how corrupt the regime is and how well it delivers prosperity, the general public, including the average soldiers, who would be a conscript and not used in the East to do the ethnic cleansing and settlement once the war in the East was over, might well not be very pro-Nazi. There might be an anti-Nazi undercurrent in society, with a favored, radical elite like in Iran.
Deleted member 1487
Its funny I made that argument on reddit and go downvoted to oblivion. Well it certainly is an argument with merit, same with the very real problems with Omar Bartov's work on the German army, it cannot be denied that the German military didn't know about the atrocities going on in the East through the grapevine, if not directly witnessing it. Many if not most might not have liked or supported it, but they weren't fighting to stop it.
Still after the war bringing back their experiences and talking about them at home they might help create an anti-Nazi/war sentiment in German society that undermines the regime, especially if they are corrupt and don't deliver the promised prosperity.
As I said before, when the post-war settles in, Nazi Germany's cruelty is going to garner a 0% Approval rating across Occupied Europe (especially France), and when the house of cards comes crashing after Hitler's death, there's going to be a lot of drawn knives.
Deleted member 1487
There were fascist movements all over Europe that supplied soldiers that fought to the bitter end in the East. France even produced a division of SS soldiers and had the Milice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33rd_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_Charlemagne_(1st_French)
Some of the last defenders of the Reichstag were Frenchmen. The removal of non-French Jews living in France was actually pretty popular within France and the deportation of Jews from Paris was tacitly accepted within the city because it freed up a lot of apartments and drove down rents. France wasn't as against the Nazis as you'd hope; much of the resistance came from 1943 on when it was clear the Nazis were losing. The drawn knives will be in Germany, depending on whether Goering is still Hitler's appointed successor. The occupied countries won't be in a position to do anything about it.
Here is the problem in history. People want things black or white. In the Cold War in the popular history books for sale for the masses they wanted a clear SS/German Military divide both for political reasons and the reality is messy in a way most people would rather not read or accept. The more advanced WW2 history books during the Cold War for educated elite of course had a very different message. After the Cold War the pendulum immediately swung in the popular history to what the books depicts every German soldier, sailor or airman as a fanatically crazed sociopath.
Most people like a simple uncomplicated story and the reality is Hitler wanted his forces eventually to become what post Cold War popular view of all of them is, but in 13 years he didn't have nearly enough time to do that with the entirety of the non-SS German Armed forces, but certainly a number of troops in the East were bloodied, and fantasized and came to view the enemy population as something to just rape and kill.
In a Germany wins in the East scenario I imagine Hitler would send much of the regular army home and use mainly the Waffen SS which would grow to being several million strong for anti-partisan actions and to occupy various nations around Europe and defend against the British. The number of death camps in the East would grow and I imagine a great many would be used for helping depopulate areas of the East. Hitler could still could and probably would fry the economy of Germany building his grand capital city which would require to economically work importing huge numbers of slaves from the East and the German population would then be face to face with the nature of their government. Not having it be far off whispers and rumors. Some would stand against it, but most under true Totalitarianism based on other experiences with it keep their heads down.
We have never had a true Totalitarian state taken down from within, many have de-Totalitarianized into regular dictatorships like the USSR and China after the leader dies. Obviously, in the case of North Korea not all go that route. If you have a son or heir who the leader trains to rule like him it doesn't happen.
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I think either the Germans would struggle to get enough settlers moving east or bankrupt themselves subsiding the migration. Sadly the genocide portion they could probably manage.
I do wonder about food security for the German people though. If they kill of enough non-Germans surely agricultural production outside Germany would fall? Spread people too thin and rob them of enough and you'll just have subsistence farmers can't export anything.
I do wonder about food security for the German people though. If they kill of enough non-Germans surely agricultural production outside Germany would fall? Spread people too thin and rob them of enough and you'll just have subsistence farmers can't export anything.
Deleted member 1487
The question is how many Slavic slaves were needed to maintain the resource extraction economy and agriculture? The Germans thought they could get away with 20-30 million and ship in 10 million colonists that would get major subsidies with heavy mechanized agricultural equipment to enable them to do the job without nearly as much labor. It might work, might not depending on whether they could afford it and get the necessary people, while maintaining the population of slaves.
Maybe the Nazis develop cloning and industrial breeding to get more "Aryans" to settle in the east.
Deleted member 1487
Indeed, people generally don't do nuance.
The anti-partisan stuff won't really be that big of a job due to the fact that resistance requires outside support to really function and most of the time they were fixated on trying to find something to eat. Without Moscow supporting it, resistance would really not have a source of supply, equipment, and training. Instead it would mostly be trying to survive and hide from the Nazis, not fight. Fighting and organized military and being seen is going to be the worst thing they could do. Especially if the Nazis can control the food sources they'd really be able to starve out resistance.
Remember move of the General Plan Ost murders was planned to be a function of starvation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
IOTL the Germans were face to face with forced labor and they didn't care one whit. That was normalized in WW1 and really the German people by an large were fine with making foreigners do the work they didn't want. I mean in some ways the use of illegal immigrants in US society is a much more mild verision of that. Same with the use of wage slaves to make cheap products for US consumption.
Yes. I think the Nazis would go that route, because I just don't see the 'pure' system of Nazism being viable in the long run and once post-Hitler leadership realizes what would be needed to keep the regime viable they would alter the way it ran. I don't see a North Korea situation being sustainable in Germany. North Korea is the exception to the rule.