Nazi Germany an allied power

I'm sure we've all thought about the possibility at one point or another about an anti-communist ww2 instead of an anti-fascist one. I've been wondering how likely is this prospect? What would it take for an anti-communist ww2 to happen? All of the european powers had been closely watching Germany and the soviet union to see what they would do. Wouldn't they of loved to see the two go to war and just kill eachother?

So basically, how do we make an anti-communist ww2 happen with Nazi-Germany being allied with otl western allies? If this isn't possible, then why?
 
The Nazis certainly intended to destroy Britain eventually: as Orwell pointed out, the British Empire was committing the unforgivable crime of dissolving, and if you gave it thirty years then the Indians would be building machine-guns and flying aeroplanes and the Nazi fantasy of a master-race sustained by slave-labour would vanish forever. In some earlier sketches of Hitler's plans, which were always vaguely conceived and altered as opportunities arose, Britain and France would help Germany in its endeavour to conquer the USSR and exterminate the inhabitants and only then would Germany turn on them and crush them (before starting to build up for the next conflict, with American-Jewish finance capital); but as we saw, even with Chamberlain in charge, the pace of Nazi re-armament made it necessary to engage in such aggressive grandstanding that they ended up at war with the Entente first.

For a German regime to be slow and sober enough to avoid that problem, it would have to not be Nazist. And the only other way to get this result, as ywnm says, is for the USSR to decide on a course of national suicide.

An anti-communist alliance - either dedicating to containing the USSR, or even to attacking it - between Britain, France, and Germany is plausible only in a world where the Nazis never rise to power.
 
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I agree with IBC, it wont happen as long as the Nazi party is in charge. There is just no working with them. Now if the party were reformed DRASTICALLY or outed and replaced by something more reasonable, its a possibility.
 

Eurofed

Banned
I agree with IBC, it wont happen as long as the Nazi party is in charge. There is just no working with them. Now if the party were reformed DRASTICALLY or outed and replaced by something more reasonable, its a possibility.

For a German regime to be slow and sober enough to avoid that problem, it would have to not be Nazist. And the only other way to get this result, as ywnm says, is for the USSR to decide on a course of national suicide.

An anti-communist alliance - either dedicating to containing the USSR, or even to attacking it - between Britain, France, and Germany is plausible only in a world where the Nazis never rise to power.

Sorry folks, both of you ignore the obvious PoD of Hitler dying in 1938-39 because of Maurice Bavaud or Georg Elser getting lucky, and a more moderate Nazi leadership taking over. With that, things can easily progress much like my "Phony War, short war" TL: Germany and the Entente never come to blows or quickly achieve a compromise peace over Poland, Mussolini crushes Yugoslavia but otherwise behaves, gradual Entente-nazifascist detente ensues, Stalin grabs some of his M-R Pact gains in the confusion but he is otherwise momentarily cowed by the aborning European powers bloc, so he turns to the Far East for easier gains and crushes Japan out of Manchuria and China. Far Eastern success and growing Soviet industrialization and rearmament make Stalin increasingly bolder in Eastern Europe and more confident about confronting the Euro powers, while Soviet successes and boldness drive Britain, France, Germany, and Italy to an anti-Soviet alliance. Tensions escalate during the early-mid 1940s till war is declared.

This kind of TL would still see a "Nazi" Germany in that it would still be a fascist power with some of the familar faces at the helm, if not the mustachioed genocidal loonie, so it would satisfy the PoD. And it would give Stalin a plausible way to stumble into a general conflict with a united Europe. It all depends on what definition of "Nazi" you adopt.
 
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Sorry folks, both of you ignore the obvious PoD of Hitler dying in 1938-39 because of Maurice Bavaud or Georg Elser getting lucky, and a more moderate Nazi leadership taking over. With that, things can easily progress much like my "Phony War, short war" TL: Germany and the Entente never come to blows or quickly achieve a compromise peace over Poland, Mussolini crushes Yugoslavia but otherwise behaves, gradual Entente-nazifascist detente ensues, Stalin grabs some of his M-R Pact gains in the confusion but he is otherwise momentarily cowed by the aborning European powers bloc, so he turns to the Far East for easier gains and crushes Japan out of Manchuria and China. Far Eastern success and growing Soviet industrialization and rearmament make Stalin increasingly bolder in Eastern Europe and more confident about confronting the Euro powers, while Soviet successes and boldness drive Britain, France, Germany, and Italy to an anti-Soviet alliance. Tensions escalate during the early-mid 1940s till war is declared.

This kind of TL would still see a "Nazi" Germany in that it would still be a fascist power with some of the familar faces at the helm, if not the mustachioed genocidal loonie, so it would satisfy the PoD. And it would give Stalin a plausible way to stumble into a general conflict with a united Europe. It all depends on what definition of "Nazi" you adopt.

Problem is the ‘’moderate’’ Nazi’s are still barbaric, prone to murderous anti-Semitism, militantly and diplomatically incompetent and corrupt to boot. Also you kinda ignore the fact that Hitler was Nazi Germany to a large degree without his charisma and domineering personality to keep the various factions line. Nazi Germany is an utter basket case.

Another point is, Stalin wasnt rabid like Hitler and was never prone to starting wars with major powers who could ally against him. Face it Eurofed we know you hate Poles and Russians (and to a degree the British) practically all your PODs result in a fascist Germany with Poland and the U.S.S.R getting ruled over by a genocidel *ahem* not-Nazi-honest-Greater German Empire.

You also tend to present this type of victorious Germany as a good thing with the Madagascar Plan adopted by *ahem* not-Nazi-honest-Germany as face saving exercise. Leaving aside the fact Nazi/fascist Germany would never adopt this far more expensive solution and that dumping millions of people into was basically a tropical wilderness was just another method of killing most of them)
 

Eurofed

Banned
Problem is the ‘’moderate’’ Nazi’s are still barbaric, prone to murderous anti-Semitism, militantly and diplomatically incompetent and corrupt to boot.

Without the genocidal loonies like Hitler and Himmler, they would not be any more barbaric, militant, diplomatically incompetent, and corrupt than Stalinist Russia, with which an wartime alliance of convenience was (temporarily) possible. And in the same circumstances, there is no convincing reason why their anti-Semitism would progress beyond existing legal discrimination or forced emigration at the worst.

Also you kinda ignore the fact that Hitler was Nazi Germany to a large degree without his charisma and domineering personality to keep the various factions line.

The thread asked for a "Nazi" Germany, so my PoD provides one. It is indeed more likely that the death of Hitler would bring the Heer at the helm, but that would no more be a fascist regime, so for the sake of this discussion I focused on the less likely outcome of the regime stabilizing under an alliance of party moderates and the officer corps.

Another point is, Stalin wasnt rabid like Hitler and was never prone to starting wars with major powers who could ally against him.

He could still stumble into a general war, given the "right" cricumstances. It's far from inevitable, but the man was prone to make bad mistakes about enemy powers' ability and willingness to fight (see: Winter War, Barbarossa, Korean War).

Face it Eurofed we know you hate Poles and Russians (and to a degree the British) practically all your PODs result in a fascist Germany with Poland and the U.S.S.R getting ruled over by a genocidel *ahem* not-Nazi-honest-Greater German Empire.

Sure, sure, I eat Slav liver for breakfast. :p:rolleyes: It is more accurate to say that I hate Communism and I loathe Britain for keeping Europe disunited, so practically all my fancy PoDs result into Ameriwank USA and/or a Europe united by some kind of Western European empire that crush the British Empire and somehow de-wank Communism. I'm actually otherwise neutral at worst about the success of a strong non-Soviet Russian Empire (which always has the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East as alternative expansion options) and it is an European hegemon as good as any other in my book (I'm simply less familar with the right PoDs to wank it). But if Russia needs to be knocked down one peg or two to ensure the success of uber-Europe, so be it. It is however correct that given a choice between non-genocidal fascism and communism, I'm typically going to pick the former.

You also tend to present this type of victorious Germany as a good thing with the Madagascar Plan adopted by *ahem* not-Nazi-honest-Germany as face saving exercise.

Blame my rabid Zionist sympathies <waves Israeli flag> if among all the manifold victims of Nazi atrocities, I feel most driven to find a butterfly way of keeping the Jews' skins safe in any Nazi-victory scenario. If it is plausible at all, I would keep all of those victims alive, genocide being the threshold of what makes such a scenario insufferably dystopian in my eyes, but if there is a choice to be done, I have some favorites. If you wish, this is my excuse to sneak a wanked *Israel in an otherwise rather popular TL kind.

Leaving aside the fact Nazi/fascist Germany would never adopt this far more expensive solution and that dumping millions of people into was basically a tropical wilderness was just another method of killing most of them)

As I reckon things, many more of them would survive than OTL, and that's a definite good thing in my book. But this is not really the case for the scenario we are discussing. The political and diplomatic constraints of alliance with the Western powers would either force Nazi-lite Germany to tone down its antisemitism even beyond its pre-war levels, or otherwise they would set up some kind of forced emigration-resettlement plan for their Jewish population in cooperation with the Western powers (which would tone down most of the hardships you were referring to). What angle of the world this would mean, whether Palestine, Madagascar, or some other rather low-value part of the European colonial empires Britain and France could do without, difficult to say.
 
I'm sure we've all thought about the possibility at one point or another about an anti-communist ww2 instead of an anti-fascist one. I've been wondering how likely is this prospect? What would it take for an anti-communist ww2 to happen?
It would need the Soviet Union to launch an invasion of Poland in, or before, January 1939, then Adolf could offer to come to the aid of Poland, and with a bit of luck if the invasion is serious enough, get Britain and France to support this new alliance as well.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
It would need the Soviet Union to launch an invasion of Poland in, or before, January 1939, then Adolf could offer to come to the aid of Poland, and with a bit of luck if the invasion is serious enough, get Britain and France to support this new alliance as well.
And for that you'd need some one much more of a nutcase than Stalin in charge of the USSR. Also Germany need to be less of a dick for anyone taking them wanting to protect Poland seriously.
 
Sorry folks, both of you ignore the obvious PoD of Hitler dying in 1938-39 because of Maurice Bavaud or Georg Elser getting lucky, and a more moderate Nazi leadership taking over.

As UF points out, it's questionable just where Germany stops being Nazist, given that Nazism was to a large extent just political Hitler-worship. A regime run by one of his annointed lieutenants would be Nazi, by my reckoning, but the greater the influence you give to those less likely to wage quixotic wars - the army-junker-business complex - the less Nazi the government becomes.

With that, things can easily progress much like my "Phony War, short war" TL: Germany and the Entente never come to blows or quickly achieve a compromise peace over Poland, Mussolini crushes Yugoslavia but otherwise behaves, gradual Entente-nazifascist detente ensues,

What's the nature of the "compromise" we're taking for granted? In the (unlikely) event of the Nazis restoring Poland... they would make it about as independent as 1st Slovakia, so in effect they would be conceding nothing but a banner.

Once the fight started, the British people were for fighting. They responded to stunning German success by launching a national effort to rescue the army, raising Churchill to the premiership, and starting to clear out the dead weight. Who's going to negotiate, why, and how are they ever going to get it throw parliament?

Stalin grabs some of his M-R Pact gains in the confusion but he is otherwise momentarily cowed by the aborning European powers bloc, so he turns to the Far East for easier gains and crushes Japan out of Manchuria and China. Far Eastern success and growing Soviet industrialization and rearmament make Stalin increasingly bolder in Eastern Europe and more confident about confronting the Euro powers, while Soviet successes and boldness drive Britain, France, Germany, and Italy to an anti-Soviet alliance. Tensions escalate during the early-mid 1940s till war is declared.

The good old Stalin-commits-suicide meme. Does anybody else (besides myself and Faeelin, who's idea I pinched :D) think a "Red Alert war" is more likely to be started by a western power?
 
You could always have communist revolution somewhere else in Europe that would scare the shit out of Britain enough to work with Germany and Italy(it wouldn't be hard). Western leaders were much more worried about communism than fascism in the inter-war years. They didn't bother launching propaganda campaigns against fascism, there was no "black scare". They would have had no problem dealing with fascists if communist states became a real threat to them.

You could have the Stalinist faction come out on top in the Spanish Civil War, and maybe even a communist France. A professor of mine once said that one of the main reasons the French didn't intervene when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland was that they were afraid of communist unrest or even revolution at home. He painted a picture of a very polarised Paris between Communists and Action Francais that could explode at any moment, and sometimes did.

If France and Spain managed to go Red the British would shit their pants. They'd ally with the devil himself to beat back bolshevism and maintain the balance of power on the continent.
 
Without the genocidal loonies like Hitler and Himmler, they would not be any more barbaric, militant, diplomatically incompetent, and corrupt than Stalinist Russia, with which an wartime alliance of convenience was (temporarily) possible.

Soviet Russia, militarist? Stalinist Russia, the country that shot senior generals for being senior generals, militarist? Chuckles.

In any case, Stalin made his share of big mistakes, but his diplomacy was based on rational and achievable goals. Stalin was an (evil, mass-murdering) statesman, and statesmen by-and-large hate wars (which put those vulgar generals in charge, and we know how much Stalin loved his generals) and fight them only when they look either unavoidable or easily winnable. The Nazis were war-fetishists, and killing Hitler in 1938-9 doesn't get round the Germans having built a war economy in a peacetime state.

And in the same circumstances, there is no convincing reason why their anti-Semitism would progress beyond existing legal discrimination or forced emigration at the worst.

Because slave labour can actually be pretty handy?

The thread asked for a "Nazi" Germany, so my PoD provides one. It is indeed more likely that the death of Hitler would bring the Heer at the helm, but that would no more be a fascist regime, so for the sake of this discussion I focused on the less likely outcome of the regime stabilizing under an alliance of party moderates and the officer corps.

Such a state is less Nazi, but describable as Nazi. And I still see no way to bring it into alliance with the Entente.

He could still stumble into a general war, given the "right" cricumstances. It's far from inevitable, but the man was prone to make bad mistakes about enemy powers' ability and willingness to fight (see: Winter War, Barbarossa, Korean War).

Example one: Stalin makes the seemingly quite reasonable assumption that tiny countries with minimal industry are easy targets. As soon as he learns that this is not necessarily the case, he backs down.

Example two: Stalin clings desperately to the belief that a large land war is not coming yet, and exposes his country to disaster through his timidity and refusal to provoke the enemy.

Example three: Stalin sends only unofficial volunteers and equipment to aid the risky endeavour begun by his ally.

Clearly the portrait of a man given to rash aggression. :rolleyes:

Stalin wasn't averse to taking risks, but nothing is going to make him intentionally pick a fight with multiple great powers.

Sure, sure, I eat Slav liver for breakfast. :p:rolleyes: It is more accurate to say that I hate Communism

Any particular reason why communism is worse than the other tyrannies that comprise the majority of human history?

and I loathe Britain for keeping Europe disunited,

So many things wrong with this...

1) If we ever did, "we" were a handful of statesmen, most of them unelected, all of them dead. Its as reasonable as me saying "I loathe Germany for bombing our cities"...

2) Except that the Germans totally did bomb our cities. The idea that Britain alone kept Europe disunited is laughable. Turns out Europe doesn't want to unite under some historic conqueror's rule, whatever us Brits think. Has our diplomacy has been perfectly succesful at accomplishing its aims since Queen Liz I? Nobody told me.

3) Germany acts in its national self-interest, and this is good. Britain acts in its national self-interest, and this is evil. Oh, sure.

I don't agree with the milder variety of Indian or Irish Anglophobe, but I can understand him and sympathise with him. This, not so much.

so practically all my fancy PoDs result into Ameriwank USA and/or a Europe united by some kind of Western European empire that crush the British Empire and somehow de-wank Communism.

There are no wanks in OTL. "Wank" refers to an implausible level of contrived success, and OTL is by definition plausible. If we allow OTL to contain "wanks", the word immediately becomes useless. You think communism was wanked IOTL (in spite of how it now survives in only a handful of countries - not an inevitable outcome) because you don't like communism. If I abused the word in the same fashion, I'd call OTL a Naziwank 'cos I don't like Nazis. But OTL happened, so let's deal with it.

I'm actually otherwise neutral at worst about the success of a strong non-Soviet Russian Empire (which always has the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East as alternative expansion options) and it is an European hegemon as good as any other in my book (I'm simply less familar with the right PoDs to wank it).

Of course, late Tsarist Russia was a land of Jews being beaten up in the street by Black Hundred thugs, of people living in caves below a prosperous city (Odessa), of workers shot for trying to protest peacefully, and of mass land theft from the Kazakh people.

Not saying it was worse than Stalin (it wasn't) or would have become worse than Stalin had it carried on that way (it could be as bad, but it wouldn't have to be). I just like how human suffering is okay when communists aren't to blame.

It is however correct that given a choice between non-genocidal fascism and communism, I'm typically going to pick the former.

Why, I must ask? Based on womens' rights alone, I'm with the reds.

Blame my rabid Zionist sympathies <waves Israeli flag> if among all the manifold victims of Nazi atrocities, I feel most driven to find a butterfly way of keeping the Jews' skins safe in any Nazi-victory scenario. If it is plausible at all, I would keep all of those victims alive, genocide being the threshold of what makes such a scenario insufferably dystopian in my eyes, but if there is a choice to be done, I have some favorites. If you wish, this is my excuse to sneak a wanked *Israel in an otherwise rather popular TL kind.

Sorry, but I just don't like the idea that anyone deserves death more or less because of colour or creed.

Most of history is people killing and opressing one-another. Changing history makes it better for some and worse for others. I prefer not to make moral judgements about that.

So why do we assume that there's "a choice to be done"? The Jews were race-enemy #1, and also the most accesible. If you for some reason prefer dead Poles to dead Jews, you shouldn't be rooting for the Nazis.

As I reckon things, many more of them would survive than OTL, and that's a definite good thing in my book. But this is not really the case for the scenario we are discussing.

You know what would save the Jews without even making them uprooted migrants in a hostile country?

Soviets at the Elbe, 1942. :p

The political and diplomatic constraints of alliance with the Western powers would either force Nazi-lite Germany to tone down its antisemitism even beyond its pre-war levels,

Hehe. So we assume, firstly, that the Nazis would change their policies for the sake of allies (like how they stopped shooting communists to please Stalin, I guess, or stopped believing that Asians were inferior for the Japanese?); and secondly, that the Entente give enough of a shit to necessitate this?
 
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Eurofed

Banned
As UF points out, it's questionable just where Germany stops being Nazist, given that Nazism was to a large extent just political Hitler-worship. A regime run by one of his annointed lieutenants would be Nazi, by my reckoning, but the greater the influence you give to those less likely to wage quixotic wars - the army-junker-business complex - the less Nazi the government becomes.

A quite reasonable point, and in the end it is up to interpretation where the threshold ought to be set up, as I pointed out myself. I would tend to agree that a regime by one of his annointed lieutenants, as opposed to a new leader or junta put up by the army-junker-business complex - would probably qualify, at least for the purposes of this thread. To inject some amount of moderation in the regime's nature is necessary to make it palatable as an anti-Soviet ally to the Western powers; given the way appeasement failed in the face of Adolf's quixotic megalomania, the key to fulfill the scenario lies in throwing him under a bus, while managing to keep enough of the old faces and fascist trappings in charge that it is still recognizable. As others have poiinted out, the alternative is to radicalize the Soviet regime enough that even vanilla Hitler looks a preferable alternative in the eyes of the West. This is quite doable, too (pretty much nobody expects the Holocaust), but I admit I am not too familiar lacking in plausible PoD that would radicalize the USSR since the mid-late 30s. I'm aware of 20s PoDs, such as throwing Lenin's succession to someone more radical than Stalin, such as the Trotzkite-Zinovievian faction (not Trotzki himself, he was too obnoxious to be accepted as supreme leader) or Yakov Sverdlov. But this would in all likelihood butterfly away Nazism by causing an European united front to form much earlier. I dunno, perhaps a good PoD would be Yagoda growing balls and assassinating Stalin before Stalin can purge him.

What's the nature of the "compromise" we're taking for granted? In the (unlikely) event of the Nazis restoring Poland... they would make it about as independent as 1st Slovakia, so in effect they would be conceding nothing but a banner.

I think that a compromise peace that would be palatable to the moderate faction would be to keep the 1914 borders, and otherwise restore Poland to more or less true independence.

Once the fight started, the British people were for fighting. They responded to stunning German success by launching a national effort to rescue the army, raising Churchill to the premiership, and starting to clear out the dead weight. Who's going to negotiate, why, and how are they ever going to get it throw parliament?

I think you are largely exaggerating here. Until Churchill took over, there was nowhere such a radical committment.

The good old Stalin-commits-suicide meme. Does anybody else (besides myself and Faeelin, who's idea I pinched :D) think a "Red Alert war" is more likely to be started by a western power?

Actually, in the scenario I described, war would erupt out of a gradual worsening of relationship between the Euro bloc and the USSR, so the details of the casus belli and whom fires the first shoot aren't that relevant. ;)
 
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Eurofed

Banned
Soviet Russia, militarist? Stalinist Russia, the country that shot senior generals for being senior generals, militarist? Chuckles.

Militant, not militarist. :p

The Nazis were war-fetishists, and killing Hitler in 1938-9 doesn't get round the Germans having built a war economy in a peacetime state.

Even the Nazi leadership had its own share of common-sense moderates that were willing to avoid a war with the West or the USSR if it could be avoided. The war economy unbalance in 1938-39 wasn't nothing that couldn't be dealt with by toning down the pace of rearmament for a while. It only becomes a problem if you are purposefully building up the country to attack the USSR as soon as possible.

Because slave labour can actually be pretty handy?

The German Jew minority was nowhere so plentiful that its slave labor would make a meaningful difference. :eek:

Stalin wasn't averse to taking risks, but nothing is going to make him internationally pick a fight with multiple great powers.

He could still stumble into it by miscalculating the Euro bloc's ability and willingness to fight.

Any particular reason why communism is worse than the other tyrannies that comprise the majority of human history?

Well, I'd surely pick non-genocidal communism rather than theocratic fundamentalism. :p

1) If we ever did, "we" were a handful of statesmen, most of them unelected, all of them dead. Its as reasonable as me saying "I loathe Germany for bombing our cities"...

Why it always has to be about the bloody Nazi and nobody ever remembers poor Napoleon and Wilhelm? ;)

The idea that Britain alone kept Europe disunited is laughable. Turns out Europe doesn't want to unite under some historic conqueror's rule, whatever we think. Has our diplomacy has been perfectly succesful at accomplishing its aims since Queen Liz I? Nobody told me.

No, but British power and influence played a pivotal role in making such resistance rather more stubborn and successful than it would have otherwise been. Napoleon and the Kaiserreich would have triumphed if Britain had been just a bit less of an implacable opponent.

3) Germany acts in its national self-interest, and this is good. Britain acts in its national self-interest, and this is evil. Oh, sure.

As I see it, beneficial/harmful in the utilitarian long-term picture, and there is little recognizable high-likelihood good out of Coalition/Entente victory in the Napoleonic Wars and WWI.

I don't agree with the milder variety of Indian or Irish Anglophobe, but I can understand him and sympathise with him. This, not so much.

The day majority opinion in England stops being so £$%& paranoid and hateful about European integration, or at least decides to be honest and leave the whole thing rather than keep trying to sabotage it from within, everything is forgiven for ever, I swear, and I subscribe to Anglophilia. ;)

There are no wanks in OTL. "Wank" refers to an implausible level of contrived success, and OTL is by definition plausible. If we allow OTL to contain "wanks", the word immediately becomes useless. You think communism was wanked IOTL (in spite of how it now survives in only a handful of countries - not an inevitable outcome) because you don't like communism. If I abused the word in the same fashion, I'd call OTL a Naziwank 'cos I don't like Nazis. But OTL happened, so let's deal with it.

I would agree with you that there is a lot of ambiguity in how the word "wank" is used in the hobby. Sometimes it has the meaning you describe, sometimes it just means "making a polity or movement more successful than a given standard, typically OTL".

Not saying it was worse than Stalin (it wasn't) or would have become worse than Stalin had it carried on that way (it could be as bad, but it wouldn't have to be). I just like how human suffering is okay when communists aren't to blame.

Never said it would be OK, I was just answering to accusations of having a racist hate for Russia.

Why, I must ask? Based on women's rights alone, I'm with the reds.

Well, as far as women's rights go, communism was moderately better, but in the end, fascist support for mysogyny IMO was much more talk than fact. The real notorious historical offenders in this field are the religious zealots (one reason I hate them even more than totalitarianism-lite).

Some reasons why I may prefer fascism to communism if given a strict choice and the death camps are kept shut by both: the former typically tends to leave the common person a bit more alone as totalitarian control goes if you aren't a dedicated dissident, for all its cronyism and corruption it screws the standard of living rather less, and I fancy heroism as a recognizable "good" ideal more than equality.

So why do we assume that there's "a choice to be done"?

Well, it may be an issue of how many butterflies to "tone down the damage" we may apply to an ever quite popular AH polity (for the foreseeable future of the genre, Nazi victory is going to stay much more popular as a subject than say its domestic overthrow in 1938-39, as I may prefer, or Entente victory in the same timeframe, as you may prefer ;)) to make it less dystopic, and keep it plausible and recognizable. Of course the more can be spared before the whole thing turns utterly unplausible, the better.

The Jews were race-enemy #1, and also the most accessible. If you for some reason prefer dead Poles to dead Jews, you shouldn't be rooting for the Nazis.

I don't root for them, I all too often end up playing devil's advocate for them kinda like you do for the Soviets, unpleasant task as it may be. Frankly, to make me deem them a barely acceptable outcome, you'd have to apply them so many truckloads of whitewash that the Austrian Caporal becomes a German Napoleon in ideas and deeds.

As you may be aware, I'm just rather generous with deeming the unavoidable human suffering caused by conquests excusable, if it seems the resulting greater polity somehow looks like an house that is built to last and doesn't make its citizens too miserable, since I'm utterly convinced that otherwise the overall outcome typically turns in a greater good. But I'm quite downright convinced that the brown-shirt guys are among the poster boys for not fulfilling that standard. And of course their racist atrocities are an utilitarian black hole and the epitome of stupid, gratuitous evil.

You know what would save the Jews without even making them uprooted migrants in a hostile country?

Well, I am also so favourably impressed by OTL Zionist accomplishments that I often tend to think fondly of how much better it could have been if most of the pre-Holocaust European Jew population had surived and been brought into its ATL equivalent, whereever it ends up on the map.

Hehe. So we assume, firstly, that the Nazis would change their policies for the sake of allies (like how they stopped shooting communists to please Stalin, I guess, or stopped believing that Asians were inferior for the Japanese?);

Well, they were sometimes quick to revise their racial standards when it suited their strategic/diplomatic objectives, the Japanese being a typical example. Anyway, I remain a downright moderate functionalist on the origins of Holocaust issue, and believe that the right circumstances can cause those policies to change, and arrest the slide to genocide, more or less up to when the "industrial" killings start.

and secondly, that the Entente give enough of a shit to necessitate this?

Well, it depends on how much antisemitism played a pivotal role in making the Western public loathe Nazi Germany. You get conflicting views here, and it is sometimes dfficult to tell how much Holocaust-driven retconning influences them. :confused:
 
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A quite reasonable point, and in the end it is up to interpretation where the threshold ought to be set up, as I pointed out myself. I would tend to agree that a regime by one of his annointed lieutenants, as opposed to a new leader or junta put up by the army-junker-business complex - would probably qualify, at least for the purposes of this thread. To inject some amount of moderation in the regime's nature is necessary to make it palatable as an anti-Soviet ally to the Western powers; given the way appeasement failed in the face of Adolf's quixotic megalomania, the key to fulfill the scenario lies in throwing him under a bus, while managing to keep enough of the old faces and fascist trappings in charge that it is still recognizable.

I think the Nazi regime could be Nazi and yet more moderate (say, under Goering) but with a 1938-9 PoD I'm not seeing such a regime as able to explain away the past seven years of aggression and promise-breaking with a wave and a smile at the Entente. Compounding the problem, they can't stop the decline in the German standard of living with such tactics either.

As others have poiinted out, the alternative is to radicalize the Soviet regime enough that even vanilla Hitler looks a preferable alternative in the eyes of the West. This is quite doable, too (pretty much nobody expects the Holocaust), but I admit I am not too familiar lacking in plausible PoD that would radicalize the USSR since the mid-late 30s. I'm aware of 20s PoDs, such as throwing Lenin's succession to someone more radical than Stalin, such as the Trotzkite-Zinovievian faction (not Trotzki himself, he was too obnoxious to be accepted as supreme leader) or Yakov Sverdlov. But this would in all likelihood butterfly away Nazism by causing an European united front to form much earlier. I dunno, perhaps a good PoD would be Yagoda growing balls and assassinating Stalin before Stalin can purge him.

After 1933 (with Germans over here and Japanese over here), Soviet diplomacy was on the back foot. Even if, somehow, Stalin was replaced by someone more willing to take larger gambled, the time was not ideal. The Soviets, remember, were still in the process of building their modern army in 1941 (hence why they got so hammered). By 1941, the exploits of Nazism will have reached resolution, one way or another.

I think that a compromise peace that would be palatable to the moderate faction would be to keep the 1914 borders, and otherwise restore Poland to more or less true independence.

True independence with no borders except with German-bloc or Soviet-bloc countries, and almost certainly with German troops staying in the country in case the Soviets try anything? As I say, Poland was a) already beyond saving without total victory or at least Russian entry on the Allied side and b) the match that had started the fire, but not the whole of its fuel. Britain was fighting to prevent the domination of the European continent by the Nazis. This "compromise peace" is a kind of Munich II, and what happened to the "independent" state created by Munich I? And now that the Nazis need not worry about the east, will they respect their commitment not to attack France like how they respected their commitment not to attack Poland.

There's nothing that's going to convince Britain to make peace short of victory. Or defeat, of course.

I think you are largely exaggerating here. Until Churchill took over, there was nowhere such a radical committment.

And so Churchill took over by pure chance and then converted everyone to his views with the power of his speechmaking? Times make the leaders. If someone had replaced Churchill in OTL's circumstances with a peace agenda, parliament would have shouted him down, and that's why Churchill came to power in the first place.

The war was an almost cathartic thing for a British society that had spent a decade poor, divided, headless, and losing its confidence. Nobody had wanted a war in 1938. Nothing had substantially changed in 1939 (except that Poland was a lot nastier than Czechia), but once the government led Britain into war, there were some months of milling around ineffectively, a sudden disaster, the country came under direct attack - shouldn't this have broken morale? No, it gave the struggle an air of apocalyptic fulfilment. One way or another, everyone from Winston Churchill to George Orwell thought that once the war was won, we could start over, and that if we lost, well, better that than vanishing into obscurity like France seemed to have done. The king actually voiced a kind of perverse satisfaction after the fall of France: now we had no allies to bother us.

Nobody in any position to hold power wanted to give up until it was over.

Actually, in the scenario I described, war would erupt out of a gradual worsening of relationship between the Euro bloc and the USSR, so the details of the casus belli and whom fires the first shoot aren't that relevant. ;)

Oh, quite. But I note that, whatever else you can say of them, if I had to pick a man to rashly start a major war, it'd be Churchill and not Stalin.
 
Here's another thought, what about a different leader for the Soviet Union? Perhaps Trotsky succedes lennin, or maybe Lenin lives to see ww2.
 

Stephen

Banned
All you need is a more agressive Starlin invading Poland and other countries in 38/39. The only problem is the Soviet military are so crap they will have trouble digesting there first conquests that they may not be able to launch enough new invasions to provoke an anglfrench DOW. So probably the best way is to have Stalin invade Poland before Hitler but after the Chamberlain gave them security guarantees. An extremely arrogant Starlin foolishly launching multiple simultanious unprovoked invasions of several neiboring nations at the same time should do it also.
 
Militant, not militarist. :p

Well, militant in my experience normally just means "they want to spread their ideology and enforce their interests same as all other countries, but we don't like them." Move your perspective, and Nazis are militant fascists, Stalinists are militant commies, Churchill was a militant old Tory... :p

Even the Nazi leadership had its own share of common-sense moderates that were willing to avoid a war with the West or the USSR if it could be avoided. The war economy unbalance in 1938-39 wasn't nothing that couldn't be dealt with by toning down the pace of rearmament for a while. It only becomes a problem if you are purposefully building up the country to attack the USSR as soon as possible.

Not true. Ever looked through The Wages of Destruction? There were foreign currency shortages, vast resources had been sunken into window-breaking machines, and real standards of living were in decline.

The Nazis had their comparative moderates, but being moderate doesn't svae you from the mistakes left by the radicals.

The German Jew minority was nowhere so plentiful that its slave labor would make a meaningful difference. :eek:

Polish one was, though. Besides, if you have a group of people and you're determined that they can't be citizens, which way you decide to abuse them isn't really a matter of economies. The point is, the Nazis thought Jews were "semi-apes" and everything they did to them followed on from this belief. A regime which is capable of carrying through something as barbaric, elaborate, and profoundly self-defeating as the Holocaust is not going to be prevented by anything short of physical impossibility.

He could still stumble into it by miscalculating the Euro bloc's ability and willingness to fight.

He miscalculated the ability and willingness of Finland and North Korea to fight. Germany, France, Britain, and Italy in a oner is a slightly differant thing.

Well, I'd surely pick non-genocidal communism rather than theocratic fundamentalism. :p

Me too, but they're all of a stripe anyway in my opinion.

Why it always has to be about the bloody Nazi and nobody ever remembers poor Napoleon and Wilhelm? ;)

Wilhelm? Ha! We have a plaque down in the Grassmarket: "On this spot in 1915, a bomb dropped by the German zeppelin [Serial Number] fell and exploded [achieving sweet fanny adams since, as you can see, this is the middle of the street]." Imagine if we tried to have acommemorative plaque for every bomb they dropped in WW2. Wilhelm can come back when he's learned to bomb people properly! :p

No, but British power and influence played a pivotal role in making such resistance rather more stubborn and successful than it would have otherwise been. Napoleon and the Kaiserreich would have triumphed if Britain had been just a bit less of an implacable opponent.

They would also have triumphed had Russia just sat on the sidelines of Europe twiddling its thumbs, or had France just agreed to German demands. Everybody acts in their own selfish interests, big surprise there. What's so bad about Britain?

As I see it, beneficial/harmful in the utilitarian long-term picture, and there is little recognizable high-likelihood good out of Coalition/Entente victory in the Napoleonic Wars and WWI.

I've said often enough that only one link in the chain of destiny &cetera. Maybe Napoleon winning just means the *Nazis win, or we all get obliterated in a nuclear Holocaust. We can agree to disagree on that front.

However, saying that you "loathe" my country on the basis of long-past actions that were perfectly understandable is not very nice. As I said, I don't "loathe" German even though I can go right along and point at where the things German bombers blew up used to be.

The day majority opinion in England stops being so £$%& paranoid and hateful about European integration, or at least decides to be honest and leave the whole thing rather than keep trying to sabotage it from within, everything is forgiven for ever, I swear, and I subscribe to Anglophilia. ;)

*is Scots*

I would agree with you that there is a lot of ambiguity in how the word "wank" is used in the hobby. Sometimes it has the meaning you describe, sometimes it just means "making a polity or movement more successful than a given standard, typically OTL".

The English language decays when we allow words to lose their meaning! If we need a new meaning, we should devise a new word or phrase! :mad:

[/Orwell]

Never said it would be OK, I was just answering to accusations of having a racist hate for Russia.

Yeah, I don't think you do, though I think that "anti-communism" generally drags in the classical anti-Russian/Chinese/Vietnamese/Hispanic myths. The whole (bogus) idea that Chinese people kill infant girls for the sake of family honour is way older than the One Child Policy.

Finish in a bit. My presence is required at the cafe. :D
 
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Eurofed

I will leave you and IBC to argue the case for the least worst great dictatorship of 20thC Europe.;)

Why it always has to be about the bloody Nazi and nobody ever remembers poor Napoleon and Wilhelm? ;)

I thought you read widely on this site? Plenty of people here remember other attempts to establish military domination of the continent. The only think about Napoleon and Wilhelm that was poor was their choices.

No, but British power and influence played a pivotal role in making such resistance rather more stubborn and successful than it would have otherwise been. Napoleon and the Kaiserreich would have triumphed if Britain had been just a bit less of an implacable opponent.

I am reminded of Pitt the Younger's famous quote. We preserved our own liberties by our efforts and helped preserve that of others by our example.:D

As I see it, beneficial/harmful in the utilitarian long-term picture, and there is little recognizable high-likelihood good out of Coalition/Entente victory in the Napoleonic Wars and WWI.

We're had this discussion before.;) I much prefer choice and flexibility to monolithic military states.


The day majority opinion in England stops being so £$%& paranoid and hateful about European integration, or at least decides to be honest and leave the whole thing rather than keep trying to sabotage it from within, everything is forgiven for ever, I swear, and I subscribe to Anglophilia. ;)

The day the hate merchants of the pro-EU fanatics stop being so pig-headed and abusive we might be able to get a heathlier relationship between Britain and Europe. Alternatively we might have the British people being given the chance to choose. [This later is unlikely while the fanatics are in power in Britain as they fear what the choice would be].

Clarification, before anyone jumps to the wrong conclusion. The above paragraph is not aimed at Eurofed or any continentals. I think Britain's key problem with the EU are the fanatics on both sides in this country, but especially the pro-EU ones. I get the impression that elsewhere people and politicians see the EU as a way of helping their country improve its position. Unfortunately in Britain the pro-EU stance seemed to be dominated by narrow minded nationalists who 's idea of prompting the EU is by decrying and abusing any alternative. They never seem to consider throwing insults and abuse at people is not conclusive to winning them over. If they weren't so extreme and idealog then I suspect our own 'national' bigots would be a lot few and more sidelined.

Steve
 
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