My, such hatred for FDR due to a single plan which certainly never went in to effect or have we all imagined West Germany's industrial capacity from 1949 to 1989.
Thankfully for Europe and the world, nature removed FDR and his cronies from the helm in time and let a new President and Administration take over with a rational German policy. They realized that a livable Germany was necessary to Europe's welfare and economy and to contain the Soviets. So the plan was scrapped.
Germany was 'gutted' by WWII yet somehow we've all also managed to miss the utter destruction of Europe's welfare and prosperity since that time.
There are degrees of being gutted, of course. Truman's Administration was sane and wise enough to realize that rebuilding Germany as a functional and prosperous state was going to support the stability and welfare of democratic Europe much much more than FDR's mad genocidal revenge schemes. However, one must wonder how much additional welfare and stability could have been reaped for Europe (and indirectly, the world) during the last 50 years had WWII American political leadership pursued the same approach and sought to keep Germany united in her ethnic borders and Eastern Europe free of Communism.
Whatever Stalin's crimes, and they were massive, he was also vastly more cautious than Hitler, which makes him marginally preferable in terms of choosing between brutal tyranny or genocide.
This is a false dichotomy. A policy could be pursued during WWII by the Western Democracies that sought to topple or contain both Hitler and Stalin as much as possible equally.
I won't go on about this assumption that the destruction of Austria and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia were things Germany was 'entitled' to.
According to national self-determination, yes. The people of Austria and the Sudetenland had clearly expressed their wish to be reunited with Germany after the fall of the Habsburg Empire, but they had been forcibly prevented by the Entente powers and had been forced to become a separate state, or a subject minority of the Czech, by the Versailles-St.Germain settlement. Germany's actions in 1938 had provided the means by which such national self-determination will could be exercised. It involved the threat of military force, sure, but then again pretty much any national unification in history has required the use of force to some degree, either by revolution or war or threat of force.
Anyway, if the Western Allies had any doubt about the democratic legitimacy of the Anschluss and the Munich settlement, there is an infallible means to ascertain such matters, namely a referendum. They could have asked post-Nazi Germany as a peace treaty clausle to run referendums in Austria and the Sudetenland, under their supervision, with the choice of union with Germany, separate nation, or union with Czechoslovakia, respectively. Just like it was done for Saar. I have no doubt about the result.
I will, however, note that these hopes based on a hypothetical coup ignore that such a coup never took place, that there was no reason for any such participants to assume a coup could make matters worse for Germany and might improve terms while surely cutting short an ever-worsening bloodbath sooner for Germany,
I utterly fail to understand the point here. Offering the chance for a decent peace deal to the Axis powers, is a win-win option for all parties involved. Either the people of the Axis powers topple their dictators and sue for peace, which cuts the bloodbath for all, or they do not, in such a case the Allies simply go on with the war till final victory. The Allies lose nothing by scrapping Unconditional Surrender, since their goal is not to annex Germany, Italy, or Japan (the reason why US made sense in the ACW but does not in WWII).
that this also ignores the moral bankruptcy of most of the figures in the coup who were willing to follow a Hitler before they had one and who were plotting against him for the sole reason that he was losing the war.
This ignores that many of the partecipants in the coup had been plotting to topple Hitler for years, but only the worsening military situation during the late phase of the war created the circumstances that gave the coup a fair chance to succeed. Some of the others may have been sincere patriots that only were awakened to anti-Nazism gradually by the grim realities of the war; so what ? Hitler deceived millions about his true intentions, both inside and outside Germany. And if some others are cynical pragmatists that are simply trying to bring their nation out of the terrible mess the previous leadership had brought it into, again, so what ? Toppling the murderous tyrant and ending the war and the genocide are still the right thing to do, even if you do it with selfish motivations. Besides, to my knowledge NOBODY of the military resistance had been directly and actively involved in the Nazi crimes against humanity to any significant degree.
This also ignores the obvious questions as to what happens if the coup fails and the Nazis look to the ruthless but pragmatic Stalin when finally ready for a deal,
I fail to see the point here. If the coup fails, there won't be any deal. Hitler was not going to seek a compromise peace.
what happens if Germany plunges into civil war while Stalin has far more troops in Europe(outside Italy NO British or Americans until D-Day),
It is very questionable that had the coup succeeded, patchwork resistance by local nests of Nazi diehards would have been in the position to launch any kind of prolonged civil war. Rather some days or weeks of mop-up work at most. In 1943, this scarcely gives Stalin any huge advantage.
and the prospects for German democracy in a nation where twice in a generation the military rushed eagerly to war, then stabbed the German government in the back to save themselves.
The revelation of the crimes of the Nazi regime would retroactively remove any legitimacy for it in the eyes of the vast majority of the German people. Moreover, national unity in the 1937 plus Austria/Sudetenland ethnic-linguistic borders and economic livelihood is a deal that again the vast majority of the German people can deem satisfying, given the circumstances. Most would readily acknowledge that the Walkurie plotters had moved to save the Fatherland from near-certain destruction and restore her honor. In all likelihood, post-war Germany will quickly tread the path back to a functional democracy just like it did OTL, only with less of a guilt complex since it would have removed the butcher and his cronies with her own hands.
I can see what Germany gets out of these proposals, most of it undeserved, but it remains unclear just what the US and UK get out of rewarding Germany for aggression and genocide by leaving her most of her conquests in return for changing a few faces at the top. The most likely result would be a third war against Germany, possibly a war against Stalin, all in return for a lower death toll.
Your bias shows. Pick a map, look at the extent of the territory Nazi Germany had occupied by 1942-43, then look at Austria and the Sudetenland and explain to me how you can honestly call the latter "most of her conquests". Besides, they were a special case: there were an overwhelming German majority in those territories, which did not exist in any other of Hitler's conquests (well, except Danzig). If you remember, the occupation of Bohemia-Moravia turned the Western Democracies' opinion against Hitler decisively just because it was the first case where he did not have a rather good point based on national self-determination, it was just naked imperialistic conquest.
Anyway, the US and UK win in this scenario since they end the war much sooner, limiting the bloodshed and hardship for themselves and the civilian populations of Europe greately, they cut the Holocaust short greately (it would have had only a year to run), they remove the regime responsible for the war in Europe, return Germany to be a functional democratic and peaceful member of Europe, and prevent Stalin from expanding his tyranny outside the pre-war borders of the SU.
As for Stalin, hopefully he will acknowledge that he must content himself with restoring the integrity of the pre-war Soviet Union, and by looking at all the stuff he was able to conquer in 1939-41, the deal is rather positive. If he insists about waging a war of conquest in Europe even after the Nazi regime is toppled and the integrity of the SU is restored, this just proves he is an aggressor and a threat to Europe no less dangerous than Hitler and he must regretfully be dealt with by similar means. It's really no different a scenario from the one where Stalin chooses to wage WWIII in response to the Berlin airlift or the Korean War. If anything, the US and UK would be in a rather better situation to fight that war if they can have a united post-Nazi Germany at their side instead of just West Germany.