Post war world if Valkyrie succeeds?

He used both at times, but Stalin played people as suckers very very well liquidating potental foes when the view of the world was away not on.
True, but I can't help but think this goes against Stalin's MO -- his practice pretty much throughout OTL was "always consolidate gains, centralize power". Hell, this very debate (repress periphery and play defense vs decentralize and play nice to foster further communist expansion) was the debate that split Joe from Lenin, Trotsky, and co.; again, that doesn't make your scenario crazy, since it would hardly be the only time Stalin made orthodoxy out of old heresies, but still... well, I'll see what I think after reading the next book.
 
Too late in the game to change the outcome. The Allies would still demand unconditional surrender and the Nazis would still be held accountable for the Final Solution
 
Minimal change on the overall post-war period. The western Allies would never consider a separate peace with the provisional government no matter how successfully it de-Nazified Germany. People need to remember that the western allies saw Germany, not an ideology, as its enemy. It was Germany, not the Nazis, who started WW2 and Germany needed to be brought down to the point that it could never again threaten world peace.

Presuming the junta regime did eventually accept an unconditional surrender, it is possible that the allies might work with and through it to implement the military occupation zones, reparations, and necessary border changes. They would probably also require elections as soon as possible under allied supervision - elections in which many of the military and nationalist leaders of the junta might be barred, because of their willing participation in Germany's war machine. If (or when, more likely) the Cold War still breaks out, this will all change but Germany will still end up divided and occupied. I see no possibility any of the allies would tolerate a "neutral" Germany not under their thumbs
 
Too late in the game to change the outcome. The Allies would still demand unconditional surrender and the Nazis would still be held accountable for the Final Solution

The Nazis responsible for the Final Solution would already be dead if Valkyrie succeeds and the camps cleaned up and bulldozed over with court marshals for the camp leaders before they got there.

By the time the Allies got there they would find nothing. The population left would likely be spread out in towns. Word bit by bit would get out in time about what happened, but it would be nothing like OTL without pictures and video.

Frankly this would be the biggest change and post war the West and German people would see the camps more like we today or back then regard Stalin's camps and the German people would be able to say whatever horror was there we stopped, having someone else have to stop it is entirely mentally different then stopping it yourself.

That would change very much the post war German psyche.
 
I tend to think that in most plausible post-Valkyrie scenarios, the borders and occupation zones at war's end would be pretty much as OTL, but obviously the timings and details of how things got from 20 July '44 to that end point might end up very different depending on exactly how things played out in the aftermath of Hitler's death. And the more I read about it all, the more complicated and hard to predict those details seem to be.

In fact, I think the most interesting part of a "Valkyrie-succeeds" TL might be tracing all of those outcomes and butterflies in the years after the end of the war, although I think it would be very challenging to research and write and hard to do in a way that wouldn't get the author accused of screwing/wanking somebody or other no matter what outcomes they actually came up with.

Another thing that occurs to me is that most of the discussions of the effects of Valkyrie succeeding naturally enough focus on Germany and the various European fronts. However, it seems to me that a a different, possibly earlier, end to the war in Europe might easily have significant knock-on effects for the last year of fighting in the Pacific theatre. To know exactly what effects, you'd need to know exactly what happened in Europe and when first, however, and as I say the more reading I do the harder I find it to reach firm conclusions at more than the most broad-strokes sort of level.
 
One point. Iirc around half the Holocaust victims died in the final year of the war. So if the genocide ends in Summer '44 there are a lot more surviving Jews.

Could give Israel significantly greater manpower.
 
One point. Iirc around half the Holocaust victims died in the final year of the war. So if the genocide ends in Summer '44 there are a lot more surviving Jews.

Absolutely - it's things like this (obviously a very positive thing in its own right in this case) that I think will mean that however similar the world might seem to OTL a year after Valkyrie succeeds, further down the line things could be very different indeed, although many of those differences would be very hard to predict to any degree of accuracy from our standpoint. As I say, the degree of authorial licence that would be necessary in a TL along those lines woukd leave it open to accusations of implausibility.
 
Re comments that the Occupation Zones would be unchanged -- weren't said zones not even finalized until Yalta?

The final scheme of four zones (including a French Zone) was finally agreed at Yalta, but the planning had been in progress for some time before that. I think the notion of dividing Germany into occupation zones to be administered by the "big three" powers had been raised at Tehran in Nov-Dec 1943, as well as the idea of revising Poland's western borders at Germany's expense. The European Advisory Commission that defined the occupation zones started work at the beginning of 1944, and had come up with a plan featuring three zones (Soviet, British and US) by May of that year. It wasn't signed off until the London Protocol issued in September, after the POD in this case, and was revised again at Yalta, but as far as I'm aware the basic plan was in place before Valkyrie went down.

Now, I allow that before anything had been formally agreed there might be a possibility of differing circumstances on the ground leading to further revisions and differences compared to OTL, but I think the facts are that the WAllies had already agreed in principle to the Soviets occupying Eastern Germany (and to Poland receiving a slice of German territory to make up for the territory it was losing in the East to the Soviets). I'm not sure this would really be affected by a faster German collapse or a different final line of contact between the WAllies and Red Army compared to OTL, because I think it's pretty clear that the WAllies would not allow any German government to avoid surrendering unconditionally to all of the Allies. And nor were they, apart from a few dissenting voices, eager to "betray" the Soviets as they saw it at the time by cutting them out of any surrender.

Obviously, from our position of hindsight, post Cold War and aware of the oppression the Soviet Union visited upon the countries unlucky enough to fall under its influence post 1945, it seems like something the WAllies might have, or should have, been willing to do, but at the time it wasn't so obvious. As they saw it at the time the enemy to be defeated at all costs was Germany, not just the Nazis but Germany the state and the whole notion of German nationalism and militarism, and all other concerns were secondary.
 
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