Contrary to popular opinion, dictatorships can often breed quite effective science and technology. They're more focused on actual, practical achievement, and less on making money, than capitalist democracies. After all, it was the Soviet Union that successfully launched the first satellite, and put the first man into space. And, currently, even Kim Jong-un's extremely small, poor and repressive North Korea continues to surprise the world with its ability to develop impressive weapons technology.
The Soviets did have a very high proportion of engineering, mathematics, physics, science discoveries. But was this because they were a dictatorship, or because they had a massive population larger than the U.S. at the time and significant funding of engineering education?
Many of the Soviet-era physics and mathematics discoveries went unused or remained theoretical until the 1990s, when Western computing technology from outside the Eastern Bloc allowed them to be simulated or applied for the first time.
True, but unlike Nazi Germany the USSR wasn't insanely obsessed with racial and ideological 'purity' of it's science establishment. Meanwhile, Germany discards major parts of quantum physics as being impure "Judenphysik".
Soviets were also obsessed with ideological purity of its science establishment, in areas like Lysenkoism and the campaign against cybernetics.
Germany would definitely be years behind in quantum and nuclear physics. Especially because of the Lost Generation of physicists due to combined factors of the Nazi persecution of scientists of Jewish background, and the military conscription of most remaining physicists.
However, Werner Heisenberg and associates would probably re-establish, slowly, the physics research in Germany. If he dies early though, Germany would be totally backwards in that regard, and lack of contact with discoveries made in the West, by all the experts that continued research in the U.S. and Britain, would cause an increasing gap.
With a POD early enough that changes the course of the war, due to butterfly effect, Heisenberg might be killed by the Nazi government during those purges.
Well, Albert Einstein rejected quantum physics -- "God does not play at dice!" I'm not sure I'm too keen on quantum physics myself, and, it was not particularly a product of Jewish scientists.
Albert Einstein "rejected quantum physics"? He was one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, besides Planck and Schroedinger. Einstein rejected the Copenhagen interpretation, not quantum physics as a whole. It was the investigation of Einstein's theories and postulates that revealed most quantum physics.
Einstein thought that quantum physics had to follow physical realism. He did not live to see Bell's theorem and the Bell test experiments which demonstrated that the physical world (and quantum theory) is not compatible with local realism. If Einstein had seen those experiments, he probably would have changed his mind on the Copenhagen interpretation.
This trope is overplayed, the Nazi scientists were utter garbage at getting actual useful data from their experiments. They were merely performed experiments to satisfy their sadism.
Yes, the Nazi scientists were certainly sadistic and garbage at performing actual science, if it can be even called an attempt at science.
Yet there were non-Nazi scientists stuck inside Germany and scientific institutions that continued research. Non-war-related scientific research continued to a surprising extent during both WW1 and WW2, even in countries devastated by both wars. Even in occupied Czechia, treated as a colony, brutalized by the Nazi regime, and where forced laborers were being conscripted from, there were some Czech scientists that continued work as usual, before, during, and after the war.
It is also pretty crazy how quickly West Germany liberated by the Allies resumed normal science from 1946 onward--of course, much of this is due to persecuted scientists that returned, but (outside of the field of physics) a number of the institutions and ongoing projects basically remained through that time.
Their work on hypothermia, for example, is probably the most useful that has ever been done.
Not true, the data in the Nazi hypothermia experiments is generally agreed to be unusable since they failed to use the scientific method.