Social and econmic effects of Nuking Berlin

Germaniac

Donor
In every TL I read where German survives a few more months in WW2 Berlin is nuked. While I find that Idea to be a bit absurd, the Soviets would go ape shit crazy, I find it very interesting. In the Following years Berlin became a hotspot and center of the cold war struggle.

How would Germany be as a nation and how would it react to their capital being utterly destroyed, how would the world feel. It was, and luckily to this day is, a major capital of the world.
 

Deleted member 1487

Well, it was already destroyed by conventional bombing. In fact, while the Soviets were busy surrounding the city, the Allies leveled in the inner city and the Soviets did not have a problem with it. Actually, nuking it would be a waste, as there was no proper way to assess the damage. That is why Nagasaki and Hiroshima were selected, as they were not bombed and the damage could be assessed. There is little chance of Germany being nuked, as most cities were already rubble with fewer people, and there was no point in blowing up what was going to be overrun in days, weeks, or months. I doubt there would be a need to do a tactical bombing either, as the Germans were ready to surrender and the Brass wanted to do a real field test to get it ready for the NEXT war.

Besides, the main reason it worked so well in the two historical examples was the large number of wooden and paper buildings in Japan. Concrete, brick and steel held up much better, so it won't have nearly as dramatic an effect on German cities, as they were of these materials. It would still effect the populations left in the cities, but they will be shielded better by the structures in their cities and by being in basements. That is until the radiation starts kicking in, which will kill many in the coming days and months. In fact, the death totals in the Japanese bombings don't include the radiation fatalities which were worse than the initial losses. That is going to have an effect on the German mindset after the war, which will probably give some reason to feel that they were victims of allied atrocities. Plus, being a western country, the radiation fallout (in both senses of the word) would be better documented and portrayed in the US than the Japanese casualties.
 
I do not think Berlin would have been bombed. Destroying the German government would mean that there would be nobody who could surrender.
 
I do not think Berlin would have been bombed. Destroying the German government would mean that there would be nobody who could surrender.

Unless hit directly with ground-burst, the bunkers had a good chance to survive even a Fat Man explosion. The air-burst like in Hiroshima or Nagasaki would result in maybe 1/5 of the casualty rate, and even far less with an appropriate warning time. A firestorm like in Dresden or Hamburg could kill mor epoeple in the shelters, but this wasn't possible in the 1945 Berlin any more - most combustible materials were already gone. And a large proportion of casualties in japan was due to the fact that the respective cities were not bombed before, the bomb shelters capacity was insufficient, their quality far lower than in Berlin, and the bomb shelter drill was utterly lacking in the general population. By 1945 in Berlin, any single plane would trigger the air alarm, and people would run to the shelter without deliberating what this particular alarm means.

So, in any case, the first nuclear bomb would IMO have less of an impact than let's say firebombing of Dresden or Pforzheim. It would only lead to fast surrender if a) it catches a major part of the Nazi government out in the open, or if b) USA manages to trick the Nazi top brass into believing that it can let nukes rain down like conventional bombs (and not produce one per month). At a rate of a nuke per month the psychological result will be the same as 2-3 conventional large-scale raids per month - bad but not necessary leading to "let's throw down arms and surrender" decision after the first 2-3 nukes.

OTOH there was no need for USA to do much except sit back and let the Russians take Berlin.
 
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