Succes of fascism with a moderate "Hitler"?

A Italian journalist,Paolo Barnard in a recent editorial have write that a more moderate fuhrer in place of Hitler would have been a disaster for the future of the democracy because with more moderate politics and foucusing on the industrial production and export of goods instead that on the war could have accomplish a fascist block in Europe.
Italy,Hungary,Poland,Spain,Greece Portugal,Yugoslavia,Romania,Bulgaria would been fascist nations,with Turkey probably cordially friend.
With time also France could become fascist..or at least there was a possibility.

Is this scenario plausibile?
If Hitler had died in 1935 and some moderate type of fuhrer had taken the power,with different politics and without war, fascism could really triumph....at least for some decade?
 
Hitler Cribbed fascism off Mussolini without him, we'd see Italian Style fascism become dominant.

That means it's less about racial purity and anti semetism and more about right wing nationalist totalitarianism
 
It worked for attaturk although the dominance of liberal democracy makes an apples to apples comparison difficult because we didn't see a real transpher of power. Would a still fascist turkey have avoided the deep state and coupes? Would it have developed closer to Europe then it did in otl ?
 

Deleted member 1487

A Italian journalist,Paolo Barnard in a recent editorial have write that a more moderate fuhrer in place of Hitler would have been a disaster for the future of the democracy because with more moderate politics and foucusing on the industrial production and export of goods instead that on the war could have accomplish a fascist block in Europe.
Italy,Hungary,Poland,Spain,Greece Portugal,Yugoslavia,Romania,Bulgaria would been fascist nations,with Turkey probably cordially friend.
With time also France could become fascist..or at least there was a possibility.

Is this scenario plausibile?
If Hitler had died in 1935 and some moderate type of fuhrer had taken the power,with different politics and without war, fascism could really triumph....at least for some decade?
Hitler dying in 1936 after the Rheinland reoccupation could see the Schacht program of barter export economics really taking hold and forming a core of a de facto integrated European economy with Germany at the core but France and Britain on the outside of it, trying to compete for markets. At some point the Soviet-Nazi trade will pick back up after the initial 1933 collapse in trade for ideological reasons; by 1936 Stalin had started to make accommodations with the new German regime. As I always say in these sorts of threads without an aggressive Germany in Europe there would be more efforts to sanction Japan over China, which Germany had a lot of economic and geo-political interest in without Hitler pushing for an anti-comintern bloc. If Nazism morphs into more of a technocratic regime under say Goering (no guarantees of that), focused on building an export neo-colonial empire they could get rich and remain a Fascist regime for a while. I don't think the German people would tolerate it in the long run though if they get a taste of prosperity, as they will want freedoms in the younger generations who didn't know that insecurity that brought the Nazis to power. Plus if that taste of prosperity goes away the people will turn on the Nazi regime. Hitler was able to distract from his economic woes by foreign policy successes, but if there are no foreign adventures and the recovery ends...then the Nazis in Germany end.
 
Probably Hitler's death after his ascension to power is too late to save fascism, depending who succeeds him.

But if Hitler would be more moderate or someone else rise as prominent fascist leader instead Hitler we might see more succesful and longer living fascism. It was originally only just nationalist not genocidal and bloodthirsty ideology.
 
I don't think the German people would tolerate it in the long run though if they get a taste of prosperity, as they will want freedoms in the younger generations

This is a interesting scenario little explored in alternate history.
For sure in 1970s or 1980s peoples of fascist block ( in a timeline in which a more moderate German regime don't make the war) wanted more freedom.
But how would have been a post fascist society in late XX century?
For sure not liberal as of our timeline.
Maybe conservative as post war 50s in our timeline?
 

Deleted member 1487

This is a interesting scenario little explored in alternate history.
For sure in 1970s or 1980s peoples of fascist block ( in a timeline in which a more moderate German regime don't make the war) wanted more freedom.
But how would have been a post fascist society in late XX century?
For sure not liberal as of our timeline.
Maybe conservative as post war 50s in our timeline?
I don't think most people like to acknowledge just how transactional the Nazi regime was with the ruling elite and German people. The Nazi party was loathed, but Hitler became popular, despite economic woes in the late 1930s, because he delivered on some promises, like restoring order, increasing employment, foreign policy successes, and remilitarizing and making the German people feel safe. Later it was military success that made Hitler popular, but that fell apart after Stalingrad when the people really started losing faith in him. Then he stayed in power due to the war and force, plus then of course purges of resistance. I was surprised to find out how much of the military was getting bribes from Hitler too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery_of_senior_Wehrmacht_officers

Without all the successes of the 1930s and no war, then people could get really tired of the Nazis especially without Hitler if they don't deliver something, which would need to be prosperity, and keep it coming. I'd say if that wasn't forthcoming in the 1940s there would be unrest. If that came and left in the 1950s, there would be unrest. In the USSR it was the stagnation starting in the 1970s and overspending on the military that really cost the regime and ultimately caused it to fall apart. I'd image the Nazis wouldn't really last past the 1950s unless they became competent technocrats...which they were not IOTL.
 
OTL, Marxism was in vogue among colonial insurgents; TTL, could some see Fascism as the way to go to free their countries (see the Lebanese Phalangists)?

Yes, this is rarely explored, anti-colonialist fascism. The closest we came OTL was certain factions in Imperial Japan which were genuinely fascist (in the Italian sense) yet espoused "anti-colonialism" in the Imperial Japanese sense. This could be all over Africa and Asia with the right leaders. All you need is a major fascist revolutionary along the lines of Sun Yat-sen in impact. Considering these regions were mostly locked up by France and Britain, a fascist European power (especially Germany with the end of their African colonial empire after WWI) could build fascist movements there. What you need is for the Montreux Fascist conference to evolve into a "fascist international" and thus assistance for groups in Africa and Asia. Italy incidentally will hate this going by their rule in the Horn of Africa--possibly means fascism can't establish itself there. Independent Ethiopia might be a good place for a fascist regime to work. And the other independent African state, Liberia, might also be good for a fascist regime, if you could get some young, avant-garde thinking Afro-Liberians to overthrow the paternalist True Whig Party regime there and try and forge a Liberian identity with the exploited indigenous people--that's good material for any other Afrofascist regime to build upon. But overall, Asia and Africa could become fertile grounds for fascism. And for regions exploited by neocolonialism in this era, i.e. Latin America, expect a strengthening of groups like the regional Falangists, Brazilian Integralists, all the Argentine fascist groups, and the Chilean National Socialist Movement.

Hitler and the Nazis in large part helped killed any way to create a strong third-world fascist movement by making fascism the ultimate taboo. In reality, the appeal of fascism could have been extremely broad, especially in colonial regions, given that in many cases, the local communists, Marxists, socialists, what have you, were basically nationalists of some nature or another.

Would this be good for those countries? That's quite debateable. African Marxism fared horribly in the long run, even compared to other self-described communist countries, but I have no doubt that Afrofascism would latch itself onto the worst excesses of tribalism we saw and see nowadays in Africa. For Asia, I have less of a criticism, but Burma (formerly communist) is not a good country, and a fascist Burma would almost certainly not be prettier. I have also seen the main use of "Afrofascism" (unlike my own use of the term to describe hypothetical nationalist regimes against colonialism) be used to describe the regime in Rwanda during the genocide there. That's probably not a good sign, though I wouldn't call Rwanda at that point an Afrofascist state. So overall, that suggests that third-world fascism would probably be equivalent to how communism worked there--not too much worse, and not too much better, although to name an example, in Cambodia, a fascist version of Pol Pot who studied in Rome or Berlin might stop with "only" killing non-Cambodians (as Pol Pot also did) and non-fascist Cambodians who don't agree with him, instead of killing everyone, so we might assume that a fascist Cambodia would be better on the basis of a lower body count. A lot depends on who the fascist dictator is in these places, since fascism tends toward a style of personal rule, and Africa and Asia OTL have had some very notorious dictators with their cults of personality. Kim Il-sung, for instance, easily could've been a fascist and probably eagerly would've been a fascist had the circumstances not forced him to become a communist (his descendents even more so given by how extremely racist and Korean supremacist North Korea is). On the bright side, you might get some pretty solid leaders who genuinely care about nation building and development and aren't using it to enrich their tribalist clique or themselves and are only allied with the fascists because they hate their former colonial masters more than the fascists in Europe. In this scenario, a non-Hitler-ruled but still Nazi Germany would be huge in sponsering some of these weirdos throughout the Third World. If the United States managed to dig up some of the worst people OTL, I have no doubt that the Nazis could find even worse people to rule, all in the name of "anti-colonialism".
 
What you need is for the Montreux Fascist conference to evolve into a "fascist international" and thus assistance for groups in Africa and Asia. Italy incidentally will hate this going by their rule in the Horn of Africa--possibly means fascism can't establish itself there.

A thread, Maverick's The Shadow of Montreux: The Fascist International, was made about the creation of a Fascist international in Montreux, and, while one of the points of the common agreed ground among members is colonialism, Fascists movements still rose in India and other Third World countries.
 
A thread, Maverick's The Shadow of Montreux: The Fascist International, was made about the creation of a Fascist international in Montreux, and, while one of the points of the common agreed ground among members is colonialism, Fascists movements still rose in India and other Third World countries.

That was an inspiration of mine, it was a good TL. But the key point is that fascism had far more potential than seen OTL, especially in the newly decolonised countries. Hitler and his regime was the worst thing that happened to fascism, since it helped kill it as an alternative to other ideas (like Marxism). No, it wouldn't be any good, wherever it was instituted, or maybe at best, it's at least as good as the alternative paths of development (under ideal conditions). But it's still an alternative (in most cases an equally shitty one albeit for different reasons) which never existed OTL, where there were plenty of awful regimes aligned with the US alongside awful regimes alongside the Soviet Union with some vague commitment to Marxism. Either way seems a failure, albeit for different reasons. No, fascism won't solve things, for the reasons I noted.

And at worst, under especially incompetent rulers, this third-world fascism ends up with tribalism on steroids and we see some Rwanda-tier evil happen.
 
With time also France could become fascist..or at least there was a possibility.

I tend to doubt France with its leftist tradition. Despite Mosley, Britain wasn't likely either. The US had Huey Long who might've gotten far had he lived.

If Hitler had died in 1935 and some moderate type of fuhrer had taken the power,with different politics and without war, fascism could really triumph....at least for some decade?

It would've been hard to avoid war, given the antagonism toward Versailles. Just about any nationalist/fascist regime in the reich would've wanted the corridor back; that was the most unpopular part of Versailles.
 
It would've been hard to avoid war, given the antagonism toward Versailles. Just about any nationalist/fascist regime in the reich would've wanted the corridor back; that was the most unpopular part of Versailles.

Actually, no. By the end of summer of '39, most of the German leadership and public had felt Versaille had been more then rectified and were extremely skittish about kicking off another crisis and war. WWII just doesn't happen without Hitler. At least not remotely in the same fashion that it did. Yes, it's likely that there'll be a rise of right wing sentiment in Germany and a re-militarization of the country, but without Hitler the German leadership won't be nearly so dedicated to starting a war. This is particularly the case since the French and British were willing to make some pretty extreme concessions to Germany in the interests of avoiding another conflict. Virtually any other German leader would have taken Munich as a triumph and cashed in at that point, as indeed most in the Nazi Hierarchy and the Wehrmacht leadership wanted. It's not that other German leaders of the day were peacenicks or anything, but none of them were willing to take the gambles Hitler was.

You might get a different war years later, when France, Britain, and Russia have reformed and rebuilt their militaries and Germany is on the downswing of disappointment after the early bloom of fascist glories has worn off and does something rash that the Anglo-French and/or Soviets now feel strong enough to punish, but by then the odds would be so strongly and obviously against Germany that its unlikely the Wehrmacht would go for it.
 

King Thomas

Banned
You need a less war-crazy Hitler, but yes, it would be possible to have a successful bloc of Fascist nations although if things stagnate you might see the equivalent of an Arab Spring later.
 
You need a less war-crazy Hitler, but yes, it would be possible to have a successful bloc of Fascist nations although if things stagnate you might see the equivalent of an Arab Spring later.

"Successful" in this case is a relative term. The economics of the fascist-bloc were not conducive for doing very well past the early-1940s.
 

Hunter W.

Banned
"Successful" in this case is a relative term. The economics of the fascist-bloc were not conducive for doing very well past the early-1940s.

Fascism is extreme centrism, the State Dept. called Hitler a moderate as late as 1938 supposedly standing between the extremes of the Right and Left of the NSDAP, Mussolini implemented the concept of workers and corporations working together in harmony to serve the national interest where as National Socialism in itself was a mixed economy built entirely on racism and nationalism.
 
Fascism is extreme centrism,

A subjective statement (many of the socio-cultural aspects of Fascism is very much right wing, only their populist and economic platforms resemble centre-leftish ideals) which does absolutely zip-all to refute my e. It's a near unilateral observation among economic historians that the economic programs of Nazi Germany was financially unsustainable and would likely have led to a financial catastrophe by '42 had the Germans not been able to knock out the French and loot much of Western Europe in the process.
 
I suspect that fascist economics were so bad, that unless the German economy was reform Germany would suffer an economic collapse without the looting of the countries in invaded during the war.
 
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