Surviving Third Reich, 2012

By the end of 1941 Hitler's rule was so absolute that he, and he alone, controlled almost all of the major activities of the Third Reich.

This. And I can't really see him abdicate or retiring - or siring/apponting an heir, for that matter.

I think that the death of Mao and the power struggle ensuing thereafter would be a good example of what would happen in the Reich. There's a powerful nomenklatura, more interested in personal fiefdoms than in the "ideology", and there no clear line of succession - not to mention overlapping areas of responsibilities. Infighting between factions of the top-Nazis, the military guys and SS is ensured.

Question merely is what factions will have emerged after the war and during the years where Hitler is less and less able to control them. There's always a moderate and a radical wing, and I guess there'll also be a "military first" faction.
 
By the end of 1941 Hitler's rule was so absolute that he, and he alone, controlled almost all of the major activities of the Third Reich.
He enjoyed tangling things up and the Gaulieters were given near total control over their gaus. He seldom disciplined them. Non-annexed areas would each probably have patrons from within the German government, be they the SS, army, navy, or whoever else is about.
 
He enjoyed tangling things up and the Gaulieters were given near total control over their gaus. He seldom disciplined them. Non-annexed areas would each probably have patrons from within the German government, be they the SS, army, navy, or whoever else is about.

After ensuring that men who would "Work towards Fuehrer!" were in charge, he would leave certain areas to individual control. Besides, Hitler would assign similar responsibility to rival services and then intervene as they fought with each other and side with one or the other, depending on his whim.
 
He did. But after USSR was defeated and Germany controlled entire Europe. He might as well said 'I am going to retire when the pigs start to fly!'
He seemed pretty intent upon building giant monuments and collecting art from all over the world. He might have kept the title as Fuhrer while giving away the jobs of president, chancellor, and his heading the party to others. With the belief in micromanaging and doing whatever the hell he wants. Whatever way he decides to do it would have a major effect on the future as to whether people can leave the offices of leadership in retirement, shame, or feet first.
 
After ensuring that men who would "Work towards Fuehrer!" were in charge, he would leave certain areas to individual control. Besides, Hitler would assign similar responsibility to rival services and then intervene as they fought with each other and side with one or the other, depending on his whim.
Probably would allow him to keep making decisions later on as he arranges it that people needed to come to him for their blessing on disputed things. That or those in charge give him options they know he will choose to make him feel good.
 
He seemed pretty intent upon building giant monuments and collecting art from all over the world. He might have kept the title as Fuhrer while giving away the jobs of president, chancellor, and his heading the party to others. With the belief in micromanaging and doing whatever the hell he wants. Whatever way he decides to do it would have a major effect on the future as to whether people can leave the offices of leadership in retirement, shame, or feet first.

Before all this, Germany would need to defeat the USSR. And that is not going to happen. As long as there is war, Hitler is not going to leave military and foreign policy decisions to anyone but himself.
 
Probably would allow him to keep making decisions later on as he arranges it that people needed to come to him for their blessing on disputed things. That or those in charge give him options they know he will choose to make him feel good.

And once he dies - the result is scramble for power.
 
And once he dies - the result is scramble for power.
Unless he has decided upon a new heir to replace Goerring or if his will said who got what position, unless everyone keeps the one they are in at the time. Martin Bormann would probably be in the best position for being bribed to forge or withhold certain papers.
 

MSZ

Banned
I don't mean of regime transition, but rather of personal transition. Fuhrer role in Nazi Germany was pretty much unique. Granted, before the war broke out, there could be hopes of some sort of order crystallizing. You and I both have done it in our timelines. But as the war progressed and as Hitler grabbed more and more power to himself the succession process would result in more and more chaos as many people would feel entitled to take his place. The result would be utter chaos. If it survived, Nazi regime would then be 'nazi' only in the name. It would probably more resemble Franco variety of fascism, than anything else, or perhaps the regime in South Africa. Nazism, in its fundamental form it certainly would not be.

Wasn't really unique - a dictator with absolute power is something that has happened not that rarely. We both realize that the death of such a leader always has to lead to a power struggle of succession, the successor most often not managing to assume the same degree of power. But the regime can go on, Soviet Union, and North Korea would be your prime examples. The fact that given time all ideological states tend to become less driven by ideology and more by national interest is a natural result of revolutionary/military leaders becomic civic ones - their goals change, and so must their means of achieving them. Ideology becomes secondary to keeping people fed and calm (or if they are not, then dead).

Nazi Germany would be no exception in my opinion, turning from a "Revolutionary National Socialist" country to just "Germany with Nazi symbolism and parts of the original ideology implemented, following a foreign policy of its national interest". Just as the Soviet Union went from "Revolutionary Bolshevist" state under Lenin, to "Russian Empire with bolshevik symbolism and parts of the original ideology implemented, following a foreign policy of its national interest". It wouldn't be "real Nazi" in the sense that its original founding principles would not be impemented fully or continued; but some would remain or be replaced by others.

Again, unlike the Nazis, Soviets ideal was justice and equality for everyone. Stalin may have perverted this ideal up to a measure, but even his rule rested upon some outside, impersonal legitimacy. Theoretically, at least. Fuehrer's decisions were unquestionable, his person irreplaceable. Fuehrerprinzip almost guaranteed that upon Hitler's death no committee would sit around to discuss and hammer out a compromise succession. Hitler purposefully pitted institutions of the Reich against each other. So, all potential successors would derive their legitimacy from the power to grab the position.

Meh. Call it as you want, both were just absolute lunatic dictators bent on killing people. Soviet ideal was "justice and equality for everyone" meaning Soviets; German ideal was "justice and equality for everyone" meaning Germans. Hitler probably had more legitimacy to his rule than Stalin since he was elected after all. A succession would not avoid blood being spilled, but anyone who would take power is in my opinion more likely than not to legitimise his rule by calling a Reichstag session (or NSDAP rally) and confirm it.
 
Unless he has decided upon a new heir to replace Goerring or if his will said who got what position, unless everyone keeps the one they are in at the time. Martin Bormann would probably be in the best position for being bribed to forge or withhold certain papers.

Nonetheless, there would be people controlling other people with guns. Probably Himmler or whomever succeeds him in the position, Goering or his counterpart at the head of the Luftwaffe, someone who controlled the party (perhaps Goebels). A bunch of people willing, used to and able to resort to armed violence and not wanting to accept the purported will of the Fuehrer, considering it either forged or made under duress or even blaming the other faction(s) for Hitler's death.

Don't get me wrong, Germany will survive. Some form of government will arise. It is, however, vanishingly unlikely that Germany could make it to 2012 with the fundamentally Nazi form of government, whatever their vision was for the world after the war. I find it hard to imagine such a world, because Nazi philosophy had strife and conflict as its cornerstone, being the extreme social Darwinism.

Virtually since its inception in Germany, Nazi regime produced escalating crisis. There is no period during which Nazi regime didn't either perpetuate or prepared for a war or some other aggressive act towards the neighboring countries. I find it hard to see any sense to Nazism outside of this.

The way I understood the OP, he wanted to know if purely Nazi, not only in appearance but in substance, Germany could make it to 2012. And my answer to this is no. But certainly Germany would, provided it avoided getting into total war of mutual annihilation with the Soviets, might have survive and keep a regime that is Nazi in appearance but not in substance. I am certain, it would require the death of Hitler.
 
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Meh. Call it as you want, both were just absolute lunatic dictators bent on killing people. Soviet ideal was "justice and equality for everyone" meaning Soviets; German ideal was "justice and equality for everyone" meaning Germans. Hitler probably had more legitimacy to his rule than Stalin since he was elected after all. A succession would not avoid blood being spilled, but anyone who would take power is in my opinion more likely than not to legitimise his rule by calling a Reichstag session (or NSDAP rally) and confirm it.
Hitler was appointed Chancellor. He had only gotten German citizenship a few years before when he was appointed to head the delegation from Brunswick to the Reichstag. I am unsure if he was ever even elected to the Reichstag, as I can't find where it was from.
 
Nonetheless, there would be people controlling other people with guns. Probably Himmler or whomever succeeds him in the position, Goering or his counterpart at the head of the Luftwaffe, someone who controlled the party (perhaps Goebels). A bunch of people willing, used to and able to resort to armed violence and not wanting to accept the purported will of the Fuehrer, considering it either forged or made under duress or even blaming the other faction(s) for Hitler's death.

Don't get me wrong, Germany will survive. Some form of government will arise. It is, however, vanishingly unlikely that Germany could make it to 2012 with the fundamentally Nazi form of government, whatever their vision was for the world after the war. I find it hard to imagine such a world, because Nazi philosophy had strife and conflict as its cornerstone, being the extreme social Darwinism.

Virtually since its inception in Germany, Nazi regime produced escalating crisis. There is no period during which Nazi regime didn't either perpetuate or prepared for a war or some other aggressive act towards the neighboring countries. I find it hard to see any sense to Nazism outside of this.
No doubt it would involve guns and such, but the issue is on whether it would constantly be a dictatorship under a single man or if there would be factions, chances to remove the leader, or perhaps positions in the government which people could claim they have tenure with because they were appointed by the previous Fuhrer, if that position would even remain. I am currently reading Hitler's Table Talk so I hope to learn a bit more on how he said things would be.
 
I think it would collapse from bad economics and mega projects like the ones below.
"
Breitspurbahn



Proposed route map 1943.


The Breitspurbahn (German pronunciation: [ˈbʁaɪtʃpuːɐ̯baːn], translation: broad-gauge railway) was a planned 3 m (9 ft 10 1⁄8 in) broad-gauge railway, a personal pet project of Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich of Germany, supposed to run on 3 metre gauge track with double-deck coaches between major cities of Grossdeutschland, Hitler's expanded Germany.[1]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn

Welthauptstadt Germania

250px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_146III-373%2C_Modell_der_Neugestaltung_Berlins_%28%22Germania%22%29.jpg


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welthauptstadt_Germania



 
They were considering moving the capital away from Berlin, which Hitler had mused on doing sometime before the turning point in the war. Might have been for the best, as it was unlike New York and not built on granite. Everything would have sunk like the Leaning Tower. They had been expecting tribute from the conquered countries and on making the Balkan countries cease to produce industrial goods so as to eliminate their bourgeoisie, instead focusing on providing food to the Germans. When I say they I mean Hitler. That and making it so that countries can only trade with Germany.
 
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A mess.
I'd give them a decade or two tops holding things mostly together then steadily piece by piece their satellite states would drift away and into the American sphere.

By 2012 the worst of it would probally be over. Education and economy restored to sanity and all that. But the legacy would remain. Sort of like modern Russia I suppose would be a good analogy.
 

Cook

Banned
There seems to be several clear points where a change in events would have favoured the Third Reich. The most critical would be the one no-one has yet mentioned in this thread: a general European war not starting in 1939. One of the key requirements for an attack on Poland, as stipulated by Hitler was that Poland should be isolated and the Western Powers would not respond, and this is what Ribbentrop continued to tell him throughout 1939 even though there were clear signs that it was not the case. If Hitler had had a competent Foreign Minister at the time, then he would not have attacked when he did, instead continuing his preparations while trying to isolate the Poles diplomatically; given the regular collapse of French governments even Hitler’s limited patience would not have been stretched too far.

Alternatively, if the British had made peace in 1940, leaving Hitler in control of Europe and them in control of their empire, he would not have issued plans for a lightning war against the Soviet Union in 1941 and would have instead been able to resume his earlier plans of building up Germany and attacking the Soviet Union sometime in the 1943 – 45 period. With an armaments industry freed up from having to deal with an ongoing war and therefore able to retool for a new generation of weapons, as was planned as early as 1937 but was shelved due to the urgency of fighting what was believed to be a short war, and without the devastating impact of strategic bombing, the attack on the Soviet Union, when it came, would have been substantially stronger than that which occurred in June 1941. Given that the Barbarossa attack reached half way to Moscow in only thirteen days, a stronger initial onslaught may have been sufficient to destabilise the Soviet Union, even with the increased strength that up to three years would have provided, especially if it coincided with one of Stalin’s regular purges of the Armed forces and industry.

Contrary to what people seem to think, the Reich's military would be backwards both technologically and tactically, fine for internal oppression, but utterly useless for defending the border.
Given that the Wehrmacht in World War Two was the most tactically innovative and flexible of the armies fighting, and was also the army most willing to explore and adopt new technology as it became available, and was not used domestically for security purposes (the Reich having other administrative branches dedicated exclusively for that task, the SS, ORPO, SD, Gestapo to name a few), I’d have to say that you’re suggestion is very far off the mark.

Unlike the USSR, the Third Reich had the real, actual, one man rule.

Between 1937 and 1953, the Soviet Union’s decision making and control was also concentrated exclusively in the rule of one man: Joseph Stalin. The two dictatorships operated along remarkable similar lines.
They never envisioned any transition or anything.
On the contrary, of the Soviet Union and Third Reich, that was only true of the former, not the latter; in the Soviet Union no provision whatsoever was made for a transition of power in the advent of Stalin’s death; just raising the subject was treasonous and would have guaranteed the immediate execution of the individual fool-hardy enough to do so. Stalin’s paranoia made the possibility of naming a successor impossible and resulted in several promising individual’s carriers being cut fatally short when they were rumoured to be next in line for the throne. Stalin himself ignored his own mortality, eating and drinking excessively despite having reached his seventies and having had at least one minor heart attack and stroke. At the time of his death he’d been planning another purge of the Communist Party that would have included all those in senior government positions at the time. So unprepared were Stalin’s successors that they continued to invoke his name and maintain his cult of personality until 1956, fully three years after his death.

Hitler, in contrast to Stalin, was acutely aware of his own mortality; not only was he a hypochondriac, but he had been repeatedly shot at and was nearly blown up by an assassin (in all, more than assassination 19 attempts) before the start of World War Two and he made preparations accordingly. In 1938 Herman Goering was named as his official successor (prior to then it had been Rudolf Hess), and plans were made for a smooth transfer of power even in the advent that Hitler was assassinated; these very plans were used by the July 20th plotters in their attempt to organise a coup. During the Fuhrer Meeting of November 10th, 1937, when Hitler was spelling out his plans for the following years (and recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum) the subject of the period 1943 – 1945 is covered, including the issues arising from the aging of the Nazi purty’s then current leaders and ‘if the Fuhrer was still living’ what his plans would be.

The entire point of the Third Reich was to make war on everyone and everywhere, forever.

This too was not actually the case; Hitler had very clearly defined long-term goals, but was opportunistic in the short term. Aside from raising Germany to a position of pre-eminence in Europe and defeating Communism, he really had no foreign policy goals; he’d spelt out his territorial ambitions in Mein Kampf and he would repeatedly emphasis their importance in the succeeding years. He had no interest in extending German power beyond Europe or of acquiring Germany’s former colonial territories in Africa and the Pacific and preferred the British and French empires to be maintained if possible, if for no other reason than to prevent the United States acquiring them instead.

When France Capitulated in June 1940 Hitler immediately ordered the demobilization of a significant part of the army, releasing the men back into the civilian workforce in the belief that Britain would shortly negotiate and therefore the war was over. Rather than feverishly plotting the attack on British, Hitler took a summer holiday in Northern France touring Paris and showing his associates where he’d fought in the First World War. In late 1941 when he (over-confidently to say the least) believed that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse he once again demobilised entire divisions in the belief that the war would shortly be over.

Soviet Union at least had an underlying cause of trying to make a progressive society. Their society at least demonstrated the ability to exist without having to periodically plunder the neighbors.


Again not correct; the Nazi regime was always far more conscious of public opinion and the need to raise the standard of living of the German people than were their Soviet counterparts during same period. Because of the need to keep the German public happy, the Third Reich was far slower than Britain or the Soviet Union in converting to a full war economy and was still producing consumer goods long after the other powers had shifted their industry totally over to armaments. The very foundations of Nazi power were that they and they alone had brought prosperity to the German people. The Nazis were desperately aware that the German public would only consider them legitimate as long as their standard of living continued to improve and feared what would happen when it didn't.

As to the Soviet need to plunder the neighbours, that was the underlining basis of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact for most of fifty years.

While there was some lunacy in Soviet method, there was no method in Nazi lunacy.

For a regime lacking any method, they were remarkably capable of continuing a war for six years against much of the world and under conditions that would have crushed anyone not capable of at least some significant degree of skill.

While both the Soviet Union and Third Reich were autocratic command economies, in the period when it was not at war of immediately preparing for war, a far larger proportion of the economy was dedicated to satisfying the public demand for consumer goods. The economy was dominated be a working relationship between government and large corporations that provided improvements in worker’s real standard of living while at the same time suppressing labour dissent, but then the same is true of post war Japan and to a very large degree to the modern People’s Republic of China.

In some ATL somewhere, where the USSR collapsed in World War II, someone is posting a thread asking "WI The USSR survived until the 1970s (or even 80s?)", and people are saying "Impossible! Assuming the whole thing didn't collapse after Stalin's death, they'd still be teaching Lysenkoism and Japhetic theory!"
This is a valid point; Stalin’s Soviet Union still played ideological lip service to the World Wide Revolution, even though Stalin had abandoned it in favour of Socialism in One Country. The Soviet relationship with The West was still affected by The West’s perception of that ideology even long after the demise of Stalin and it should have been otherwise clear that the Soviet Union did not have expansionist ambitions. A post-Hitler Third Reich dominating Europe would, even without radically changing its basic economy, have continued until the 1980s or ‘90s. And as we have seen in the PRC, a complete change to the regime’s economic theories can occur without the collapse of the regime. It is only within the last few years that we’ve seen the least softening of the grip on public opinion in the PRC, and that is yet to be translated to any increase in democratisation.

If the Third Reich had achieved success in the war, with either a later start to the war, and then fighting selectively against individual nations in isolation, or been able to achieve a negotiated truce with Britain before turning all their efforts on the Soviet Union, then once out of the war the likelihood of the regime surviving decades seems very likely. It would definitely not have been a pleasant place (to say the least) for the subject peoples of the east, and those in the western vassal states would have had reduced standards compared to the Germans themselves, but the standard of living of the German people would probably have continued to rise (at least, as long as they didn’t try to speak their minds). It would not have been a free society, but its collapse would by no means have been guaranteed.

‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation… if we fail, then… will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.’
 
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MSZ

Banned
Again not correct; the Nazi regime was always far more conscious of public opinion and the need to raise the standard of living of the German people than were their Soviet counterparts during same period. Because of the need to keep the German public happy, the Third Reich was far slower than Britain or the Soviet Union in converting to a full war economy and was still producing consumer goods long after the other powers had shifted their industry totally over to armaments. The very foundations of Nazi power were that they and they alone had brought prosperity to the German people. The Nazis were desperately aware that the German public would only consider them legitimate as long as their standard of living continued to improve and feared what would happen when it didn't.

This, plus the fact that even with the war being known it was lost, Germany maintained quite a developed welfare program (financed by looting others, but still, the looted wealth was given to people rather thad directly to the war effort). I recall that a lot of Nazis and military supported this, remembering the first world war, where the lack of consumer goods and general poverty led people to revolt against Germany - Nazis were trying to prevent that all costs. And it worked, seeing there was no uprising, even among the sailors. So a nazi regime realizing it won't be able to pay and feed the people is actually likely to try and remedy it someway other than "shoot them if they don't like it". That invading others and stealing their stuff is an option is known; but there were others as well.
 
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