The Man with the Iron Heart: Aftermath

[TheNordicBrit]

Spoilers Ahoy!

Right, at the end of the book both America and Britain have withdrawn from their occupation zones in Germany. The French and Soviets are still in their own individual zones though. The Americans and British left each of their zones under the control of the German 'police'. Now of course these 'police' are Nazis (or at least it's made out to be this.)
Now at some points in the book Turtledove makes it clear that France basically relied on the British and American support there, otherwise they really didn't have much to go on. So after the Brits and Yanks leave I can imagine the French would get harsher than the Soviets, but after Anglo-American pressure would be forced to leave Germany to give their section back to the supposedly 'Democratic' government.
After this handing-over of territory I can envisage the Soviets getting an even tighter grasp over their own territory, this would lead to a grueling campaign by a join Anglo-German-American team that would try to get Stalin out of the Soviet occupation zone.

Now what do you think about what I've said? Do you think it'd go differently? And what do you think would happen after this? Or share your own ideas.

 

[The Red]

The Soviets would probably crush all resistance in the long term, a Nazi resistance can't survive without the help of the German people and even then it will struggle greatly. There's a nice but of fan fiction about this called "The Man with the Tungsten Toe" you should check it out.

 

[DCC]

Possible aftermath, maybe? Stalin gets so upset that he decides to literally depopulate his part of Germany. (Considering some of the things he said about the Doctor's Plot" in OTL, one could make a case that Uncle Joe was losing it--and the Iron Heart timeline would be even more stressful on him.)

He quickly finds out that it's very hard to remove that many people with any speed. Even the gulags can't get rid of that many people without it taking decades, and without constant danger of the uprisings getting worse. But there are ways...

The Allies, and especially the U.S., were washing their hands of the whole mess. But word leaks out that Stalin has *reopened Auschwitz*, the issues become more complicated and the choices more difficult.

What do you think, AH.com?

 

[The Red]

The Allies, and especially the U.S., were washing their hands of the whole mess. But word leaks out that Stalin has *reopened Auschwitz*, the issues become more complicated and the choices more difficult.

There's no need, he can just gas entire villages if he wants to. Or burn /depopulate them, the Germans found that to be a very effective way of dealing with partisans.

I fell horrible after saying that

 

[Mojo]

It would be out of character for Stalin to gas all of Germany. Stalin above all Russian rulers appricated how big Siberia really is and according to The Gulag Archipelago how quickly an entire population could be moved. As he grew older it is entirely possible that a Germany in exile could be created in place of the Jewish Autonomous Oblasts.

 

[Mojo]

It would be out of character for Stalin to gas all of Germany. Stalin above all Russian rulers appricated how big Siberia really is and according to The Gulag Archipelago how quickly an entire population could be moved. As he grew older it is entirely possible that a Germany in exile could be created in place of the Jewish Autonomous Oblasts.

 

[T3h_shammy]

It would be out of character for Stalin to gas all of Germany. Stalin above all Russian rulers appricated how big Siberia really is and according to The Gulag Archipelago how quickly an entire population could be moved. As he grew older it is entirely possible that a Germany in exile could be created in place of the Jewish Autonomous Oblasts.

Yeah America, France, and Britain along with most of the Western world just fought the Germans but will they really be fine with 60 million Germans being forcibly deported. This isn't Hitler. The SU doesn't need living space. I just don't see that flying.

 

[DCC]

There's no need, he can just gas entire villages if he wants to. Or burn /depopulate them, the Germans found that to be a very effective way of dealing with partisans.

I fell horrible after saying that

Oh, it gets worse than that:

As the Germans found out: there are problems of scale. Those methods work OK when you're trying to kill off dozens or hundreds of people. They don't work real well when you're trying to kill off millions of people.

Those methods sometimes work when you're trying to kill off a bunch of members of some troublesome group to frighten the rest of them into submission. (Though sometimes they just rile the rest of the group up). They don't work real well if you're trying to completely eradicate that group.

The Germans tried going from village to village killing people, but to really have a Final Solution, they had to develop more efficient methods. And did.

My really dark scenario assumes Stalin isn't after the land in East Germany--he already has that. He wants to get rid of the Germans, once and for all.

 

[Ivan Druzhkov]

Judging from the scenario you outlined, it looks like the Cold War in Europe is going to right buggered up. Rather than having a nice West/East dichotomy, the 1950s will have a loosely-aligned US-UK-French alliance, a slowly consolidating Eastern Bloc, and a vaguely Nazi West Germany that neither side particularly likes, and that isn't interested in playing by anyone's rules. To top it off, the rather sour postwar occupation does suggest that we could see the emergence of a popular "Fortress America" program for fighting the Cold War, with a greater reliance on nuclear saber-rattling rather than commitments of troops to conflicts against indigenous Marxist groups.

I do wonder how likely Evil West Germany's chances of success are. I mean, sure, there hasn't been a vigorous denazification of west Germany. However, the party is still trying to regain its grip on power, and there are plenty of people who remember Weimar, remember how the Nazis brought Germany to ruin, and decide to take matters into their own hands. The early 1950s could end up being an even drearier replay of the Freikorps era, and who knows how that would shake out.

(Incidentally, why would Stalin need to ethnically cleanse East Germany? Surely there's plenty of good brains in the KPD who, thanks to a spell in the camps, are more than eager to personally resolve the Werwolf question through the vigorous application of revolutionary justice.)

 

[ObssesedNuker]

Stalin occupies the Nazi West Germany as soon as the last Allied troops leave.

Seriously, Stalin is not going to accept any form of Nazi-state in any part of former Germany. The Allies can give less of a fuck as they don't care about the Nazis and France still has occupied control over a part of Germany. Stalin proceeds to implement Morgenthau*.

End result: Eastern-bloc is further West, Soviet Union gets more loot and is therefore stronger post-war, West Germany is significantly smaller, and if any reunficiation comes about Germany is going to be even weaker economically then OTL.

*Not in name of course, but the execution will be so similar as to make no difference.

 

[Grimm Reaper]

Certainly the right in the US will be decades recovering before they can credibly accuse anyone else about being soft on communism.

The book was one of Turtledove's most nonsensical, of course. The idea that the US or British would hand half of Germany back to an incipient Nazi regime rather than do what was needed to crush a Nazi resistance, no matter how brutal, is absurd. The only thing more ridiculous would be Soviet troops NOT moving in to the British and American zones about eleven seconds after the Western Allies left.

 

[Ivan Druzhkov]

The book was one of Turtledove's most nonsensical, of course. The idea that the US or British would hand half of Germany back to an incipient Nazi regime rather than do what was needed to crush a Nazi resistance, no matter how brutal, is absurd. The only thing more ridiculous would be Soviet troops NOT moving in to the British and American zones about eleven seconds after the Western Allies left.

Yeah, I had problems with the premise too. I did find it kind of weird that nations that had few qualms about, say, napalming civilians into puddles of fat, would turn tail after a few IEDs. It always seemed to me that the British and American attitude towards postwar Germany was something along the lines of "we will create a new peaceful German nation united by the spirit of democratic community, even if we have to shoot each and every one of you kraut fuckers to build it."

Of course, it could be that it was Turtledove's intent to disabuse his readership of a few cherished myths about the war, perhaps referencing genuine antiwar sentiment in WWII or the experiences of veterans, like Kurt Vonnegut, who did not have a particularly glorious war. I could even imagine spinning a yarn as a metaphor for postwar America's shifting attitudes on denazification vis-a-vis anticommunism. Then again, given how most comments I've read about this book describe it as an Iraq parable written in Turtledove's usual style, his intentions may have been far more modest.

(Incidentally, the most interesting line of speculation I've read about concerning a more successful Werwolf movement was a brief scenario in which, in a victorious Third Reich in the 1960s, the plan evolves into a volkish mass movement, akin to the Red Guard, that the old party elites use as a weapon to attack the entrenched hierarchy of the SS and the Party bureaucracy. Good novel fodder, if you ask me.)