U.S.-Nazi Cold War

missouribob

Banned
Would such a Cold War have been stable or would it have collapsed into nuclear holocaust? No POD earlier than 1935.
 
Given the number of resistance groups America and Britain (and possibly the USSR, depending on the actual scenario) would be able to supply and assist, the US would definitely have won. The Nazis simply cannot hold all of Europe (even just western/central Europe) forever without taking serious attrition losses from guerrillas and partisans, or somehow instilling loyalty towards puppet governments in the civilian population of occupied countries. I'm not saying they can't hold Europe, just that it will be costly to do so. The US has no such problem.

I think we can also speculate that some sort of blockade will be in force around German-occupied Europe, probably around a chain of territories consisting of Svalbard-Iceland-Great Britain-Gibraltar-Sardiania/Corsica-Malta-Sicily-Crete-Rhodes. You might end up with 'Free' governments of Italy and Greece being set up on Corsia-Sardina-Sicila and Crete-Rhodes respectively.
 

missouribob

Banned
The Nazis simply cannot hold all of Europe (even just western/central Europe) forever without taking serious attrition losses from guerrillas and partisans, or somehow instilling loyalty towards puppet governments in the civilian population of occupied countries. I'm not saying they can't hold Europe, just that it will be costly to do so. The US has no such problem.
I have a hard time agreeing with you here. Knowing the Nazi's they'd just kill everyone in every village and town within 20 miles of an insurgency. From what I've read insurgencies don't work to well when everyone in the local population is dead. I like your points about the free governments of Italy and Greece BTW. That would be interesting.
 

bguy

Donor
missouribob said:
Would such a Cold War have been stable or would it have collapsed into nuclear holocaust? No POD earlier than 1935.

How long would it take the Nazis to develop the atomic bomb once the U.S. or U.K. demonstrates its possible? Hitler probably won't live much past 1945 even in a Nazi Victory timeline, and his successors will probably be much less willing to intentionally start a nuclear war, so the world is basically racing the clock on whether or not Hitler dies before the Nazis can produce a large number of atomic bombs and the means to deliver them to the U.S. and U.K. (Obviously if Hitler ever has a large stockpile of nuclear weapons and bombers or rockets that can carry them to targets in the United States then nuclear war is pretty much inevitable.)

I think we can also speculate that some sort of blockade will be in force around German-occupied Europe, probably around a chain of territories consisting of Svalbard-Iceland-Great Britain-Gibraltar-Sardiania/Corsica-Malta-Sicily-Crete-Rhodes. You might end up with 'Free' governments of Italy and Greece being set up on Corsia-Sardina-Sicila and Crete-Rhodes respectively.

Wouldn't a blockade be an act of war? I could certainly see the U.S. having Nazi occupied Europe ringed with bomber and missile bases, but I don't think the U.S. would actually be interdicting trade in a "Cold War" situation.
 

Deleted member 94680

Wouldn't a blockade be an act of war? I could certainly see the U.S. having Nazi occupied Europe ringed with bomber and missile bases, but I don't think the U.S. would actually be interdicting trade in a "Cold War" situation.

According to the not ratified document San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea, 12 June 1994, a blockade is a legal method of warfare at sea but is governed by rules. The manual describes what can never be contraband. The blockading nation is free to select anything else as contraband in a list, which it must publish.
Whether or not a blockade was seen as lawful depended on the laws of the nations whose trade was influenced by the blockade. The Brazilian blockade of Río de la Plata in 1826, for instance, was considered lawful according to British law but unlawful according to French and American law. The latter two countries announced they would actively defend their ships against Brazilian blockaders, while Britain was forced to steer for a peaceful solution between Brazil and Argentina.


Did the Americans (outside of the Cuban Missile Crisis) ever ennact a blockade of Soviet territory? Obviously the Soviets blockaded Berlin, but that and the American blockade of Cuba were both short term actions, over a specific issue.

A full-on blockade of Europe (presumably meant to last for a long time) wouldn't be the kind of thing engaged in during a Cold War, surely?
 
Knowing the Nazi's they'd just kill everyone in every village and town within 20 miles of an insurgency.

That would simply stoke even more resentment and build up the cause of resistance. Oppression frequently works in the short term (e.g. decades, like the USSR), but is rarely successful in suppressing dissent longer-term - particularly not in a developed region. And large-scale depopulation isn't really a practical policy when it comes to economic efficiency.

I like your points about the free governments of Italy and Greece BTW. That would be interesting.

Thank you!

could certainly see the U.S. having Nazi occupied Europe ringed with bomber and missile bases

Yes, I meant more a military 'blockade' than a commercial one, though I wouldn't be surprised if the US and UK did try to block Germany's access to foreign markets/suppliers (if they could get away with it).
 

missouribob

Banned
That would simply stoke even more resentment and build up the cause of resistance. Oppression frequently works in the short term (e.g. decades, like the USSR), but is rarely successful in suppressing dissent longer-term - particularly not in a developed region. And large-scale depopulation isn't really a practical policy when it comes to economic efficiency.
Well we are talking about Nazis here, economic efficiency is going to take a back seat. They are probably going to enslave Russians and kill anyone who resists. The reason USSR oppression failed was because they weren't willing to continue that level of oppression in Eastern Europe. I can't see a Nazi state having such issues. Once again at worse from the Nazi point of view they will just depopulate any area with sizeable dissident.
 
Armed resistance groups are notoriously ineffective without supporting boots on the ground. It's also very easy to wreck your own cause via collateral damage or from hardened killers in the groups.

Passive resistance is more effective but still a drop in the bucket.

A full out cultural co-opting and Eastern Front style atrocities would cause even the French and Norwegian resistance to collapse.

Even in AANW, the war got restarted for real because the Nazis went on the offensive.

I mean, look at where the Nazis weeded out the sadists: massacring helpless, innocent people who had already been crushed. There's no need/it's counterproductive to weed those sadists out of your anti-resistance forces.

Look at OTL Stasi and intra-country KGB behavior and worse.
 
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Armed resistance groups are notoriously ineffective without supporting boots on the ground. It's also very easy to wreck your own cause via collateral damage or from hardened killers in the groups.

Passive resistance is more effective but still a drop in the bucket.

A full out cultural co-opting and Eastern Front style atrocities would cause even the French and Norwegian resistance to collapse.

But, Eastern Front style atrocities did not really stop resistance on the Eastern Front, insofar as I am aware.
 
But, Eastern Front style atrocities did not really stop resistance on the Eastern Front, insofar as I am aware.
They couldn't devote sufficient resources and manpower due to fighting the Red Army and the WAllies.

Once they have occupied the USSR up to the Urals, dealing with partisans will be easy for the immoral Reich. We're talking about the same group that created Generalplan Ost and wanted to kill/enslave over 100 MILLION Slavs and Poles.
 
Is the idea here that the Nazis leave the UK and the Soviet Union alone, instead consolidating their control over continental Europe during 1940-41 and then the actual fighting ends?

If the Soviets remain allies of convenience with the U.S. and UK, my guess is that this Cold War wouldn't last as long as the RL Cold War did. The Nazis would have to invest even more into their military spending and buildup than they already did, while maintaining control over numerous hostile populations who wouldn't have even a sentimental or nationalistic loyalty to their government (something that I suppose the Soviets did have, at least within the Russian SSR). Some combination of economic stresses, internal resistance, and the problems originating from their own fanaticism might well undo their regime quicker than what happened to the Soviets.

Another question, I suppose, is if and when the full truth about the Holocaust comes out and whether the Nazis try to ramp it up to the level they reached IRL during what would pass for peacetime. Maybe they'd run into more internal resistance in that case, insofar as they couldn't use "we're fighting a war, now shut up and follow orders" as effectively to persuade and coerce Germans reluctant to cooperate? And if the Allies did get wind of it and incorporated it into their propaganda operations targeted to civilians in Nazi territory, could that spur more guerrilla resistance and demoralization?

I don't know how much of it is a stereotype and how much of it is true, but my impression is that Stalin was probably at least somewhat more rational than Hitler was, so if the Nazis do develop nukes somewhere in this timeline, that would add an extra dose of volatility to the proceedings. (I'm less sure what the consensus is about Bormann, Himmler, Goering, or any other potential successor if Hitler didn't live much longer.) If Allied intelligence developed solid information that the Nazis were working on nukes or even had a few, would that be enough for the Cold War to "go hot," with them invading to dislodge the Nazis before they could develop enough to threaten the entire world?
 
Either it would be "stable" ala A Valkyrie Rises or go hot ala AANW (though it was more like a continued WWII); though IMO the Nazis would need to adjust their policies to sustain themselves in the long run yet it must accommodate for their newly gained conquests, including the unfortunate populace within those territories planned to be enslaved rather brutally. The whole affair regarding the insurgencies (which would be supported by a rump USSR) would be like the OTL Bush Wars on crack and with one rather immoral side.
 
Would such a Cold War have been stable or would it have collapsed into nuclear holocaust? No POD earlier than 1935.

Given that it happened in OTL I wouldn't be too worried about nuclear holocaust, America would have eventually joined the war against fascism.
 
How long would it take the Nazis to develop the atomic bomb once the U.S. or U.K. demonstrates its possible?

From the bugged conversations among German Nuclear physicists at Farm Hall on August 6-7, a really long time.
They were gobsmacked that not only the Americans had a working Atomic bomb, they could deploy it on long range missions: but they had at least two of them.
https://en.langenscheidt.com/german-english/unglaublich
Unglaublich!
 
Is a "de-Hitlerization" period following Hitler's death realistic? I figure there may be a few years of infighting between the party factions until a less repressive Khrushchev-style figure takes over.
 
There wouldn't be the same level of hostility. There are a lot more Americans of German descent than Russian descent, so "otherizing" Germany would be more difficult.

Also important: the Cold War adversary being Nazi Germany assumes they won the war in Europe, and that means we didn't discover the concentration camps. So they aren't considered as evil as they are in OTL. We would know about their racism and antisemitism, but we had the same attitudes during the Jim Crow era. Eugenics was popular enough before WW2 that some states practiced mandatory sterilization of "undesirables" and the Supreme Court endorsed those laws in the shameful Buck v. Bell ruling. Eugenics is considered evil IOTL, but largely because Hitler took it to its logical conclusion.

Communism was diametrically opposed to our best values; Nazism was our worst instincts on steroids.
 
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