Von Stauffenberg and World War III

"We hear again and again that, if the attempt had succeeded, the only result would be the creation of another 1918"-SS Security Service after the Assassination Attmpt in 1944.

Richard J. Evans's final work on the Third Reich just came out, and he talks about German morale during the war. There's a fair bit of discussion about the coup attempt, and how people reacted. And the radical conservative state the plotters wanted to build.

In essence, it seems to me that any surviving plotter-led state would be a nasty, unstable regime which mourned the deaths of the Jews while openly admitting Europe was better off without them. It would not be friendly to parliamentary democracy, and rsemble Franco's spain, or perhaps Salazar's Portugal, much more than the FDR.

And it would have a huge embittered group of people who would think Hitler could've won the war. Combine it with reparations, political isolation, and ISTM that things could get nasty.

Thoughts?
 
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You have a point but the fact is almost anything is better than the Nazis. Besides weren't weveral of the plotters democrats?
 
Some of the plotters were military conservatives. Others were Social Democrats (e.g. Julius Leber and Wilhelm Leuschner, both intended for high cabinet posts). It was a broader-based coalition than either the Germany Must Perish! or the Nazis would admit to.
 
I think if hitler would have been assassinated there was still one major problem and that is the Soviets would not have accepted a new regime in Germany due to the fact that they are weaker and need to make sure that Germany does not rise again to threaten them. As for Germany turning out like the Franco Government Franco eventhough he was a dictator Spain was relatively stable thoughout the cold war untill his death even with the basques carring out terrorist activity.
 
THis state would be defeated by sOVIETS. Or you want Alllies to fight with germany together?

Why just the Soviets? The Allies cutting a deal with a bunch of war criminals isn't that likely either; indeed, when word of the plot first reached London and Washington, it was just dismissed as a power struggle among Nazis.
 
"We hear again and again that, if the attempt had succeeded, the only result would be the creation of another 1918"-SS Security Service after the Assassination Attmpt in 1944.

Richard J. Evans's final work on the Third Reich just came out, and he talks about German morale during the war. There's a fair bit of discussion about the coup attempt, and how people reacted. And the radical conservative state the plotters wanted to build.

In essence, it seems to me that any surviving plotter-led state would be a nasty, unstable regime which mourned the deaths of the Jews while openly admitting Europe was better off without them. It would not be friendly to parliamentary democracy, and rsemble Franco's spain, or perhaps Salazar's Portugal, much more than the FDR.

And it would have a huge embittered group of people who would think Hitler could've won the war. Combine it with reparations, political isolation, and ISTM that things could get nasty.

Thoughts?

With you 100%. Totally, Utterly.
 
I kind of disagree. You seem to assume that the post-assassination government would have been able to make peace with the allies, which at that point was just not likely to happen anymore. In my opinion, with a success of the assassination attempt Germany would be actually worse off than in OTL. The Allies would not have accepted anything short of an unconditional surrender which would have forced the Wehrmacht to continue fighting to the bitter end. Of course, by 1944 there was no chance anymore of them winning, however, the thing is that this might actuallly prolong the war, given how a lot of Hitler's highly irrational actions effectively shortened the war as they actually weakened Germany. Without Hitler, Germany could hold out drastically longer - and if they manage to hold out until the summer of 1945, then consider it a given thing that the nukes will be dropped on Germany, not on Japan. This means, Germany will be in a much worse shape post WWII, and the FRG may not even be able to pull the "economic miracle" we saw in OTL (that's a conjecture, however).

The other problem is certainly that in the aftermath of WWII, a second "Dolchstosslegende"-style myth could have arisen, with people claiming that the war would have been won had Hitler not been assassinated. While I don't think such a movement could reach significant influence in divided Cold War Germany, I'm certain that it taint Germany's reputation and make it a lot harder to re-integrate into the international community than it was for OTL's German states during Cold War.

In regard for WWIII, I'm not sure. I don't see how exactly this could affect the outcome of the Cold War, so I'd wager the chances of the Cold War going hot would be about the same as they were in OTL. Assuming the Cold War ends analogous to OTL, what I can see however happening then is that there will be substantial international resistence to a German reunification. In essence, Germany by present-day would be a much shittier place to live in than OTL.
 
It's worth pointing out that the people behind the coup weren't a monolithic group and had a varying range of views on policy - I sometimes wonder just how (in)coherent any post-Hitler regime would have been.

But on the whole, the fact is that people do too easily fall into the notion that they were friendly anti-Nazis, when they had almost to a man distinctly authoritarian views. One of their foreign policy wonks (can't remember who) was firmly convinced that Germany would need to retain much of the Nazi-conquered territory of Central Europe, and that the South Tyrol should be 'returned' to Germany, a view which in that respect was more nationalist than Hitler's.

Mind you, you have to ask yourself: would they have been able to negotiate a peace which would enable them to stay in power in the long term, even assuming the coup is succesful, to which I think the answer is pretty obviously 'no'. The Allies were all too aware of the failures of 1918, had spent vast amounts of blood and treasure prosecuting the war, and they blamed the monocole-totting Junkerocracy for the war just as much as they blamed the Nazis. When you consider that, paz blanco seems an awful long way off.
 
Good sirs, hello. I might have to agree with the original idea of the thread. If a Stauffenberg Germany somehow survives the War intact, then the Prussian aristocracy which would support the Stauffenberg coup would still be firmly in place, and quite powerful as well.
Of course, the likeliness of a Stauffenberg government surviving the War is in fact, not likely. The Soviet Union is still marching West, and by now they do not even need a second front in the West - victory is certain. The Western Allies, too, would not be willing to co-operate with a regime made up of un-democratic types for the most part.
However, it is not likely that nuclear weapons would be all that damaging to Germany. Japan survived two, and the damage of Dresden and other bombings was not that small compared to the atom bomb.
 
I'd think the Germans would already have to have been doing better from 1943 or so. Otherwise, it'll just be part of the Fall-of-the-Nazis legend.
 
Not all of Germany's war gains were bad, though.

Austria only existed as a separate nation after 1918 because of Allied diktat, against the will of its population.

Not sure about the Polish Corridor or Sudetenland.

In any case, the US made deals with Soviet war criminals out the yin-yang and engaged in war crimes itself (Operation Keelhaul, Dresden), so this moralistic attitude about dealing with "war criminals" seems rather out of place.
 

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Assuming there isn't a civil war in the aftermath of the assassination, it is very likely that the war was going towards the bitter end. Not quite as bitter as the Nazis would have it, but nevertheless still going to be bad. I don't think that even with the best strategy the war could have been prolonged that much longer. Likely, what is going to happen is that the Soviets are viewed as the worst of the two enemies, and the reserves are concentrated in the East. This is going to be hard, because Bagration is almost complete resulting in the destruction of army group center.
One thing that we won't probably see is the Volkssturm and the clusterfuck that that turned out to be, with Goebbels controlling them and getting large numbers killed. East Prussia will also probably be evacuated instead of leaving the population there to stiffen the moral of the soldiers at the front. Wacht am Rhein (battle of the bulge) is not likely to happen either, as forces are sent East to battle somewhere where they might make a difference. The Rhine is likely to be the only obstacle that the Germans contest.

Overall, not much changes, except for revisionists after the war claiming that that Allies should have cut a deal with the Germans once they killed Hitler. I don't know of the Nuremburg trials will have the same impact if most of the Nazi leadership is dead and the Germans are claiming to have already "de-nazified" themselves. It might mean that the Germans are less willing to be reflective after the war about what they did, if they think that the coup was their mea culpa. I would be interested to see how the world views the plotters after the war. There are probably more Germans alive at the end of this TL, if the evacuations happen, more Soviets deaths, if reserves are used solely in the east, and less Western Allied deaths for the afformentioned reason. It would be interesting to see how the new German government treats the Holocaust and how the Allies treat the Germans based off the new dynamic that they set.
 
I think Grimm_Reaper, in response to someone claiming the Valkyrie gang was not aware of the Holocaust, produced one of their "general orders" in which food and medical supplies would be sent to the camps but the inmates would not be allowed to leave immediately or engage in "political demonstrations" (!).

The Wikipedia article on Valkyrie suggests the slaughter of the Hungarian Jews might have played a role in the plot moving forward when it did. It's possible to be an anti-Semite (V.S. claimed Poland was populated by "Jews and half-breeds") and be opposed to mass murder, after all.

So about the Holocaust, I would imagine there'd be a reckoning, if anything because the camp guards were from the Death's Head Legion of the SS and therefore would need to be dealt with because they might otherwise participate in a power-grab themselves.

About a Civil War, wasn't the point of Valkyrie was that the Army would believe Hitler had been murdered by the SS and all the hard-core Nazis would be immediately detained, before they could organize?

The SS in Paris were detained without a shot fired, IIRC.

How far along was Operation Bagration when the bomb plot took place? General Zod's scenario describes how theoretically some divisions could have been successfully rescued, but his scenario has also been criticized by board members.
 
However, it is not likely that nuclear weapons would be all that damaging to Germany. Japan survived two, and the damage of Dresden and other bombings was not that small compared to the atom bomb.

My point actually was that the increased damage in that scenario would not come primarily from the nuclear weapons, but from the general prolonged fighting.
 
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