What if Adolf Hitler was not an anti-semetic bigot?

I think he would be bent on pan-Germanism and anti-communism. This would step on quite a few toes, but if he plays it nicely, he could get the pre-WW1 German Empire (european territories)+Luxemburg+1939. Germany without having Germany clobbered in the mid-40.`s.
 
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He does it economically, which is impossible without a rearmament campaign it seems. What do you do with these weapons that you made in order to give jobs to people so they could feed themselves? Sell them? To who? Not like many nations have enough money to buy foreign weaponry.

Stir the pot in Eastern Europe about Soviet expansionism (The Poles still have their war with Russia fresh in their minds and Ukraine's brief independence cut short by the Soviets would be in everybody's minds) and sell weapons to those nations?

Re-arm Germany in defiance of Versailles, citing German national defense interests against possible, if not likely, future Soviet aggression?

Sell to China? They need weapons and they're at war with Japan...and a powerful, victorious China that crushes it's communist insurgents later provides a powerful, anti-communist ally on Stalin's eastern flank...

Covertly supply arms to nationalist movements in other nations colonial possessions like the Soviets did after WW2? (Guns for Israel? The idea of the thread is that he's not an anti-semite, so why not?)

Re-arm Spain after Franco takes control?

Plenty of places the German arms industry can sell to in the thirties and forties.

Hitler would have to be patient too. If he's still impatient, none of this matters and he still jumps the gun and launches his war (now with more allies, perhaps) too soon and Germany and whatever allies he's assembled still lose.
 
The Red

You can't use somebody as a scapegoat without hating them. For whatever reason, Hitler started hating the Jews sometime between the start of the war and him becoming head of the Nazi Party. I think he was already damaged when whatever-it-was happened, but his hatred of the Jews gave him direction.

Regards

teg
 
There's an interesting version of this in Third Reich Victorious called 'the Littler Admiral'. Basically Hitler goes into the Navy instead of the Army WW1, gets his anti-semitism kicked out of him and learns a few things about administration and naval warfare. Starts hating on the British instead and actually wins the election to the Reichstag. History happens. Unnamable Sea Mammel also sort of happens in a way that it at least partially realistic. Germany attacks USSR because faschism and communism are not best friends. Jewish scientists create nuclear bomb. Moscow goes up in a mushroom cloud. Cold War between German and US starts.
 
The Red

You can't use somebody as a scapegoat without hating them. For whatever reason, Hitler started hating the Jews sometime between the start of the war and him becoming head of the Nazi Party. I think he was already damaged when whatever-it-was happened, but his hatred of the Jews gave him direction.

Regards

teg

Who knows when he started hating Jews? But that doesn't mean he used them as scapegoats. For example look at Nick Griffin, a man that stood together with some of the most radical clerics of Islam to oppose Judaism and now calls them wicked and vicious whilst defending Israel. Now doubtless he hates both religions but he chooses who to scapegoat.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
I think it wonderful that if you have a few Jews in the basement you can make nuclear weaponry, serious what is it this idea, that just because a a few Jews stay in Germany they're going to produce nuclear weaponry, it completely ignore the enoumous quantity of resources the Manhattan project cost. The benefit of non-anti-Semitic Hitler isn't a few Jewish sciencetist, but the fact that there's 7-8 million Yiddish speaking Jews in Europe, which suddenly will be seen as semi-Germans, which can be drafted as other Volksdeutsche, and that Germany doesn't waste a lot a lot of resources on die Endlösung. While it may not give them victory it will place them in a better situation.
 
Ok. The way I see it, if Hitler was neither a bigot or insane, Germany would probably have unified with Austria, taken the Sudentland in the Apeasment, and stopped there. For a while at least. I think the main problem with Hitler is that he was mad with power, and was riding an ungodly huge wave of nationalism. A pragmatic leader would have known when to move, and when to hold tight. But then again, this brings us back to the old question of wether or not it would have been best for England and France to allow Hitler to have Poland, in effect re-establishing old Prussia, which England enjoyed a particularly good relatioship with. I can't help to wonder if done correctly, could Hitler have accomplished this?

If he didn't invade Czechoslovakia and the Munich agreement, instead only supporting the Slovak nationalists and the Hungarians from afar, I suppose he might get a freer hand against Poland, which might yield without the support of the Western powers. At this point Germany will have gained Danzig and the Sudetenland, and be the undisputed hegemone of Central-Eastern Europe. Hungary, Slovakia and Romania would surely all rally to the anti-Communist banner, and with some persuasion Poland and Czechia as well. After all Poland was an anti-communist, nationalist military dictatorship, and just as Romania in OTL rather pragmatically accepted realities on the ground after Germany forced them to give up Transylvania to Hungary, I think the jingoists in Poland would be to excited by the prospect of a bloody war in the east for them to stay grumpy for to long.

Anyway, I don't think you get the dynamics behind fascism. Fascism is what you get when the middle-layers (the white collars, the well-off farmers, the small business men) feels squeezed from both the workers movement and finance capital. At one hand, they feel they are getting pushed out by the big monopolists, but at the other hand they fear the supreme monopolist, the coming Socialist state, because that will definitely be the end of their existence. To solve that riddle they make up conspiracy theories how both international capitalism and international socialism are part of the same conspiracy, and then set out to ally themselves with a primarily imagined national capital and the traditional upper-class (clerics, nobles, military officers) against the socialists. (After the fascist victory what typically plays out is then a struggle between the middle-class ideological fascists and the upper-class more old-style reactionaries. Out comes may differ, as Nazi Germany and Nationalist Spain shows.)

Of course a socialist would argue that their being squeezed out is a natural effect of the development of the means of production, and that rather then trying to cement a old and dying way of life, they should join the workers in the struggle for a modern industrial economy, but not under the control of monopolists, but instead under control of the people.

In this scheme anti-semitism works, because Jews tend to be both in the socialist camp (in their capacity as intellectuals, and due to alienation many Jews historically felt for a society that discriminated them, though the latter is of course no longer the case) and in the capitalist camp, which allows the fascists to single out one group of capitalists as the evil ones (Jewish internantional bankers), and ally with the rest (like the Krupps), but its not antisemitism thats the real driving factor. Germany would have gone fascist even if there weren't a Jew in the country, and Hitler would simply have had to hate something more abstract like internationalism then the Jews.

(In fact, if you ask me, this very process can be seen in the US today. A Christian proto-fascist movement is growing of disgruntled Middle American, seeing their livelihood swept away by the present crisis and the long-term stagnation of the Middle-Class. These people idealize capitalism, blaming the crisis only on a small fraction of "bad capitalists" (Goldman Sachs et al) in alliance with the state, and fear socialism as the plauge. They are nationalistic jingoists, have ultra-conservative social values, are full of nostalgia for a rural past and belives in a national rebirth, "restoring the republic".)
 
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No, this Hitler is not anti-slavic either, and yes, he is a pragmatist.


This only is creates an avalanche of change IMO. You are assuming that everything else within the mains reason is the same, so I'm confident that you're still going to have the basic foreign elements and decisions remain in line with OTL. Perhaps the argument could be made that if he were such a pragmatist then he wouldn't have jumped into Russia with England still afloat but oh well. If Germany invades Russia with the attitude of Victory instead of ideology or in this case without a twisted ideology. I think you're going to see a lot of the Russian people jump to the Germans cause. Being a pragmatist I would wager that he could manipulate large legions of troops from the Baltic States and Ukraine as well as other parts of the regime. It always amazes me at the numbers Germany managed to use even while ravaging the land and treating them as subhuman. If he goes in and plays the liberator card I think you can just give him the 'W' in the bloody Eastern battles.
 
Well, considering that many jews would be alive, more soldiers would be in the army, and with Jewish Businesses still intact, the homefront would be better and the Jewish Scientists (Einstein), would stay in Germany and work on Germany's A-Bomb, probably developing it by 1944. If Hitler wasn't insane, he might have let his Generals lead the warfront, and not himself.

In the end, Hitler would control most of Europe by 1950. If he does loose the war, he won't be put on trial and would probably live past the war.


Also, I studied Hitler extensively, he never wanted to control the world, only Europe. I have read on Hitler for quite a time, reading Mein Kampf. Hitler knew that taking over the world would be near impossible.

I have read excerpts from his second unpublished book, Zweits Busch. He said he would retire to his hometown in 1950 and probably give up the title of Fuhrer to one of his Generals or a member of his staff. (Rommel, Himmler, Goering, Hess, or Goebbels.) He said that if America was involved in the war in Europe, he would make a ceasefire with them, and there would be an air war in the 1980's. Very interesting concept.

Some other results would be the defeat of the Soviets, who would exist mostly in Asia now. Stalin would move the government to somewhere in Asia as well. He would keep out of the Pacific Theater of the war. Hitler probably would not keep his alliance with Japan after Pearl Harbor, and not enter the war. The Korean War and the spread of Communism would never happen. China with the support of America, would be nationalist, Tibet would probably remain independent.

If Japan realizes that they have no allies, they might make a Ceasefire early in the war and keep Korea and some Pacific Islands, or America would proceed with Operation Olympic.
 
If Hitler weren't anti-semetic and insane, he wouldn't be Hitler.

If you want a 'sane Hitler' kind of scenario, read
Holding Out for a Hero: Gustav Stresemann Survives (
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I think you have to go back further on this one. He built his political support on engaging the lower classes with an anti-monority approach. Once in power, he destroyed the middle class intelligencia (mainly Jews) who would influence opinion against him. So would he have even become the Fuhrer?

The next challenge is that Britain, France and Russia were very happy to maintain the status quo in Europe, Eurasia and the World. German expansion could include the annexation if Austria (it was only 60 years since Germany was formed), but would any aggressive expansion see the same outcome as WW2?
 
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I think you have to go back further on this one. He build his political support on engaging the lower classes with an anti-monority approach. Once in power, he destroyed the middle class intelligencia (mainly Jews) who would influence opinion against him. So would he have even become the Fuhrer?

The next challenge is that Britain, France and Russia very very happy to maintain the status quo in Europe, Eurasia and the World. German expansion could include the annexation if Austria (it was only 60 years since Germany was formed), but any aggressive expansion would see the same outcome as WW2?
 
Anti-semitism was a popular tactic used throughout Europe for centuries , by regimes or governments looking for scapegoats , so it was nothing new in Weimar Germany . The NSDAP did take it to the extreme . The Italian fascists as a whole did not endorse anti-semitism . Plain anti-bolshevism might not have been enough to differentiate the nazis from the more or less already right-leaning political scene in Germany
 
Remember also that Hitler had syphilis. The mental effects of the disease may have contributed to his paranoid ramblings concerning the Jews. That, coupled with his occultic dabbling.

So let's say ol' Dolph doesn't get the syph. Where would his anger be directed? At France and the other countries which imposed the harsh Verseilles Treaty. So instead of attacking the Jews, he instead attacks those nations which he perceives to be the greatest threats to Germany. With Jewish scientists on his side, Germany gets nuclear weapons. Not a good thing. Hitler conquers Europe.

Since this is what he wanted, I say he stops there...and glares viciously at the USSR. The Japanese however might consider him a problem.

Imagine:

Nazi Europe
Imperial Japan
Isolationist America (or semi-isolationist/non-expansionist)
USSR

Talk about a cold war...eek.
 
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