What If: France Annexes Rhineland After The Fall of Nazi Germany?

Most of the Polish settlers in the territories it got from Germany, were themselves expelees from the Kresy boderlands annexed by the Soviet Union. For example, the Polish inhabitants of Lwow formed the core of Wroclaw's population.

France has no such source of manpower to draw upon so resettlement is out of the question.

Pied-Noirs?
 
France wanted to weaken Germany after World War One, and annexing the Rhineland was one of the options they suggested. Germany had more people than France and that was considered to be a threat to the future of France. The other allies said no to annexing the Rhineland.

Some French - Foch notably. There were a good many voices in France who rejected the idea. One of the problems is that to claim the Rhineland, the French would need to violate the logic used to press their claim to Alsace Lorraine.

And all this applied after WW2 as well. And after WW2, the need for a military frontier on the Rhine is lessened since the Allies properly finished the job that time around and Germany was crushed and occupied.

What may be possible is for France to reject merging their zone of occupation into the Anglo-American Bizonia and also separate it from the Soviet zone, meaning Germany splits into 3 - Bizonia, East Germany and... West Germany?

It would require much better Franco-Soviet relations and much less threatening Soviet behavior.

fasquardon
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
France simply has no way to enforce this.

While I think this is an unlikely scenario, since the French would not want the Rhineland and they would not have been willing to risk American economic support, its not quite true to say that they had "no way" to enforce this. At the end of WWII, the French Army had been reconstituted and numbered over a million men.
 
While I think this is an unlikely scenario, since the French would not want the Rhineland and they would not have been willing to risk American economic support, its not quite true to say that they had "no way" to enforce this. At the end of WWII, the French Army had been reconstituted and numbered over a million men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saar_Protectorate

It is so unlikely it almost happened.

But Kehl was annexed for some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehl
 

longsword14

Banned
While I think this is an unlikely scenario, since the French would not want the Rhineland and they would not have been willing to risk American economic support, its not quite true to say that they had "no way" to enforce this. At the end of WWII, the French Army had been reconstituted and numbered over a million men.
All that is true, but getting others' permission is the key here. France did not conquer the Germans, it only got what the Three ( or rather Two) allowed it to have, and one of them definitely would not have it.
French leaders, and not just DeGaulle, thought otherwise and behaved accordingly during most of the Cold War
In peace, yes, but they never had the power to back their stance. For all the talk, nobody had any doubts about the French "third way".
 
Most of the Polish settlers in the territories it got from Germany, were themselves expelees from the Kresy boderlands annexed by the Soviet Union. For example, the Polish inhabitants of Lwow formed the core of Wroclaw's population.
Slight majority of Polish settlers were Poles from Central Poland. Circa 40% of settlers were from Kresy. Poles from Kresy suffered heavy losses during ww2 and many of them remained in USSR (mostly in Western Belarus and Lithuania) after war.

What should happen to make France willing to take Rhineland? Germans should treat French people like they treated Slavs-mass executions, deportations, burned villages, Paris levelled to the ground. In such situation not only French people are more resentful towards Germans, there are also masses of people in France, who have nowhere to go, because their houses were destroyed.
 
Some French - Foch notably. There were a good many voices in France who rejected the idea. One of the problems is that to claim the Rhineland, the French would need to violate the logic used to press their claim to Alsace Lorraine.

And all this applied after WW2 as well. And after WW2, the need for a military frontier on the Rhine is lessened since the Allies properly finished the job that time around and Germany was crushed and occupied.

What may be possible is for France to reject merging their zone of occupation into the Anglo-American Bizonia and also separate it from the Soviet zone, meaning Germany splits into 3 - Bizonia, East Germany and... West Germany?

It would require much better Franco-Soviet relations and much less threatening Soviet behavior.

fasquardon

I suspect that the moment France looked the other way, they'd turn back to find that West Germany had swallowed up their occupation zone. Perhaps the WG government starts funding passive resistance methods in their OZ? After all, are the French willing to be caught on world news mowing down unarmed marches full of civiies demanding union with their brothers and sisters?
 
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