What if the Nazis treated the Russian people better in WWII

my view the option of "Russian people treated better" was during Soviet-Axis talks, that the German side was serious about long term collaboration.

when met with Soviet haggling and an unfortunate grab of more than agreed upon Romanian territory (like a brush across Hitler's throat) the retreat to natural inclinations happened.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
I didn't just mean Hitler, but also the Germany navy and the personalities there. Raeder was no idiot, but was deeply conservative and out of touch with modern technologies and non-battleship warfare. Donitz was very intelligent, IIRC the highest IQ of any Nazi official tested at the end of the war, but also had his biases flawed assumptions. If you read some of the British intelligence/operations research memoirs/histories the German navy was simply out played by the Allies.

I think a better way to put it is "The German navy was outweighted by the Allied Navy".

To the Raeder issue, we really don't want a carrier attitude admiral since it carriers actually are waste of resource for the Nazi. So a BB admiral may not be such a bad thing. But if we have POD that puts naval aviation under the Navy, would Raeder not have embraced the funding? If planning the BoB, not Goering, would Raeder not have went for the ports first? If there was quality staff planning for a naval war with the UK, would Raeder not have executed the plan?

As to Donitz, which assumptions do you see as the problem?

Now as to how I would write this type of ATL, I would put the main character (the POD) in the first 100 or maybe first 20 Nazis. He would be a trusted, and original associate of Hitler, and would make better decisions. It is the same path I would use to boost food production, or to fix most other single weaknesses of the Nazis.
 

Deleted member 1487

I think a better way to put it is "The German navy was outweighted by the Allied Navy".

To the Raeder issue, we really don't want a carrier attitude admiral since it carriers actually are waste of resource for the Nazi. So a BB admiral may not be such a bad thing. But if we have POD that puts naval aviation under the Navy, would Raeder not have embraced the funding? If planning the BoB, not Goering, would Raeder not have went for the ports first? If there was quality staff planning for a naval war with the UK, would Raeder not have executed the plan?

As to Donitz, which assumptions do you see as the problem?

Now as to how I would write this type of ATL, I would put the main character (the POD) in the first 100 or maybe first 20 Nazis. He would be a trusted, and original associate of Hitler, and would make better decisions. It is the same path I would use to boost food production, or to fix most other single weaknesses of the Nazis.
That was also a factor, but the German navy made heaps of mistakes and were outplayed by the Allies. Big mistake: Plan Z, pushed by Admiral Raedar. In intel they were screwed by SigInt issues, Doentiz pushing for war with the US, and getting played on things like the Metox receiver. The KM's use of radar was extremely limited, including hiding their development from all the other services and running their own research program independent of the others.

Raeder demanded carriers BTW:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graf_Zeppelin-class_aircraft_carrier

The problem was he really didn't know what to do with naval aviation and demanded things like a dive bombing Do217, which delayed the design thanks to wasting effort trying to make it into something that wasn't really possible (long range naval dive bomber). Despite having the patent for the Italian air deployed naval torpedo pre-war the German navy never used it and instead produced a bunch of defective torpedoes, both regular and air deployed, which had issues beyond just the magnetic trigger.

Doenitz wanted war with the US, tried to centralize all Uboat operations and got them sunk (https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/BlaUboat.pdf), and failed to develop certain technologies earlier enough to get use out of them...plus there was the torpedo issue he ignored for nearly a year.

Getting rid of Goering in 1936 instead of having Walter Wever die in a plane crash and then getting Fritz Todt leading the 4 Year Program would help a lot...but the issue is that without Goering there is a huge problem with the diplomatic side of the run up to the war that probably leads to war early and in a far less favorable situation for Germany, given that Goering actually helped moderate Hitler and sweet talk the British, who were convinced he was a moderate of their class that they could trust.
 
I think people are rather missing the point about Barbarossa here. The reason the Heer stole food from the local peasants (and thus caused mass starvation) was nothing to do with the food situation in Western Europe, and everything to do with the fact that their logistical tail for Barbarossa was hopelessly bad. They knew full well before launching the attack that the only way to make it work was to rely on seized food to feed their armies, and that doing so would cause millions of civilian fatalities. Treating Soviet civilians well (at the level of "not deliberately starving them to death, or kicking them out into the snow in just their underpants in order to steal their homes and clothes since no winter kit is available") essentially means that the advance grinds to a halt somewhere in the region of Smolensk, simply because that's about as far as they can go while shipping in food as well as ammunition and fuel.

No one denies that life will be hard in the actual combat areas as there is not only looting but destruction. However, improving things in the cities and main occupation areas isn't hard and would ease a lot of the pressure on the countryside
 
I think people are rather missing the point about Barbarossa here. The reason the Heer stole food from the local peasants (and thus caused mass starvation) was nothing to do with the food situation in Western Europe, and everything to do with the fact that their logistical tail for Barbarossa was hopelessly bad. They knew full well before launching the attack that the only way to make it work was to rely on seized food to feed their armies, and that doing so would cause millions of civilian fatalities. Treating Soviet civilians well (at the level of "not deliberately starving them to death, or kicking them out into the snow in just their underpants in order to steal their homes and clothes since no winter kit is available") essentially means that the advance grinds to a halt somewhere in the region of Smolensk, simply because that's about as far as they can go while shipping in food as well as ammunition and fuel.

It's important to note that out of the 17-18 million Soviet civilians who died during the Second World War, the majority were killed by exposure or starvation rather than murder. This is a rather understated German war crime in popular history but it ensures that any appeals to anti-communist or independence movements are going to lose any legitimacy within the first months of the Eastern Front.
 

Deleted member 1487

It's important to note that out of the 17-18 million Soviet civilians who died during the Second World War, the majority were killed by exposure or starvation rather than murder. This is a rather understated German war crime in popular history but it ensures that any appeals to anti-communist or independence movements are going to lose any legitimacy within the first months of the Eastern Front.
Got a source for that? Seems a bit off.
 

Deleted member 1487

Kiev 1941 by David Stahel. I think it's mentioned in War Without Garlands by Robert Kershaw as well.
Depends on what you count as part of exposure and starvation I'd think. Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands presents things a bit differently, though he focuses on the Holocaust.
 
If Germany wanted to keep agricultural production up, a solution could be to follow the WWI model of sending POW out to farms to work as farmhands, it's not a solution but it would help.

IIRC this is what happened with French POW's, along with using them in factories. And weren't Hitler Youth required to work on farms during the summer pre-war?
 
No one denies that life will be hard in the actual combat areas as there is not only looting but destruction. However, improving things in the cities and main occupation areas isn't hard and would ease a lot of the pressure on the countryside
NO! The whole point of my post is that improving things in the occupied territories is very, very hard since it involves starving the frontline of resources since the logistical train can't ship in both munitions and food. You fundamentally cannot change the situation in the occupied territories without changing the basis of the entire campaign.
 
I presume Russian here means pretty much all Soviets? Besides Jews, I means. They... would have a rather hard time of even hiding in plain sight, given how they had to have Jew written as their nationality on identification cards. Now then, for Ukraine there was a bit of a famine I believe, not helped by Stalin apparently sending more wheat than the Nazis requested at one point, and this may have given the Germans views on there being more food in Ukraine than was really there. They would have invaded anyways, given their ideology and how there was a lot of decent farmland down there for their yeomen farmersque vision of the future. Now, how much food from Soviet Ukraine was being shipped to Russian cities or being exported to the Germans?
 
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