1941 - are they on the borders of Moscow? IMHO if the Germans are serious about offering this peace, they should put all their efforts into TAKING Moscow, and then can negotiate from that position with whatever remains of the Soviet leadership. In saying this, I mean that they do not need to worry about the long-term stability of other fronts, if they are going to offer peace.
That would be a disaster. But completely in character for the Nazis.
1) it wastes alot of German lives.
2) they may not be able to take Moscow.
3) IF they take Moscow they may not have a Soviet government left to make peace with, and end up stuck in a quagmire.
Can they get something resembling a Brest-Litovsk in the East? And if the Soviet Union is out of the war and America is yet to declare it, can a Germany that offers to leave the non annexed parts of France, the Low Countries, Norway, and perhaps Greece get a peace with Britain?
Yes, from the modern histories of Barbarossa that I've read, a Brest-Litovsk style peace in the East is totally possible, if the Germans offer one soon enough. Of course, this peace would be more of a truce than a true peace. Though as the two Koreas show in OTL, sometimes a truce can last a long time.
Britain is more difficult. Unless the United States becomes unfriendly, the British can basically stay in the war for as long as they like, and unless there's a major political shift in the UK, the Germans MUST withdraw from Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece and Denmark to get peace, very likely from Bohemia and Slovakia and probably Yugoslavia as well. For Britain to accept German annexation of its allies and the country it declared war to protect would be a very serious humiliation, and it is difficult (though not completely impossible) for the Germans to pressure the British enough to successfully require the British to swallow their pride. And obviously, even without Hitler, it is very difficult to imagine any German leadership that would accept giving up most of its conquests when they have won a stunning series of victories and Britain appears to be so small and isolated. No-one at this point knows that the UK and Commonwealth are already out-producing Germany and its allies, they don't know how much closer the British are to a nuclear bomb and they don't know just how much industry and mass literacy have changed the nature of war.
And even if the Germans avoid their OTL DoW on the US, they are still in a de facto war with the US, and the US has strong economic reasons to desire Nazi Germany to be crushed. Add to that FDR really doesn't like the Nazi regime and even if FDR were voted out and replaced with a more German-sympathetic US administration, the new world orders people were imagining in Germany were ones that locked the US out of alot of profitable business they'd been expanding into since WW1. It is hard to imagine even a bona-fide American fascist preferring a German victory to a British victory.
So most likely, the Germans get a few years to build up, Germany itself can be made nearly impregnable to air attack, Europe can be made nearly impossible to invade, but real peace is never obtained and the Nazi empire is destroyed by a combination of British atom bombs and Soviet forces invading. If the US gets more involved (as OTL), expect the above to happen sooner, with US a-bombs, a US-equipped Soviet army and US-Commonwealth armies invading Europe.
It's all horrifically costly, the Jewish population of Europe is wiped out, there's noticeably fewer Russians in the world and there's much fewer Poles, Ukrainians and Belorussians. But at the end of the day, the Germans are trapped between victory disease (why shouldn't they expect the world on a platter in fall of 1941? In OTL they'd been trouncing everyone up until December of that year) and the massive pile of bad ideas called Nazism.
Even without Hitler, the Nazis were a bunch of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists who thought everything would come up roses for Germany once they killed the last Jew. Their own bad ideas mean the odds are heavily against them and being a little less stupid doesn't fix their core problem of being a bunch of untrustworthy murderous anti-Semitic conspiracy nuts. These are people who thought that, when they conquered a whole bunch of Europe that contained significant British and American business interests, the only reason why the British and Americans were upset about this is because the Jews secretly controlled their governments.
And the "good Germans" in the military were no more in touch with reality. The portions of the German officer corps that didn't buy the Nazi ideology was out of touch with reality in its own way, as the officer class had spent 22 years telling themselves that if only the civilians hadn't betrayed them they would have won WW1 and ideas that worked in the age of black powder armies were still good and sane in the new era of industrial war. Plus, they didn't yet have the information that we have today and so did not know how important things like industrial potential and levels of education would prove to be.
fasquardon
