Who Would Be Worse: Fuhrer Heydrich or Himmler?

Which Fuhrer Would Have Greater Nightmare Fuel?

  • Heydrich

    Votes: 157 70.1%
  • Himmler

    Votes: 67 29.9%

  • Total voters
    224

Wolfpaw

Banned
Albert Speer or Martin Bormann would actually be my bets for the next Fuhrer.
Like Bormann, Speer is capital-N Nothing without Hitler in charge. He'd probably stay on some planning committees and run a ministry here or there, but he would not become nor in all likelihood want to become Führer.

I can actually see Speer retiring once Ade is dead and going on to head an architectural firm that gets very generous government contracts.
Didn't Hitler curb Himmler's wilder fantasies about paganism and the occult? Without that "restraint" it almost doesn't bear thinking about how even more depraved Nazism could have become.
Fixed that for ya ;)
 
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What were Himmler's wilder fantasies? How would they have shaped Germany if he became the Fuhrer?

I need to catch up on my WWII history.
 

Deleted member 14881

Ally restoring paganism starting a new cult of heores of dead SS men
 
I voted Heydrich. He was the one in charge of the SD and would be able to take most of the leaders down in a coup. With the SD backing he could have found the reliable people in the different power bases to back him if push came to shove and he wanted to take over after Hitler. I could even see him making a push in later parts of 43 or 44 if he saw Hitlers health deterate, He was one of the few who could get access to to him on a moments notice without having to explain to other people before hand what was going on. If he was to show documents to Hitler about how people were plotting against him, especially after July 20th, Hitler would let the SD round them up. He was one of Hitlers favorite people and most importantly was trusted with important tasks and not told what to do.
 
AFAIK, Heydrich was an extreme hard-ass, but I don't think he was INSANE like most of the Nazi higher-ups.
Oh, he was certainly insane. Just not in an apparent, rabid-angry dog kind of way. Rather than a pathological hatred of any particular group, he had a pathological inability to have any concern for anyone other than himself, and sometimes not even then. He had the hallmarks of a sociopath: lack of empathy, manipulation, narcissism, and boldness. He had, at times, a lack of regard for his own safety (see his time as a pilot in the Eastern Front, or his attempts to fight his own assailants).

This makes him the worst possible choice, in more ways than one. His lack of ideological adherence to Nazism, but his adept ability to feign it to the extreme, means he's likely to effectively and efficiently apply complete brutality and unfeeling mechanisation to the Nazi genocides. Moreso than were applied IOTL. Add to that the sociopathic need for control, and you'll see something like the East German Stasi but across all of Europe.
But the second thing is, what happens if he's leader of Germany when it wins and becomes a superpower? Opposing perhaps America or a rump USSR or Japan or China in a Cold War scenario? He's not going to quietly coexist with them. He's reckless and self-absorbed and believes he is the best at everything, like any sociopath. He'll drive postwar Germany towards brinkmanship and beyond, and likely start a nuclear war (assuming Germany obtains nuclear weapons, which is probably the only way it'd win the war anyway). And he wouldn't care.
 
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