WI Hitler less crazy/more realistic

Replicator

Banned
What if Hitler was less crazy with his racial theories, war economy, politics ect? Or at least more realistic?Racial theories: He viewed the Slavs as subhumans allthough Slavs are an Indo-European people, and thereby might be expected to be considered "Aryan", and they were just as likely to fit the Nazi "Nordic" ideal as Germans were, if not more so. But he called the people of India and Iran Aryans allthough they were dark skinned? War economy: Full mobilisation didnt begin untill 1943, and then there were his decisions like making the Me 262 a blitz bomber or giving the U boats less priority.Politics: Allways hoping that the Brits would come to an agreement with him even when they bombed German cities into oblivion. Or attacking Russia before he was finished with Britain ect.
 
I think people get the Nazis all wrong. They were mad, yes, but they were the kind of mad which is a lot scarier than anyone with a carving-knife and a distant expression: they had fundamentally sick, wrong, and anti-human ideas underpinning their philosophy and worldview, but they were rational and functioning people who were able to put into practice plans to achieve their goals. Theirs a reason they ended up giving the rest of the industrial world a run for its money rather than giggling in a maximum-security cell.

We know, in hindsight, that it was overwhelmingly improbable for them to win the war. That doesn't mean they were on a death-ride: each decision they made had some kind of logic behind it, at least in their world.

To start with: Slavs. I think the problem here is that we identify Nazi social-darwinist racism with modern in-one-country and generally American racism: that is, race is the thing and the whole of the thing; if there is some sort of hierarchy, it begins and ends with race.

In fact Nazi ideas were based on the idea of a worldwide struggle for survival among different peoples. They believed in a racial hierarchy, and for instance they obviously regarded black people as 'semi-apes' and at the bottom of the heap. But they didn't set out to persecute black people - the local authorities did harass and discriminate against the 'Rhineland bastards', but black Berliners, IIRC, just slipped under the radar and even served in the Wehrmacht - because black people weren't the goal of their plan for colonial power.

The Slavs were believed to be sub-human because they were in the way. That's the important thing. The Czechs, the Poles, and the eastern Slavs were on territory that Germany urgently needed to dominate if it was to achieve American economies of scale and hence secure itself as a world-power; so they had to go. But even anti-Slavicism wasn't consistent. The Poles and Czechs has been Menacing Germandom for decades in lurid imaginations; the 'Russians' (Belarussians, Ukrainians...) were the commie masterminds. But the Nazis didn't treat Croats or Bulgarians with much more contempt than they treated Romanians and Hungarians.

The Slovaks and Croats were allowed to set up states. Ukrainians who wanted to set up a state, even though this put them in a corner with the Nazis against the Soviets, got shot: the Nazis couldn't allow east Slavs to dream of ruling themselves.

It is well-known that Hitler ranted, in his last days, that the German people deserved what they were getting; and I recall hearing from somewhere that he wondered aloud whether the 'Russians' had in fact been the master-race all along.

Now, though it connected to a long strand in German and European history, and satisfied the need for an enemy about which to cause panic, the hatred of the Jews was certainly not physically necessary to the Nazi plan - though intellectually it stood at the heart of a worldview in desperate need of enemies.

But the Slavs were the enemy because they needed to be exterminated, and you could tell they were inferior because the superior Germans were going to exterminate them. Snake eats tail. A regime less homicidally anti-Slavic - all right-nationalists in Germany were more-or-less anti-Polish and anti-Czech - has no reason to invade the Soviet Union or to base its policy on the ultimate necessity of so doing.


The war-economy. I am much less able to spraff about this off the top of my head, but the essence of it is that Germany was already astonishingly succesful in mobilising an industrial and resource based dwarfed by that mobilised against it - and it accomplished that only by the extensive use of plunder and slavery. It wasn't as if the Germans had factories working at half-speed. The Wages of Destruction by Tooze is an instructive read.


Weaponry. All this rests on hindsight. In 1939, for example, everyone assumed that u-boats were at most only as important as Germany's surface commerce-raiders - and to be fair, without the ports of the grossraum their range was extremely limited. It was the rapid conquest of western Europe that made the u-boat threat urgent. So why should the Nazis have invested more in u-boats before? They already made naval plans which were simply too grandiose to reconcile with the more urgent land build-up.


Treaties with Britain. Have we any specific examples? I think Hitler's Anglophilia - a grudging respect for the arch-imperialists that gave way to a mix of fury at our determined opposition and contempt for our umbrella-twirling and willingness to mortgage away the empire - is badly exaggerated.


Invading the USSR. Well, what was the alternative? A continuing war against Britain with the industrial capacity of the United States hovering behind it, allowing us to gain larger and larger advantages in the air while the Germans much around in Africa and wait for Stalin to decide that he's had his fun watching the capitalists tear into each other and turn off the supply-tap?

The Germans had backed themselves into a corner, and the only way out of it was to defeat the Red Army in one go. In retrospect, of course, this was a pretty crazy thing to bank on. But who had expected them to conquer France?

After all, they did inflict the greatest land military defeat in history on the Soviets. It just didn't do them any good in the end.
 

MSZ

Banned
A "more realistic" Hitler would not have started the war in the first place. While I Blame Communism rightly says that the Nazi's were the type of crazy folks who however had some kind of logic behind them, their logic was still based on false premises, and led false conclusions. A simple example - the Nazis claimed Germany needed Lebensraum to achieve Greatest Power status and self-sufficiency. That Germany was a netto importer of food products was supposed to justify that claim (you cannot be a great power if you can't feed your own population). It is ridiculous though, as Germany could easily have achieved food self-sufficiency if either invested in intensive agricultural technologies which were already available to them at the time (pesticides, nitrogen fertilizers, mechanized harvesting etc) or simply opened up trade with it's agricultural eastern neigbours (Poland, Slovakia, the Baltic States). The latter would have the added benefit of allowing the Reich to gradually dominate those states economically. Plus, already at the time, it was not agricultural output that decided powerhood, but industrial production and a states scientific-industrial-military complex. Nazi ideas of deurbanizing Germany and settling the uprooted population on eastern blacksoils while using labour extensive techniques (slavs turned to slaves) for production had no economic merit in the first place. But Hitler justified it saying IIRC "empires are built by war, not economy, economy is a jewish matter" or something like this, and nobody called him out on this.

Similiarly, other ideas the nazis had were mostly only logical and full of merit in their own minds, not justified by history, politics, economy, science.
 
A "more realistic" Hitler would not have started the war in the first place. While I Blame Communism rightly says that the Nazi's were the type of crazy folks who however had some kind of logic behind them, their logic was still based on false premises, and led false conclusions.

Oh, absolutely. Their belief that becoming a modern country with a diminishing rural population and a globalised economy was tantamount to colonisation by Jewish capital and race death was precisely the sort of 'mad, violent, anti-human' belief I was referring to and it underlay their whole strategy.

What I'm arguing is that they had a goal - carve out a settler-colonial empire to match the 'large spaces' available to America or to the country formerly known as Russia - which was based on lunatic dreams of conquest and slavery and was never actually going to be achieved, but in working towards it, they made choices which, while often wrong, were not without logic.

Perhaps it is best to say that they were insane, but had common sense.
 
Oh, absolutely. Their belief that becoming a modern country with a diminishing rural population and a globalised economy was tantamount to colonisation by Jewish capital and race death was precisely the sort of 'mad, violent, anti-human' belief I was referring to and it underlay their whole strategy.

What I'm arguing is that they had a goal - carve out a settler-colonial empire to match the 'large spaces' available to America or to the country formerly known as Russia - which was based on lunatic dreams of conquest and slavery and was never actually going to be achieved, but in working towards it, they made choices which, while often wrong, were not without logic.

Perhaps it is best to say that they were insane, but had common sense.

Eh, I'd put it as more that the end they were achieving was impossible and inhuman, the means they used to achieve it were more rational than one would expect.
 
If Hitler and Germany magically become "sane" before Stalingrad, then Germany's got a chance to stalemate the war.

If it's after Stalingrad, then Hitler and Germany are toast now matter how many breaks they get.


But everybody else are already answering the bigger questions a topic like this raises.
 
Hitler had evil racial theories all along yes, but there was a separate issue that he was taking high dose basically methamphetmenes which was effecting his military judgement and he was slowly becoming demented because of Parkinsons.
 
It is well-known that Hitler ranted, in his last days, that the German people deserved what they were getting; and I recall hearing from somewhere that he wondered aloud whether the 'Russians' had in fact been the master-race all along.
Interesting. . . i recall reading that as well, but i cant remember from who or what source.
 
Hitler had evil racial theories all along yes, but there was a separate issue that he was taking high dose basically methamphetmenes which was effecting his military judgement and he was slowly becoming demented because of Parkinsons.

That wasn't until quite late in his reign; he was quite rational in the early years of the Third Reich. And it may not have been Parkinson's; it has been rumored, but never proven, that he contracted syphilis during his Bohemian period (circa 1906-1914).

Normally syphilis forms visible skin lesions, among other symptoms, but that is not always the case; it can take a latent form with no visible symptoms. In the tertiary stage it causes coronary and cerebral damage, leading to heart failure and/or dementia; the Fuhrer's behavior during the last few years of his life certainly fits with this.

This is purely conjecture, though; the only time he was tested for it the results were negative. That in itself is not definitive; such tests are not one hundred percent reliable. We will probably never know.
 
That wasn't until quite late in his reign; he was quite rational in the early years of the Third Reich. And it may not have been Parkinson's; it has been rumored, but never proven, that he contracted syphilis during his Bohemian period (circa 1906-1914).

Normally syphilis forms visible skin lesions, among other symptoms, but that is not always the case; it can take a latent form with no visible symptoms. In the tertiary stage it causes coronary and cerebral damage, leading to heart failure and/or dementia; the Fuhrer's behavior during the last few years of his life certainly fits with this.

This is purely conjecture, though; the only time he was tested for it the results were negative. That in itself is not definitive; such tests are not one hundred percent reliable. We will probably never know.

My father sent decades of his life diagnosing Parkinson's and says his hand shaking and the way he holds one of his hands is classic Parkinson's and a very high pecentage of Parkinson's patients especially back then had it develop into Parkinsonian dementia, but it can take several years.
 
I think people get the Nazis all wrong. They were mad, yes, but they were the kind of mad which is a lot scarier than anyone with a carving-knife and a distant expression: they had fundamentally sick, wrong, and anti-human ideas underpinning their philosophy and worldview, but they were rational and functioning people who were able to put into practice plans to achieve their goals. Theirs a reason they ended up giving the rest of the industrial world a run for its money rather than giggling in a maximum-security cell.

I think that "mad" or "crazy" people often do have a logic about them, and that once you know the logic, you can't really call them "crazy". (You can still say they're wrong.)


As an example, I remember an ex-girlfriend who had a 6 year old daughter who was just a holy terror. One day she went into a full-blown tantrum at a mall food court about her mother buying her a small drink, not a large one. It made no sense - she could never drink that much. However, Mommy finally gave in and had the clerk pour the small drink into a large cup. The little girl shut up --- as she tore the game piece off, the game piece that was only on the large drink cups. Of course if she had said why she wanted a large drink in the first place, the whole incident could have been avoided.
 
A Nazi Germany lead by a sane Hitler would be terrifying. I don't think he would've started the Holocaust. Probably use Jews like Einstein for Germany's benefit.
 
What if Hitler was less crazy with his racial theories, war economy, politics ect? Or at least more realistic?Racial theories: He viewed the Slavs as subhumans allthough Slavs are an Indo-European people, and thereby might be expected to be considered "Aryan", and they were just as likely to fit the Nazi "Nordic" ideal as Germans were, if not more so. But he called the people of India and Iran Aryans allthough they were dark skinned? War economy: Full mobilisation didnt begin untill 1943, and then there were his decisions like making the Me 262 a blitz bomber or giving the U boats less priority.Politics: Allways hoping that the Brits would come to an agreement with him even when they bombed German cities into oblivion. Or attacking Russia before he was finished with Britain ect.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic
 
if he were less crazy, he would have waited for stalin to become more confident and start his "restoration" of western russia. then he could have swept into bohemia and poland to secure the old borders claiming the need to protect his people from evil soviet communism.

oh, and he would have had some basic knowledge of economy. :D
 

Maur

Banned
I think that "mad" or "crazy" people often do have a logic about them, and that once you know the logic, you can't really call them "crazy". (You can still say they're wrong.)


As an example, I remember an ex-girlfriend who had a 6 year old daughter who was just a holy terror. One day she went into a full-blown tantrum at a mall food court about her mother buying her a small drink, not a large one. It made no sense - she could never drink that much. However, Mommy finally gave in and had the clerk pour the small drink into a large cup. The little girl shut up --- as she tore the game piece off, the game piece that was only on the large drink cups. Of course if she had said why she wanted a large drink in the first place, the whole incident could have been avoided.
Or, the incident could be avoided if she was asked why she wants large one...
 
That wasn't until quite late in his reign; he was quite rational in the early years of the Third Reich. And it may not have been Parkinson's; it has been rumored, but never proven, that he contracted syphilis during his Bohemian period (circa 1906-1914).

Normally syphilis forms visible skin lesions, among other symptoms, but that is not always the case; it can take a latent form with no visible symptoms. In the tertiary stage it causes coronary and cerebral damage, leading to heart failure and/or dementia; the Fuhrer's behavior during the last few years of his life certainly fits with this.

This is purely conjecture, though; the only time he was tested for it the results were negative. That in itself is not definitive; such tests are not one hundred percent reliable. We will probably never know.

Of course Hitler was always luntic, you cant draw a veil over that historic fact. However mega-stress, pill-popping and errtic sleeping and eating habits didnt help his state of mind. However you cant really avoid these things either.

All the leaders suffered from health problems. Total-war takes a great toll on the warlords. FDR dropped dead and Churchill & Stalin were never the same health-wise after the war.

Many generals suffered from, heart-problems and digestive complants. Rommel is a case-in-point. As he became a burned-out wreak after two years in North Africa.
 
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