WI: Hitler was a better occupier

Typo

Banned
Please explain?
How did encouraging people to oppose them help the Nazi's, when being a little less nasty might have brought in almost as much supplies, suffer less loses through partisans, and gotten more volunteers for the army.
Why do the Nazis want more Ukrainian volunteers?
 
Half the rationale for the invasion of the USSR was to plunder the Ukraine of food to keep Germany from starvation. If you're trying to win local support, you have to abandon this strategy.
 

Typo

Banned
Half the rationale for the invasion of the USSR was to plunder the Ukraine of food to keep Germany from starvation. If you're trying to win local support, you have to abandon this strategy.
The other half is to colonize it, which is contradictory if you start to play the nationalist card and start to arm the Ukranians as "volunteers", those people arn't dumb and arn't going to put their guns away if the Nazis win.
 
I'm sure we're all familiar with the Soviet citizens welcoming the Nazis with open arms, only to turn on them when they were oppressed just as badly if not worse.

Has this phrase "open arms" any meaning? If it was "open arms" in the USSR, I haven't the foggiest what super-human amity they met in Austria and the Sudetenland.

In Galicia and the Baltic countries - two places where the population had every reason and some more to revile Stalin - the Germans were met grudgingly. Grudgingly is about the best they got. This of course has to do with the policies you propose to change, but let's not go altering history as part of our premise: the best the Germans could hope for IOTL, as alien tyrannical invaders, was sullenness.

I also like "if not worse". National extermination or slavery may or may not be worse than life under Soviet rule.

But what if this wasn't the case? Not to say I'm making the Nazis "less evil" or anything; but what if they simply decided "active wartime is not the time to purge the undesirables in our new territories; we can do that once we have crushed the Bolsheviks."

In short, what if they actually had acted as liberators as long as the war was going in?

The problems of one totalitarian regime "liberating" people from another totalitarian regime ought to be self-explanatory. The best the Nazis could be was (what they were in the Baltic countries: more of the same, rather than destroyers of the nation.

There were plenty of people (active communists and Jews, to start with) who were not going to be reconciled to Nazi rule by anything. These people were going to begin a partisan war: there were Red Army men who had been caught in the kessels on the loose, and of course the mass of the Russian/Belarussian/Dniepr-Ukrainian population may not have liked Stalin or his regime but hated foreign invaders of their native soil - you had GULAG inmates signing up in 1941.

The Nazis deliberately confused their genocidal plans with anti-partisan activity (look at the Commissar Order) which makes the whole premise of waiting until after the war to finish the genocide difficult. The German army - officered by a class who had spent a couple of decades in an echo-chamber repeating to themselves their own militaristic values, manned by frightened young men far from home who had been indoctrinated to regard communism and Slavs as a bogey-man, and to change that you ahve to start in 1933 - was not going to win hearts and minds in partisan war.

The three big causes of death were the Holocaust, the savage anti-partisan measures, and mass-starvation. Mass-starvation is also still happening: you can't liberate food into Leningrad, and the Nazis were plundering the USSR to feed blockaded Europe.

The Nazis did gratuitously alienate the Galician-Volhynians and Baltic nations by barging into their countries, tearing down their briefly-raised national flags, and immediately starting to treat them like dirt. That could probably be changed (the Germans will still make an occupier every bit as high-handed, foreign, and authoritarian as the Soviets had been without actually remaining their Ukrainian collaborators how racially inferior they are), but given that for these peoples Nazi rule seemed the lesser of two evils anyway, that can get you at most a few infantry divisions earlier and no weapons for them.

Well under the Communists, the Ukraine was often left on a starvation diet.

This is so misleading a statement as to be hardly true. Ukrainians starved more than one time under the Soviet Union, however two of those times (Civil War and Great Patriotic War) much of the USSR was starving and the communists were not the only ones responsible.

The third was the Holodomor. During the Holodomor, brutal Soviet policies to reign in the truculent administrations of the outer parts of the USSR, collectivise agriculture, and export grain to fund crash-industrialisation combined with natural poor harvests to cause a gigantic artificial famine. Results: terrible death-toll, huge migration to the cities and to other parts of the USSR. Similar stories were played out at the same time across the USSR's black-earth belt.

By the late 30s, this was over. It was no consolation to the dead, but Ukrainians were eating as well as other Soviets.

The Heer usually had very little problems handling occupied territory. It was once the nazi party engine and ideology came into the picture that things soured. Keep the occupied territories under Heer control until the war against the Soviets are over and you will have much better management.

You will still have some atrocities, you will still have opression, but generally, the Heer wanted its stuff and no resistance, if it got that, it did not go out of its way to kill, maim or opress.

This is the same Heer that issued the Commissar Order, exterminated three-and-a-half million Soviet PoWs, besieged Leningrad, and conducted the anti-partisan war with help from ill-disciplined local auxiliaries?

The Heer did control Belarus from august 1941 to spring 1942 (when large parts of Belarus which had been under Heer controlw as turned over to civilian authorities). While brutal, the Heer occupation cooperated quite well with the puppet government of the Central Rada and with the anti-Soviet partisans, meaning the pro-Soviet partisans and anti-Soviet partisans spent most of their time fighting each other.

Local auxiliaries were often used to fight the partisans: that was there main use. As so often happens, the USSR behind the line became a huge and bloody civil war: nobody's suggesting that in IOTL every Soviet was trying to throw out the occupier. The partisans made no bones about robbing their food. It was a nightmare.

In terms of volunteer soldiers, even in the countries Germany treated well there was only a trickle. Fear of Stalin and his NKVD (who will go underground) won't encourage volunteering any more either.

Then of course there's the problem of arming these volunteers.

I would note also that the Nazis did try using battalions recruited from Soviet PoWs on the frontline. They were so unruly that the Germans sometimes had to shoot at them. After Kursk, the Germans threw up their hands and sent them all to the west - where in spite of their fear of going back to the tender bosom of the NKVD, some of them mutinied anyway.

It's not throwing them into absolute poverty if it is no worse, or marginally better, than the previous regime.

A violent invader is never exactly the same as the previous regime: all else being equal (it decidedly was not) and with the best of intentions (the Nazis had the worst), quite a lot of people have wrecked houses and dead childen thanks to you.

Iraq was a a doozie, amirite?
 
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Thanos6

Banned
I also like "if not worse". National extermination or slavery may or may not be worse than life under Soviet rule.

When it comes to Stalin and Hitler, I'm never prepared to pick one or the other as automatically worse. I always hedge my bets.
 
Didn't the Wehrmacht use something like a million Hiwis during the war on the Eastern front?

Lots, yes, however Soviets fighting on the German side were not all of a piece. You had:

1) Volunteer units that fought as frontline divisions. These were basically all recruited from Galician-Volhynians and Cossacks.

2) Conscript units that fought as frontline divisions, raised in the Baltic when the Soviets started to close in.

3) Drafts of locals used to replenish German units: mostly Balts sent to the trenches at Leningrad.

4) Anti-partisan bands organised by the security services ("Schuma") and other locals recruited to serve in security forces of various kinds, like those notorious concentration-camp guards.

4) A huge mass of ordinary Soviets who ended up as "camp followers" - this is what "Hiwi" strictly means, if I'm not wrong. These stories varied enormously. With the economy and society falling apart around them, a lot of people found comparative security and safety in cooking or cleaning for the Germans. Sometimes odd sorts of friendships sprang up, and sometimes Hiwis ended up fighting - they hardly wanted to fall into the hands of the NKVD as "former Russians".

But a lot of others were doing it purely to survive - and remember that as morale failed in parts of the front, a lot of Germans were demoralised and surrendered quite willingly. The Soviets never had any use for German units as they had no German territory to occupy until the war was practically over, but they did form a propaganda council headed by Von Paulus, so I'd call it breasts and potatoes.
 
When it comes to Stalin and Hitler, I'm never prepared to pick one or the other as automatically worse. I always hedge my bets.

Who is worse always depends on who you, the victim, are; but we are discussing the Soviet Union and for all the Soviet peoples bar maybe the Soviet Germans, Kalmyks, and Circassians Hitler was transparently worse:

1) Jews: yeah, that's an easy one.

2) Slavic and Turkic peoples and Armenians: to be exterminated as soon as the Jews are finished.

3) Balts, Lithuanians, Georgians: To be allowed to continued to exist as serfs with no national cultural life.
 
I'm sure we're all familiar with the Soviet citizens welcoming the Nazis with open arms, only to turn on them when they were oppressed just as badly if not worse.

But what if this wasn't the case? Not to say I'm making the Nazis "less evil" or anything; but what if they simply decided "active wartime is not the time to purge the undesirables in our new territories; we can do that once we have crushed the Bolsheviks."

In short, what if they actually had acted as liberators as long as the war was going in?

Time for a mini-TL

The young Adolf Hitler enlists in the army in 1914 to fight for Germany in WW I, but instead of going to northern France, he's sent to the eastern front. While there he comes to get a more direct appreciation of the massive size of the Russian Empire.

His troops are among those that march into the Ukraine in 1918. While there, he nearly suffers a fatal accident with a runaway horse nearly hitting him, but a Ukrainian pushes him out of the way, thus saving his life and making the two friends.

1919-1941: roughly the same although propaganda is more anti-communist and less anti-Slavic.

June 1941: Barbarossa. Hitler allows for the formation of a Ukrainian state and a Ukrainian army which is equipped with German equipment. A "White Russian" volunteer army is also formed while the Russian population begins to stir since they want liberation from Stalin. The regime is toppled from within and German installs a puppet government in Leningrad which is now renamed to St. Petersburg.
 

Typo

Banned
Is Lebensraum ideology still there? Because if it is then creating an Ukrainian army and state contradicts the entire aim of the war, if there isn't then the rational for Barbarossa is gone in the first place.
 

Thanos6

Banned
Granted I'm no expert like most people here, but couldn't they set up a deliberately weak state and army; just strong enough to serve their needs during the war, but easy enough to remove and/or crush afterwards?
 
I've asked this question before.

Possible ideas-

The key thing about the Nazi regime was that its structure wasn't designed for effective governance but to cement as much power in Hitler's hands and keep everyone else weak.
When it came to the behaviour in the East there was no specific plan, instead there were hundreds. While its the behaviour of the Einsatzgruppen that has entered the history books, and shaped the opinion of the occupied people elements of Ribbentrop's plan were implemented in some areas, along with a myriad of other schemes.
However they can all divided into two camps:
1. The pragmatists, mainly the army but also other groups who basically wanted to stabilise and secure rear areas and minimise partisan activity so the Wehrmacht could get on with fighting the Red Army. Recruiting puppet forces and actually exploiting the Eastern territories as much as practically possible was a bonus.
2. The ideologues, including Ribbentrop. There were schemes for anything from Brest-Litvosk Mk. II too racially cleansed lebensraum.

While picking a firm plan and implementing it might have been bad (depending on the plan) it couldn't have been worse than having someone from the Foreign Office turn up to find a new leader for a Tartar state one week, an Army officer looking for recruits for a labour battalion the next and the Einsatzgruppen the week after.

Koch ran the Ukraine with an Iron fist... lots of rapes and murders of people who would have generally been friendly to the Germans

The Einsatzgruppen where a systematic part of the plan organized by the SS for Jew extermination... something Ribbentrop objected to for fear of negative press (not out of any peronal concerns) Todt had his objections too for economic reasons... he wanted to turn everyone and anyone into slave laborers instead of just killing them

the architect of the Einsatzgruppen where Steiner Heydrich and Himmler (they set them up before in the invasion of Poland... it is not commonly known that the Einsatzgruppen actually worked in Poland in 1939

You would definently need Hess to stay around because Todt was a buddy of his. The group that would be for a less harsh occupation policy would revolve around Ribbentrop, Todt, Hess perhaps even Goering if he can be convinced that it will be a way to embarass and reduce the influence of Himmler. It would help them if they could co-opt major members of the army but this is rather unlikely...non of the big players in the German high command except for Raeder and Donitz had any serious objection to Barbarossa itself let alone the follow on policies which where ruthless enforced by the generals (Reichenau order and its unspoken equivilents)

A lot of the Eastern Field Marshals where Prussian who loved the idea of Prussian expansion, and had an air of superiority about them. Manstein, Rundstead, Guderian and their kind loved the idea of thrashing the Russians. The younger generals perhaps from Western Germany might not have been so enthralled with Lebensraum. Rommel is the only person who ever went on the record as objecting to the campaign in Russia... but of course we know of his activities at the time (given the Africa Korps in Spring 1941) so we can't say he necessarily felt this way out of the goodness of his Swabian heart


I've noticed a rather strong current of faith in Ribbentrop in this thread. The man was basically seen by everybody (and I mean everybody) as a pompous dolt and was almost never taken seriously. Some of this may have to do with the fact that being a champagne merchant who was the most sycophantic of Hitler's sycophants doesn't necessarily qualify one to lead the Foreign Ministry :rolleyes:

Basically, Ribbentrop's plan was discredited by the mere fact that it was Ribbentrop who suggested it. I'm not saying that the Germans couldn't have pursued a different policy in the East (the kind thatTodt, Speer, the Wehrmacht,etc. had in mind), but it is extremely unlikely given the fact that you have ideologues like Himmler, Rosenberg, Goebbels, and Heydrich in the most powerful positions, not to mention Hitler's own monomania with regards to the East. With that clique wielding the most influence, any policy in the East other than slavery/extermination will be near-ASB levels of difficulty to get approved.
 

Typo

Banned
Granted I'm no expert like most people here, but couldn't they set up a deliberately weak state and army; just strong enough to serve their needs during the war, but easy enough to remove and/or crush afterwards?
Ok, so how do you do that?
 
Well actual support for A.A. Vlasov's Free Russian Army would have been a great place to start. However, I don't think the Germans could ideologically rationalize that considering they believed the Russians were untermensch. Unless the POD is to change Nazi ideology before the war even starts, however if that was changed then Germany might not even invade the USSR in the first place.
 

Typo

Banned
*shrugs*

Set up a puppet state? Like I said, I'm no expert, but hadn't they done this several times before?
Ok, what model would you use so that they can setup a state which will go along with Nazi plans and not offer resistance when the Germans decide to exterminate it? Instead of you know, acting like self-interested Human beings.
 
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