WI:More pragmatic Germans create ROA in 1941?

Deleted member 1487

Pretty much this. Sooner or later pragmatic Germans will realise they can join the international system through trade and win the peace...they had been doing so both times when they threw it away for war in the first and then preparing for war in the second instance.
That's the thing the trade situation pre-WW2 was vastly different than it was post-WW2. West Germany got far richer than Germany had ever been able to pre-WW1 even because the US forced a free trade system on the capitalist world and the imperial system broke down opening up trade that Germany never previously had access to. That wouldn't exist without WW2 having broken down the old world order. They could do okay in the pre-WW2 system relatively, but even without Versailles debts they had very serious economic issues being that they were a middle sized workshop nation that depended on foreign trade that was highly limited by imperialism, tariffs, foreign competition, and wars (China occupied by Japan). Ironically losing WW2 actually won Germany what it always wanted before WW1: an equal chance at international trade that the colonial and tariff systems shut them out of at the turn of the century. Sure they had access to trade, but nothing like what they got after WW2 thanks to the US free trade system it was able to impose on Europe because of how broke they were from the war. I mean if you look at the growth of GDP per capita in German from 1870-2015 there is a major leap in growth post-1950, as it did for all of Europe really.

The question is how much they can really expect to prosper in peace without WW2 due to their debts to the US they couldn't afford to pay and had defaulted on or the big debt they took on in the 1930s for rearmament. And that's assuming Versailles isn't made an issue again once the Depression ends (Lausanne was only supposed to be a moratorium, not an end to the debt). It wasn't just Hitler that decided war or at least an aggressive foreign policy combined with autarky was the better option than the fragile trade system that had damaged Germany so badly after WW1. So long as high tariffs remain and the imperial systems limited trade opportunities (plus whatever happens with China and Japan) the German trade opportunities were limited in the 1930s and who knows what would have happened going into the 1940s. So there is no reason to assume German leadership even non-Nazi would assume peace and trade in post-Versailles Europe was in their interest.

gdp-per-capita-graph.jpg
 
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The biggest problems with Germany (under Hitler or some more pragmatic Nazi) recruiting an army of anti-Soviet citizens were

(1) The German strategy (such as it was) depended on feeding the German armies "off-the-land" as much as possible in the Soviet Union. The Germans didn't have the logistics to feed their men more than a few hundred miles from the railheads and couldn't switch the railroads over to a gauge their trains could use fast enough to keep up with the advance. The Soviets removed or destroyed as much of the crops, herds and farm machinery as they could ahead of the German advance, leaving the German-held areas at starvation level even before the Germans grabbed food for their troops. Even if the Germans had wanted to turn Soviet citizens into soldiers on their side, it would have been difficult to do so when the families of those soldiers were starving.

(2) The Germans thought they were going to face food shortages at home, like they did during World War I, so they actually seized and exported millions of tons of already scarce grain from the parts of the Soviet Union they took. Hitler and company figured that around twenty million Soviets needed to die in order for there to be enough food for Germany and its allies in the face of the British blockade. That calculation turned out to be wrong, but that's what they believed. That belief fueled a lot of what they did in the east that otherwise seemed irrational. They had no problem with that many slavs dying, but could probably have been persuaded to work them to death or use them as cannon-fodder except that the Nazi leadership felt that as many as possible needed to starve to death quickly so that Germans wouldn't starve. When you're trying to starve people to death, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have their relatives fighting in your army. Support roles, yes. Armed? Not so much.

(3) German logistics were so chaotic in the first year of the war that they couldn't feed/clothe/shelter the prisoners they took, even if they wanted to and millions of Red Army soldiers died of starvation/exposure/even cannibalism that first winter. Granted, some of that was lack of priorities, but the Germans were trying to capture way too much territory on a frayed logistics shoestring and couldn't even properly escort the prisoners they took to prison holding areas, much less screen them and arm/supply those who would have been willing to fight the Soviets.

(4) The effort of screening out Soviet agents among those troops would have been enormous. The Soviets were very good at human intelligence and would have almost certainly infiltrated any units of Soviet citizens very thoroughly. Using those units would have made it much more difficult for the Germans to achieve strategic or even tactical surprise.

(5) German administration of the captured territory was often extremely brutal and incompetent, even independent of the Nazi ideology. Their administration in the Ukraine was particularly bad, while the Baltics were considerably better. The Nazis didn't have people remotely qualified to run the territories they seized and tended to award the jobs as rewards to old Nazis for their loyalty.

(6) Choosing which factions among the anti-Soviet soldiers to support would have been a nightmare for the Germans even if they wanted to and could have put together such an army. There were at least two major Ukrainian factions that might have been willing to collaborate, along with at least one other faction of anti-Soviets who definitely would not have. And that's just the Ukrainians. Add in conflicts between Ukrainian nationalists and Russians, ByeloRussian nationalists and Russians, Crimean Tatars against both Russians and Ukrainian nationalists and probably dozens of other conflicts among Russians and between Russians and various nationalities, and the Germans would have faced a continuing nightmare trying to keep the factions from spending most of their efforts fighting each other.

If you can figure out a way to get past all of those issues, in theory recruiting those soldiers might have been a good idea, though they would have their own agenda, which would eventually become a problem for the Germans.
 
That's the thing the trade situation pre-WW2 was vastly different than it was post-WW2. West Germany got far richer than Germany had ever been able to pre-WW1 even because the US forced a free trade system on the capitalist world and the imperial system broke down opening up trade that Germany never previously had access to.

An interesting claim and one which merely relies on being able to prove that Germany gained more from losing five million war dead, losing permanently a quarter of its territory and having East Germany under communism for half a century plus the reapplication of at least some of its WW1 reparations debt and the addition of WW2 reparations and the addition of pensions for the dependants of war dead and those injured in the war of which there were millions. Further you need to show that the damage to the general European economy impeded Germany exports less than the gains from the aftermath.

Finally you need to demonstrate that the aftermath was only likely given the Second World War and that the wide ranging impacts of several technologies in development such as improved air travel, sea travel, land motor vehicles and shipping containers would not have had an equally large impact on an economy that among other things would have enjoyed at least six extra years of growth in productive industries.

I await with interest.
 
A more pragmatic Germany does not start WW2, much less the Soviet Union. If the Germans had had a competent strategic planning group prior to the war, the most likely answer from them would have been "don't bloody do it, we'll lose". But the Germans did not have a competent strategic planning group... instead they had Hitler.
 

Deleted member 1487

An interesting claim and one which merely relies on being able to prove that Germany gained more from losing five million war dead, losing permanently a quarter of its territory and having East Germany under communism for half a century plus the reapplication of at least some of its WW1 reparations debt and the addition of WW2 reparations and the addition of pensions for the dependants of war dead and those injured in the war of which there were millions. Further you need to show that the damage to the general European economy impeded Germany exports less than the gains from the aftermath.

Finally you need to demonstrate that the aftermath was only likely given the Second World War and that the wide ranging impacts of several technologies in development such as improved air travel, sea travel, land motor vehicles and shipping containers would not have had an equally large impact on an economy that among other things would have enjoyed at least six extra years of growth in productive industries.

I await with interest.
Well if you'll notice the graph that I posted shows the vast increases in GDP per capita after 1950 compared to the period before 1914 and in the interwar period, I think that proves it pretty well. It turns out the EEC and collapse of the colonial system, even with communism ravaging the East part of the country, the war dead, and the cold war wasn't enough of a drag to offset the huge gains from the post-war liberalization of trade. Of course part of that might also be the end of the cartel system in German, just as it was a help in Japan, allowing for increased efficiency in corporations. That was Europe wide too.

its pretty difficult to find info about the pre-WW1 to 1990 German economy, but here is a graph from 1925-1940:
800px-Graph_charting_income_per_capita_throughout_the_Great_Depression.svg.png


Basically the per capita income barely increased since 1925 and only had gotten as far as it did since 1933 by the Nazi spending program and the smash and grab economics leading up to 1940. I question how well that would work otherwise, while from 1950 on the German GDP per capita increased much more rapidly. In comparison it grew more slowly than Britain or the US.
http://mechonomic.blogspot.com/2012/02/real-gdp-per-capita-in-germany-1871.html

image002.gif


Its very hard to debate the role of productivity increases due to technology, but without trade the German economy would have gone nowhere after WW2 due to its total lack of internal capital after WW2. The trade situation was far better after the war than before it, as Tooze demonstrates in his discussion of the German economy in the 1930s and during WW2 in Wages of Destruction they had a very bad trade position all things considered leading into the war.
 
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