WI Nazi Germany had not been so expansionist?

King Thomas

Banned
And Hitler had been content with all of Germany, and Austria? How long can the Third Reich last? Does it collapse due to economic pressures or, without the desire to conquer all the countries around it, does it last until now? If it does last, will it ever go back to democracy at some part, or is that impossible?
 

Germaniac

Donor
ASB. Nazism is Expansionism. The basic tenent of nazism was to expand eastward and give rise to german living space.

Lets say Germany for some reason cannot expand. Their economy collapses. It was based on military expansion and not economic growth. The Government was taking money from the people, telling them they were paying for things but instead spent it all on military things. No one can eat a tank, well other than Comrade Stalin.
 
I'd go with what he said, but if they managed to turn around the economy, my bet is just that all the "undesirables" in Germany are obliterated.
 
Please See Spain, 1940-1975.

Germany would simply discover that hard control wasn't what they wanted after all.
 
Well, which "all of Germany"? You can still have an expansionist Nazi Germany without having them have the desire to own half of Russia. They could want to unify all the German peoples and hold dominance over Europe (Reclaiming their Place in the Sun).
 

Eurofed

Banned
One thing that really doomed Nazi Germany in the end was the utterly insane idea that Germany could do to 100 million modern Europeans in a few years what European white settlers had done to 10 million pre-modern Native Americans over three centuries.

You would need a completely different, sane "Napoleonic" Hitler that is no racist fanatic, basically aims to rebuild what Wilhelmine Germany had almost grasped, with fascist ruthlessness but all the necessary diplomatic and geopolitical savy: unite all German-speaking peoples, Germanize those West Slav lands that round up the Germansphere economically and strategically (Czechia and Western Poland), establish economic-political hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe, only make war to Soviet Russia if you have the support or benevolent neutrality of the Western powers (not too hard to get in the 1930s) and with the maximum war aim of carving out non-Russian nationalities as client states, whose loyalty one wins over by offering them a economic-political deal somewhat better than Stalinism (really not hard to do, even for a fascist). Such a program would have been wholly acceptable to the Western powers if Germany does not implement it like an incontrollable and untrustworthy rabid dog, using naked military aggression as the means of choice and breaking pacts before their ink was dry. And if you need a scapegoat, for Heaven's sake don't pick a minority that is blatantly peaceful, loyal, and productive, has a lot of influence in great powers whose support or benevolence you absolutely need, and includes a sizable part of your best educated elite. Britain was eager to have a powerful reliable Germany to use as an anti-Soviet bulwalk.
 
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By the time you have got a 'sane' Germany as described by Eurofed you don't have a 'Nazi' Germany you have a Whilhelmian or Weimar Germany. The central tenant of the Nazi Party was rabid Anti-Semitism and Risk style expansionism, take those to away and you have a completely different party, or a bunch of NINO's (Nazi's In Name Only)
 

Eurofed

Banned
Have them come up with a different plan to deal with the Soviets besides invading them?

That's a definite possibility, although a war to cut them to size might still be in the cards, only done the smart way. You see, invading the USSR is not the damning feat by and of itself (declaring war to America fro no good reason is); it's how and why you do it. If you do it with the support or benevolent neutrality of the Western powers, a decent casus belli and preparation, and you cast yourself to Soviet populace as a benevolent despot liberator from Stalinist terror and not a rabid mass murderer that does not know the difference between Mother Russia and the Sioux Nation, well the USSR is basically toast.
 

Eurofed

Banned
By the time you have got a 'sane' Germany as described by Eurofed you don't have a 'Nazi' Germany you have a Whilhelmian or Weimar Germany. The central tenant of the Nazi Party was rabid Anti-Semitism and Risk style expansionism, take those to away and you have a completely different party, or a bunch of NINO's (Nazi's In Name Only)

It is however quite plausible to have a far right vanilla fascist (or conservative-authoritarian for that matter) undemocratic expansionist Germany in the 1930s that basically clings to a neo-Wilhelmine foreign policy and security program. Actually, it is the most likely outcome if you climb a time machine and kill Hitler but leave the Versailles treaty and the Great Depression into place. It depends what you mean by "Nazi" here, either German version of fascism in general or the peculiar aspects that Hitler's personal obsessions (and little else; the Nazists' climb to power would have worked just as well if they had picked say the Communists or the Poles as their main scapegoats) lent to its OTL incarnation. Since, as you point out, the OP question becomes unanswerable if you choose the latter interpretation, I think that for the scope of this discussion the former one is necessary.
 
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