WI: Nazi Germany survives ww2

E. Burke

Banned
What would it have taken for the Nazi leadership to see the writing on the wall after D-Day and negotiate a peace treaty that preserved them in power? Like, what if they were able to use the momentum of the Battle of the Bulge to seriously damage the Allied armies and bring them to the negotiating table. I can't see Hilter, the megalomaniac doing it, but if he were to fall victim to an errant bombing run could cooler heads have prevailed?
 
Last edited:
I don't see how the NAZIs could survive ww1. As for wwII they could only live if Hitler was out of the way and someone with intelligence ran things.
 
Much of Nazi Germany did survive WW2. Several of its top military officers held high rank in the post-war Bundeswehr. As nearly every bureaucrat and academic was a Nazi member, most of them would have survived to work again. Kiesinger, West Germany's Chancellor in 1966 was deputy head of a Nazi propaganda unit.
 
Many of the people who got appointed to position of power in germany after the war were former Nazis, mostly because the top brass at the time felt that the former Nazis were the best choice to fight the next enemy, The Communists.

Nazi Germany could have done a deal after the D-day landing, they were still ahead and had plenty to negotiate with, Its possible the Allies would have taken peace in exchange for Germany's withdrawal from France and the Low Countries, and just say sorry Poland and let Germany and the Soviets beat eat other up.
 
Many of the people who got appointed to position of power in germany after the war were former Nazis, mostly because the top brass at the time felt that the former Nazis were the best choice to fight the next enemy, The Communists.

Or because the Nazi regime had incorporated nearly everyone with any ability to run things. That's what happens in a totalitarian state. Sweeping away anyone connected with the old regime sounds great, until one finds that it leaves no one to run things. E.g. "de-Ba'athification" in Iraq. In the case of Sicily, it created a power vacuum filled by the Mafia.

I don't think there is any evidence that Allied occupation authorities favored ex-Nazis. (And when it came to "fighting the next enemy"... the German armed forces had been abolished, and were not revived until the 1950s. The Allies made use of Gehlen and his Foreign Armies East group, but they were military intelligence officers, not Nazis, and had specialized in monitoring the Soviet forces, and they were not placed in "positions of power" in Germany.)
 
The Allies weren't going to budge on unconditional surrender.

Particularly if it was with a government that involved the Nazi party remaining in existence and in power in any way, shape or form.

We aren't talking about an expressly anti-Nazi government staging a coup and then suing for peace while hanging Nazis and closing the camps of its own volition, which is about the only way I can see the principle of unconditional surrender being compromised either in theory or practice.
 

E. Burke

Banned
Or because the Nazi regime had incorporated nearly everyone with any ability to run things. That's what happens in a totalitarian state. Sweeping away anyone connected with the old regime sounds great, until one finds that it leaves no one to run things. E.g. "de-Ba'athification" in Iraq. In the case of Sicily, it created a power vacuum filled by the Mafia.

I don't think there is any evidence that Allied occupation authorities favored ex-Nazis. (And when it came to "fighting the next enemy"... the German armed forces had been abolished, and were not revived until the 1950s. The Allies made use of Gehlen and his Foreign Armies East group, but they were military intelligence officers, not Nazis, and had specialized in monitoring the Soviet forces, and they were not placed in "positions of power" in Germany.)


That's great but there is sting evidence that lots of ideological Nazis were allowed power. Like not people who joined because they had to, committed National Socialists. I mean, the eastern front army was thoroughly nazified by the wars end and they weren't screened.


If the Germans had done to France as they did to Russia and Eastern Europe they wouldn't have been so light.
 
That's great but there is sting evidence that lots of ideological Nazis were allowed power. Like not people who joined because they had to, committed National Socialists. I mean, the eastern front army was thoroughly nazified by the wars end and they weren't screened.

If the Germans had done to France as they did to Russia and Eastern Europe they wouldn't have been so light.

The Western Front army was purged all to hell by late 1944. One of the highest ranking member that wasn't was made NATO ground force commander after the war. The Warsaw Pact thoroughly mocked him for selling out Rommel to save himself from the SS executors... which he probably did.

Hans Speidel was a German general during World War II and the Cold War. The former chief of staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Speidel was a nationalist conservative who agreed with the territorial aspects of the Nazi regime's policies, but strongly disagreed with their racial policies. This led him to participate in the July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler, after which he was jailed by the Gestapo. At the end of the world war, he escaped from Nazi prison and went into hiding.

After the world war, Speidel emerged as one of the leading German military figures during the early Cold War. He served as Supreme Commander of the NATO ground forces in Central Europe from 1957 to 1963, as the first German NATO commander during the Cold War, and with headquarters at the Palace of Fontainebleau in Paris. He was also a military historian.

In 1960, Speidel took legal action against an East German film studio which portrayed him as having been privy to the assassinations of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in 1934, as well as having betrayed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to the Nazis after the 20 July Plot in 1944.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Speidel
 
What would it have taken for the Nazi leadership to see the writing on the wall after D-Day and negotiate a peace treaty that preserved them in power?

The UN had already declared unconditional surrender to be their policy over a year beforehand. The success of Overlord, and especially Bagration, aren't going to make them change their minds.
 
What would it have taken for the Nazi leadership to see the writing on the wall after D-Day and negotiate a peace treaty that preserved them in power?

Pigs to start flying. By this point, the Nazis couldn't stop the WAllies or the Soviets individually. They certainly can't stop both of them at the same time. And the policy for both is the unconditional surrender of Germany, regardless of who is in charge.

Like, what if they were able to use the momentum of the Battle of the Bulge to seriously damage the Allied armies and bring them to the negotiating table. I can't see Hilter, the megalomaniac doing it, but if he were to fall victim to an errant bombing run could cooler heads have prevailed?
Bringing the WAllied armies to the negotiating table was the precise purpose for which Hitler launched Wacht am Rhein, and the resulting attack achieved the absolute maximum it could have. In fact, it really achieved far more then the Germans had any right to expect given the disparity in combat power between them and the WAllies.
 
Last edited:
Bringing the WAllied armies to the negotiating table was the precise purpose for which Hitler launched Wacht am Rhein, and the resulting attack achieved the absolute maximum it could have In fact, it really achieved far more then the Germans had any right to expect given the disparity in combat power between them and the WAllies.

It really should become clear how limited the aims of your tide-turning offensive should be when you're entirely reliant on bad flying weather.
 
As for this thread the Nazis could have survived WW2 if they played their cards better in 1940 and 41 and as part of that picked better allies. They would have eventually fallen internally or blown themselves up in another war anyway in time as long as they were a pirate economy that needed loot to go.

After December of 1941 no the Nazi Party was not going to survive being at war with three of the five largest world economies, but that doesn't mean the country would necessarily lose how they did OTL with another leader. After Normady it was simply a question of who got to Berlin first.

If they survived WW2 it probably wouldn't have made it to being a World War... more of another European war then one that draws in the whole globe.
 
Last edited:
What would it have taken for the Nazi leadership to see the writing on the wall after D-Day and negotiate a peace treaty that preserved them in power?...

I mean to remember that this was the perpetual pipe dream of the gang of officers that tried to blow up Hitler on July 20th 1944. However they either didn't know or tended to forget that after the US entered WWII, one of the first meetings between Roosefelt, Churchill and Stalin,I don't recall which meeting this was, laid out the ground rules of their alliance pretty strictly: Nothing is acceptable except for an unconditional surrender of Germany. No partial surrenders or withdrawals and no separate peace treaties with just one of the allies. So yea, after 1942, Nazi Germany was essentially a dead man walking.

As for events before 1942: The only way for the Nazis to come out of WWII alive would be for them to act, think, be so different from what they were in real time that the resulting organization would have nothing left in common with OTL nazis.
 
Top