WI: Private Henry Tandey had shot and killed Adolph Hitler in WWI?

Personally, I feel that much of what happened after WWI would still have happened. But how much do you think would have changed later on if Hitler hadn't survived WWI?
 

Deleted member 140587

I mean, even if the Tandy incident didn't happen, there were plenty of times during the First World War that Hitler could've been killed. He was shot in the left thigh at the Battle of the Somme and he was gassed in October of 1918.

If the question is a world without Hitler, then you can roll with it. No Hitler doesn't necessarily butterfly away the Second World War but it does change the shape it could theoretically take. The Far-Right could still rise but would have a different figure at the top, i.e. Hugenberg, Strasser, Goering, Rohm, etc. Or alternatively, the far-left and the KPD could've risen to power.
 
I mean, even if the Tandy incident didn't happen, there were plenty of times during the First World War that Hitler could've been killed. He was shot in the left thigh at the Battle of the Somme and he was gassed in October of 1918.

If the question is a world without Hitler, then you can roll with it. No Hitler doesn't necessarily butterfly away the Second World War but it does change the shape it could theoretically take. The Far-Right could still rise but would have a different figure at the top, i.e. Hugenberg, Strasser, Goering, Rohm, etc. Or alternatively, the far-left and the KPD could've risen to power.
Do you think Himmler might end up on top? I just ordered a book on all of the different assassination plots against Hitler. What I'm interested in figuring out is how WWII might have butterflied had Hitler died after the nazi's came to power, but before they started getting too aggressive with neighboring countries. I'm interested in learning about a better strategist taking over the third reich.
 

ShySusan

Gone Fishin'
Do you think Himmler might end up on top? I just ordered a book on all of the different assassination plots against Hitler. What I'm interested in figuring out is how WWII might have butterflied had Hitler died after the nazi's came to power, but before they started getting too aggressive with neighboring countries. I'm interested in learning about a better strategist taking over the third reich.
At that point in time, Goering was his designated successor so it's likely that he would take power
 

Garrison

Donor
Without Hitler it's likely some sort of authoritarian regime would have emerged in Germany in the 1930's, but I can't see anyone else being quite as aggressive about rearmament as Hitler was. Many others might have seen war as possibly being necessary at some point, but no on else, even amongst the ranks of the Nazi's, was so convinced it was desirable. So yes you probably get a more belligerent Germany that breaks Versailles when it comes to rearmament, but at the same time its unlikely to gamble as recklessly as Hitler did.
 

Deleted member 140587

Yes. You are right. But I just couldn't resist indulging my wishful thinking. What if Hitler had been a nonentity?
I entirely understand.

The reason I came off that harshly was because the mods have been quite stringent with people doing DBWIs when it's not a DBWI or vice versa.

I will state however that I don't necessarily believe that butterflying Hitler would make the world that indefinitely better. Although the man and everything he stood for were absolutely evil and are abhorrent to how I view the world, the positive effects of Nazism being destroyed were the United States finally becoming involved in world affairs, an extreme reduction of institutionalized anti-semitism throughout the West, the end of ten years of economic depression, and major advances in medicine. Without them, the US might remain isolationist longer, anti-semitism might be much more mainstream than it is today, and poverty and diseases engendered by it would be much more endemic. That said there are obvious benefits to Hitler not coming to power as well, potentially no WWII or Cold War, over 20 million innocent Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists, and Homosexuals would not have murdered in the concentration camps of Germany and Poland, and decolonization would likely be much less chaotic and pell-mell then it was IOTL.
 
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World War II well arise but there will be a more competent German leadership.
Germany will go for pre-war borders in the east and with the right diplomacy they should be able to get them
Because Stalin and the Soviet Union are considered a threat by the Western powers.
If war does happen Great Britain and France would remain neutral but they would support Germany eventually joining Germany
 
World War II well arise but there will be a more competent German leadership.
Germany will go for pre-war borders in the east and with the right diplomacy they should be able to get them
Because Stalin and the Soviet Union are considered a threat by the Western powers.
If war does happen Great Britain and France would remain neutral but they would support Germany eventually joining Germany
What role would the US play, if any?
 
What role would the US play, if any?
Probably neutrality but they would sell to the allies and Germany if war with the Soviet Union happened.
Stalin would have to do something to try and stop the flow of supplies that could bring the United States into the war against the Soviet Union
 
Probably neutrality but they would sell to the allies and Germany if war with the Soviet Union happened.
Stalin would have to do something to try and stop the flow of supplies that could bring the United States into the war against the Soviet Union
Interesting idea. Do you think atomic weapons would play a role in this?
 
For one, there would be no Nazi party and the Holocaust as we know it (industrial genocide, gas chambers, death camps) may not have happened. Nazism was not at all inevitable: in 1920 it was just one of several populist parties that attacked the order of Versailles as illegitimate. It was Hitler and his charisma that made the NSDAP a major party; he had both the oratorical skill of a populist and the ability to cozy up to the Weimar Republic's military-industrial elite that dominated the country. Unless someone like Hitler comes out of nowhere, the German Workers' Party (not even the National Socialist German Workers' Party; that was a result of Hitler's little coup against preexisting party leaders) is likely going to remain on the fringe of German politics.

Communism would not prosper, however: there was nothing Hitler could do that would allow the KPD to survive, and Germany's elites made it very clear that any kind of pan-leftist coalition that included the Communists would be forcibly dismembered. I see the Weimar Republic formally dragging on for a few more years - remember, Germany was already more-or-less a dictatorship before Hitler, with all of the previous Chancellors only having Presidential (and not popular) support - before finally collapsing. I find it likely, actually, that a conservative, aristocratic (maybe monarchist?) regime could take over Germany; led by members of the Army and the landowning Junkers, it might try to recreate the 1916-18 military dictatorship.

Does that mean WW2 is averted? No. These people were very revanchist, without all of the pseudoscientific stuff. A German reclamation of its 'rightful' lands in the East were not viewed as a hypothetical; all that was ever in dispute was when they ought to be claimed. In 1922 a German minister was making public statements saying that the conflict between Germany and Poland was "a struggle" for "Germandom and Kultur [German civilization]" --- and this is a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party saying this! The power vacuum in Eastern & Central Europe after WWI was also too large, making war inevitable -- as Germany concurrently sought more land in the 1930s, revanchist sentiment was also high in Hungary, Romania, Italy, etc. The second World War will likely happen later, as the German military elite who argued against Hitler's expansionist policy (on the grounds Germany was unprepared for a large-scale war against GB & France) and were discredited by early German victories will now be in control of the country.
 
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