WI: Six Germanies after the war

As for the Morgenthau plan, well its basicly the Blood and Soil ideal the Germans were fighting for minus the slave labor.

Most Germans thought they were fighting to build an Empire. They did not think they were fighting for slavery in fact slavery was sold to them as a temporary wartime measure to make up for major manpower shortage and was quite unpopular still. They also did not see it as a genocidal war of colonization the way you see it as and the way Hitler and Generalplan Ost planned it as. In fact talking to a German who fought in the East it was sold to them as Stalin is going to double cross Germany so Germany must double cross him first. :rolleyes:

It wasn't sold to them as we need that land to put German settlers on their land, kill off a large portion of the population and make what is left of the population surfs. There is a huge disconnect from the ideas Hitler had and what he sold his policies as being to his population and troops.

The problem with collective punishment politicians like Morgenthau and others is they could not understand that under Totalitarianism the population is rendered ignorant and all information is controlled. One can commit mass murder on an epic scale in Maoist China or Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany and the population be unimaginably ignorant of what is going on.
 
Well if we look at the pictures and what was written during the war rather than the post war didn´t see, hear or know anything the policies were rather straight forward and known with the exeption of the deathcamps.

The classical photo of a German unit holding a large sign saying "the Russians must die so that we may live" and the recruitment of farmers for colonies in the east with attached political advisors from the SA/SS/BDM weren´t secret in anyway.

But regardless how interesting the Morgenthau and General Plan East is to discuss its OT.
 
Well if we look at the pictures and what was written during the war rather than the post war didn´t see, hear or know anything the policies were rather straight forward and known with the exeption of the deathcamps.

Oh, Mr. Zimmer was quite upfront about what he was taught and told during the war and its more extreme in ways then people here might think. He fought in Stalingrad with his brother. He was apolitical, his brother was anti-Nazi and got in trouble twice with the SS for saying disparaging comments about the leader on military leave. He survived Stalingrad and was saved by Americans from being taken away by the Soviets for forced labor in Siberia. His brother wasn't so lucky and died in the mid 50s of starvation in a Siberian work camp.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f132/jmc247/Misc/23_zpsff2fe132.jpg

But, as for what he was taught he said he was taught in depth English as well as the American governmental system and American history as he was told that Germany would in his lifetime rule over the United States and they needed people like him to manage it. He got hit with a ruler for questioning if a small state like Germany really would be able to effectively rule so much of the world. As for groups like the Jews, Slavs, etc. They were taught actually that they weren't all evil and should be destroyed, but that there were real threats inside these communities to Germany and while a few 'real threats' that show themselves need to be gotten rid of. The vast majority should be relocated where so called threats inside these communities will no longer threaten Germany.

As for the Slavs they too would be relocated places into different places in Russia. In the case of the Jews the favored place for relocation was first intended to be Palestine or really anywhere else that would take them according to Zimmer. The British said no regarding Jews to Palestine and of course so did many other countries and then the policy became to move them to somewhere in Africa. The war made such plans impossible so they told the public they were just interring the Jews for the duration of the war for national security reasons no different then American were interning the Japanese to the point the SS would have fake news reels made for the German public constantly of the 'great' conditions the Jews have it in the camps and ghettos up until late 1944.

As for what else he said... it was kind of amazing where less then two years from the Red Army and the German Army marching together in Poland they were fighting one other, but he said it was the nature of those systems where the leaders had absolute power. He said that thanks to propaganda and early victories German soldiers were convinced that they were bad ass, but the Red Army was bad ass at another level able to fight and operate efficiently in extreme sub-zero conditions that German soldiers could hardly function in.

What else? He was 14 during the Night of the Broken Glass and watched helplessly as SS troops with machine guns ordered a well organized mob to attack various stores. He said the public was uneasy about Hitler until nearly overnight he turned 40% unemployment into full employment and all the sudden he had near universal support. He also said Hitler was also very good at sizing up and playing the limits of what German society and his generals would morally accept. According to Zimmer the Final Solution had it come out during the war would have fractured German society itself and caused a civil war not just among the generals, but among ordinary Germans. Would it have? Who knows, but Hitler certainly believed it might when he told Himmler it was a secret they must take with them to their grave in 1942. The problem is getting the information out is very hard to do in such a state.

He also said the regime used the Allies own words and policies as weapons to make surrender to the Western Allies not much more appealing then surrender to the Soviets. As far as he believed when he surrendered to the WAllies they were going to snip off his nads as well as completely destroy Germany as Americans were waging war against Germans as a race according to the state run propaganda and he completely believed it as that was his only news source. I think people in the modern era in the West have little concept of having only one news source controlled totally by the state and almost no one being willing to talk with you differently out of fear of being killed and their families being killed. It is not a conducive environment for the average person being able to see the big picture or any picture other then the one regime wants you to see.

You couldn't hate Hitler more then Mr. Zimmer at the same time even though he has lived in the U.S. for many many decades the territorial concessions to Russia and Poland still burn and he believed they should be returned to Germany to his dying day. That kind of goes to show how well splitting up Germany into 6 countries would have gone... not well at all.

Mr. Zimmer's grandson now serves in the U.S. Army and is due to be stationed in Germany this year.
 
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I assume such a plan to completely destroy Germany also would have had added onto it in time the Plan Morgenthau clause so they would be starving feudal uneducated peasants in the various states. Not much worry of 'Prussian militarism' when you have people dying in the streets like flies of starvation.

There is the small detail that it's not a given that, had the Morgenthau plan be enacted, people would have starved, you know.
The plan was to send a sizable part of the German city population in the countryside to be farmers. Subsistence farmers, of course, but subsistence, while not meaning wealth, still means the opposite of starvation. And, guess what, by 1945 Germany did really need manpower in the countryside. One of the reasons why the Germans had to starve their neighbors in 1944, and still send slave labor in their own farms, is that their men were in the army or in the factories, churning out those arms. Remove the army, remove the arms, and send the men in the farms.
There would still be a shortage of food, sure. So what. As far as the West was concerned, the Allies, in actual history, kept sending in supplies. They could do exactly the same in a Morgenthau scenario. The Germans would initially receive this for free, as aid. Then they would pay it by ther light industry (as in, an industry unable to build tanks and howitzers and such things): cuckoo clocks and radios and refrigerators, that sort of thing. The surplus of manpower who couldn't survive as farmers, could work in those light-industry factories.
And if there's still a surplus of manpower that doesn't find work, who says they're to starve. There's work to be done in South America or elsewhere. If it was good for the Irish in 1860, it's surely just as good for the Germans in 1960. Will that mean a decrease of the total population over time? Well, good news.
 
Another positive side effect of this is that unlike OTL Germany cant be as fast and forceful in re-establishing its former puppets in Eastern and Central Europe so we might see a more peacefull development

I don't understand. How can post-WWII "Germany" (I assume the FRG is meant here?) be said to have "re-established puppets" :confused:
 
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There is the small detail that it's not a given that, had the Morgenthau plan be enacted, people would have starved, you know.
The plan was to send a sizable part of the German city population in the countryside to be farmers. Subsistence farmers, of course, but subsistence, while not meaning wealth, still means the opposite of starvation. And, guess what, by 1945 Germany did really need manpower in the countryside. One of the reasons why the Germans had to starve their neighbors in 1944, and still send slave labor in their own farms, is that their men were in the army or in the factories, churning out those arms. Remove the army, remove the arms, and send the men in the farms.
There would still be a shortage of food, sure. So what. As far as the West was concerned, the Allies, in actual history, kept sending in supplies. They could do exactly the same in a Morgenthau scenario. The Germans would initially receive this for free, as aid. Then they would pay it by ther light industry (as in, an industry unable to build tanks and howitzers and such things): cuckoo clocks and radios and refrigerators, that sort of thing. The surplus of manpower who couldn't survive as farmers, could work in those light-industry factories.
And if there's still a surplus of manpower that doesn't find work, who says they're to starve. There's work to be done in South America or elsewhere. If it was good for the Irish in 1860, it's surely just as good for the Germans in 1960. Will that mean a decrease of the total population over time? Well, good news.

Intentionally decreasing the population of a people over time is literally the definition of genocide, you realize?

This is leaving aside that yes, mass starvation would have ensued, because the issue was never that food for 70 million people could be gotten, the issue was that the land alone was physically incapable of feeding more than 45 million people, and that Germany, both before the war, had essentially depended on heavy industry to pay for the balance (because it was physically impossible for light industry to make the balance). It's as simple as that; if you're limited to making $7, you can't buy $10 worth of food.

Also, I cannot think of worse examples for defending a policy than 19th century Ireland, for which a far stronger argument of intentional genocide can be made than Morgenthau.
 

Cook

Banned
Suppose that Germany had been partitioned into six independent states, as in this map.

That is five successor states; Austria, the first of Hitler’s conquests, was regaining its independence.

This is actually only one of the ideas bandied about by Roosevelt; he considered anything up to 50 successor states at one time.
 
Also, I cannot think of worse examples for defending a policy than 19th century Ireland, for which a far stronger argument of intentional genocide can be made than Morgenthau.

Agreed, but I think 'neglectful' is a better descriptor than 'intentional' there. Same effect, though, of course:(
 
That is five successor states; Austria, the first of Hitler’s conquests, was regaining its independence.

This is actually only one of the ideas bandied about by Roosevelt; he considered anything up to 50 successor states at one time.

Wait, 50 successor states? Weren't there only, like 40 before German Unification? And I don't think you could add more than four or five states, tops, if you balkanized Prussia, and the states before unification included a insane number of ridiculously small ones too...

Agreed, but I think 'neglectful' is a better descriptor than 'intentional' there. Same effect, though, of course:(

Well, my point was that with the Morgenthau Plan, nobody (except maybe Morgenthau), considered it a key end goal that some 25 million people starved to death (even many supporters, I suspect, might have shrunk from that if it'd been described in those terms).

On the other hand, even though you can also say that the British in Ireland, did not actually intend to murder every Irishman (even if only for purely practical reasons), the effects of British rule on the Irish language and culture, and the fact that through deliberate neglect, close to a quarter of the Isle's population died or left are fairly damning in itself.

In any case, the point stands that it's not the sort of precedent you want to invoke when defending policy.
 
How large would some of these famrs be and would they be allowed the use the fertilizers some partially Jewish man had created during WWI for artificial petroleum? I recall that apparently the smalls had been getting too small for people to make a living off of them and the Nazi government illegalized the land being split amongst the children and had it all go to the firstborn.
 
Intentionally decreasing the population of a people over time is literally the definition of genocide, you realize?

Uh, no. As far as I'm concerned you need mass murder in order to talk about genocide. Measures that encourage emigration aren't genocide, even if they result in a decrease of the local population.

Or, if you are convinced that such measures do qualify as genocide, then please be advised that the whole post-war Western German policy of the Gastarbeiter was genocide. It encouraged emigration from Turkey or Italy, and for some time it even forced men to spend most of their time away from their wives - both measures that would result in a decrease of the local Italian or Turkish population.

This is leaving aside that yes, mass starvation would have ensued, because the issue was never that food for 70 million people could be gotten, the issue was that the land alone was physically incapable of feeding more than 45 million people, and that Germany, both before the war, had essentially depended on heavy industry to pay for the balance (because it was physically impossible for light industry to make the balance). It's as simple as that; if you're limited to making $7, you can't buy $10 worth of food.

I notice you conveniently removed the kind foreigners sending in $3 worth of food for years.
You are aware that as of today, there are large countries in the world that strongly depend on foreign aid for basic stuff like everyday food. Thus, it is not a given that this couldn't happen in other time frames.

As to the pre-war years, I suppose you could back up your word with data - could you? - but even if you can, conditions were drastically changed. Germany was no longer as big, the population was no longer as large,

Also, I cannot think of worse examples for defending a policy than 19th century Ireland, for which a far stronger argument of intentional genocide can be made than Morgenthau.

Of course it was not casual. It was indeed a stronger case for genocide, provided you adopt an extremely wide definition of that, but the main difference is that Ireland happened to produce enough food to support its population - only, it was not available to its own population. In the hypothetical Morgenthau scenario, I don't see the commas of that plan specifying that a sizable part of the German harvest should be sent abroad. Do you?

As a final general remark I'm particularly impressed by how it seems that to you, the fact that a few millions of foreigners did in actual history come to Germany to find a livelihood is nothing to write home about, but if it's Germans who have to emigrate, why, that's a crime against humanity! It's genocide!
Weird.
 
Uh, no. As far as I'm concerned you need mass murder in order to talk about genocide. Measures that encourage emigration aren't genocide, even if they result in a decrease of the local population.

Or, if you are convinced that such measures do qualify as genocide, then please be advised that the whole post-war Western German policy of the Gastarbeiter was genocide. It encouraged emigration from Turkey or Italy, and for some time it even forced men to spend most of their time away from their wives - both measures that would result in a decrease of the local Italian or Turkish population.

You don't see a difference between reducing a country's population by 25 million, about one third, based on the assumption that the pressures which would cause such would be entirely voluntary, and thus, would not be preceded by mass starvation or some other population pressure ensuing from bad policy (I cannot emphasize enough how stupid a person would need to be to assume that a population can be reduced by one thirds through voluntary emigration alone), and people emigrating to a country with higher wages? Well, that is your problem.

I notice you conveniently removed the kind foreigners sending in $3 worth of food for years.
You are aware that as of today, there are large countries in the world that strongly depend on foreign aid for basic stuff like everyday food. Thus, it is not a given that this couldn't happen in other time frames.

As to the pre-war years, I suppose you could back up your word with data - could you? - but even if you can, conditions were drastically changed. Germany was no longer as big, the population was no longer as large,
Yes. This is a bad thing. Foreign aid is not "normal operations" for any country; it's actually a sign that the situation in said country is very dysfunctional. Unless you are implying that countries which receive foreign aid see this as a good situation to be in, I don't see what's your point.

Furthermore, I should advise you that handwaving through "times are changed, no comparison" is made is an especially lazy way to dodge an argument. If the population is reduced by 8%, land size (of the most agriculturally productive areas) is reduced by 25%, and there is less foreign exchange to import food, will there be more or less food available per person? This isn't a difficult question.

Of course it was not casual. It was indeed a stronger case for genocide, provided you adopt an extremely wide definition of that, but the main difference is that Ireland happened to produce enough food to support its population - only, it was not available to its own population. In the hypothetical Morgenthau scenario, I don't see the commas of that plan specifying that a sizable part of the German harvest should be sent abroad. Do you?
Obviously not, the issue is that the land doesn't actually support more than 50 million people, something which ensued from the fact that Germany pre-war largely imported its own food, utilizing foreign exchange generated from heavy industry, something which would no longer be the case after the Morgenthau Plan. Obviously, the two are not precise parallels, something which stems from the two not being the same events.

As a final general remark I'm particularly impressed by how it seems that to you, the fact that a few millions of foreigners did in actual history come to Germany to find a livelihood is nothing to write home about, but if it's Germans who have to emigrate, why, that's a crime against humanity! It's genocide!
Weird.
Answered above, nothing else to say except that the amount of cognitive dissonance required to hold your position is extremely astonishing.
 
I don't understand. How can post-WWII "Germany" (I assume the FRG is meant here?) be said to have "re-established puppets" :confused:

In foreign policy big state do make propositions true smaller states (but there are not puppet state at least in my understanding)

For exmple: let say that big country A does not want state B to join the E.U. but does want to say out front for fear of damaging there economic relations,So the go to a smaller state C and ask them to say no.

And since the crisis there are some, that say the countries that have been bailed out are puppet sates.And since Germany is the pay master the Germany must be the puppet-master.
 
In foreign policy big state do make propositions true smaller states (but there are not puppet state at least in my understanding)

For exmple: let say that big country A does not want state B to join the E.U. but does want to say out front for fear of damaging there economic relations,So the go to a smaller state C and ask them to say no.

And since the crisis there are some, that say the countries that have been bailed out are puppet sates.And since Germany is the pay master the Germany must be the puppet-master.

A better example would be country A sending funds and aiding in acquiring arms by group B to break up Country C while making sure that country C is unable to act on the international arena.

Paymaster Germany well maybe if you count forcing other countries like say Spain having to accept taking "rescue" loans to save financial companies that have large loans in German banks btw its interesting to hear Germany talking of the need to follow the rules while frequently breaking them.
 
A better example would be country A sending funds and aiding in acquiring arms by group B to break up Country C while making sure that country C is unable to act on the international arena.

Paymaster Germany well maybe if you count forcing other countries like say Spain having to accept taking "rescue" loans to save financial companies that have large loans in German banks btw its interesting to hear Germany talking of the need to follow the rules while frequently breaking them.


What:confused:
 
A better example would be country A sending funds and aiding in acquiring arms by group B to break up Country C while making sure that country C is unable to act on the international arena.
In this case we are talking of proxy wars not puppet nations,as implied about Germany in central Europe where we are talking of influence (political and economic) which is a necessary think and positive in my opinion of that countries since it waters down the influence of others countries.

Paymaster Germany well maybe if you count forcing other countries like say Spain having to accept taking "rescue" loans to save financial companies that have large loans in German banks btw its interesting to hear Germany talking of the need to follow the rules while frequently breaking them.

Well Germany did make some reforms (I refer to the deficit rule),and then also France brakes rules,and talks of the need to fallow rules especially when others are the one how must respect them and i believe you could find other countries that practice this form of hypocrisy,and by the way Spain and others are not that innocent,they needed and wanted the "rescue" loans.
By the way do you think it will have been better if Germany would have refuse to participate and bail out there banks directly,those countries that have been bailed out would still go to austerity and probably bigger economic mess,for ex if Greece will have not been bailed out very likely they would have had to leave the euro,and face not only pay check cut but also cuts to a devalued currency.
 
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