With a PoD after 1900, who would make the plausible and interesting alt-Nazis?

Most interesting alt-Nazis?

  • France

    Votes: 10 19.6%
  • UK / GB

    Votes: 8 15.7%
  • Russia

    Votes: 21 41.2%
  • Austro-Hungary or a constituent nation

    Votes: 4 7.8%
  • Spain

    Votes: 2 3.9%
  • Other (not Germany or Italy)

    Votes: 6 11.8%

  • Total voters
    51
Of the European countries listed above, who would make the most interesting alt-Nazis?

The basic qualification is a country which has suffered from a series of spectacular disasters eventually turning toward fanatical nationalism and a non-Marxist totalitarian dictatorship. Racial mysticism, irredentism, and radical anti-Semitism are pluses but not necessary.

How would your country of choice operate, would it start an alt-WW2, and how would it look afterward?
 
A Russia that doesn't go commie could really easily be a dangerous opponent with some racial hatred brought to the fore. Anti-Japanese or Anti-Western sentiment could be born from Manchurian conflicts or even scapegoating the CP or Entente for a failed revolution (one that cost many lives). Tack on Rasputin for some religious persuasion of the masses and you have a serious contender for most whacky religio-political dictator.
 
Its somewhat cliche, and I have mentioned it before but I think a Yellow Socialist france is both very possible and potentially more potent (being more coherent than fascism, which was built on some of it's ideas).
 
A Russia that doesn't go commie could really easily be a dangerous opponent with some racial hatred brought to the fore. Anti-Japanese or Anti-Western sentiment could be born from Manchurian conflicts or even scapegoating the CP or Entente for a failed revolution (one that cost many lives). Tack on Rasputin for some religious persuasion of the masses and you have a serious contender for most whacky religio-political dictator.

Its somewhat cliche, and I have mentioned it before but I think a Yellow Socialist france is both very possible and potentially more potent (being more coherent than fascism, which was built on some of it's ideas).

Yeah, with the POD in question, either a France that loses WWI or a White Russia are both in a prime position to play the same role. In France, you get some hardline Rightists building on prewar Revanchism after the defeat; in Russia, the 'nastier' factions of the Whites end up on top of the post-Revolution chaos.

If you want something interesting, however, I would say an alt-Turkey would have a lot of possibility. Alt-Ataturk could easily go fascistic IMO, particularly if the Armenians or Greeks are seen as a fifth column in the war in a parallel to the Stab in the Back myth...

However, I doubt that he can be much more than the Mussolini of this world, the Turkish state simply won't have enough great-power status to do more than that.
 

Zen9

Banned
I think I'll go with France after it's humiliation by Germany in 1915.

An ex-communist, or Catholic hardliner would rise to power blaming the Jews and the British as much as Germany.
 
I don't see much potential for a non-democratic France to cause Nazi-tier damage. The pre-WW2 French right has the potential to become a kind of water-down Franco-ism (reactionary catholics with monarchist, antisemitic tendencies), but France was a status quo power with the exception of Alsace-Lorraine. The A-L dispute was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a major world war, because Paris would be open to any anti-German coalition but France wasn't powerful enough to start the conflict on its own.

If France wanted to grab Italian territory from Mussolini for some reason, it probably could, but I don't see what it would want to, or how the conflict would expand to the rest of Europe. A war of conquest to gain the French-speaking Swiss cantons would break the AH trope of nothing happening in Switzerland, but it would be in difficult, mountainous terrain like the Italo-Austrian front in WW1. Any attempt to anschluss the Walloons in Belgium would probably end with France getting smacked down by an Anglo-German alliance, or Germany doing the dirty work and restore Belgian neutrality while London agrees to look the other way.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
@Arcavius @CountPeter
I think a Fascist/quasi-Fascist France that won World War 1 would be more interesting, because a France defeated in WW1 would be neutered and easily defeated by Germany in Round 3. Maybe France pushes hard for an annexation of the Saarland and the UK and USA block that at Versailles, leading to sentiments of mutilated victory like Italy. Alternatively, if Germany goes communist the resulting red scare in France could turn France fascist.
 
A reactionary, non-communist Russia seems like the logical stand-in. Germany's unique conditions come from the combination of an industrialized, largely catholic West where democratic parties (SPD, Zentrum) were predominant, and a more autocratic, agrarian, and protestant society in East Elbian Germany/Prussia.

Pre-1914 Czarist Russia is like a giant version of East-Elbian Germany with all of the German Empire's condition's cranked up to 11 (landed nobility establishment vs. large left wing party, no tradition of liberalism or democracy, chimeric combo of Empire and national state with social conflict between state-forming people and ethnolinguistic minorities.

Ethnic Germans from the Russian Empire, as well as ethnically Slavic reactionaries had a disproportionate influence on the early Nazi party. The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945, goes into the connections. The Aufbau Vereinung (Reconstruction Organization) brought together White Russians and early figures in national socialism who wanted to establish reactionary regimes in both Germany and Russia, dominating eastern Europe through an ideologically compatible Russo-German alliance.

Max von Scheubner-Richter, the brains behind the beer hall putsch (he was shot while standing right next to Hitler) and Alfred Rosenberg, NSDAP minister for occupied territories in WW2, were both Baltic Germans who were born in the Russian empire. In a 20th century without a Bolshevik takeover, their antisemitism would've fit well with any Russian dictatorship.

Ethnic Germans were a disproportionately part of the Czarist elite and the landed nobility (especially in the Baltic states), so they would have economic incentives to join an alliance with a Slavic, reactionary/Anti SR movement. In any White Russian scenario post-WW1, Russia would a be former empire turned nation-state like Germany with oppressed co-ethnics to "liberate" from new countries in central eastern Europe.

The rhetoric of Russian nationalists nowadays about how Ukraine is just a made-up country and a puppet of the west is very similar to interwar German remarks about Poland being a "season-state" and a glorified French puppet established to keep Germany down. A reactionary, pan-slavic Russian regime would face similar motivations that Stalin did to suppress Ukrainian national consciousness and crackdown on the other nationalities of the empire as well.
 
A protectionist, paranoid UK would be interesting if less plausable. A turn Right and towards popular militency is possible, I'd argue, if the Irish Question gets ugly (Driven by extreme actions/quisling capitulation by the Left to the Nationalists) perhaps with a seriously pursued (and real) Plot Against Ulster and an economic crisis created by a war on the Continent in which Germany sucks Western Europe into it's sphere and it's perceived that Left-driven problems and indecivness allowed to occur without British intervention and it's seen that Britain's being played the fool by stubbornly sticking to free trade policies and letting it's markets get ravaged by competition while their German rivals (and whatever Russia ends up being) along with America are safe behind their customs barriers. It'd be more "The Empire is under Siege, we need to pull it back together!" sentiment, perhaps feeding on some racism depending on the area in question (Yellow Peral in Australia, Keeping down the Blacks in South Africa, Fear the Hun in the Home Isles).
 
@jerseyguy
That makes me wonder where Comrade Stalin would end up ITTL. Does he die, live and remain one amongst the teeming masses, or join the Whites and perhaps become a far-right counterpart to the Uncle Joe IOTL?
 
@jerseyguy
That makes me wonder where Comrade Stalin would end up ITTL. Does he die, live and remain one amongst the teeming masses, or join the Whites and perhaps become a far-right counterpart to the Uncle Joe IOTL?
Nah! Boris Savinkov will lead this Russia to glory under the banner of the National People's Republican Party! :p
 
Some time ago I tried my hand with a terrifyingly maniacal "Nazi" India ruled by a deranged version of the Arya Samaj, but I gave up because implausibility. I may return on it if I ever have time (so not anytime soon) but would probably require a pre-1900 POD to work realistically.
However, for interesting alt-Nazis... China:

The basic qualification is a country which has suffered from a series of spectacular disasters eventually turning toward fanatical nationalism and a non-Marxist totalitarian dictatorship. Racial mysticism, irredentism, and radical anti-Semitism are pluses but not necessary.

IOTL they turned toward a Marxist totalitarian dictatorship, a not so fanatically nationalist one and obviously not interested in Anti-Semitism or racialism in general. But it is at least conceivable that a more nationalistic, totalitarian, racially obsessed ideology emerges out of a different Chinese Warlord Era. It would be highly militaristic, and might single out might groups (Muslims come to mind) as scapegoats for China's woes. Irredentism about lost lands, of which China would have plenty by 1900 (outer Manchuria and Formosa just for a start) is almost a given, as well as a desire to restore China to its rightful place and lost greatness through the recreation of the tribute sphere (on a tighter leash this time, hey) which might morph into a mix of "civilizing mission" and "lebensraum" discourse.
 
Hmm. The prospect of having Chinese "Nazis" rather than communists seize power makes me wonder how the former's atrocities and cruelty would stack up against the latter's (I don't mean to sound callous or detached when I say this, I'm just wondering for the sake of the discussion).

I mean, the tens of millions dead by Mao's hand IOTL--whether intentionally so and/or an accidental byproduct of his policies--is a human catastrophe that's damned hard to surpass. There's also the modern PRC's one-party authoritarianism and human rights abuses to factor into the equation as well.

And now, I find myself imagining a hypothetical ASB confrontation between "Nazi" and communist China alike. For obvious reasons, I bet they'd have much more in common than they'd like to admit;
a potential war between the two would certainly be something to write about.
 
There is an argument that France would have been the most "logical" place for a fascist movement to arise. It spawned proto-fascist politicians and intellectuals like Boulanger and Sorel. Antisemitism entered the mainstream after the Dreyfus affair. And figures like Henry Dorgères and François de La Rocque started to gain influence in the 1920s and 30s. They never went anywhere, but if you mix in a worse economy, a sense of national defeat/humiliation, and a weakened left and center, things might have gone differently.

The UK and US might be the only countries during that time period that could be considered consolidated democracies, which makes them the least likely places for an alt-Nazi movement to gain power, but (if done correctly) also the most interesting.
 
There is an argument that France would have been the most "logical" place for a fascist movement to arise. It spawned proto-fascist politicians and intellectuals like Boulanger and Sorel. Antisemitism entered the mainstream after the Dreyfus affair. And figures like Henry Dorgères and François de La Rocque started to gain influence in the 1920s and 30s. They never went anywhere, but if you mix in a worse economy, a sense of national defeat/humiliation, and a weakened left and center, things might have gone differently

The French Far Right don't have the same extistential violent threat from the Radical Left to get the power brockers of society behind them, though, and looking at Fascist history they almost always get into the halls of power as "attack dogs" for the center and right-center liberals as a check on the Communists since there own base dosen't have the militancy andzeal to do it.
 
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