Wouldn't the victorious Nazis just attempt to engineer a coup in the US?

Ive been hearing more about the major American players that were pretty cozy with the Nazis, Ford being the first to come to mind. In a timeline where the Nazis and Imperial Japanese end up with something close to victory (each controlling half of Eurasia, not facing rebellions, etc), wouldn't it be easier to just try and overthrow the US govt from within? Seems like a more valuable use of resources than trying to outright conquer them. I'm sure that there were plenty of powerful people who, once sensing which way the wind was blowing, could be bought for the right price. Does this sound plausible to anyone else?


I don't know enough about WW2 to come up with a plausible POD, but lets just say that the US entrance into the war was as mismanaged as it could possibly be, leading to a bloody embarrassment that turns the population against the war.
 
Ive been hearing more about the major American players that were pretty cozy with the Nazis, Ford being the first to come to mind. In a timeline where the Nazis and Imperial Japanese end up with something close to victory (each controlling half of Eurasia, not facing rebellions, etc), wouldn't it be easier to just try and overthrow the US govt from within? Seems like a more valuable use of resources than trying to outright conquer them. I'm sure that there were plenty of powerful people who, once sensing which way the wind was blowing, could be bought for the right price. Does this sound plausible to anyone else?


I don't know enough about WW2 to come up with a plausible POD, but lets just say that the US entrance into the war was as mismanaged as it could possibly be, leading to a bloody embarrassment that turns the population against the war.

Could succeed when they have some degree of popular support. I seriously doubt anyone outside a very small group would have thought a Nazi friendly overthrow of our democratically elected government would be anything except apocalyptically bad.

I don't even think you could find people who would be willing to actually take on the federal government and stand up to be part of its hypothetical fascist successor. There's a big difference between expressing a degree of support for fascism a la Ford and actually being willing to pledge life, fortune, and sacred honor to becoming the American Hitler with a slim chance of success.
 
In the astoundingly unlikely event this were to happen, somehow, and the Nazis/Japanese tried it, they would fail. Coups aren't as easy to engineer as all that (Just ask Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein) and never a poorer country against a richer one.

The Nazis would be poorer, because they would squander the wealth of Europe killing people and building penis substitute architecture and the Japanese because they won't have conquered any industrial areas at all with the minor exception of Australia.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Germany might have managed a stalemate

Ive been hearing more about the major American players that were pretty cozy with the Nazis, Ford being the first to come to mind. In a timeline where the Nazis and Imperial Japanese end up with something close to victory (each controlling half of Eurasia, not facing rebellions, etc), wouldn't it be easier to just try and overthrow the US govt from within? Seems like a more valuable use of resources than trying to outright conquer them. I'm sure that there were plenty of powerful people who, once sensing which way the wind was blowing, could be bought for the right price. Does this sound plausible to anyone else? I don't know enough about WW2 to come up with a plausible POD, but lets just say that the US entrance into the war was as mismanaged as it could possibly be, leading to a bloody embarrassment that turns the population against the war.

Germany might have managed a temporary stalemate (think 1803 Peace of Amiens type of agreement) with the British controlling North Africa and and the Soviets somewhere east of the Ukraine-Belarossia internal borders (think Stalin loses out in a coup, similar to the Russians in 1917).

That still doesn't give the Germans enough of an economy to threaten the British Isles with invasion, much less threaten to project any power into the Western Hemisphere.

Japan's best hope - and that's all it is - is that a UK that stalemates with the Germans in 1940-41 may be willing to continue allowing the NEI to supply the Japanese with POL, in return for the Japanese limiting their ambitions in Asia to (maybe) Northern China...

That's about it, in any rational world.

Just as a reminder, in 1938, the total industrial potential of the powers (from Bairoch via Kennedy) and with the UK in 1900 = 100, is:

US: 528
GE: 214
UK: 181
SU: 152
JA: 88
FR: 74
IT: 46

Good luck.

Best,
 
while the US has its flaws, generally speaking, when there turns out to be a great big scary threat we tend to come together. Even in the War of 1812, when New England seriously considered secession, all that came to an abrupt stop when the British burned down Washington DC

There was apparently a conspiracy in 1933 by the Far Right, but it never got past the talking stage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

note at that time there was no scary external enemy. A victorious Axis would definitely be scary
 
This is totally ASB. Sure the victorious Nazis would do their best to influence the USA. There were a lot of Americans who admired at least some of what Hitler did. Saying that a coup, not happening period. As popular as anti-semitism was in the USA, if the "final solution" ever comes to light, it will be a disaster for Nazi efforts in propaganda.
 
This is totally ASB. Sure the victorious Nazis would do their best to influence the USA. There were a lot of Americans who admired at least some of what Hitler did. Saying that a coup, not happening period. As popular as anti-semitism was in the USA, if the "final solution" ever comes to light, it will be a disaster for Nazi efforts in propaganda.

I don't know, there were some Nazi plans to glorify and celebrate the Holocaust.
 
This is totally ASB. Sure the victorious Nazis would do their best to influence the USA. There were a lot of Americans who admired at least some of what Hitler did. Saying that a coup, not happening period. As popular as anti-semitism was in the USA, if the "final solution" ever comes to light, it will be a disaster for Nazi efforts in propaganda.
The question is how much of the Holocaust would be known in the outside world, and even in the Reich, in the event of a Nazi victory
 
OTL Himlmer in a speech at a concentration camp basically told the SS men that much of the essential work they were doing would never be known. Unless the Nazis are uninterested in what anyone else thinks or rule the world, they realized that advertising the Holocaust would not play well elsewhere. OTL information came out during the war, however the issue is how much evidence will come out and be believed. At least for a while the Nazis will continue with Potemkin villages like the Theriesenstadt camp, maybe even some small "resettlement" village in the east somewhere to show off. Given the death rates in the east if the Germans win even if they don't occupy the UK (like CalBear's TL), the gradual vanishing of the Jewish population will be buried in the much greater total numbers.

IMHO the Germans will try and keep the details of the Holocaust secret as long as they can because if the truth came out it would poison relationships with the USA and many other nations. (this was the situation in "Fatherland")
 
The question is how much of the Holocaust would be known in the outside world, and even in the Reich, in the event of a Nazi victory

The Germans were never able to keep the Holocaust a secret even during the war. Place leaked like a damned sieve. People were reluctant to credit the reports, but enough gory details had been leaked by 1942 that the basic evidence was available for people to evaluate, had they been inclined to do so.
 
In a timeline where the Nazis and Imperial Japanese end up with something close to victory (each controlling half of Eurasia, not facing rebellions, etc), wouldn't it be easier to just try and overthrow the US govt from within?

In a timeline where Japan and Germany each control half of Eurasia they could literally walk across the Atlantic and conquer the United States with one man. How you ask?

Easy, getting to that point would require so much divine intervention that just a bit more wouldn't be too hard.

As for a coup. Nope. Even if you COULD find an army commander to lead it (doubtful) you would also need soldiers to follow him (good luck with that), AND you would have to convince everyone else in the army to go along with it (outright laughable.) Even IF a coup was attempted, it lasts maybe fifteen minutes before the rest of the army removes him, puts the president back in charge and whoever led said coup is getting put up against a wall after a very public trial.

And whatever business leaders were stupid enough to support him are going to get the same fate.
 
OTL Himlmer in a speech at a concentration camp basically told the SS men that much of the essential work they were doing would never be known.

"Much", but not all. Not even remotely all. The Holocaust was something of an open secret in Germany and there is no way it couldn't have: the number of personnel involved indirectly in it was huge. Furthermore, we know that it was an open secret among the German public: troops casually discussed the massacres in the East while on leave, camp guards sent post cards home with some frank discussion about what was going on being uncensored, and the people even talked about it among each other.

For example, the following quote is from Ian Kershaw's book The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Nazi Germany which he drew from a report from the SD office in Stuttgart in November 1944 about the effectiveness of the propaganda about the Nemmersdorf massacre butt the Soviets. It included the following conversation overheard in a super market store:

Surely the Reich's leaders must realize that every thinking person, seeing those gory victims, will immediately contemplate the atrocities that we have perpetrated on enemy soil, and even in Germany. Have we not slaughtered Jews in their thousands? Don't soldiers tell over and again that Jews in Poland had to dig their own grave? And what did we do with the Jews who were in the concentration camp in Alsace? The Jews are also human beings. By acting in this way, we have shown the enemy what they might do to us in the event of their victory... we can't accuse the Russians of behaving just as gruesomely towards other peoples as our own people have done against their own Germans.

So it was known that the Holocaust was happening among the German public, they just didn't know all the details.
 
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