WWII aftermath with a non-genocidal ("Bonapartist") defeated Germany

There have been many threads with a non-genocidal fascist or authoritarian Germany winning WWII. But I think the question how the aftermath of WWII with Germany run by an aggressive fascist regime with a non-racist Hitler-like rabidly anti-Communist leader would look like is equally interesting. Lets say that the war mostly runs like OTL, with the only difference being that there obviously is no Holocaust, the occupied Eastern European Nations are treated like Denmark (Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, Czechia) or France (occupied bits of Russia and Poland) were in OTL. THe war still ends in 1944-1946 with Soviets and Western Allies meeting somewhere in Central/Eastern Germany and German unconditional surrender. The war against Japan and Italy happens more or less like in OTL.
 
In the end the geopolitical map of Europe ends quite like the same, USSR will punish german creted puppets integrating more land in the union, Nuremberg Trials still happen but wile people are still put to death, there will be lot less shame in it...
 
The problem here is that we have the broadest possible speculation to go on.

Events would never play out the same in any alternate scenario, even if the historical forces that create this scenario are mostly identical to what we saw in our history up until about 1930 or whatever.

Though personally I do reckon that a non-genocidal, not-quite-totalitarian Third Reich, led by a 'sane' dictator can still come a cropper. Plenty of Germanophobes will tell you Armageddon was brought down on OT's Third Reich not because they (the German leadership) were acting abnormally, but rather because they (both the Nazis and the Wehrmacht) were perfectly in accord with traditional German impulses.

I'm not saying I agree 100% with that, but when you get an AJP Taylor, an Enoch Powell, and a Milton Shulman all in agreement about the Hun then the root of that antipathy is worth considering.
 
In the end the geopolitical map of Europe ends quite like the same, USSR will punish german creted puppets integrating more land in the union, Nuremberg Trials still happen but wile people are still put to death, there will be lot less shame in it...
I largely agree; after a second major European War that will be blamed on German aggression there's no way Germany is going to survive as a great power, and Stalin is still ambitious enough to expand the USSR as much as he can without overextending himself.
 
I'm not sure Germany would be treated better at all, and perhaps worse.

All of this would still be seen by the victorious allies in the context of an aggressive "normal" Germany that flaunted the Versailles Treaty, rearmed, broke agreements, and was the clear aggressor in starting a Second World War which killed millions. There would be no "Nazis" upon which "normal" Germans could heap blame. I suspect that the allies would decide that Germans were just a bad lot altogether and that they were too soft in 1919 and not make that mistake again. Allies might decide that, this time, Germany would be dismembered and stay that way. The key perpertrators of the aggressive war would be tried by allied tribunals. Since presumably they would not be tried for "crimes against humanity" since the various ethnic holocausts would not have occurred, fewer would be sentenced to death, but rather imprisoned for life.

Parodoxically, this war might result in a modern world that was less accepting of Germany than OTL. When you are found totally guilty of the most horrible crimes imaginable, it is really easy to sincerely accept blame and de everything possible to repent. Plus, Germans could point their fingers, not at themselves, but "nazis". Would Germans in this time line react this way, or would they see more sympathy in their former rulers, who after all, were just "regular" Germans upset about Germany's treatment? Assuming Germany was ever reunified, which I think could be less likely in this TL than ours, would its chancellor see nothing wrong with visiting war memorials dedicated to WW2 war criminals like the Japanese prime minister does? Would Germans be secretely building nuclear weapons? Would this Germany be a leader in establishing a democratic, peaceful (some might say "spineless") European Union together with France? Without Nazis, could there be an effective "de-nazification" program that truly created a liberal democracy in Germany?
 

Thande

Donor
Even a Germany without ideological racism would probably end up having a very dirty war with the Soviet Union just by the nature of that front (and the Soviets would be just as bad, just like OTL).

Also does this count for things like bombing civilians (on both sides?)

However, let's say that magically somehow we have a totally clean World War as far as Germany is concerned. The end peace will be only slightly more lenient than OTL - ignoring modern historiography, most people at the time were more angry about German aggression and the failure of Versailles than stuff like the Holocaust. But in the long run this will lead to a more rapid rapproachment as by the late 1960s the Western powers begin to be ashamed of their treatment of the Germans in the immediate aftermath. On the other hand, the Germans might not make the same national re-examination they did in OTL with the absence of the Holocaust and other war crimes to force them to confront themselves.

One thing that would happen is that the world would be a lot more racist (by our standards), both because there is no Holocaust to act as a bogeyman against racism and also because, if Germany doesn't do anything nasty but Japan still enslaved and murdered its POWs and tested biological weapons against civilians and so on, it's easy to see how the obvious conclusion in world culture would be "only white people can conduct civilised warfare".
 
One thing that would happen is that the world would be a lot more racist (by our standards), both because there is no Holocaust to act as a bogeyman against racism and also because, if Germany doesn't do anything nasty but Japan still enslaved and murdered its POWs and tested biological weapons against civilians and so on, it's easy to see how the obvious conclusion in world culture would be "only white people can conduct civilised warfare".

Interesting observation. I agree.
 

The Vulture

Banned
Further on down the line, there may not be a UN mandate creating Israel as a Jewish homeland and leading to a very different Middle East.

Iran might still be our fair-haired boy in that area, given a long partnership aimed at containing Russian communism.
 
One thought....in OTL, Americans mostly unambigously view WWII as "the good war", because anything we may have done or parties we may have aligned with pales to the fact that we* defeated frikkin' Hitler. If this isn't the case TTL, do we see a much larger resurgence of isolationism in American politics? Let's say that *Schöntheil is slightly more ruthless that Churchill, but nowhere near as bad as Stalin...

*The Allies? Who are these "Allies" you speak of?
 
The problem with this situation, is that you have just changed a major part of how the war is going to be fought. Even if you keep the third reich the same in a structural sense as it was under hitler, if you get rid of hitler, the war could go vastly different than it did OTL. Since hitlers insanity drove decision making by and large if you get rid of just him then you open up a wide variety of possibilities. These are some examples just to name a few: Jewish scientists may not defect to the allies, US entry into the war may be delayed or prevented alltogether, no tripartite pact, no molotov ribbentrop pact, the war starts over finland rather than poland, or elimination of super weapon projects (i.e. the V weapons). Any one of these major changes could lead to an iron curtain much further west or east of OTL. I think in order to really get an idea of what post war Europe is going to look like you need to give more specifics.
 

Thande

Donor
The problem with this situation, is that you have just changed a major part of how the war is going to be fought. Even if you keep the third reich the same in a structural sense as it was under hitler, if you get rid of hitler, the war could go vastly different than it did OTL. Since hitlers insanity drove decision making by and large if you get rid of just him then you open up a wide variety of possibilities. These are some examples just to name a few: Jewish scientists may not defect to the allies, US entry into the war may be delayed or prevented alltogether, no tripartite pact, no molotov ribbentrop pact, the war starts over finland rather than poland, or elimination of super weapon projects (i.e. the V weapons). Any one of these major changes could lead to an iron curtain much further west or east of OTL. I think in order to really get an idea of what post war Europe is going to look like you need to give more specifics.

Germany could still be anti-Semitic without committing war crimes or the Holocaust - just having bullyboys smash up Jewish businesses and ghettoise the Jews. Reprehensible, but it wouldn't be any worse than what often happened in Eastern Europe anyway, and would still encourage the Jewish scientists to flee (Fermi did it from Italy in OTL despite the fact that Mussolini's own anti-Semitic policies were decidedly half-hearted).
 
When you put "Bonapartist" I thought you were trying to say they restore the Kaiser. THAT would be awesome!:D
 
Germany could still be anti-Semitic without committing war crimes or the Holocaust - just having bullyboys smash up Jewish businesses and ghettoise the Jews. Reprehensible, but it wouldn't be any worse than what often happened in Eastern Europe anyway, and would still encourage the Jewish scientists to flee (Fermi did it from Italy in OTL despite the fact that Mussolini's own anti-Semitic policies were decidedly half-hearted).


Although Fermi is a good example for you, keep in mind the bad situation in the US for african americans and Japanese americans, both of which were treated quite poorly by the US government and yet many of them risked their lives for the Us military during WWII.
 
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