Alternate Histories and You

[SckizoBoy]

I would argue the war was lost back in the Weimar Republic. The aspirations for creating what would be the Third Reich started then ... and the thing is the Weimar Republic had already prodded and try to cultivate that fascist regime into being back then. They were just hoping that it wouldn't necessarily take the form of what it did. Or more accurate to say, exactly who. Militia training schools and programs as a way of not directly contravening the Treaty of Versailles, etc. I'd argue the Third Reich had the type of political landscape to win. The mindset to win. But economic realities are not trumped by mindset alone. It lost the second it thought that appeasement would last forever.

The Weimar Republic had all the pre-existing designs on Czechoslovakia, etc... There's even some evidence they were already planning the invasion of the Soviet Union years prior the war. Not only that under the guise of perceiving the Western powers as a future threat, Soviet and German relationships were strange to say the least. Various tank development programs and military exercises planned in conjunction with the Soviets on Soviet soil no less. And this relationship went back as far as 1920.

It's the same sort of geostrategic realities that some things are just beyond a nation's grasp. Push your luck, or disastrously allow yourself to believe that diplomacy and mutual necessity aren't weapons on their own, and suddenly you have a string of very pissed off nations that otherwise wouldn't have much to do with eachother on their own arraying against you ... and suddenly you learn quite quickly that the world will align against your interests and you will lose everything.

Thoroughly good points, raising the question: in what way could the Allies have dealt with a beaten German Empire so as to avoid the Weimar Republic?

My initial inclination was to wind that all back even further (Bismarck with his alienation of Wilhelm II from Frederick III and his lack of diplomatic foresight, the ramifications of German nationalism (i.e. 1848), all the way back to Louis XIV!), but that would've been quite a stretch(!)

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Thoroughly good points, raising the question: in what way could the Allies have dealt with a beaten German Empire so as to avoid the Weimar Republic?

My initial inclination was to wind that all back even further (Bismarck with his alienation of Wilhelm II from Frederick III and his lack of diplomatic foresight, the ramifications of German nationalism (i.e. 1848), all the way back to Louis XIV!), but that would've been quite a stretch(!)

I'm honestly not too familiar with 19th Century German history... but I do know there were many individual factors. A whole lot of Germans in Czechoslovakia, for instance. That being said I think it's important to remember thatEuropeans in general were not nice people. What the Kaiser did in Belgium during the Great War wasn't that far removed to what the Nazis were doing in the Netherlands (and Belgium) ...

Of which was a far cry from what the Belgians were and had been doing in the Congo, so it's hard to be sympathetic ... but it was still a war crime (by even then standards)...

The Rape of Belgium basically solidified popular support across the British sphere of influence. And even Australian war propaganda used it extensively as a call to arms from basically the other side of the globe. So let's put it in historical context ... Europeans are professional bastards ... and it's kind of hard to separate the Third Reich from merely being an evolution of that.

Basically the argument of what the Entente could have done to stop a fascist regime baed extensively on ethnonationalist doctrine ... well, sorry but that mentality already existed. And it wasn't even the reasons why the British Empire eeffectively declared war on it. Churchill was a genuinely awful human being, and he had always been a genuinely awful human being who had to reisgn in disgrace after the Dardanelles campaign during the Great War. Basically only the Britons and the Britons only liked Churchill when compared to what the rest of the Commonwealth thought of him.

The Third Reich wasn't anomalous to Western and Central European powers. It was pre-existing. Basically any Treaty of Versailles that adequately tried to change that by attempting to defang the blatantly imperialist view of Europeans in general would have been subverted by itself in time.

The origins of the Wehrmacht began in 1919. The Reichswehr may have only been 100,000 strong, but the militia alone totalled over 4.5 million by the start of 1934. Th Nazi SA specifically was 35 times larger than the Reichswehr before 1933. Many of whom had access to weaponry and training provided for it by the Republic over the years.

So who exactly was going to stop it?

And these militia programs had started well before then ... so what logically could the Entente forces have done?

Arguably we could have not invaded the burgeoning Soviet Union in 1918.

People seem to forget that Western powers invaded what would be the Soviet Union... hoping to intervene and displace the revolutionaries. It failed miserably and also cemented paranoia in then Bolshevik party members specifically that the biggest threat to the Soviet Union came from the Western powers. This allowed another avenue to the Weimar Republic secretly-not so secretly to rearm and research, and emboldened their vision to be a military power once more.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

How about a dystopian alternate present where the Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism was left to stand unopposed and the entirety of the western world is succumbing to radical nationalism while the third world is being exploited with no chance of recovery? Also, the world is heading towards environmental as a result of unrestrained capitalism destroying the environment and exploiting ressources with no regard for long term sustainability. Boy. That would make for a really scary premise.

 

[CaitSeith]

snip

To make that work without being indistinguishable from shameless Nazi propaganda, you'd have to shred out pretty much the core of what Nazism stands for.

PS: The proper name would be Neo-Allies!

But that is kind of the point. Winning the war would never have been enough to make the absurd fantasies of Mein Kampf happen and even there it is far from world domination. The undiluted Nazi ideology and the fantasies of Nazi planners are so unrealistic that they never could have been set in practice. Any proper extrapolation of "What if Nazis had won" needs to take that into account and water it down until it becomes workable.

There is no possible watering down that would make it workable. The end result would be pretty much anti-Nazi.