Alternate History: If Germany won WWII.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am not at all sure where this thread belongs. I am putting it in IMHO because it doesn’t seem worthy of GD.

Anyway, I have a question about what would happen to the American “National Psyche” in the case of a Nazi victory in WWII.

I assume that at the end of the war, Germany occupies all of Europe with sattelite states that have the same amount of autonomy that the Warsaw Pact nations had (e.g. Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Croatia), North Africa, and most of the Soviet Union. They do not, however, invade the United States, and a Cold War ensues. What would life in America be like? Would a defeat change how Americans have seen themselves and send the country into a completely different direction? What direction would that be?

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Phillip K. Dick has a GREAT book based on this premise called “The Man In The High Castle.” In his book, both the Japanese and the Germans occupy the U.S.

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There was a photoshop on fark.com about this, but i cant seem to find it. Ill post it if i do.

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Well, for starters, instead of blacklisting actors for being Communists, we’d have blacklisted them for being Fascists.

Our space program would have kicked into high gear after Germany launched their V4 satellite.

There would be a large grassroots counterculture movement in the late '60s in protest of US involvement in the jungles of Congo fighting the Facist-backed rebels as part of our “Containment Policy”.

There would also be a large interest in foreign music artists that would be knick-named the “Canadian Invasion”.

We’d boycott the Olympics held in Nuremberg in protest of their bogged-down invasion of Iraq from the German provence of Palestine.

President Ronald Reagan would make his famous “Evil Empire” speech. (Some things never change.)

And the '90s would see the German Reich collapse from within due to a pro-democracy movement, starting in the satellite nations and finally culminating in the break up of Germany into a loose federation of independent states.

Japanese electronics would still dominate the market.

Of course, none of this came to pass after I went back in time and changed history so that Germany actually lost the Second World War. :wink:

5

Germany didn’t lose the war because of some random “Pickett’s Charge” somewhere; they lost because they were outmanned on the eastern front by Russia and outproduced (in terms of weapons and planes) by America. Something pretty cataclysmic would have had to happen to both Russia and America (and, miraculously, not Germany) for the outcome to have changed.

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Hypothetically speaking, I don’t think a cold war would have had a chance to set in. It would have remained hot. The deployment of the Peacemaker would have seen to that. Assuming that Great Britain would have scuttled her fleet before surrender, Germany would have have still had its hands full with the Canadian and US Navy.

I think the war would have just dragged on a lot longer.

7

Well, assuming that Hitler moved into Moscow before the winter set in, and he also invaded England, Germany might have been able to hold the fort. Also having Hitler assassinated would have helped too.

As for what would have happened next, I vote for the cold war. Both America and Germany would have the bomb in the '40s. After that, it would be who had the greater megalomaniacs.

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In order to answer this question, you need to say what event changed that allowed the Germans to win. As Krokodil stated, it was not a random fluke that the Germans were defeated.

Were the Russian winters of 41 and 42 the mildest on record instead of fairly harsh? Did Japan not attack Pearl Harbor and the US stayed out of Europe until much later? Did the Nazis develope the bomb in 43?

Pick one and I can come up with a good scenario for you.

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I have just finished reading Letter to My Descendants by Niels Skov which I mentioned in another thread to be an authentic autobiographical account of World War Two from the perspective of one of the Danish saboteurs in the civilian resistance. Based on the research of the author/saboteur (and the man is a college professor now) it characterizes the Nazi regime as less than an iron-clad dictatorship led unquestionably by Hitler. Instead, he writes that it was more a vicious pack of competing factions, each struggling with the other for ultimate power. Even if the Nazis had managed to take over Europe (and even the US and USSR) the internal divisions would have torn it apart into bloodthirsty infighting before too much longer. Even at the end of the war, Hitler’s own staff was trying to kill him; he was countermanding good strategy by his generals which they knew was foolhardy; members of Hitler’s staff were sending feelers of peace to the Allies. Regional Nazi party leaders were held to their loyalty by systematic bribery, not through ideology, at least according to this book.

Further, the book alleges that Nazi structure was built for a short-term sacrifice in education to emphasize physical fitness and power; from this, I imagine Hitler’s regime would have likely stagnated or stalled without fresh ideas and educated people dedicated to other things than explosive, brutal military growth.

It’s hard to imagine the Nazi structure, as it was, could have gotten very large without splintering into backbiting and territoriality among its various factions. OP, do you have a specific means by which Germany fought and won this war, so I know what you’re suggesting had changed? In my opinion, it would take much more than bigger guns, deeper pockets, and prosperous mines.

FISH

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OK. Last night I didn’t think that the circumstances of a German victory would really matter much, but now I see I was mistaken.

The way I had imagined Germany would win is as follows: They develop the Bomb in late '43 or early '44 and use it over Moscow. Stalin dies, which creates an enormous power vacuum. The ensuing chaos forces what is left of the Soviet Union to sign a treaty with Germany. Germany can then concentrate on Britain and the U.S. They threaten to use a bomb over London unless the United States pulls out of Italy and North Africa, all the while firing rockets at London as fast as they can make them. This causes INTENSE anxiety in Britain, since no one has a clue if the next one is going to be Atomic or not. Churchill, bowing to public opinion, surrenders in late '44, and Germany can then dictate terms to the U.S. as they have no real bases in or near Europe anymore. I hope that makes sense.

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We’d still have Iceland. And, although the Republic of Ireland was neutral, if we really needed Irish bases, we’d take them. But if we offer to “liberate and reunify” Northern Ireland from the German-controlled British, we might not even have to invade Ireland.

So, we could “leapfrog” from Canada, to Greenland, to Iceland, to Ireland, and over to invading Britain or Scotland.

Since Germany has demonstrated the practicality of nuclear weapons, I imagine that the Manhattan Project would be given even more resources than it had in the “normal” timeline. Possibly aided by whatever information about the Nazi A-Bomb that we could glean from spies.

If the U.S. still manages to defeat Japan in '45, we’d have access to Unit-731’s biological weapons data. We might choose to use biological and chemical weapons against Germany and occupied Europe. With much of Europe’s population killed, there would surely be enough of a “negative effect” on the Reich’s industrial capability to keep them from developing means of delivering nuclear weapons to America. (Better them than us, after all) Even without Japan’s bio-weapons data, we could probably hit the European population centers pretty hard with chemical weapons.

England, in any case, is going to be toast. Burned, poisoned toast.

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OK, now to come up with a logical answer, we have to have a logical situation.

Late 43 or early 44 the Germans are far from certain to be able to get a nuke into Moscow. Would have had to be a one way suicide mission due to bomber range and position of the front lines. They would not have had enough refined uranium to make nukes in large quantities, so an iffy mission like this would have been unlikely. What if the plane gets shot down before it gets to Moscow? German air superiority had greatly diminished by this time in the war in the east.

And early war nukes would not have had as dramatic an effect on Moscow as they did in Hiroshima. Moscow had many more solid stone and concrete buildings, and Moscow was much larger. Even if you got a nuke to Moscow, you would not necessarilly kill Stalin. But if you did take the gamble, got a nuke to Moscow, and killed Stalin, Hitler would not have taken a Russian surrender. Heck, he now had a super weapon!

Confident that he could keep the western powers bottled up in Italy, convinced that the Atlantic Wall was invincible, he would have used his nukes to continue the fight into Russia for complete conquest. But Russia by now had a lot of her factories behind the Urals, so they would be far from out even if they had a leadership vacuum.

But it would likely have allowed Hitler time to conquer the Russian Oil fields, may have swayed Turkey into siding with the Nazis as the likely winner, and opened up the path to Egypt.

English surrender in the face of Nuclear Nazis would be FAR from certain. After all, we did more damage to Dresden with firebombs than we did to Hiroshima and Germany didn’t immediately surrender. Nukes only forced Japan to surrender because they had essentially already lost the war at that point.

I think that if the Germans had gotten nukes in 43/44, the deciding factor would have been how much Uranium they had. If they could have afforded to use the nukes tactically, they could have defeated Russia and forced an English truce.

Germany would likely have been able to convince war weary Fascist Spain to join them, and Gibraltar would have fallen.

Italy was already surrendered, so I think that if Britain gave a truce, Germany would have let England keep Egypt. Too tired to extrapolate into 1950 or beyond.

Buuuut… I do not think that Germany had access to enough uranium to use nukes tactically, and I do not think that strategic terror would have forced out Russia or the UK. Russia lost 26 million people. A couple hundred thousand more wouldn’t have broken their spirit.

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You should watch Fatherland, starring the timeless Rutger Hauer as an SS officer. I didn’t get to watch all of it but I do remember that Germany “won” WWII because the US decided to stay out of the war. IIRC, the movie starts out with an impending meeting between JFK and Hitler on an Nazi anniversary of some sort.

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Ahh…a little nit here, though perhaps the movie is different from the book, I’ve only seen bits and pieces of movie. But the U.S. President in Fatherland the book is Joseph Kennedy, Jr., John’s oldest brother. He was a bomber pilot in the European Theater in WWII and was killed when a bomb exploded prematurely on his plane. Perhaps the movie left out this twist in history to make it simpler for the audience.

There’s lots of What If… fiction about Germany winning the war, Fatherland is certainly one of the most popular and well known.

15

Nitpick: there was no Republic of Ireland at the time.

Churchill offered to reunify the country, too. De Valera still wouldn’t violate Irish neutrality.

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The real question is who would have succeeded Hitler, that has everything to do with it. Hitler was in ill health, and I doubt that he would have lived or stayed in power much longer after 1945.

I doubt that Isreal would have been formed, so America would not be so involved in the middle-east or with terrorism as we are today.

We would not have gone to war in Vietnam, Korea, or had any problems with red China or the Soviet Union, nor would the United States have played the role of worlds policeman - overall, America would have ended up being much more peaceful with the rest of the world than what actually happened.

The germans would have depended on having good peaceful trade relations with the United States but we would never have let the Germans take over Chrysler Corporation.

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Mea culpa, thanks for the nitpick, ruadh.

But still, the point stands…if the United States had really needed to use Ireland as a base, we’d have taken it. The cost might have been heavy—on both sides—but if the alternative was a nuclear-armed Nazi empire creeping across the Atlantic…

18

If Germany had won, then Klink would have a much more prominent place in the history books.

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My favourite take on this subject, (apart from The Man In The High Castle, which has no equal, but is also about so much more,) is Stephen Fry’s wonderful Making History, in which some well-intentioned folks use a very limited time-travel technology to ensure that Hitler is never born.

What they fail to consider is that the Nazi party didn’t just spring up ex nihilo with Hitler at its head – it was a product of the time and place. Without Adolph, an altogether more competent Führer leads the party to victory. There’s some very nice speculative work describing student life in Nazi-controlled America in the 1990’s.

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Well, maybe not Chrysler.