Most of the histories I’ve read (most influentially, Shirer) have named many key people involved in the organization and the rise to power of the Nazis. Some of the early ones (e.g. Roehm) were murdered before Hitler became chancellor. But Himmler, Goebbels and others were influential from start to finish. It was like there was a small group that was the power behind the throne.
Was the time ripe, given the Versailles Treaty, the inflation, the unemployement, and the anti-Semitism, such that this group of supporters could have taken the Nazi party to power with someone other than Adolf Hitler as their figurehead ? The person would still have to be a charismatic leader able to capture the attention of the populace.
One reason I wonder about this is this: After Hilter assumed the ultimate power no one could safely disagree with him. A lot of his singular decisions from the invasion of Russia forward were just downright stupid and led to “the fall”. Had the party chose someone that they could better control as their leader, after the early successes of the military, they may have been able to keep what they had stolen and dominated Europe for decades to come.
An incredible wave of authoritarianism swept Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s. We all know of the fascist takeovers in Germany, Italy, and Spain, but in addition Austria, Portugal, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia all fell to dictatorial rule roughly between 1925 and 1935. (Note that I’m not talking about the Nazi and Soviet invasions; these countries all had home-grown dictatorships.)
I’ve never read a good study of this phenomenon (most Western historians ignore the chaos in eastern Europe). Obviously the dislocation of WWI and the Great Depression played a part. But based on the pattern alone, I’d have to say yes, it didn’t take a Hitler for a country to go fascist in that era.
As for whether Germany would have done “better” under some other fascist . . . I don’t know, I guess it’s hard to see how they could have done worse.
Yes, I think. I believe that Hitler was the right wrong man at the right wrong time. The only really special thing about him was his charisma, and there are other men with charisma. Yes, he was hateful and ruthless, but such characteristics are fairly common, unfortunately. If times had been different, he’d have been a footnote; if he didn’t exist some other would be Great Leader would have come along, and the political environment was perfect for an evil “Great Leader”.
But compare Mussolini and Franco to Hitler. Fascism was very very likely in Germany…but without Hitler they might have got a semi-sane fascist leader. Franco was quite content to repress his own people and hold on to power in Spain without invading anyone, he worked extremely hard to keep Spain out of WWII. And while Mussolini had some imperial ambitions he never dared to attack powerful countries…invasions of Ethiopia and Albania were about his speed.
A German dictator other than Hitler might have been bad, but might not have plunged Europe into WWII, or exterminated the Jews, or held the nutty ideas Hitler did.
My premise was more along the lines of: The same cast of characters with someone else as the figurehead.
As a hypothetical, say that while Hilter was in jail, the party replaced him with Goering. Goering was extremely popular and a war hero. He would have been very electable. Goebells could manipulate the media. Ribbentrop could still make the pacts with the industrial leaders.
I could see Germany still taking Austria and Czechoslavkia. Perhaps Poland as well. And they probably would have gotten away with it. If they had stopped at that point, no WWII.
Although, at that point, Germany and Russia would be squared off against each other with no buffer between them. Stalin would likely spark a war if Germany didn’t.
Hitler was the only one who thought (perhaps hoped is a better word) France would collapse like they did, so I can’t see Germany advancing to west under any other leader.
There were plenty of fascists who rose to power without scapegoating Jews or launching wars of conquest. Might a different fascist leader have held onto power in Germany a la Franco in Spain (who held on until his death in the 1970s)?
There’s another interesting aspect to this question. Before Hitler showed his colors, there were many admirers of fascism around the world. If Hitler had not discredited the idea so badly, would there still be a (non-fringe) faction of people advocating for fascism today?
Just a slight nitpick, Hitler was elected chancellor on Jan 30th 1933, Roehm was killed on June 29th 1934…after AH came to power.
Gregor Strasser who Hitler was worried about could have assumed the power if he had not also been executed, June 30th 1934.
Strasser was earlier offered the position of depty chancellor in 1932 but Hitler and his cohorts objected to this stating the it was a ploy to split the Nazi party.
Thanks Chowder. Now, assume that in 1932, that one of the cohorts looked into the future and saw Hitler’s meglomania and decided that Strasser was a better choice. You still have all of the key players in place for the German expansion and atrocities that will happen over the next 10 years.
At what point do you see this hypothetical situation and what really happened starting to diverge?
I think the Jewish extermination attempts would still happen because I don’t think Hitler thought that up by himself. If, as I supposed earlier, Germany stopped short of invading France and Russia (for which Hitler was almost solely responsible), the extermination may have continued unchecked. England and France would have negotiated a settlement that kept them safe and the US would not have been drawn in.
True, the idea of blaming Jews for all the world’s problems was not original to Hitler. But it was a major – not minor – component of his political philosophy. Read Mein Kampf if you doubt that; there is an entire chapter, Nation and Race, which provides his justification for total extermination.
I think that if Hitler had not existed, he might have been invented to fill a gap. But the filler might not have had such strong antisemitic beliefs or been as warmongering. We might have been confronted with more of a Castro; a country which frantically festers but doesn’t do much else, like start a world war.
Stalin wanted what he could get, but was relatively realistic about not overreaching himself. Also, the Red Army needed rebuilding from the officer purges of the later 1930s.
Based on that, I think he might have tried to backstab Germany if Germany hadn’t beaten him to it, but probably wouldn’t have tried to go further (at least not for a few years).
A lot of monarchies fell apart in the half-century or so leading up to that period, and there were a good number of philosophies competing to succeed them. Communism, Anarchism, Fasciscm, etc. in all their different flavours. Fascism was flavour of the month between the wars, much as communism/socialism was after it. The ‘one strong leader’ concept proved very popular, and if you look at places like latin america it lasted a long long time.
An interesting point is that if you look at characters like Strasser and Rohm, they were much more socialist than Hitler (hence the jibe about SA being beefsteaks - brown on the outside and red on the inside). So if either of them had remained after the hypothetical ‘Hitler chokes to death on a viennese pastry’ incident, they would probably have had dramatically different priorities, and probably had much more confrontational relationships with the industrialists and the Junker families that dominated the armed forces high command. More class war and less external war, as it were.
But part of the reason that the Nazis got to power in the first place was because Hitler came to an agreement with the industrialists, the armed forces, and the right-wing parties that they’d back him in exchange for his suppression of the Strasser-Roehm wing of the party. Take that out of the equation, and the conservatives never go into a coalition with the party, and the party never comes to power.
Well, the Popular Front got into Govenment in France, the Labour Party got into office in the UK, and the Bolsheviks pretty famously worked their way into power in Russia, despite opposition from the armed forces and the industrialists. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine the National Socialist German Workers Party getting into power in alliance with splinter elements of the USPD or other non-communist left-wing parties. In fact I would have thought a hyper-nationalistic but socialist party would have more popular appeal than a hyper-nationalistic conservative one.
Yes it is. First, the USPD ceased to exist as a party in 1924, with the left-wing joining the Communists, and the right-wing joining the SPD. There’s no way the NSDAP would ally with the KPD, so the only alternative under your idea is for an alliance with the SPD. But the SPD hated the Nazis, and the Nazis considered the SPD internationalist, Jewish-controlled, and responsible for the treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic. There’s no way the Nazis would ally with any of the pro-republican/pro-democracy parties.
Sorry, I don’t see any good coalition partners for the Nazis on the left.
So, if Hitler was solely responsible for this coalition, then my question is pretty well answered. Without the backing of the military and the industrialists, even if the party had still made it to power, the re-arming could not have occurred. I knew that Hitler got buy-in from the industrialists by agreeing to oppress the communists and supress the unions, but I did not realize he sold out his own party to do it. What a bastard. A whole career of making alliances and then screwing them over for the next bigger deal.
I would also think that we have to remember how Hitler became popular far before any of his “beliefs” took place. He became popular with the citizens of Germany which also helped propel him into power. Mein Kampf was his personal piece of propaganda which helped alot and he was a powerful speaker to boot. This with the many alliances he made and the circumstances that existed in Germany during that period gave him an easy walk into power. The German people wanted change and boy did they get it.
Stephen Fry’s novel Making History gives one answer to the question: “What if Hitler had never been born?”
The answer to the OP is “Yes.” In fact, a Nazi Leader without Hitler’s flaws might have produced a worse reality.
Those who regard literature dealing with alternate reality or time travel (of a sort) seriously might find some flaws in the plot. But Stephen Fry–unsurprisingly–supplies an abundance of wit.
