It is November 9th, 1938. The Fuhrer is in Munich to commemorate the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Earlier in the year, Maurice Bavaud, a Swiss Roman Catholic, had purchased a semi-auto pistol intending to shoot Adolf Hitler. As it turned out, Bavaud hesitated as a result of spectators lifting their hands in the Nazi salute.
But what if…he didn’t hesitate. Bavaud fires, inflicting multiple gunshot wounds on the Fuhrer. He is rushed to the *krankenhaus *but is pronounced dead on arrival. The Reich mourns the loss of its Fuhrer and the struggle to fill the power vacuum begins.
In the years preceding, Hitler had transformed German life, made the failed Weimar Republic a thing of the past. Reunited his heimat Austria with the rest of the Reich. He had repudiated the hated Treaty of Versailles. However, he still leaves a dark shadow over the Reich - although the Holocaust had not begun in earnest, his repugnant ideology means there is little compassion for perceived enemies of the German people. The Night of Broken Glass no doubt becomes even more hellish for Germany’s Jewish community on the night following Hitler’s death.
But if he had died in late 1938, how would history judge him? Who do you think would have come out on top of the power struggle - and does the war still happen? Don’t worry about Godwin…
Also happening before 1938 was the night of the long knives.
Military dictatorships for a while.
By 1938 the path for war was already set. The new Führer for WWII would likely had been Goering. I think it is likely that most of what took place early in the war would had taken place, like the defeat of France, but I think that plans like Barbarossa would had less of a chance of going forward.
Depends on the historian, and, in the the worse case kind of scenario, his or her government.
Probably. See:
I don’t personally buy the great man theory of history, where wars are primarily caused by the will of a leader. But it’s not the kind of thing you can ever prove.
Even though I think (unlike A. J. P. Taylor) that World War II was inevitable, Hitler did influence it’s character. It’s easy to imagine an alternate, perhaps more cynical, Hitler, who used antisemitism as a vote-getting tactic but downplayed it once fully in power.
I’ve never thought about this aspect of “what if you could shoot Hitler?”. It mainly would depend on how successful his successor is.
As is stated above, as long as Nazi foreign policy doesn’t change in a huge way, WWII is coming. If his successor is Goering, I don’t see it turning out much better for them. Most of the upper level Nazis were about as foolish as Hitler himself. Maybe they wouldn’t have over reached, held off the Soviets and the U.K., sued for peace, and eventually settled into one side or the other as the cold war got going. If they were able to do that, he might be seen a bit less evil outside of Greater Germany, and probably quite popular within. If they still overextend and get crushed, he’ll end up slightly less evil due to not personally overseeing the Holocaust.
The attempt at ethnic cleansing in the east and the resettlement of Germans still happens as long as the Nazis are in power. That was their “scientific” analysis of history and plan for the future.
The war in the east was to secure a vast and agriculturally rich territory in Poland and the Ukraine to depopulate and subsequently repopulate. It was Manifest Destiny, only left-to-right.
The war in the west was to get the western powers off their back long enough to get the real job done.
He’d also started doing a lot of crazy things to the economy that were not sustainable, and that Germany would have to pay the price for. Nationalization of Jewish business that were then going downhill, and increasing pressure on the middle class with socialistic promises that were never going to be realized. A
Additionally, he was the government in many ways. There was no independent bureaucracy in many ways, and he loved pitting one minister against another. That was all going to fall apart with him gone.