# Hitler's Alternate Universe
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [September 11, 2013, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544 "2013-09-11T01:51:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@jsutter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jsutter)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/1 "2013-09-11T01:51:37Z")
Hitler was a genius. Politically, economically and militarily, no one has touched him since Caesar.
If Caesar had had Hitler’s technology, we’d be bowing toward Rome today. Had Caesar had but one Ak-47 and a box of clips, the sun would have never set on Rome. Doubt it? Watch this.
[![]( " - YouTube") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuYkcZZfwhg)
So why Reich so lame, Rome so game?
Caesar was a colonizer. As long as outliers were paying their taxes and defending Rome’s borders, who gave two shits what color they were or what gods they worshipped? Not Caesar.
But Hitler was a racist and his racism brought him down. Instead of colonizing, he sought to own. Instead of harnessing Russian agricultural/industrial might to his purpose, he sought to destroy it. In the end, it destroyed him.
Hitler would have won the war had he eased up on the Ubermench thing a bit and played his anti-communist card to Russian peasant partisans. Feed them and lo-tech arm them now and immediately own the Ukraine while the millions of Stalin’s Disgruntled assassinate their political commissars and welcome you into Moscow. Germany with their loyal Russian Peoples and their Pacific Brothers lock down Europe and Asia and declare Hawaii and Alaska jointly held missile bases. Australia gladly enters the Reich and Canada and the US have some serious thinking to do.
But how could Hitler have come to power without his racism? Without his anti-semitism, how could he have raised the armies of thugs which beat his way into office?
Hitler and the German people did have an honest grievance with the onerous terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Without his racism, Hitler could easily have united the country behind him on the promise of the return to national power and the reclaiming of territories taken at Versailles. And if instead of destroying Jewish wealth he had taxed it, he would have spared himself the huge expense of the final solution and retained a vital middle-class.
What do you think?
Aloha
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/2 "2013-09-11T02:26:33Z")
Hitler was, at best, a second-rater. He really didn’t accomplish all that much given what he had to work with. A more competent dictator would have done more.
The terms of Versailles weren’t really all that bad. It’s just the Germans whined a lot. They were less harsh than what the Germans had imposed in 1870 against France or 1918 against Russia - or what they planned on imposing against Britain and France if they had won the war. It was also less than what was imposed upon Germany after WWII.
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### Author:  [@jsutter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jsutter)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/3 "2013-09-11T02:33:28Z")
The OP, to summarize, proposes that **if Hitler had not been a racist** , the world would be a different place.
Aloha
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### Author:  [@chacoguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chacoguy)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/4 "2013-09-11T02:39:33Z")
> [@jsutter](#):
>
> The OP, to summarize, proposes that **if Hitler had not been a racist** , the world would be a different place.
>
> Aloha
No.
Aloha.
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### Author:  [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/5 "2013-09-11T02:41:00Z")
> [@jsutter](#):
>
> The OP, to summarize, proposes that **if Hitler had not been a racist** , the world would be a different place.
>
> Aloha
Sure, but he was also a lousy military strategist, overrode his staff when they were right, and had paranoid distrust of those around him. If he wasn’t racist he still would have failed as a conqueror.
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### Author:  [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/6 "2013-09-11T02:45:24Z")
> [@jsutter](#):
>
> Hitler would have won the war had he eased up on the Ubermench thing a bit and played his anti-communist card to Russian peasant partisans. Feed them and lo-tech arm them now and immediately own the Ukraine while the millions of Stalin’s Disgruntled assassinate their political commissars and welcome you into Moscow. Germany with their loyal Russian Peoples and their Pacific Brothers lock down Europe and Asia and declare Hawaii and Alaska jointly held missile bases. Australia gladly enters the Reich and Canada and the US have some serious thinking to do.
Here’s the thing. I disagree with everything in that paragraph.
For one thing, after you arm the Ukranians so they’ll do your dirty work and get rid of the Russians, what’s to stop them from turning to the other direction and telling you “We don’t want YOU here, either.”
For another thing, why do you think the Russians would welcome the Germans under any circumstances, instead of, let’s say, re-establish a republic?
Third, there’s no indication that Hitler and his “Pacific Brothers” would have ever cooperated on anything if they were remotely close to each other geographically.
Finally, what makes you think Australia would have “gladly” entered the Reich, or, for that matter, that some giant Nazi-Japanese hegemony would have been able to launch a missile from either Alaska or Hawaii that would have gotten anywhere near the continental U.S.?
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### Author:  [@KRC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KRC)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 10:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/7 "2013-09-11T10:03:42Z")
He whirled around the corner of San Mateo and Central in Albuquerque in a battered pickup in 1986. I saw him and he saw me. Another woman saw us seeing each other and started laughing.
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### Author:  [@Ken001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ken001)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 11:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/8 "2013-09-11T11:55:59Z")
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis believed in the theory of eugenics - racial purity. This was a concept many learned people throughout Europe and the USA debated in the 1930s. The universities were hot with the arguments.
The point is that racism as we understand it in the modern context, was seriously believed in the 1930s to be a rational view of the development of man. Thus the Nazi worldview was not a shock or even a surprise for other governments. Stalin held similar views about true Russians.
As for Adolf Hitler - he was a political genius but little else. He had no concept of economics or military tactics. Hitler became Fuhrer of a dynamic fascist state and the only way that state could exist was by invasion of outlands to feed the German Republic’s need for resources - food, iron, coal, and oil.
The thing about dynamic states is they cannot stand still.
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### Author:  [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/9 "2013-09-11T12:14:48Z")
You take the racism and violence from the Nazis and you’re left with absolutely nothing. Racism and violence was all they had to offer.
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### Author:  [@lost4life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lost4life)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/10 "2013-09-11T13:05:04Z")
> [@Alessan](#):
>
> You take the racism and violence from the Nazis and you’re left with absolutely nothing. Racism and violence was all they had to offer.
And those awesome Hugo Boss uniforms!
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### Author:  [@El\_Kabong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Kabong)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/11 "2013-09-11T14:22:17Z")
The OP’s garbling of Nazi motives and history makes my head hurt, but I only have time to highlight a couple of items:
> [@](#):
>
> If Caesar had had Hitler’s technology, we’d be bowing toward Rome today.
I’m unclear what the point of this statement is. Yes, perhaps if Rome had technology more than 1500 years in advance of their rivals, the empire might still exist today. WWII German technology was nowhere near 1500 years in advance of that of the the allies, however, and in many cases was poorly utilized, _by Hitler’s direct orders_.
> [@](#):
>
> Had Caesar had but one Ak-47 and a box of clips, the sun would have never set on Rome. Doubt it? Watch this.
The AK-47 actually was a Soviet weapon, and didn’t go into service until 1948, so what does any of this have to do with Nazi Germany?
If we’re talking alternative Hitler speculation, I find Norman Spinrad’s [_The Iron Dream_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream) rather more compelling. Just sayin’.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/12 "2013-09-11T14:50:46Z")
> [@jsutter](#):
>
> Hitler was a genius. Politically, economically and militarily, no one has touched him since Caesar.
To use official psychologist speak, Hitler was batshit fucking crazy. He did have political skills and was able to tap into people’s resentments and fears and manipulate them, but you can’t really separate his insanity and racial hatred and military failings from other elements of his personality and behavior. They occurred together for a reason. Hatred of Jews and non-Aryans was an important part of his appeal, so he wouldn’t have gotten where he did without it. If he’d been a rational guy who was able to think about the best interests of Germany without letting bigotry enter the discussion, he wouldn’t have been Hitler. And he wouldn’t have done the things he did if he hadn’t been a lunatic who wanted to reshape the world and who decided he wanted everything destroyed when it became obvious he was going to lose. There’s a reason a lot of these alternate history scenarios involve Hitler getting killed in the early 1940s.
And while I am no expert on military matters or the economics of the period, I’ve never seen any evidence of his genius at either. I know he was a terrible military tactician, and as you say yourself, he hamstrung himself by devoting to many resources to exterminating people. It seems to me he won a lot in the early stages by just building a huge modern military and surprising people by using it. And the German economy was in such bad shape when he took over that pretty much anything would have been a big improvement.
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### Author:  [@jsutter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jsutter)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/13 "2013-09-11T15:14:10Z")
> [@El\_Kabong](#):
>
> The OP’s garbling of Nazi motives and history makes my head hurt, but I only have time to highlight a couple of items:
My premise is, IF Hitler had NOT been a racist, he might well have spared himself much of what he hemorrhaged on the Eastern Front AND gained much in return.
> [@](#):
>
> …
> WWII German technology was nowhere near 1500 years in advance of that of the the allies, however, and in many cases was poorly utilized, _by Hitler’s direct orders_.
True, because his thinking was muddled by his racism.
> [@](#):
>
> The AK-47 actually was a Soviet weapon, and didn’t go into service until 1948, so what does any of this have to do with Nazi Germany?
A poor example on my part, give the seeming lack of poetic license allowed in your mind. Germany, by virtue of it’s years of “surreptitious” rearmament funded in part by US banking interests, enjoyed a huge military advantage for the first two years of the war. Hitler pissed much of that away in Russia killing potential allies and gave everyone else time to get their act together. How would the battle of Britain gone if Hitler had freed half of what he expended on Russia to use on England instead.
> [@](#):
>
> If we’re talking alternative Hitler speculation, I find Norman Spinrad’s [_The Iron Dream_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream) rather more compelling. Just sayin’.
Looks interesting.
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### Author:  [@twickster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/twickster)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/14 "2013-09-11T15:26:13Z")
Moved MPSIMS --\> GD.
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### Author:  [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/15 "2013-09-11T15:31:08Z")
> [@jsutter](#):
>
> True, because his thinking was muddled by his racism.
Explain how his boneheaded military decisions were muddled by racism? He was just bad at it.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/16 "2013-09-11T15:45:15Z")
> [@Telemark](#):
>
> Explain how his boneheaded military decisions were muddled by racism?
Perhaps it led him to underestimate the enemy.
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/17 "2013-09-11T15:46:49Z")
Hitler’s problem was he lacked patience. He wanted to win wars by fighting a battle rather than a campaign. That worked in the early months of the war when he was fighting countries than collapsed quickly. But when he had to fight a country that didn’t fall after the first few defeats, he lacked the patience for a longer war. When he couldn’t defeat Britain right away, he got bored and declared war on the Soviet Union. When he couldn’t defeat the Soviet Union right away, he declared war on the United States. In every case, he never made plans past the first ninety days of the war.
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### Author:  [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/18 "2013-09-11T15:48:06Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#):
>
> Hitler’s problem was he lacked patience. He wanted to win wars by fighting a battle rather than a campaign. That worked in the early months of the war when he was fighting countries than collapsed quickly. But when he had to fight a country that didn’t fall after the first few defeats, he lacked the patience for a longer war. When he couldn’t defeat Britain right away, he got bored and declared war on the Soviet Union. When he couldn’t defeat the Soviet Union right away, he declared war on the United States. In every case, he never made plans past the first ninety days of the war.
He “got bored”? Really?
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/19 "2013-09-11T15:51:41Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#):
>
> Hitler’s problem was he lacked patience.
He thought Germany needed to win quickly because he didn’t have long to live, which, again, was something he believed because he was nuts.
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### Author:  [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2013, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hitlers-alternate-universe/668544/20 "2013-09-11T16:00:20Z")
“Hitler was a genius” kinda reminds me of that _Star Trek_ episode “Patterns of Force” in which a historian (!) described Nazi Germany as “the most efficient state in history”. Was this a common belief in the 1960s? It kinda strikes me as mixed up with stereotypes of German efficiency rather than actual historical evidence.
Anyhoo, Hitler’s racism let him build the Nazi party in the first place. Had he “backslid” on persecuting Jews, I suspect he’d’ve been assassinated early on. There had been numerous attempts prior to July 20, 1944, and if Hitler was seen as “soft on Jews”, there would have been more from within the party itself. Even if he stayed lucky, he would have been forced into even deeper isolation and paranoia, and I don’t expect that would have benefited his leadership or Germany.
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