Interesting scenario, but i think no.
Hitler living at the whim of a world he was not in control of was not in his mindset.
And he was just not the kind of person to be able to stay under the radar.
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2 nephews and a niece did have children.
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One of the nephews (William Patrick Stuart-Houston) had 4 children none of which happened to have children, but there was no pact.
Anyway. One major driving force in Hitler’s life was the Stab-In-The-Back nonsense. That somehow Germany could have won WWI if those weaselly politicians (supported by Jews) hadn’t caved in. Hitler under absolutely no circumstances was going to allow this war to end this way. So it was going down with the ship all the way.
He saw the treatment of Mussolini and didn’t want that. He also knew any attempt to merely delay things was pointless. It would increase his chances of being caught by the Soviets so the bunker in Berlin was going to be the finale. No other option was on his table.
The main problem with putting a nuke on a V-2 was the sheer size of early nuclear warheads. There’s no way you could put a nuclear warhead on an average V-2, you would have to greatly enlarge it and thus that would make U-Boat usage also impossible. It wasn’t until the mid 1950’s that we actually saw the first practical mating of submarines and nuclear missile launchers, there’s no way the Germans would have solved that problem by 1945.
Thanks for all the replies everyone! This is fantastic information. I will never get over how humans could be so under the influence of a regime that committed so much atrocity. I guess my interest in the subject is trying to understand why people fall for this crap, but I guess I’ll never figure it out, nobody will.
Back to the Tank Versus Ship stuff!
Hitler also issued the Nero decree shortly before he did himself in. He wanted Germany to be destroyed at his whim rather than have anything left of value in the country for the Allies to take over. Fortunately Albert Speer (who seems to be the only high-level Nazi with any hint of human decency) prevented the decree from being carried out.
It’s well known how it happened, there have been hundreds of books written about it. If you’d like a well-written, thorough analysis of it from beginning to end (with a few missteps when looked at in hindsight), I recommend William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Excellent! Thanks Airman Doors, USAF I sure will look into it. It’d be nice to have a concise book on it since I only ever caught bits and pieces on the Military/History channel over time.
It boiled down to a lack of scientific knowledge, manpower, and resources, not sabotage. (Not to say there wasn’t any - for example, the destruction of an important heavy water manufacturing facility.)
To get an idea of the scale of resources and work it took for the American program to succeed, I suggest the classic book ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ by Richard Rhodes. As just one small example, at one point ALL the silver in the U.S. Treasury was being used for electromagnets as part of the manufacturing process in Oak Ridge.
It’s worth noting by the end, escape from Berlin for anyone even remotely important was pretty much impossible; most of the people who “disappeared” in that final escape attempt were almost certainly killed in fighting, random explosions, run over by tanks, or otherwise turned into ex-parrots.
Sure, that doesn’t make for great conspiracy theories or movies, but that’s the reality.
Interestingly, from what I gather by the time the dust settled in what was left of the Third Reich, the allies really weren’t especially interested in anyone who wasn’t a high-ranking Nazi, a member of the SS, or a Concentration camp guard. So while your average “I’m a Nazi because I have to be otherwise I don’t get to have a job” German wasn’t likely to end up the subject of an extensive search, you can bet anyone who’d ever been in the same room as Hitler would be.
The “I’m not a Nazi, honest!” chit was known as a “Persil” (after a famous brand of laundry detergent) and basically meant the bearer could be trusted to work in an official role such as a postman, police officer, or basically any other job that needed to be nominally 100% Nazi-free.
And has had been noted, let’s pretend for a moment that Hitler did get out - where was he going to go? Even Switzerland would probably turn him over (or the Allies would arrange for him to have an unfortunate accident there), Franco really didn’t want the entire British & US turning their attention on him in Spain, and making it to South America starts involving the increasingly improbable use of aircraft, and even that’s assuming a route via the Balkans, North and West Africa and the Cape Verde Islands before heading to Brazil.)
By the time the Gotterdammerung kicked off, there was zero chance of Hitler being able to shave off his moustache, change his name to Mr Reltih and settle down somewhere running a Bed & Breakfast in the countryside with Eva until things blew over.
Hitler was determined to win or die. He was offered the chance to escape from Berlin before the Soviets arrived in force - Albert Speer and test pilot Hanna Reitsch both urged him to get out - but he indignantly turned them down.
I’d love to see a site for that.
Delivery was the least of their worries. They were never close to the development of the atomic bomb. If they did, it’s hard for me to believe that they couldn’t have found a way to modify the HE-177 to carry it to Britain or the Soviet Union.
To the OP: As has been stated, Hitler was tired, ill and worn out. He’d lived like a kind, with the compete adoration of his world. Why do you think he wanted to climb into a U-boat and sail to South America only to be hunted down like a dog? He’d have no army to protect him, money would do him no good. Why would he want to live like that for another month or so? Some of the very few Nazis that did live in South America were able to do so because they weren’t very well known, and there wasn’t all that much incentive to hunt them down by the allies. They would have hunted Hitler to the ends of the earth.
A scene in Copenhagen airport - early May 1945.
Dane 1 - ‘Dont look, but that guy beside the Fanta machine, do you recognise him?’
Dane 2 - ‘He seems familiar somehow. Is he in movies? I haven’t seen much recently, what with Denmark’s occupation by German forces under a monomaniacal leader for four years preceded by a decade of destabilising Nazi politics in our neighbours, led by the same guy whose personal cult following put him at the forefront of the German state, and in whose name everything that’s happened since the early 1930s has taken place.’
Dane 1 - No, I can’t work out who it is either. Looks like someone whose face I’ve seen before. That moustache instantly makes me think of Charlie Chaplin and absolutely no one else in the entire world’.
Dane 2 - ‘I tell you who’d know. That absolute leader of the German people who’s plunged Europe into war since 1939, and presided over an unprecedented state-sanctioned genocide. He has the sort of oppressive state surveillance and terror system that would keep tabs on people. If anyone knew who that smallish man with the military uniform and the toothbrush moustache could be, it would be him.’
Dane 1 - ‘They’ve just called the Buenos Aires flight, and he’s getting on. This is going to bug me now through a succession of war crime trials and detailed reanalysis of how such a takeover of Europe can be avoided from ever happening again, let alone a succession of movies. Its coming up to summer in Argentina now isn’t it? Lucky bastard.’