If you’ve ever read Robert Harris’ excellent novel Fatherland (set in an alternate 1964 where Nazi Germany won WWII), then you’re probably inclined to agree that Harris has created a disturbingly believable setting for the novel.
But it does raise an interesting question, namely, how long would Nazism have survived without Hitler, assuming German victory in WWII and Hitler dying of natural causes sometime thereafter (say, the late '60s)? Would there still be a Nazi Government in Germany today, or would the whole thing have fallen over by the end of the 1970s?
It would have depended on who survived the power struggle after Hitler’s death: Himmler or Goering. Himmler was much, much more swept up with the Nazi mysticism and would have continued all the murderous, crackpot racist programs. Goering would have kept the Nazi bullshit as window-dressing and run a nasty police state/slave labor empire.
But it’s hard to say. Goering’s Germany would have tolerated more corruption, and the Nazi philosophy would have been compromised earlier (“I know they’re Jews, but they’re our Jews,and they’ll build us an atomic bomb before Stalin’s Jews builds his.” However, under Himmler, the unrealistic demands of a flawed theory might have collapsed the system even sooner.
In Harry Turtledove’s World War series, with an alien invasion interrupting World War II and putting the Allies and Axis uncomfortably on the same side, Hitler does die and the Third Reich continues on after him under, IIRC, Himmler. Turtledove makes it seem plausible, but you have to wonder if the regime would have survived without such a common enemy to give it a reason to exist.
Turtledove wrote an even more apt book, In the Presense of My Enemies, about a modern-day Nazi Europe. He had the Reich breaking up in the 1990’s like the Soviet Union did.
He had the Reich breaking up in the 2010s…the book takes place in 2010-2012. But he has it last about 70 years, the same amount of time the Soviet Union did.
It’s not a strictly comperable system because the Spanish brand of fascism was never as virulent or constructed as German and North European varieties, but Spain’s fascist trappings essentially died with Franco. I suspect the same will be true with Cuba and Castro. (Yeah, he’s Marxist/Leninist or whatever got him the most aid, but it’s a personality cult.) The Soviet Union probably survived so long because of internal fractionalization–there was always someone to step in and take a strong hand once a power vacuum began to form.
I doubt that a postwar Nazi Germany would have survived very long, though. Hitler seemed very mercurial even before the tide of the war turned against Germany, and he clearly had no clue how to run a sustainable economy. Nazi Germany’s rise was based upon expansion, exploitation, and displacement of problems onto ethnic groups that were already despites, particularly Jews, Poles, and the Roma. Once they were Solutionized, who would he turn on to excuse the failures of Germany and the Nazi regime?
An authoritarian political system can last a long long time. I mean, there are plenty of countries today that have authoritarian political systems. It’s pretty likely that Nazism as a popular political philosphy would be dead long before the regime established by the Nazis ended. Of course, the most likely successor state to the Nazi regime would be some other authoritarian regime, witness the former communist countries turning into generic non-ideological authoritarian crony states. Or this could happen without an explicit break in governments, witness the transformation of China, where a successor dictator quietly gets rid of embarassing ideology-driven policies while still maintaining political control.
And of course, a lot depends on the state of the world that allowed Nazi Germany to survive. Do they survive due to a negotiated peace? Do they conquer all of Europe? Are they able to maintain puppet governments in the conquered countries? 70 years later is Western Europe still under German domination, like Eastern Europe was under Soviet domination in real life? What about Eastern Europe? Did any of this territory have to given up in return for a peace treaty with whatever surviving allies there were? Does the Soviet Union survive, does communism still exist as a viable ideology? What’s the economy in Germany like?
Everyone has the idea that a surviving Nazi Germany would be an economic, scientific and cultural powerhouse, but authoritarian regimes tend to have crappy economies because things are set up to benefit the rulers rather than the people. Nazi Germany’s real-life performance during WWII was pretty unimpressive compared to their potential. And this is because you have one guy, and a small number of henchmen, whose whims HAVE to be followed or you get a bullet in the back of the head. So if the dictator wants a 50 foot tall gold-plated statue of himself, that’s what he gets, never mind that the soldiers on the front will have to do without ammunition resupply this month. Nazi Germany was living off its pre-Nazi economic development. A couple more decades of Nazi misrule and Germany’s economy would have cratered.
One big question is whether the Nazis would have continued their extermination programs until they had ethnically cleansed Europe of non-Germans. If the only surviving humans in Europe from the English Channel to the Ural mountains were ethnic Germans, that would pretty much preclude any return to the prewar status quo.
It’s worth remembering that the Nazis were only in power for twelve years. Historically, radicalism for radicalism’s sake rarely lasts longer than about thirty years; then people (or more importantly, the survivors of multiple purges) get sick of it all, tone down the rhetoric and become more pragmatic.
I can’t see Hitler remaining in control of Germany much past the end of the 1940s. He was gibberingly demented by 1945, and by 1950 he would probably be held in seclusion as a figurehead while someone else ran Germany. And eventually the “old guard” would probably be replaced by party apparatchiks.
I think by the 1960s outside influences, such as American culture, would start to corrupt the younger generation. For example, I wonder how long German women would have remained content to be hausfraus breeding more master-race babies?
There seems to be a presumption that the Nazis were economically incompetent, which is a new one to me. They got into power on the back of a massive depression and managed to arm and build the autobahns. That was impressive.
My understanding is that they got on pretty well with industrialists.
They also did not hate all Poles, Poland was a reconstruction of something that had been carved up by Russia, Austria and Germany, and was re-invented after WWI - there were a lot of ethnic Germans there - and a lot of people who were not sure who they were.
My sort of ex-m-i-l was interned, basically she was an interpreter in a work camp full of girls from the hills who did not even speak standard Polish. When the Russians were advancing the German CO wanted to ship her to Hamburg - as he correctly said the Russians were lethal - there was no way she was any form of Quisling.
I used to work for a Jewish-Polish guy who was in the siege of Warsaw. He said the Russians held off waiting for the Germans to finish them. The Germans offered surrender terms that said they would be treated as normal POWs - to his astonishment they kept their word - his telling me about it pretty much demonstrates it.
There are also records of non-German ethnics joining the Nazis in enthusiastic mass murder.
The SS were two distinct forces, the Waffen SS were the equivalent of crack regiments, to my understanding the major atrocities were committed by the Totenkopf who were ex policeman, customs officers etc.
When I read Harris’s ‘Fatherland’ I could understand the protagonist’s confusion as he uncovered hidden history. My view is that Hitler got into power on a wave of hysteria, but with successful expansion there was nothing to prevent economic prosperity, the Nazis were quite happy with a military-industrial complex.
There is a tendency to re-write history to portray a beaten enemy as an incompetent idiot
But that was because Juan Carlos essentially decided to make it so. If Franco’s successor had been interested in continuing Franco’s work, do you think the result would have been the same?
The nazi economy depended upon conquest. had war NOT broken out, Germany would have faced severe import problems. Invading neighboring countries and stealing their resources enabled the regimew to survive. That was the ultimate goal; invade and colonize Russia. The nazi war machine needed Rumanian oil and Russian wheat, iron ore. An extended period of peace would have meant bankruptcy
They did regard the slavic people as inferior.
My guess is that after the war they would have been second class citizens and useful as a semi-slave labour force. Which might have been good for the economy.
There were a lot of non-Germans involved in atrocities in Russia. Most were in the SHUMA units from the Baltic states, Ukraine and White Russia.
Two Waffen-ss units were extremely notorious; the Dirlewanger and Kaminsky ‘Divisions’. Other ss were reportedly disgusted with their conduct during the siege of Warsaw.
The main perpatrators besides the local SHUMA’s were armed police and SD units.
Totenkopf Division was recruited from administrative ss personell from the Totenkopf Verbände, it was a crack Waffen-ss division that performed extremely well on the battlefield.
It was not the only division to partake in several war crimes, Das Reich also stepped over the line on occasion, as did the LAH.
You mean the Baku oil fields - a target but they did not get them
I doubt the Ukraine produced that much wheat - they were pretty primitive.
More, I suspect, they were going after their old stamping grounds and trying to remove a threat. In WWI Germany imploded partly because of ‘communist’ mutinies - and they have always been worried about Russia.
Colonisation was definately a goal. All the rest of the world had already been taken by the other western nations, which did wonders for their economies, so they looked to the east for expansion. That’s the whole idea behind the term Lebensraum.
And incidentally the main reason why the slavic people were termed as an inferior race, in the first place.
So as to make it easier to sell to the public that their land could be taken. Analouge to how the otrher Western countries portrayed the native peoples they colonised.
Germany definately needed the Ukrainian wheat-and Russian oil, and coal, and iron ore… The whole purpose of the war was to acquire raw materials and slave labor-so that the germans could gear up to invade Russia. The plan was for the german army veterans to colonize russia-after the “inferiors” were enslaved and put to death… proof of this: the Germans were building roads in Poland and Russia, to connect their future cities. Hitler planned a "1000 year Reich’-and the absorption of Russia was a big part of it. He (Hitler0 thought the British would come to their sneses, and sahre the world with the Reich.
Yeah. Even in Franco’s waning years the grip on the country weakened, and Spain was economically dependant upon increasing foreign trade, tourism, and integration with the European economy that was allowed by liberalization. Personality cults just don’t generally survive well unless a successor has been groomed for the role and the populace is kept in a repressed, economically deprived state.
Germany (and the global economy) was already in recovery when the Nazis started coming to power. The Nazis won the appeal of non-Jewish Germans by placing the blame on Jews (who did, by dint of cultural impetus and education, have a disproportinate amount of wealth) and essentially inviting people to take what they wanted from their Jewish neighbors. Under the Nazi regime there were certainly some massive public works, but like the German rocket program, these were losing propositions from an economic standpoint.
Adolf Hitler was a very charismatic man who knew little about actually organizing and essentially nothing about economics or military strategy. Even before the late years of the war when he dispatched some of his best advisors for plotting against him (some of whom really were, and some just a victim of Hitler’s increasing paranoia), Hitler was very mercurial, and the upper ranks of the Nazi Party were replete with unbalanced people. One could say the same of any government, I suppose, but in democratic governments no one acquires sufficient power to give form to their worst impulses; the government of Nazi Germany, on the other hand, was the archetype of despotism, and its need to continually expand its domains and control or persecute native ethnic groups would have been its undoing.
Seriously? The Ukraine was a major grain source for the Soviet Union, and even while they were experiencing the famines of 1921-23 and 1932-3 they were a net exporter of wheat that sustained Mother Russia. I don’t know that Germany needed grain, though, as much as it required petroleum, metals, and defensible ports.
I think Nazism could have survived without Hitler, although of course it depends upon the circumstances of his death, what enemies Germany was facing at the time, etc. Hitler had a lot of ambitious men around him who would have been glad to become Fuhrer after him, and would have been eager to make use of the levers of power which Hitler left for them.
Harris’s Fatherland is quite good, but for a glimpse of Nazi Germany post-Hitler you might also want to check out Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (which posits that Martin Boormann succeeds him, and then a power struggle develops between Goebbels and Goering upon Boormann’s death in the early 1960s, IIRC).
What was “Nazism” though? Virulent anti-Jewish/Communist Fascism combined with fanatical German Nationalism, Racism and Militarism? If that is your definition then some of these guesses as to how long it could last are good.
If the answer is, really, Nazism was whatever Hitler says it was, and it was all of the above plus the overweening obsession with the “betrayal” of the Treaty of Versailles, and with starting a War with Russia and weirdo eugenic ideals about German racial purity and its only acceptable place in the world - then I am not sure it could have survived long post the the 40’s. To echo others, Hitler was going to keep making War until he died. He was never going to accept a world with a rump Communist Russia or give up occupied France and focus on the Economy (“Its the Economy Stupid, Aldolf” is a sure way to die)
For Germany to have a negotiated settlement of some kind in '42 or Russia somehow losing and England suing for Peace - none of that would have mattered in the long run because Hitler would be on to the next war - which sooner rather than later would have ended in German defeat.
How long could a particularly hateful form of Fascism survived in Germany w/o Hitler? – decades maybe
How long could Hitler/Nazism/Fascism survived with Adolf calling the shots? I doubt a full decade longer than it did IRL - for the very reasons it didn’t last IRL