A few years ago, a teacher had told me that if the Nazis had won WW2, I would not be here today. Is this statement accurate? Did Africa and other Asian countries put up much of a fight against Nazi Germany and Japan?
Depends on the exact nature of the Nazi victory. The most likely scenerio I can think of would end up with the Soviets being thrown back behind the Urals into a minor state, with a Nazi dominated Europe and the US in a Cold War like standoff, perhaps with the Japanese controling a large East Asian empire. Still, the logistics of the Axis forces actually making an invasion of the Americas would require enough time for them to build up their forces that it is imposible to speculate.
The Chinese tied up a very large portion of the Japanese army during WWII, and other Asian countries that the Japanese occupied had pretty good size resistance movements.
Germany never had enough Germans to win. Too much acreage, not enough saurkraut.
Doubtful. IIRC the Nazis didn’t set up death camps and start killing its imprisoned “undesirables” en masse until about 1942, when the the war was turning against Germany. The Jews, Communists, Gypsies, and other folk had until then been sent to ghettoes and concentration camps to isolate them from the ethnic German population—since the Nazis had just dispossessed them of their personal fortunes and liberties, isolating them and putting them under guard was the only way of making sure they didn’t revolt. Once it became clear that the Allied powers might encroach upon German territory and liberate these concentration camps, thus flooding the war with millions upon millions of Allied partisans and military recruits, they began killing off the concentration camp population to avert this possibility.
Had Germany won the war, it’s unlikely the concentration camp prisoners would have been sent to death camps during the war, as there would have been no pressing economic, political, or military need to do so. Would they have set up death camps after the war? IMHO, that would be extremely unlikely. They would have simply expelled the undesirables to the fringes of the German empire to work as slave labour or in near-slavely conditions, under heavy guard and far from central urban centres, much the same way as the Soviet Union exiled its criminals, nationalists, and political dissidents to Siberian gulags. Using twelve million (or however many concentration camp survivors there were) subdued labourers to lay railroad tracks, mine, and build cities would have been far more economical than simply killing them.
Did Africa put up a fight? Condidering that all the African countries were emasculated European colonies with no real indigenious armies (except SA which had strong german sympathies) one cannot expect any African involvement.
If Germany/Japan had conquered the world then there would have been of course lots of natives left - many I suspect used as slave labour. Their genocidal tendencies were mainly restricted to those unfortunates that they thought were “polluting” germanic lands - which covered poland and austria and onwards, and towards the jews.
The Continent would have the means to fight back, without Human help.
Climate, disease, & some of the most challenging terrain on Earth can kill you real quick. Add a handful of guerrillas, & they might put up a hellava fight.
European powers had already conqured Africa and divided it up by that point - it was the weaking of those powers caused by WWI & II, among other things, that allowed various independance in Africa movements latter on to succceed.
Since there is not likely a factual anwer here, let’s move this one.
samclem GQ moderator
Sixty years is a mighty short time to successfully exterminate EVERY black and Asian everywhere. Plus there’s the niggling little pang of conscience that tells people that massive racial genocidal pogroms are, well, unseemly.
Your teacher’s quite the fatalist.
Are there still Nazis around? Yep. Hiding in South American countries (well, some of them) , but they’re still around - and there are certainly Neo-Nazi groups carrying on their ideals, unfortunetly.
Anyway, my point is, they lost, and they’re still around in a world in which they are actively being hunted down to be arrested/killed (depending on who’s doing the hunting). There were (and are) many more Blacks/Asians/minorities groups they hated than there were Nazis. So from a logical standpoint, yes, it’s safe to assume a pretty significant number of such people would survive.
You don’t understand the obscene logic of the nazism. Adolf Hitler didn’t mind japanese in Asia, or africans in Africa. What he didn’t stand was the jews, particularly in Europe, who he blamed for just about everything. He didn’t think highly of the slavs, but probaly had no thought of exterminate them as a people/race. As a matter of fact, Hitler had plans to *move * jews out of Europe (to Madagascar, for instance!), and the plan to exterminate them is very late in the pathetic history of the Third Reich, perhaps forming when he began to realize he wouldn’t be here to take care of the “jewish problem”.
He didn’t want to murder all who wasn’t aryan, there were “muslims” in SS divisions, for instance. He didn’t mind; probably quite the opposite. The lunacy of Hitler wasn’t that he felt he had to exterminate undermenschen around the globe, it was that he had to clean out the Third Reich (including the *lebensraum * areas) of jews, and that the war against the bolsheviks was “total”, since he felt that he was up to him to once and for all save Europe from “the asians”. Also there was some confusion in his brain that communists and jews always were in leage with each others, so bolsheviks was more or less jews, and henceforth could not be regarded as menschen.
Now, can one comprehend the bottomless agony of Adolf when the Red Army approaches…?
To answer your question: Hitler would try to dominate much of Europe and the world, but I don’t believe he would try to exterminate what he called “undermenschen” all over the globe. That’s just not the (howbeit insane) logic behind his ambitions.
Besides, who would there be for them to feel superior to if they killed all the “undermenschen”? Gotta have a hated/feared enemy to convince people they need to be ruled with an Iron Fist.