Sorry if this has been asked before, but was unsure of the right search criteria.
Let’s assume the Allies had lost. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are the victors, and proceed to embark on their respective massive expansionist schemes. Couple of questions:
Could they have, to any meaningful degree? I can’t help imagining some serious logistical issues before too long, as troops got spread ever more thinly, and supply lines got ever longer.
Assuming they could indeed have divided up the world into German and Japanese empires, how long would they have tolerated one another? Surely the racial ideas and the simple hunger for more power would have been prominent. Or, maybe, if they knew the logistics of the whole enterprise, they might have settled for keeping their respective empires more modest, would they have grudgingly tolerated one another?
I don’t think they particularly wanted to divide the world into Japanese and German empires. They each wanted to be the dominant powers in their respective regions. The Germans in particular wanted as much land as was (generously) required for the volk; extending the Reich beyond that would involve bringing in large non-Aryan populations for no good reason. SFAIK the Germans had, for example, no plans to annexe Russian territory beyond the Urals, even at their most hubristic, and they had no desire to build up colonial possessions in Africa, take India from the British, etc. Likewise, the Japanese wanted to defeat the US not in order to conquer and annex it, but because it was an obstacle to their domination of their immediate neighbourhood.
I think the Germans would have considered some colonization of Africa but principally for military purposes only, i.e. the establishment of naval bases near sources of minerals and fuel. However given their attitude I can’t see them tolerating inferior races for long and would have eventually begun encroachment.
But Germany and Japan were suitably distant that their immediate interests did not clash, and the Nazis considered the Japanese and Chinese ‘honorary Aryans’ too.
A lot of it would hinge on exactly what the terms of victory were. I don’t think its plausible that Germany could militarily conquer Russia or any significant part of North America. Likewise, Japan was only powerful relatively speaking. They had no resources or industrial capacity to match American production (if a ship sank, there was no replacement in the forseeable future).
What this really means is that both powers were geographically limited to their respective areas. European colonialism was on its knees at that point. The idea that Germany would conquer large portions of Africa and central Asia to replace the inhabitants with more Germans would take generations to achieve… assuming they even wanted to bother with it. The same is true of Japan. They might be able to make a slow, steady march across Asia, but it would take a long damn time. They occupied Korea for decades and never won the loyalty of the population or assimilated it.
So, +1 to the above, they could be great regional powers and then re-assess the situation in another twenty years or so.
Personally, I think it likely that if the Nazi’s had won, Hitler would not have lasted long. Just as the British dumped Churchill, the Germans would have dumped Hitler (more likely assassinated him). They would then have taken a far more pragmatic approach to running the German Empire.
Of course they would have wanted the African territory, as much of it as they could grab, simply for the mineral resources. They would also probably have used the native Africans as slave labour.
SFAIK, the Nazis viewed any substantial amount of colonies with non-Aryan populations as a drain, not an asset. They reckoned that you could get the mineral and other resources without needing to colonise the territory (and the experience of the US since 1945 has proved that this is completely correct).
As for slave labour, they weren’t that interested in it. They knew what everybody else knew by then; it’s not very efficient or productive, and slave economies do not perform well by comparison with economies utilising free labour. Which is why they were more concerned about ensuring that Jews, Slavs etc in their custody died than they were about ensuring that they worked. Working them as slaves was a by-product of the extermination programme, not its object, and only featured as a by-product because of labour shortages brought on by wartime conditions. They had no moral qualms about enslaving non-Aryans, but also no desire to do so on any large scale. Had they succeeded in settling Germans on farms in the Ukraine and Western Russia they might have needed a modest population of serfs until they could build up the volkdeutsch population of those areas, but that was about the limit of their ambition when it came to slaves.
Assuming no-one had successfully invaded the USA, I presume that there would be nothing to stop the USA using their nuclear capability (as they did in ‘real life’). That might deter potential empire makers.
Maybe, maybe not. What a lot of modern folks don’t understand is that the people of the 1940’s did not perceive atomic weapons the same way we do now. They were just really damn big bombs. They were also much more optimistic about the ability of a “wonder weapon” to solve all their problems. The long-term effects of radiation, along with things like fallout and nuclear winter, were poorly understood.
A European or Japanese invasion in this scenario is difficult mainly because the US is geographically isolated. I don’t think its a stretch that the Germans would have produced their own bomb in short order, and the guy with his finger on the button wasn’t exactly known for his calm and rational decision-making.
If by ‘modest’ enslavement you mean tens of millions then I agree with you.
Per Hitler’s Generalplan Ost (GPO) or Master Plan East, he was going to kill off mass portions of the population of Eastern Europe and Russia, but he was still going to enslave tens of millions.
To say that the Nazi’s were not supportive of enslaving people to the economics involved is putting too fine a point on the sensibilities or effective running of the German economy.
The obvious endgame would be - the USA decides it does not want a foreign war and withdraws; Germany does or does not conquer Britain, but it becomes less of an issue - the British alone stop being able to do much, it ends in stalemate. They choke off the African campaign, and end up dominating the Mediterranean. They score some lucky break (win Stalingrad) and push the Russians back to the Urals, fighting a minor border war from then on.
That would leave the empires to sort themselves out. The Americas go along on their own, the European theatre plays out much like the cold war, and the east perhaps plays out much like Communist China a few decades later.
In both cases, the cold war and the outcome of communism eventually turned out very different than Lenin/Stalin or Mao ever intended. Same likely with Germany and Japan. Hitler and his party took over Germany vowing to revenge themselves on the WWI victors. The Allies treated Germany badly, gave away a lot of its motherland and tried to enforce demilitarization, which gave Hitler the excuse to be defiant and demand land be returned. From what I’ve read, the German elite viewed him as a crazy man, and tolerated his activities because it got Germany out from under the post-WWI oppression. Plus, for a while he was winning. Presumably once the fierce urgency of total war was gone and the oppression of the need to militarize was over, you would see more tolerance leading to open debate and eventually more freedom. Maybe for some groups it would be too late, but sooner or later one presumes civilized minds might prevail.
I’m not sure what sort of liberating intellectual thought might eventually prevail in more feudalistic, militaristic Japan. Presumably, too, they would continue to fight a larger number of medium level guerilla independence movements. Since they were not above using brutality - i.e. mass executions of civilians - perhaps local resistance not supported by Allies might die off (in both senses) very quickly.
I think the role the Nazis envisaged for slaves was (a) as agricultural labourers on (German-owned, German-run, German-settled) farms in the Ukraine and Western Russia, and (b) as unskilled labourers in German-owned, German-run factories in the same region. But the long-term plan was to Germanise these areas thoroughly; the Nazis had no qualms about enslaving non-Aryan people, but they didn’t want to be dependent on them, and they didn’t even want Germans to be mixing with them to any degree. Lebensraum meant room for Germans to live. So I think slavery was seen as a transitional phase; in the long run they wanted a Slav-free Reich, which meant expulsion or extermination.