I thought one of the horrible things he did was kill Georgians, not with intent but simply forgetting to allocate food to the area, and his minions were too frightened to ask him about it.
Killing Stalin might have won the war if 1)Hitler got lucky and Stalin death resulted in internal strife, or a power vaccum, or an incompetent leadership in the USSR resulting in a Soviet defeat and 2)the difficulty and enormous cost in lives involved in conquering Europe leads to a draw and peace on the western front. That’s a lot of “if”. And there’s the very real possibility that Stalin successor would in fact be better at the job.
Killing Churchill seems more useful, if it results in the UK agreeing to terms. Presumably in this situation the USA never gets involved and the war turns into a Germany vs USSR match, with no German army tied in the West and no American support for the USSR. Might be enough for a victory on the Estern front. A definitive peace in the west could also possibly mean that Germany receive additional military support from friendly west European regimes, such as Spain, France, the Netherlands…It’s not even completely unconceivable that the USA and the UK would eventually give support to Germany in this big “war against communism”. Sounds like a plan.
Killing Hitler after the fall of France as proposed by some might be a good idea too. A saner leader of an enlarged Germany (half of Poland, Checkoslovakia, Austria, Alsace-Lorraine plus chunks of some other countries) might go somewhere. Stalin would likely eventually attack Germany, which would result in the same situation as in real history, so this new leadership would still need to come to terms with the UK and avoid an American involvment (or ideally get UK/US support for the war against communism as in the previous scenario). I’m not sure this would be possible, given Churchill intransigence. On the other hand, I definitely can see the USA being amenable to a dominating but not too horrible, and very anti-communist, Germany.
Also I suspect that with Hitler in charge, even assuming a German victory in the east in one of the two previous scenarios, his delusions would still lead to some catastrophic outcome for Germany (would he be able to come to an agreement with the UK/USA rather than antagonize them more, for instance? Emboldened by yet another success, would he embark on a world conquest plan? Would crimes and genocides on an even larger scale and even more obvious than what happened historically make impossible to tolerate the continued existence of the Nazi regime?). So I guess he has to go anyway for any final German victory to be possible.
All things considered, I would rate first killing Hitler, second killing Churchill and distant third killing Stalin. None would guarantee a victory, but there’s potential for some strange alternate histories.
clairobscur: And what about the bomb? The US had the bomb less than 3 months after Germany was defeated. Any scenario that doesn’t end the war completely well before this will result in the US having the bomb. Once several German cities are wiped out this way, the German high command will neutralize Hitler and sue for peace. End of war.
Not exactly. The US got the bomb as a result of a massive effort directed at defeating the aggressive Axis powers.
Had the US sat out the entire war in Europe per clairobscur’s various scenarios it’s possible the US would never have developed the ambition to develop the bomb.
Or would have done so much later, say in the 1950s, after the Nazi empire in Europe eventually became too scary to co-exist peacefully with.
Shared anti-communism is nice and all, but there’s no guarantee the US could have continued to make common cause with the Nazis after they’d trashed the SU. But during the time we were actively or passively assisting the Nazis in fighting the SU we might well have not seen the need to fund the Manhattan Project.
Said another way, once any major bit of counterfactual gets into the scenario, pretty much all the rest of the scenario needs to be re-examined. “Everything will be the same except for this one major alteration” is (IMO) never a productive way to do counterfactual history.
Everyone is starting from the assumption that Hitler could, would and should have conquered the world, if he’d just done one or two things differently.
I’m more inclined to the opposite opinion- that Hitler was damn lucky to do as well as he did. Beating France shouldn’t have been so easy, for starters, and Hitler simply didn’t have the resources to take on ALL of the Allied nations simultaneously.
It’s easier for me to imagine ways the Allies could have won earlier than ways Hitler could have come out on top.
I think if we don’t get the troops out of Dunkerque it is a stone-cold certainty that we come to a deal and the USA does not enter the war in 1941.
Germany, then without Hitler, would have carved up Europe at their leisure and with a different high command their campaign on Russia plays out differently.
nm.
Well, we can speculate on Germany winning the war (for various values of “winning”), contingent on getting rid of Hitler the moment before his stupidity starts to overrule his luck, i.e. late 1940 / early 1941.
*Everyone *isn’t. I certainly didn’t.
The OP itself is a hypothetical about a route to Nazi victory. Not a route to Nazi defeat. Your proposed answer amounts to “Nobody. Thread over.” We recently had a remarkably long-running and hotly contested ATMB thread about when and how bashing the OP’s hypothetical rises to the level of threadshitting. I am *not *suggesting you are threadshitting here. You raise a good question.
I *am *suggesting this OP asks “Let’s change history so the Nazis win this time. What should we change?” So answers will be spring loaded to support that conclusion, not the opposite. Regardless of the real world plausibility of those changes and conclusions.
As you rightly point out, the Nazis had the deck stacked pretty hard against them from the git-go. Part of what made them so scary as the real war actually unfolded was just how much early success they did have from a fairly unpromising baseline.
You might enjoy the answers to a thread on “How could the Allies (or some other ahistorical grouping of countries) have defeated the Nazis much earlier than what really happened?”. It’d make a nice companion thread to this one.
I’ve wondered that if instead of the Holocaust, Germany had conquered what was historically Israel and shipped Germany’s Jews there, leaving them them weapons and machinery to make a go of it. They would be rid of the Jews, and perhaps have some of them as allies, making oil available to Germany. There would be no need to invade Russia for oil.
Note the OP: We’re talking about scenarios involving killing 1 person and such. How do you kill one person and keep the US out of WWII in Europe and keep the US from developing the bomb?
Note that a lot of stuff happened with the US before Dec. 7, 1941. We were lend-leasing all over the place, we took over occupation of Iceland from the UK, and FDR approved the A-bomb program on 9 October 1941. The latter was seen as a defensive move. I.e., we had to develop it before the Germans did in case we got dragged into the war.
Having them as allies kinda depends on the Jews having enjoyed being dispossessed and deported, doesn’t it?
Sounds like a long shot to me.
Good point. The war had a lot of momentum long before hostilities were joined, much less when Johnny-come-lately US joined the battle.
The OP *is *pretty far-fetched. “How could Germany win the war?” is one thing. “How could one carefully chosen killing change everything?” is a much taller order.
Indeed, but they get Israel back.
Germany gets a great improvement on their PR.
To use the bomb, the USA would need to be at war with Germany to begin with.
You’re right, it prevents the stalemate on the western front in my first scenario (Stalin assassinated and the Soviet Union somehow collapsing as a result, then stalemate in the west), but in the two others (murder of Churchill or Hitler), I envisioned the USA not waging war on Germany as a result (or even supporting it against the Soviet Union).
Wonder if eliminating Eisenhower would do it. He had a very tough job where he had to keep all the allies happy each with their own agenda. In his book he talked about how tough a job that was. If he wasn’t there it likely would have gone to Patton or Montgomery. Either one would have been a disaster as they would let their egos and national pride destroy the alliance.
The idea is to kill someone with the expectation that it will result in some massive change preventing the USA from entering the war. Churchill murdered----> UK seeks terms—>no lend lease, no obvious reason for the USA to declare war on Germany (or the other way around)
Patton was an asshole, but I thought he was a good military guy. Didn’t he save the Bulge by moving his armored unit some distance that was difficult?
I doubt they would have been that much of a disaster. Even assuming they would have made big mistakes (and in this case they would have been replaced by someone more competent), it couldn’t have prevented the allies from winning, the odds were so overwhelmingly in their favour. And it couldn’t have destroyed the alliance. At worst, it would have made it more dysfunctional. And on top of it, even assuming that the British and American leadership was so utterly inept that they couldn’t manage any success on the western front, Germany would still have been crushed by the Soviet Union.
No, no. What doomed Hitler and the Nazis was the failure of Operation Willi.
With the Duke of Windsor under wraps, the British would have been compelled to seek a separate peace, and the Allies’ war effort would have collapsed.
I can’t believe no one mentioned this. 
I can’t quite decide if you’re serious or I’m getting world-class whooshed.