Don’t know if this is a Great Debate, so I’ll stick it here.
Let’s tweak what actually happened in the Wolf’s Lair just slightly. A piece of shrapnel from the bomb hits Hitler in the thigh, severs the femoral artery, and he bleeds out in a couple of minutes.
What happens? Do the conspirators seize control of the gouvernement? Were they well-enough organisées to do so?
Or does a viscous civil war break out, maybe pitting Waffen-SS against the Wehrmacht?
And, does it change the course of the war? It seems that many, like Himmler, thought that the real opponent was the USSR, and if only they could reach an accommodation with the western Allies, the war would be limited to the Eastern Front.
Was that realistic, or would the Casablanca Declaration of “unconditional surrender” hold?
I suspect the unconditional surrender would still have come about.
Stauffenberg knew perfectly well in 1944 that the war was lost, and it appears his hopes of what Germany could keep in a negotiated armistice was unrealistic. Best case scenario is a civil war between the Nazis, and everyone else, which would have hastened the end of the war (probably to the benefit of the Soviet Union). The idea that Germany could negotiate a peace with the Allies and then unite against the USSR is pretty much a non-starter.
If you’re talking about the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, I think the ship had already sailed in terms of negotiating a peace without surrender. The allied invasion had reached St. Lo, and the Soviet army had reached Majdanek.
The Western Allies had absolutely no desire whatsoever to sign some kind of settlement with Germany, then have to fight them again 20 years later. Germany was going to be beaten, they were going to know they were beaten, and they weren’t going to get a say in what happened to them. Modern people tend to view things through the lens of the Cold War, but that hadn’t happened yet, and Germany didn’t have any history of actually being peaceful like they do now. While the UK and US weren’t huge fans of the USSR, they were much bigger non-fans of Germany starting a war that killed millions of people, then starting another one a generation later, and wanted to be damn sure Germany wouldn’t start a third one.
Yeah the conspirators thought Germany could keep Austria, Danzig and the Sudetenland among other things in a peace settlement.
They also thought Germany could avoid a military occupation.
Mind you, the Japanese thought that they could keep Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
The July 20 conspirators were living in total fantasy land.
One knock-on effect of the coup succeeding will be that those Weimar-era politicians that were executed in the after-math will survive and be part of the post-war political world, which will have odd effects on the Bonn Republic and the GDR.
Nope and nope. The plotters lacked resolution and violence of action in both their planning and execution. I’m guessing they die rather quickly. Peering through my crystal ball, Himmler tries to take charge, botches it, and we see a short, sharp bloody civil war within the Nazi high command.
I’m trying to think of who would take over and I’m running a blank. Jodl? Keitel? Kaltenbrunner? I can’t see Goering rousing himself enough to do it. Heydrich would’ve had a good shot, had those two Czechs not killed him. Speer?
I see peace feelers floated by whoever wins, and I see the Allies turning them down. Kill Hitler before Overlord and I think peace would be a lot more seductive. But by July 20, the Allies are there in France to stay (having taken St Lo two days prior) and even though they were hating life in hedgerow country, I can’t see the Western Allies wanting to call it quits with a negotiated settlement. Not 18 months after Casablanca and Unconditional Surrender.
You mean the Goering that, near the end of the war, “suggested” to Hitler that Hitler take a last stand in Berchtesgaden while Goering run the country from Berlin - a move which, supposedly, was a key factor in Hitler naming Doenitz and not Goering as his successor?
Let me rephrase. I can’t see Goering rousing himself enough to be effective at the internecine bloodletting that would inevitably accompany Hitler getting killed. Not that Jodl or Keitel were models of vigorous, dynamic leadership at that point.
Though depending on when Goering made the suggestion, facing off the Russians in Berlin instead of running to Berchtesgaden with Hitler (or to South America or Norway) was either incredibly brave or incredibly drug-addled. Probably both. Maybe he couldn’t bear to separated from Carinhall?
I think the smartest guy in the whole thing was Müller.
Assuming he actually made it out of Berlin in the final days.
The conspirators were idiots. They really fouled up a lot of things like letting Himmler not just live but make phone calls, etc. They weren’t going to have much say in what followed even if Hitler died.
As noted, they were surprisingly hard liners. Make a deal with the West, keep fighting Russia, battle to a draw. Keep a lot of conquered territory.
Put them together and you have even bigger hard liners taking control. Worse, they would be vastly more effective than Hitler on strategic matters and things would have been bloodier still, if you can imagine that.
The best outcome is if they had not tried it at all. Then the next winter a coup attempt would have had much better chances of succeeding with a goal of ending the war right away. Some blood would have been saved.
The effects of the purge and ensuing fear meant that the war was going to be fought until Hitler took himself out.
They might have been thinking about Italy. They were included in the “unconditional surrender” policy. But when a coup overthrew Mussolini, Italy was able to negotiate and change sides.
Some Germans may have thought they had a similar opportunity. But they were almost certainly wrong; Germany was not Italy.
Except that Italy was still subject to unconditional surrender, and didn’t get any special terms. You can see the text of the Italian armistice document, they got no terms favorable to them and even had to agree to indefinite future terms “Other conditions of a political, economic and financial nature with which Italy will be bound to comply will be transmitted at a later date.” They changed sides, but they got no guarantees or treaty concessions for it.
A lot of U.S. people don’t realize that many of the initial Nazi policies and programs towards the disabled etc were copied from the contemporary American ones. Virginia was forcibly sterilizing social undesirables until the 1970s.
Yeah, the US (and UK) were no beacons of human rights. So? Thats not the question.
I think Hitler being killed and followed by the collapse in France which historically came pretty quickly after July 20 1944, would have reverberations which are difficult to ignore and even more difficult to have deduced with any certainty.
“Copied” is too strong a term. Pretty much independent developments. Later the US programs were used in Nazi propaganda but Hitler needed no such forerunner to “inspire” him.