Suppose Count von Stauffenberg and his July 20th, 1944 plotters had successfully killed Hitler and taken control of Nazi Germany. Were they planning on surrendering immediately to the Allies? Try for a negotiated peace despite the Allied pledge of “unconditional surrender”? Did they even think that far trying to arrange killing Hitler Goering and Himmler at the same time without getting caught? For that matter, did the Allied governments ever have any plans for what they would do if Hitler was killed or died suddenly in the middle of the war? A lot of them at the time thought the problem with ending World war I was that Kaiser Germany wasn’t conquered but negotiated a peace at Versailles harsher than they thought, giving rise to the “stabbed in the back lie”.
I thought that the German Army staffers in charge of the plot were hoping to sign a peace treaty with the Western Allies (USA, France, UK) before the Soviets were able to invade from the East. After that, I guess they were hoping to be able to put more troops on the Eastern front and eventually negotiate another peace with the USSR.
My impression from reading *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich *is that the plotters would have tried to negotiate a peace with the Allies, although a peace that would allow Germany to keep some territory. I don’t think Shirer made any mention of them being willing to surrender unconditionally. I have no idea what the answers to your other questions would be.
I agree with what the other posters said. The Valkyrie plotters were hoping to negotiate a peace with the Western Allies, which I don’t think would have been successful.
I think they were hoping for something like reverting to their prewar borders, avoiding occupation, and conducting their own war crimes trials. I highly doubt the Allies would’ve agreed to any of that.
One hypothetical I’ve always thought about, is could they effectively force a surrender to only the Western Allies, even if the Allies themselves rebuffed their peace overtures. By simply withdrawing from the western front but keeping fighting on the eastern front.
That would have left the Western Allies in charge of all of occupied Germany. With presumably alot of impetus to ignore their previous arrangements with Stalin (what with possesion being 9/10th s of the law and all).
Presumably the complete overthrow of the “evil junta” running Germany and responsible for the war would make it much more difficult for the western Allies to insist on unconditional surrender; but the Germans would be bargaining from a position of weakness now that D-Day had established the front in the west and if they expected “ok, we’ll lay down our arms, pull back to the border and call it even” - well there was too much destruction across Europe for that to be a valid ending to the war. I find it hard to believe the allies would (a) screw Russia (that’s actually the easiest to believe) and (b) let Germany keep a standing army and © avoid any retribution for the war, not to mention (d) details of setting everything “right” agian, from the concentration camps to the mass displacement and destruction of whole areas of the continent.
I have trouble imagining that the aliies would want anything other than complete surrender; maybe the Germans would let the west move in to the east border of Germany while keeping up the fight on the eastern front until the surrender…
Didn’t some of them also hope they’d be able to keep Poland?
I’ve heard it said (no cite) that after the real German surrender, Churchill wanted to continue the fight against the Soviet Union. So I think he’d go for it.
You may be confusing the wars. Churchill wanted to join the “White” counter revolution against the Bolsheviks after World War I, “strangling it in its cradle” is the phrase used. Patton was more the “we’ll have to fight the Russians someday, let’s do it now while we have the army” type.
I can’t remember a cite but my understanding is after the July 20th attempt reporters asked Franklin Roosevelt about it. He gave a “I know as little about it as you do” response. The truth was probably more complex and I think a von Stauffenburg government asking for peace talks might have been ticklish for FDR in an election year (and for his opponent Thomas Dewey).
Nope Churchill definitely considered immediately starting hostilities against the soviets after Germany’s surrender in WW2. See Operation Unthinkable for more details.
Remember that this was just a phrase tossed out by FDR after the Casablanca conference – no particular legal force to it. (In fact, it’s said that Churchill & Stalin didn’t even know he was going to say that until after he said it.)
And, in fact, they didn’t insist on it. The surrender of Japan had some conditions, like not ever trying the Emperor for his war crimes.
That wikipedia entry doesn’t make it sound like it was something Churchill wanted to do, but something he felt the need to plan if circumstances forced it. I’m sure the US military has all sorts of plans for doing things that we don’t want to do and aren’t planning on doing.
Having said that, I am no expert on the subject, so if there is any better information, I would be interested in seeing it.
Some previous threads on the Valkyrie plot and its possible outcomes:
They do call it Operation Unthinkable after all.