Say that Hitler won the war and never even thinked of invading Russia, and instead concerntrated on subjugating the rest of Europe into his domination and eventually established the Union of National Socialist Republics. Would it follow the same downfall as the Soviet Union? How would the economy be run? On what lines would agriculture be developed? I know there would be isolation and certainly unrest after Hitlers death.
There is no basis for this speculation, as it would never have happened. Hitler’s goal was never to unite Europe or the world for that matter under Nazi rule. He fought a war of annihilation against a certain selection of arbitrary groupings of people, namely the Slavic peoples, the ‘other’ Russians, the French and the Jews. He also threw in a number of other socio-politic groupings and minorities that he slammed together as deviants and ‘internationalists’.
Ironically enough some individuals of the very peoples that he wanted to destroy helped him destroy the others, as happened in both France and on the Eastern Front.
Hitler is unique as warlord in human history in this way. He did not fight a war of conquest nor a war of subjugation, nor a war of self-defense. He fought for ‘lebensraum’ (living space) in a time when there was no need for it and his method was genocide. The German people and not even the rest of NSDAP quite ever caught on to exactly how bad his mass homicidal tendencies were. As a matter of fact his absurd idea regarding the purpose of warfare never even quite fully transcended into the Wermacht and especially not into the navy. It was both grounds for the conflict between the German military leadership and Hitler as well as a constant source for strategic weirdness and mistake, as in when Germany offers England peace after having defeated France. Sic!
His desired end state was a German “Welt Reich” with large colonies in Africa and South America and a Germany that stretched all over continental Europe where Berlin was to become the capital of the ‘Germanic World’ and renamed Germania. What he intended to do with Italy, Spain and the Scandinavian countries was never quite clear, the rest of Europe’s polulation were to be reduced to serfdom or exterminated with their lands repopulated by the ‘German peoples’. He stated over and over again that he couldn’t care less about England and the US and until December 1941 he was convinced that he would be able to appease them anytime soon. Japan could have Asia as long as they just left him the piss alone. In 1936, when asked with what timeframe this was going to be accomplished he answered “In my lifetime or not at all.”
When the war in the East turned as he lost the battle of Moscow on December 5th 1941 he went on record saying that he now knew that the war could not be won. He then proceeds with his plan B and starts the holocaust. If he can’t have the ‘Welt Reich’ at least he will ‘save the world from Jewry’ as he put it. The first step he takes is debated in two ways. It seems evident that he needed to engage the world in a war to get space to carry out his horrid master plan. He has also been recorded to state multiple times that if the Germans were not up to the task of winning ‘the great struggle for world dominance’ they must be destroyed. With this in the background he proceeds to declare war on the US, a nation that he cannot fight due to distance and technological capacity of his forces. It does however enable FDR to shortcut the process of getting engaged on the European theatre, which there was still enormous resistance to on the home front, especially after December 7th and Pearl Harbor.
As of January 1942 he starts the holocaust and the random genocides in the East are increased and systematized to eventually become synonymous. Meanwhile he increases the war on both fronts against the advice of his staff and forces the Wermacht into an obvious death struggle. The invitation of the US to join that struggle is arguably the safest way he could find to make sure that his desired destruction of the undeserving Germans will come to pass, but first he must buy time for the Holocaust. It is fortunate that he didn’t make it, it is unfortunate that he managed to keep it up as long as he did.
The creation of the European Union is in matter of fact the ultimate defeat of Hitler’s worldview. Churchill was one of the few people to understand exactly what an evil, reprehensible monster he was already before he started acting his plan out and after beating him Winston also tried to make sure that Hitler’s legacy would die with him and be terminally entombed by the unification of Europe.
Hence there is no answer to the questions the OP poses since this was never in the scope of his ideology and therefore there was no such plan that we can reach back to and debate from.
If you want a thorough examination of his ideology and the chain of events I describe above I recommend reading Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler and The Meaning of Hitler. For an intimate view of the grinding defeat of the German army thanks to Hitler’s decision to sacrifice them for his ‘greater cause’ read Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. All four books are a fascinating and informative read, but you better be ready for some solid hours of horror. If you can read Haffner in German; do! He has a remarkably light and entertaining style considering the weight and substance of his argument.
Sparc
Correction:
Insert capitals were needed, I did not mean to deemphasize or marginalize any words in the text, I am just as always hard pressed to proof my own text.
Sparc, not a bad summary, but some of your facts are a bit off.
- Hitler did not intend to eliminate the French. IIRC, he rated the French in the 3rd position on his five-point racial grading system. Positions 1-3 got spared.
Ironically, this isn’t true. Hitler envisioned a confederation of Western European nations under German dominance after the war.
If you want a popularized (but still pretty damn accurate - at least from what I’ve read of the source materials) concept of Hitler’s goals, read Fatherland, by Robert Harris, which is set in 1964 Berlin - after Hitler’s victory.
Sua
Jeanne Kirkpatrick (former Reagan UN ambassador) made an academic career on the One Big Idea that fascist states tended to evolve into democracies while communist states did not*. This seemed to be the case from the 60’s thru the late 80’s when The Fall screwed the whole thesis up.
Nazi Germany was uniquely homicidal & I am not sure that it could be expected to go the same way as other fascist states (which where not “empires” but countries which also may have made a difference.) Saying all that it may have ended more like Franco’s Spain, than Gorby’s Russia – with much, much less genetic diversity I mean that to be chilling not flippant…
(*btw this is One Big Simplification of a long academic career)
Sua you’re sort of right. The French were not on his top list of folks to do away with, but they it was not really clear-cut that they were to be spared either. His ‘classification system’ is not a good way to judge his will and desire since he wavered forth and back on what to do re the ‘classes’ of the various peoples his hatred was extended towards. His desires for France as a nation were made clear already in Mein Kampf:
From then on the meaning of this seems to depend a little on his mood. At some points he speaks of ‘just’ enslaving the French later on he wants to mass sterilize them and so on and so forth. The same goes for amongst others the Poles and the Czechs by the way. His consistent plan regarding all of the ‘serf peoples’ was a complete destruction of the educational system with education only allowed to grade 3 or 4 to learn ‘basic skills of the serf’, extermination of all intellectuals, politicians and skilled workers in order to systematically create a second-class ‘race’ of human beings. He even managed to start this horrific process in Poland with the help of Dr. Hans Frank Governor General in occupied Poland and his sparring partner in the creation of the ‘serf program’. In any case his goal was the annihilation of these cultures, albeit the individuals of the same were sometimes to be spared as serfs. I find it highly ironic that some portions of these peoples welcomed the Nazis as liberators.
OK so there might be a debate in that dog darned OP after all!
I beg to differ with this view, and I’ll try to take care to demonstrate how.
H based his Weltanschauung largely on the works by Arthur Moeller and specifically his book ‘Das Dritte Reich’ from 1922 which is the often forgotten founding document of Nazism. From there H develops his ideas about ‘lebensraum’ and what is even more essential here ‘volksgeimenschaft’ (literally ‘people’s community’ often translated into the ‘people’s state’) by which he means ‘the restoration of the German peoples’. The idea is basically that the German peoples need to have space so that they can have unity now and in the future within the ‘people’s state’. In the same paragraph as he posits the destruction of France in Mein Kampf he says:
In other words he thinks that the proliferation and hence need for more space of the ‘German peoples’ is an inevitable step for its ‘success’.
Unfortunately we must take one moment to look at Hitler’s concept of ‘race’. Not only is this ugly and reprehensible, it’s also so confused and convoluted that sometimes understanding what he means makes riding a rollercoaster and eating a pizza while trying to read a tax ledger backwards and being beaten over the head with a cudgel seem like an enticing prospect. In any case. When he speaks of the ‘Aryan race’ he includes in this the ‘German peoples’ and the ‘brother peoples’. Since I don’t really want to get too deep into this; let’s just say he roughly means the ‘German peoples’ that are scattered across Northern Europe and who are not Jewish. These are the peoples that he wants united in the ‘People’s State’.
Thus far no contradiction towards a possible ‘Confederated Europe’ under Germany since his ‘People’s State’ could arguably be realized in that form. Let’s go back to Mein Kampf.
This is from chapter ten in the second volume, entitled ‘Federalism As A Mask’. It deals with how to reorganize Germany into a cohesive unit rather than a federal union. It’s horribly jumbled and badly argued. His main point is clear though. As he says above, the federal states must be subjugated the greater state for the good and safety of the ‘people’s state’. Eventually they must be abolished and completely subjugated to the NSDAP. I won’t even go into the why and how of his argument because this is some of the most asinine and populist crap which has ever been written in the history of humanity. In any case that’s his view on federalism in general.
In chapter two of the second volume he gets down to the real issue here, the purpose of the state in general. I refuse to quote from that chapter as any quote would come across as a snappy argument for racism and Nazism, find a copy and go look for yourselves, but I will not be party to taking anything out of context from what he there writes. It must be judged in its entirety so that its total idiocy becomes apparent. His general argument in this chapter is that the state only has one purpose and that is to unify and protect a race. He goes on and puts the concept of race above the concept of state and predicts the eventual disappearance of states, once the Aryan race has achieved world dominance.
The idea of Hitler wanting to unite Europe as a federal Nazi state stems largely from the foreign policy against occupied nations, before and after occupation. The message that went out was that the autonomy of the country would be preserved within a National Socialist sphere. Hitler’s spoken words and the foundation of his ideology speaks against it. It is more rational to believe that this was one step in the process of the elimination of the state in favor of the party and ultimately the 'Aryan race’. When he speaks of the abolishment of Federal Germany in 1924 it sounds like it could take some time once started. As we now know it eventually took just over a year for him to do it. To surmise that a conquered ‘federal’ Europe under Hitler would have lasted much longer is IMHO contentious.
To boot H was against every form of ‘internationalism’ and believed in the isolation and segragation of ‘races’ in separate units while they struggled for world dominance. This concept goes badly together with any union of various nations, however much subjugated by Germany.
I once again refer to the books by Haffner who offers amongst other things a fairly comprehensive argument for Hitler’s anti federalism.
Too tired to go on. I think I said what I meant to say and I hope it wasn’t too jumbled. I also hope there aren’t too many typos in there.
Sparc
Concerning Sparc’s lengthy theory:
Ah…ok. I’ve never heard ANY of this before, and I have a degree in history. I read “Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101”, which is a pretty good documented account of how most of the ethnic murders took place. Village to village, men with guns. Nowhere in all my studies did I see anything indicating that Hitler didn’t really want to conquer Europe, that it was all some sort of ploy to get access to inferior peoples so he could eliminate them. People he eliminated left wealth and resources behind, and he took them for Germany, that’s a simple and more logical motivation.
Here’s an alternate, more popular theory. Hitler realizes in the early 30’s that he needs a scapegoat to blame for economic distress. He picks Jews for the same reasons people always blame things on Jews, the perception that they’re all wealthy world bankers in control of immense resources. If something’s wrong with the economy, blaming Jewish people would appeal to the general public’s misconceptions.
Hitler uses this strategy to gain about 30% support in the upcoming election, manages to manipulate that into becoming the real power in Germany. Then he decides, just as Stalin was deciding at the same time, that the best way to protect his interests is to get some buffer space between Germany and other nations. So he annexes area to achieve this goal.
He attacks the penninsula not because he hates Gypsies or Slovaks, that’s absurd. He attacks it because there’s OIL there. He needs OIL to run his tanks. A war is about gaining resources, growing your economy through diversity of resources.
Everything he did is consistent with that very simple theory. Hitler wanted POWER. Why launch a last-ditch attempt at an offensive if he didn’t care about winning the war?? Why go up against Red Russia if you just want to kill civilians??
Mein Kampf is just a political fancy from a man trying to make his later grab for absolute power seem to be part of some bigger philosophy.
You say he wanted to destroy his own population because they’d failed him, they were undeserving of life?? And that’s why he invited the US into the war, so that Germany would LOSE?? I’ve never heard such hogwash in my entire life.
This is all part of a notable tendency on people’s parts. They don’t want to believe that just anybody could commit genocide and random murder. So they give Hitler various psychoses and a demented philosophy. Maybe this makes them sleep better at night, thinking that only a few really demented people are capable of this. The fact is, it was all part of a simple power and conquest play, and it could happen again anyday and anywhere.
Take Occam’s Razor to heart. The simplest explanation is probably the best one.
Given the fact of the Holocaust, I’d say that “Hitler was a raving genocidal lunatic” is a pretty damn simple explanation. I can’t say whether it’s correct, though.
Oh dear,
I was just about to go to bed when I found RexDart’s rather offensively toned reply here.
For starters I’ll ask you this: where did I say that Hitler did not want to conquer Europe? I think I rather said the contrary; that he did. I said that he did not want to conquer and then unify Europe as a federation.
I provided you with two cites from what is considered one of the chief authorities on the subject. Your cite is? Oh yeah that’s right! You have a degree in history and you refer us to accounts of how the genocide on the Eastern front was carried out. Events where we are still to this day learning more, amongst things proof of the ideological involvement of the Wermacht Eastern command that was for many years questioned. I have myself spent a few years studying the man and phenomena in question, but I wouldn’t dream of quoting myself as a cite on such a gigantic issue that men and women spend lifetimes understanding.
You want to take Occam’s razor to the Holocaust? I beg your pardon? You honestly claim that you know the ‘simplest answer’ to why this happened, the most astoundingly and simply most horrific event in known human history??? I’d like to see that post because if you can do that… wow we’ll have some academic kudos raining at the SDMB soon. They might even make you an honorary super professor emeritus for that you know.
Regarding your views on the war… wow, this is going to be a long debate I’ll tell you. So your view is more popular and this makes it more right? That one is taught in rhetoric fallacies to avoid, lesson one IIRC. Not only that, I do believe that you’ll find that this popular theory of yours is loosing in popularity as we gain more distance and less dogma in the academic debate.
Never the less I’ll grant you that the war and the Holocaust need to be seen with slightly different shades on, since the war in some parts does take Occam’s razor without breaking it. However, post December 1941 the war in Europe makes less and less sense out of a traditional perspective and we must look for new explanations in order to specifically come to the simplest explanation, which yours isn’t since it doesn’t make any sense, and has evidence against it.
And hey I certainly hope that it can’t happen again any day and anywhere, or we’re a lot worse off than I thought. Do you really understand what a mind-boggling event we are talking about? Do you even fathom the scale and horror at hand? Do you even begin to grasp how inexplicable it is by traditional explanations?
Tell you what RexDart. It’s 5.30 AM my time. I’ll be back with more founded stuff when I’m awake. Meanwhile I suggest you surf over to Amazon and pick up the books I cited. I’ll give you a longer reading list tomorrow.
Good night!
Sparc
Well, Sparc, I would enjoy a dialogue on the subject. There are really two points from my post that I favor particularly well, and don’t see how you would counter.
Hitler inviting the US into the war so that Germany would lose simply seems like a ridiculous piece of speculation. I don’t fault you for it, and I realize alot of analysis will end up as speculation, but I think the authors of a study claiming that are really stretching things too far.
Secondly, I still think that giving an economic or power-grabbing rationale to Hitler is far more consistent with what he did. I suppose he could have attacked the Baltic penninsula because he hated Gypsies, but boy wasn’t it fortunate for him that there was oil there?
BTW, I didn’t claim that my theory on the war was right because it’s more popular, it’s more popular because alot of people think it’s right. I didn’t make any effort to put that forward as my argument…but for the record, an argument from authority may be weak, but it’s not a fallacy, just a technical logic definition.
I’m open to hearing any arguments, but I’ve always preferred the type of history that comes from personal accounts and verified documents. Endless speculation that starts off with a premise about Hitler’s motivations, and then tells the facts in a way designed to bolster that premise…well that’s not my cup of tea. Every war before Hitler was fought for similiar reasons, it would take some pretty extraordinary evidence to convince me that he was somehow unique in history. As most professors will tell you, there’s nothing unique in history.
Rexdart, your posts beggar belief.
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Um, Hitler had been raving against the Jews since at least 1918. Most scholars believe that Hitler’s anti-semitism took root during his pre-WWI time in Vienna.
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Hitler didn’t need the Jews as a scapegoat for the bad economy - he wasn’t running the economy before he came to power. Hitler actually did a decent job of pulling Germany out of the Great Depression, though his methods - primarily autarky - were extremely short-termist.
In your later post, you identify the peninsula in question as the “Baltic” peninsula. As the Baltic States (a) aren’t a peninsula, (b) don’t have oil, and © isn’t populated by Slovaks or Romany, I assume you mean the Balkan peninsula.
But there your claim is also dead wrong. The key oil fields in the Balkans are the Ploiesti oil fields in Romania. Romania was a German ally, having joined the Axis on November 20, 1940. Germany invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941.
So, given that the Germans already had access to the Balkan oil fields, why did Hitler invade the Balkans?
Sparc, let’s get back to our discussion after we clear this business up.
Sua
Well, Yugoslavia was a German ally (for two days). The Germans had put enormous pressure on the country to ally with Germany. On March 25, 1941, the Yugoslav government announced they were joining the Axis. Two days later there was a coup, and the new Yugoslav government declared its neutrality. The Germans invaded on April 6.
Why did they invade the Balkans? To pull Italy’s ass out of the fire. The Italian invasion of Greece wasn’t going well and needed German help. Germany wanted a friendly Balkan region so that when they invaded the Soviet Union, they wouldn’t have to worry about their southern flank.
And we have a winner. Well done, my Captain.
Sua
You’re on RexDart! I can’t give a proper reply immediately since I am in the end stage of writing on work related things, and I must conclude. Hopefully I can compose a serious reply to you later tonight. Since it’s sort of a hijack I’ll open a new thread for it.
Meanwhile so that we get the level set and cite bashing out of the way…
I don’t know if it was Haffner or me that you were implicitly criticizing with that remark. No matter which I agree with you fully and as far as I know Haffner he would revolve in his grave if someone accused him of being a lofty analyst. First of all he was the first journalist to write a comprehensive analysis of the German situation as it evolved directly upon his exile to England before the war. Second he followed the war from the Allied perspective firsthand while covering it for the London Times German Edition during and after the war. Third of all he bases every single argument he makes on protocols and verified events from the time. As for myself I agree as well, and if you think that using Mein Kampf as a source for working out Hitler’s basic philosophy is poor source research, I’m confused. The man wrote it himself and founded his movement on it. You said earlier that:
Which indicates that you might be overlooking some aspects of Hitler’s personal history and completely ignoring the ideological aspect of Germany and WW II under the NSDAP (which I will get back to). The book is a disaster out of a literary perspective and politically it is the ramblings of a madman, sure. But he followed through with what he threatens to do in that same work. Read it, if you haven’t already. For instance, the whole question of his idiotic move of sticking like a bulldog to the Eastern front comes into a totally new light when you read the chapter about expansion to the East. Last but not least I did not base any of my arguments solely on Mein Kampf. This is however a debate that we entertain for pleasure, so I did skip some cross-references to actions, records and statements that further the point I was making. I could arguably excuse the procrastination by the fact that I might have some vague reason to pursue this topic professionally, so I’ll try to be more precise henceforth.
As I said, more later.
Sparc
Simulposts and simulthread openings… hmmm I’m confused now… I opened another thread and what not. And I AM OUT OF TIME. What do we do???
Well if Germany didn’t go to war in 39’ and instead kept the pace of military spending what would happen to the economy?
Last one before I HAVE to work.
Montezuma: Nothing. The economy was not bloated in Germany. as a matter of fact Hitler did not inflate the economy simply by bloating military spending. He also initiated public works and restructured the economy. 1936 to 1938 were remarkable years as far as finances go, older people in Germany still call them ‘the good Hitler years’. He might have run into problems that many opressive adminitrations do eventually through the breakdown of the socio-cultural climate, but in 1939 there was as of yet no financial need for a war and no such need on the immediate horizon.
Sparc
Hilter was not looking to Western Europe for his lebensraum. He wanted to move people and colonize onto the Eastern plains up into Russia. He had no need to fight Britain, whom he viewed as a brother state, and he wanted to get France out of the way simply as a matter (as he saw it) of defending his policy. No one aver made any real lans for colonizing western europe, since in any case they were fairly close according to his own standard. The eastern peoples were to be oved to Siberia if not kept in slavery.
I’m guessing at some stage Munich and Frankfurt would have been reduced to radioactive puddles, as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were. Nothing Germany did after 1941 would have delayed or disrupted the Manhattan Project, short of signing a lasting peace with the United States. I can’t quite see that happening with FDR in power. Maybe if he loses the 1944 election to Thomas Dewey…
huh? Just because Hitler wasn’t running the economy doesn’t mean he doesn’t need to blame someone for the mess, especially when it will cause a political advantage. If you were a German back then, would you listen to the candidate that said long boring speeches about the complicated economic state, or the guy who said “It’s all their fault, get 'em!!” The second option is much easier, and you can vent your anger by smashing some skulls. Now, granted, not every German went for this (i’m sure a majority was against it), but enough did that problems arose.
Either that, or you are saying i can’t blame Congress for the economy because i am not a member of Congress, which is just silly.
i don’t buy that either. So the Battle of the Bulge was just the Battle to Buy Time to Kill Those Circumcisors? I thought Hitler declared war to honor his commitment to the Axis powers, for whatever reason, and he had little respect for the USA. (can’t find a cite, but he said something like"nobody is as much a coward as an American")
this site seems to believe that Hitler was a crazy sypilitic http://users.systec.com/kimel/syphilitic.html
And this site argues against the whole master plan to wipe out Jews from the beginning theory. http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/hitler/lectures/holocaust_origins.html