[RIGHT]“In a real fourth reich you’ll be the first to go” — Jello Biafra[/RIGHT]
In the real world, the SS was streets ahead of the SA, Röhm, and the Strasser brothers, leading to a Fascist Nazi party with Hitler and his SS in charge and everyone knows the rest.
What if the big purge (known as the Night of the Long Knives (a.k.a. the Röhm-Putsch, or Operation Hummingbird (German: Aktion Kolibri))) that killed the Strassers, Röhm, his SA, and all the rest of the working-class anti-Hitler Socialist Nazis had destroyed the SS/pro-Hitler/Fascist faction instead? Would this have prevented the Second World War?
(Hey, this could be more interesting than Yet Another “How The Man in the High Castle Could Have Happened, For Real This Time” Thread.)
Rohm was hoping to eclipse Hitler, make the SA the new German Army, become a military dictator and the new conquering Napoleon. His rise to power would not have prevented war.
Right. I read a little about this on Wikipedia while writing the article and … yeah. I really don’t know how much this aspect could have come to prominence even if we do accept my basic revised timeline.
This certainly sounds like a start. Given the anti-Bolshevik policies of the Strassers, it also seems like they would have aimed at the USSR. The remaining questions, then, are whether the SA!Nazis would have committed the Holocaust and whether they would have felt a need to invade France and the UK as well.
Then probably the Nazis would have disappeared and another of the far right wing parties would have become dominant.
You have to remember WHY Rohm had to die. Hitler had enough political support to become Chancellor, but the people who really ran things in Germany- the military and the industrialists, weren’t having any of this Rohm guy and his populism. They were the ones who laid down the law that Rohm had to go. Also, Rohm was a homosexual, which made him more personally unpopular back in the oldy days when everyone wasn’t cool with that.
Also, remember that the political popularity that the Nazis enjoyed was because of Hitler himself. Rohm was shocked that Hitler turned against him.
Probably still would have been a war because the issues of the previous one hadn’t been resolved.
A Nazi party headed by Rohm and the SA would probably have more closely resembled Mussolini’s Fascists- right wing to be sure, but more quasi-Socialist in the sense of being willing to impound or nationalize industry.
The Army, whose officer corps despised Rohm, would have quickly prevailed upon Hindenburg to declare martial law. The SA would not have been allowed to assume power, and I suspect that they lacked the public support and organizational strength to take it.
Rule by a military junta would probably have meant rule by committee, so my guess is that Germany would have been less aggressively expansionist.
I don’t see why the SA-led Nazi party wouldn’t have gone forward with the Holocaust, or some similar program. Radical anti-semitism was part of the party platform right from the 1920s, and the SA were as committed to that as anyone. Rohm and the Strassers were less competent than Hitler (after all, they lost), but they weren’t any less evil.
They probably would have done something to the Jews, but I doubt it would have gone as far as outright genocide. More likely they would have tried to deport them. (To where, I don’t know.) Or they would have just been second class citizens living in ghettos. A lot of them probably would have died of starvation and disease. But the idea of actively exterminating the Jews seems to have been Hitler’s and his close advisors Himmler and Eichmann.
My impression was that they were more shit-kicking skinhead types, who would have been satisfied with beating up and murdering those they disliked, taking huge bribes, partying it up, and generally lording it over their enemies. If you were a Jew it would be bad for you - having skinheads steal your stuff and beat you up would be a common hazard.
Planning a conquest of Europe or the sort of coldly calculated extermination of whole sub-groups was I think simply beyond them.
My prediction is that, had they won, their victory would be ephemeral, and the Nazi party a mere dire footnote to the history of the 1930s. It was the Nazis lead by Hitler and the SS who created the truly abomitable brew of ideology and (apparent) order and ambition that made further Nazi horrors possible.
The Nazis wanted to deport the Jews to Madagascar, but the war made that impossible.
The army’s hatred of the SA was what made the night of the long knives possible. If the SA takes out the SS then the army takes out the SA. Probably a win win scenario with either the Bolsheviks or the army taking over.
Not sure why people assume the KPD would win out - the Richsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold was a quarter of a million strong, and loyal to the SPD. I don’t think the Rotfrontkampferbund ever got that large.
And the military had held its nose and worked with the SPD before.
Hitler turned against the SA as the price for making peace with the Army. If he hadn’t don it or if the SA had won, the Army would have turned against the Nazis.
Theoretically, the SA might have won such a war. While the Army was better armed and better trained, the SA was much larger numerically (this was the main reason the Army felt threatened by the SA). But I think the numerical advantage would have faded if it came to a civil war. Strasser and Roehm didn’t have the ruthlessness Hitler and Himmler did - they would have backed away from a confrontation and that would have given the Army the upper hand.