What would society had been like in a post WW2 Nazi Germany, if a truce had been reached?

In My Humble Opinion
1

If, in a hypothetical world, the Germany helmed by Adolf Hitler had elected to withdraw its forces and ceased its imperialist activities, and if the Allied powers had accepted some truce, what might a Nazi society had been like?

Perhaps this is an impossible hypothetical, in that the entire Nazi regime was predicated on a war footing - I’ve heard it speculated that Hitler had some condition (Parkinson’s, I think: it’s said that he would hold his right hand to stop it from shaking ) which was going to cut his life short, and the entire venture was sort of a collective suicide mission.

But, surely, others within the upper echelon envisioned the actual success of their Reich. I’m morbidly curious what that society might have been like.

Part of this is inspired by a post I read recently (and can’t find now) about education in Nazi Germany; basically, there was a heavy emphasis on physical education.

Would their nation have been like a modern Sparta, where the men are prepped for war, and the women are conditioned to believe that childbirth is their greatest achievement?

I’m guessing that the Nazis would place a huge emphasis on success at the Olympics, and would be ahead of even the Soviets in terms of doping.

I also know that the Nazis were, well, Nazis about smoking. They actually took measures to stop it; quite the feat in the 1930s. Hitler, of course, was known to be a vegetarian.

If the Nazi government continued, I’m imagining a situation similar to Singapore (where, IIRC, personal choices like chewing gum are outlawed), but perhaps even more severe. Personal conduct would be strictly regulated (maybe like the Saudis, with their religious police). I could see them using corporal punishment for minor offenses. Their cities would likely be clean, though.

And, lest there be any confusion, please know that I am not in any way trying to glorify the Nazis.

In fact, as I think of the type of society that they would likely create, I’m thinking of some combination of the worst of most oppressive regimes: Undoubtedly, a secret police would ensure that any dissent is severely punished. I’m doubting that any company could operate without regular government intervention (if only to ensure it was not undermining the state), and there wound surely be a caste system: No Jewish people would live there (and I’m guessing that most foreigners would avoid any travel there for fear of persecution), but surely they’d identify some other scapegoat for blame and retribution.

And there would be a severe “brain drain” - intellectuals would run from a place so militaristic, and there’d be a dearth of science or artistic innovation.

Your thoughts?

2

The Nazis would definitely have my head about the typo in the title. …have been like…

3

I don’t think that the regime in Nazi Germany would have been stable even if they’d managed to grind the Allied nations into a truce and sue for peace. Even aside from the reality that there was going to be a confrontation between Germany and the Soviet Union at some point (with Poland and the Baltics sandwiched in between), the Nazi government was unstable and rife with infighting, the famous and far less known efforts by multiple parties to execute a coup against Hitler and the German High Command, and Hitler’s progressive physical and mental health issues. Despite the popular portrayal of Germany as a technological innovator and industrial powerhouse, by the time of WWII it had ideologically purged many of its best scientists and engineers for being ethnically Jewish (even though many of them were not practicing) and more left in sympathy and/or fear of the harbinger of mass persecution, and its lack of domestic hydrocarbon fuel resources and materials meant that it would be constantly engaging in incursions or proxy wars over petroleum, iron ore, et cetera. It was, in short, a paper Reich that used autocracy to prosecute what ended up being a two-front war by hollowing out everything that had made 19th Century Germany such a powerful economic player, and that had allowed the recovery of post-WWI Germany to exceed that of most other European states.

If Nazi Germany had somehow been able to remain intact and retain its military and economic power, it would have become the powerhouse of Europe, dominating Central and Eastern Europe with endless border conflict with the Soviet Union. It probably would have subsumed the Low Countries, Austria, France, the Balkan States, either as vassals ‘client states’ or enveloping them into a greater superstate empire with superficial autonomy similar to the Soviet Union, while Italy, Greece, and Turkey would become allied and probably quasi-fascist (or certainly in the case of Italy, openly fascist) themselves. We can only vaguely speculate how that would have turned into a three-cornered Cold War (assuming that Nazi Germany would develop or acquire nuclear weapon and ballistic missile technology) but it seems unlikely that there would be even the relative stability of a bipolar world, particularly with regular direct conflicts between German and Soviet client states, or how Poland would be carved up. Depending upon the state of Europe before a truce, the economic recovery without a Marshall Plan would have likely left the German Reich at an economic disadvantage, although the ability to pull together the remaining industrial might and aptitudes of European nations in cooperation (which I think is a fantasy but we’re engaging in errant speculation) might have resulted in a comparable recovery.

Overall, it would be a less stable world and one in which the constant multilateral conflict would weaken all parties, but probably Germany the worst.

Stranger

4

You don’t need to postulate that much. We know what a fascist regime that avoided being wiped out in WW2 and survived as an authoritarian regime into the post-war period looks like. Franco’s Spain is exactly that. It was just a stagnant reactionary regime, left behind by its democratic neighbors, until Franco died in the 1970s.

Of course there would be no “post war” Europe as we know it in this counter factual.

5

Spain was never highly industrialized nor entrenched in Central European politics since the end of it’s reign as a global power; recovery and industrial development was hobbled by the Spanish Civil War, which is part of the reason it stayed out of WWII despite being notionally aligned with the “Rome-Berlin Axis” and even sending the “Blue Division” numbering over eighteen thousand troops to fight for Germany on the Eastern Front. Post-WWII, Francoist Spain became largely isolationist in a way that Germany never could have, so I don’t think we can draw any particular conclusions from that example.

Stranger

6

Not to fight with the OP over his own thread, but a slightly different take I always wondered about is what if Hitler had done the Munich Agreement, taken the Sudetenland by the stroke of a pen, and had quit the conquest gig right there? Now what?

To motivate this strange turn, assume Germany had a certain amount of indigestion absorbing those folks, looked at Poland which, taking a cue, was acting real indigestible by then, and said “Too hard for us. Let’s focus on perfecting the Fatherland we already have.” ?

It also helps to assume Hitler wasn’t going to descend into abject madness by 1945, but rather like Franco (or Saddam Hussein), bumbled along as a garden variety psychopathic dictator for decades after 1945. (FYI, Hitler was ~3 years older than Franco, so him living into the 1970s is quite conceivable.)

So now Germany, the rapidly re-industrializing power of the post-Depression late 1930s, spends all its efforts being beastly to its own dissidents and ethnic undesirables, and in growing its commercial export might and in being a prickly and pushy, but not invasive, neighbor to all and sundry. Rather analogous to China under Xi. Getting richer all the time, getting big for its britches, makes everybody nearby nervous (even the bigger boys), makes scary noises now and again but doesn’t really pull the trigger. Yet.

The big difference between my scenario and the OP’s is that there’s a lot less fresh hate of Nazi Germany fomented by WW-II however far it got until the OP’s truce, and Germany has not wasted a few years’ worth of men and materiel fighting and taking land.

More importantly, my version of Germany does not have large restive captive populations of non-Germans to contain and control. Yes, my version of Germany has fewer square miles than a Nazi Trucial State that included some or all of France, Belgium, Poland, etc. But it would be far more homogenous, and therefor be far more likely to wear the Nazi yoke willingly or even mostly proudly, not so much grudgingly while trying to escape it. At least as long as the Nazis kept delivering economic and ethnic pride gains to their propaganda-besotted populace.

In my tweaked scenario I could see them going the route the OP posits. Focusing on “society-building with Nazi characteristics”: martial virtues, social conformity, police-driven obedience, traditional religious and gender roles, ethnic purity powered by ethnic purges via selective deportations and mass murder, corporatist / clientelist relations between big business & high government, etc.

IOW, not too different from the MAGAt blueprint for Amerika. Nor Xi’s for China.

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Id argue a counterfactual nazi regime that had made peace, given up all their occupied territory, and somehow survived that without getting deposed by the military, would have more in common with that, than with IRL Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

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OP here. No, this is perfect: I was trying to figure out how it would be to live in Nazi land.

As I noted upthread, there is strong evidence that Hitler had Parkinson’s disease.

Considering that it showed up fairly early in his life, I don’t think he was destined to live long.

(My bold)

Did the Nazis subscribe to any religion? I thought it was more into occult stuff.

Since it’s Germany, I bet they would have tolerated Lutheranism, but would have also had some official state religion based on pseudoscience and idol worship.

9

Spain is geographically on the outskirts of Europe, and by the beginning of the 20th Century almost completely uninvolved with the European economy or the conflicts in Central Europe, and in fact was largely sidelined after the Dutch revolt and the Peace of Münster in 1648. It was in no way central to European conflicts and wasn’t on the way to or in between any any national or ethnic conflicts aside from the mostly internal Basque region. Germany, on the other hand, is a multi-ethnic state that was mushed together out of various polities, was the center of the Holy Roman Empire, and was right in the the middle of every conflict in mid-19th to 20th Century conflict. There is really no way that Germany could be isolationist, and is unlikely that it could even maintain neutrality the way Austria did post-WWII.

Stranger

10

As you suggest, IMO they’d develop a pet state religion. Akin to Putin’s relationship with Eastern Orthodoxy. Maybe start from Lutheranism, maybe some pagan pseudo-Aryan Druid nonsense.

Ultimately, from the Nazi’s POV, it’s not about god or faith or details of practice. It’s about building another source of teaching conformity as a virtue from childhood and another channel for delivering top-down thinking to the proles. And a vehicle for asserting the unique cultural and ethnic glory it is to be Nazi Aryan that no others may aspire to.


And as to Hitler’s Parkinson’s, my take was if we’re going to magic-wand away (most of) WW-II, disappearing his Parkinson’s too is small beer. :slight_smile:

Hitler ran the real Nazi Germany for only 12 years, and only 7 of them were when they really got rolling. He might have lived with Parkinson’s a few more years had he not ended it in the bunker. But he would not have been an effective dictator during much of those final infirm years. Parkinson’s treatments are still pretty ineffective here in 2023. Early 1950s? Nada.

All dictatorships struggle to survive leadership turnover. IMO “successful” dictatorships demand long-lived leaders who’re vigorous to near their end. So for me, Hitler needs to be Parkinson’s-free for us to have a long- and vigorous-enough regime to really remake German society into Nazi society.

Bottom line: I fully agree with your real-world objections. But while we’re playing fiction here I’ll gracefully sidestep them.

11

The fascists did take over Spain in the late 1930s, so at least we know exactly what that’s like. Not much to add, except that it is a black mark on Spanish history. (Once I met a dude who fought in the Spanish civil war—for the fascists! They were paying a couple of pesetas more per week than you made working in a factory.) Also, Spain is still not a republic today, and has various political problems (what country does not?), but could be worse, obviously.

12

I’m more curious if the July 20th Plot had succeeded in killing Hitler, but Himmler or Goering had taken over immediately after. Both of them were already musing about an armed ceasefire with the Western allies in order to focus on the Eastern Front. If somehow by some magic the Western Allies agree to a ceasefire, while the Soviet Union maybe in this alternative reality had taken more losses in their war than in real life also pauses their offenses, what happens?

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No he wasn’t.

He sometimes had short periods when he stopped eating meat on the advice of his quack doctors. But he was never a vegetarian.

14

I’ve thought about this counter factual too. But surely the agreement of the western allies isn’t really needed? If the Germans simply don’t contest the western front (or offer minimal resistance while the almost all the western armies relocate to the eastern front then lay down their arms.) What happens?

15

Thanks for enlightening me.

Wasn’t he really gassy? Not just the fuhrer, but the farter, too? Does that account for the quack nutrition advice?

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The point of this thread is NOT alternative geopolitics.

It’s life inside Germany under a “successful” long term Nazi regime.

It’s 1955 or 1967. You’re German. Hitler is still in charge. What is your life like?

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Other way around, possibly. His quack advised him to eat only vegetables for a period, and this caused severe flatulence.

18

So you’re telling me there is truth in parody?

19

Back to the original question: given its (unlikely) premise, I could imagine daily life for ordinary citizens being rather like what developed in East Germany.

If you kept your head down, concentrated on your job and your home life, joined in the expected public/communal activities and events (even if unenthusiastically), knew what not to talk about, had little or no contact with foreigners and foreign media, accepted that you could never be sure which of your friends and family might be reporting on you - then you were OK. I’d imagine life might be economically better in an undivided Germany than it was for a good few years in Eadt Germany, though I’d guess a post-Hitler Germany would still be aiming at a more autarkic than globalised economy.

20

The Nazi’s completed that ginormous planned cultural center, or whatever it was. They actually support science and engineering, as long as it isn’t “decadent science”, or they can handwave it away. So an average German might think they were free to think and do what they want. People still are being arrested by the secret police, but not to the extent of Argentina in the Dirty War.

German cars will be the best in the world. German commercial transports will have jet engines before anyone. Unfortunately, the national carrier won’t be Lufthansa, but probably LuftReich, and the planes will all have giant swastikas on their tails.

The German film (and later, television) industry will be large. (If you’ve ever seen the 1943 German film Titanic, you can see they had talent. And that was made during the war! Of course, it also had a strong pro-German subtext.)

I’m not sure any free-world countries will trade all that much at first, so consumer goods will be a lot like the Soviet Union. No one has Levis, and everyone wears hats. :slight_smile:

Grocery stores will be well stocked, unlike the USSR, but ethic foods will be virtually non-existent. Probably couldn’t even get decent pizza.

Women in the workforce will lag behind all other democratic countries.

The British will still invade, but with pop music. German teens will be listening to The Beatles. No amount of gestapo can stop that.