Or some similarly named version thereof:
Well, Nasty’s father-in-law DID invent World War II.
There is no way the Third Reich would have allowed the sort of scene in Hamburg that essentially birthed the Beatles’ stagecraft and sound. In this alternate timeline, Neil Sedaka would still be dominating the charts in the late 1960s.
Instead it would be in Paris. Or Madrid. If we can suppose Hitler lived, we can propose Franco died (and stayed dead).
Still?
Well, we have lots of good information about what daily life was like in Nazi Germany between 1933-1939, and I suspect life in this hypothetical will be the same, just more of it. the early period was about establishing the “norms” of Nazi society. After that, it’s mostly about maintaining those norms in the face of any opposition.
I suspect a Nazi regime that survived into the second half of the 20th Century would be obsessed with human genetics. Resources formerly devoted to war would be diverted to research and applications in cloning and eugenics entirely uncoupled from any ethical concerns. Reproductive autonomy would practically be nonexistent.
This just in. Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
This is the only realistist unreal scenario because by the time Germany had started on a rampage, there just wasn’t any way that the Allies would have let them stay around.
Anyway, the problem both with Nazi Germany and fanatical Japan prior and during the war was that the cultures were such that there were no brakes, they would just keep attacking and attacking until they crashed and burned.
It’s like an out-of-control drunk or addict and for them to not wind up dead or prison, something drastic has to change.
That would fundamentally change the dynamics of the whole culture, and then it’s hard to imagine what would happen.
It’s your take on this question, so you’re free to frame it as you wish. But Hitler’s focus was always on Russia. We wanted to avoid war with the west so he could focus on the East. So any scenario that runs counter to this is diametrically opposed to the central facts as they were.
As others have pointed out, the very obsessions of Hitler will drive him towards the same path. One possibility might have been:
- Chamberlain is more lenient than historically and France is in more political instability: there is no assurance given to Poland in march '39 after the Czechs are crushed.
- When Stalin sign the treaty in august '39 with Ribbentrop, the Allies are cowed into fear and plan to rearm, but only in a defensive stance.
- in september '39, Poland is devastated from both sides, and quickly disappear. No reaction from the Allies.
- After Stalin attacks Finland in november '39,and subsequent peace in april '40, the USSR is seen as a bigger threat than Germany.
- in june '40, when Stalin attempt to coerce Romania and the Baltic states, Hitler intervenes and denounce the pact. Germany quickly allies with Hungary, Romania and the Balts (and also the Finns).
- without the Atlantic front, nor the air front, and USSR having not the help of the Lend-lease, Germany manage to reach far enough in the USSR to either have a peace, or settle a stable frontier.
- A cold war is in place between the Reich and the Allies, neither side is willing it to becoming hot.
- Life is as “normal” in the Reich as it was in the '30s: segregationist, militaristic, with an absolute control of the Party on every aspect of the life. The SS will probably be everywhere (police, science, bureaucracy). Mass deportations and genocide in the East are not publicly known, except for those directly appliqued. Relation with the rest of the world range from tense ( the Allies) to cordial (Italy, Japan, Argentina)
Even within the premise that the domestic life under a post-WWII Nazi-controlled Germany is somehow disconnected from the geopolitics of Europe, I think the notion of a “‘successful’ long term Nazi regime” it itself questionable. There were multiple heirs apparent to Adolf Hitler (who was almost certainly not going to live into the 1960s regardless of care) but they were neither capable of long term collaboration nor had really interest in the continuation of the Nazi ‘Third Reich’ regime for its own case. Save for Goebbels and maybe Dönitz, most of even the Nazi party leaders and German High Command were opportunists, technocrats and political hangers-on who were more often than not inept and avaricious, seeing their participating in the Nazi movement as a way of enriching themselves and engaging in some more-than-casual anti-Semitism (an attitude that was in no way limited to Germans and was in fact pervasive throughout Europe; in fact, Germany had such a large population of Jews specifically because of their previous tolerance for religious difference).
I suppose one could conjecture a continuation of the highly codified domestic model focusing on women being brood mares to produce successively more ‘Aryan’ children and men running a progressively more sophisticated technocracy where efficiency is the key metric of performance. However, the reality is that while Germany of the Nazi era put a lot of money into applied research, and specifically into warfare (to little benefit; the Agreggat program that produced the V-2 cost a phenomenal amount of money per person killed, and was almost exclusively a terror weapon unusable against force, and their various jet aircraft developments were too far ahead of the curve to be produced in scale for the manufacturing technology of the day) but very little into basic research and almost nothing into biosciences, nuclear engineering, or communication technologies that would be the backbone of post-WWII Western technology. Their ideas in eugenics could be charitably described as naive and driven by ideology instead of fact; their energy research was focused on 1920s technologies, and they were overall dependent upon access to outside research for most of the non-rocket and aeronautical advances made in the Nazi era because Hitler et al didn’t see the point in investing in non-warfare related science and because they also purged their universities of most intellectuals; not only Jews but anyone who wouldn’t openly aligned with Nazi ideals. A Nazi German domestic life circa 1960 would have looked like a facade of * Vater weiß es am Besten* with a crumbling foundation.
Stranger
So as somebody said upthread, about like contemporary East Germany, but with different iconography and a different line of BS to supposedly justify the wide-ranging repression. But probably with some more economic wealth & velocity of money.
If you were lucky enough not to have a handicapped child.
I don’t know that I’d count on that. Virtually all of Germany’s wealth is reliant upon imported material and energy resources, and the financial and infrastructure services that it provides to other nations; it does have a substantial amount of domestic coal but virtually all fuel-grade petroleum was expended early in the war effort, hence the thrust to capture the oil fields of what is now Azerbaijan (the Baku fields). An isolationist, Nazi-ruled Germany is going to be poor and getting poorer all the time because their development is predicated on mostly external resources.
Stranger
You are familiar with the rearming that had occurred prior to ’39?
How are the Allied cowed into fear? Why are only planning a defensive stance?
Unfortunately, a lot of alt-history scenarios depend on a long series of torturous, implausible and historically impossible conditions to get a specific result that just would not happen otherwise.
How could it be possible that the USSR in 1940 would been seen as a bigger threat than Nazi German?
Besides the hand waving away of all the historical reasons, just look at a map.
None of this makes any kind of sense at all.
Well, the OP was asking for a still Hitler-driven Germany. That requires a lot of tortuous events.
Else, the Reich is crushed as historically (or maybe a little slower or faster), having been incapable of preparing for the war, and using efficiently its resources during the war itself.
Robert Harris postulated a 1964 Reich in Fatherland. It diverges from the OP in that Germany defeated the Soviet Union (by cutting off their supply of Caucasus oil) and starved England into submission (by identifying that Enigma was compromised). After that, the US bailed on Europe to concentrate on Japan. So when the novel opens the Reich has absorbed Poland, the Balkans and Russia west of the Urals, and corralled most of the rest of Europe (except for Switzerland) into a “European Community” that it dominates. There’s still a Vietnam-like military action going on along the Urals against what’s left of the Soviet Union, which is more-or-less openly backed by the US. So there’s Cold War, just with different players.
As for the domestic front, some of the points raised upthread are present. Some random items:
- Hitler and Goebbels are still alive. Goering and Himmler are not.
- Reinhard Heydrich survived his assassination attempt; he’s in charge of all security services and is Hitler’s heir presumptive.
- The Gestapo is very much active, and has dossiers on everyone and informers everywhere someone could be overheard expressing any kind of thought. Wiretapping and mail interception are routine (any foreigner with a phone should assume it’s tapped).
- The Nacht und Nebel (“Night and Fog”) decree providing for the extrajudicial apprehension and disappearance of suspected resistance workers and political activists is still in place. This applies to the Nuremberg laws as well: the Kriminalpolizei have an entire section devoted to tracking down suspected miscegenation.
- Officially, the Jews have been “relocated to the East” and anyone with the intelligence that God gave mayonnaise leaves it at that.
- At least on the surface, the economy is in pretty good shape, bolstered by imports from the countries under the Reich’s domination and low-level work performed by “cretins” from Eastern Europe. But there are signs it’s beginning to fray around the edges, in large part due to military spending.
- In spite of the Gestapo, discontent with the status quo is present and growing, especially among the young (despite Goebbels’ best efforts, the human and economic cost of the war in the East can’t be suppressed completely). The White Rose has been reborn, jeans are increasingly popular, and what one newspaper describes as the “pernicious negroid (sic) wailings” of a Liverpool band have drawn enthusiastic audiences in Hamburg.
Granted, Fatherland is an alt-history work of fiction. But I’ve read several of Harris’s books, and he does seem to be thorough in his research. So take the above for what you will, but it does seem to hang together.
I disagree: Hamburg has been the main port for importing bananas worldwide for over a 100 years. I present you the Afrikanische Frucht Kompagnie. It was no coincidence that East Germans devoured bananas when the wall fell. And the jokes wrote themselves:
And concerning pizza, Germany would have needed Gastarbeiter and Italy, being a friendly fascist regime, would have supplied them. Same thing as what really happened, probably around the same time: '50s and '60s at the very latest.
Good!
Don’t forget Spain! Lloret de Mar would be called Yorett von Meer, Mallorca (or was it Menorca) MEINorca.
I agree with most of what you said upthread, but this point is not correct IMO: after a truce in the West they probably would have gotten Baku, and then perhaps Persia, which would have broken the truce. Then all bets are off again and we start a new war.
I agree with the broad analysis here too.
So coming back to the OPs question: Nazi Germany post truce, after defeating the Soviet Union, twenty years later would be a lot like the USA if you take all the negative aspects of US-society (racism, imperialism, inequality, monopolies…) and raise them to the n-th power, with more dirigisme from the state, more social security (Bismark’s idea!) for the compliant masses. Woe you if you are not compliant! There would be a privileged caste that would enjoy more freedoms and luxury than the rest. And rampant hypocrisy.
Like Hungary today too, but much much much worse. Except for those privileged enough.
Or like China, the Nazi party playing the role of the CCP.
“The West” might be willing to give up Baku but I highly doubt the Soviets would be in agreement with this arrangement. For Germany to take Persia (i.e. modern Iran) it would have to take Turkey (which was complicit in deportation of thousands of Jews but was officially neutral and unlikely to be a subservient ally to a post-WWII Nazi Germany) as well as Transjordan, the Mandate of Syria, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq. The notion that the Allied powers would agree to such an arrangement in a truce beggars belief; Germany would be in conflict long before it got to Iran, and in fact it was the threat of a German takeover of Iran that created a “pre-alliance” agreement for the Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran in 1941.
Of course, all of this assumes that that Germany isn’t pushed back to its pre-1939 boarders, essentially resetting to the status as of the Munich Agreement where Germany maintains its annexation of Czechoslovakia, occupation of the Rhinelands, and the defacto merger of Austria with the Anschluss but gives up non-Rhine France, the Balkans, the Low Countries, et cetera. (The Soviets might have agreed to a carve-up of Poland and Lithuania, or turning them into ‘neutral’ buffer territories without established armed forces to be jointly overseen.) I don’t think there could have been a truce with Germany being allowed to keep more territory because it would be quite apparent that the Germans would try again to expand as soon as they could rebuild their industrial base and military forces.
Stranger