Yes, I agree that this is all very hypothetical. The sentence I quote reminds me of the present situation wrt Russia in Ukraine, and I don’t know how this is going to end either. Going back 80 years and not knowing the details of the truce that wasn’t does not make it easier.
Not necessarily: If Germany had taken Baku it would have a direct border with Persia East of all the countries you mention. But I also wrote that this invasion would have broken whatever truce was agreed between Germany and Britain/USA. You say it “beggars belief”, I say that Nazi Germany was a militaristic nation, probably incapable of wielding peace.
Even within the hypothetical of a Nazi Germany that successfully sues for peace, I think we have to posit some set of conditions that would plausibly be accepted by the Allied powers (and not instantly rejected by powerful neutral parties like Turkey or Sweden). A return to German-controlled borders circa the Munich Agreement seems likely agreeable to all parties (well, except the Czech government, although the Ethnic Sudeten Germans were mostly in favor), and it was in everyones’ interest to blunt Poland, but letting Germany keep any part of the British controlled ‘Mandates’ in the Levant, or the Soviets acceeding to giving up any part of the Transcaucasus is a non-starter. And without this, Germany is largely dependent upon imports for oil and gas, which means it is either getting poorer (as other nations exploit it), or more aggressive militarily, or likely both.
I fully agree with your last statement (bolded for emphasis), which is why I don’t think a lasting truce or an isolationist Germany is really plausible. The rise of the Nazi (NSDAP) party in Germany was always predicated on a combination of fear of immigrants and ‘non-Aryans’, expansionist rhetoric based upon the exceptionalism of the Deutsch Volk with their superior Teutonic blood (which was complete nonsense), and the ‘Big Lie’ that Germany had victory snatched from it in First World War by subversive elements in the government and a grand conspiracy of Jewish bankers and Communist intellectuals. (Hmm…why does this sound familiar…) Expansionism, persecution, and war was always the direction that the Nazi party was going, and it really had no reason to exist in their absence. It was not a ‘normal’ political party that governed by consensus and compromise, and in fact never enjoyed wide popularity until 1930, and then largely dominated the divisive political landscape until the March 1933 elections, which were the last federal elections held until the end of the Nazi regime (and all other political parties were banned in November 1933, so there was no electoral dissent or formal political opposition possible).
So, I don’t really think a stable Nazi party in a post-WWII period of truce is realistic. The party would either have to continue to rile up Germans with the same hypoernationalistic rhetoric that brought them to war after less than a generation from the previous destructive conflict, which at some point is going to mean invading or provoking someone into a fight, or mediate those impulses by allowing more moderate elements and becoming an insular autocratic regime presiding over a decaying Fascist empire, surrounded by and doing business with nations dedicated to limiting its military and economic power and probably taking advantage of it by overcharging for all resources and goods it would have to import. Given how Germans viewed themselves and the German place in the world order (even if they didn’t agree with Nazism or Hitler) I don’t think peace was ever an option for a Nazi-led Germany.
Bolding mine! I perhaps mistakenly assumed that the premise was a truce between Nazi Germany and the West, so that Nazi Germany could wage war against the Soviet Union, conquer Baku, get the Caspian oil, and win in the East.
Then I assumed they would go on to Persia, them being a militaristic society with imperial ambitions, and the whole WWII starting anew. If the premise is a truce with the Soviet Union too, then nothing makes any sense: no way Nazi Germany would have accepted that. Their ideology was unambiguous: first exterminate the Jews, then enslave the Slavs. Killing a lot of them is a bonus, but not necessarily exterminate them all. Just enough to make them toe the line and be very, very afraid and submissive for ever and ever.
But if my assumption is right and the OP meant it as i understood it, then Germany gets a truce in the West and wins in the East and has oil. And then – they can’t avoid it, it’s in their ideological genes – the truce breaks down. I postulate it would break down over Persia, but there are many other possibilities.
Apart from the thing about Russia being included in the postulated truce or not I think we don’t disagree at all. Our imagination just takes a couple of different turns here and there, all of them imaginary.
Ah, got it. In that case…I don’t think a truce is even possible. Not that the Western allies gave a fig about Soviet Russia or the Balkans, but the strategic advantages that would give an expansionist Nazi Germany were just too obvious, and Hitler (or his successor) was just too likely to pursue war with France and Great Britain (and thus the United States) as soon as it rebuilt stocks of materiel.
Now, I think a more plausible scheme is the US electing a more isolationist President and Congress, which would agree with Nazi Germany to cut a dividing line through the 30° W meridian, with everything to the east being the province of whomever dominates Europe, and everything to the west is ‘American’, i.e. under the US sphere of influence. Europe becomes a polyglot trans-German empire managed from the top down, Britain is left to its own devices to collapse into irrelevance as the single remaining European monarchy without much of an empire left to milk, and globalization as we know it today never develops. Society in German-dominated Europe is autocratic but somewhat moderated by its multi-ethnic composition that never really becomes German, and “The Holocaust” is a scarcely remembered campaign lost in a multitude of major and minor ethnic persecutions. Eventually, it comes crumbling down due to mismanagement by ‘elder statesmen’ in their dotage unwilling to admit that their ideological notions don’t really function as an economic system. In other words, very similar to what actually happened to the Soviet Union, circa 1990, except without a functional Western Europe to buffer the collapse or an international market on which to sell natural resources.
That is what I meant with “Our imagination just takes a couple of different turns here and there, all of them imaginary.” What you write is completely plausible for me.
What you write is completely plausible for me.