And what would the sound of music be like?
There would be no Sound of Music. !!!
The von Trapps would never have had to sing for money and Julie Andrews would not have dropped by and… what?
I think it would have been better-Germany would have learned 9the hard way) that having colonies didn’t pay off. Controlling a bitter and rebellious French population would have been a huge burden-I think the Germans would avoid imposing a huge reparations burden on France.
Or a humilating peace from Russia just a few months before their own defeat in the West. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was more draconian than the Treaty of Versailles. So there’s no reason to think the Germans would have been any more magnanimous in victory than the Allies were. You could easily have ended up with right-wing revisionist parties taking over France and Russia.
Other potential problem areas that would remain would be the faltering Austrian and Ottoman Empires, Japanese expansionism, and resentment in Italy and Spain over their fall from great power status. Any of these could have triggered another world war.
No “Hogan’s Heros” ?
Count me out.
This is all really interesting but it’s completely irrelevant. How you don’t “get” German humiliation after World War I is baffling. There’s nothing to get. It is fact. Germans felt humiliated by Versailles; that is absolutely true. Read up on a history of Germany in the inter-war years; many Germans had a strong feeling of humiliation and national betrayal. You may not like it, you may think they were wrong or “Hypcritical,” but with regards to the OP’s question it doesn’t matter. What matters is that that sentiment DID exist as the result of Versailles, and that sentiment was the political linchpin for the ascendancy of the National Socialist Party.
Had Germany won, Versailles doesn’t happen, the humiliation doesn’t happen, and the Nazis don’t happen. History would be totally different.
If Germany had won, the horrors we know would not have happened - but there may have been worse horrors.
It could be considered almost providential that WW2 happened when it did - if something similar happened 20 years later, between say imperial Germany and imperial Russia, both sides may well have had nukes …
The Ottoman Empire would have survived and Israel might never have been created.
Nuclear weapons were originally developed as part of a massive (and tremendously expensive) effort by the largest economy on the planet in response to a desperate specific need. Why would Imperial Germany/Imperial Russia invest that kind of time/money in the absence of the pressures of WWII?
Hell, even GIVEN the pressures of WWII neither country seriously attempted to develop atomic weapons.
I think it would depend on how Germany won, especially how quickly they won. If they won the war in 1915 that would be a lot different than had they won in 1918. As another poster up thread said, however, I think there are simply too many variables to make even an educated guess as to what the outcome would be. You’d have to make a number of assumptions like would the Ottoman empire go completely belly up? When and how would Germany ‘win’, and what would that mean? Would they occupy France or would there simply be an armistice? What would happen in the Balkins? How about Russia? What would be the post war relationship with America? Would America have gotten involved and then been on the losing side? What would the British involvement have been, and what effect would this have on their empire? Would Germany et al occupy parts of the British empire? Would the British have to cede some of their empire as part of a peace settlement?
And so on.
-XT
If Hitler had not been in power, the VW beetle might never have been created. If the beetle hadn’t come along, the microbus wouldn’t have been developed. Won’t someone think of the hippies?
And besides all that, what if fish had tits?
They would call it fish and tits then, I suppose…and they would probably be pretty popular.
-XT
I’d say the most likely scenario would be Britain deciding to remain neutral (they weren’t formally bound by treaty - it was more of a diplomatic understanding). The issue of whether or not to declare war was discussed by the British cabinet, so it was at least an open question.
Let’s then assume that with British neutrality, the Germans are a little more agressive in their 1914 offensive and they pull it off (it was a near thing historically). They capture Paris and France asks for an armistice. In the east, Russia loses the early campaigns (as they historically did) and without allies in the west, they also seek an armistice. The war’s over and everyone’s home by Christmas.
Belgium becomes a German protectorate (with maybe a couple of French provinces added). Poland (and maybe Finland and Lithuania) is broken off from Russia and also becomes a German protectorate. Germany might also ask for a few colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Austria annexes Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania. Romania becomes an Austrian protectorate. France turns bitter and becomes more radicalized in the twenties and thirties. Russia goes through another period of unrest like 1905 and emerges even more unsteady. The Ottoman Empire toddles along. Britain decides to stay out of European affairs and stick with its overseas Empire. The United States keeps sleeping. Japan looks around and goes hmmm.
All told, I don’t think this scenario is too incredible.
Because if a great power knows or suspects it is possible, it will make the effort - albet perhaps not as urgently - even though it is vastly expensive.
Sort of like why the Soviets developed the bomb after WW2 was over.
By the 1940s, the knowledge of physics necessary was definitely “in the air”. I am guessing that the chances of it not developing within 20 years in some hypothetical alternate universe (barring some major dislocation) approach zero.
Neither Germany nor Russia developed the bomb during WW2 for the primary reasons (1) that Germany’s physics tech was years behind where it ought to have been because of Hitler’s oppressions against German scientists who were Jewish - which included guys like Einstien, who initially brought the possibility of a bomb to the attention of the American President - (2) Russia’s science base was not nearly as developed (it later developed a bomb helped immensely by spying on the US) and (3) the two countries were locked in a life-or-death struggle with each other, leaving nothing to spare for expensive projects like that (though Hitler did waste lots of resources on “superweapons” of dubious utility nonetheless).
I am assuming an Imperial Germany would not have the same trajectory. In this universe, Einstien and the other physicists stay in greater Germany, are the elite of the German scientific establishment, and as patriotic greater Germans view Imperial Russia as the enemy. Germany develops the bomb first, perhaps some years after it was developed in our universe, and Russia, using spies, soon after in response.
In that case, and depending on the terms that France and Russia had to swallow for the armistice I’d say that it would be unlikely to spawn a full blown world war or the communist revolution in Russia as happened historically. Eventually the Ottoman empire probably would break up, but it would be under completely different circumstances.
Most likely Germany would have been more disposed to expanding their colonial empire, and this might have brought them into confrontation with the Brits and possibly the US at some future point. Also, I’m not sure about what would have happened with Austria/Hungary and the Balkins…that situation would still be brewing away. The Middle East would probably look a LOT different as well, since once the Ottoman empire started breaking up it might have broken along tribal lines with a more organic composition…or it could have been part of a land grab between Germany and the Brits (instead of France and the Brits).
The Jewish ‘problem’ would still be unresolved in Europe and Germany, and I can still see pogroms going on…just not the wide scale genocide that actually happened. Also, I’m thinking that the process of Jews moving to the ME might have continued, but there could be a serious snag if (assuming the Ottoman empire started to disintegrate) the Germans decided to make or impose territorial claims in the ME (and if the Brits contested or made alternative claims).
Wild cards. Would the Great Depression still have happened? After all, if the US stayed neutral it would have changed our own manufacturing stance…and if the war in Europe was over quickly they may have been more stable. By the same token, if the war was over quickly in Europe that would mean that a lot of the materials and ability for war would still exist…and the Europeans might not have learned the lessons they learned and still be raring for more.
All told, however, I think that, depending on how you define ‘better’, the world probably would have suffered less devastation and less deaths had Germany won, at least in the short term. I think that what we’d have today is a world more dominated by Europe, with perhaps a multi-polar super power structure between Europe (or several European powers) and the US, with the dynamic being democracy verse imperialism, instead of democracy vs communism during the cold war era.
-XT
Anyone notice that Qin Shi Huangdi, as usual, is not participating in the thread he started?
shrug Maybe he’s just following along and doesn’t know much about WWI? It’s an interesting question, whether or not the OP comes back and participates.
-XT
Here is my scenerio from an old thread:
Regarding the atomic bomb, although actually producing an atomic bomb took an enormous effort, a critical part of the effort were the comparitively easy experiments confirming that it was possible in principle. In our history, the early steps starting with the discovery of fission and leading to the first nuclear “pile” took place under a self-censorship due to the imminent outbreak of war and the loathing that much of the international physics community had for Nazi Germany. If how to build a self-sustaining fission reactor was public knowledge and THEN war broke out, I think whatever powers had the means to do so would have immediately attempted to build fission bombs.
Yup, though I think that the great powers would look into it before the existence of any war, once the knowledge that it’s possible comes to their attention.
This is why I said upthread that WW2 can be seen as almost providential: it provided the ‘scare’ necessary for over a half-century of peace, demonstrated the horror of nuclear warfare while only two cities got nuked.
In my theoretical scenario, an Imperial Germany eventually faces off against a British Empire, a ‘humiliated’ France and an Imperial Russia - much like the lead-up to WW1; only this happens over a longer period of time - say around 1960 (because France is far weaker in relation to Germany than IRL Germany was in relation to France). In a multipolar world, not scared off of war and unfamiliar first-hand with the horrors of nukes, all parties end up using them on each other … leading to near-apocalyptic results. Much of Europe is rendered uninhabitable, the air is poisioned with fallout; humanity survives in much reduced numbers and circumstances.
Little Nemo, your scenario sounds reasonable. Note that with no communist revolution in Russia, the Communists in China would have had a much harder time. China could have ended up carved into pieces, like, say, a separate Manchuria (puppet of Japan), a north China nominally ruled by a Ching emperor that was actually a protectorate of Japan, a south China ruled by the Kuomintang, and a few western Communist states.
I could also imagine Germany demanding and getting French Indochina after the war, in much the way France got Germany’s China holdings in real life. They would also hold a lot of influence over the Dutch East Indies due to their domination of the Netherlands.
Russia would be another sick man of Europe, with everyone trying to prop up the tsar. For balance of power reasons, I could see Britain and the US cooperating with the KMT, albeit with a lot of mutual suspicion. Japan’s oil needs might be met sufficiently so as to avoid further war in Asia.