Suppose Hitler had been killed in WWI and never had a political career. Would there still have been another world war? (And by world war, I’m talking about a war that’s at least as big as WWI. Wars between two or three countries don’t count for purposes of this debate.)
In my opinion, no. Hitler, as an individual, was a necessary factor. Nobody else in Germany would have taken Hitler’s place and been able to lead Germany into a war against France, Britain, Russia, and America. Most potential German leaders would have been overthrown if they had suggested starting another war against any one of those countries.
Other dictators, like Stalin or Mussolini or Franco or Tojo wouldn’t have taken the risks Hitler jumped into. They were willing to attack a neighboring country when it was weak and looked like an easy conquest but they would have hesitated before starting another general war.
Depends how, and if the Germans build themselves back up. Its not impossible Soviets attack Poland alone and start designs on Germany eventually finding themselves in a war with Germany, France and UK.
Also do the Japanese attack the US, UK and Netherlands without WW2 already started? Tojo either starts Pacific theatre or gives up all the gains they made.
Well Japan invaded China in 1937 so well before Germany started anything.
The USSR invaded Finland shortly after Germany invaded Poland. Poland being invaded may have given Stalin some political cover but regardless I think it shows Stalin had designs on more territory and probably would have started some shit after a few years of building his military.
Would that have been enough to suck Europe and the US into war? Hard to say but the US probably would not be happy with Japanese control of the Pacific and Great Britain and France and Germany (sans Hitler) probably would not be happy with Soviet land grabs.
As I said in the other thread, I don’t think Stalin would have started a war on his own initiative. Like Mussolini, he waited until Hitler started a war and then joined what appeared to be the winning side. Hitler was a Scut Farkus; Stalin and Mussolini were Grover Dills.
Mussolini might have been aggressive enough to start a European War: he started a fight with Ethiopia, Albania, Greece, Libya. He was just very incompetent in how he fought most of them. Would it have sucked the rest of the world in? Probably not. The Greeks had already expelled him from Greece, and may well have done so in Albania if given free rein, and his invasion of Libya went poorly. None of this required the mobilization of Europe, never mind America. I think sans Germany, you’d have needed a naval victory or two to crush Mussolini’s Med aspirations entirely, and this was something that Adm. Cunningham, Somerfield, hell, Darlan, would have been able to achieve without involving the rest of the world.
Japan was going to spar regardless of what happened in Europe. They needed oil for their empire and, post-embargo, the US wasn’t going to give them any. The US wasn’t going to sell oil unless they backed off of China, and that wasn’t going to happen. No other sources for them then besides the East Indies, so to war they were going to go.
All that said, I wonder just how expansionist Stalin would have been, without Hitler? He certainly devoured a good chunk of Finland, the Baltics, Besserabia, and half of Finland. Would he have stopped there, or been merely content with fomenting rot within the West?
Stalin may have moved faster because Germany invaded Poland but I think Stalin had designs on places other than the USSR. Didn’t he and Hitler make a secret pact to divvy up eastern Europe and stay out of each other’s hair (I forget the details)?
The Soviet military was in a shambles around that time and Stalin needed to buy time to get things sorted (of course he was a major cause of the military being a shambles). But given time Stalin would improve it.
After that I don’t think he’d do a Hitler and outright invade but he’d manufacture a casus belli to suit his needs.
I think it’s safe to say that we don’t know. Like, really don’t know. If things had been different, then things would have been different. I may sound flippant or something, but it’s what I think.
You are completely correct but it is fun to think about and sometimes helps one see what really happened in a different light as you consider other motivations from what really happened.
Historians like to call these “counterfactuals” and they write scholarly(ish) books about them. Granted the books are all guess work and they are the first to admit it but it is scholarly guesswork (i.e. an educated guess). In the end there is no certain answer and never can be but the process is interesting.
(The book I linked to above is really interesting and explores “What If” scenarios with real historians writing short essays. The one rule is you can only change one thing such as, “What if George Washington had been killed early during the US revolution?”)
Something was going to blow. Europe was a mess, mostly due to mistakes made at the Treaty of Versailles. Germany’s war reparations radicalized the population. The Nazis rose to popularity for a reason. In fact, the rise of the Nazis was preceded by the rise of Communists, with the rise of a hard right being a response to that. If the right hadn’t been as effective, maybe Germany would have become Communist and allied with the Soviets against the west, and that would have been much worse.
There was a lot of discontent all through Europe after WWI, and the depression caused further fractures. I believe some kind of war was inevitable.
Without Hitler, Germany would likely have had a smaller military. It might have gone into the Sudetenland, because I believe that was pretty popular. But it’s here where Hitler’s crazy lebensraum and thousand year reich nuttery caused him to be reckless and push on while his generals worried.
Let’s say Goering would have been Fuhrer. He was a populist and a grandstander, and might have been happy to take some border territory back to re-assert Germany’s independence, then take a parade and go back to his estate and roll around in money.
But honestly, the real answer is, “Who the hell knows?” WWII’s story is certainly not as simple as, “There was peace, then a bad man named Hitler started stomping around and breaking things.” There were a million reasons for that war, and I’m guessing we only actually understand a small percentage of them. Or even know they existed.
But the Anglo-US-Dutch oil embargo was triggered directly by Japan occupying southern Indochina. Its policies in China were definitely a precursor in terms of inflaming tension with the West and being on the border of Indochina, but that was the straw. Which was obviously influenced, Vichy France’s weak position to resist Japanese demands in 1941 that is, by the European war.
It is worth pointing out that Japan’s general policy of expansionism had nothing directly to do with Hitler. In fact when Japan invaded China ‘proper’ in 1937 (let alone when it invaded what’s now simply considered northeast China in 1931 or when it took Taiwan in 1895 before Hitler was even in power or the Nazi’s even existed respectively) Hitler’s regime was still a major provider of military equipment and advice to Nationalist China. The ‘Rome Berlin Tokyo Axis’ postdated Japanese aggression in China even only counting from 1937.
Still, it’s hard to disentangle the separate threads of WWII. Japanese expansionism in China might well not have led to an outright war with the US and Britain if France (and the Netherlands, the exile govt which controlled the Netherlands Indies govt was basically a British client in 1941) hadn’t been weakened, Britain tied down in Europe, and the US pushed so close to Britain (even prior to Dec 1941) by perception of a global Axis threat. And that would also have affected Japanese risk tolerance to push things the way they did.
As I said, I think Mussolini’s ambitions would have been limited without Hitler around. He was willing to attack Albania or Ethiopia. But I don’t believe he would have attacked France on his own.
I feel the same way about Stalin but even more so. Stalin had absolute control in the Soviet Union but he never attempted to spread his power past its borders prior to Hitler’s rise.
Japan’s a harder case to speculate on. They were certainly expansionist and they acted independently of Hitler. I’m sure they would have invaded China regardless of what was happening in Europe. That was another example of attacking a weak neighbor.
But it’s hard to predict beyond that. If there was no Nazi threat in Germany, European powers would have been more willing to confront Japan over their Asian interests. I can’t say whether that would have made war more or less likely. Would Japan have backed down before a stronger European and American stance? Or would such a stance have caused a war?
People should understand that man is ultimately not in control of his destiny. As Spengler said, man is not an autonomous creator of history, rather a means for its expression.
Yes, the second Great War, and all the atrocities that went along with it, absolutely would have happened, Hitler or no Hitler.
Good post. I think Stalin would have started moving west, Poland, etc. Bit by bit and with excuses. WW2 would have been Stalin and the Japanese as the Axis.
He didn’t do it until after Hitler had started a general war. Would Stalin have invaded Finland if Britain and France weren’t already involved in a war and had been free to protest such an invasion? Stalin was in power in the twenties and thirties and he didn’t invade Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, or any other country during that time. He waited until the other major powers were distracted by a general war.
In the decades prior to Operation Barbarossa, Stalin had been busy murdering/exterminating/economically failing (resulting in starvation from famine) of as many as 20 million Russians. He didn’t have time to murder his neighbors, yet. Since Stalin did believe in expanding/exporting Communism to other nations, it was only a matter of time before he began a land grab.
Hitler invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939.
Stalin invaded Poland on Sept 17, 1939.
Stalin invaded Finland on Nov 30, 1939.
As far as the British and French were concerned, they had an agreement of mutual (military) assistance with Poland. An attack against one of us would be considered an attack against all of us. (Why the British and French did not also declare war against Russia is a mystery.)
Britain and France had no such agreement with Austria, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, or Finland.
IMHO, Japan would have conquered large swaths of Asia anyway, and Stalin wouldn’t have invaded the rest of Europe immediately, but rather, bided his time and wait a decade or two before doing so.