I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Stalin stayed within his borders for over a decade and then happened to invade six countries within nine months of the other major European powers getting involved in a war.
Stalin saw an opportunity created by the war and took it. Without the war, there would have been no opportunity. And Stalin wasn’t going to act unless it was safe.
Britain and France signed agreements with countries in Eastern Europe because they were being threatened by Germany. If the Soviet Union had been the threat, Britain and France would have made a similar response.
Hitler ignored the British and French threats. Stalin did not.
Maybe not linked but I’d expect we’d still see a large war in Asia and one in Europe.
Asia is pretty easy. Japan was a resource-starved militaristic empire that was expanding before Germany was really ready. Their first efforts began before Hitler was even Chancellor.
For Europe, it’s important to remember the actions of the German Freikorps in the immediate aftermath of WWI. The government used these right-wing paramilitary groups to help suppress Communist elements during the revolutionary period. They also were involved fighting communists in the Baltics and Poland. They generally were hard right, strongly nationalist, pissed off about the Treaty of Versailles, opposed to the Weimar Republic, and virulently anti-Communist. The fighting in Eastern Europe saw them committing a number of atrocities. (“The village was full of Communist sympathizers. Of course, we had to rape and murder everyone living there.”)
The government managed to reign them in and get them disbanded but the members didn’t just disappear. Much of the SA that helped Hitler to power in the early years was composed of Freikorps veterans, including the head of the SA, Ernst Rohm. While Rohm and the SA would eventually be purged, the security apparatus Hitler then relied on until his death was also led by a Freikorps veteran Heinrich Himmler. Hitler didn’t create the hard right, ultra-nationalist movement in Germany. They already existed and were looking for their Hitler.
The Soviet Union wasn’t likely to actively try to expand militarily in the period. They were attempting to expand Communism by fomenting and supporting revolutions in their neighbors, though. That’s a good recipe for the anti-Communists in Germany to stay motivated and for proxy wars betweeen the two to flourish. Mix the threat of expanding Soviet influence, with traditional rivalry over their shared Eastern European security zones and the potential for escalating conflict was just below the surface. To their west Germany shared a border with another regular adversary, France. Between a nationalist right that hated the Treaty of Versailles and losing terrority to France under that treaty, their was plenty of justification for another in a long series of wars. The loss of territory to Poland, which made Germany non-contiguous, was another pretty big point of friction on the continent. Potential actions against Poland, in the Soviet security zone, leads back to yet another friction point with the Soviets. Even a Weimar Republic that successfully holds off the hard right has most of these forces pushing them towards war.
Hitler skipped some of the off ramps on the road to another large European war. The road still led that direction even without him in the picture.
Stalin’s aggression prior to 1945, whether or not only enabled by the cover of Hitler starting a war with France and Britain, was more purely irredentist than Hitler’s. Finland was part of the Russian Empire before the revolution as was basically all the territory the Soviets took from Poland as well as their re-seizure of the Baltic’s in 1940. The Soviets only formed a sphere of puppet regimes definitively outside the former Russian Empire from 1945. But OTOH they did do that.
We could argue back and forth whether Soviet expansionism after 1945 was ‘understandable’ in terms of the wounds Russia suffered in 1941-45, but it still happened. And it isn’t even just about Stalin and the Soviet system. Arguably it’s a basic theme of Russian thought re-emerging recently: any territory once in Russia’s empire is always Russia’s, and to the extent neighbors of Russia are recognized as ‘real countries’ (as in Putin’s alleged statement to Bush he must understand Ukraine ‘isn’t a real country’) they must either be subservient or else be declared enemies and threats to Russia. That clearly could have started larger wars without Hitler, as it still might in the future. However wars in Stalin’s times wouldn’t necessarily have been in the same time frame or scale as the actual WWII.
I think the Versailles treaty made WW2 inevitable. The shame and outrage about the end of WW1 and its aftermath were just taken advantage of by the Nazis, not created by them. The timing and circumstances may have been different but at some point Germany would have attempted to avenge that shame.
It also worth noting the Nazis were just one of many crazy ultra-conservative factions jostling for power in post-WW1 Germany, is perfectly possible that without Hitler another extremist organisation with similar ideology would have seized power (whose leaders might have not made the same mistakes Hitler did when WW2 came around)
But I don’t see any other German leader, of the right or the left, who would have started a major war. Germany, after all, had not done well in the first world war (and, as it turns out, would not do well in the next second one). Most Germans were rational enough to see this and want to avoid a war. They might talk about war as a political tactic but they would have pulled back from the edge.
At most, other German leaders probably would have been content to reclaim “German” territory like Austria and the Sudetenland. They could have proclaimed this as a great victory for Germany and rested on their laurels. The other major European powers would have accepted this. Hitler was the only one who wanted a German empire over all of Europe and was willing to fight all of Europe to get it.
Well the most egregious Versailles imposition (territorially) was the Polish corridor to the sea, and invading that that would have meant war with the western powers (France in particular based their defence on pacts with Poland).
The timing of the war, the decision to invade the soviet union and declaration of war on the US are all Hitlers doing. Outside those things (which are of course the things that ultimately led to German defeat) I don’t see things going that differently without Hitler.
A non-hitlerian German leader would have realised that a Polish state is a fantastic strategic benefit to German security and well worth the price of a few Prussians having to learn Polish.
Buffer states only work if they are friendly client states, and Poland was very much not that.
And even if it were the case, the emotional case for avenging the Versailles treaty and “freeing” the Germans of Poland would have overridden any logical considerations (the idea of a “greater Germany” made up of all the German speaking peoples pre-dated Hitler by a long way)
Ok then a Germanic Mussolini bullies Poland and the West into concessions. It’s the invasion of Czechoslovakia that leads Britain and France to stand up to Hitler over Danzig.
In which case everything ends up transpiring exactly as they did IRL through to the invasion of the USSR.
It might all happen a year or two later, but I don’t see an different outcome. The western allies were essentially fighting the last war, and did not “get” armour-based mobile warfare. A few more tanks in their order of battle, and a year of extra training, would not change that.
From the point of view of someone (like Hitler and the entire German military top brass) who fought on the Western Front, you could argue they did incredibly well. They never “lost” a battle, German was never invaded, and it was the Germans not the Allies that broke the stalemate of the western front (and of course completely defeated their opponent on the Eastern Front). You can see how the “stabbed in the back” myth was an easy myth to believe.
There are a lot of problems to navigate without Hitler. The Weimar Republic was obviously undermined by the Nazis, but the basic problems of reparations, war guilt, nationalism (many Germans living outside Germany Proper) and economic hardship still doom Germany’s democracy. Without Hitler, it won’t be the Nazis (Look up Anton Drexler for who’d lead the Nazis without Hitler). It could be the Communists (The KPD), it could be military rule, it could even be a new monarchy.
Japan and Italy are both trying to expand their empires in a world where France and the United Kingdom rule the world; Japan has already targeted China; by 1933, Japan has already installed a puppet regime in Manchuria. Italy hasn’t yet attacked Ethiopia, but that war didn’t necessarily have a powerful Germany at the table either. Japan and Italy are likely to be opportunistic actors without a stronger player supporting them.
There is, however, a clear source of sparks for future conflict: The Soviet Union is not doing well. Stalin’s purges and predatory behavior against his own people continues, and with no military adventures in sight, there are purges and show trials right though what would have been the war years. There would be no Stalin Nostalgia; he breaks Russia into what he wants it to be, but there’s no vindication for his efforts.
It is strongly suggested that Stalin didn’t die of natural causes, that he was poisoned by his Secret Police Director. The achievement in OTL–victoriously standing against the Nazis and ruling half of Europe–gave the Soviet Union some staying power. In a world where the Soviet Union is an unmitigated nightmare, it is vulnerable to unrest, civil disorder and potentially a second revolution.
So far, everything seems towards ‘lesser conflicts’, but one piece of technology may be delayed, not denied. Even without the Manhattan Project, nuclear weapons will emerge no later than 1965–the awesome potential of such a weapon will demand investigation, and eventually early computers will turn the acquisition of nuclear weapons from a national superproject to a Corporate R&D venture.
A world of opportunistic powers, waiting for the collapse of British and French Power (or perhaps the Soviet Union’s failure), acquiring nuclear weapons without really understanding how devastating such a war could be for generations. Or, perhaps, these smaller wars provide an early lesson that also averts a larger nuclear tragedy.
No Hitler means no WWII as we know it. It probably means no Fascist Right Wing vs Democracies matchup, but with things like the League of Nations unstable, some nations feeling like they need a war to get an empire, the crisis is likely a slower burn.
No, the military and political leaders in Germany understood the reality. Despite relative success on the front line, they had decisively lost the war. It’s the reason Germany was the country that sought terms.
The general public may not have understood this because it involved strategy and economics. That’s why a “stab in the back” conspiracy theory worked as a political tactic. But most political leaders would have known it was just a myth and not a sound basis to fight another war on.
I’m certainly not arguing that an absence of Hitler would have led to the spread of democracy or world peace. I agree that democracy was weak in Germany and the country was probably going to end up run by some kind of dictator. But that doesn’t mean another world war was inevitable. Most dictators are content to obtain absolute power in their own country and maybe attack a weak neighbor if it looks safe.
Without Hitler, I think we would have seen the equivalent of the Cold War; a lot of hostility between major powers and some small wars. But not a general war.
The counter argument to that is the fact WW2 did in fact happen. Hitler was one person. If EVERYONE except Hitler, in the German military hierarchy believed fundamentally that war was a bad idea it would not have happened. Yes there were massive misgivings among the generals in the lead up to WW2, but that had more to do with timing (they did not believe they had built up enough strength to knock out France and Britain in 1939) than a fundamental belief that the war was doomed endeavor.
There was (just as there was in 1914) an understanding that failure to knock out the allies before it became a two-front war of attrition would be bad, but there was also a strong desire for revenge for the end of WW1.
Also were any of the senior in generals in 1938-39 actually senior enough in 1918 to be party to the political decision making apparatus that saw the wider picture?
You don’t have a cold war without nuclear weapons. My guess is that even the cold war would have gone ‘hot’ if we didn’t have nukes.
The honest truth is that no one has any idea what would have happened without Hitler. There is absolutely no way to even guess, because we don’t know what forces and factions would have arisen had Hitler not been in the picture. Goebbels was still a genius propagandist looking for a home in some extremist party. Anti-semitism had been growing in Europe and in Russia. Mussolini was still there trying to reconstitute the Roman Empire. There was left-wing and right-wing extremism growing everywhere. The world was kind of a powder keg waiting to go off.
Heck, given what we know of complex systems, it’s entirely possible that if we could have made an exact duplicate of the world of say 1937 exactly as it was with Hitler and all and restarted hisotry again, we might have gotten a completely different outcome. Even if we duplicated it 100 times and re-ran the world from that point we’d probably get a hundred different outcomes. The future is a random walk, which means the past represents a kind of random walk as well - it’s just that it looks far more pre-ordained and causal because we can never see the paths not taken.
For example, Hitler avoided one assassination attempt because he was late for a meeting and wasn’t there when the bomb went off. Maybe the future path of the world changed that day because Hitler decided to eat a different food because a waitress smiled at him and it gave him gas and he stopped to use a washroom. Or when Hitler gave his first speech in a beer hall in Munich, Goebbels might have been somewhere else on a whim, and never connected to Hitler and joined another right-wing party which then won over the people with the help of its genius propagandist.
History always seems like a series of logical, connected steps which led to an inexorable outcome. On the other hand, the future is always completely unpredictable. That tells us our belief in the inevitability of outcomes is an illusion.
I think that last bit is actually what I was trying to get at. In context, “no Hitler” changes a great number of things all at once. Hitler not giving one certain order on one certain day, now that could be interesting - to me anyway.