You're Hitler. When do you call it quits?

Great Debates
21

Assuming I’m still Evil Hitler (hey the OP Godwin’d and called me Hitler in the first post)

No Holocaust. I might need the Marge Schott vote later.

Shoot Adm Canaris.

Push hard to capture as many prisoners as possible at Dunkirk

Replace a rotor every week on Enigma. Ignore bombing London, bomb Bletchley Park. Daily.

Blockade UK from the air and concentrate Wolf Packs to destroy shipping and Royal Navy around UK. Operation Sea Lion becomes the priority. Barbarossa has to wait at least a year if not two. Stalin is busy becoming strong in the meantime.

Do not attack Soviet Union unless and until UK surrenders unconditionally. When attacking USSR, do not kill civilians, but co-opt them as they hate Stalin.

When Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, do not declare war. In fact, publicly condemn as an act of aggression on the “peaceful” US and break off Axis Pact with Japan and insincerely offer to help the US in order to undermine Roosevelt.

See all movies in private screenings. Send double to Inglorious Basterds premiere, make sure only incompetent officers attend.

Have Himmler assassinated, same with Heydrich. Not because they are evil, but because they are threats to my power. No need to mess with Stauffenberg assassination ring because they only did it because of losses to the army.

Use the 262 fighters as fighters, and not bombers. Make lots more of them. Drop the Comet rocket fighter program. Really cool, but not effective. Same with V1 and V2 programs. Not effective militarily. Develop 4 engine bomber, computers, radar and proximity fuse.

Because I’m evil, execute Dietrich Boenhoeffer in the 1930s. Don’t get addicted to drugs, don’t let Goering get addicted to drugs and don’t give him so many jobs.

Make sure that Doernitz has at least 400 submarines before starting war, rather than less than the 300 he said were necessary. This is essential to winning the Battle of the Atlantic.

USSR. Only when UK has surrendered and Egypt also secured. Take over Turkey first. As mentioned earlier, no mass killings. Have enough cold weather gear for every troop. Co-opt populace by providing massive amounts of food aid and use lots of anti commie propaganda. Do not attack cities, but rather occupy the rail hubs around Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow. With the Turkish flank already held, without the UK and Africa to drain forces and distract, and with oil secured, USSR is probably conquerable.

Number one evil thingy is to change enigma with one new rotor every week. Also communicate with enigma and a code within enigma. Make sure that everyone on general staff assumes that enigma is limited.

22

if hitler really had rudimentary knowledge of major events of WWII, he really could go as far as he wanted, couldn’t he? as long as he:

pushed at dunkirk
stressed nuclear research
not invade russia

and stress to the Japanese to NOT BOMB PEARL HARBOR, he could really get away with a lot, couldn’t he? take the continent and then some?

23

There’s a few things that would make life a lot easier.

Scrap the capital ships. If you didn’t bother with the Bismark etc., you could build two or three hundred U Boats. That would probably be enough to either keep Britain out the war or starve her into submission.

In a similar vein, don’t bother with giant anything.

Tiger and especially the King Tiger tanks were a huge waste of resources. Huge numbers of the Mk IV with some Panther tanks would have been good enough.

If the resources devoted to the V2 were spent making the much simpler V1s, life would have much more difficult the Allies.

24

I figure by that time your reputation is shit anyway. Britain and France will be gunning for you, but I figure their desire to avoid war by that point still outweighs their distrust of you, probably even after the invasion of Poland.

25

Don’t invade Poland. Really, the goal is to get *Russia *to invade Poland, and then ally with Britain and France against the Soviets. There are plenty of powerful people who see the Communists as a much greater threat than the Fascists.

Skip building capital ships. Concentrate on the Luftwaffe. If war with Britain DOES break out, first fight the RAF for control of the air–initially all bombing should be against airfields, aircraft factories, and aircrew training facilities.

26

Focus on painting.

27

Threads like this are fun.:slight_smile:

I don’t waste resources sending “undesirables” to concentration camps. Especially, I’d back off on the Jews, but being Hitler (and having written Mein Kampf) I can’t do that 100%. I tell the Jews they are simply not wanted in Germany or any German territory. After the “conflict” they will be rewarded with a homeland where they can establish their own government, military, etc… They can keep whatever wealth (property will be bought by the government at an inflated price) they have when they move from Germany to their new homeland. I make public that the Jews will be going away. But until they do it is a capital offense to commit a crime or discriminate against them.
Hitler becomes a hero to the Jews for promising (and later actually delivering) on a Jewish homeland, he becomes a hero to the German people/Nazis for getting the Jews out of Germany/German territory, and he gets the Jewish brains that built the atomic bomb (which Hitler uses to win the war and kill all the Jews in the new homeland once they all move there).

Hitler doesn’t ally with Japan or at least breaks whatever alliance there was in 1933 (I’m rusty on my history and too lazy to look it up). When Japan attacks Pearl I declare war on Japan and even nuke them as soon as I have the bomb. When Americans (MANY with German ancestry) realize that Hitler is actually their friend, and Americans are still standing in soup lines under FDR, no American troops are sent to Europe.
FDR and his quasi-commie economics are booted out of office and he later dies with the loathing he much deserves.

No attacks on Russia.

Punch Mussolini in the head. He was a buffoon.

28

Don’t invade the USSR, try to make peace with the UK, distance myself from Japan then try to build an anti-communist bloc with the UK and the US.

29

Push at Dunkirk. Use the defeat of English forces to make peace with England, no matter how favorable the terms England would require are.

Do not provoke the US. Do not send cables to Mexico. Do not attack US shipping, even if it is war supplies heading to allies. Do not declare war on the US. Make a major diplomatic push about being buddy buddy with the US. If I must, throw Japan under the bus by condemning Pearl Harbor and declaring war against Japan (which would be in name only since Germany had little to do with the Pacific). I won’t get the US to join my side, but it would be worth it if I could just prevent Lend Lease and other massive aid given to the allies.

If I decided Russia had anything I wanted (a big if), I would invade Russia. All the resources that were devoted to bombing England would instead be devoted to Russia. Rather than getting bogged down in urban warfare, just firebomb the cities. A lot. After a winter of starvation, then invade. Between not having two fronts since I made peace with England or provoke America and the fact I would have massive bombing capabilities I imagine the eastern front would go quite differently.

30

Wasn’t that in WWI, or did they repeat the mistake in WWII? Mexico didn’t declare war on Germany until 1942 when some oil tankers were sunk, provided Germany with oil earlier on and generally seem to have preferred sitting on the fence as long as possible.

The Zimmerman Telegram. Sent by Western Union - the fastest way to get your proposal to attack the United States intercepted by British intelligence, worldwide.

31

Interesting. I disagree about not attacking Russia. He almost made it, but delayed the attacked and his soldiers were caught unprepared for winter. So attack earlier, punch through to Moscow and kill Stalin.

DO NOT DECLARE WAR ON THE UNITED STATES!!!

Forget about building those battleships and build a few hundred more U-boats.

Don’t try to make the Me-262 into a bomber.

32

People keep saying this but would it matter?

Roosevelt wanted at the Germans. He was looking for an excuse and Germany gave it to him but lacking that easy excuse would it have mattered much?

My sense is Roosevelt would have “found” the reason were it not handed to him.

33

1933? Everything as normal, but: Don’t attack Poland - let the Soviets do the dirty, then denounce them. Get Britain, France, Italy, Hungary etc behind you as a bulwark against aggressive communists in the east. When the time comes for a scrap, foster resistance against Stalin among the Ukrainians and Cossacks. Don’t obsess over Stalingrad.

Ignore the Japanese, denounce their attack on Pearl Harbour. Do anything possible to try and get the U.S. on side against the commies.

Don’t alienate all Germany’s top scientists by terrorising the Jewish population…but as Hitler’s still Hitler he’d have to do something about them. Wasn’t there some stupid plan to ship them to Mozambique or something? Not great, but miles better than the camps.

34

The problem with lot of these ideas is they all depend on Hitler not being Hitler. You can come up with a counterfactual where Hitler doesn’t persecute the Jews and doesn’t attack Russia. Or invades and treats the non-russians well to win them over.
Unfortunatly at this point you’re no longer dealing with a recognisable Hitler and Nazi party, doing these things was their raison d’etre.

    About the only thing i can see that might be plausible the  Pearl Harbour scenario. Hitler was somewhat embarrased by with his alliance with (as he saw it) a bunch of inferior untermenschen.  Break the alliance, denounce the Japanese for their treachery and offer all possible assistance to the USA. Might work, might not. 

   Also, it is my understanding that this whole ME262 being initially wasted as a bomber is a myth. The Germans had massive problems making a reliable jet engine for the plane, which had to work at unprecedented temperatures. It wasn't until after the descision to make it a fighter had happened that these problems were solved and the plane became a viable aircraft. Having it as a fighter from the start would not have affected this.
35

If I was Hitler, I’d have invented a device to reverse the flow of time. Then I could behave in exactly the same way as the hitorical Hitler and become a hero.

36

While this is a fun exercise (really) the real problem is that Hitler’s goal was land in the east. He hated the Soviet Union, Poland etc, and wanted that land as part of the Greater Reich. And once that is brought into the formula, there is little he could do that would allow him to have that, and avoid war. Those two aims are incompatible. Same thing with the Jews. his hatred of them, and his supporters, would not allow him not to persecute them

But I’ll play none-the-less. His big problem was England. France would have marched into Germany after the re-militarization of the Rhineland if they could have gotten English support. After Czechoslovakia, any invasion would have brought a response from England. Hitler didn’t have the time (his age and the time his populace would live with the constant war time footing it was on) to let things cool off with England.

So he would have had to stop after Czechoslovakia.

37

That was basically the plot of Martin Amis’s “Time’s Arrow”, about this concentration camp doctor.

38

Hitler was only 50 in 1939. He was actually one of the youngest world leaders at the time, younger than Stalin, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Daladier, Chang Kai-Shek, and Roosevelt. The only leader of a major war power that was younger than he was 38 year old Hirohito.

And Germany wasn’t on a war footing until like 1942-1943. The German government did their best in the early war to minimize the economic effects on their citizens. And, in terms of a psychological war footing, there were no mass pro-wear demonstrations like in 1914. William Shirer says that when Germany declared war on Poland, the Berlin population was “apathetic” and “dazed”, and when the announcement was made that Germany was at war with England, only about 250 people turned out, and they took the news silently and were “stunned”.

39

There were other parts of Eastern Europe with large German populations at the time, too. It might have been more difficult to grab those areas that were not contiguous to the German-speaking core in Central Europe without getting the UK and others involved.

40

I’d say no and no.

While I might think he was young (seeing 50 on my horizon) HE didn’t think he was young, and that was the important part. He made references to others that he had to finish the work of the war soon because he wouldn’t live much after the war. So that was a concern to him.

And while I agree that Nazi Germany never mobilized for war from an economic standpoint the way the allies did (women workers is one glaring area) from a psychological standpoint, Nazi Germany permeated the day-to-day lives like no other state at the time. And this could not last forever without problems. Constant rallies, Nazi men’s and women’s groups, the Nazi student’s league, labors groups, state intrusion into the theatre, radio, the media, Nazi schools, the intrusion into the universities, attacks on religion (not just the Jews) all had a toll the population that was causing strain. Even programs like Strength though Joy, designed to give the population time off but also designed to further Nazism into the people lives had a negative effect.

I concur there was no mass support at the start of the war, much to Hitler’s surprise as he drove though Berlin. I take this as further evidence that the population was already strained and tired of much that the Nazi’s brought, as early as 1939.

And economically, the population had to make sacrifices for the war though funds drives, wage sacrifices, longer hours etc, and Germany’s economy from a macro economic standpoint was a mess. That “war footing” was straining the nation, and could not last very long.