What would the world be like if Germany won World War Two?
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Eggie (
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September 5th, 2016
If Germany had won that war, what changes would there be in the world?
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The entirety of Western Europe would be under Nazi control, and uncontested.
There would likely be a continuous Cold War between the Soviet Union, Nazi Europe, and the Capitalist Nations (the Colonies + UK).
I have this constellation, because a victory for Nazi Germany has the requirement that they never invaded the Soviet Union, because that mistake was the one that lead to their defeat.
The Nazi military would then have been unassailable on mainland Europe.
However, just as Hitler’s attempted invasion of the UK failed miserably, so would any attempt to conquer the american continent, so those power blocs would stay intact, and virtually untouched by the Nazis.
I am not a history expert, so I did a Web search and found that there is an extensive literature on the subject. In the genre of alternative history, the top candidates are the Civil War and WW II. Here is a Wikipedia article. In particular, check the list of references at the end.
@LostInParadise Your link is empty, it redirects to this page.
About the question: my guess is that Nazism would turn into the “good” and left wing would be a “danger”. Many would be exterminated, or at least brought down to extremely rare, like gays, Jews, disabled, and anyone else Hitler saw as not needed. Communists would be looked at as right wing groups nowadays.
But it would probably fall apart after Hitler’s death, maybe even sooner than that, as it actually did in real life. Many communist countries fell rapidly after their leaders died. I guess it happens with any totalitarian system. When the cat is away, mice take the lead.
Also, Nazis winning would mean Japan won as well. It would mean no atom bomb and rule over China and Korea.
It definitely would have a huge social and cultural impact on our civilization in ways greatly different than today.
I got interested in this question a couple years ago and picked up a couple of books.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick takes place in America. The East Coast belongs to the German Reich and the West Coast is part of the Japanese empire. In between is a neutral zone.
It’s been made into TV series by Amazon, which has fascinated me.
The book and movie have a plausible plot point that makes it seem frighteningly possible – Germany gets the edge with technologies that in fact, the Nazis were working on in 1945 – the bomb, jets and rockets.
I’ve always been interested in aerospace hardware. The Germans military had jets and advanced rockets in hand – they were just a year or two too late to win the war. Their atomic research was far, far behind though, both because the put resources elsewhere, and the best scientists left or were kicked out before the war.
Fatherland by Robert Harris was the other book. It takes place in Germany and it’s a detective novel set in 1960s Nazi Berlin. I don’t remember it as well, I remember thinking it was just OK.
Sorry about the link. Try this instead.
Britain would be much like it is today, superior in every way to the bourgeois european continent.
Undefeated, unblemished & singularly unique…that’s how we roll
I wouldn’t exist, for one.
There’s no one answer to that question, because there are so many different ways that could have happened (all of them are fairly unlikely, and would involve specific differences), and things that could have happened since.
Not sure about the uncontested part.
The question has been variously explored in fiction. For one instance, Jo Walton’s three-novel “Farthing” set takes place in a world where Hitler didn’t lose.
They did, and we’re living in it. The armies of Nazism may have been defeated, but the ideology they promoted infected all of Western culture. Prescott Bush, for example, father and grandfather of two presidents, made his billions selling oil to the Nazi war machine. Henry Ford built tanks for the Nazis. IBM built and maintained the computers used to track Jews in the death camps.
In fact, what we have is worse than Nazi Germany since the Nazis were at least socialists and believed that no one should have unearned wealth.
I agree with much of what @ragingloli wrote, and I found it very interesting.
I think America would be fairly similar to what it is today, just to be America centric for one minute. I don’t think Hitler would have made his way across the Atlantic. I’m sure I wouldn’t have a Porsche in my garage.
My guess is the Jewish population would be smaller than it already is. More people who were helping the Jews would be dead also, and their descendants never would have been born. The disabled possibly would have continued to be systematically aborted or murdered. Maybe by now there would have been more push back against some of these genocides Hitler was committing, but regarding the Jews I don’t think there would have been much to stop it. He killed 30% of the Jewish world population. A huge chunk. I think we were 11 mlion after the war ended. We just now in the last few years got back up past 18 million. If he had dwindled our numbers down even more in Europe, there would be fewer in other parts of the world too, since many Jews left Europe after the war. Who knows if Israel would be the same? Who knows what the Middle East would be like without Israel.
I guess there wouldn’t have been an East and West Germany. No wall. Even more blondes in Germany. I can’t help it, I see a blonde with high cheek bones who is German, and I wonder if they are grandchildren of the baby factories. I know someone who says he is.
However, I do think Hitler would not have ruled for 40+ years. Not like Castro in Cuba, or a closed society like North Korea. The German people, and especially many people in other countries that would have been controlled by Germany, I think eventually would have gotten rid of him. As technology and communications developed more and more, he would have lost his control hopefully.
@SmashTheState. Could you please elaborate on your statement about IBM? I wasn’t aware of computers tracking Jews in death camps.
Only caveat to @ragingloli is that Germany had a reasonably successful A4 missile project led by von Braun. They managed to launch a couple of thousand towards GB and Belgium, but they weren’t tactically significant and were more of a terror threat. That said, if the Nazis had been successful in securing their borders and as @ragingloli said were able to concentrate their forces on defending against an Allied attack (without the Soviets), they could have bought themselves enough time to develop an atom bomb. If they were able to improve on the accuracy of the A4 and stick an atom bomb on it, then London could easily have been hit. Heck, the Germans didn’t even have to bomb London—they could have done some outskirt town like the Americans did with Japan and Churchill would have been forced to surrender.
Then with Europe completely secure, and the US without any close military base now that England was closed to them, then the Nazi’s near term future would have been secured.
I do agree, however, that America would not be taken. The only question would be would the US have the stomach for a prolonged solo ground war against a third superpower. I think not.
@monthly
Wouldn’t they had Russia as an ally? What about China?
Ragingloli didn’t mention they were defeated, only Europe.
On a personal level, which I think is a more explicit way to measure these things and drive them home:
A lot of our friends here on Fluther would have never be born for racial and cultural reasons, or would be “liquidated” as soon as their “deficiencies” were recognised. Our world would lack a richness of thought and culture we today take for granted. Fluther itself would very likely not exist, as would the free net as we know it. I probably would have been eliminated many years ago for any one of many reasons.
No Jews, no people of color, including Orientals. No gypsies, cripples, amalgams, out-of-the-ordinaries. No gays. Only white, pure blooded, Christian types. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
In The Man in the High Castle, the Nazis develop the bomb and the US does not. America has to surrender on Germany’s terms or get nuked.
Which fits exactly with reality in the Pacific. The US did not have to invade Japan.
@Sneki95 That’s a good question. The Nazis hated the communists more than the American’s did. Hard to know.
^Thanks @SmashTheState. Just when I think I’ve heard it all…
Wish I could say I’m surprised.
I think they would have crumbled under their own weight, ultimately, as the USSR did, and probably sooner than the USSR.
I probably wouldn’t have lived to be a Jelly.
What about small islands like my own?
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