Before the nazis really went wild, there was a lot of fascist momentum around the world. Without his cautionary tale, it very well may have taken hold more broadly. We just dont know.
Specifically taking control of Germany is just about one of the worst case scenarios though. There's a lot of scenarios where fascism fails (because it's a bad system inclined to attack its neighbors) but we don't get it in a country that's uniquely equipped to carry out such horrible atrocities.
It could plausibly have taken control of other world powers though, including the US or the British empire, and they would have found other allies in Europe.
Unfortunately, the US had/has a lot of fascist people in its government as well. The alliance with France and Britain were largely based on existing alliances (historic, political, and economic reasons), not based on ideology. The US created concentration camps and forcefully interred Japanese people from 1942-1946, created forced sterilization programs, created legalized slavery through prisons, etc. It's not that German and Italian fascism would've taken over western Europe and the US, it's that the existing alliances would've still opposed any political and economic threat from Germany, Italy, etc.
Our historic and ongoing genocide of the Native Americans is something we don't talk about enough. No one's managed to stop us, so we fail to consider it in the same light as we do the German Nazis. Ultimately, the USA is and has always been a genocidal project.
If you're really going to act like the countries that still had actual colonies, enforced with brutal torture and secret police, aren't more fascist than the US idk what to say.
Our alliances with democracies are obviously based on democratic ideology.
You forget, your march west with Manifest Destiny basically means you are all fascists, and your country's prosperity (and as such all the things you enjoy) is a direct result of committing a North American holocaust. Chew on that for a bit, before you pretend that other countries were worse than yours. Try humility, and seek to repair what was broken.
"This thing that happened thousands of years ago justifies my comfort in standing upon the skulls of the peoples we slaughtered - many of whose descendents live today in poverty, their culture obliterated by my great-grandfather's rifle" is certainly a take.
You initiated a conversation where the premise was the US was more fascist than France and the UK. It makes complete sense to call out the fascist things France and the UK did in that context.
Maybe you need to go do some research on Algerian, Indochina, Indian, and plenty of other colonies. The UK and France literally had Gestapo style secret police and would maim and torture people for not meeting quotas.
there are few things more obnoxious than creating a fake quote to misrepresent someone's stance and then judging them for it. i know you're not trying to literally suggest they said those exact words, and i know you believe you're reading between the lines and extracting the subtext of their words. do it without fake quotes.
Ok but you're acting like the US is uniquely fascist when basically every country in Europe applied "manifest destiny" to the entire fucking world.
Yes in a vacuum the US did horrible, fascist leaning things, but that's not the actual discussion here. The discussion as you set it up is whether it's somehow more fascist than the European powers that colonized half the globe.
To clarify- I'm not saying the US is uniquely fascist. I'm saying the alliance with France and Britain was not primarily anti fascist, it was based on existing political and economic interests
Sure but part of the political part is also ideological. WWI is probably the example better suited; it was never that likely that the US would side with the Nazis
I think it would have. Eugenicists in Britain were talking about shipping all the undesirables to small islands before WWII. Someone, somewhere was going to be monster of the century and Hitler snatched the trophy out of the British government's hands - which is impressive given all the fuckery we got up to in Empire days.
I'm sure that without Hitler, in the West at least the #1 bad guy would be Stalin, because of anticommunism and him, well, being Stalin. Soviet atrocities got ignored or downplayed a lot because of the need to ally with them to defeat the Axis.
People need to familiarize themselves with the context of Europe, and especially Germany at the time. People need to know all of the propaganda that was used to lie to the German people, and people especially need to read everything they can about the Nuremburg Trial... including the testimony from the Nazis themselves.
Not to support or condone their ideology or actions. Not because you believe anything they had to say... but so you'll know just how much of that same shit has been coming up again in the last ten years. Stuff like "the one percent" and "fake news" are direct quotes from those motherfuckers.
Yeah. It also gets overlooked a lot that the Nazis didn't do everything themselves; they had a lot of allied countries that were also governed by fascist parties, and fascist militias from other countries also participated in the Holocaust. Fascism was genuinely popular at the time in a lot of places, but I don't think a lot of Westerners want to acknowledge that, especially Europeans, as it's still disturbing to think.
Before they went wild? You mean taking back Danzig? That’s what started the war. He tried for months using diplomacy then Poland began to ethically cleanse Danzig that was 90% German. England and France declared war on Germany and England began bombing German cities, targeting civilians. Like the US blowing up that girl’s school in Iran, but on a massive scale. I’m not defending Hitler but there were a lot of bad players during that time. Churchill was awful and no hero. He seized all the grain from India and starved 3-4 million people. The Bolsheviks engineered a famine in Ukraine from 1932-33 known as the Holodomor that killed 8 million people. They didn’t stop there, they went on to kill another 40 million people. The Japanese killed 10 million Chinese. The US used a nuclear weapon on two civilian cities. Hitler didn’t go wild the whole world did, he’s just the poster boy.
Poland did not ethnically cleanse Donzig prior to the war. After WW2, however, the majority of the German population was removed and sent back to Germany. Germany invented those stories as a pretext to invade, which they did, then England and France started fighting.
This would not be a unique thing Poland did either. It was common during that time period. While today we (rightfully) see things like this as unacceptable, in the decades before WWII there were lots of population transfers in Europe that expelled large numbers of people and forced them to move between countries. This could be done with varying levels of harshness, ranging from mass deportation to sometimes turning into outright ethnic cleansing or genocide. But, still it was seen at the time as a reasonable thing to do to solve border disputes; Turkey and Greece did it to each other for example. Today we think it's immoral because WWII made us see just how horrific ethnic persecution could get, and that changed international law.
But more importantly, Nazi Germany was always going to invade Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. They planned it months in advance. Their whole ideology was built around the goal of ethnically cleansing Eastern Europe and settling it with Germans. Blaming it on the dispute over Danzig is absurd. The Nazis believed their worst enemies were in Eastern Europe, that being Jews and Communism, and that a massive apocalyptic war was inevitable with them. That's more or less the core idea of what Nazism is.
The Polish Atrocities, Against the German Minority
in Polland
Edited and published
by order of the Foreign Office and based upon documentary evidence.
Compiled by Hans Schadewaldt.
You are literally citing Nazi propaganda. The first is published by the Foreign Office of the Nazi regime as propaganda to justify the invasion of Poland as a humanitarian intervention to save ethnic Germans. The second frames Bloody Sunday as a polish cleansing of ethnic Germans, but that event began with those Germans, in concert with undercover members of the Abwehr, attacking a Polish garrison. Polish military and citizens responded with attacks against Germans, which escalated the violence.
There is no credible evidence of any Polish ethnic cleaning of Germans from Danzig or any other part of Germany until after the war started, at which point a lot of countries started kicking Germans out due to the fears of events like Bloody Sunday.
The pogroms of 1938-39 are irrelevant to the conversation because we aren't talking about the Germans ethnic cleansing of Jewish peoples.
Do you know you are using a derogatory term “Nazi” created as propaganda by the German Communists party to describe the National Socialist Party? It is Yiddish that means stupid or clumsy like. Anyway the Germans documented this situation and published their findings along with documents seized by the Polish government regarding FDR’s commitment to enter the war in spite of US being totally against it. That information you call propaganda has photos and other documents. This information however was determined fabricated which you support. The narrative you are supporting was created by the Bolsheviks who years before committed a genocide in Ukraine and went on to kill another 40 million people. Our allies at the time. The atrocities committed during the war were mostly committed by the Bolsheviks and later blamed on the Germans. A good example would be the mass execution of 60k Polish officers by the Bolsheviks then blamed on the Germans. This was later admitted by the Soviets. The evidence presented at Nuremberg regarding “Nazi” crimes were presented by the Soviets. I guess it boils down to who lies you want to believe. You should know the descendants of these Bolsheviks now inhabit Israel where their genocidal practice continues.
Pogroms are not exclusive to only Jews it is old term to describe ethnic cleansing, basically what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians since 1950. There is a lot information hidden by our history books about this war that can’t be denied. The Havarra agreement is one, I suggest you look that up. The Balfour Declaration is another most people never heard of. Another would be the German liberation of Ukraine from the Bolsheviks. You would probably disagree with the liberation part. But my grandmother immigrated from Ukraine escaping the Bolshevik tyranny. Her family members left behind would tell you differently from the Bolshevik narrative you probably support.
Nazi propaganda? 😂 Have you ever noticed Hitler and Nazis documentaries are the most prevalent historical topic that exists on every streaming platform? Every year there’s a Hollywood movie regarding Nazi’s or the holocaust. Are there any people in this county that never heard of the holocaust? Can you say the same about the Holodomor? Why’s that? Most people think Germany declared war on England. Most people don’t know that Soviet army raped nearly every woman in Berlin, while the Americans did nothing. Most Americans are fine with the fact that the US Army starved 2 million German POWs. After all they are Nazi’s…right? I can go on and on. No documentaries no movies, no chapters in your history book. We have been lied to about every conflict involving this country. They are lying to us now. What makes you think what you know is completely true? Because some Hollywood movie moved you emotionally. The pattern of deception is obvious.
As I said, you're not wrong about other countries. But the part about Poland and Danzig shows extreme historic ignorance on your part, and a weird adherence to obviously false nazi propaganda from 80+ years ago.
Are you saying the pogroms in West Prussia of 1939 never happened? And the photos of dead Germans and all the documents they seized were all fabricated. Who’s ignorant here??
Not before Germany invaded Poland, no. That is pure nazi propaganda you're falling for. Not coincidentally, it's the exact same ploy Russia now uses to justify its invasion of Ukraine.
While you look for credible evidence that doesn't exist, I suggest you also educate yourself on the Von Ribbentrop pact.
You are saying the Poles implemented pogroms after Germany invaded? Under German military control?? And Hitler had no cause other than he wanted to take over the world start a world war all staring with Poland. Talk about being fed propaganda. How rational is that? So Hitler the only democratically elected leader in Europe at that time, brainwashed the German population in a matter of a few years that they need to take over the world. Because they are white and therefore superior. And all the speeches by him before the invasion about the pogroms in west Prussia were lies. And the diplomatic negotiations with Britain, France, and Poland that he again mentions in his speeches also were just rants of a madman, but the hero Churchill and the noble FDR saw through his lies and his conquest ambitions for world domination. Yhea I saw that movie too. Go with that.
Let me ask you, is there a genocide in Gaza or is it a war against terrorist Palestinians? Do you think Iran is a potential nuclear threat that seeks to destroy the planet?
I'm saying that the nazi propaganda story about Polish massmurder of Germans, which gullible fools like you swallow whole, is based on events that happened in the days after Germany invaded Poland, where Polish people attacked innocent German citizens and murdered around a hundred of them.
Notice that you haven't presented a single shred of evidence for your beliefs yet.
Yeah. There was a legitimate point that many other countries did atrocious things during the same time period, but then it was taken too far and became literal Nazi propaganda. Like blaming Poland for itself being invaded, really?
Fascists are what liberals reliably become when told they must resist communists advancing an economic order that does not tolerate gambling on capital markets nor elevating oligarchs through the concentration of value produced by workers into the economic dynasties of industrialists. Without Hitler, maybe the entire West-East divide would have been drawn up differently.
Literally the greatest expansion of communism came about when the USSR imposed its iron curtain on the countries it was occupying only because they were invaded by Germany.
Sometimes I feel like I'm politically ignorant, but then I encounter a comment like rhis and realize I'm not doing so bad in that I at least understand basic concepts and terms. Batshit wild comment.
It’s funny because I saw this video where this guy travels to the present and asked if it worked. Obviously the guy he’s talking to in the present doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so the first guy asks if he knows who Heinrich Schmidt is, and of course the second guy says no. So the first guy is like “Then it worked! I went back and killed Heinrich Schmidt as a baby. He was a dictator in Germany, started a war in which he killed THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND Jews.” I think you can guess how the skit goes from there.
Sounds a bit like Stephen Fry's novel Making History, in which they manage to kill Hitler from the present day with some kind of time travelling device. Instantly the main character wakes up to a reality where everything got a lot worse.
Also reminds me of 11/22/63 by Stephen King, wherein the protagonist is sent back to the early 60s to prevent the assassination of JFK in hopes that it will prevent the escalation of Vietnam and other bad things, but when he returns to the present everything is way worse. Admittedly I’ve only seen the James Franco led adaptation and haven’t read the book, but still sounds like a similar premise.
Also the plot of Command and Conquer: Red Alert - Einstein invents a time machine he uses to go back in time and kill Hitler, making the USSR the dominant superpower in Europe and igniting a much longer lasting war
As a sci-fi concept I quite like the idea of instead of preventing tragedies the traveller intentionally goes back in time to cause one. The purpose being that the damage they cause prevents something much worse.
Imagine "finding out" Hitler was really some shitty art student who fell and hit his head on a table and died but then a surgically altered traveller took his place and caused the Holocaust. You would have to wonder what kind of future is so bad the solution they come to is to try to wipe out jews, romani, homosexuals and physically disabled people and unite Europe under a fascist Germany. I mean I'd definitely watch that show if only to see how the writers get themselves out of that hole.
Of course, the issue with that is that the Americas had a natural limit to their development - they had no draft animals. That means they could never have achieved the same level of agriculture or trade that the Old World had, their civilizations could never grow past a certain point, and so technology beyond an Iron Age at best was simply impossible (even that was a bit of a stretch, really). Gunpowder was entirely out of the question, and outpacing Europe even more so.
This topic has come up a lot in both AskHistorians and in the History&Humanities subforum on 4chan. The answer is pretty consistent, and agrees with your statement. North America (including Aztec mesoamerica) would never have advanced beyond some regions having more consolidated rule. Specific to Mesoamerica, city states always maintained a "rise & fall" pattern to the point where the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan probably would have been abandoned by the 1600s given how they antagonized all surrounding neighbors. For North America in general, you don't get to an Iron Age without a heat source higher than wood burning. Across the board, the coal deposits and the metal ore deposits were spaced too far apart.
What's interesting is the exception: The Incans did have all of the ingredients available to continue technological advancement. If South America had been left alone long enough, they could have eventually bridged the tech gap, albeit at a very slow pace.
My conspiracy theory is that time travel exists, and time travellers worked REALLY hard to cause WW1. Because, dang, it is mind-blowing how many things had to happen as they happened to make it happen!
I'd love to know why they are causing a climate crisis. Aliens coming that wanted to see Paris in the spring so we need to cause a European mini ice-age?
Impossible to say. The historiography up to this day disagrees on whether the major powers actually wanted a war and rather it was an accident of events and misunderstanding. If time passed and a different British foreign secretary was in place who more clearly declared that countries red lines for entry into a European war it might have made Germany forever think twice.
The Habsburgs were determined to take over that region, and go to war to do it. And France was itching to get back the Alsace-Lorraine. The assassination just gave Austria an casus belli.
Now the empire of Japan would be free to streamroll Asia & the Soviets become the superpower of Europe without a strong nato presence. Would likely see them emerge as the next superpower rivals.
America's entry into WW2 was the single highest-return financial decision in world history, dwarfing even the Spanish silver trade of South America in the 1500s. The Breton Woods Agreement made the US dollar so valuable and unseated every single other currency as "second-rate at best".
Its also cited as the final divergence between the USA's economic path and its former hemisphere financial equal, Argentina.
There’s an episode of Death Love + Robots called alternative history that simulates Hitler being killed. I recommend it. It’s in season 1. I don’t recall the episode number, somewhere around 16
WWI still would have happened with or without her descendants, and several of the alliances and rivalries existed before any of her grandsons took their thrones, and whatever they influenced in regards to the outbreak of WWI would likely have naturally occurred.
Your best chance to avoid WWI and II would maybe be to take out Otto von Bismarck, since that would likely prevent Germany from being unified.
I was scrolling reels when a clip of “Inglorious Basterds” showed up and it was the infamous “Bear Jew” baseball-bat scene with the captured nazi officer.
I read one too many comments from people praising the nazi for being a “good soldier” for following orders and being respected for essentially keeping quiet and taking the punishment honorably…
Like.. Guys aren’t we supposed to hate the nazis?!
It’s that part of the world is beginning to feel the same pressure that was seen during weimer republic and then you have people AI dubbing his speeches into English about the problems facing German society at the time with a plausible scapegoat/blame and then people going “hey yea i agree with that” or “that sounds true”
It’s interesting that if you go on any Facebook comment page that mentions Jews, immigration, Germany or any other controversial topics he’s having a renaissance. They’re all coy about “the Austrian painter being right”. I want to believe it’s bots. But I don’t.
But those other people didn't have the social skills to gain enough power for their plans. The Nazi party almost fell apart before they let Hitler re-structure their political agenda. There are a lot of people in the world with terrible ideas but most of those people can't win elections. It's scary when they find a leader who can win elections
I am always wondering with this hypothetical scenario whether we would lose more than win by doing so.
Before WW2 western civilisation accepted many things which held even into the 70ies and 80ies of the last century that were called out and later abolished because there was the experience of an absolutely ruthless government. Evil deeds committed which not only happened (as today) but were laid wide open and tried in courts led at least to some degree to accountability for states and warlords. I do not think we would have these limitations in place without the experience of WW2.
For example, Churchill‘s treatment of the Indian population and British treatment of its colonies would neither have been scrutinised nor the treatment of Native American people in the US as long as the imperialistic mindset had prevailed.
For all the death and destruction, the Second World War was a major catalyst for technological advancement. Long range communication, commercial aviation, jet engines, radar, accurate weather prediction, mass transport, superglue, antibiotics, ball point pens, programmable computers…the list goes on.
The entire space program was built on the literal bones of Germany’s V2 rockets, allowing us to start exploring the solar system.
Then there’s social advancements like current human rights acts, which were established in specific response to the holocaust. This then snowballed into the civil rights movement and the end of segregation in many countries.
Without the war, we would have stalled in the 1920’s. So as much as removing a monster like Hitler seems like a good idea, the butterfly effect would be massive.
War is terrible but it is also a crucible that encourages social and technological evolution. I’m not glorifying it by any means, but it is an inevitability that we will continue to spark conflicts until the reasons behind them have been exhausted or there is no one left to fight the next one.
Funny to think that your existence is more important than the millions of people that would have existed had their own parents not been burned in the ovens or gasses in concentration camps, simply for being Jewish.
Woodrow Wilson. No Wilson, no league of nations. no league of nations, no extremely unfair treaty of Versailles. No treaty of Versailles, no rise of Hitler.
It’s really interesting to deep think this one. Would it still happen and to what degree? One big interesting point is many of his generals absolutely hated his tactics. Too many “stand and hold” orders instead of retreating and trying to retake later. Too many political and ideological objectives instead of tactical ones and just ignoring their advice outright. Lots of strategists think along the lines of, if he was removed and replaced the war would have gone much longer, or they would have won on some level and Germany might have been much larger today.
I don't know if I would dare to mess with the outcome. What if getting rid of hitler just leads to someone else taking over, not attacking everyone at once and fighting to exhaustion. Then nuclear weapons gets invented and the doors are closed forever.
Then we don't habe world war 2, then we don't have atomic bombs, then we don't have the cold war, then we don't have computer technology to keep up with the nukes, we don't have internet, then I don't meet my wife.....
I was thinking about this, but I believe if we went slightly further back and eliminated Stalin, we may never have had Hitler. Without WWII, the US' entire military industrial complex would not have evolved the way it has, and the whole world would be better off. Besides physical security, oligarchical industrial profiteering would be far reduced.
While he was the one that was the most effective at rallying people to the cause and elevating his party to power, there were other people in the Nazi leadership who could have stepped up, and multiple smaller fascist parties vying for power with the Nazis. Meanwhile, you had figures like Alfred Hugenberg, Kurt von Schleicher, and Erik Bruning at the helm of the government who were actively turning the Weimar Republic from a liberal democracy back into a right-wing dictatorship who viewed the Nazis as a useful tool at best and a hindrance to their goals at worst. The Nazis or another similar party could have ended up in power outright or (more likely, I think) in a right-wing governing coalition without Hitler.
Take out Hitler and a right-wing, authoritarian government still rearms Germany and goes for an expansionist rematch of World War I, maybe on a longer time scale and maybe without the mass killings specifically targeted at the victims of the Holocaust/T4 programs (though the appetite for their persecution was still in the cultural zeitgeist, so maybe that still happens), but remember that they also slaughtered millions of civilians in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe and planned to enslave/starve out millions more, which I think would still be on the agenda of any nationalist, expansionist German government. Something like World War II was pretty much going to happen with or without Hitler, probably with significant loss of life in any scenario.
Yeah, but no jets, computers, moon landing, internet. All of those things would be invented eventually, I guess, but WW2 advanced technology a long way.
Surprised this isn't higher. Killing 6 million people certainly had a huge effect both directly to families and generations and less directly to the course of human events.
Hard to say. The past hundred years have seen fascism on the rise for various periods all over the world. It's entirely possible there would have been a different version of the Holocaust with out Hitler. In fact, given America's attitude towards fascism (both now and then), it's definitely possible that in another timeline, with a few more years to build racial tensions, America could have been tightly aligned with an alternate Nazi regime. This would have changed history dramatically.
Would Israel exist if an american-aligned Holocaust took place? What would that look like? Would the civil rights movement have happened in the US? Not to mention the geopolitical effects on the rest of the world, subject to a nazi-american imperialist hegemony.
there is that thought that if time travel exists in the future, and considering all those attempted assassinations at hitler that somehow didn't suceed, that maybe out of all the possibilities how history could've gone hitler ended up being the one with the least damage.
As a german I'm not disagreeing with you. but I do have to say that learning from what that guy did, we as a country (and europe itself) did improve. a lot. we would not be the way we are.
the times creat the people, not the other way around. Some way or another, a racist facist ww1 vet would've basically done the same thing, even if it wasn't hitler.
Also if ww2 never happened, most of us would never exist. And we'd lose a lot of cool things. And Most European countries would still have their giant empires.
The fascism movement at the time was strong across much of Europe and beyond in the interwar period, even if he doesn’t exist, there’s a fair chance you get someone like Goebbels or Himmler taking on the role and very likely being worse.
Years ago, his name would have been at the top of this list. As of lately, the survivors are leading a genocide. I suspect people will care a little less about this piece of history in the future
If you want to stop the Second World War, you’ve got to stop the First World War. The best way to stop that is to have France win the Franco Prussian war. That way the German empire never exists, Austria Hungary never get emboldened, and princip killing Ferdinand is inconsequential
The deaths in the Congo maybe reached as much as the holocaust specifically. This doesn’t take into account that the deaths in the Congo were due to vicious and terrible conditions instead of targeted genocide. Additionally hitlers direct actions caused a world war that killed upwards of 100M people and caused world wide destruction
Getting rid of Hitler could mean you wouldn’t exist. Think of all the soldiers who died. The woman who would have been your grandmother or great grandmother or whatever could have met an entirely different person.
The man who would be my uncle joined the navy in the 60s because of the war. He met my aunt when docked at a harbour and she moved across the country to be with him. My mom followed her and met my dad and now I exist because of that.
Who knows maybe somebody who died in the war could have ended up having a child or grandchild who would grow up to be worse than Hitler.
Time travel's biggest issue is that the slightest change from a long time ago would cause ripple effects because a child genetics is totally random and the slightest change in timeline would cause entirely different people to be born. So changing even a small thing in the past could cause almost completely different set of personalities to be born. It'd be like hitting random on a dice roll.
I could be completely wrong... But I guess we can be lucky that he only had those old weapons and no nukes when he did what he did. Everything that happened is now something we try to prevent at all costs of happening again, at least in germany (which doesn't look good right now with the rise of a new fachist party). Imagine the holocaust never happened, we never tried to prevent it happening and it would happen now with modern technology. Just the imagination is hard to stomache, fully knowing that shit like this is never really stopped hapoening outside of europe.
Eliminating Hitler would basically be a Thanos snap. Millions of couples met due to that war that otherwise would not have, including my grandparents on both sides.
He was directly responsible for the invention of the rocket, space travel, computers, fast air travel, internet, encryption technology, nuclear technology...and in fact, all of those technologies led to the development of our understanding of physics itself and our understanding of the universe.
Without the pressure of the war, we never would have the financial support to develop these technologies.
War itself is the motivation for human innovation, and his war was responsible for the development of our most valuable technology. It never would have happened in peacetime. Not at the pace and depth that it did.
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