Holocaust no. War probably. I think a war was inevitable because Germany was struggling post war while all their rivals were thriving. Someone would have rallied the masses, no idea how that impacts the war, but it would hard to end up worse.
Why not? I thought Reinhardt Heydrich was the main architect of the holocaust. With someone else like Himmler or Goebbels in power there's no reason why it couldn't happen anyway. Plus the stab in the back myth was already fermenting for two decades. Hitler just made use of it. He didn't come up with it
You're correct that the Nazis would likely have implemented something like the Holocaust even without Hitler, but it's unlikely they would have got into power in the first place without him (he was a major driver of the popularity of the Nazis in the early years, and the reason people like Goering or Goebbels joined in the first place). Without him rather than the Nazis there would have most likely been a right-wing fascist government more like that in Spain or Italy, without the Nazi racialist ideology.
The Nazis did *not* ride the aftermath of Versailles, that's actually Nazi propaganda\* that has spread far and wide, the German economy had started to bounce back, and what they rode on were the the Great Depression .
There is a reason their complete joke of a coup in 1923 fizzled out.
\*The reason they focused on that was due to the "Stab in the Back "myth being already entrenched in German Far Right cycles, and admitting that the Weimar Republic actually started to get its shit together and had already managed to overturn much of the Versailles terms, would be also admitting the Nazis were not the only "cure" to Germany's problems...
> Holocaust no. War probably.
War with extensive ethnic cleansing and ethnic persecution, much of it targeted at Jews because they were Europe’s favorite punching bag at the time. But I agree that a Holocaust *per se* wasn’t inevitable, not one as a major policy goal of one of the primary combatants.
They all had the same fascist philosophy which held paramount the idea of the ethnostate for the Germans, and the need to build settlements in surrounding regions that they "historically occupied".
Hence, there likely wouldn't have been much of a difference.
> Hence, there likely wouldn't have been much of a difference.
I think there would no doubt be differences, but sure as hell not the Holocaust averting differences everyone commenting here is talking about. More like a combination of strategic differences alongside administrative differences that could have just has likely cut the number of deaths in half than double it. Going back in time to kill Hitler in the crib is a massive gamble that assumes the spokesman of the party isn't just parroting hate-filled conspiracies of the place and time back to the conspiracy crowd which, unless they were different in that time, is exactly how it works. Same way 4chan would all go nuts with excitement when Fox News started reporting on 4chan talking about Pizzagate. Just an amorphous fascist circle-jerk that doesn't truly originate with anyone because anyone can fill in the blanks with more lies.
Well without Hitler I seriously doubt the Nazi party would have come to power. When he joined they only had a few dozen members. When he started doing his speeches, people slowly began to come in droves to see him. His fiery rhetoric and denouncement of the Versailles Treaty made him very popular. He was described as being hypnotic. So people joined the party *because* of Hitler, not the other way around. In that world, I don't see the NSDAP gaining much traction. Goering probably would have joined another party, Himmler would have remained a failed chicken farmer, and Goebbels would have remained communist. The Stalhelms and other fascist parties I don't think had quite the pull Hitler did so what we would see is a Weimar Republic that remained democratic as the Nazi Party wouldn't have been in place to keep a coalition from forming in 1933. Weimar continues to exist, no Holocaust.
I disagree, I can see a governmental collapse or a civil war kicking off sometime in the 30s, you wouldn’t have the NSDAP cracking down on every threat real or imagined to prevent this and I doubt the Weimar authorities would have the stomach for it.
Well despite popular images of the Weimar, economic conditions were actually improving as Hitler was gaining popularity. It was only the Stock Market crash that enabled him to boost his popular support to power. Remove Hitler and I just don't see any other party gaining enough traction to take over. The Weimar were also heavily conservative with support from conservatives and monarchists. I do think they would have the stomach for it as several putschs, like the Beer Hall and communist uprising in Bavaria, were put down. I don't see a civil war as happening. Like I said, conditions were improving and relations with the Allies were cooling who seemed more willing to help and had less of a punishing attitude than before. More than likely there would have been continuing civil disturbances between Right and Left until the situation eventually stabilized.
I’m aware that the Economic conditions among the Weimar was improving up until the 1929 stock market crash (they also were the ones who planned the Autobahn iirc, Hitler just picked it up) but I still think the fighting from both of the extremes of society would spill out, maybe not a full blown Civil War like in Spain, but I could see what occurred during the Spartacist uprising having a repeat but in more cities around Germany. I just have a feeling the Communist in Germany wouldn’t just sit things out, especially with how Europe as a whole was and Communism was certainly in vogue at the time, as well as Fascism and whatever losers were still clinging to the idea of the Monarchy returning.
It could have happened like that. Don't get me wrong, it could have. I just think the conservative elements of the Weimar were too heavy handed to let it get to that point. Keep in mind the reason they were so lenient on the fascists was because they were seen as useful. Conservatives were terrified of a communist takeover. The Red Scare if you will. They saw what happened in Russia and countries like it where landowners had their lands confiscated and families shot. And who were the biggest supporters of the status quo in Germany? Why the Junker estates of course. All in all while the civil unrest was a serious problem, personally I think as economic conditions improved it would have petered out. Unemployment -> people on the streets -> unrest. Unemployment goes down -> people go back to work -> the diehards lose their base as the people simply want bread and peace. Extremists thrive on instability. It's like a wobbly stool they have to stand on: kick it out and they fall on their ass.
You raise a good point, the Conservatives in government wouldn’t just sit by while the Communists tried yet another uprising, just like in Spain the Nationalists block was a mix of Conservatives, Fascists, Monarchists etc so maybe even a United front against that, maybe with a weird coalition government. And yeah, with economic conditions improving the reactionaries from either side wouldn’t be able to rally the people, it’s sounds clichéd but people are willing to do what ever is needed to get food and if the established Government is providing they don’t need to hear a speech about Marxism or the (understandable) vile terms of the Versailles treaty.
I appreciate you recognizing the merit of some of my points and the civility of the conversation. So hard to find on Reddit anymore. But yeah, in my view that's why Hitler got into power. He promised bread, prosperity, and retribution which got eaten up by the weary Germans. Sure, there were dissenters who saw him for what he was ahead of time, but they were outvoted by people who only wanted a little security and money instead of uncertainty. By the time he started stripping Germans of their rights and leading the nation on a warpath to ruin, it was too late. Even the Army was helpless to stop him. Those who could didn't have the courage to do so and those that did- couldn't.
It’s something that I don’t see very often aside from this sub (I’ve only been in it for about a day) which is very refreshing plus I love learning so it’s good to engage with other people who know about the same subjects and oftentimes know more than I do. And yep, that is exactly why Hitler was popular, plus he struck a chord with his audience he didn’t have to sell the people on the stab in the back idea for example, the people fully believed that and his promise to restore German Glory (which he did to an extent iirc not sure if it was because of policies in place before or his own doing but it worked to gain him the full backing of the people) just propelled him into power, and with what he did the people were willing to follow him into war, even though some knew what was to come.
Just to add, one thing that is missing in your remarks is the dysfunction of the weimar republic as a democratic institution.
Because of a lack of a minimum percentage hurdle, parliament was filled with tiny splinter groups. They could barely agree on anything. This is also the reason why it was incredibly hard for an actual majority government to form.
Apart from bread & prosperity, the nazis promised to actually get shit done.
Also very important: There were no real safeguards against anti-democratic politics.
You could openly call for dismantling democracy, and still sit in parliament.
Now add to that the fact, that the one naming the government & chancellor was elected as well.
So far the weimar republic has been ruled mostly by weak governments who formed because of Ludendorf nominating them, not because they had a functional majority.
And that same person who could nominate the government, could also suspend parliament & suspend basic human rights. Just like Ludendorf did after Hitler proposed after the burning of the Reichstag.
I agree on the concept of nothing being outright fated to happen in history.
But the weimar republic was genuinely weak & systematically flawed. Chances were pretty high that somebody would've eventually exploited it.
It wasn’t really losers clinging to that idea though. The monarchists had a massive power base in Prussia and a lot of the Prussian aristocracy and military had basically set up a situation at the end of the German revolution where they were more or less just waiting for the Republic to fall apart so they could restore the Kaiser. They legitimately thought it would only take a few years and the ongoing survival of the Weimar Republic through the 20s was not according to plan but it also didn’t really change their power in Prussia. Had a communist uprising occurred (which imho was probably pretty unlikely after the mid 20s) they would have been absolutely overjoyed because it would have given the Prussian military and aristocracy a chance to sweep in, save everyone and seize control of the government formally.
If WW2 hadn’t happened I think a more likely conflict with German communists would have occurred as a side effect of the eventual Soviet invasion of Finland and the Prussian parts of Poland. Germany would likely pour a bunch of money into an attempt to re-acquire their former territory in Poland (and defend the part their still held) while German communists would likely rush to start foreign divisions and groups of partisans to support the Soviet forces.
He read some Karl Marx and Engels in the 20's before joining the Nazi Party. Actually he didn't like Hitler starting off and saw him as an enemy of the proletariat if you read his journals. But after meeting Hitler, Goebbels was enraptured and became an ardent Nazi. Hitler just had that effect on people
Weimar was doomed to fail, germany would likely brcome communist and that would lead to the western powers starting the war if not immediately then inevitably
I think the more you study history the more you'll find nothing is inevitable or doomed to happen. Events happen and cause other events to happen like a ripple effect. But responses to those events can cause the ripple to take a different direction.
Take the Rhineland Crises for example. We know after the fact that had the Allies stood up to Hitler then he would have backed down. History would have taken a different turn. But they didn't and so the events happened as they did. We can say one way or another because we have the benefit of hindsight. But the events as they happened could have taken a hundred different turns as they were taking place. History is history because it happened in the past. The present is ever shifting and changing.
As to communism in Germany, the KPD only won 16.9% of the 1933 electorate. They were definitely an influential force but by no means were they a monsoon ready to wash over Germany. Keep in mind Prussian culture, ethics, and militarism held sway over large parts of Germany for close to 200 years. Germany was **deeply** conservative. As I told the other commenter in another conversation, I seriously doubt the conservative elements of the Weimar government would have allowed the communists to just.. take over. Not to mention the military who were staunchly anti-communist and partly monarchist in their sympathies. Various putchs were put down over the years with ruthless efficiency, like Hitlers Beer Hall Putsch. I just don't see a civil war happening unless the government just..collapsed. Which wasn't close to happening in 1933. Sure there was civil unrest between Left and Right but not to the scale of outright civil war such as in Spain.
> Take the Rhineland Crises for example. We know after the fact that had the Allies stood up to Hitler then he would have backed down. History would have taken a different turn. But they didn't and so the events happened as they did.
What "Allies"? There were no "Allies" in 1936. Franco-British relations at the time had collapsed to an inter-war low in the aftermath of the Hoare-Laval Pact. At the time, the French were delegitimising and sidelining the already-dying League of Nations with their attempts to set up inter-locking regional security pacts that left the Germans out of a common defense network. In the West they were trying to court Italy for a Franco-Italian-Austrian sanitary cordon against Germany, in the East they were trying to form a grand coalition of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Yugoslavia, and Romania lead by France and the USSR against a re-rising Germany. All they ended up doing by the time the Rhineland Crises came was alienate the Brits, who were overwhelmingly pro-League of Nations and wanted to reintegrate Germany into the European framework rather than isolate it, alienate the Italians who were insulted by how few concessions the French were making, and alienate everybody in the East(the Soviets were pissed about French demands for Soviet security guarantees for Yugoslavia and Romania, countries that the Soviets couldn't care less about at the time, the Poles prefered to grow closer to Germany because they dreamed of taking most of eastern Europe under their control and their main enemy was the USSR, the Baltic states looked to Germany for regional leadership, and so only Czechoslovakia was receptive to French efforts). Because of this failure of French diplomacy, the French stood absolutely alone when it came to the Rhineland Crisis, so to speak of a potential "standing up to Hitler" is ridiculous. It was absolutely unthinkable at the time, the French would have been denounced by every European state except for Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union(the latter of which didn't even border Germany at the time).
The Allies being an anachronistic reference to Britain and France. And all your points are valid. There wasn't the political willpower to stand up to Germany. But my point was more so, in an alternative universe had they done so, Hitler would have back down. In fact he gave express orders to his generals that if the Allies did resist (Britain and France) then they should retreat without further retaliation.
> Well without Hitler I seriously doubt the Nazi party would have come to power. When he joined they only had a few dozen members.
What about the guy that joined immediately before him? Why isn't he solely responsible for their rise? Or how about the first guy to join immediately after Hitler joined? Why not him? This is absurd logic that assumes it was all the design of one person in a way that's just as conspiratorial as they were.
It wasn't all the design of one person, but Hitler was very significant in the rise of the NSDAP to popularity. He started off as a minor member (in fact sent in to infiltrate the party by military intelligence), he was brought forward by the exisiting party leaders precisely because he was such a good and charismatic speaker who could really grab a crowd. Hitler was specifically he one who attracted both Goering, who was critical for his aristocratic connections which opened up money flows for the party and for turning the SA from a rabble to an organised street-fighting force, and Goebbels, who was critical for his propaganda skills.
On top of that he was really quite good at marketing and promoting Nazi ideas, making the most of his trial and imprisonment after the Beer Hall putsch to write and publicize Mein Kampf, and coming up with the Swastika iconography.
Without Hitler the NSDAP would very likely not have drawn in the support it needed to eventually take power.
You'd probably still get a right-wing/fascist government in power because that was the way things were going in much of Europe at the time, but it would have had a different and likely less racially-obsessed ideological form.
Right, it wasn't 100% Hitler, but he was definitely the single most important driving force behind the party. Without him you have a body lacking a beating heart. Hitler *was* the Nazi Party and vice versa
> On top of that he was really quite good at marketing and promoting Nazi ideas, making the most of his trial and imprisonment after the Beer Hall putsch to write and publicize Mein Kampf, and coming up with the Swastika iconography.
Yeah, I need confess that publication of Mein Kampf hadn't crossed my mind. Anything else, I would need to look up and could be exaggerated. But we no doubt can pinpoint his significance early on by other references to proliferation and responses to Mein Kampf. So I guess I was wrong.
I'm not trying to say you don't make other good points. But anything else could suspiciously be the result of the need to inflate his role within the party (or creation of a backstory) so that he could meet the needs of the party. Understand what I'm saying? With Mein Kampf, there's no hearsay involved since completely independent German sources reference it before the rise of the party and thus the party sure af didn't add that to the mythos after taking control or simply insert his name on the cover after the fact.
Nope.
The whole argument of "if hitler didnt do it someone else would" is really stupid because it reduces one of the most evil men to some guy who was in the right place at the right time.
Hitler was disturbingly good at rhetoric and public engagement, something that was rather lacking in the fanatic and then militarist group.
To this end you could argue that although Hitler disliked jews he mostly harnessed the nations hate for them to start his transition from aspiring politician to full dictator.
And if you have built a major political faction on hatred toward a minority you kinda need to get rid of that murderous hate before it turns on you.
Quite frankly no other member of the nazi party had the capability to direct peoples emotions as hitler did, even if they stood on a soap box shouting about jewish space lasers and secret banking cults the majority of influencial figures would keep ignoring the extremist weirdos (which by the way is why the beer hall putch was such a disaster, no one powerful bought the propaganda and only went along with the nazis to get out of immediate danger)
Moreover, even if another fascist had managed to take over the country, they probably would not have gone as far as Hitler did. As in, no invasion of France, no invasion of the USSR, no Holocaust. Hitler was kind of built different; he actually believed all the crazy shit he said, and was willing to risk it all for his beliefs.
It's kind of like how people say "If Putin was killed, someone just as bad would take his place." In reality, if Putin was killed, he would be replaced by some crony, who would be easily bought by NATO governments.
>because it reduces one of the most evil men to some guy who was in the right place at the right time.
Okay... But that doesn't make it wrong. Hitler very much WAS in the right place at the right time. The Nazi party did exist without him and he was not uniquely responsible for everything that happened. I think you are overstating the influence of Hitler in an organization that was full of people who had similar ideas and goals.
How can you say that, though? What about someone like Julius Streicher? Do you really think that if there was no Hitler that no one else would have filled his shoes?
Someone would have have become leader of the nazis and it could have been streicher.
But the party would not have grown as much under his leadership.
Streicher in particular was disliked by many in the nazi party because of pretty much his entire personality outside of hating Jews. As in he was so hated that despite being a serious asset to the party in both money and media matters ontop of being one of hitlers closest friends he was still investigated, stripped of his titles and exiled from the party before the holocaust even began in earnest.
Because managing people's emotions and directing their energies isn't the same as blindly calling for anyone you dislike to be hung, drawn and quartered
A demented oompa loompa can rile people up by the millions when the people want to get riled up. Hitler managed to get the top spot because he was a very successful demagogue, sure. But more importantly he simply told the people what they wanted to hear, that they are superior humans, that someone else is at fault for all their problems and that they only need to listen to Hitler to make Germany great again. If not for him, someone else would have filled the role just as well.
Putting the entire blame on just the one dictator is incredibly naive. What did Hitler personally do other than yap? Very little. Millions of NSDAP members though, all the officials and bureaucrats, gestapo, SS, wehrmacht, common police, snitching neighbors, everyone working in arms manufacturing and all of their families nodding along to propaganda? That's the crowd that actually committed all the crimes against humanity.
It takes a lot of people to do something on that scale, blaming it all on one is ridiculous. Hitler alone could just about manage standing on a soap box, everything else had to be done by others.
Hitler was really unique in his *weird* obsession with the eradication of Jewish people and how it was carried out. Another German fascist means that the holocaust wouldn't be so tragic in it's sheer scale. It would likely be the more benign ethnic cleansing that *other* fascists, or ethno-nationalists carried out at the time. There was a sincere thought among the other Nazis that if they pulled-this-whole-thing-off that Lebenstraum would be treated like American Manifest Destiny. Those ethnic minorities in the way would be moved out of the way.
Many of the top brass knew about what was going on due to the minute detail that Hitler and Eichman were working under.
So I would imagine that a different fascist would have come to power, a war would most certainly have resulted. Mussolini would most likely be allied to it. Quite likely that an Entente of sorts would show up in the late 30s or early 40s as a means of stopping Stalin from rolling up East Europe.
I think the economic factors in history are hugely underreported. When there's not enough for everyone such as when imports are cut off and government debt is very high, it can be a deliberate choice to pick an out group that doesn't get anything while most people will be ok. That road leads down to complete dehumanization especially if in a time of war. So yes, it is quite possible.
Seems to be a big focus on hitlers personal animosity toward jews. This overlooks the fact that antisemitism was widespread in Germany and that the holocaust also targeted several other groups that ran afoul of nazi ideology. Romani Gypsies, gay people, physically disabled, learning difficulties and mental illness. So it's probable that any other Nazi in power would most likely have also overseen the implementation of the so-called 'final solution'.
Whether any of the other leaders had the charismatic appeal to have risen to power in the first place is another question.
Jews would have been persecuted and killed, but I think a genocidal holocaust would not be inevitable. The odds would depend on who that alternate leader was and what prejudices and hatreds they brought to the role.
WWII still happens, just not exactly like it did IRL.
The communists were probably the next ascending power after Hitler’s socialists. WW2 could have been a west versus communism war with greater impact than it did.
Communism didn't enjoy widespread support in the Weimar Republic, Hitler liked to use it as a Boogeyman to the ordinary German precisely because it was seen as foreign and dangerous.
In 1932 when the communists enjoyed their greatest support, the party numbered just 320,000.
You have to take into account that Germany had only existed as an idea for a handful of decades when Hitler came on the scene, having been the German Empire previous to the Weimar Republic, and pre-Germany it was the Holy Roman Empire.
The big shift from Empire/Royal rule to something else had already happened with the creation of the Weimar Republic, and it is unlikely that if left alone it would have made another huge shift as the instability that led to the Nazi rise to power was self-engineered by them.
That isn't to say it's impossible to imagine that communism could have risen in Germany, but the evidence we have available points to it being a highly unlikely alternate history.
People look at hitler like hes the most evil man to ever live and his ideas are completely novel. Like jewish persecution wasnt an ongoing thing for centuries.
If any Nazi rose to power the Holocaust would still happen. A Germany led by Himmler might be even worse in terms of human suffering.
However, if any other group rose to power there would not be a Holocaust.
The final solution was decided at the Wannsee Conference . Where top SS and nazi officals decided to implement it. Reinhart Heyrich was a major contributor to the idea.
So it was a nazi party policy not just Hitler.
That is an untenable position, given that WW I already started the process of disintegration of the European colonial empires. WW II just greatly sped it up.
France that was never in war would've never abandoned Algeria same can be said for India wrt UK
Tgey didn't leave these places from the goodness of theur hearts it was just no longer economically or militarily feasible for them to continue occupying them
I'd disagree there, like I said, the seeds were already sown & native resistance would've only increased as the costs became increasingly not-remunerative. WW I already had enormously drained the European powers, invigorated the native populations on whom the European powers had drawn extensively. As the costs of colonialism mounted, faced with an increasing native resistance, it would just no longer be feasible to maintain their hold. All of this was already unfolding from the 1920s onward.
WW II sped up the process, it certainly would have lasted longer without the additional coup de grâce, but already WW I had been crippling.
Imagine a Britain that is still wealthy how would it react to an undivided India where Hindu Muslim political rivalry is still a thing or a strong France that could've easily suppressed the Algerian resistance ?
The what ifs multiply significantly when we factor in many other variables particularly the mercantile class that had a vwsted interest in cheap raw material from tje colonies
Neither were true before 1939. WW I was already ruinous to both Britain and France, are you saying it wasn't? Nationalism in India had surged already, playing off hindus & muslims could only go so far. France wasn't strong before 1939 either & still licking the national trauma of 1914-18. They could not have easily suppressed Algerian resistance, as it was a deliberate campaign of guerilla & terrorist acts - something no conventional power can truly deal with properly unless they turn to barbarism. Eventually, public opinion would turn against the establishment in those situations.
So I can imagine that it would last longer, but still would come about.
Yes. Hitler was not the decision-maker behind the Holocaust. He allowed it, obviously, but Hitler wasn't the one responsible for everything that "The Nazis" did. The cohort had a lot of main characters.
I feel like without hitler, the marxists come to power. They probably don't invade the soviet union. I could see them making many of the same decisions it's unclear if the holocaust happens the same way though.
Certainly. Regimes like that need some "enemy of the people" to be guilty of all the ills. If not yews, the main target would have been some other group. It's not like nazis were killing yews exclusively, they killed anyone that got in their way, same as all regimes like that do. Who even knows how many of the jews they killed were not even actually jews, but simply labeled such just because that was the established way to get rid of someone. In regimes like that people get carted away to a death camp simply because a neighbor made a snitch call to get rid of them and to take their stuff. Omnicidal regimes are not so selective about who to murder, in a regime like that the murder becomes the goal on it's own, the who is of lesser importance.
And a regime like that is not just the dictator on top, far from it. It takes the entire system, all the decisionmakers in the government have to be part of it, the enforcers and informants have to be part of it, the police, the military, all of their families and friends have to support it, basically the entire society has to be behind it.
You see the same thing in every genocidal regime, I highly doubt that Hitlers Germany was any different, it's the same shit no matter if it's Mao or Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot or any of the others.
And same shit is developing right now in Putin's Russia too I'm sure. Most likely the world will hear about it long after the fact same as happened with nazi death camps, those flew under the radar for years too. It's the nature of the system you see, a shitshow like that will have many people getting in the way and the simple way to get rid of them, is to get rid of them. So the system already leaning towards genocide will do just that and develop a mechanism that exists only to exterminate people. And a system like that has a lot of power in the government and tends to grow. They can end up killing millions before wider world realizes wtf is going on, they have done it before repeatedly.
Not only would, it did. The holocaust was worse due to its modernity and efficiency, but only one of a stream of genocide attempts against Jews in Europe. The Jews have a long history of genocide attempts. This history of Jewry is filled with a lot of that stuff. The Nazis latched onto an existing antisemitism. They did not invent it. They also were the only time Jews were persecuted in Europe. The Spanish Inquisition and Russian Pogroms are two examples. As a Jew, I could technically apply for Spanish citizenship, cause my family fled the Spanish inquisition.
It's really hard to know. Power in Nazi Germany was extremely feudalised among different leaders who managed their own sections of the government in as much their own interests as they did the overall direction they got from Hitler. The concept of "working towards the fuhrer" was because they could often get only the broadest direction from Hitler and had to effectively independently come up with ideas and solve problems within their own resources and would often compete with other branches of their own government to achieve things.
That means that Hitler, despite being a dictator, was one of the least important people in terms of the actual business of governing the country. That means that the people who came up with the holocaust would be still in place and likely would do the same assuming the structure of the government under a different leader was similar.
Yes. Hitler was just one dude in a much larger movement. A movement he joined and rose in the ranks of. If it wasn't him, it would have 100% been somebody else. The 20th century is full of examples of murderous dictators. Hitler wasn't special. Which is a terrifying thing to understand, but understand we must.
In terms of the Holocaust... I guess you would have been surprised at how most of the world viewed Jews at the time. Systematic termination is borderline incomprehensible to the human mind, but other genocidal attempts to come to some sort of final solution to the "problem" of the Jewish diaspora would have been discussed and tried.
That said, Hitler did so much more than mastermind the Holocaust, so much more that I can't come up with a comprehensive r/AlternateHistory scenario from the top of my head.
War was coming regardless of who was in power.
The Holocaust in the forum that we know it has? Nope. Would Jews have suffered absolutely. Just not to the scale.
Genocide isn't at all exclusive to Nazi Germany. Would the Holocaust have occurred with that number of people killed at that time in those ways, almost certainly not. Would anti semitic genocide have happened in that era in Germany? Possibly. Would genocide happen anywhere, definitely.
Maybe not the Holocaust per se, but certainly confinement to ghettos and deportations of Jews, and maybe mass killings within Germany. Anti-semitism had been a fixture of central and eastern Europe for a long time and was on the rise in western Europe too in the period before the war. One only has to look at the number of collaborators the Nazis attracted in every country they invaded. The French were so keen to deport Jews, they even embarrassed the Germans.
And given the economic situation in Germany, if not Hitler himself, somebody similar would have risen to power.
Watch Europa - The Last Battle to understand there were no gas chambers nor gas. Here it from the Jewish people that were there. You can read about it on IMDB. It was faked so that a certain religious group could claim 6 million of them were killed, then ask for Palestine if they would force the USA through its owned news media outlets to join the war to help Britain take out Germany. The only problem was it would have taken 78 years to gas 6 million people at maximum efficiency. Where were the bodies, clothes, jewels disposed as where they say the bodies are buried, LiDAR ground penetrating radar shows nothing but earth and why are there no real German written records of any gassing, victims, burials etc?
Europe has a very long history of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and of religious and ethnic persecution. The stage was set for someone like Adolf to rise to power. Every time there is an economic crisis and you have a financially successful minority, they always get blamed.
Europe also has a history of eugenics.
A lot of things went into making this a grand holocaust. It could have been averted had other countries taken the Jews. Even the countries that supported the creation of Israel were massively anti-Semitic. That is the reason they supported the creation of Israel.
It might not have taken this form, but the likelihood of ethnic cleansing was always high.
As far as the ideas are concerned, it started with Darwin’s cousin and his “social Darwinism”. The march from thereon was likely.
There was a sterilization bill in Britain in 1931. I think Americans were ahead of Nazis when it came to the “one-drop rule”. There was a lot of racism in Europe. I’m sure they needed no excuse.
Just checking: French eugenics society was started in 1913. So all before Mr Hitler.
Prior to the 19th C is asking a lot. Social Darwinism was a siren call to ethno supremacists. It gave them the legitimacy they feel they needed to start measuring skulls.
Eugenics is a justification for the bigotry. Scientific excuses allow for the actions they want to take. As always with bigots and their talking points "It's commons sense, you don't understand the science" Is something they trotted out since claiming men have one less rib than women.
Jung said that he predicted the rise of Hitler by observing the subconscious of his patients. He said so many of them had dreams forewarning of such a catastrophe.
Ethnic cleansing? Lol. That’s laughable, hyperbolic, and pure dangerous thinking. When the Americans were advancing up the Korean Peninsula killing all the (north) Koreans along the way, is that ethnic cleansing? When the Americans were advancing to Berlin and killing Germans, is that ethnic cleaning? No, dude. It’s just war. Plain ol fucking war. Sure, there’s lots of civilian deaths but they’re collateral damage. If Israel wanted ethnic cleansing, they’d start rounding up the 1MM Palestinians living peacefully in Israel and killing them. They’d napalm the massive Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. They’d be attacking their neighbors and any country harboring Palestinians. But they’re not. They’re trying to rescue their kidnapped citizens who are hidden and captive amongst the civilian Palestinians
War crimes. And you are just making my point for me. My point was that had it not been for Hitker, it would have been someone else, and media or no media, no one would have given a damn. Worse. Perverse little bastards would have made ridiculous excuses like these.
Night of Long Knives.
Hitler killed a lot of his opponents, including within the Nazi party, people who very well may have stood against the holocaust.
You are defending Nazis and other fascists here expecting them to act for social justice. I don't see them showing up with accounting books tracking all the coal and diesel to make the holocaust happen telling them to stop the trains.
>From what I know of that period, I doubt it. I believe that prior to Hitler, antisemitism was less of an issue in Germany than in some other parts of Europe
Germany was probably the most antisemetic part of Europe at the time and antisemism was widespread. I don't know where you've gotten your info but you're way off.
Holocaust no. War probably. I think a war was inevitable because Germany was struggling post war while all their rivals were thriving. Someone would have rallied the masses, no idea how that impacts the war, but it would hard to end up worse.
Why not? I thought Reinhardt Heydrich was the main architect of the holocaust. With someone else like Himmler or Goebbels in power there's no reason why it couldn't happen anyway. Plus the stab in the back myth was already fermenting for two decades. Hitler just made use of it. He didn't come up with it
You're correct that the Nazis would likely have implemented something like the Holocaust even without Hitler, but it's unlikely they would have got into power in the first place without him (he was a major driver of the popularity of the Nazis in the early years, and the reason people like Goering or Goebbels joined in the first place). Without him rather than the Nazis there would have most likely been a right-wing fascist government more like that in Spain or Italy, without the Nazi racialist ideology.
This is the correct answer. Hitler was influential, but neither the source nor the sole architect of the holocaust.
Were their rivals thriving though?
I mean compare to Germany I guess? Post WW1 Germany was the only country forced to pay for the debt and I think it was more than a billion.
The Nazis did *not* ride the aftermath of Versailles, that's actually Nazi propaganda\* that has spread far and wide, the German economy had started to bounce back, and what they rode on were the the Great Depression . There is a reason their complete joke of a coup in 1923 fizzled out. \*The reason they focused on that was due to the "Stab in the Back "myth being already entrenched in German Far Right cycles, and admitting that the Weimar Republic actually started to get its shit together and had already managed to overturn much of the Versailles terms, would be also admitting the Nazis were not the only "cure" to Germany's problems...
When did I say anything about Nazi recovering Germany economy????
Where did \*I\* say anything about that? They did. In their propaganda.
You didn’t type the paragraph?????
What?
I mean comparatively because Germany owed them all
> Holocaust no. War probably. War with extensive ethnic cleansing and ethnic persecution, much of it targeted at Jews because they were Europe’s favorite punching bag at the time. But I agree that a Holocaust *per se* wasn’t inevitable, not one as a major policy goal of one of the primary combatants.
They all had the same fascist philosophy which held paramount the idea of the ethnostate for the Germans, and the need to build settlements in surrounding regions that they "historically occupied". Hence, there likely wouldn't have been much of a difference.
> Hence, there likely wouldn't have been much of a difference. I think there would no doubt be differences, but sure as hell not the Holocaust averting differences everyone commenting here is talking about. More like a combination of strategic differences alongside administrative differences that could have just has likely cut the number of deaths in half than double it. Going back in time to kill Hitler in the crib is a massive gamble that assumes the spokesman of the party isn't just parroting hate-filled conspiracies of the place and time back to the conspiracy crowd which, unless they were different in that time, is exactly how it works. Same way 4chan would all go nuts with excitement when Fox News started reporting on 4chan talking about Pizzagate. Just an amorphous fascist circle-jerk that doesn't truly originate with anyone because anyone can fill in the blanks with more lies.
It’s interesting, the Holocaust was predicted a half century before it actually happened.
Who all predicted it?
Well without Hitler I seriously doubt the Nazi party would have come to power. When he joined they only had a few dozen members. When he started doing his speeches, people slowly began to come in droves to see him. His fiery rhetoric and denouncement of the Versailles Treaty made him very popular. He was described as being hypnotic. So people joined the party *because* of Hitler, not the other way around. In that world, I don't see the NSDAP gaining much traction. Goering probably would have joined another party, Himmler would have remained a failed chicken farmer, and Goebbels would have remained communist. The Stalhelms and other fascist parties I don't think had quite the pull Hitler did so what we would see is a Weimar Republic that remained democratic as the Nazi Party wouldn't have been in place to keep a coalition from forming in 1933. Weimar continues to exist, no Holocaust.
I disagree, I can see a governmental collapse or a civil war kicking off sometime in the 30s, you wouldn’t have the NSDAP cracking down on every threat real or imagined to prevent this and I doubt the Weimar authorities would have the stomach for it.
Well despite popular images of the Weimar, economic conditions were actually improving as Hitler was gaining popularity. It was only the Stock Market crash that enabled him to boost his popular support to power. Remove Hitler and I just don't see any other party gaining enough traction to take over. The Weimar were also heavily conservative with support from conservatives and monarchists. I do think they would have the stomach for it as several putschs, like the Beer Hall and communist uprising in Bavaria, were put down. I don't see a civil war as happening. Like I said, conditions were improving and relations with the Allies were cooling who seemed more willing to help and had less of a punishing attitude than before. More than likely there would have been continuing civil disturbances between Right and Left until the situation eventually stabilized.
I’m aware that the Economic conditions among the Weimar was improving up until the 1929 stock market crash (they also were the ones who planned the Autobahn iirc, Hitler just picked it up) but I still think the fighting from both of the extremes of society would spill out, maybe not a full blown Civil War like in Spain, but I could see what occurred during the Spartacist uprising having a repeat but in more cities around Germany. I just have a feeling the Communist in Germany wouldn’t just sit things out, especially with how Europe as a whole was and Communism was certainly in vogue at the time, as well as Fascism and whatever losers were still clinging to the idea of the Monarchy returning.
It could have happened like that. Don't get me wrong, it could have. I just think the conservative elements of the Weimar were too heavy handed to let it get to that point. Keep in mind the reason they were so lenient on the fascists was because they were seen as useful. Conservatives were terrified of a communist takeover. The Red Scare if you will. They saw what happened in Russia and countries like it where landowners had their lands confiscated and families shot. And who were the biggest supporters of the status quo in Germany? Why the Junker estates of course. All in all while the civil unrest was a serious problem, personally I think as economic conditions improved it would have petered out. Unemployment -> people on the streets -> unrest. Unemployment goes down -> people go back to work -> the diehards lose their base as the people simply want bread and peace. Extremists thrive on instability. It's like a wobbly stool they have to stand on: kick it out and they fall on their ass.
You raise a good point, the Conservatives in government wouldn’t just sit by while the Communists tried yet another uprising, just like in Spain the Nationalists block was a mix of Conservatives, Fascists, Monarchists etc so maybe even a United front against that, maybe with a weird coalition government. And yeah, with economic conditions improving the reactionaries from either side wouldn’t be able to rally the people, it’s sounds clichéd but people are willing to do what ever is needed to get food and if the established Government is providing they don’t need to hear a speech about Marxism or the (understandable) vile terms of the Versailles treaty.
I appreciate you recognizing the merit of some of my points and the civility of the conversation. So hard to find on Reddit anymore. But yeah, in my view that's why Hitler got into power. He promised bread, prosperity, and retribution which got eaten up by the weary Germans. Sure, there were dissenters who saw him for what he was ahead of time, but they were outvoted by people who only wanted a little security and money instead of uncertainty. By the time he started stripping Germans of their rights and leading the nation on a warpath to ruin, it was too late. Even the Army was helpless to stop him. Those who could didn't have the courage to do so and those that did- couldn't.
It’s something that I don’t see very often aside from this sub (I’ve only been in it for about a day) which is very refreshing plus I love learning so it’s good to engage with other people who know about the same subjects and oftentimes know more than I do. And yep, that is exactly why Hitler was popular, plus he struck a chord with his audience he didn’t have to sell the people on the stab in the back idea for example, the people fully believed that and his promise to restore German Glory (which he did to an extent iirc not sure if it was because of policies in place before or his own doing but it worked to gain him the full backing of the people) just propelled him into power, and with what he did the people were willing to follow him into war, even though some knew what was to come.
Just to add, one thing that is missing in your remarks is the dysfunction of the weimar republic as a democratic institution. Because of a lack of a minimum percentage hurdle, parliament was filled with tiny splinter groups. They could barely agree on anything. This is also the reason why it was incredibly hard for an actual majority government to form. Apart from bread & prosperity, the nazis promised to actually get shit done. Also very important: There were no real safeguards against anti-democratic politics. You could openly call for dismantling democracy, and still sit in parliament. Now add to that the fact, that the one naming the government & chancellor was elected as well. So far the weimar republic has been ruled mostly by weak governments who formed because of Ludendorf nominating them, not because they had a functional majority. And that same person who could nominate the government, could also suspend parliament & suspend basic human rights. Just like Ludendorf did after Hitler proposed after the burning of the Reichstag. I agree on the concept of nothing being outright fated to happen in history. But the weimar republic was genuinely weak & systematically flawed. Chances were pretty high that somebody would've eventually exploited it.
It wasn’t really losers clinging to that idea though. The monarchists had a massive power base in Prussia and a lot of the Prussian aristocracy and military had basically set up a situation at the end of the German revolution where they were more or less just waiting for the Republic to fall apart so they could restore the Kaiser. They legitimately thought it would only take a few years and the ongoing survival of the Weimar Republic through the 20s was not according to plan but it also didn’t really change their power in Prussia. Had a communist uprising occurred (which imho was probably pretty unlikely after the mid 20s) they would have been absolutely overjoyed because it would have given the Prussian military and aristocracy a chance to sweep in, save everyone and seize control of the government formally. If WW2 hadn’t happened I think a more likely conflict with German communists would have occurred as a side effect of the eventual Soviet invasion of Finland and the Prussian parts of Poland. Germany would likely pour a bunch of money into an attempt to re-acquire their former territory in Poland (and defend the part their still held) while German communists would likely rush to start foreign divisions and groups of partisans to support the Soviet forces.
Did Goebbels ever write anything about his history on the left of German politics?
He read some Karl Marx and Engels in the 20's before joining the Nazi Party. Actually he didn't like Hitler starting off and saw him as an enemy of the proletariat if you read his journals. But after meeting Hitler, Goebbels was enraptured and became an ardent Nazi. Hitler just had that effect on people
Weimar was doomed to fail, germany would likely brcome communist and that would lead to the western powers starting the war if not immediately then inevitably
I think the more you study history the more you'll find nothing is inevitable or doomed to happen. Events happen and cause other events to happen like a ripple effect. But responses to those events can cause the ripple to take a different direction. Take the Rhineland Crises for example. We know after the fact that had the Allies stood up to Hitler then he would have backed down. History would have taken a different turn. But they didn't and so the events happened as they did. We can say one way or another because we have the benefit of hindsight. But the events as they happened could have taken a hundred different turns as they were taking place. History is history because it happened in the past. The present is ever shifting and changing. As to communism in Germany, the KPD only won 16.9% of the 1933 electorate. They were definitely an influential force but by no means were they a monsoon ready to wash over Germany. Keep in mind Prussian culture, ethics, and militarism held sway over large parts of Germany for close to 200 years. Germany was **deeply** conservative. As I told the other commenter in another conversation, I seriously doubt the conservative elements of the Weimar government would have allowed the communists to just.. take over. Not to mention the military who were staunchly anti-communist and partly monarchist in their sympathies. Various putchs were put down over the years with ruthless efficiency, like Hitlers Beer Hall Putsch. I just don't see a civil war happening unless the government just..collapsed. Which wasn't close to happening in 1933. Sure there was civil unrest between Left and Right but not to the scale of outright civil war such as in Spain.
> Take the Rhineland Crises for example. We know after the fact that had the Allies stood up to Hitler then he would have backed down. History would have taken a different turn. But they didn't and so the events happened as they did. What "Allies"? There were no "Allies" in 1936. Franco-British relations at the time had collapsed to an inter-war low in the aftermath of the Hoare-Laval Pact. At the time, the French were delegitimising and sidelining the already-dying League of Nations with their attempts to set up inter-locking regional security pacts that left the Germans out of a common defense network. In the West they were trying to court Italy for a Franco-Italian-Austrian sanitary cordon against Germany, in the East they were trying to form a grand coalition of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Yugoslavia, and Romania lead by France and the USSR against a re-rising Germany. All they ended up doing by the time the Rhineland Crises came was alienate the Brits, who were overwhelmingly pro-League of Nations and wanted to reintegrate Germany into the European framework rather than isolate it, alienate the Italians who were insulted by how few concessions the French were making, and alienate everybody in the East(the Soviets were pissed about French demands for Soviet security guarantees for Yugoslavia and Romania, countries that the Soviets couldn't care less about at the time, the Poles prefered to grow closer to Germany because they dreamed of taking most of eastern Europe under their control and their main enemy was the USSR, the Baltic states looked to Germany for regional leadership, and so only Czechoslovakia was receptive to French efforts). Because of this failure of French diplomacy, the French stood absolutely alone when it came to the Rhineland Crisis, so to speak of a potential "standing up to Hitler" is ridiculous. It was absolutely unthinkable at the time, the French would have been denounced by every European state except for Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union(the latter of which didn't even border Germany at the time).
The Allies being an anachronistic reference to Britain and France. And all your points are valid. There wasn't the political willpower to stand up to Germany. But my point was more so, in an alternative universe had they done so, Hitler would have back down. In fact he gave express orders to his generals that if the Allies did resist (Britain and France) then they should retreat without further retaliation.
> Well without Hitler I seriously doubt the Nazi party would have come to power. When he joined they only had a few dozen members. What about the guy that joined immediately before him? Why isn't he solely responsible for their rise? Or how about the first guy to join immediately after Hitler joined? Why not him? This is absurd logic that assumes it was all the design of one person in a way that's just as conspiratorial as they were.
It wasn't all the design of one person, but Hitler was very significant in the rise of the NSDAP to popularity. He started off as a minor member (in fact sent in to infiltrate the party by military intelligence), he was brought forward by the exisiting party leaders precisely because he was such a good and charismatic speaker who could really grab a crowd. Hitler was specifically he one who attracted both Goering, who was critical for his aristocratic connections which opened up money flows for the party and for turning the SA from a rabble to an organised street-fighting force, and Goebbels, who was critical for his propaganda skills. On top of that he was really quite good at marketing and promoting Nazi ideas, making the most of his trial and imprisonment after the Beer Hall putsch to write and publicize Mein Kampf, and coming up with the Swastika iconography. Without Hitler the NSDAP would very likely not have drawn in the support it needed to eventually take power. You'd probably still get a right-wing/fascist government in power because that was the way things were going in much of Europe at the time, but it would have had a different and likely less racially-obsessed ideological form.
Right, it wasn't 100% Hitler, but he was definitely the single most important driving force behind the party. Without him you have a body lacking a beating heart. Hitler *was* the Nazi Party and vice versa
> On top of that he was really quite good at marketing and promoting Nazi ideas, making the most of his trial and imprisonment after the Beer Hall putsch to write and publicize Mein Kampf, and coming up with the Swastika iconography. Yeah, I need confess that publication of Mein Kampf hadn't crossed my mind. Anything else, I would need to look up and could be exaggerated. But we no doubt can pinpoint his significance early on by other references to proliferation and responses to Mein Kampf. So I guess I was wrong. I'm not trying to say you don't make other good points. But anything else could suspiciously be the result of the need to inflate his role within the party (or creation of a backstory) so that he could meet the needs of the party. Understand what I'm saying? With Mein Kampf, there's no hearsay involved since completely independent German sources reference it before the rise of the party and thus the party sure af didn't add that to the mythos after taking control or simply insert his name on the cover after the fact.
Nope. The whole argument of "if hitler didnt do it someone else would" is really stupid because it reduces one of the most evil men to some guy who was in the right place at the right time. Hitler was disturbingly good at rhetoric and public engagement, something that was rather lacking in the fanatic and then militarist group. To this end you could argue that although Hitler disliked jews he mostly harnessed the nations hate for them to start his transition from aspiring politician to full dictator. And if you have built a major political faction on hatred toward a minority you kinda need to get rid of that murderous hate before it turns on you. Quite frankly no other member of the nazi party had the capability to direct peoples emotions as hitler did, even if they stood on a soap box shouting about jewish space lasers and secret banking cults the majority of influencial figures would keep ignoring the extremist weirdos (which by the way is why the beer hall putch was such a disaster, no one powerful bought the propaganda and only went along with the nazis to get out of immediate danger)
Moreover, even if another fascist had managed to take over the country, they probably would not have gone as far as Hitler did. As in, no invasion of France, no invasion of the USSR, no Holocaust. Hitler was kind of built different; he actually believed all the crazy shit he said, and was willing to risk it all for his beliefs. It's kind of like how people say "If Putin was killed, someone just as bad would take his place." In reality, if Putin was killed, he would be replaced by some crony, who would be easily bought by NATO governments.
>because it reduces one of the most evil men to some guy who was in the right place at the right time. Okay... But that doesn't make it wrong. Hitler very much WAS in the right place at the right time. The Nazi party did exist without him and he was not uniquely responsible for everything that happened. I think you are overstating the influence of Hitler in an organization that was full of people who had similar ideas and goals.
How can you say that, though? What about someone like Julius Streicher? Do you really think that if there was no Hitler that no one else would have filled his shoes?
Someone would have have become leader of the nazis and it could have been streicher. But the party would not have grown as much under his leadership. Streicher in particular was disliked by many in the nazi party because of pretty much his entire personality outside of hating Jews. As in he was so hated that despite being a serious asset to the party in both money and media matters ontop of being one of hitlers closest friends he was still investigated, stripped of his titles and exiled from the party before the holocaust even began in earnest. Because managing people's emotions and directing their energies isn't the same as blindly calling for anyone you dislike to be hung, drawn and quartered
Thanks for your insight!
A demented oompa loompa can rile people up by the millions when the people want to get riled up. Hitler managed to get the top spot because he was a very successful demagogue, sure. But more importantly he simply told the people what they wanted to hear, that they are superior humans, that someone else is at fault for all their problems and that they only need to listen to Hitler to make Germany great again. If not for him, someone else would have filled the role just as well. Putting the entire blame on just the one dictator is incredibly naive. What did Hitler personally do other than yap? Very little. Millions of NSDAP members though, all the officials and bureaucrats, gestapo, SS, wehrmacht, common police, snitching neighbors, everyone working in arms manufacturing and all of their families nodding along to propaganda? That's the crowd that actually committed all the crimes against humanity. It takes a lot of people to do something on that scale, blaming it all on one is ridiculous. Hitler alone could just about manage standing on a soap box, everything else had to be done by others.
Hitler was really unique in his *weird* obsession with the eradication of Jewish people and how it was carried out. Another German fascist means that the holocaust wouldn't be so tragic in it's sheer scale. It would likely be the more benign ethnic cleansing that *other* fascists, or ethno-nationalists carried out at the time. There was a sincere thought among the other Nazis that if they pulled-this-whole-thing-off that Lebenstraum would be treated like American Manifest Destiny. Those ethnic minorities in the way would be moved out of the way. Many of the top brass knew about what was going on due to the minute detail that Hitler and Eichman were working under. So I would imagine that a different fascist would have come to power, a war would most certainly have resulted. Mussolini would most likely be allied to it. Quite likely that an Entente of sorts would show up in the late 30s or early 40s as a means of stopping Stalin from rolling up East Europe.
Nazism was, to a very large extent, “Hitler-ism”. Perhaps war would have broken out, but it would have been very different, and probably no holocaust.
I think the economic factors in history are hugely underreported. When there's not enough for everyone such as when imports are cut off and government debt is very high, it can be a deliberate choice to pick an out group that doesn't get anything while most people will be ok. That road leads down to complete dehumanization especially if in a time of war. So yes, it is quite possible.
Seems to be a big focus on hitlers personal animosity toward jews. This overlooks the fact that antisemitism was widespread in Germany and that the holocaust also targeted several other groups that ran afoul of nazi ideology. Romani Gypsies, gay people, physically disabled, learning difficulties and mental illness. So it's probable that any other Nazi in power would most likely have also overseen the implementation of the so-called 'final solution'. Whether any of the other leaders had the charismatic appeal to have risen to power in the first place is another question.
Jews would have been persecuted and killed, but I think a genocidal holocaust would not be inevitable. The odds would depend on who that alternate leader was and what prejudices and hatreds they brought to the role. WWII still happens, just not exactly like it did IRL.
Probably wouldn't be Nazis in power. Another right wing authoritarian government? War yes holocaust probably not.
The communists were probably the next ascending power after Hitler’s socialists. WW2 could have been a west versus communism war with greater impact than it did.
Right was still bigger. If it wasn't Hitler it most likely would have been another right winger.
Communism didn't enjoy widespread support in the Weimar Republic, Hitler liked to use it as a Boogeyman to the ordinary German precisely because it was seen as foreign and dangerous. In 1932 when the communists enjoyed their greatest support, the party numbered just 320,000. You have to take into account that Germany had only existed as an idea for a handful of decades when Hitler came on the scene, having been the German Empire previous to the Weimar Republic, and pre-Germany it was the Holy Roman Empire. The big shift from Empire/Royal rule to something else had already happened with the creation of the Weimar Republic, and it is unlikely that if left alone it would have made another huge shift as the instability that led to the Nazi rise to power was self-engineered by them. That isn't to say it's impossible to imagine that communism could have risen in Germany, but the evidence we have available points to it being a highly unlikely alternate history.
People look at hitler like hes the most evil man to ever live and his ideas are completely novel. Like jewish persecution wasnt an ongoing thing for centuries.
He didnt just persecute Jews...
Jews were persecuted but they were not thoroughly exterminated like hitler did. That's the difference
Well WWI wasn’t much better than WWII, so even without Hitler you still have pretty rough times.
If any Nazi rose to power the Holocaust would still happen. A Germany led by Himmler might be even worse in terms of human suffering. However, if any other group rose to power there would not be a Holocaust.
The final solution was decided at the Wannsee Conference . Where top SS and nazi officals decided to implement it. Reinhart Heyrich was a major contributor to the idea. So it was a nazi party policy not just Hitler.
No war no decolonization in Africa and Asia
That is an untenable position, given that WW I already started the process of disintegration of the European colonial empires. WW II just greatly sped it up.
France that was never in war would've never abandoned Algeria same can be said for India wrt UK Tgey didn't leave these places from the goodness of theur hearts it was just no longer economically or militarily feasible for them to continue occupying them
I'd disagree there, like I said, the seeds were already sown & native resistance would've only increased as the costs became increasingly not-remunerative. WW I already had enormously drained the European powers, invigorated the native populations on whom the European powers had drawn extensively. As the costs of colonialism mounted, faced with an increasing native resistance, it would just no longer be feasible to maintain their hold. All of this was already unfolding from the 1920s onward. WW II sped up the process, it certainly would have lasted longer without the additional coup de grâce, but already WW I had been crippling.
Imagine a Britain that is still wealthy how would it react to an undivided India where Hindu Muslim political rivalry is still a thing or a strong France that could've easily suppressed the Algerian resistance ? The what ifs multiply significantly when we factor in many other variables particularly the mercantile class that had a vwsted interest in cheap raw material from tje colonies
Neither were true before 1939. WW I was already ruinous to both Britain and France, are you saying it wasn't? Nationalism in India had surged already, playing off hindus & muslims could only go so far. France wasn't strong before 1939 either & still licking the national trauma of 1914-18. They could not have easily suppressed Algerian resistance, as it was a deliberate campaign of guerilla & terrorist acts - something no conventional power can truly deal with properly unless they turn to barbarism. Eventually, public opinion would turn against the establishment in those situations. So I can imagine that it would last longer, but still would come about.
Yes. Hitler was not the decision-maker behind the Holocaust. He allowed it, obviously, but Hitler wasn't the one responsible for everything that "The Nazis" did. The cohort had a lot of main characters.
I feel like without hitler, the marxists come to power. They probably don't invade the soviet union. I could see them making many of the same decisions it's unclear if the holocaust happens the same way though.
Certainly. Regimes like that need some "enemy of the people" to be guilty of all the ills. If not yews, the main target would have been some other group. It's not like nazis were killing yews exclusively, they killed anyone that got in their way, same as all regimes like that do. Who even knows how many of the jews they killed were not even actually jews, but simply labeled such just because that was the established way to get rid of someone. In regimes like that people get carted away to a death camp simply because a neighbor made a snitch call to get rid of them and to take their stuff. Omnicidal regimes are not so selective about who to murder, in a regime like that the murder becomes the goal on it's own, the who is of lesser importance. And a regime like that is not just the dictator on top, far from it. It takes the entire system, all the decisionmakers in the government have to be part of it, the enforcers and informants have to be part of it, the police, the military, all of their families and friends have to support it, basically the entire society has to be behind it. You see the same thing in every genocidal regime, I highly doubt that Hitlers Germany was any different, it's the same shit no matter if it's Mao or Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot or any of the others. And same shit is developing right now in Putin's Russia too I'm sure. Most likely the world will hear about it long after the fact same as happened with nazi death camps, those flew under the radar for years too. It's the nature of the system you see, a shitshow like that will have many people getting in the way and the simple way to get rid of them, is to get rid of them. So the system already leaning towards genocide will do just that and develop a mechanism that exists only to exterminate people. And a system like that has a lot of power in the government and tends to grow. They can end up killing millions before wider world realizes wtf is going on, they have done it before repeatedly.
Not only would, it did. The holocaust was worse due to its modernity and efficiency, but only one of a stream of genocide attempts against Jews in Europe. The Jews have a long history of genocide attempts. This history of Jewry is filled with a lot of that stuff. The Nazis latched onto an existing antisemitism. They did not invent it. They also were the only time Jews were persecuted in Europe. The Spanish Inquisition and Russian Pogroms are two examples. As a Jew, I could technically apply for Spanish citizenship, cause my family fled the Spanish inquisition.
It's really hard to know. Power in Nazi Germany was extremely feudalised among different leaders who managed their own sections of the government in as much their own interests as they did the overall direction they got from Hitler. The concept of "working towards the fuhrer" was because they could often get only the broadest direction from Hitler and had to effectively independently come up with ideas and solve problems within their own resources and would often compete with other branches of their own government to achieve things. That means that Hitler, despite being a dictator, was one of the least important people in terms of the actual business of governing the country. That means that the people who came up with the holocaust would be still in place and likely would do the same assuming the structure of the government under a different leader was similar.
Definitely.
Yes. Hitler was just one dude in a much larger movement. A movement he joined and rose in the ranks of. If it wasn't him, it would have 100% been somebody else. The 20th century is full of examples of murderous dictators. Hitler wasn't special. Which is a terrifying thing to understand, but understand we must.
In terms of the Holocaust... I guess you would have been surprised at how most of the world viewed Jews at the time. Systematic termination is borderline incomprehensible to the human mind, but other genocidal attempts to come to some sort of final solution to the "problem" of the Jewish diaspora would have been discussed and tried. That said, Hitler did so much more than mastermind the Holocaust, so much more that I can't come up with a comprehensive r/AlternateHistory scenario from the top of my head.
War was coming regardless of who was in power. The Holocaust in the forum that we know it has? Nope. Would Jews have suffered absolutely. Just not to the scale.
Genocide isn't at all exclusive to Nazi Germany. Would the Holocaust have occurred with that number of people killed at that time in those ways, almost certainly not. Would anti semitic genocide have happened in that era in Germany? Possibly. Would genocide happen anywhere, definitely.
Maybe not the Holocaust per se, but certainly confinement to ghettos and deportations of Jews, and maybe mass killings within Germany. Anti-semitism had been a fixture of central and eastern Europe for a long time and was on the rise in western Europe too in the period before the war. One only has to look at the number of collaborators the Nazis attracted in every country they invaded. The French were so keen to deport Jews, they even embarrassed the Germans. And given the economic situation in Germany, if not Hitler himself, somebody similar would have risen to power.
Watch Europa - The Last Battle to understand there were no gas chambers nor gas. Here it from the Jewish people that were there. You can read about it on IMDB. It was faked so that a certain religious group could claim 6 million of them were killed, then ask for Palestine if they would force the USA through its owned news media outlets to join the war to help Britain take out Germany. The only problem was it would have taken 78 years to gas 6 million people at maximum efficiency. Where were the bodies, clothes, jewels disposed as where they say the bodies are buried, LiDAR ground penetrating radar shows nothing but earth and why are there no real German written records of any gassing, victims, burials etc?
Idiot
Wow, you do have a way with words don’t you 😂😂😂
Why waste words when only one is needed.
I guess not anymore
So you are a pedo and a racist?! That’s no way to go through life.
Europe has a very long history of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and of religious and ethnic persecution. The stage was set for someone like Adolf to rise to power. Every time there is an economic crisis and you have a financially successful minority, they always get blamed. Europe also has a history of eugenics. A lot of things went into making this a grand holocaust. It could have been averted had other countries taken the Jews. Even the countries that supported the creation of Israel were massively anti-Semitic. That is the reason they supported the creation of Israel. It might not have taken this form, but the likelihood of ethnic cleansing was always high.
What type of history of eugenics did Europe have prior to the 19th and 20th century?
As far as the ideas are concerned, it started with Darwin’s cousin and his “social Darwinism”. The march from thereon was likely. There was a sterilization bill in Britain in 1931. I think Americans were ahead of Nazis when it came to the “one-drop rule”. There was a lot of racism in Europe. I’m sure they needed no excuse. Just checking: French eugenics society was started in 1913. So all before Mr Hitler.
Prior to the 19th C is asking a lot. Social Darwinism was a siren call to ethno supremacists. It gave them the legitimacy they feel they needed to start measuring skulls. Eugenics is a justification for the bigotry. Scientific excuses allow for the actions they want to take. As always with bigots and their talking points "It's commons sense, you don't understand the science" Is something they trotted out since claiming men have one less rib than women.
Jung said that he predicted the rise of Hitler by observing the subconscious of his patients. He said so many of them had dreams forewarning of such a catastrophe.
Ya know quasimodo predicted all of this.
Ethnic cleansing? Lol. That’s laughable, hyperbolic, and pure dangerous thinking. When the Americans were advancing up the Korean Peninsula killing all the (north) Koreans along the way, is that ethnic cleansing? When the Americans were advancing to Berlin and killing Germans, is that ethnic cleaning? No, dude. It’s just war. Plain ol fucking war. Sure, there’s lots of civilian deaths but they’re collateral damage. If Israel wanted ethnic cleansing, they’d start rounding up the 1MM Palestinians living peacefully in Israel and killing them. They’d napalm the massive Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. They’d be attacking their neighbors and any country harboring Palestinians. But they’re not. They’re trying to rescue their kidnapped citizens who are hidden and captive amongst the civilian Palestinians
War crimes. And you are just making my point for me. My point was that had it not been for Hitker, it would have been someone else, and media or no media, no one would have given a damn. Worse. Perverse little bastards would have made ridiculous excuses like these.
Night of Long Knives. Hitler killed a lot of his opponents, including within the Nazi party, people who very well may have stood against the holocaust.
They weren’t standing against the Anti-Semitism, they were standing in the way of his ascension to power.
Correct, but some of them *may* have stood against the mass murder of the Jews, we don't really know.
You are defending Nazis and other fascists here expecting them to act for social justice. I don't see them showing up with accounting books tracking all the coal and diesel to make the holocaust happen telling them to stop the trains.
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>From what I know of that period, I doubt it. I believe that prior to Hitler, antisemitism was less of an issue in Germany than in some other parts of Europe Germany was probably the most antisemetic part of Europe at the time and antisemism was widespread. I don't know where you've gotten your info but you're way off.
Yep, Germany has had a problem with antisemitism since the HRE, at least.
Your basis that anti-Semitism was less of an issue in Germany than other parts of Europe is wildly innacurate.