What if Hitler had never been born or had been assasinated

@Alan McDougall,

Funny, I was right on my way to a local library to borrow his book, Mein Kampf which has been translated into our language not long ago.

I am courious what his views were also since all I know about him and that dark age is from the highly subjective view of our victorious alliance. Not that I would have anything against that view, after all, all history has been written throgh the eyes of winners but this man has been one of the most influential ones of 20th century and for many personified Devil himself.

To answer your question, I would say he came just at the right time, the A-bomb would have been developed even without him 100%, war has been in human nature through all known history (sad but true), and if all that world tension would have been released 15 years later, there would be A-bombs flying around everywhere. So the short answer would be a pessimistic one: the world would be radioactive.

Also, even more interesting qustion in my opinion would have been, what would the world be like if he had won WW2?

1 Reply

@proV,

ProV

A bit of synchronicity working I see, and why should we restrict the thread to Hitler demise, your suggestion of him winning the war has also huge implications

Quote:

I am courious what his views were also since all I know about him and that dark age is from the highly subjective view of our victorious alliance. Not that I would have anything against that view, after all, all history has been written throgh the eyes of winners but this man has been one of the most influential ones of 20th century and for many personified Devil himself.

I disagree that all history has been written by winners would you consider the holocaust victims winners?

Although that is not the direction I would like this thread to go, but the thread does not belong to me but to the forum

Thanks for bouncing off the topic.

I have read Mien kampf and found it silly Hitler did not even write it himself but his crony Rudolf Hess did while they were in prison.

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@Alan McDougall,

The only thought that comes to mind is be careful of what you wish for..Ifs and buts..We have history and its consequences, it could have been better but also a lot worse..

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@Alan McDougall,

Hitler was quite possibly the worst military strategist in the history of the planet. Stalin was horrible as well, but Stalin got better as the war went on and Hitler got worse. If Hitler had been assassinated at some point during the war, it's almost certain that the military leadership would have prevailed over the Party leadership and there would have been some attempt to sue for peace. It probably wouldn't have worked, because the Nazi atrocities were just too extreme; but on the other hand I bet the Wermacht would have made a quick retreat to the pre-Barbarossa border and fortified there.

Hitler was central to the Nazi rise to power, but he was not essential. Throughout the 20s and 30s the Nazis employed the SA, a paramilitary group of thugs who intimidated and terrorized the German populace. If it hadn't been Hitler, it would probably have been Goebbels, Goehring, or Himmler who rose to party leadership.

The conduct of German domestic policy, diplomacy, racial policy, armament, and warfare would have probably been different from the start with a different leader, though, and Hitler's ambitions in Russia were NOT held by most others in the Party or the military.

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@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall wrote:

I have thought about how the world we live in would have differed if Hitler had never been born or if he were assasinated before or during the war

I wonder if there is an inconsistency implicit in this question. Consider:

1. Hitler was born, and the atomic bomb was later discovered.
2. But if he had not been born, the atomic bomb would never have been discovered.
3. But if he had not been born and the atomic bomb had still been discovered....

If (2) is conceptually possible, then so is (3). If counter-facts are meaningful, so are counter-counter-facts. So there is no single answer to the question 'What if Hitler had not been born?'

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@ACB,

However, it is said that the Japanese pressured their youth to achieve due to the dishonour of the Second World War. If this was indeed uncaused then a fair amount of technology would not have been discovered.

If you look at history it is worth noting that, even if Hitler had not been born or, even more unimaginable, his art career succeeded, then there would still have been a power shift in 1930's Germany. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 (-cough-America-cough-) caused global mass depression forcing a Germany, that was still barely recovering after a massive damges bill from the First World War, into extreme poverty. When poop hits the ventilation device, people want change. More likely than the Nazis coming to power under another man (Hitler was a very powerful influence for them, being an amazing public speaker) would be the Communist Party coming to power to perhaps join their Russian neighbours. Nevertheless the world would be very different.

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@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall wrote:

Hi there

I have thought about how the world we live in would have differed if Hitler had never been born or if he were assasinated before or during the war

I will start the thead with a few possibilities

1) The atomic bomb would never have been discovered

2) Highly gifted people that were killed would have lived and great advancing in science would have happened

3) The space race would never have happened

4) There would never have been a cold war

Etc Etc

What do you think can you add to the lists and more

I thought Hitler killed himself? Guess not.

1 Reply

@Elmud,

Elmud;50279 wrote:

I thought Hitler killed himself? Guess not.

Yeah, on April 30 1945 with the Red Army blowing the piss out of Berlin and with the Wermacht reduced to 14 year olds on bicycles going up against T-34 tanks. A bit late in the game for history to be rewritten.

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@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall wrote:

Hi there

I have thought about how the world we live in would have differed if Hitler had never been born or if he were assasinated before or during the war

I will start the thead with a few possibilities

1) The atomic bomb would never have been discovered

2) Highly gifted people that were killed would have lived and great advancing in science would have happened

3) The space race would never have happened

4) There would never have been a cold war

Etc Etc

What do you think can you add to the lists and more

There definately still would have been a cold war, but maybe not an iron curtain from Stettin to Trieste, maybe further east. Then again, without Hitler, the communists might have suceeded in Germany, and France, who knows. Before the war it was very unclear whether fascism or Soviet communism would prevail in Europe. Of course, either one's a dukie sandwich, so...

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@BrightNoon,

Aedes

Quote:

Hitler was central to the Nazi rise to power, but he was not essential. Throughout the 20s and 30s the Nazis employed the SA, a paramilitary group of thugs who intimidated and terrorized the German populace. If it hadn't been Hitler, it would probably have been Goebbels, Goehring, or Himmler who rose to party leadership

Yes but they did not have the hypnotic power of Hitler and would have been replaced.

I am sure also that the holocaust would not have happened as this depraved idea came out of Hitlers sick mind

America would never started the hugely expensive Manhattan Project to create a weapon of unnecessarily destructive power.

America might have taken longer to become a Superpower

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@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall wrote:

Aedes

Yes but they did not have the hypnotic power of Hitler and would have been replaced.

I am sure also that the holocaust would not have happened as this depraved idea came out of Hitlers sick mind

America would never started the hugely expensive Manhattan Project to create a weapon of unnecessarily destructive power.

America might have taken longer to become a Superpower

Would you actually take the chance of changing history ? I think the idea that history would be better if a certain maniac did not exist or you could have killed him or her is beyond our reckoning.To say that no other more intelligent orator could not have led Germany into a more destructive and more worrying possible victory for Germany is a naive attitude towards history.

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@Alan McDougall,

Yeah, there was a cold war of sorts between Russia and England/US even from the end of the Bolshevik Revolution. In WWII it was a date with the devil for England / France / US to have to diplomatically (and later strategically) ally with the USSR. In fact the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Nazi-Soviet Pact) might have never happened had Stalin and the West already mistrusted each other.

Fascism in Spain and Italy was not expansionist in the way that Hitler was, and without his influence Mussolini probably wouldn't have been so militaristic.

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@xris,

Guys I made an awful mistake with the title of the thread

Re: What if Hitler had never been born or were "not" assassinated wrong

I know he was not assassinated but committed suicide, it was just a key stroke error, sorry for that

It should have read"

"What if Hitler had never been born or were assassinated"

Can someone correct the title I dont know how!!

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@Alan McDougall,

Title corrected.

1 Reply

@Aedes,

Paul

Thank you or that and the correction of my Engineering grammer :bigsmile:

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@BrightNoon,

...and maybe Hitler unknowingly killed his uber-evil replacement; and the world could have been much worse.

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@Alan McDougall,

I'm reading a book right now by Antony Beevor called "Vasily Grossman: A writer at war". (Antony Beevor wrote two of the best books I've read about WWII, "Stalingrad" and "The Fall of Berlin")

Vasily Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent who covered the entire war in Eastern Europe. He covered (and survived) the initial massive German invasion, the defense of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, the discoveries of the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps, and the Battle of Berlin. His notebooks would have gotten him executed if the NKVD had ever discovered them, and as such he is one of the greatest sources of info about the war in the east.

One interesting point is the famine in Ukraine that Stalin had unleashed in the 1930s by collectivizing agriculture. About 7 million people died, they were reduced to cannibalism, etc. (No one knows if the famine was intentional or if it was just one of the greatest examples of brazen neglect in world history). It turns out that Stalin's propaganda team found a way to blame Jews for the famine.

Thus, Grossman discovered, the people in Ukraine not only greeted the Nazis as liberators but also helped them root out and exterminate the Jews. (Something very similar happened with the German invasions of Belarus, East Prussia, the Baltic states, etc). Of course the Germans created a famine of their own by utterly pillaging the conquered territories, and committing widespread atrocities against the general population, so "liberated" isn't exactly what Ukraine experienced.

But it just supports the point that the Eastern Front in WWII was not just a Hitler parade. It was sort of the culmination of a massive civil war in Eastern Europe that had been going on since the beginning of hostilities in the First World War. The scale of the bloodshed and atrocities was possible only because of so much kindling on the ground.

1 Reply

@Aedes,

Quote:

Thus, Grossman discovered, the people in Ukraine not only greeted the Nazis as liberators but also helped them root out and exterminate the Jews. (Something very similar happened with the German invasions of Belarus, East Prussia, the Baltic states, etc). Of course the Germans created a famine of their own by utterly pillaging the conquered territories, and committing widespread atrocities against the general population, so "liberated" isn't exactly what Ukraine experienced.

Stalin if it were possible was more of a monster than Hitler, in fact he was responsible for more murders.

The people of the Ukraine did indeed at first welcome the Germans of liberators, it is believed that Stalin in anticipation of the German advance into deep Ukraine ordered a horrific horror of pillage, murder, rape and every depravity known to humanity on the Ukrainian people , and made it appear that it as the Germans who were doing this

In this way this evil monster made the Ukrainian people turn on the German armies instead of welcoming them as as before. My dad told me this when I was a child so I am not absolutely sure if he got it correct

You can check out the validity of this blight on history if you like As you rightly stated the German army did more than their part in this sorry episode of human history

Thank you for a nice post

1 Reply

@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;50603 wrote:

Stalin if it were possible was more of a monster than Hitler, in fact he was responsible for more murders.

This is actually a common misconception. Even if you only look at Russians Hitler killed more than Stalin, to say nothing of the millions of NON-Russians killed by Hitler.

Stalin's "Great Terror" during the purges of the late 1930s killed between 1 and 3 million. An additional 5-10 million dead were political prisoners in the Gulag, and there were up to a million German prisoners of war who died in Soviet custody. If you add the 7 million from the famine, that brings the total to 15-20 million.

The SS killed between 11 and 15 million noncombatants in the death camps and by the firing squads in occupied Russia. Yeah there were 6 million Jews, but there were also 3 million non-Jewish Poles, up to 5 million Red Army POWs, and millions of "partisans" shot by the Einsatzgruppen and Waffen SS in Russia. An additional 2 million people starved or froze to death in the 3 year long encirclement of Leningrad. Finally, the Wermacht in Eastern Europe was specifically told to live off the land, and as such there was catastrophic famine as the German army commandeered the entirety of agriculture in their occupied territories.

The population of the Soviet Union decreased by about 25 million during the war, and half of these were civilian deaths. The virtual entirety of civilian deaths were at the hands of the Germans.

Alan wrote:

You can check out the validity of this blight on history if you like As you rightly stated the German army did more than their part in this sorry episode of human history

Stalin was indeed a monster of superlative proportions. It was the combination of Stalin and Hitler's combined 1) incompetence and 2) brutality that made it such an apocalyptic war.

1 Reply

What if Hitler had never been born or had been assasinated

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