What if Hitler had never been born or had been assasinated

And when Soviet intelligence interrogated German physicists in 1945 they found that Hitler had largely abandoned a nuclear weapons program as early as 1941 or 1942. See "The Fall of Berlin" by Antony Beevor, which goes into quite a bit of detail about this (Stalin was obsessed with not allowing this to fall into allied hands).

This is from the Wikipedia article:



---------- Post added 07-07-2009 at 12:09 PM ----------

James, I'm at work and I can't respond to your many points at any length right now.

I'd first say that there absolutely was a second front -- and if you need evidence look at the deployment of German divisions in France.

Secondly, you need not defend Hitler by putting down Churchill. I'm not putting Churchill up on any pedestal.

Third, there are many audacious people who do nothing but get themselves and others killed. Look at the Battle of the Somme -- that was a pretty audacious act, but few would elevate Gen Haig as a great leader, mainly because it was a bloody catastrophy. George W. Bush was audacious in his invasion of Iraq -- is he great? Mussolini was audacious in his invasions of North Africa and Ethiopia -- was he great? Hitler's audacity yielded dividends because his army was so much better prepared for war than any of his opponents -- and that lasted until his opponents got better. He became no less audacious as the war continued, but he began to lose. Kursk and the Battle of the Bulge were a prime examples of where the same aggressive audacity led him to bleed his own forces dry without any strategic merit.

Next, the ONLY condition in which I can envision Germany having been victorious over the USSR would have been if Japan invaded the Soviet Union from the east. The Soviet ability to withstand devastating losses of territories and troops was plainly evident within a few months of the invasion. The encircled pockets of Soviet troops at Kiev, at Bialystok-Minsk, etc, fought savagely against the Germans, and even though Red Army troops were captured by the millions, they exacted a dear (and unexpected) toll on the invading army (a fact remarked upon by several German generals). The Germans were NEVER able to wear down the Red Army as a fighting force, ever, and it's hard to believe that the loss of Moscow would have done so.

After all, the Germans took Minsk, Riga, Kiev, Odessa, Orel, Kharkov, etc, i.e. captured city after city after city. But capturing cities is not how you win a war. Destroying armies is how you win a war. And in the battle to eliminate the Soviets as a fighting power, the Germans did not have much of a chance. Once the Soviet industrial machine got going they were able to churn out their best weapons of the war (T-34 tanks and Katyusha artillery pieces), replenish their air force, and provide small arms to ungodly numbers of recruits. The Germans would NEVER have had access to the industrial areas in the Urals, even with a capture of Moscow, because they were far out of bombing range and the Germans were already far too distant along their supply lines by the time they reached the outskirts of Moscow.

If Japan had invaded Russia, then the USSR would have been fighting a 2-front war and the USA might have remained a noncombatant -- or at best belatedly lent operational support to England.

This is incorrect in that as many as 15% of the Holocaust's eventual Jewish victims were already dead by the time of Wannsee, and the largest committment of manpower to the task was also prior to Wannsee in the form of SS death squads (see below). The Wannsee Conference primarily functioned to 1) define Jews, and 2) subordinate Jewish policy under the RHSA / SS and communicate this policy to other leaders.

Functionally, i.e. in practice, the Holocaust was well underway by the time of Wannsee. Ghettoization and mass starvation / disease, and to a lesser degree enslavement and mass shootings of Polish Jews was happening as early as 1939.

After Barbarossa in June 1941, Hitler was asked what to do with Jews in occupied areas of the Soviet Union, and Hitler ordered that be "shot as partisans". The commissar / von Reichenau orders are regarded as the paper justification for rounding up and dispatching all Jews in occupied Soviet territory.

The einsatzgruppen were formed by Heydrich in 1941 (recall that Heydrich later chaired the Wannsee conference). These were large death squads that ultimately exterminated nearly the entire Jewish populations of the Ukraine, the Baltics, Belarus, and Western Russia (by mass shooting), and most of their work was done in the first 6-12 months after Barbarossa. Between 1 and 1.5 million Jews were killed by the einsatzgruppen, most famously 37,000 in two days at Babi Yar. Even though these squads were SS functionaries, the Wermacht was complicit in their actions, and von Manstein's troops actually assisted at Babi Yar (which is near Kiev).

After Wannsee, because the mass shootings were taking a grievous psychological toll on the perpetrators, they began to employ gas chambers. In 1942 Operation Reinhard got underway, which was the deadliest action of the entire Holocaust. By a year later there were almost no Polish Jews left, and the Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor) were closed, and it remained for Auschwitz to be the site where Jews imported from other countries were sent.



By the way, most participants in this thread are American. I'm a first generation Jewish American, my mom was born in Germany but her parents were from Poland, and my dad was born in Hungary.

I believe the classification of Jews had already been accomplished by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws

the Wannsee Conference was a secret meeting of Nazi leaders and a different matter altogether.

It was as much about the fate of the Jews as it was about the Eastern War as a whole

many Jews were actually 'encouraged' (read: coerced) to leave Germany

The Nuremberg Laws, while undoubtedly an abominable piece of anti-Semitic legislation, had nothing to do with the extermination of Jews.

They were, perhaps, a stepping-stone in that direction, but their only function was to define who was and wasn't a Jew

They did NOT call for the systematic destruction of the Jewish race

It is a matter of debate whether at this point Hitler had contemplated all-out genocide

True, a great many Jews (as many as 15% of the total, you say?) were killed before the Wannsee Conference and the authorization of the Final Solution.

A disproportionate number of those were Poles.

I do not believe that systematic extermination of the conquered populations was a key feature of Hitler's policy of war at this early date.

Put in simpler terms, I don't think genocide and mass-extermination were central to Hitler's war aims and war effort, not in the early stages of the War.

Jews WERE slaughtered before 1942, and a 'Holocaust' of sorts was developing, but many of the casualties were exterminated as combatants and as prisoners of war - NOT simply as Holocaust victims.

After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS and police units (acting as mobile killing units) began massive killing operations aimed at entire Jewish communities. By autumn 1941, the SS and police introduced mobile gas vans. These paneled trucks with the exhaust pipe reconfigured to pump poisonous carbon monoxide gas into sealed spaces, killing those locked within, were to complement ongoing shooting operations. Four weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union, on July 17, 1941, Hitler tasked SS chief Heinrich Himmler with responsibility for all security matters in the occupied Soviet Union. Hitler gave Himmler broad authority to physically eliminate any perceived threats to permanent German rule. Two weeks later, on July 31, 1941, Nazi leader Hermann Goering authorized SS General Reinhard Heydrich to make preparations for the implementation of a "complete solution of the Jewish question." In the autumn of 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler assigned German General Odilo Globocnik (SS and police leader for the Lublin District) with the implementation of a plan to systematically murder the Jews of the Generalgouvernement. The code name Operation Reinhard was eventually given to this plan, named after Heydrich (who was assassinated by Czech partisans in May 1942). Three killing centers, with no purpose other than mass murder, were established in Poland as part of Operation Reinhard -- Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

However, take Stalingrad as an example. As you probably well know (I recommend watching the film Enemy at the Gates, if you haven't already), the city was absolutely crucial to the wider Eastern Front, NOT solely because of its strategic value, or because of its importance as an industrial center, but because it bore Stalin's name.

The victory of Stalingrad was a morale-boosting victory for the Red Army, albeit a Pyrrhic victory in the fashion of the Somme, because the defenders actually suffered higher casualties than the attackers.

Stalin recognized that the city COULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO FALL, BECAUSE IT WAS SHATTER THE MORALE OF THE RED ARMY.

Please, if you would, explain the implications as a result of the Treaty at Versailles and the attitude of the Germans as a result of that treaty in your opinion.

James posted
The Nuremberg Laws, while undoubtedly an abominable piece of anti-Semitic legislation, had nothing to do with the extermination of Jews. They were, perhaps, a stepping-stone in that direction, but their only function was to define who was and wasn't a Jew (you were Jewish if you were of the first, second or third generation), strip Jews of their property and civil rights, even of their status as German civilians, and even deny them certain human rights accorded to other (non-Jewish) Germans. They did NOT call for the systematic destruction of the Jewish race; not so directly or boldly, that is. Hitler was more subtle. He forbade Jews and non-Jews (especially German non-Jews) from marrying or having relations and producing children; this can be seen as a means of preventing the Jewish race from spreading, and diminishing its 'dominance' in German society; and so it was a move in a less-than-liberal direction, but still a long way from actual mass murder. It is a matter of debate whether at this point Hitler had contemplated all-out genocide, or whether he intended merely to continue victimizing them; there is evidence for both views, and it is such a conflicting subject there is even historical debate about it today. Genocide proper, determined and organized, arrived much later on.

Fascinating James. Please, if you would, explain the implications as a result of the Treaty at Versailles and the attitude of the Germans as a result of that treaty in your opinion. In my opinion, this was not a treaty as I understand the definition of the word. :perplexed:
Thanks,
William

Thanks for your post, James.

That was a different classification and for a different purpose.

The classification of Jews was discussed at length there according to the transcript that Eichmann took there, as well as his testimony when on trial.

Yes, that's what I said. The formal purpose of this part of the Wannsee conference was to subordinate all activities against the Jews under the SS, as administered by the RHSA (though this changed when forced labor became official policy as well, so the RHSA was not the only involved government organ).

Around 600,000 Jews fled Germany before the war. Many of them were imported from surrounding countries and killed anyway, because the US and Britain were very reluctant to accept Jews.

Correct.

No, they had a bigger function than that -- they stripped Jews of political, professional, and economic power, and ultimately stripped them of citizenship.

I never said anything to the contrary. That is correct.

That's not much of a matter of debate if his speeches and if his writing in Mein Kampf bear testimony to it.

The Wannsee Conference was NOT "authorization of the Final Solution". It was a communication of this policy to people outside the RHSA and SS.

No they were NOT Poles!!

While from Sept 1939 until June 1941, Poles were killed in large numbers as part of the ethnic cleansing / lebensraum program, the Jews were not particularly singled out except for ghettoization, and died in relatively small numbers. The einsatzgruppen killed the Polish intelligentsia, but did not massacre Jews at the time.

But from June 1941 onward, the einsatzgruppen went into action in the occupied Soviet Union. The einsatzgruppen operated in the Baltic States, in Ukraine, in Belarus, and in Russia. Separate actions against Jews took place in Romania and Yugoslavia, but these were mainly carried out by local populations with SS support.

The vast majority of the einsatzgruppen killings happened before Wannsee ever took place. They are thought to have killed between 1 million and 1.5 million Jews altogether, but most of this was in the beginning months of the war -- later on the einsatzgruppen were disbanded and many of these were incorporated into Waffen SS units or Wermacht formations.

The Polish Jews were killed en masse AFTER Wannsee, as result of Operation Reinhard, which established an experimental death camp at Chelmno and operational death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek. Between 2 million and 2.5 million Jews died in these camps, nearly all Poles, and nearly all in 1942-1943. The reason 1942 was such a deadly year after Wannsee is that Operation Reinhard started, Auschwitz-Birknau was functional, and the einsatzgruppen were still operational.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was also a killing center for Polish Jews (two of my grandparents were sent there from Lodz, Poland), but by the time it took over as the main killing center most of the Jews in the "general government" of occupied Poland were dead. Fully 1/3 of the Jews who died at Auschwitz were from Hungary, and imported from elsewhere in occupied Europe (incl Germany).

Then you believe incorrectly. Systematic extermination of the Jews began in 1941. Systematic extermination of Soviet POWs also began in 1941 (3 million dead between June 1941 and Jan 1942). This is not even debatable.

[URL="http://[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen""]Einsatzgruppen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/URL][URL="http://</p><p> </p><p><a href="http://[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Death_squads_.281941.E2.80.931943.29"" target="_blank">The Holocaust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>]Timeline of Holocaust"]

[URL="http://[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Death_squads_.281941.E2.80.931943.29""]The Holocaust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/URL] (linked to a specific section of this article)[/URL]

Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Table of estimated Jewish deaths by year (copied from Wiki):
1933-1940 under 100,000
1941 1,100,000
1942 2,700,000
1943 500,000
1944 600,000
1945 100,000

This adds up to 5.0 million during the war years. Most historians estimate 5.9 million total. Whatever the actual total, 1941 was the second most lethal year of the Holocaust.



I think the evidence suggests that one of the main reasons he waged war specifically for the slaughter of Jews, partly because he conflated the idea of Jews with that of Bolshevism. His writing and speeches suggest this from as early as the 1920s, and he and Goebbels both prattled constantly about Jews as a plague that needed to be eradicated. In 1937 or 1938 he gave a speech in which he threatened the destruction of the Jews if another war developed.

You're wrong about this. Please look it up.

From the USHMM website:


Stalingrad was symbolically important, but not enough to justify the million people who died in or as a result of that battle. Whether Stalingrad or some other town, the importance was that between the Volga and the Black Sea was the Nazi road to the Caucasus, and somewhere in there the Germans needed to provide security for their expedition to the Caucasian oil fields. If the Germans had walked into Stalingrad uncontested, then the battle would have happened somewhere else.

By the way, I've seen Enemy at the Gates twice, and I don't think it portrays the battle accurately or comprehensively at all. Read "Stalingrad" by Antony Beevor, "The Road to Stalingrad" and "The Road to Berlin" by John Erickson, and read "A Writer at War" (Antony Beevor's compilation of the journals of Vasily Grossman).

It was not a pyrrhic victory at all! It was a major tactical victory and a major strategic victory. (Pyrrhic victories generally mean tactical victories but strategic losses). I mean you're right that the Soviets suffered more casualties, but in the Eastern Front as a whole they suffered 4 times as many as the Germans, but there is no doubt as to who the winners of that war were. The Soviets also suffered more casualties at Kursk and at Moscow.

Stalingrad destroyed the entire German 6th army and much of the 4th Panzer army. Never had Germany suffered a defeat on that scale. Furthermore, the momentum of the victory and the subsequent Operation Saturn threatened to cut off the remainder of Army Group South, which was in the Caucasus and would have been trapped if the Red Army had made it to the Black Sea in time, so Stalingrad created a major gain in territory. The Germans withdrew rapidly (and their withdrawal was costly) from that whole region, and after back and forth exchanges at Kharkov they had only one offensive left in them at Kursk.

The propagandists loved that, but it's just not true. Morale is overrated. When the Soviets lost 600,000 troops to an encirclement at Kiev, THAT was cause for loss of morale. When the Germans began to bomb Moscow (and they had to evacuate Lenin's pickled body from the mauseleum), THAT was cause for loss of morale. When the Germans made it all the way to the Volga and the Caucasus, THAT was cause for loss of morale. Stalingrad, compared with cities like Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Odessa, Sebastopol, and Leningrad, was not all that important.

---------- Post added 07-08-2009 at 06:41 PM ----------

Its role in the eventuality of WWII is grossly overrated.

It was NOT a fair treaty, and it was meant to be punitive and not reconstructive. That is clear. But the use of it as a propaganda weapon is FAR disproportionate to its actual relevance.

Fundamentally, WWII happened because the conflicts that flared in WWI were never satisfactorily resolved. Four empires collapsed in WWI (Kaiser Germany, Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey). In their wake was left ultranationalist idealogues fighting it out, in a brutal civil war in the cases of Russia and Spain. Mutually incompatible military powers rose to prominence in the political and economic melee that followed.

If you're interested in this subject, I'd suggest you read "War of the World" by the British historian Niall Fergusson. His thesis is that the first half of the 20th century represented an enormous civil war within Western civilization, in fact a quasi-suicide attempt. He goes into extraordinary detail about factors such as economic changes, mass movement of refugees, and the connectedness of various atrocities such as the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Stalin's purges and famines, and the Japanese atrocities in mainland Asia as having common underlying themes.

WWII, and the rise of Naziism, was probably independent of Versailles. No one would have cared about Versailles if Germany had been more prosperous under the Weimar government.

James you are indeed a man of words. I have read through your post and it is historically correct, but nevertheless, Hitler did not need to start that war, Germany was beginning to get on its feet and and trying to find excuses for the actions of a monster like Hitler and consolidated all Germany into Hitler's dogma is wrong.

There were some 23 attempts to assassinate Hitler that indicates to me he was not so much adored but feared

IT was really the old story of power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely

I believe, instead it was an excessively punitive series of measures designed to chastise the German people for their part in the bloodshed, between 1914 and 1918.

Versailles imposed many brutal and insuperable demands on the German people: impossible reparations, the demilitarization of the Rhineland, severe limitations on its army and navy, the foundation of a Weimar Republic that proved most unpopular, and later incapable of dealing with the social and political upheavals of the Great Depression

II don't think Versailles' importance can be overstated. It is cited by most western historians as a major reason, or 'condition', for both Hitler's rise to power and the Second World War.

However, to my mind there is a big difference between suggesting or talking about doing something - especially something as horrific as the Holocaust - and actually making it a reality.

ISimply because Hitler WROTE about the Final Solution in his cell in Munich, did not make it a foregone conclusion that it was going to happen.

IOne wonders how people in Europe in 1930, reading this book for the first time, were not startled and concerned by his insinuations

Well, it's easy to miss something.

might I add a suggestion: read Max Hastings' Armageddon.

the fact that fewer people were being executed in 1943, 1944 or 1945, while it might point STATISTICALLY to the suggestion that the Holocaust was 'letting off steam'

But I don't see how it is connected with Stalin's purges or famines.

The rise of Nazism could *not* have been independent of Versailles

If that's true, it's only because Versailles was too weak to effectively prevent Germany from becoming an economic and industrial force. The psychological effect of Versailles was a trifle compared with the psychological effect of having lost the war.

I can tell you that my grandparents, who were Jews in Poland and in Hungary, have said that they were terrified of the Nazis long before the war ever happened.

the MAIN proximate factor for WWII was the rise of a bellicose regime in Germany. They were going to seek war with whatever rhetoric. Versailles was NOT why the Nazis came to power -- they came to power because they had street armies and forced Hindenberg into a power sharing government. They had popular support because they had a charismatic angry leader who could tickle the fancy of angry disaffected young men. He used Jews, Bolsheviks, Versailles, stab-in-the-back, whatever as rhetoric. But Hitler was an angry man before Versailles was ratified. And his regime did not wage war in order to nullify Versailles -- which was a treaty that the Soviet Union (or Tsarist Russia for that matter) had no part in.

And yet after Versailles Germany was still economically stronger than any other continental power including France. Furthermore, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed by Germany on Russia was far more punitive than Versailles.

I liked 'Overlord' by Hastings.

How many people actually believed Adolf Hitler was serious, when he wrote about exterminating the Jews?

Your grandparents may have been terrified of the Nazis, but did they have any inkling that Hitler's plans of 'racial cleansing' might actually come true? Or were they more worried in general?

His words spoke to people, and those people largely agreed with what he said and were furthermore frustrated by their incompetent leaders and their ailing political system.

Hitler's reason for hating the French was fairly simple. He did not entertain a racial or ideological hatred of them; neither he did the British race, or the Italians, or the Spaniards, or any other so-called 'Aryan' culture or civilization. His hatred of the 'untermenschen' and of Soviet Communism, however, was entirely racial and ideological in basis.

he idea behind it was if Hitler had never been born how would world history differed

Richard Nixon would have had to find some other political play book to dream about at night.

It is I who started this thread and the idea behind it was if Hitler had never been born how would world history differed