What if Hitler had never been born or had been assasinated

The Nazis had technology much nore advanced than anything at the time. It was terrible what they did, but perhaps there would have been a lag in technology had Hitler not existed. Though that wouldn't be a problem, as that time period caused severe lags in technology and scientific advancement anyway.

I think the advancement of most areas of physics would have happened faster were it not for Hitler. The greatest minds in quantum / particle physics were in Germany, and nearly all except Heisenberg fled the Nazis. This was pretty disruptive to the advancement of science. The scientific know-how was channeled into works of engineering, like ballistics (von Braun's V2 program), and the exiled German scientists worked on weaponized nuclear fission (which was an application of the science but not necessarily an advancement of it).

Medical science under the Nazis was barely recognizable as science by any standards of the day and was just a vehicle for sadism.

What about the many great Jewish minds that were annihilated by the Holocaust, how much of a better world we might be living in if these remarkable people had never been murdered?

If Hitler wasn't around, the nazis wouldn't have been nearly as powerful as they ended up. Don't get me wrong, they would still have had plenty of military and political masterminds; however that isn't where they got their power from. The nazis turned Germany from a third world nation into a world power because of the blind faith that the German people put in the nazi party. It was Hitler's charisma that got the people's support.

He words reached into the deepest parts of the German people's mind and erase all their fears. They were a completely demoralized group and he became like a savior to them. By the time Hitler was done giving a each speech, they were more than happy to follow him. Had there have been an election to decide whether or not to give Hitler supreme power over the nation, he would have won in a landslide. Never underestimate the power of charisma, for it often decides who leads and who follows.

Such a hard, impossible thing to speculate on.

2/3 of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust came from Poland and the USSR, and in general these were people with low education and socioeconomic status. Sure, some were professionals, but most were just people living their lives. The most educated population of Jews was living in Germany before the war. "Only" around 200,000 German Jews died in the Holocaust, though, because around 600,000 had fled Germany during the 1930s. This was the exodus in which many of the great minds of science left Germany.

Even if the Germans didn't kill a single "remarkable" mind, the world is worse for their having killed millions of "ordinary" people.

---------- Post added 08-13-2009 at 11:06 PM ----------

His party won 43% of the vote in 1933, which was by far the best they ever did. This was a plurality, because it was more than any other single party. But a landslide? Hitler was popular among a certain demographic, but he NEVER had the ear of the entire German populace -- that is why he had his brownshirt thugs running around the streets to terrorize people.

I'm pretty much of the view that the general history would have played out the same way.
So the Atomic bomb would just have been discovered a little later. The cold war would still have happened. The space race would have happened later, missing the German rocket development.
But there are a few changes if ww2 had not happened.
1. At the time of WW2 the US had a military of the size of that of Romania. The US would not have rearmed because of the war and the world would have been overrun by the soviets.
2. Two decades worth of weapons development would not have happened within a few years. Technology would have been different. Almost all of technology is an offspring of weapons development, so like it or not human kind would be a few decades further back with technology.
I couldn't even start naming all the technologies we have today in some way being developed during the war.

Without Germany initiating it, WW2 would still have happened, only the sides would be less clear. Italy would still have started the conquest that it attemtped during the early part of the war, which would put it in conflict with France and Britain. The Soviet Union, under Stalin, would have attempted to conquer the rest of Europe, starting with the easter European nations. Now, a couple of things could have happened in Europe at this point. One, Italy, France and Britian could have put their conflict aside to deal with the Soviets, or the Soviet Union could have allied with Italy to conquer the rest of western Europe.

Also, Japan would still start its conquest of Asia and the Pacific Ocean, which would put in in conflict with the US. The U.S. and the nations around the Pacific Ocean would have banded together and probably would have eventual defeated Japan. After this, the U.S. may have gotten involved in Europe's war. Probably by launching an attack on the Soviet Union from Asia.

R.E. ShadowDragon:

You make a few interesting points here, I have been absent from this forum for a while so I will try to challenge them as best I can.



You are definitely right about the possibility of a Second World War erupting in Hitler's absence. It may have occurred later, however, and under very different conditions. For it was Hitler's singular ambition that led to the war of 1939, a war that was very different in character to that of 1914-18; but there were other mavericks in Germany agitating for war at the same time, any of whom might have risen to prominence without Adolf's existence.


A few quick points: (I shall try to be concise.)

1) As I mentioned in a previous topic, the Treaty of Versailles made a Second World War likely - although not necessarily the war that happened. Its punitive terms gave the German people good reason to hate the Allied 'victors', reaffirmed their belief that they had not been defeated in the conventional sense (the political "stab in the back", as opposed to a straightforward military defeat), and weakened the German state to such an extent that a war of vengeance actually seemed desirable.

2) Also the Depression of the 1930s, which happened independently of Hitler's influence and was more or less concurrent with the rise of fascist and otherwise extremist regimes throughout Europe (excluding Mussolini's regime, which came into power before 1929), created an explosive powder-keg in Western Europe that was likely to erupt in some form or another.

I refer you to an earlier post of mine (it has to be at least six weeks old by now), concerning whether Hitler was "the driving force" of World War Two - a statement made by Eric Hobsbawm in The Short Twentieth Century: The Age of Extremes (an excellent read if you want to buy it) - or merely the circumstantial architect of events.

3) Probably the sides would have been "less clear", as you put it - the alliance of Italy with Germany was a turn-out for the books, as it had allied itself with the Western Powers in the previous war - but I think the main lines would have been the same. Germany chafed under the imperial restraints of Britain and France, still the greatest imperial powers of the day, and to the east was threatened by the growing power of the Soviet Union, which was both a military threat (albeit seemingly diminished after its ignominious role in WWI) and an ideological one (being communist.) America's part in these events is less certain, despite being a natural ally of Britain, because of its fierce isolationism. In any case, no German leader, regardless of his intentions, would want to declare war on the United States: Hitler was wise not to do so until 1941 (and very unwise to do so independently after Pearl Harbour.)



This statement assumes several things. Stalin did not have concrete designs on Europe, at least not in our 1930s timeline. Barring the ill-fated invasion of Finland, he made no attempt to expand the Soviet Union's influence beyond its borders, EXCEPT through the Comintern: all the Communist (and SD) parties in Europe were influenced by Moscow in some way, with varying degrees of success. Stalin did invade Poland in 1939, under the terms of the duplicitous Nazi-Soviet Pact, but as later events made clear that was due more to his need to protect the Soviet Union and build up a "buffer zone" against the West in the future. Stalin was no fool - he failed to anticipate the timing of Hitler's attack, in June 1941, but he knew that it was coming. Therefore, the conquest of East Poland was compelled by two overriding factors: the pressures exerted by a militant and expansive Germany (under the influence of Hitler, a man with a well-known prejudice against the "untermenschen" Slavs of the East); and the ideological threat posed by a capitalist and suspicious West.

The latter pressure had nothing to do with Hitler - as early as the 1920s Stalin had declared that the Soviet Union must "become strong" or face total destruction at the hands of the West: "we are lost." In this he was eerily prophetic. However, Stalin did not know then who the enemy would be, or what form this conflict would take. "The West" encompassed all of Europe, which was by-and-large capitalist, and Britain, France and possibly the United States (excluding for a moment the issue of its isolationism) were the most likely contenders. Germany, after Poland, was the Soviet Union's closest neighbour, with a demonstrable hunger for blood and conquest; but Germany in the 1920s was weak and disarmed, and although it might regain its strength in a decade or less, Stalin probably gave less thought to it. Yet, even in 1940, as the threat of Nazi Germany loomed large, France fell and Britain teetered on the brink of collapse, Stalin felt that Britain and Germany might reach an agreement and seek to destroy him together - and why shouldn't they, given their ideological hatred of communism?

The former pressure - that exerted by Germany, and by Hitler's designs on Europe - is another matter, and raises indeed the issue of whether or not Stalin would have started to expand his territorial boundaries, without the presence of Hitler. This could become a topic in itself!



Exactly the argument I mentioned before, although I wonder why the Soviet Union would ally with Italy, of all countries, to conquer western Europe? Germany, given its grievance towards the Allied powers, would surely make a more natural bed-partner? And in fact, in real life, Germany and the Soviet Union did make a pact, even if it was only an alliance of convenience, and short-lived at that. And although Germany was a "capitalist" nation in the 1920s and 30s, like Britain, America and France, it actually had by the time of Hitler's arrival one of the largest and most powerful Communist parties in the world - as I mentioned in a previous thread, had the Nazis not come to power, the German Communist Party might actually have gained a sizable majority in the Reichstag and bowed to Soviet pressure. In which case, if Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe followed suit (I know Hungary and Czechoslovakia had powerful communist parties, and Stalin had made attempts in the past to bring them into the fold), history would have seen a pseudo-"Cold War" in the heartland of Europe, centred on Germany, WITHOUT the existence of atomic weapons, and thus potentially more devastating than the real-life Second World War and the Cold War that developed in the late 1940s and 50s.


Whew... food for thought there! Feel free to tell me what you think!

I very much agree with James' points (and good to see you back).
Before generalized war broke out, there were already numerous conflicts erupting. The Spanish Civil War and the Russo-Finnish War were the main ones in the European theater, and the second Sino-Japanese War (including the war between Japan and the USSR) was the main in the East.

Still, it's hard to at least divorce the Spanish Civil War from Hitler's influence.

There was a great deal of diplomatic distrust between Britain and the USSR before WW2 broke out, so the Cold War was probably inevitable in some form.

Definitely agree there, you could even say that the initial distrust between Britain and Russia (which went back at least as far as the Great War, and Russia's sudden capitulation in that) was the foundation for the later Cold War. And with its ideological roots in the historic confrontation between capitalism and communism, as predicted by Karl Marx, the Cold War was, in a sense, inevitable. More than that, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Marxists said a conflict between capitalism and communism was historically inevitable; capitalists, even those that despised Marx, feared it; the Bolsheviks at various times were actively trying to bring it about.

However, the distinctive "character" of the Cold War - the East/West divide; the United States and the Soviet Union as the central protagonists (as opposed to, more likely in my suggested "alternate timeline" hypothesis, Britain and a communist Germany); atomic bombs and Mutually Assured Destruction; a war of proxies (neither the Soviets or the Americans actively engaged each other at any point, the closest they got was the Cuban Missile Crisis) - was entirely the product of the Second World War.

Without Hitler, without history transpiring as it did, without the Second World War, without the United States assuming the mantle of leadership and shrugging off the robes of isolationism, without the rise of a fascist dictatorship in Germany - and the arrival, in its stead, of an influential communist one, perhaps dragging the nations of Eastern Europe down with it - without all this, the twentieth century could well have taken an even more violent and destructive course than that which it did.

As one of my old history lecturers used to say, there is no such thing as "an ill wind that blows nobody any good." Even the most catastrophic events of history have produced some good. For those living at the time, of course, it can be hard to see: the wonderful thing about history is it gives one a sense of perspective. The Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th century is a great example - although it killed tens of millions, its consequences both short- and long-term were more beneficial than harmful. In the immediate term it solved Europe's overpopulation problems; in the medium term it brought about a gradual revolution in medicine and the arts; in the long term it led, directly and indirectly, to the Enlightenment, which in turn produced the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, not to mention the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, liberalism, the rise of secularism and the decline in religion. Events in history, as you can see, are not separate, but tend to hang together rather like balls on a string.
The Second World War is another example, closer to home: few individuals have been as reviled as Adolf Hitler (or Joseph Stalin, for that matter) but in hindsight even they may have had some beneficial impact on history. The Cold War was good in some ways, too: it accelerated the pace of technological development (not only weapons technology) in the latter half of the twentieth century; but for it mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, as the Space Race was a key feature of the War; the advent of nuclear deterrence made war as mankind had known it for centuries obsolete; and so on.

The problem is that it takes a highly multivariable counterfactual to think about this beneficial impact as compared with the alternative (the world without them).

And because by their own agency, both Hitler and Stalin caused an untold amount of suffering and harm, and any proposed benefits to the world can at best be thought of as unintentional side effects of their reigns, I can't really go along with the statement that they've had a beneficial impact on history.

It's a paradox, I know, but one thing history has shown is that sometimes good things come out of great evil. From evil purpose sometimes springs good intent. And what is history but one long succession of suffering, interspersed with the vain attempts of men to overcome their tribulations?

Hitler was an evil man - I don't think anyone can dispute that - but some of his actions had good consequences, even if they were not intended. Until about 50 years ago (even less, in fact) "racism" as we now know it is was socially acceptable. Later social developments, such as the Civil Rights movement in the US, have put an end to socially institutionalized racism, if not discrimination. Those changes came about decades after World War Two, but it is inconceivable that the movement was not driven in some way by the recognition of society that racism in any form is an inexcusable "evil." The Holocaust targeted not only Jews, but blacks, gays, "liberals", gypsies, and other then-considered "social undesirables", all of whom have since been accepted into mainstream western society.

As for Stalin, even today western historians as well as Russian citizens are not entirely certain whether or not the "Iron Leader" was truly an "evil" man, or whether his rule was "all" bad. Certainly many of his actions were evil - the purges, the conduct of the Soviet police state, the horrific management of the War and of German prisoners of war, the treatment of Poland, East Berlin and Eastern European countries after the War, just to name a few examples - but on the whole the Soviet Union was a force for the greater good in Russia, and Stalin, more than Lenin, Trotsky or any other Bolshevik leader, made the Soviet state what it was; his legacy endures to this day. Yes, the Soviet Union in Stalin's time (and long afterwards) was autocratic, ruthless, and in many ways inhumane, but it replaced a Tsarist system that was comparably autocratic, ruthless, and inhumane, and incompetent, fumbling and backward to boot. Russia prospered under Stalin's reign, even if that prosperity was enforced at the point of a gun, and was slow to reveal itself to the greater masses: but even as early as 1924, at the onset of Stalin's Five Year Plans, the Soviet Union had a greater percentage of young people in university and higher education than any other European nation (back then you had to come from an upper- or middle-class family to afford to go to Uni.) It was also remarkably progressive (for the time) in its attitudes to women, as demonstrated by the fact that many of the Bolsheviks in the Politburo brought their wives to meetings, thus lending them a degree of political influence; Stalin's own wife Nadya was able to influence her husband's decisions. Can one say the same thing about Churchill and Roosevelt, or any other contemporaneous European ruler? Many of the survivors of Stalin's purges, some of whom lost have families and loved ones to the dictator, are the first and the loudest to sing his praises. They cannot ALL have been brainwashed; some of this sentiment must be genuine. Who are we, the western world, knowing nothing of the experiences and historic trials of the Russian people, suffering under a grim succession of monarchs, lords and tyrants, to judge?

In conclusion, "good" and "evil" are not defined absolutes, they depend on one's own attitudes and experiences, and are seldom "black and white"; one should not be too ready to condemn "evils" without considering the "good" they have by consequence.

Glad to be a part of this discussion.

James, you make a lot of good points. The most part, you can't call a leader truely good or evil. It depends on your pov (this is excluding some people of course, such as Hitler). Generally, if you live in a country and your leader saved it in war or caused it to succeed, you'll consider him/her a hero, even if some of their actions and motives where questionable. Another Russian leader that could be used as an example of this is Vladamir Putin. There are quite a few of his tactics that most people would consider questionable, however he has a lot of support in Russia because the country has been extremely successful under his leadership.

James,

Stalin like Hitler was evil and it is my opinion that the world would be a better place if neither of these despots had never been born.

Stalin could masquerade as a compassionate human as he did at his brothers funeral, the very brother he had murdered out of fear of any competition to his dictatorial rule no matter how small

Of course we can paint Hitler with the same brush

It is difficult to say really what the fate of the world would be had Hitler not been in it. It is just as well played out as determining the future for an aborted fetus. Someone else could have just as well risen to the ascendancy that Hitler was, or we could lived out the last 80 years in peace. And the absence of materials like the A-bomb or the state of Israel can be debated as a true loss or gain.

But Hitler was not the always the root cause for all major conflicts of the twentieth century, the circulation of these conflicts have dated back hundreds of years earlier and Hitler only manipulated these beliefs. However, under certain circumstances economically, the world may have been better off with the war. But much of what has happened may have happened anyway, there are numerous paradoxes to encounter. But perhaps for the sake of the future, the past should not be tampered with, only learned from.

Ultimately, of course, everything in this topic is speculation, but it never hurts to make educated guesses. And I stand by my earlier statement that, as evil as Hitler was, a world without him might have seen even worse times than the twentieth century we have experienced.

There is a Command and Conquer computer game (I'm not sure which one it's called, I haven't played it myself but a friend pointed it out to me), where the premise is that Albert Einstein goes back in time and assassinates Hitler before he rises to power and becomes the head of the Nazi Party. The consequence of this, as I speculated before, is that the Soviet Union under Stalin initiates a war of its own, attempting (and succeeding!) in the conquest of Western Europe. The idea is not as ludicrous as it sounds. The end result of this war could be either good or bad, depending on your point of view. Either it brings about the ascendence of communism and the death of capitalism in Europe (and possibly the United States) - not such a bad thing, if you're a raving Marxist revolutionary like I am. :sarcastic: Alternatively, and more probably, it becomes a real bloodbath, and Stalin's aggressive ambitions aren't sated by the successful conquest of Europe: the 'Greater Soviet Union' would not become the utopian worker's paradise that Marx, Lenin, and other early Bolshevik activists desired, but a tyrannical totalitarian world-state, not unlike the New World Order predicted by some doomsayers today.

In real life, the rise of a militant, aggressive and fanatically anti-Communist Nazi Germany checked the rise of a similarly ruthless and ambitious Soviet Union. Who is to say that, if the roles were reversed, a Soviet Union without Stalin might not have fallen to Hitler's predations? And, as I argued forcefully in my final year History dissertation, if the Soviet Union had collapsed at any point during the Second World War, an Allied victory against Nazi Germany would have been impossible. Britain would have had no choice but to surrender, and the United States would have had no effective means of mounting an invasion of Europe, and so bringing the Thousand Year Reich to its knees. In effect: total Nazi domination of Eastern and Western Europe. And its ambitions would not stop there: Hitler regarded all 'non-Aryan' races as inherently inferior, and with Europe and Russia out of the picture, what would stop him attempting the conquest of America and China? He even regarded the Americans with distaste - a "mongolic" society of intermarried, interbred races - and had no love for his Asian allies... In short, paradoxical as it sounds, the Soviet Union, the very embodiment in the twentieth century of totalitarianism and tyranny, was the only barrier to a (potentially) even greater tyranny developing.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I regard Hitler and Stalin as two sides of the same equation; hence why, although this forum is pointedly about the former, I can't help but bring up the latter. Removing either one unbalances the equation. The presence of two ruthless, bloody-minded tyrants in positions of power in the twentieth century made this century what it was - arguably the worst in human history - but allowed that war to end as it did, with a peaceful (albeit unsettled) conclusion. Without Hitler and a 'strong' Germany, the Soviet Union might have gotten out of control; likewise, without Stalin, there would have been little to stop Hitler achieving his goal of world conquest. Yes, you can say, "but there might have been someone like Hitler or Stalin", but that rather negates the purpose of this discussion, doesn't it?

This is developing into quite a lively debate. Glad to be a part of this forum.

James, you're thinking of the Command and Conquer Red Alert series, though in that the soviets lost to western Europe, but just barely. And yeah, it's very possible that a Soviet lead Eastern Europe Alliance would have gone to war with the Western European countries had Germany not given Stalin and the major powers of the west a common enemy.

And like I mention before, instead of a two sides world war, it could have been a global conflict between several major powers, each fighting seperate wars. Due to this, the fighting could have gone on much longer and the death toll could have been higher.

It may well have turned out like that if Hitler hadn't declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. The US might have given material and financial aid to Britain and the USSR, but restricted its combat to fighting Japan.

in all honesty things would have changed but not to the degree that you are insisting
hitler was an evil dictator but he still was embraced very nicely the german people were not little lambs devoured by the wolf that was hitler .they were a beaten bruised people who had lost world war one in their last quest for colonies and land, they were paying heavy restitutions to the allies and were in the worst depression of the century the sociopathic population needed someone who professed their superiority and even more so needed someone to blame for all their misfortunes (jew gypsies etc.)
the cold war wouldnt be too different and the atomic bomb would have still have been discovered since most of the knowledge nessasary for its fabrication was present before ww2 started
but still this is all make belive who knows what would have happened

All points that I made in my earlier posts (go back a few pages and you should be able to find them), my main argument was that Hitler was able to latch onto these feelings and exploit them. If Hitler had never existed, another opportunistic leader might have come along who would have been able to take advantage of this situation, but it is unlikely that any such leader would have combined Hitler's fanaticism, charisma and powerful oratory, features that were peculiar to him.

In many ways Adolf Hitler was not an exceptional individual (humble background, origins etc.), but like Stalin he was an unusually successful one in that he was able to seize the reins of power and plunge the world into war in such a relatively short time.



"Wouldn't be too different" is so vague. As I speculated in a much earlier post, I think a sort of "Cold War" would have developed in Hitler's absence - the ideological clash of capitalism and communism, at least according to Marxist theory, was predestined and inevitable, and perhaps likely to occur in that timeframe anyway - but several key features would have been very different. I foresaw the possibility of a Communist government forming in Germany, and its falling under the influence of Moscow, which sought to control all Communist parties in Europe through the Comintern. If that happened, other Central/East European countries may have quickly followed suit (as predicted by 'domino theory'), and thus an East/West divide would rapidly form in the heartland of Europe. This could have happened at any point from the mid-1930s, around the time of Hitler's (real-life) rise to power, at the nadir of the Depression and the height of the German Communist Party's popularity; and so our 'Cold War' could have developed a decade earlier than it did in real life. WWII accelerated the development of nuclear arms - the war pressured both the American and German governments to create the first bomb; Stalin didn't consider building one until after the War, and didn't achieve it until 1949 - and so there would have been no promise of Mutually Assured Destruction. Thus, it would have been a 'hot war', more akin to the Second World War, waged directly and openly (rather than indirectly and covertly) between combatants. America, too, would have retained its isolationism, at least until events in Europe reached a crisis point (historically it always seems to have jumped in in the 11th hour, why should our 'make believe' history be any different?); but that is a vague speculation. I imagine Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, etc.), caught between two communist regimes (Soviet Russia and Communist Germany), would have quickly turned 'Red'. France, too, had a powerful Communist party at this time, albeit not as strong as Germany's; Italy, also, depending on Mussolini's predilections, might fall under the Communist shroud. (Fascism and communism have more in common than most people realize, and Mussolini unlike Hitler did not entertain an ideological hatred of communism.) Britain, however, as a long-standing capitalism, traditionally imperialist (i.e. anti-communist) power, would have been more reluctant than its neighbours; so in all likelihood I can see an East/West divide forming with Britain (and possibly America) on the one side, Germany, the Soviet Union, much of Eastern Europe, and probably France and Italy on the other.
One doesn't have to look too closely that this seems a dire situation for capitalism. Perhaps, in some parallel universe where Hitler never was born, Germany DID become communist, and my speculation played out, the whole of Europe DID become Red, and it was left to Britain and America to hold the flag of capitalism.

Well, you're entitled to make your judgments. This is a brief outline at best; check our my earlier posts. I invite all criticism.