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Originally Posted by elvislives
I am very familier with the death camps i went through a period where i read quite a few books and accounts on the subject..But do this suspend reality forget the death camps and tell me about a real 21st century europe under the nazi's instead of the E.U how do you see it? what is the world like? You know i vaguely remember a book like this. I know i read one based on the South winning the Civil War ..
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There are many books like this, and both an entire sub-genre within Science Fiction (Alternate Histories) and a field within the discipline of History (Counter-factual Histories).
Bring the Jubilee (Ward Moore) is an SF version of the South's winning.
If the South Had Won the Civil War (Mackinlay Kantor) is a Historian's treatment of the issue.
What If or History Rewritten is probably my favorite anthology in this realm, created in the early 20th century, with tales by Winston Churchill and G. K. Chesterton, among the authors. The field is burgeoning, these days, on both the fiction and essay sides of the question.
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Had Hitler somehow survived without having in turn caused the rest of Europe to be conquered or the U.S. to go under
or nuke Berlin, I suppose it might have gone something like this:
Hitler does not, in fact, marry his long time partner. He only married her because the end was near - no end, no marriage. No reason to believe that he would have had a child, either, given that they'd not had one in all those years.
Hitler presumably had to return the Sudatenland and allow Austria to return to self-rule, to appease the rest of Europe. As somebody above noted, no defeat of Hitler combined with a far earlier end of the conflict (which kept the US out of Europe and allowed a far earlier end to the conflict with Japan for them) would probably preclude a State of Israel, at least for a while, and the division of the Middle Eastern countries post WWII would be very different.
There are two key questions to the pseudo-future you ask about
:
1) Would Hitler be able to restrain his appetite for Europe?
2) Would his successor - whether his child or not - be able to hold onto Germany as an integrated country?
Given that he'd plotted for decades his conquest of Europe, it seems unlikely to me that he'd be able to resist trying again - and if he did, bet that his attempt would have been short-circuited just as Napoleon's was, and he would
then not be freed again.
However, because the end of the war came so early, the Soviet Union never had the chance to create the kind of hegemony in Eastern Europe that we saw.
Other potentially interesting ripples might include no Josef Broz siezing power in the Balkans (1943 is when he consolidated his power there, as I recollect); no Mao Tse Dung because he did not have time to rise to power in China in fighting the Japanese; and no Ho Chi Minh, as he had no role model in Mao to follow.
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If, instead, Hitler overcomes his urge to conquer Europe, when he dies (or gets weak for some reason), what happens to Germany? Unlike the Balkans, the nationalist fervor there has been less about splitting into parts and more into consolidation, comparatively recently. So, bet it holds together. The Nazi movement, though, has no more taken hold on the continent than the Communist (Russia) or Fascist (Spain) movements before it.
The Cold War became a three way concern, rather than two way, with a lot of tension, but no willingness to get blown to kingdom come on anybody's part. When Hitler dies, while there is an initial urge to replace him with another iron man, there is nobody with the same force of will that he had, nobody who could fill his shoes. As with the Eastern European countries, post-Soviet Union, so, too, Germany. It seeks to return to the democracy it was before Hitler, goes through growing pains.
Less death and destruction. Less interest in neo-Nazis and skinheads. No lasting 'movement' worthy of the name. Over-population sooner. Less conflict in the Middle East, due to no state of Israel. (No idea how that would resolve, just now.)
The Man in the High Castle (Dick) never gets written. Neither does Iron Dreams (Spinrad).
This question would become "What would have happened if Hitler had not retreated in 1941?"
Come on are you Americans truly trying to pin the deathcamps on lil ol' Hitler?
You could even argue that the Americans and the S. Africans are crueler than the Nazis by killing their victims very slowly.
Fact is that the strong will always exploit the weak.
Learn to read or either learn to stop projecting your preconceived notions (or is it emotion?) on my posts.
