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Leaders don't create the crises; the crises create the leaders.
Doesn't it work both ways? I would think that the Roman Civil War of the 1st Century BCE is an example of the former. There was no crisis until the Marius/Sulla power struggle erupted. That evolved into the Pompey/Caesar clash and finally the Anthony/Octavian conclusion.
Or sometimes it can be both. Isn't it fair to say that the French and Russian revolutions were the product of the foolish and inflexible policies of mediocre monarchs? After Louis and Nicky had created their crisis, the crisis then produced the Robespierres and Lenins.
First, that was a terrific essay which you provided, covering numerous possible scenarios.
I'd like to run with the one above.
In reality, the threat of the fascists ultimately produced the strange bed partners of capitalists and communists working as allies to defeat them.
If Germany had gone socialist and had forged some sort of alliance with the USSR, might it not have been possible that the western democracies would have found common cause with fascist Italy and fascist Japan..under the bigger threat theory?
I would guess that under the Russian/German alliance scenario, Japan's aggression against China would have suddenly seemed not so offensive at all...better Japan overrunning China than the Russians. Rather than denying Japan oil, the US and Britain would have been laboring to make sure that Japan had enough to sustain their armies in Manchuria so that they constituted an ongoing threat to the Russians and forced them to keep a good chunk of their army away from any efforts in the west.
As for WW II...who can say? In this scenario, we may readily imagine the fate of middle Europe as the German and Soviet super alliance would have divided up those nations and installed socialist governments there. Britain and France might have threatened war over this, but it would have been a hollow threat. Instead the world might have settled down to a spheres of influence arrangement whereby Eastern Europe was considered lost to the socialists, while the British/French/US/Italy/Japan alliance would have been designed to make sure that socialism spread no further...a stand off, as you mentioned in speculating about a premature cold war.
In sum, the above would represent more or less the outcome of WW II, but without it having been fought.
Excellent follow-up Grandstander and I agree with your points. I think the western capitalist democracies would be MUCH more comfortable with stable fascist governments than they would be with communist governments. I could see the scenario of a German socialist state playing out much as you laid out with Europe broken into speheres of influence.
I also think your addition of Japan and China is very interesting. Certainly the other powers would see a strong allied China as vitally necessary to keeping the "noose" tightened around the socialist block. In addition to China; Turkey, Greece and the Middle East would be incredibly important areas and sort of the battlegrounds of this Cold War, much as they were historically.
Interesting to think that we could end up with the result of WW2 without a shot being fired.
You begin with the above recognition, but then follow it with a series of absolute oraculations such as:
and
Do you not see the contradiction between "...it can only be speculation"....and "this would have happened no matter what?"
True enough, Grandstander.
I got into some absolutes about Japan, for sure. But the Japanese part of WWII was a lot different than the German and Italian part.
I was trying to say that it's possible we could have avoided a war with Germany, but war with Japan was pretty much a given, with or without Hitler.
The reason for this is simple- we entered war with Germany through political ties, but we went to war with Japan as a result of a direct military attack.
True enough, Grandstander.
I got into some absolutes about Japan, for sure. But the Japanese part of WWII was a lot different than the German and Italian part.
I was trying to say that it's possible we could have avoided a war with Germany, but war with Japan was pretty much a given, with or without Hitler.
The reason for this is simple- we entered war with Germany through political ties, but we went to war with Japan as a result of a direct military attack.
Okay, so we are dealing with possibilities. My thinking is that the removal of Germany as a fascist threat would have had a domino impact on all the events of the era. Japan's actions in the '30's would have been met more aggressively by a US and Britain who were not distracted by European dangers.
Keep in mind that the oil embargo wasn't established until September of 1940. Until that time, there was a division among Japan's military rulers regarding in which direction expansion should take place. It was a matter of the prestige of Japan's two martial arms. The Navy was in favor of the Southern strategy, the one ultimately followed, where Japan siezed Indonesia for the oil, and the islands to the South to set up a strategic defensive ring. The Imperial Navy favored this because it would be their branch of the service which was at the forefront in their oceanic conquests. The army argued in favor of the Northern strategy, concentrating on the completion of China's conquest, taking Vladistok and the Kamchatka peninsula from the Russians, possibly targeting Mongolia as well. The Japanese devoted a half year to sorting out this dispute with the need for oil being the decisive factor in favor of the Southern strategy. In April of 1941, they made the Southern strategy their only option by signing a neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union.
So as late as the end of 1940, it still could have gone either way for the Japanese in terms of their pending opponent. If you cancel the impact that Nazi Germany had on world events for the period 1933-1940, then certainly unanticipated factors would have arisen which served to alter Japan's options, or perhaps remove them entirely.
Okay, so we are dealing with possibilities. My thinking is that the removal of Germany as a fascist threat would have had a domino impact on all the events of the era. Japan's actions in the '30's would have been met more aggressively by a US and Britain who were not distracted by European dangers.
Keep in mind that the oil embargo wasn't established until September of 1940. Until that time, there was a division among Japan's military rulers regarding in which direction expansion should take place. It was a matter of the prestige of Japan's two martial arms. The Navy was in favor of the Southern strategy, the one ultimately followed, where Japan siezed Indonesia for the oil, and the islands to the South to set up a strategic defensive ring. The Imperial Navy favored this because it would be their branch of the service which was at the forefront in their oceanic conquests. The army argued in favor of the Northern strategy, concentrating on the completion of China's conquest, taking Vladistok and the Kamchatka peninsula from the Russians, possibly targeting Mongolia as well. The Japanese devoted a half year to sorting out this dispute with the need for oil being the decisive factor in favor of the Southern strategy. In April of 1941, they made the Southern strategy their only option by signing a neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union.
So as late as the end of 1940, it still could have gone either way for the Japanese in terms of their pending opponent. If you cancel the impact that Nazi Germany had on world events for the period 1933-1940, then certainly unanticipated factors would have arisen which served to alter Japan's options, or perhaps remove them entirely.
That speculation is as good as any Grandstander. I agree that the Japanese military had those divisions. And for a fact, the Japanese wanted Mongolia and Kamchatka- they went after it in 1909. Their victories there didn't translate into territorial conquest mostly because that war made the leadership realize how much more they needed to keep what they won.
It played a large part in the Japanese military buildup and modernization that followed for the next 30+ years.
If the scenario you built was to happen, I also think that the Northern strategy would have been the one most probably chosen. Seizing the Russian oil fields would have been more difficult, but could have been done.
To get a better idea of which direction Germany might have taken politically in the absence of Hitler or a strong Nazi Party, one need only to take a look at what was happening in the world of Weimar Republic politics in the early 1930’s.
The two largest parties during the Weimar Republic, prior to the emergence of the Nazi Party, were the Social Democrat Party and the Catholic Center Party. The Social Democrats were by far the largest political force in the Reichstag up until 1932 and had provided Germany with its’ first three Chancellors. However they presided over coalition governments because the party could never achieve the necessary majority of seats in the Reichstag needed to form a purely Social Democrat government. By 1933, failure to expand the party’s base beyond Germany’s working class population and refusal to soften their socialist agenda saw the Social Democrats lose 40% of their voters to other political parties. By contrast, the Center Party, which was considered politically center-right, never received less than 15% of the popular vote in Reichstag elections, gave Germany five chancellors, and participated in every national government between 1919 and 1932.
With the onset of the Great Depression, the people of Germany had become disenchanted with the traditional political parties and looked more toward those on the far Left and Right. Thus, parties like the German National People’s Party, the Nazi Party, and the Communist Party, saw their popularity increase with voters, particularly those between the ages of 20 and 25. This was largely due to their belief that the parties their parents had supported were bereft of fresh, new ideas and were the root cause of the misery Germany was experiencing overall. The political instability which was characteristic of much of the Weimar period also made many Germans hostile to the basic concept of democratic government. This was fertile ground for those who preached about the need to rid Germany of the Republic and its’ liberal constitution.
And such talk was not limited to just the political rabble rousers on the Left and Right. There were individuals within the national government itself who felt exactly the same way. In fact, the three chancellors that preceded Hitler; Heinrich Bruning, Franz von Papen (both from the Center Party) and Kurt von Schleicher, had all pressed President Paul von Hindenburg to dispense with the pretense of democratic government by dissolving the Reichstag then imposing an authoritarian regime in which all power rested with the president. Hindenburg had no particular love for the Weimar Republic or its’ institutions and wished for nothing more than the restoration of the monarchy. But he was loathe to embrace what these men proposed simply because he believed doing so during a time of economic and political upheaval would plunge Germany into civil war.
So when you take into consideration the political climate in Germany and the attitudes espoused by key government officials, I am inclined to believe that a right wing, authoritarian regime of some sort would have eventually emerged in Germany during the period between 1932-34 with or without Hitler. This seems the most likely scenario given that many countries in Central and Eastern Europe already had such governments in place during this time period. It is also quite possible the Germans would have used as their model the presidential dictatorship/corporatist state which had been established in Austria in 1933 by Engelbert Dollfuss. As to how this new government would have interacted with its’ neighbors, that’s really anyone’s guess.
Now to the question of whether the Nazi Party would have been such a force in German politics without Hitler, that is not something which can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”. For all intents and purposes, Hitler was the Nazi Party. He was its’ public face and voice going back to when the Party was in its’ infancy. Were it not for him, it is hard to imagine the Nazi Party would have ever been anything more than an obscure Bavarian political group. Yet this is not to say there were not individuals within the Nazi Party who could have accomplished what Hitler did if he had never existed. The most likely candidate was a man named Gregor Strasser.
Strasser was a native of Bavaria and a decorated World War I veteran. After the war he became active in the “Freikorps” movement in Bavaria which sought to combat Communist elements there. With Heinrich Himmler as his adjutant, Strasser served in a Freikorps storm battalion which fell under the overall command of General Erich Ludendorff, who was both a war hero and early supporter of the Nazi Party. Strasser joined the Nazi Party in 1921 as a stormtrooper and led an SA detachment during the Beer Hall Putsch. While lacking the charisma and oratory skills of Hitler, Strasser was extremely popular. He was responsible for putting together the Nazi Party’s organizational structure and was widely viewed as Hitler’s “right hand”. Strasser became the leader of the “left wing” or socialist faction of the Nazi Party and as such maintained that the Party’s chief goals should be the destruction of capitalism, fighting for social justice, and nationalizing German industry.
During the time Hitler was in jail and the Nazi Party was outlawed, Strasser, his brother Otto, and Joseph Goebbels, formed the “National Socialist Worker’s Association” which became a major political player throughout northern Germany. When Strasser reunited with Hitler and the reconstituted Nazi Party in 1926, his revolutionary rhetoric had not lessened and he often found himself at odds with the direction Hitler was taking the Party. However, by the start of the 1930’s, Strasser’s views began to change and he increasingly pushed for the Party to participate in the national government in coalition with other political parties; something to which Hitler was vehemently opposed. More and more, Strasser was perceived as a “moderate” alternative to Hitler, which led to Strasser being asked to serve in Chancellor von Schliecher’s cabinet as Vice-Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. Hitler was incensed and demanded that Strasser turn down the offer. Strasser eventually agreed but was so angry over how he was being treated that he resigned all of his Nazi Party posts on December 8, 1932 and retired from politics completely. Unable to forget or forgive disloyalty, whether real or imagined, Hitler added Gregor Strasser’s name to the list of those who were arrested and murdered during the “Night of the Long Knives” on June 30, 1934.
Could Gregor Strasser have been the one to lead the Nazi Party into power had there never been an Adolf Hitler? I believe it is entirely possible for him to have done just that. But since this isn’t how history played out, we will never really know.
I disagree with Banjomike's statement that "Hitler was not a specially gifted man". The Hitler of the earlier years, say up to about 1943, was not the same man with physical and mental health problems who raved and ranted and made so many military mistakes in the last year and a half or so of the war. Hitler was a person of great personal charm who could motivate and inspire others. That is not an opinion that I came to on my own, but I am following Albert Speer and others who said essentially the same thing. So what is my point? If I am correct about Hitler's unusual leadership abilities, then perhaps any other leader of the Nazi Party (or a Nazi-like party) would not have been successful in the absolutely extraordinary early achievements, most notably the stunning victory over France which was a much more closely run thing than is usually believed. Hitler's generals were not at all enthusiatic about attacking France; it was Hitler's personal forcefulness which was behind it. And he turned out to be correct militarily moreso than his generals, which led to the unfortunate (for Germany) belief that he always knew better than his generals.
So while the elements would have been there for any leader (German resentment of the Versailles treaty, the basic discipline of the German people, etc.), I think this is one case where a man of unusual personal attributes probably made a very real and very substantial (and very tragic) difference to history.
I disagree with Banjomike's statement that "Hitler was not a specially gifted man". The Hitler of the earlier years, say up to about 1943, was not the same man with physical and mental health problems who raved and ranted and made so many military mistakes in the last year and a half or so of the war. Hitler was a person of great personal charm who could motivate and inspire others. That is not an opinion that I came to on my own, but I am following Albert Speer and others who said essentially the same thing. So what is my point? If I am correct about Hitler's unusual leadership abilities, then perhaps any other leader of the Nazi Party (or a Nazi-like party) would not have been successful in the absolutely extraordinary early achievements, most notably the stunning victory over France which was a much more closely run thing than is usually believed. Hitler's generals were not at all enthusiatic about attacking France; it was Hitler's personal forcefulness which was behind it. And he turned out to be correct militarily moreso than his generals, which led to the unfortunate (for Germany) belief that he always knew better than his generals.
So while the elements would have been there for any leader (German resentment of the Versailles treaty, the basic discipline of the German people, etc.), I think this is one case where a man of unusual personal attributes probably made a very real and very substantial (and very tragic) difference to history.
Point well taken, Escort Rider.
I came to my statement from some personal accounts. In my early 20's, I knew a German immigrant family who lived here well. They escaped E. Germany in the 50's before the Berlin wall went up. I talked to them a lot about Hitler's rise, as I was mystified as to why the Germans appeared to be so entranced by him.
The family were converted in Germany to the LDS faith during Hitler's rise, and lived very quietly in a small little farm town during the war years. Since the SS rounded up Mormons, 7th Day adventists, Christian Scientists, and others, they were never Nazi sympathizers, and lived through it all.
The family's father's account of those years was what led me to my statement. When I asked him why Hitler became the leader, he chalked it up to a few simple things:
Perseverance. Hitler went everywhere, and spoke everywhere. He was newsworthy because fights often broke out in the halls where he spoke, and fights always made for good news coverage. Hitler always managed to get the last word in the media after a fight. Reporters began to follow him around like a pack of hounds because he sold newspapers.
Hitler's Veterans. There were thousands of very angry vets after WWI who longed for the old Empire's glory. Hitler came from them, had war wound credentials and an iron cross. He spoke their slang, and was able to create word pictures they understood. His consistent theme was always a return to Germany's military might and former glory.
His vets were quick to physically attack anyone who disagreed with him, and they didn't stop after just one fight. They would beat a guy up several times over a period of weeks, any time they caught him. Nazi meetings often finished with a pack of drunk brown shirts going out in the streets looking for people to beat up. If the brown shirts lost a fight, they would come back and trash the place the next day. This too, was all covered by reporters, and it gave the peaceable folks a sense of inevitability- the Nazis would win no matter what, and would play dirty to win.
Great Visuals. Once he became Chancellor, his speeches were mostly Party glorification stem-winders. His enormous pageantry- the very picture of Germanic might- was vastly more inspiring than his speeches. Goebbels created the pageants and wrote Hitler's speeches - Hitler only showed up and did his bit. The actual pageants were often less impressive than the carefully filmed versions; the films were what most Germans saw, and they heightened the German's sense of Nazi invincibility.
Iit is important to remember that sheer repetition played a huge part in Hitler's rise. As he ascended, everything was filmed, and was shown over and over in every theater. Same with his radio speeches- the were aired nightly for months after he first gave a speech. Before the war broke out, the movies audiences saw were also glorifying propaganda- lots of brave Nazi mountain climber movies, men in nature rescuing damsels in distress stuff, all glorifying great Germanic qualities. Hitler got a lot of rubbed-off glamor from them.
The folks I knew said audiences often groaned when the Nazi stuff came on the screen, and turned down their radios until the good stuff came on, but it sunk in. The repetition created a mental inertia, where everyone came to accept Hitler, whether they liked him or not. He was just there, all the time, everywhere, invincible, unbeatable, inevitable.
Rush Limbaugh's ditto-heads are real pikers compared to the Nazis. Goebbel's Nazi creations were everywhere perpetually in all forms- newspapers, flags, public displays, radio, magazines, fashion, songs. Everything Hitler said was repeated over and over by locals; his stuff was so simple that others could recite it word for word endlessly. His people would stand in public parks and recite his speeches for hours.
Time and again, my guy and his wife said Hitler was just another face in the crowd. There were hundreds of men just like him who could have done and said the same things. There were a few like him in every village in the country. Hitler was a professional politician who always presented himself as a common man. In a time when everyone still remember the Kaiser, he was a real novelty.
He was always paranoid that another could take his place because his abilities were so ordinary. That was why he took care to kill any seriously potential contenders who could do what he did.
Tony T summed it up very well.
Last edited by banjomike; 09-11-2011 at 11:48 AM..
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