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Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

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    Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

    1. . . there would probably have been no World War II for a start.

    2. Losing a war would not have meant oblivion for the UK, any more than losing two has meant oblivion for Germany.

    Discuss.

    #2
    Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

    Maybe... we would have had the economic and political collapse that allowed Nazism to take hold. Maybe... we would have been the bad guys in World War II. Hey, there's an idea for a novel. My idea for a novel.

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      #3
      Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

      A few consequences I can see - if Germany didn't demand Ireland as a colony, the ongoing political stalemate would have degenerated into a civil war between nationalists and unionists. Similarly, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was disintegrating at the seams, would have seen ethnic conflict between Germans, Hungarians, Poles and Slavs due to the glacial pace of internal reform. France, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic States would have been subsumed into Kaiser Wilhelm's Reich, resembling the map in Fatherland. Lenin would still rule Russia, and the Ottoman Empire would probably still have collapsed, but the Arab territories would have become a single state, there having been no Western carve-up.

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        #4
        Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

        The first thought that springs to mind is to wonder what the price of British defeat would have been in terms of the wider world - particularly the British Empire as was?

        Presumably the African colonies would have been handed over straight off; would India have been a harder bargain? I guess the more independent bits of the Commonwealth - Aus, NZ, Canada - would have told Germany to go fuck itself and moved on much as they have, but got around to Republicanism a bit quicker.*

        And if Germany had been the Imperial power, how would this have changed the timetable of independence for the rest? I'm trying to picture Germany letting go of comparatively recent acquisitions within 50 years... or maybe I can see them disposing of unwanted trouble in which they had less investment and with which they had less connection. (Doubtless after an asset-stripping spree.)

        It might have been an opportunity for some independence movements, but not being much of a historian, I don't know how well-developed those struggles were at that time, and whether they'd have been able to take advantage. Again, India comes to mind, and with it the thought that bloody as partition was, had it come about as the result of a civil war between factions of the rebellion it might have been utterly horrific.

        *My suspicion is that groups of rebels would have hidden in highly forested regions and fought a rearguard action with the help of small, hairy locals armed with logs on ropes, before finally destroying the shield generator.

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          #5
          Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

          Jeez, what sort of cuts would we be facing over the next few years if we still had WW1 reparations to pay off?

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            #6
            Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

            Wingco, I take it you've read your Svejk. If there's anything to learn from that book, it's that the degenerates running the Mittelmächte were just as bad as our own inbred overlords.

            Not that it would have made a sod of difference to the colonies, of course.

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              #7
              Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

              And if Germany had been the Imperial power, how would this have changed the timetable of independence for the rest?
              If Germany had won WW1 and made Europe and all of her dominions part of a global empire, there still wouldn't be any independent bits in the third world.

              We all wouldn't have wasted 6 years' worth of GDP fighting WW2 for a start, which was the principal reason all the European colonial powers had to give up their colonies to begin with.

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                #8
                Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                There's been at least one alternate history written on this subject.

                I think chances are there would still have been a later international conflict. Japanese expansionism would have continued, possibly at a faster rate. This would have brought them into conflict with Germany, now the dominant Colonial power in the Pacific. Therefore Germany, in turn, would have to build an alliance with the US. That, given the legacy of WW1 might not be straightforward.

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                  #9
                  Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                  Nuneaton Rally, anyone?

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                    #10
                    Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                    I don't think a post-WW1 Germany under a victorious Kaiser would have had any trouble at all building an alliance with the post-WW1 US.

                    The latter seemed perfectly happy to sit back and watch what Herr Hitler was doing in Europe twenty years later, until Pearl Harbour.

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                      #11
                      Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                      Non-interventionism isn't the same as forming an alliance.

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                        #12
                        Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                        Unless a German victory in WWI meant the Wall Street Crash of 1929 would not have taken place, then I don't think we'd have got a better outcome in the long-term. The global consequences of the Crash created the social conditions of the 1930's. And that affected matters more than any ideology, I feel.

                        And a victorious Germany, dominating central Europe, would have been terrible. They'd have been cunts. Not cunts like the Nazis, but cunts nonetheless. And, as mentioned upthread, a Balkanisation of the new German Empire would have inevitably occurred.

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                          #13
                          Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                          I find this kind of counterfactual history very difficult. There's a kind of vague statistical argument, though, that says that whatever would have happened, it would have been unlikely to be as bad as the Nazis, because the Nazis were so extremely, atypically bad. It needed a "perfect storm" to create them, and if any of the preconditions had been changed only slightly, something less horrific would probably have happened.

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                            #14
                            Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                            There's also the question of when and how the Germans could have won.

                            Early on, before the trenches?

                            Because the Americans never got involved, perhaps because there was no Lusitania, or other attacks on shipping?

                            Do you need to have a complete counterfactual in which it is the Brits who are waging submarine warfare and sink a German passenger liner bound for the US?

                            Once you have the US in the war on the Allied side, it's hard to see how the Germans win.

                            I'm not aware of any history that would support a theory that the Germans were more progressive imperialists than the Brits were; they were better than the Belgians, but so was everyone else.

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                              #15
                              Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                              Given that Prussian militarism would have succeded again, whetting the appetite for further conquest, and that Stalin and the Bolsheviks would still have been in charge of the USSR, then the German-Soviet confrontation would still have happened in all it's bloody terribleness. It may have even been brought forward by a few years as Germany would not have needed to rebuild to wage this war (which might have spared a lot of people from the great purge, I guess). It's unlikely that the defeated western powers would have resisted the chance to throw their lot in with Soviets, using the same 'my enemies enemy' logic that created the WWII allies.

                              The holocaust would have looked different, probably less dreadful. That said, I would think something very similar to the concept of Lebensraum would have come about to justify the eastward expansion, with likely terrible consequence for the Slavic populations of Middle and Eastern Europe. As Alderman says, read your copy of Švejk (you do all own one, right?) to see that the German and Austro-Hungarian attitude to the Slavic populations of their countries was very much that of second-class citizens not worthy of full human rights. The conditions were there...
                              Also the Nazi's didn't exactly create Germanic anti-semitism, more exploited it, so I doubt the Jewish population would have been unmolested in such a world. And, without that boil being lanced, their position would be much worse in the alternative modern Germany.

                              I find the US reaction to all this a bit harder to judge, but my instinct is that they would have been drawn in on the anti-German side, as a growing and rapacious empire would have threatened their developing world trade interests. Plus there seems to be a lean towards the English-speaking block in their reactions prior to WWII which wasn't neccesarily simple self-interest, more a feeling of shared heritage, and I think a similar reaction would have occured towards a Kaiser-led Germany.

                              My conclusion, then, is things would not have passed off very differently.

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                                #16
                                Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                n.b. there is a tendancy in the initial question to think of WWII as a British-German conflict. It's always worth keeping in mind that the pre-conflict assimilation of territory, and the attack that eventually triggered the conflagration, were eastward. WWII was in a lot of ways a Germanic-Slavic war that escalated. Britain and France obviously couldn't stand aside from it, as if Germany had won it would have massively threatened their strategic interests.

                                The Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact is still possibly the most inexplicable thing in history. What was Stalin thinking?

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                                  #17
                                  Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                  Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote:
                                  And if Germany had been the Imperial power, how would this have changed the timetable of independence for the rest?
                                  If Germany had won WW1 and made Europe and all of her dominions part of a global empire, there still wouldn't be any independent bits in the third world.

                                  We all wouldn't have wasted 6 years' worth of GDP fighting WW2 for a start, which was the principal reason all the European colonial powers had to give up their colonies to begin with.
                                  I've read a number of arguments that WW2 mostly accelerated an already inevitable process. But leaving aside the difference between the 'wider world' and the 'third world', do you not think the Indians would not have tried to capitalise on the confusions inevitable in the transfer of power?

                                  As AdC says, it's not too hard to see a conflict arising between the Japanese and the Germans resulting in a similar result; especially if, as OA said, you still had the Depression.

                                  What might have altered the mix significantly, I suppose, is the possibility that the US would have lost its global pre-eminance to German Empire that would (assuming it absorbed both the British and French) have controlled most of the world's raw materials along with the technological and scientific resources of Europe.

                                  (The ideas in The Man in the High Castle are interesting and indirectly relevant, though it contains alternative histories for WW2.)

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                                    #18
                                    Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                    I'm not aware of any history that would support a theory that the Germans were more progressive imperialists than the Brits were; they were better than the Belgians, but so was everyone else.

                                    They weren't at it for very long, which is a plus. In the Pacific the colonists were mostly traders, missionaries and civil servants, certainly benign compared with what came later, — the Japanese and Americans. I don't think they maintained a substantial military presence anywhere did they? Most of their colonies capitulated very quickly. Of course, long term they'd probably have been as bad as the rest.

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                                      #19
                                      Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                      Well, apart from waiting for G-Man to come on and say that Germany didn't lose the Great War, the important thing is that the peace was destroyed by Clemenceau. He personally was responsible for the insane reparations which Germany had to pay which destroyed their economy and led to the massive inflation.

                                      So, blame the French for the second world war. I do.

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                                        #20
                                        Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                        God knows what our supporters would sing. I imagine the band would be a huge improvement playing Bavarian festival tunes though.

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                                          #21
                                          Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                          lso the Nazi's didn't exactly create Germanic anti-semitism, more exploited it, so I doubt the Jewish population would have been unmolested in such a world.
                                          That's the bit I doubt. It's certainly the case that anti-Semitism existed, and was an important political strand, before Hitler, but whatever Daniel Goldhagen says, I don't buy the idea of a general disposition towards it--still less a general disposition towards genocide, which is more or less his startling claim. The mass of ordinary Germans turned a blind eye, in circumstances where to do otherwise would have taken great courage, but the Nazis were forever complaining about the population's lack of appetite for what had to be done, and took steps (albeit ineffectual ones, if we're honest) to hide what was being done.

                                          It's entirely possible that the tide of Jewish Emancipation would have continued to flow in an Imperial Central Europe, in other words. Especially as neither the Hohenzollerns nor the Habsburgs had any particular beef with the Jews.

                                          And I read Svejk a bit differently, I think. Its cynical, sardonic tone certainly speaks of alienation and marginalisation, but neither of those amounts to, or compares with, what Lebensraum meant for, say, Poland or Ukraine. A Svejk in the Generalgouvernement would have lasted about ten pages before being shot.

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                                            #22
                                            Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                            I suppose it depends what your definition of "lose" is. The Germans didn't lose WWI, as they didn't get the chance. The armistice was signed before the Allies could finish the job. It was only a matter of time, and they would have lost eventually had the fighting continued.

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                                              #23
                                              Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                              Glaciers can be quite fast.

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                                                #24
                                                Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                                Amor de Cosmos wrote:
                                                I'm not aware of any history that would support a theory that the Germans were more progressive imperialists than the Brits were; they were better than the Belgians, but so was everyone else.

                                                They weren't at it for very long, which is a plus. In the Pacific the colonists were mostly traders, missionaries and civil servants, certainly benign compared with what came later, — the Japanese and Americans. I don't think they maintained a substantial military presence anywhere did they? Most of their colonies capitulated very quickly. Of course, long term they'd probably have been as bad as the rest.
                                                In Micronesia they were cunts. Germany was only the colonial power in (what is now) FSM for about 20 years and yet in that time they managed to leave behind a collective memory of a brutal regime. The 3 other colonial powers (Spain, Japan, USA) were all there much longer and have left behind no such legacy of horror.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

                                                  Also the Nazi's didn't exactly create Germanic anti-semitism, more exploited it, so I doubt the Jewish population would have been unmolested in such a world. And, without that boil being lanced, their position would be much worse in the alternative modern Germany.
                                                  WoE has already answered that, and pre-empted my criticism of Jonah Goldhagen. Anti-semitism was much more virulent in the East, and its manifestation in central Europe no more benign than it was in Germany. The Jews of occupied France and the Netherlands generally received not much more protection than did their counterparts in Germany or Austria. Vichy France cheerfully collaborated in the Holocaust.

                                                  Germany's Jews were the most assimilated in Europe. Without the Nazis' strategic, concerted and effective genocidal campaign, Germany's Jewry would have been comparatively safe.

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