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Poland cedes Danzig to stall for time

Md139115 said:
Well yes, but the thing about pyramid schemes is that the people at the top tend to make out pretty darn well, even if overall everyone loses money.

And Germany did go from being one of the worst economic basket cases of the entire Great Depression to funding a war against an increasingly large majority of humanity for roughly five years off the spoils of their conquests so something beneficial to the Nazis happened from doing that.

My question is: was that planned from the beginning or did they luck into it like they got ridiculously lucky on a great many other things in the war?
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They got extremely lucky. The Nazis never had an actual plan beyond perpetual race war and whatever they viewed as the immediate short term solution- one can point to Mein Kampf ect., but the actual structure of Nazisim was more like one of those cults that exist to shave money off its members, because 'where did the money go?' is that the whole country was a gangster state that existed to facilitate the personal wealth of Hitler and his cronies.

The thing with "but the Depression?" Is that by 1933 Germany was exiting the Depression in a fairly strong way due to the austerity programme started under Brüning finally paying dividends and bringing the economy into recovery; Hitler and co. just smothered the recovery over six years for personal gain.
 
Let's say Poland agrees to cede Danzig, have a referendum in September 1940, AND there somehow is no coup/instability inside of Poland.

The Second World War starts in October 1940. Could the German economy have even lasted until then without being able to plunder Poland?


monroe templeton said:
Well okay, there are some options here, but the last serious chance for the military to coup Hitler and avert war was during the Debt Crisis in 1938, when Germany effectively defaulted on repaying its debts (turns out a man who was committing tax fraud would just commit tax fraud on a national level, and so would all his mates) and was only propped up by the Nazis holding everyone at gunpoint and threatening to shoot the first person who moves. By August 1939, the German debt was something insane like 120%, 150% of its GDP, had lost all of its major trading partners, and had an economy in which 10% of revenue was reliant on seized property- be this the plunder of conquest, or the theft from minority groups like the Jews. And that 'revenue' had effectively dried up. The invasion of Poland, when viewed through this economic lenses, was inevitable because the only way the German economy could function under the Nazi economic plan was through plunder of conquest (this is what happens when your ideology disregards everything but the race war).
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Jackson Lennock said:
Let's say Poland agrees to cede Danzig, have a referendum in September 1940, AND there somehow is no coup/instability inside of Poland.

The Second World War starts in October 1940. Could the German economy have even lasted until then without being able to plunder Poland?
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No, for reasons outlined regarding the dire state of Germany's economy. Again, a war between Poland and Germany was going to happen in 1939 regardless of what Warsaw chose- had they ceded Danzig and agreed to a referendum, Germany would have demanded they be allowed to flush the corridor with their own security, who would have ensured the right outcome, and had Poland ceded to this, then further territorial concessions would have been demanded, and had Poland ceded, etc.; the economic pressure to invade was feverish. If Germany is prevented from going to war, then the German economy is going to collapse into a black hole and civil war that makes Spain look like a slapfight.

That in itself would be an interesting trigger point, mind- peacekeeping forces comprised of the remaining League of Nation states would almost certainly be involved due to the tremendous debt owned to them by the (now crumbling) German Government and economic interests in the Ruhr, while the Soviets would certainly look to do everything they can to assist German Communists as Nazism becomes discredited through basic economic failure, and Mussolini would be manoeuvring to save some semblance of fascism at least on his borders while the Austrians and Czech break out as German military supremacy disintegrates, and if Poland is still standing they could do so with Polish help. And then of course you also have Japan eyeing the carnage in Europe- if they choose to make their big bold play though is another question, if you do not have the UK and France tied up like IoTL, and if they don't make their big bold play, they likely aren't going to be agitating for a war with the US over the oil embargo as their position is more unfavourable.
 
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monroe templeton said:
That in itself would be an interesting trigger point, mind- peacekeeping forces comprised of the remaining League of Nation states would almost certainly be involved due to the tremendous debt owned to them by the (now crumbling) German Government and economic interests in the Ruhr, while the Soviets would certainly look to do everything they can to assist German Communists as Nazism becomes discredited through basic economic failure, and Mussolini would be manoeuvring to save some semblance of fascism at least on his borders while the Austrians and Czech break out as German military supremacy disintegrates, and if Poland is still standing they could do so with Polish help. And then of course you also have Japan eyeing the carnage in Europe- if they choose to make their big bold play though is another question, if you do not have the UK and France tied up like IoTL, and if they don't make their big bold play, they likely aren't going to be agitating for a war with the US over the oil embargo as their position is more unfavourable.
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I would find this interesting honestly, especially since I bet a lot of Spanish Civil War veterans are going to be showing up (possibly on both sides, depending on which Republicans make it out of the country alive), interesting reversal there.
 
Jackson Lennock said:
Let's say Poland agrees to cede Danzig, have a referendum in September 1940, AND there somehow is no coup/instability inside of Poland.

The Second World War starts in October 1940. Could the German economy have even lasted until then without being able to plunder Poland?
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Yes, the German economy still had plenty of space. The "plunder" argument has been increasingly pushed back upon; even Tooze has tactically started to concede on some of it. Here's Robert J. Gordon in The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Mar., 2009), pp. 312-316:

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Further, here is a recent paper that Tooze helped write:

This article refutes a fundamental assumption behind the Western powers’ ‘long-war strategy’ in 1939, and casts doubt on the conventional wisdom regarding the alleged unpreparedness of Nazi Germany for a longer war. It does so by re-examining Germany’s war-preparedness through the lens of those raw materials that were of vital importance for the production of all armaments: non-ferrous metals. Contemporaries believed that these metals were the Achilles heel of the Nazi war economy because Germany had to cover its consumption predominantly with imports from overseas, which meant that it was extremely vulnerable to a sea blockade. But this article challenges these assumptions and shows that the Nazi war-planners were prepared for a longer war because of the lessons learned from the Great War, which they had carefully and covertly studied. The statistics compiled in this article demonstrate that it was the preparations based on these lessons rather than contingencies and non-predictable events, such as the access to occupied Europe due to unexpected victories, that were primarily responsible for the fact that Germany did not run out of metals during the Second World War. Germany lost the war not because of a lack of economic preparation, at least not in the field of metals, but because of the strategic decision to start a war which was bound to draw in an ever more superior coalition of enemies the longer it lasted.​

Honestly, this is one of the biggest historiography changes of late with regards to WWII; the field seems to be reverting more towards the original USSBS survey results mixed with Richard Overy's own school of thought.
 
Roger II said:
Honestly the more I think about it the more we don't have enough TLs where fascism just gets completely discredited in the late 30s, like IDK the Spanish Civil War goes worse for the nationalists,Germany screws up in the fashion @iainbhx suggests or in a similar fashion, and Mussolini's colonial ventures turn out badly.
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I had an idea - basically, the Spanish Republicans accidentally (for a given value of the word) sink a German pocket battleship during the early days of the civil war, making it impossible for Franco to move his troops to the mainland before the Republicans manage to stabilize their lines and look much more like victors, eventually crushing the nationalists in Spain proper (and then either invading Spanish Africa or accepting a de facti division). Hitler would rage, of course, but his options for revenging himself would be very limited, making him look weaker than OTL ...
 
I think the problem is, from Poland's POV, that giving up Danzig would cripple Poland both economically and militarily - the Poles would become dependent on German goodwill and the idea the Germans would show any, even without Hitler, was laughable. The Nazis were not the only Germans who considered Poland an illegitimate state. If the Poles agreed to cede the corridor, in hopes of convincing Hitler to leave the rest of the state alone, it would be like Britain making peace in 1939 on terms that would allow the Germans to station a panzer division or two in Dover.

Suicide, in other words.
 
Charles EP M. said:
That's not Tooze saying he helped write it though, that's Tooze saying he's one of the people who've been taking a similar view.
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It wasn't just people taking a similar view, but an actual group of which Jonas Scherner is in. You can read the citations to see the impact Tooze had on writing this paper, in particular his Post-WoD stuff.
 
History Learner said:
It wasn't just people taking a similar view, but an actual group of which Jonas Scherner is in. You can read the citations to see the impact Tooze had on writing this paper, in particular his Post-WoD stuff.
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Tooze doesn't say that in the twitter post though, you could have said "they are in the same group called [name of group]". The citations are of stuff Tooze had published far as I can see, that wouldn't have told me they talk in a group or he gave Scherner a hand writing it
 
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iainbhx said:
They absolutely would have done with the Sudentenland, if they had a chance.

The Sudetenland was German Clay, occupied by large number of ethnic Germans who in the vast majority of the 1938 annexation were in the super-majority. Remove Czech civil servants, army, police etc and in for instance the Egerland, it would be about 98% German. There were a few 1938 annexed areas were the Germans were in the minority such as Břeclav/Lundenburg where the Germans hadn't been in a majority since the 1880's, but that was a very key railway junction.

Apart from the Free City of Danzig, there was nothing like that in the Corridor. Those towns and it was mainly towns that had been majority-German speaking in 1919 had seen a combination of Germans leaving and Poles coming in, there were a handful of places that were still majority-German, mainly small. 84% German Bromberg had become 70% Polish Bydgoszcz. The Corridor barely tenable as an ennexation, Provinz Pozen was ridiculous.
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Sorry for the late reply, but the Sudetenland, while ethnically German, had never been part of Germany. According to Henry Ashby Turner, the German generals had no great interest in it. Meanwhile, the German generals, just like most Germans, wanted the Corridor back because it separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. This was of course a bad reasoning considering sea transportation worked perfectly well.
 
Ricardolindo said:
Sorry for the late reply, but the Sudetenland, while ethnically German, had never been part of Germany. According to Henry Ashby Turner, the German generals had no great interest in it. Meanwhile, the German generals, just like most Germans, wanted the Corridor back because it separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. This was of course a bad reasoning considering sea transportation worked perfectly well.
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Either this is a purposeful misreading of Turner or its an out of context quote.
 
Charles EP M. said:
Tooze doesn't say that in the twitter post though, you could have said "they are in the same group called [name of group]". The citations are of stuff Tooze had published far as I can see, that wouldn't have told me they talk in a group or he gave Scherner a hand writing it
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Hence why I posted the Tweet he made saying exactly that?
 
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