Post-Reich reordering of Europe - Operation Humpty Dumpty?

[varyar]

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.”

Although my stories don’t (yet) touch on it, I’ve often wondered what would happen in Europe after the collapse of a multi-generation Reich and it generally depresses me.

The easiest solution might be ‘restore the status quo ante bellum’ but how do you bring back Poland and the Soviet states (etc) when almost everyone is either dead or a second or third generation immigrant somewhere else? Even in the relatively leniently treated western annexations, there’s a lot of Germans there now and a lot of locals living in the East. Do you just dump everyone back into their country of ultimate origin? What about mixed marriage offspring? For that matter, how can the rest of the world impose a settlement on a nuclear power like the Reich? Is there a way to glue Humpty Dumpty together again or is the best possible outcome one resembling the former USSR in OTL, but much messier and much much more bitter?

 

[Elektronaut]

You can't recreate populations that don't exist anymore or ethnic settlement patterns that have been obliterated, anymore than anyone today thinks we can take things in the Americas back to the pre-Columbian era. So it really depends on how genocidal things get and how far they go down the Generalplan Ost route.

It also depends on what emerges out of a Reich collapse and it doesn't necessarily, or would even likely, have to be anything particularly decent or self-recriminatory about the past. Russia today is a reasonable quasi-analogue but even during the nineties it wasn't exactly muted in its nationalism or desire to enforce national unity.

 

[Alex Richards]

It's one of those 'how long did it take, how successful was the killing.' cases I fear.

Perhaps considering things in terms of 'minimum boundaries of Germany' first in a 90s/2000s collapse- I suspect Austria, the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor and Memel for a start are going to be permanent additions to Germany.

 

[d32123]

I'm skeptical that a victorious Nazi Germany could survive for a terribly long time yet alone carry out the entirety of Generalplan Ost. And even if they manage to there's not really a viable way to increase birth rates high enough to fill all the newly created howling wastelands with ethnic Germans.

I think a more interesting question is how the Germans themselves would handle things. I've seen people propose that average Germans would react with universal disgust and revulsion once the true extent of Nazi crimes had been revealed to them. But this is not how actual OTL Germans reacted at all. Up until the late 1960s most West Germans saw themselves as victims, and it was only the mainstreaming of the German New Left that saw unequivocal criticism of the Nazi past become the default position. Even then there was little interest in actually going after all but the highest ranking and most egregious of Nazi criminals. Casual anti-semitism was still very common in West Germany up until the 1990s and acknowledgement of the Holocaust as a crime specifically against the Jewish people was not universally accepted either even on the left. And as other posters have mentioned before, the West German right didn't accept the Eastern border until the 1990s.

In a world where Nazi Germany is ended from the inside rather than being crushed from the outside, you're going to have an even larger element of German society that will continue to be apologists and seek to capture the glory of the Nazi past. There will be a near universal reluctance to acknowledge Nazi crimes, yet alone atone for them in ways that neighboring nations will find acceptable. And questions of territorial concession are probably out the window.

 

[Elektronaut]

They don't need to fill out the space, they just need to murder the existing population. An area which has a tiny population and rock bottom population density, but which is more or less homogenously ethnically German is no more going to be in dispute than Alaska is.

 

[The Red]

They don't need to fill out the space, they just need to murder the existing population. An area which has a tiny population and rock bottom population density, but which is more or less homogenously ethnically German is no more going to be in dispute than Alaska is.

The thing is that there's still a rump Russia/USSR behind the Urals which is probably waiting impatiently to settle scores. They might have their own nukes and even if they're reined in by the west it won't be quite as easy to just dismiss their revanchist claims as the United States does to the Lakota Freedom Movement.

 

[Elektronaut]

That's totally irrelevant to be honest. The German government isn't going to shift out an existing German population in order to hand it back to people that they've committed genocide against and the worst atrocities you can imagine within living memory. Whatever's going on in Siberia, the population there is going to be absolutely poisoned against Germany forever. There's never going to be any reconciliation, ever, no peaceful retreat back into 'sane' borders.

And given I think we can all agree that Germany is going to be a nuclear power, (and even in a collapse scenario, still a sizeable military force I would assume) no-one's going to shift them out by force. The whole thing would be a permanent geopolitical disaster with no way out.

 

[The Red]

The German government isn't going to shift out an existing German population in order to hand it back to people that they've committed genocide against and the worst atrocities you can imagine within living memory.

Would they be more willing/capable of keeping the Wehrmacht at such a level that they could defend every "Alaskan" settlement? In less than a decade the Soviet Union/Russia went from being able to rival NATO to being unable to fight guerillas on its home soil due to the toll the rapid decline and then collapse of the Soviet Union took on the Red Army. Provided the collapse of the Third Reich is at least bad ITTL then evacuation might be more palatable than continuing to drive the economy into the ground by fighting for an empire that has already failed.

 

[Mumby]

I seem to remember B_Munro doing a map on this sort of theme, which has the eventual 'Russian Federation' esque Reich including most of Ukraine.

 

[Mumby]

there we go;

 

[Doctor Sulemain]

The thing is that there's still a rump Russia/USSR behind the Urals which is probably waiting impatiently to settle scores. They might have their own nukes and even if they're reined in by the west it won't be quite as easy to just dismiss their revanchist claims as the United States does to the Lakota Freedom Movement.

I've often wondered if in the event that had actually happened, and if the Normandy Landings is called off, you might see large armies of Chinese, Indian and Americans on the Eastern Front.

 

[Creekmench]

It's one of those 'how long did it take, how successful was the killing.' cases I fear.

Perhaps considering things in terms of 'minimum boundaries of Germany' first in a 90s/2000s collapse- I suspect Austria, the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor and Memel for a start are going to be permanent additions to Germany.

I can see the Baltic be like a German Transdnesieria as well.

 

[Japhy]

I've often wondered if in the event that had actually happened, and if the Normandy Landings is called off, you might see large armies of Chinese, Indian and Americans on the Eastern Front.

I've always felt that in the event of a Soviet collapse that there's going to at the very least be major allied air assets deployed to "Free" Russia and being engaged over the utter mess that is the Urals. I've never really considered troops but it's definitely possible. And in regards to Special Forces units I'd say inevitable.

 

[Japhy]

It's one of those 'how long did it take, how successful was the killing.' cases I fear.

Perhaps considering things in terms of 'minimum boundaries of Germany' first in a 90s/2000s collapse- I suspect Austria, the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor and Memel for a start are going to be permanent additions to Germany.

I'd add a lot more of Poland to that, the destruction of the Polish state was a nazi aim in and of itself and one of their big tools for that even in the war was an active program of resettlement, mostly by relocating German colonies across East and Southeast Europe towards there. With any period of time to do it they'll inevitably get to their goals of turning Warsaw into a small German city and the like.

That said I would highly doubt their ability to replicate similar results of full on integration further east, Destroying Poland would probably take decades, anything else would be Fort Apache, The Ukraine

 

[Mumby]

I've always felt that in the event of a Soviet collapse that there's going to at the very least be major allied air assets deployed to "Free" Russia and being engaged over the utter mess that is the Urals. I've never really considered troops but it's definitely possible. And in regards to Special Forces units I'd say inevitable.

From reading Citizen Clem, there was a very definite impulse to send troops to help Russia, whether that meant a second front somewhere in Western Europe, or to send them to aid The Brave Boys Of The Red Army on the Eastern Front proper.

 

[Japhy]

From reading Citizen Clem, there was a very definite impulse to send troops to help Russia, whether that meant a second front somewhere in Western Europe, or to send them to aid The Brave Boys Of The Red Army on the Eastern Front proper.

Oh definitely, but in the event of a collapse by the Red Army and the Soviet State the problem becomes getting them there. Iran->Central Asia->The Ural Front or going down the Trans Siberian Railroad is a logistical nightmare even putting the issue of Japan aside. The troops that can be useful there are going to be impossible to supply properly for at least a decade, and the troops that can swamp the battle (Chinese, Asian Colonial Forces) would need massive training to get them up to it.

 

[Doctor Sulemain]

Oh definitely, but in the event of a collapse by the Red Army and the Soviet State the problem becomes getting them there. Iran->Central Asia->The Ural Front or going down the Trans Siberian Railroad is a logistical nightmare even putting the issue of Japan aside. The troops that can be useful there are going to be impossible to supply properly for at least a decade, and the troops that can swamp the battle (Chinese, Asian Colonial Forces) would need massive training to get them up to it.

In my mental backstory for the One Tiny Drop story I did on AHDC which was set in the early 50s, the Americans had basically funded an international alliance of Asian and Americna states which meant that Japan, India, China, Brazil etc all had troops in he Rump USSR.

 

[Japhy]

When the Russians are still in the fight obviously though the Allies can do a lot more as far as troops go. But presumably a Nazi victory means Germans at the Caucuses, and at the Artic Ports which makes the supply situation exceptionally dangerous for any particularly large force.

A US Fourteenth Air Force is one thing, as the actual unit proved in China, but even then there's problems. The B-24s and B-29s in China for example were required to fly anywhere between nine and a dozen flights over the hump to manage one raid on Japan/Korea/Manchuria IOTL. It's doable, especially with enough purely logistical assets but once it turns into significant ground assets the situation gets exponentially worse.

 

[Japhy]

In my mental backstory for the One Tiny Drop story I did on AHDC which was set in the early 50s, the Americans had basically funded an international alliance of Asian and Americna states which meant that Japan, India, China, Brazil etc all had troops in he Rump USSR.

Eventually it is doable, don't get me wrong. It's just that in a 1941-1960 period it's intensely difficult is all.

 

[The Red]

From reading Citizen Clem, there was a very definite impulse to send troops to help Russia, whether that meant a second front somewhere in Western Europe, or to send them to aid The Brave Boys Of The Red Army on the Eastern Front proper.

The overall contribution of the RAF to the Eastern Front has unfortunately gotten bogged down in the standard ideological battles over the impact of L-L but one thing that sticks out beyond doubt was how utterly dreadful it was for German morale. According to David Stahel the appearance of Hurricanes being flown by British pilots was the moment when many Germans came to realise that Barbarossa had not only failed in its objectives of swiftly defeating the Soviet Union, and in doing so removing the UK's only remaining source of hope, but that things were only going to get worse from then on in.