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What would 1960s Nazi Germany actually look like?

Aznavour

Well-known member
Published by SLP
So, as we all know, the Third Reich winning the war and becoming the dominant force in the world is counterfactual history'ss greatest, most profitable, most tired idea. Variants can go from the maximalist (Swastikas over the White House, Reichprotektorat Amerika, draining the Mediterranean) to the more modest (think Fatherland)

And we all know the tropes associated with such a world: cyclopean cement monstruositues built by Albert Speer and no one else, SS in black leather standing in every corner, colonies in the east, social policies working as they did in the 1930s, Superior Nazi Science making Germany a superpower, winning the space race, the same old gerontocrats staying in power for 20 years, unless Reinhard Heydrich has killed them all, etc.

But in all honestly, is that how Germany and Europe would have looked like decades after a Nazi victory? I mean, what are the realistic consequences of an actual German victory and Nazi run Europe?

Fatherland, for instance, had Germany undergo exhaustion after decades of war in the Urals, constant terrorism and unviable colonies in the East.

A short pieve over at AH.com a few years back dwelt on the massive real estate crisis and giant ghost cities of Eastern Europe, built upon the backs of slave labour by Nazi megalomania, but too expensive for the average German.

Of course, there's the impracticability of projects like Germania (Berlin's soil cannot handle the weight of so much cement), the simmering inter-agency rivalry (if it came down to an SS-Army match, would the SS really come on top?) the impact of brain drain on the German economy, the possibility of further agency reorganizations (who's to say the Gestapo or SS wouldn't go the way of the NKVD, or that some offices would survive their chieftains)

What do you think? What do you come up with?





Bundesarchiv_Bild_146III-373%2C_Modell_der_Neugestaltung_Berlins_%28%22Germania%22%29.jpg
 
I think the Reich population and its leaders would be worn down by the struggle in the East, even assuming the British Empire accepts a White Peace, and keeps to it.

At least most German cities won't be ruined by Allied round-the-clock bombing, and the USSR won't get any Lend-Lease, but I'm fairly certain of a bloody stalemate outside Moscow and in the Caucasus, and an accelerated Holocaust just to free up resources for the Herrenvolk.

Many of the Napkinwaffe (tanks/aeroplanes) so beloved of the Reich victorious mob won't exist, because the specific circumstances requiring them won't occur.

The Japanese will be encircled and defeated in a slightly compressed timescale because of the amount of US material diverted to North Africa, Europe and the USSR will be approaching nil. That is, if the Japanese choose to attack at all.
 
Economically? It'd be shit. There's a line in @Nick Sumner 's Drake's Drum, that the Nazified universities were churning out a lot of experts in eugenics and very few people who'd be useful in a 1940s industrial economy, and unless the Nazis noticed that and were able to change things before the 60s, woof. At some point the loot from other countries is going to run out.

So I can see these vast grand white-marble Speerist cities and statues of muscular Hitlers standing on the Jewish octopus, but the power's gone out again and the streets are full of underfed people looking for work.

Probably the Nazi equivalent of the baby boomers are seething in youthful rage because clearly the men in power aren't doing Nazism properly or things would be great.
 
C. J. Samson's book Dominion, while a bit 'you see, the SNP are Literally Fascists' at times, does make the good point that since the war between the Slavs and Poles and the Nazis was one where the Slavs and Poles would be exterminated if they lost, the war could not really end while a Slav or Pole was still living, and every Slav or Pole had a hell of a reason to take up arms.

Hence, the new Eastern Territories would be in a state of guerrilla war near-constantly. I'm not sure his description of it as 'Vietnam on a continental scale' holds, but it certainly would be very unpleasant to live in for the next 20 years at least. You'd have to pay people to take up their Lebensraum.
 
At some point the loot from other countries is going to run out.

Even if the NS-Dritte Reich has continued sole access to the wheatfields of Ukraine, the oil of the Caucasus, the coal and steel of France/Belgium, the copper of Yugoslavia, etc, the constituent countries of this Empire are going to get varying levels of fucked off, and varying levels of massacred, if all the good stuff and all the manpower ends up in the Alt-Reich.
 
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I'm seeing (and would definitely run with it for the sake of a story) a German military establishment with the notorious factionalism but without the life-or-death urgency of a world war devolving into a hyper-politicized paper tiger. Having a natural resources plunder economy in the occupied territories would not help in that regard.
 
So, as we all know, the Third Reich winning the war and becoming the dominant force in the world is counterfactual history'ss greatest, most profitable, most tired idea. Variants can go from the maximalist (Swastikas over the White House, Reichprotektorat Amerika, draining the Mediterranean) to the more modest (think Fatherland)

And we all know the tropes associated with such a world: cyclopean cement monstruositues built by Albert Speer and no one else, SS in black leather standing in every corner, colonies in the east, social policies working as they did in the 1930s, Superior Nazi Science making Germany a superpower, winning the space race, the same old gerontocrats staying in power for 20 years, unless Reinhard Heydrich has killed them all, etc.

But in all honestly, is that how Germany and Europe would have looked like decades after a Nazi victory? I mean, what are the realistic consequences of an actual German victory and Nazi run Europe?

Fatherland, for instance, had Germany undergo exhaustion after decades of war in the Urals, constant terrorism and unviable colonies in the East.

A short pieve over at AH.com a few years back dwelt on the massive real estate crisis and giant ghost cities of Eastern Europe, built upon the backs of slave labour by Nazi megalomania, but too expensive for the average German.

Of course, there's the impracticability of projects like Germania (Berlin's soil cannot handle the weight of so much cement), the simmering inter-agency rivalry (if it came down to an SS-Army match, would the SS really come on top?) the impact of brain drain on the German economy, the possibility of further agency reorganizations (who's to say the Gestapo or SS wouldn't go the way of the NKVD, or that some offices would survive their chieftains)

What do you think? What do you come up with?





Bundesarchiv_Bild_146III-373%2C_Modell_der_Neugestaltung_Berlins_%28%22Germania%22%29.jpg
I always find fatherland by robert harris a good way into a 1960s Third Reich.
 
Hence, the new Eastern Territories would be in a state of guerrilla war near-constantly. I'm not sure his description of it as 'Vietnam on a continental scale' holds, but it certainly would be very unpleasant to live in for the next 20 years at least. You'd have to pay people to take up their Lebensraum.
I imagine that eventually there would be less money and more just guns pointed at your family until you all agreed to peacefully relocate to the frontier of German civilization.
 
Many people only consider maps, battles, colonies, and yuge buildings for nazi victory scenarios. I wonder: How'd the younger generations grow up? Some thoughts:

* Many years ago I read the "Nazis win" book "Wenn das der Führer wüsste!". It was published in 1966 and set around that year (Hitler's still alive, albeit very old). Some things I found odd about it, and I don't remember that much. But I do remember how the actress Ulla von Eyck (one of the main characters - not sure about her age, but probably max. 40) mentions how she was so angry sometimes that she wished to smash all the Germanic gods (whose religion was reintroduced) and Frauja (gothic name of Jesus, since Christianity has been "Germanized") too. Why? I have no idea.
* In short - would there be something similar to the "revolution of 1968"? Would young people rebel against their nazi parents just as IOTL, with much, much worse chances to win? Or on the contrary, would they become even more radical nazis?
* Umberto Eco once wrote that he had to write in school how he prayed for the Duce every day - although he was aware all the time that he was lying about this. And even under nazism, which made Mussolini look harmless, ideology in school didn't work as well as they thought. The famous German journalist/lit critic Hellmuth Karasek even went to a Napola school as a kid, but didn't become very nazistic.
* How would Germans born after the war think about what the ideology says about Jews, if there aren't any left? "Old" nazis might have joined the party because e.g. they knew someone who allegedly had been cheated out of 1000 marks by a Jewish banker which "of course" would justify robbing and killing said Jewish banker. But what if the new nazi generation wouldn't even have that excuse?
 
Much like how some punks wore swastikas to shock 70s England, I could logically see Greater German youths picking up bastardised iconography from the exterminated Jews, Romani, Poles, Slavs etc to be 'provocative'. And that it'd quickly be the youths of the 'right class', unlike punks, since only they might have the family connections that mean the Gestapo don't fully come down on them.
 
Much like how some punks wore swastikas to shock 70s England, I could logically see Greater German youths picking up bastardised iconography from the exterminated Jews, Romani, Poles, Slavs etc to be 'provocative'. And that it'd quickly be the youths of the 'right class', unlike punks, since only they might have the family connections that mean the Gestapo don't fully come down on them.

Now I am half-imagining punks with armbands of Stars of David and Polish Home Army logos playing ska or reggae because if the Nazis despised Jazz then they would hate Ska as well.
 
There was already a youth movement revolting against Nazism OTL, they did things like get in fights with the Hitler Youth, smoke, drink, make jokes about the party and stuff like that. Some of them were also part of the German Resistance.

Rather than look to OTL Western Europe for inspiration it might be best to start with what was already present in Nazi Germany and work from there.
 
Bit hard to determine on the economic front given how so much of the Nazi economy was geared towards anticipating, and then prosecuting, the war. I'm not sure how things work at all with a peacetime economy - I don't think there is any yardstick to measure it against.

I feel like Nazism being paralysed by the east is Fatherland history. In reality they will just ethnically cleanse morning noon and night, so it won't be comparable to Vietnam or the occupation in western Europe. They were quite content to murder tens of millions and make Moscow into a lake. People like to suggest Generalplan Ost was impractical - given how many they murdered whilst in the midst of a World War in only a few years, I'm not really sure how this is the case when it comes to peacetime.
 
Bit hard to determine on the economic front given how so much of the Nazi economy was geared towards anticipating, and then prosecuting, the war. I'm not sure how things work at all with a peacetime economy - I don't think there is any yardstick to measure it against.

I feel like Nazism being paralysed by the east is Fatherland history. In reality they will just ethnically cleanse morning noon and night, so it won't be comparable to Vietnam or the occupation in western Europe. They were quite content to murder tens of millions and make Moscow into a lake. People like to suggest Generalplan Ost was impractical - given how many they murdered whilst in the midst of a World War in only a few years, I'm not really sure how this is the case when it comes to peacetime.
The problem with Generalplan Ost isn't killing everyone - after all, people did it in the African colonies all the time. The problem is what happens next. The simple fact is that even Nazi Germany can't get the birthrates needed to massively repopulate these regions, would have to spend a whole lot of money to get new structures implemented (the Backe Plan for Warsaw was only doable because of a combination of German bombing in 1939 and the actions of the Polish Resistance in the Warsaw Uprising).

The problem isn't being bogged down with partisans after a certain point, it's the fantasy of reestablishing large farming colonies of Germans once you rub out all the Slavs. You might get a few second sons who don't qualify for the Family Farm Law, but prewar urbanization means that much of Eastern Europe is likely to be devoid of people generally.
 
The problem with Generalplan Ost isn't killing everyone - after all, people did it in the African colonies all the time. The problem is what happens next. The simple fact is that even Nazi Germany can't get the birthrates needed to massively repopulate these regions, would have to spend a whole lot of money to get new structures implemented (the Backe Plan for Warsaw was only doable because of a combination of German bombing in 1939 and the actions of the Polish Resistance in the Warsaw Uprising).

The problem isn't being bogged down with partisans after a certain point, it's the fantasy of reestablishing large farming colonies of Germans once you rub out all the Slavs. You might get a few second sons who don't qualify for the Family Farm Law, but prewar urbanization means that much of Eastern Europe is likely to be devoid of people generally.

Agreed.

I think it was Gerhard Weinberg who pointed out the German trend for decades had been for people to leave the east (in this case, East Prussia, Pomerania, etc) for the more economically vital west (Berlin, the Rhine, etc). And these were areas that had had German populations for centuries. Short of settling people at gunpoint, you're not going to have much like refilling the New East to anything like its old population. There aren't that many German(ic)s period, if nothing else. In my own In and Out of the Reich stories, the Nazi East is something like 1/10th the pre-war population, and that's probably stretching it.
 
The problem with Generalplan Ost isn't killing everyone - after all, people did it in the African colonies all the time. The problem is what happens next. The simple fact is that even Nazi Germany can't get the birthrates needed to massively repopulate these regions, would have to spend a whole lot of money to get new structures implemented (the Backe Plan for Warsaw was only doable because of a combination of German bombing in 1939 and the actions of the Polish Resistance in the Warsaw Uprising).

The problem isn't being bogged down with partisans after a certain point, it's the fantasy of reestablishing large farming colonies of Germans once you rub out all the Slavs. You might get a few second sons who don't qualify for the Family Farm Law, but prewar urbanization means that much of Eastern Europe is likely to be devoid of people generally.

I agree with this - even totalitarianism is going to find it hard to re-populate the space. Even with natalist policies, grants, enticing 'Aryan' types from abroad, you are looking at a long time to re-populate the spaces. And it would probably never match the notion of farmer-settlers due to mechanisation. More likely is strategic city-creation.

But given the premise of this thread, if we are looking at a properly Nazi state - I.E, no Goring taking over, the SS being side-lined, a general slow move towards vanilla dictatorship - lasting until the sixties, then I think the depopulation would happen on a very substantial scale. In such a scenario we are talking about the SS having twenty years plus of unfettered dominion over Eastern Europe and European Russia. Between enslavement, induced famines, expulsion to behind the Urals, populations being sent to Maly Trostinets, etc it doesn't seem improbable that you are going to see numbers that Maoism achieved by error rather than by design.
 
TBH, I can see the East be like a punishment detail for like the people in the military and SS too well-connected to fire, sending the fuckups to man the radar stations in the urals, combined with really ideological German settlers in the towns would be grim as hell.
 
Maybe I've read too many of these things, or they contradicted themselves at various points, but it wasn't always total immediate extermination planned, was it? Like at some point, the plan was that the big manor farms would have non-German peasant work-forces in perpetuity, even if they were never going to be allowed to, you know, learn to read or anything.
 
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