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How many Sixes does Adolf Nazi have to Roll?

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Indeed. But if he'd actually listened to the proposals advocated by his chief administrator of the region, head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg (who favored setting up a buffer state in Ukraine to ease the pressure on the German eastern frontier, as well as collaboration with the East Slavs against Bolshevism and offering them national independence), and done what he'd told Rosenberg he was amenable to doing (rather than LOLing at him behind his back in private meetings with Koch), then he would've done so. As Nazi Germany's chief racial theorist, Rosenberg considered Slavs, though lesser than Germans, to still be Aryan; often complaining to Hitler and Himmler about the treatment of non-Jewish occupied peoples, and proposing the creation of buffer satellite states made out of Greater Finland, Baltica, Ukraine, and Caucasus. And as Hitler himself said about it,



Hitler did indeed have Ukraine et al in mind, earmarked as Lebensraum. But there's nothing precluding Adolf Nazi from simply promising or granting them all provisional independence without blinking (as he did in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania), then choosing not to honor their independence by annexing them all anyway, one by one, after the War with Soviet Russia's already been won and they've outlived their strategic advantage. And if Hitler had emerged from WW2 victorious, that almost certainly would've been the fate of Slovakia too, in spite of it formally being an independent contributing member of the Axis Powers. He IS Hitler, after all.
I guess half of it would also depend on who the top Nazi in Lviv is that day - if it's someone more amenable to the idea when the OUN-B pull their stunt, then instead of getting arrested they get accepted (or at least tolerated) and then there's a fait accomplit to send up the chain and then Rosenberg's argument has some tangible evidence & results.

Still then raises the question of whether it's worth the ideological compromise - does Germany have the equipment to support a Ukrainian army? Is there the logistical capacity to feed it in a scenario where Germany is having to at least pretend to care about the Ukrainian people? But it's a start, at least.
 
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I guess half of it would also depend on who the top Nazi in Lviv is that day - if it's someone more amenable to the idea when the OUN-B pull their stunt, then instead of getting arrested they get accepted (or at least tolerated) and then there's a fait accomplit to send up the chain and then Rosenberg's argument has some tangible evidence & results.
Indeed. The chance of the top Nazi in Lviv on that day being amenable enough to the idea to accept or tolerate them may be low, but I'd still count it as better than one in ten, comparable to "rolling a six". And it's also worth mentioning that even Rosenberg didn't intend to keep those buffer satellite states around forever- he proposed creating them to "provide a buffer against Soviet expansion in preparation for the total eradication of Communism and Bolshevism by decisive pre-emptive military action", and partially advocated granting them provisional independence as satellite buffer states on the grounds that their populations were still far too racially inferior and tainted to merit the territories' full inclusion in the Greater German Reich, with the necessity to properly Aryanize them first in order to keep Nazi Germany racially pure (i.e, earmarking them and their populations for 'Phase II' of the Holocaust, and only annexing their territories after the completion of the Holocaust's objectives there). But Rosenberg saw the basis for race as being spiritual (and thus, able to be changed via the Germanization/Nordicization of their populations, to a degree over time), whereas Hitler saw it as being biological (and thus innate, genetic and unalterable).

So even if Hitler had acknowledged the merits of Rosenberg's advocated approach, and how much easier it'd make things for Nazi Germany militarily, don't expect the eastern Slavs to survive for too long past the end of the war ITTL before facing "decisive pre-emptive military action" from the Nazis to occupy their territories, and enact genocide against them in the same manner as it'd already have been against the Jews and the Poles within the Reich itself. But even if the newly independent satellite states did band together and try to resist or fight back against the Nazis at that stage, post-war in a Nazi victory scenario, how much less of a chance would they collectively have against the Nazis than the Soviet Union did IOTL...?
 
Anyway this talk of logistics is raising yet another point - where could Germany get more oil from in the 1940-2 period? Is there enough accessible with the technology of the time, and is there the capacity to move it to where it's needed? Libyan Oil getting discovered early is a potential PoD I've seen here a few times, but then the oil is on the wrong side of the Mediterranean.
 
Anyway this talk of logistics is raising yet another point - where could Germany get more oil from in the 1940-2 period? Is there enough accessible with the technology of the time, and is there the capacity to move it to where it's needed? Libyan Oil getting discovered early is a potential PoD I've seen here a few times, but then the oil is on the wrong side of the Mediterranean.
Problem with that is that there aren't too many other options within Germany's ability to secure for itself, though. Especially when Norway's oil isn't an option, what with all of it being offshore and all...

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Sure, you could look at a few alternative options farther afield- but how's it going to get its oil back to Germany from there? IMHO, ironically enough, rather than adding a new entry to the "Alternate Axis members" or "Alternate Nazi campaigns" lists, it might well be more realistic and more original to add an entry to the "Alternate Nazi tech" tree instead. OTL's Operation Desert used technology which was already considered primitive at that time (the Kiviter process, used in Estonia since 1921, based on the earlier vertical retort technology of Pintsch's generator in 1898), with Germany only really cracking the problem of shale oil production with the development of other processes such as the Lurgi–Ruhrgas process and Galoter process in the late 1940s, only just too late to play a role. What if it had been developed in time, and Nazi German shale oil production had really gotten off the ground?
 
Thinking about it, couldn't an easier, more plausible way of doing this simply involve screwing over the Allies a bit more? Does it still count as "Adolf Nazi rolling sixes" if it's the enemies he's fighting against who're rolling lower scores luck-wise against him than they did IOTL? Take India, for instance- couldn't it have potentially turned into a 'British Russia'? True, the most likely PODs for doing so (e.g, the organized backlash against Britain after the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre being led by literally anyone who wasn't an absolutist non-violent pacifist, as Gandhi was, and OTL's 'non-cooperation movement' blowing up into a wholesale Indian War of Independence instead, as even OTL's movement had been on the verge of doing before Gandhi called it off in February 1922, following the Chauri Chaura incident) would be markedly earlier, enough so to potentially butterfly away the rise of the Nazis in Germany entirely.

But there are still plenty of other potential possibilities to sweep India, the cornerstone of the British Empire, out from under them during the height of the conflict; with 'Winston-Imperial' himself effectively having continuously rolled sixes (with the few setbacks attributable to 'bad luck' constituting rolling 5s or 4's, at the very lowest) in the Indian/South Asian theatre of the conflict over the entire course of the war. With situations like the Bengal Famine, there's no way that the backlash and demonstrations against the British Empire should have been as sporadic, ill-organized, non-violent and small-scale as they were, without a ton of sixes being rolled by the British leadership, and pure luck keeping resistance and rebellion as limited as it was IOTL.

Yes, why did the Bengal famine cause so little resistance? Sure, Gandhi had recommended to side with the Empire, but still. Theoretically, an uprising could have damaged the Empire in a dangerous way... but even if there was ten times more resistance than IOTL: Would it matter? Anyway, I'll add it to the PoDs.

For Alternate Axis members:, not sure if it's PC to bring it up right now given current ongoing events, but what about Ukraine? A week after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the OUN-B (which had already stated its immediate goal, at the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was to re-establish a united, independent, Nazi-aligned, mono-ethnic Nation state in a territory that also included parts of modern-day Russia, Poland, and Belarus) proclaimed the establishment of an independent Ukrainian State in Lviv, with Yaroslav Stetsko as premier, on 30 June 1941 in occupied Lviv, while the region was under the control of Nazi Germany, pledging loyalty to Adolf Hitler. The Nazis' response though, having been taken completely by surprise, was to choose to interpret it as an attempted coup, even after Nazi troops entered Lviv to a hero's welcome, with the German authorities telling the leadership of the Ukrainian government to disband, and the leaders of the government, including President Yaroslav Stetsko and Stepan Bandera being arrested and interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. IOTL, Stetsko and Stepan Bandera were only released by the German authorities in Sept 1944 in the hope that they would rouse the native populace to fight the advancing Soviet Army (allowed to set up headquarters in Berlin, with the remnants of the OUN-B and the UIA supplied by the Luftwaffe with airdrops of arms and equipment, as well as some OUN-B leaders accompanied by assigned German personnel and agents trained to conduct terrorist and intelligence activities behind Soviet lines until early 1945)- by which stage, it was way too late.

And with Erich Koch having been placed in charge, the more moderate, but equally supportive, OUN-M had also been swiftly and brutally cracked down upon growing strength by the Gestapo, in spite of elements within the Wehrmacht trying in vain to protect OUN-M and its members; with Koch's leadership and tyrannical administration rapidly eliminating any chances of tapping into that early Ukrainian popular pro-Nazi collaborationist sentiment to any meaningful extent. When he spoke to the commanding generals of the German Army Groups in the summer of 1942, Adolf Hitler stated that: "Were it not for the psychological effect, I would go as far as I could; I would say, "Let's set up a fully independent Ukraine." I would say it without blinking and then not do it anyway. That I could do as a politician, but (since I must say it publicly) I can't tell every German soldier just as publicly: "It isn't true; what I've just said is only tactics." But with Hitler having already acknowledged Ukraine's OUM as "a faithful German auxiliary" in the invasion of Poland, what if Hitler had decided that the advantage of setting up a fully independent (insomuch as Vichy France and Quisling Norway could be said to have been full independent) Ukrainian puppet state governed by the OUM would outweigh the negative psychological effect he (almost certainly mistakenly) believed it'd have on his troops, and elected to support it (since it would be "only tactics", so as to have a ready supply of far more expendable Ukrainian Slavs to die in the meat grinder on the Eastern Front killing the Russian Communist Slavs for him, reducing the loss of life to, and creating more Lebensraum for, his Aryan German master race, as well as ensuring they'd have an easier time of it extracting Ukraine's resources- with every intention of simply having its leaders rounded up and executed on trumped-up charges, revoking its nominal 'independence', and merging its territories into the Greater German Reich anyway, as soon as Operation Barbarossa had been won)?

The same could also be true of Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; couldn't they all have potentially been Alternate Axis Members, if Adolf Nazi had decided to support their proclamations of independence after 'liberating' them from the Soviets, and installed Nazi collaborationist puppet regimes there, simply repeating the same tried-and-tested divide-and-conquer M.O. which he'd already used with great effect in Czechoslovakia (with the Slovaks being equally 'untermensch' Slavs, but with Hitler having supported the First Slovak Republic's declaration of independence, admittance as a member of the Axis powers, and participation in the Nazis' campaigns against Poland, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust IOTL- and having almost certainly intended to revoke its independence and annex it to the Greater German Reich at his leisure after having won the war)? And if Adolf Nazi had done so, how much easier would it have made Operation Barbarossa, and how much likelier would he have been to "win the war"?

And another big possibility worth mentioning, to be added to the Alternate Nazi tech column: Nazi thermobarics. Significantly less unlikely, less technically challenging and way less expensive than the 'Nazi nuke', given that the first test with a 60kg thermobaric bomb was purportedly carried out in 1943 after it was developed within in the space of just a few months as little more than a side project at Mario Zippermayer's secret 'Hochtal' weapons research facility in Salzberg, with the Nazis only attempting to build upon this to develop and produce larger bombs with liquid oxygen at the very end of the war, and then only in the Hexenkessel (Witch's Cauldron) Project to provide a high-yield warhead for a surface-to-air missile against enemy bombers. Even in its original demonstration form (whereby coal dust was launched in a grenade, and dispersed by an explosive charge, greatly increasing their yield and effectiveness, in a reliable, low-tech and low-cost manner which easily allowed for mass-production), Zippermayer's tech could've easily played a key role for the Nazis- just imagine every platoon of Nazi soldiers being equipped with thermobaric grenades to use in all of their critical sieges in Operation Barbarossa, for example. I'd rate OTL, where the Nazis never actually used any of the thermobaric weapons that they'd developed in WW2 beyond testing, as easily a 'improbable'/negligible outcome, giving it a score/chance of <1 or 1 at most. And the chances of thermobaric weapons (which built upon the 'Brand Granate' incendiary shells that'd been developed and used by Germany back during WW1) actually being produced and utilized by the Nazis in WW2 instead, should at least count as a 99 probability-wise IMHO.

Treating the "Ost" people better would help a lot, but as so many people would pint out, you'd need Nazis not being Nazis for that. Still, someone more pragmatic in charge might help.

Thanks for mentioning the thermobaric bomb and Mario Zippermayr, didn't know about it yet. Will be added. Might come a bit late, but let's see.

Bürgerbräukeller is out, since it's before 1940.

Anyway this talk of logistics is raising yet another point - where could Germany get more oil from in the 1940-2 period? Is there enough accessible with the technology of the time, and is there the capacity to move it to where it's needed? Libyan Oil getting discovered early is a potential PoD I've seen here a few times, but then the oil is on the wrong side of the Mediterranean.

Would need an earlier PoD, IOTL the Libyan oil was only discovered in 1959. In the long run, Libya would help them a lot, of course. (After all, the TL is supposed to run at least 20 years after the war.) Unless they lose it to the WAllies...

OTL's Operation Desert used technology which was already considered primitive at that time (the Kiviter process, used in Estonia since 1921, based on the earlier vertical retort technology of Pintsch's generator in 1898), with Germany only really cracking the problem of shale oil production with the development of other processes such as the Lurgi–Ruhrgas process and Galoter process in the late 1940s, only just too late to play a role. What if it had been developed in time, and Nazi German shale oil production had really gotten off the ground?

Thanks for the info! Point as good as added.
 
Different Persons
Another overview, about important people in this timeline.

Longer lives

Leading Nazis
  • Adolf Nazi
  • Joseph Goebbels
  • Heinrich Himmler
  • Reinhard Heydrich
  • Robert Ley
  • Wilhelm Frick
  • Alfred Rosenberg
  • Hans Frank
  • Fritz Todt?
Other Germans
  • Eva Braun
  • The Goebbels kids
  • Many German Soldiers (up to 5 Millions)
  • Many German civilians (esp. from the East and the big cities)
  • Klaus Junge (young chess talent)
  • Relatives of Adolf Nazi from the Waldviertel
  • Erwin Rommel?
  • Hanna Reitsch?
  • Heinrich George
Foreign Statesmen
  • Benito Mussolini
  • Gian Galeazzo Ciano
  • Italo Balbo?
  • Pierre Laval
  • Vidkun Quisling
  • Adrian Mussert
  • Ferenc Szalasi
  • Ion Antonescu
  • Jozef Tiso
  • Joseph P. Kennedy jr.
  • Robert F. Kennedy?
Others
  • Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  • Buddy Holly
  • Ritchie Valens
  • The Big Bopper
  • James Dean
  • The Heydrich killers

Shorter lives

Foreign Statesmen
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt?
  • Winston Churchill?
  • Charles de Gaulle?
Partisans
  • Tito
  • Karol Woytila?
Other Nazi opponents
  • Konrad Adenauer
  • Kurt Schumacher
  • Oskar Schindler

Never born IOTL
  • TBD

Never born ITTL
  • The author's parents. Both of them. Draw the conclusion.
  • Gerhard Schröder, Angela Merkel, Olaf Scholz
  • All POTUSes since Clinton, Hillary too. Even Biden.
  • All British PMs since Tony Blair
  • Emmanuel Macron, Nicolas Sarkozy
  • Juan Carlos of Spain, Aznar, Zapatero
  • Mario Draghi, Matteo Renzi
  • Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, AOC
  • Binyamin Netanyahu
  • Greta Thunberg, Malala, Emma Gonzales
  • Prince Charles, Lady Di, Carmilla etc.
  • Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi
  • No Popes so far!
  • Steve Bannon, Mencius Moldbug, Andrew Breitbart, David Duke
  • Michael Kühnen, Lutz Bachmann, Attila Hildmann, Ken Jebsen, Akif Pirincci, Alice Weidel, Bernd Lucke, Bernd Höcke, Jörg Meuthen, Storchi, Anders Behrend Breivik
  • Joschka Fischer, Winfried Kretschmann, Jürgen Trittin, Cem Özdemir, Jutta Ditfurth
  • Jürgen Möllemann, Guido Westerwelle, Christian Lindner, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger
  • Sigmar Gabriel, Martin Schulz, Andrea Nahles, Peer Steinbrück, Rudolf Scharping
  • Markus Söder, Uschi Leyen, AKK, Luschet, Roland Koch, Günter Oettinger
  • Horst Köhler, Christian Wulff, Ole von Beust, Klausi Wowi
  • MbS, Osama bin Laden, ISIS people

Alternate careers
  • TBD
 
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About the Butterfly Effect
This scientific concept was popularized (as a part of Chaos Theory) during the 1980s. In its best-known form it's usually quoted as "A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may cause a tornado in Texas". The concept was discovered by the scientist Edward N. Lorenz in 1963, during a computer simulation of weather. It was when he entered the almost-precise data from an earlier point in time than that which the calculations had already reached. After continuing to run the simulation for the same amount of time, the results turned out completely different: Proving that small changes don't have to stay small, but may grow exponentially.

(Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder" predicted something like this as early as 1952, BTW.)

In Alternate History, many authors like to use well-known historical characters in similar functions as in our world's history. Take Goebbels as an inquisitor in the service of the Vatican, or Richard Nixon as a used-car salesman - of steamcars to boot. This makes their stories easier to digest, and their characters easier to relate to. "How many Sixes does Adolf Nazi have to Roll?" is not supposed to be an easy story.

Also, it fits that - if we use the butterfly effect - that the world we know is destroyed bit by bit as the years go by. (As if the Nazis hadn't done enough damage in the first place.) Hence, the only people who are the same as in our world are those conceived and born before the Point of Divergence. That is: 1940s, roughly. If I decide to let people from our history appear who are born after this date, they'll be really more like siblings from the same parents (possible after all, esp. if these parents were already married/betrothed/an item before the PoD), with the same sex (the chance is about 50%), the same first name (possible, families like to reuse names, esp. traditional ones, and people's tastes tend to stay similar), and roughly the same birth date.

Furthermore, there's still the possibility of "morphic twins", as Terry Pratchett would have said: Different people who have the same function as certain people from our history. If there is no Steve Jobs, someone else will probably still invent the PC.
 
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Important questions that might have to be dealt with in this timeline
How would a victorious Nazi Reich react to...

  • The first nuke, and further developments, including nuclear power plants. Especially if the Communists get them!
  • Space flight/ICBMs (consider that Nazi Germany was most advanced in rocketry, at this time)
  • Wide-spread television
  • Growing pollution, the hole in the Ozone layer, acid rain, the Climate Catastrophe
  • IT innovations (computers, databases, networks, e-mail, the PC, office software...) Consider that Konrad Zuse created a working computer during the war which was more advanced than what the Allies had at that time!

  • An invasion of Japan, let alone defeat and destruction
  • A Sino-Soviet split
  • Independent India trying to go its own way
  • Independence movements throughout Africa, Asia
  • The Civil Rights movement, other black and non-white movements
  • Communist takeover of China, other important states
  • Islamist movements, e.g. the Ayatollahs' in Iran (Khomeini was born before the PoD!)
  • A tripartite (Nazis and fascists/Communists/Capitalist Christian Democrats) Cold War, if not with even more participants
  • A breakdown of the Soviet Union (The Soviet Empire might last shorter if they don't have Eastern Europe to exploit)

  • The Reich's bureaucracy growing sclerotic
  • New kinds of guerillas (Che Guevara was born before the PoD!)
  • Open power struggles among factions of their own
  • An ally (Franco's Spain, Vichy France, or even italy) trying to part ways with the Reich/fascism
  • The holocaust becoming known by the public
  • Germans demanding freedom/democracy (well, it's possible)

  • Rock music, new drugs, the seual revolution, in short: The counter-culture
  • The invention of the birth control pill
  • New Hollywood, video games, science-fiction/fantasy/horror
  • Vatican II (maybe even a split?)
  • A relevant neopagan movement, or widespread atheism

  • Improved agriculture (which puts the Lebensraum idea into question)
  • Food surplus, and growing obesity of "Aryans"
  • An oil crisis
  • An end of the gold standard (if there is a Bretton Woods equivalent)
  • New kinds of organized crime
  • Rise of the megacorps
 
Some general thoughts about the story
I'm still not sure about which PoDs to use and in which order - all I can say is that I want to use as few nudges towards Nazi victory as possible. Makes a better balance between the two or three political camps in the Cold War that's going to ensue. And creates more tension for the story. (Hope this isn't too much.)

All while keeping it as realistic as possible.

Only that much: No matter which PoDs I'll choose - these sharp turns in history will have to get the best descriptions. No handwaving allowed.


"Kill your darlings"

This is a writing advice you often hear, although I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it, TBH.

It's true however that I had to follow it occasionally. One example:

I would have liked to appoint Leni Riefenstahl first female Nazi minister (of propaganda, natch) after the death of Adolf Nazi and Goebbels becoming new "Führer", but as things look, Goebbels couldn't stand her, so her career would be cut off without Hitler...
 
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Trigger warnings
This is a story where Adolf Nazi, initiator of World War 2, and main responsible one for the organized mass murder of about six million Jews, not only wins this war, but keeps on reigning over his new Reich. What do you expect, except colonialism of the worst kind, mass murder, and sadism on a gigantic scale?

But if you insist on details: This story offends everyone to the left of the Nazis (because the latter won), and in particular the government of the US, the UK, and the Stalinist Soviet Union (because they are willing to make peace with him); Jews, Zingaros(?), Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Czechs, French, Serbians, and several other people, plus the gaysexuals (because hundreds of thousands of either of them are murdered, tortured, and/or enslaved, without justification or punishment for the culprits); the European resistances and the German one in particular, for not being able to topple the Nazi regime; various people from Germany, continental Europe, Northern Africa, the Near and Middle East, for becoming Nazis or their collaborators; various moral institutions (the churches, the feminists, the Dalai Lama) for failing to stop the Nazis either; and of course Nazis, for being the unrepentant mass murderers, or at least the latter's apologists, they were and are. And often corrupt and/or perverted to boot. And often quite ridiculous characters, indeed. And often infighting (so much about unity a la "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer"), even when their country and their people (whom they allegedly loved so much) had a World War to fight. And people from the rest of the world, for being at lest willing to cooperate with Nazis. The Japanese in particular because the millions of Chinese they were willing to kill, and the hundreds of thousands of Allied PoWs they had planned to kill just in case aren't glossed over - and they receive a harsher punishment than in OTL.
 
Moderator post:

We have received complaints about the flippant tone of this thread. While discussion of how World War II could have gone differently is a mainstay of AH and even Nazi victory TLs are not inherently off-limits on this site, it should go without saying that this must be handled with care to avoid even inadvertent trivialisation of the horrors of Nazism. Your persistent use of 'cutesy' nicknames, or the pre-emptive listing of groups who will be 'offended' and should 'know what to expect' or living people irrelevant to the topic of the TL who would not be born in this scenario, do not reassure us that such care will be taken. As such, we have decided to close this thread.
 
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