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hardcore_gamer

What if Hitler had died in 1938?

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There are many works of fiction that ask the question what would have happened if the Nazis had won the war. But I have another more interesting question: What if the Nazis had never started the war?

What if Hitler had gotten ill and just died in 1938 after having united Austria and the Sudetenland with Germany, leaving a strong Nazi state in place but with no war thirsty Hitler in charge of it? What would have happened? Would Nazi Germany still be a powerful force in Europe? Would the lack of holocaust and presence of a modern Nazi Germany mean that racism would still be considered legit? How would a lack of Hitler in 1938 Germany have affected world history? What would the world look like?

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hardcore_gamer said:

What if Hitler died in 1938 after having united Austria and the Sudetenland with Germany, leaving a strong Nazi state in place? What would have happened?

I'd be born as a German instead of Czech.

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There would be no FPS.

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Piper Maru said:

What if there weren't demons in the base?


Better question, would Doom have existed?

What of Wolfenstein?

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hardcore_gamer said:

There are many works of fiction that ask the question what would have happened if the Nazis had won the war. But I have another more interesting question: What if the Nazis had never started the war?


united Austria and the Sudetenland with Germany

First of all, the verb "unite" is highly inappropriate. Even the Nazis weren't so cute about it, the word Anschluss translates to annexation, afaik. Second, "Sudetenland" is an ahistoric Nazi construct invented to promote the idea that Czech Germans must be "returned home" along with the land they live on, because they're supposedly oppressed in Czechoslovakia. It was a hostile annexation during which several hundred thousand Czechs were relocated deeper into the castrated protectorate Böhmen und Mahren. That's right, the rest of the Czech lands were already renamed to German and by 1938 we were already fully occupied.

Where I'm going with this? It was already too late in 1938, not even Hitler's death would change the course of history by then. Chamberlain's pathetic appeasement policy only fueled Germany's sense of right to demand more. They tried blackmailing Europe and they fully succeeded, so they got the first taste of blood. Their economy was already in war production regime and Germany needed to grab land and resources to fuel it as soon as possible, so there was no going back. The war was inevitable and the British government showed a disgusting lack of backbone and foresight with the "Peace for Our Time" policy.

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It's possible another charismatic leader could have stood up, and used Mein Kampf as a basis for doing what Hitler would have done, but with less bravado and probably less occultism. Well, maybe more. Who knows. Maybe that would be same.

Maybe Wolf 3D would have become Korean War 3D instead.

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I was gonna post a link to Command & Conquer: Red Alert, but seeing that's already been done, I'll just see myself out.

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hardcore_gamer said:

How would a lack of Hitler in 1938 Germany have affected world history?

There would be no "lack of Hitler". His death would become a closely guarded state secret and Hitler's cronies would find lookalikes to fulfill his official duties while a clone's prepped to assume total control of the reich.

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GreyGhost said:

There would be no "lack of Hitler". His death would become a closely guarded state secret and Hitler's cronies would find lookalikes to fulfill his official duties while a clone's prepped to assume total control of the reich.

Exactly, however if he died in the 1920s that would be another story.

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If Hitler had died that year, that probably still wouldn't have stopped WW2 or the Holocaust from happening. The Nazi ideology would still be in place, the intense German nationalism, the vicious antisemitism, the anger and frustrations of the German people, all that would still have existed if Hitler had died that year. Hitler was not the progenitor of all that. As someone else already mentioned, somebody would have probably have taken his place and continued on with the Nazi mission to purify the German race and conquer the world.

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At least we can be almost certain about what would have immediately happened if he had died in the assassination attempt at the Wolf's Den. An early end to the war, possibly without an occupation of Germany, and the "Iron Curtain" would not have had its chance to fall so far to the west, vastly changing the evolution of the USSR and the power balance that later emerged. Just going out a few years though, you already have no point of reference besides imagination to guess how things evolved from there. It would be a different universe.

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I guess if there was no Hitler, the head of the Nazi state would have to come to terms with the USSR somehow. All the Nazi propaganda was virulently anti-communist. The first people the brownshirt stormtroopers murdered in the putsch were the enemy political party: communists. Would they really forge a such a double-faced non-aggression pact? Probably, as a pragmatic measure to secure strategic resources and extra territory for the Reich. I'm not sure the Reich could have produced a more psychotic leader than Hitler to insist on a two-front war, though.

There is a critical question: does fascism with a racial bent ultimately lead to violent confrontation with neighbor states? I think the answer is yes. It is hard for a fascist state to exist peacefully, I think. There needs to be a societal crisis and a conspiratorial "other", out there, pulling strings and organizing legions within the fascist state's imagination.

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Quasar said:

At least we can be almost certain about what would have immediately happened if he had died in the assassination attempt at the Wolf's Den. An early end to the war, possibly without an occupation of Germany, and the "Iron Curtain" would not have had its chance to fall so far to the west, vastly changing the evolution of the USSR and the power balance that later emerged. Just going out a few years though, you already have no point of reference besides imagination to guess how things evolved from there. It would be a different universe.


Isn't it extremely possible that the assassination of Hitler would only strengthen the Germans' will to keep fighting?

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Ralphis said:

Isn't it extremely possible that the assassination of Hitler would only strengthen the Germans' will to keep fighting?

Not in 1944 when the Valkyrie conspiracy took place, I'd say. His zealotry was keeping things in line and without his preaching too many would simply lose resolve. In 1938, however... how does St. Hitler sound?

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If nothing as severe as the war and the holocaust happened as a result, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would likely not have been adopted on December 10th of 1948. Without such a framework, eventually something even worse could have happened, after decades of pent-up aggression and unresolved conflict, like a nuclear war in 1984 between authoritarian apartheid-like superpowers!

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If the Nazis hadn't started WWII, there would be no United Nations, and realism would be the preeminent foreign policy in the world. The League of Nations would have probably disintegrated, since it would continue to be violated with impunity. Israel would not exist, nor would any of the other nations that were formed as a result of the aftermath of the war.

Furthermore, the United States would not be as powerful as it is today. Since it rose to be the world superpower after most of the world's other industrial centers, and cities were laid to waste.

None of the European colonies would have been relinquished.

Odds are, the USA, Britain, Germany, and other world powers would have united against the USSR, and try to restore the Tsarist system.

Many technological advancements would not have been realized when they were, or ever.

none of the people in reality that are conceived after this alternative-history event would have existed. When we were sperm, we won a race against billions. To win that race again would be like the odds of winning the lottery jackpot x100. Also, you could have been busted out at some other point. Or perhaps, the father didn't eat the same food, that created the protein strands of which your sperm form was created. And for us to exist today, it would be astronomically improbable, considering, your forefathers and fore-mothers would need to be conceived, and born, before your parents.

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What if Adolf Hitler had joined his elder brother Alois Hitler Jr. in being a businessman selling safety razors, instead of going into politics?

Kontra Kommando said:

Israel would not exist, nor would any of the other nations that were formed as a result of the aftermath of the war.

I wouldn't be sure of it; Zionism predates WW2. Theodore Herzl created the movement in 1897 by publishing a book calling for the creation of a Jewish State in Ottoman Palestine.

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There is no way to predict. I think there is a good chance there would be a nazist/communist war between many countries around the 1950s-60s. With nuclear weapons.

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Gez said:
I wouldn't be sure of it; Zionism predates WW2. Theodore Herzl created the movement in 1897 by publishing a book calling for the creation of a Jewish State in Ottoman Palestine.

I would say the same of almost anything else short of the fact we wouldn't likely exist as individuals. It's false to conclude the US wouldn't have eventually become particularly powerful, that nothing like the UN would have resulted, that colonies wouldn't have been freed or that there wouldn't have been certain technological advancements. Also, certain political, diplomatic or global maladies we know today might have been lessened without the war.

hardcore_gamer said:
Nobody cares about that thing it seems.

Speak for yourself. Things were generally worse without it. Who are its main critics? Countries like Saudi Arabia, cynics without much meaning in their lives and fascists, to name some.

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myk said:

I would say the same of almost anything else short of the fact we wouldn't likely exist as individuals. It's false to conclude the US wouldn't have eventually become particularly powerful, that nothing like the UN would have resulted, that colonies wouldn't have been freed or that there wouldn't have been certain technological advancements. Also, certain political, diplomatic or global maladies we know today might have been lessened without the war.


I don't see how it would be false to conclude such things, when they were all put motion by WWII. I didn't say it was impossible for those things to ever happen, but I was measuring events that would have happened from 1938 to today. I think you're confusing what I said with a different scenario and stipulations. One thing is highly probable though; they wouldn't have happened anytime soon without the events of WWII.

I think the real question here should be, "What would have happened if we reached this point in human technological advancement, without receiving the lessons of WWII?" If a World War were to happen today, where all of the super powers operate from a realist mentality; we might go extinct considering our killing power. Imagine if a person like Hitler took power today, and was armed with state of the art weapons. Imagine if the United States wanted to demonstrate a new weapon.

Ultimately, I think World War II would have happened eventually within the time frame of when it did, considering the conditions of the world in the 1930s. The order of the world was more multi-polar when it came to hard power (i.e. military might). Moreover, the effects of the great depression had driven a lot people to the far-left and far-right. More people in industrialized countries had extreme views at the time. A climatic clash was inevitable; if it wasn't Nazi Germany, it would have been the USSR possibly. Or the West instigating a war against the USSR. There never would have been a cold war, because it would have been a hot war between the West and the Soviets. Had the Axis countries continued to exist; the mutual opposition to communism with other western countries, would have driven this to become a reality. In turn, perhaps some of those colonies would rebel against their over-extended rulers, and join the Soviets.

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Kontra Kommando said:
I don't see how it would be false to conclude such things, when they were all put motion by WWII.

You kind of answered that yourself, with similar things happening due to altered situations in conflict resolutions. "False to conclude" doesn't mean that the "not happening" situations you listed weren't possible. They could have not happened, but also happened differently. Germany was first hit by the harsh conditions of the Versailles treaty and then, on top of that, the Great Depression, which moved the US to stop handing credit to Germany, and that makes Hitler himself only a part of the gestation of the war. In a few years, others could have replaced him, perhaps with better diplomacy and military strategies. Some aspects of our historical development might not change that much with different situations, since contexts limit what is possible in a way akin to how we see convergent evolution in species.

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