What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#16

Post by HistoryGeek2019 » 14 Oct 2019, 04:03

Ironically, WW2 indirectly helped West Germany accomplish the goal of raising its standard of living. In The Economics of WW2, Mark Harrison notes that Germany's massive investment in its capital stock actually left Germany with the capacity for more industrial output than it possessed before the war, despite the Allied bombing.

Secondly, by bankrupting the old colonial powers, WW2 opened up world markets and forced economies that were previously immune from competition to have to compete with German manufactured goods for the first time. While the western Allies are usually lauded for their mass production of a small variety of weapons during the war, as opposed to Germany's low output of a large variety of specially crafted machines, it turns out Germany's approach to manufacturing matched consumer demand much better than the Allies' approach. Thus, Germany went on to win the peace in the decades after the war and to this day remains the greatest economic power in Europe.

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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#17

Post by Stiltzkin » 15 Oct 2019, 13:46

that Germany's massive investment in its capital stock actually left Germany with the capacity for more industrial output than it possessed before the war
Except that the capital stock already surpassed British and Soviet levels and with the control over Western Europe, it also approximated US levels. Granted that there are certain estimation difficulties that arise, considering the regime's concealment policies and the scarcity of data from all sectors (e.g. SRA, RRK, Wirtschaftsgruppe, DRT AG or Vierjahresplan, also factoring in Heereseigene Industriebetriebe), but we know that investments were generally understated (and Tooze was also one of the scholars who can be credited with the disclosure).
Allies are usually lauded for their mass production of a small variety of weapons during the war, as opposed to Germany's low output of a large variety of specially crafted machines
Production needs to be assessed by looking at the entire portfolio of the factions war industry and is based on the demands of the armed forces (and measured in net worth and weights). Many German weapons were the epitome of mass production, simply looking at selected figures delivers a mono-perspective, unless of course an international comparison between two specific assets from the respective inventory is desired. The Allies made more weapons, because they were more numerous (and sustained higher losses), the material density for all belligerents was similar. The Allies also made a vast variety of weapon systems (quite pronounced in the American Aircraft industry), Harrison's knowledge of military equipment seems to be limited.
There are two misconceptions that plague historiography: 1.) The view of the cost effective, mass produced Allied equipment. 2.) The believe that an invesment in higher quality material yields worse results (there is plenty of evidence since ancient times suggesting the opposite, since battlefield lethality and survivability are increased, lower quality equipment would have resulted in higher casualties and thus defeat would have occured sooner). The Soviets defeated the German war industry, by relying on powerful Allies and capturing it. Greater manpower influx enabled them to keep up the initative, while their industry provided them with the basic configuration they needed. The "Russian bear", was thus not a bear, but a pack of wolves fighting a bear to the death. :thumbsup:
Thus, Germany went on to win the peace in the decades after the war and to this day remains the greatest economic power in Europe.
Germany was already the strongest economy on the continent at the dawn of WW1 and WW2, their post war competitiveness was guaranteed by high quality of manufacturing and technical standards.

Anyway, in order to set the victory conditions, one must first understand defeat. Keynesian (or even Neo-keynesian) approaches in its procyclic nature can be ultimately dampening, in a self-defeating way, but as a failed democracy, Germany remained politically isolated and its labour force was too old and too small for such an endeavour, while higher casualty infliction potential did not manage to bridge the gap.
Even greater output of armaments beyond historical levels would have resulted in diminishing returns (maybe with the exception in certain fields during various periods) and would not have influenced the ultimate outcome. They would have effectively squandered additional resources and industry was more than capable of dealing with the battle wastage that occured up to 43. Additionally, more weapons would have fallen into enemy hands, while further personnel would have to be redistributed to fullfill maintenance and rear service tasks.


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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#18

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 17 Oct 2019, 21:41

HistoryGeek2019 wrote:
12 Oct 2019, 19:51
Have you read Tooze's book? This is what he says:
Both the real-life experience of Europeans since the early 1990s and a generation of technical work by economists and economic historians has shaken, if not demolished, the myth of Germany’s peculiar economic superiority.... Germany from the late nineteenth century onwards was the home for a cluster of world-beating industrial companies. Brand names like Krupp, Siemens and IG Farben gave substance to the myth of German industrial invincibility. Viewed in wider terms, however, the German economy differed little from the European average: its national per capita income in the 1930s was middling; in present-day terms it was comparable to that of Iran or South Africa. The standard of consumption enjoyed by the majority of the German population was modest and lagged behind that of most of its Western European neighbours. Germany under Hitler was still only a partially modernized society, in which upwards of 15 million people depended for their living either on traditional handicrafts or on peasant agriculture.

Hitler understood the overwhelmingattraction already exerted on Europeans by America’s affluent consumer lifestyle, an attraction whose force we can appreciate more vividly, given our sharpened awareness of the more generally transitional status of the European economies in the inter-war period. As in many semi-peripheral economies today, the German population in the 1930s was already thoroughly immersed in the commodity world of Hollywood, but at the same time many millions of people lived three or four to a room, without indoor bathrooms or access to electricity. Motor vehicles, radios and other accoutrements of modern living such as electrical household appliances were the aspiration of the social elite. The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its own imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States.
This is another Tooze's "hot takes" that I think is overblown. Simple GDP stats show that Germany was a typical Western European country by standard of living, even if far behind the then-exceptional America. Germany was a leader in many advanced industries and sciences.

Tooze is right that Germany had an exceptionally large peasant agricultural sector but if anything that rebuts his general thesis. If we take the peasants as outliers whose persistence related to German sentimentality about small farmers - a sentimentality on which the Nazi regime doubled down - then the average non-peasant German was probably about as well-off as the average Brit. Tooze's anecdotal evidence about the conditions of urban living in the 1930's could be said of the UK and even the US as well. My American relatives of that generation lived under conditions I could anecdotally portray as impoverished by modern standards (outhouses, intermittent electricity, etc.).

Tooze's analogy of Hitler's colonialism to European colonialism I find likewise unconvincing. The thing about European colonialism is that they always told themselves they were out to civilize/save their subjects and that the relationship would be mutually beneficial. Only a naif would accept this rationale at face value but it was to varying degrees subjectively earnest (via profound arrogance and self-delusion) and to varying degrees partially implemented (as a 7th/9th priority). Hitler's "colonialism", OTOH, was explicitly about replacement, domination, and even extermination. One needn't be an apologist for the British Empire to say that Hitler's conception of territorial aggrandizement was of a significantly-different moral character.
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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#19

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 17 Oct 2019, 21:55

On the broader topic, could you clarify the definition of "win"?

If "win" means Germany has to take London and/or Denver then I doubt there's any reasonable argument for reasonably-feasible win conditions.

If "win" means the Third Reich survives the war then I can make arguments as we've had elsewhere. For example, Germany knocks out the USSR, puts 100 divisions on the beaches of France, holds 150 in reserve, and dares the Allies to land somewhere. In that case, as we've argued elsewhere (and don't need to rehash here - though others' views would be interesting), I'm ~50/50 on whether the Allies ever land in Europe.
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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#20

Post by HistoryGeek2019 » 17 Oct 2019, 22:49

I've already said what "win" means. It means Hitler accomplishes his pre-war goals:
He (1) wanted Germany to be the sole military power in Europe, (2) wanted to create an empire large enough to challenge the United States for global hegemony and (3) he wanted to raise the standard of living in Germany to be equal to or greater than that in the United States.
The only way to do all three was to capitulate Great Britain.

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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#21

Post by Stiltzkin » 18 Oct 2019, 01:07

Tooze is right that Germany had an exceptionally large peasant agricultural sector
From Agriculture and economic development in Germany, 1870–1939, Oliver Grant
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9 ... 3928776-16
VI. Conclusions.
German agriculture between 1870 and 1939 provides a fascinating and instructive example of an agricultural sector in an economy whose comparative advantage lay in manufacturing not agriculture. For political, social and strategic reasons, Imperial Germany was unwilling to let the agrarian sector decline in the same way that it did in Britain. While this decision has been criticized, it was not a totally irrational choice, given the effect that a further flood of rural migrants would have had on German cities in the 1870’s and 1880’s. It can also be pointed out that if Germany had been even more dependent on imported food, then this would have made it more vulnerable to the threat of a British blockade. In any conflict Germany would have had to rely on the largesse of the Royal Navy in allowing food imports to pass through the North Sea, leaving little choice but to become the junior partner in an Anglo-German alliance.
As for urbanization rates, based on the censuses, Germany 68% (1939), US 56,5% (1940, overall), 76,6% East Coast.

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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#22

Post by HistoryGeek2019 » 18 Oct 2019, 01:38

The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze won the Wolfson History Prize and the 2007 Longman/History Today Book of the Year Prize. It was published to critical praise from such authors as Michael Burleigh, Richard Overy and Niall Ferguson.

The book has been positively reviewed by History Today, which calls the work "an extraordinary achievement",

"By thinking afresh about what Hitler’s war aims really were and how the Nazi leadership attempted first to win and then prolong a war for which they knew they never possessed sufficient resources, Tooze has produced the most striking history of German strategy in the Second World War that we possess."[1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wag ... estruction

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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#23

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 18 Oct 2019, 09:07

HistoryGeek2019 wrote:
18 Oct 2019, 01:38
The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze won the Wolfson History Prize and the 2007 Longman/History Today Book of the Year Prize. It was published to critical praise from such authors as Michael Burleigh, Richard Overy and Niall Ferguson.

The book has been positively reviewed by History Today, which calls the work "an extraordinary achievement",

"By thinking afresh about what Hitler’s war aims really were and how the Nazi leadership attempted first to win and then prolong a war for which they knew they never possessed sufficient resources, Tooze has produced the most striking history of German strategy in the Second World War that we possess."[1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wag ... estruction
As Tooze says in the dedication to Wages of Destruction, Overy disagreed with many of his conclusions. Nonetheless, Overy respected Tooze's intellectual effort and was in no mood to torch another of a small band of writers on this subject. As to Ferguson, he's a shallow pseudo-intellectual these days - mostly a political hack- I doubt he even read the book. I don't know enough of Burleigh to speak of him.

As a broader point, I reserve the right - as should we all - to independently evaluate Tooze regardless of Historian's Opinions. Perhaps it's because we share a couple educational institutions and that I'm not at all intimidated by Tooze. But nobody should ever be intimidated by authors at all - how does knowledge advance other than questioning the Experts? And if we're not sufficiently confident to question the Experts then why think and post at all?

What I've said in critique of Tooze stands on its own: he can't explain away the massive upswing in German war production even under a devastating bombing campaign; his analogy of Nazism to average European colonialism is facile and smacks of contemporary PC.

HistoryGeek2019 wrote:
17 Oct 2019, 22:49
I've already said what "win" means. It means Hitler accomplishes his pre-war goals:
He (1) wanted Germany to be the sole military power in Europe, (2) wanted to create an empire large enough to challenge the United States for global hegemony and (3) he wanted to raise the standard of living in Germany to be equal to or greater than that in the United States.
The only way to do all three was to capitulate Great Britain.
Ok sorry to have missed those statements in my catch-up reading (I've been a bit busy lately, have been rushing through a few threads).

Re (1) I don't see how UK's independence at all impedes achieving that goal.

Re (2) conquering all of continental Europe gives Germany sufficient economic resources to counter the USA (if they can mobilize them, which is another debate).

Re (3) I'd have to go back to my copy of Tooze on this point but this might be another instance of over-hyping a particular narrative. Hitler said a lot of contradictory things. Sometimes one could infer jealousy of American prosperity; other times he spoke of the disease (Jewish-inflected of course) of American materialism. Hitler worshiped an Agrarian Germany, a Much-Richer-Than-America-Germany, basically any Germany that would justify a great big war. On the list of his priorities, Hitler would have put German Macy's shopping lower on the list than any contemporary American politician could have understood.

Ask yourself: If Germany in 1950 ruled all of Europe but America had slightly-nicer cars and refrigerators, would Hitler consider himself to have failed based on the material goods? Of course not. We must give fanatics the credit for their fanaticism; Hitler like ISIS had a value system irreconcilable with prevailing modern standards (and with sane standards of morality, to be clear).

IMO Tooze strains too much to make sense of Hitler as an ideologue with a coherent program - it's a typical liberal failing. Hitler had a few consistent racial ideas but otherwise he was a self-contradictory chaos demon, a shell of a man. Today's liberals make similar mistakes with today's wannabe dictators.
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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#24

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 18 Oct 2019, 09:18

Stiltzkin wrote:German agriculture between 1870 and 1939 provides a fascinating and instructive example of an agricultural sector in an economy whose comparative advantage lay in manufacturing not agriculture
Thanks for this.
Absolutely correct that the pre-war Germany economy was insufficiently leveraging comparative advantage. When war came, this was one of the easiest problems to fix: draft the farmers to fight; enslave others to farm.
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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#25

Post by HistoryGeek2019 » 18 Oct 2019, 14:41

TheMarcksPlan wrote:
18 Oct 2019, 09:07


Re (2) conquering all of continental Europe gives Germany sufficient economic resources to counter the USA (if they can mobilize them, which is another debate).

No, it doesn't. Conquering continental Europe while still at war with Britain and the United States gives Germany a tiny fraction of the resources of the United States. The Soviet Union had to beg the United States for food during the Cold War. A surrounded, blockaded Germany isn't a global hegemon. It is merely a landlocked country holding on for dear life. Definitely not what Hitler or anyone else in Germany would consider a victory.

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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#26

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 19 Oct 2019, 03:21

HistoryGeek2019 wrote:The Soviet Union had to beg the United States for food during the Cold War.
The SU had a terribly inefficient economic system; the Third Reich was capitalist.
HistoryGeek2019 wrote:A surrounded, blockaded Germany isn't a global hegemon.
This goes back to our differing definitions of victory. By my own - and any reasonable - definition of victory, the Allies cant' be said to have won the war if Germany holds Europe indefinitely. I guess you could call it a stalemate. But at another level it means Hitler has attained his Lebensraum in the East, which was his primary lifetime goal to the extent he had coherent goals (plus he gets to eliminate even more Jews than OTL). Hitler talked of the war against the U.S. as something for future generations and envisioned Britain joining Germany's side. Had he died ruling all of continental Europe he would rightly have perceived himself as having set up future generations well for the "war of continents."
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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#27

Post by HistoryGeek2019 » 19 Oct 2019, 07:19

TheMarcksPlan wrote:
19 Oct 2019, 03:21
HistoryGeek2019 wrote:The Soviet Union had to beg the United States for food during the Cold War.
The SU had a terribly inefficient economic system; the Third Reich was capitalist.
HistoryGeek2019 wrote:A surrounded, blockaded Germany isn't a global hegemon.
This goes back to our differing definitions of victory. By my own - and any reasonable - definition of victory, the Allies cant' be said to have won the war if Germany holds Europe indefinitely. I guess you could call it a stalemate. But at another level it means Hitler has attained his Lebensraum in the East, which was his primary lifetime goal to the extent he had coherent goals (plus he gets to eliminate even more Jews than OTL). Hitler talked of the war against the U.S. as something for future generations and envisioned Britain joining Germany's side. Had he died ruling all of continental Europe he would rightly have perceived himself as having set up future generations well for the "war of continents."
Fast forward to 1950. Germany has been surrounded on the continent for most of the past decade. Japan is now on the Allied side. Whatever regime is left in unoccupied Russia is friendly to the Allies, who control its access to the outside world through Vladivostok. The Allies have prohibited Turkey and Portugal from selling precious metals to Germany. As a result, Germany can't build jet fighters that can fly for more than a dozen hours without needing a new engine, and certainly not anything that can compete with the USAF F-86 Sabre. Allied advances in radar and electronics have rendered Germany's radar useless. German fighter pilots suffered the same rate of attrition as in the OTL and are therefore at this point a bunch of amateurs who can't last 5 minutes against an Allied pilot, regardless of what plane they are flying.

As a result, the Allies have complete control of the skies over Germany. B-29s and B-50s under USAF General Curtis LeMay have destroyed every city in Germany many times over, and the B-47 Stratofortress is on its way within a year. Germany is nothing but a pile of rubble.

You consider this a victory?

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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#28

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 19 Oct 2019, 07:30

HistoryGeek2019 wrote:
19 Oct 2019, 07:19
TheMarcksPlan wrote:
19 Oct 2019, 03:21
HistoryGeek2019 wrote:The Soviet Union had to beg the United States for food during the Cold War.
The SU had a terribly inefficient economic system; the Third Reich was capitalist.
HistoryGeek2019 wrote:A surrounded, blockaded Germany isn't a global hegemon.
This goes back to our differing definitions of victory. By my own - and any reasonable - definition of victory, the Allies cant' be said to have won the war if Germany holds Europe indefinitely. I guess you could call it a stalemate. But at another level it means Hitler has attained his Lebensraum in the East, which was his primary lifetime goal to the extent he had coherent goals (plus he gets to eliminate even more Jews than OTL). Hitler talked of the war against the U.S. as something for future generations and envisioned Britain joining Germany's side. Had he died ruling all of continental Europe he would rightly have perceived himself as having set up future generations well for the "war of continents."
Fast forward to 1950. Germany has been surrounded on the continent for most of the past decade. Japan is now on the Allied side. Whatever regime is left in unoccupied Russia is friendly to the Allies, who control its access to the outside world through Vladivostok. The Allies have prohibited Turkey and Portugal from selling precious metals to Germany. As a result, Germany can't build jet fighters that can fly for more than a dozen hours without needing a new engine, and certainly not anything that can compete with the USAF F-86 Sabre. Allied advances in radar and electronics have rendered Germany's radar useless. German fighter pilots suffered the same rate of attrition as in the OTL and are therefore at this point a bunch of amateurs who can't last 5 minutes against an Allied pilot, regardless of what plane they are flying.

As a result, the Allies have complete control of the skies over Germany. B-29s and B-50s under USAF General Curtis LeMay have destroyed every city in Germany many times over, and the B-47 Stratofortress is on its way within a year. Germany is nothing but a pile of rubble.

You consider this a victory?
I disagree with many of your premises. One's advances in radar don't render another's advances useless, for example. That doesn't happen until/unless stealth tech and that's decades away. In the meantime there's diminishing returns to radar technology and Germany was catching up later in the war.

Re geopolitics, Turkey and its politics have always been dominated by Istanbul and its residents. If Germany masses even 30 divisions outside of Istanbul in 1943-4, after the SU falls, then Turkish elites are Germany's side. That solves the chromium problem.

With that problem out of the way, we have an offensive air war against a defensive one as a condition for Germany's survival. Germany controls ~450 million industrialized, literate people who can be forced to produce for its war effort. The U.S. has a population in 1950 of ~150mil and is too racist to let anybody else in to work for them. Japan is in ruins and is irrelevant to this calculus, as is China. Unoccupied Russia has a population of ~20mil. The Arabs are on Germany's side against aspirations for a Jewish state at the expense of Palestinian Arabs. India's population is either independent of Britain or in open revolt, under Subhandra Bhose and his ilk, for ethnic self-determination supported by Nazi propaganda. The elites of Latin America are Pro-German just as they were historically.

Basically the Anglosphere is fighting alone, far outnumbered. Liberal democracy is a pipe dream of a few elite, over-educated pansies in the West.

This picture of how things might have gone is not too far different from the picture of how things might go in the next decades in our own lives.
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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#29

Post by HistoryGeek2019 » 19 Oct 2019, 07:40

The Allies were way ahead of Germany in radar and electronics and had a much larger brain pool to draw on. The Allies could jam German radar and radio traffic during the war, and that was only going to get worse for Germany over time. The Allies were already developing air-to-air missiles that were light-years beyond anything Germany had during the OTL. By 1950, there wouldn't have been any German planes left.

There is no way Germany could conquer and hold Turkey, and Turkey was not going to politically favor a surrounded and dying Germany over an Allied coalition that has hegemony over the entire rest of the planet.

Native populations weren't going to be anything more than a nuisance for an Allied coalition going all out against Hitler. Native politicians who favored the Allies would have been bribed and installed in power, while those who stood up would have been locked away in prison.

If anyone was going to have a problem with native populations in your scenario, it's the Germans, who wouldn't even be able to keep them from starving.

Another important point is that all those naval vessels you think the Germans fooled the Allies into building gave the Allies complete control of the world's seas, and therefore over all of global commerce. Far from being isolated, the Allies would have had absolute power to isolate (and then conquer) anyone who stood in their way.

To recap, here are the departures from the OTL that need to go Germany's way in your scenario:

1. Germany conquers Russia up to the Urals by 1942.
2. Germany builds a massive transportation infrastructure to bring oil from Baku back to German refineries.
3. Germany protects Baku from Allied air bases less than 200km away in Persia.
4. Turkey permanently sides with Germany, and the Allies choose not to conquer it for some reason.
5. Germany consistently has 30-40 divisions available in every theater of operations (from Norway to the entire northern, western, and southern coast of Europe, the Caucasus and the Russian frontier).
6. Germany is able to utilize all the resources of the Ukraine and Caucasus.
7. Germany is able to increase its industrial output 5x to match the western Allies.
8. Germany is able to counter Allied radar and radio jamming techniques.
9. German fighter pilots don't die faster than they can be trained.
10. Germany is able to produce a jet fighter that can contend with the F-86 Sabre.
11. Germany somehow mobilizes 400 million industrial laborers (as opposed to the 4 million foreign laborers actually used in OTL).
12. American and British populations lose the will to fight (you know, because they are weak liberals as opposed to those tough German autocrats).
13. Populations in India, the Middle East and Latin America stage a successful rebellion against American and British hegemony during the war.

All of the above need to happen ... and you consider that a plausible scenario?
Liberal democracy is a pipe dream of a few elite, over-educated pansies in the West. 
Yeah those liberal democratic pansies, the ones who went 2-0 against tough German autocrats in the 20th century, I'm sure they would have just given up once Hitler reached the AA line. :lol:

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Re: What was Germany's win condition for WW2?

#30

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 19 Oct 2019, 17:39

HistoryGeek2019 wrote: Yeah those liberal democratic pansies, the ones who went 2-0 against tough German autocrats in the 20th century, I'm sure they would have just given up once Hitler reached the AA line.
As an over-educated believer in liberal democracy this is tongue in cheek... But it's not too far from our current situation, where governments with a deep commitment to liberal democracy are limited, basically, to Europe (hopefully the U.S. rejoins the fold in 2020). Most of the world's population lives under autocracy (China, the Middle East) or some version of illiberal democracy (India, most of Latin America, Russia, Turkey).
HistoryGeek2019 wrote:There is no way Germany could conquer and hold Turkey
Why not? You can't believe the Turkish army could have stopped the Germans on land, can you?
Given that Germany ruled over ~400mil souls by 1942, how do ~20mil Turks break the camel's back?
HistoryGeek2019 wrote: If anyone was going to have a problem with native populations in your scenario, it's the Germans, who wouldn't even be able to keep them from starving.
There was no serious challenge to German rule during occupations until Allied armies were on the brink of liberating territory. Sure, low-level partisan warfare would continue in some areas but that's not a huge deal.

In 1943 Germany had ~250k soldiers assigned to rear areas of the Eastern Front where ~70mil SU citizens lived. Pro-rate that to all European Russia and Turkey (~200mil) and you don't even need a million soldiers on occupation duties.

And partisan warfare would recede as hopes of its success receded. At some point people have to get on living - farming, working, raising kids etc. Absent a state to compel or threaten them into warfare the vast majority of the population would acquiesce. See, e.g., all the territories Stalin took before and after the war. Initial partisan fighting (e.g. Latvia's forest fighters) then decades of smoldering quiescence.
HistoryGeek2019 wrote: To recap, here are the departures from the OTL that need to go Germany's way in your scenario:
  • 1. Germany conquers Russia up to the Urals by 1942.
  • or 1943

    2. Germany builds a massive transportation infrastructure to bring oil from Baku back to German refineries.
  • As I've noted elsewhere, the rail infrastructure required to ship Caucasian oil would be only twice as large as the rail investment made under Operation Otto in Poland prior to Barbarossa. What is your argument that Germany could not do this?

    3. Germany protects Baku from Allied air bases less than 200km away in Persia.
  • Allies don't hold Persia.

    4. Turkey permanently sides with Germany, and the Allies choose not to conquer it for some reason.
  • Turkey is conquered or permanently sides with the Germany. Probably both via installation of a puppet regime. The Allies can of course try to conquer Turkey but during '44-'45 they don't have sufficient ground forces beat the Heer yet. Germany would take ~20k permanent casualties against the Turkish army - if it fought.

    5. Germany consistently has 30-40 divisions available in every theater of operations (from Norway to the entire northern, western, and southern coast of Europe, the Caucasus and the Russian frontier).
  • Germany's army would be over 200 divisions - it has lost far fewer (~2 million) men in the East. So yes, it can outnumber any feasible Allied force capable of being deployed in 1945. Later on, the Allies could build an army capable to beating Germany's in the field but whether they would do so is another argument.

    6. Germany is able to utilize all the resources of the Ukraine and Caucasus.
  • Most, yes.

    7. Germany is able to increase its industrial output 5x to match the western Allies.
  • What? Where'd 5x come from? In 1944 Germany produced about 1/3 as many planes as the Anglosphere. It spent 40% on planes; the West spent ~70%. Equalize those ratios and Germany is already close to 60% of Anglosphere production. It's easy to forget that Germany spent more in an absolute sense on ammunition/powder than did the U.S., even in 1944. That doesn't happen ATL with no Eastern Front.
    Even during 1944, Albert Speer found a willing partner in France (Vichy's economics minister) for a German-French production partnership. Such efforts would have born fruit over time given a much stronger Germany and the resultant fact that politicians and industrialists would need to work with it. Greed is and was much more powerful than European resentment of Nazism. Germany could easily have doubled 1944 production via such partnerships and via more forced labor from the East, putting it at parity with OTL Anglosphere plane production.

    8. Germany is able to counter Allied radar and radio jamming techniques.
  • I'm not sure what you mean. And you're underestimating German radar developments. Yes the Allies were better but Germany wasn't radar-blind. From Westermann's "Flak" at page 282:
    "..the experimental Kulmbach radar in the gun laying role drastically reduced the number of rounds expended per aircraft shot down to less than 300."
    So Germany was developing its radar throughout the war. They don't need to match the Allies to be able to find massive bomber streams and direct fighters and guns against them.

    9. German fighter pilots don't die faster than they can be trained.
  • Late-war German pilot attrition is contingent on lack of fuel for training and being massively outnumbered. Neither of these is true ATL.

    10. Germany is able to produce a jet fighter that can contend with the F-86 Sabre.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Ta_183

    11. Germany somehow mobilizes 400 million industrial laborers (as opposed to the 4 million foreign laborers actually used in OTL).
  • 8 million employed at peak OTL.
    Image

    Note the table is from August 1944 when it was clear to everyone that Germany was doomed. That Germany still retained 5.7mil foreign civilian workers at that time is powerful evidence that it could have recruited many, many more had it maintained control over more territory and had it looked like cooperating with the Reich was the long-term play. Plus, as I noted above, late-war Germany was moving towards partnerships with occupied countries and their rulers/industrialists. It's easy to point out that early-war Germany got little from, e.g., France, but that was under the pre-Speer regime where there was no rational administration of production. Speer turned Italy's late-war economy into a great producer for the Reich, would have done the same elsewhere if given time. http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/v ... t_fac_pubs

    12. American and British populations lose the will to fight (you know, because they are weak liberals as opposed to those tough German autocrats).
  • Reminder that my "weak liberal" comment is in jest. Nonetheless, you're taking for granted that the Anglosphere would have been willing to mobilize and bleed in the way required for a march on Berlin. At the very least, one shouldn't assume this as a given. Britain in particular showed little stomach for massive land war; the memory of 1914-18 was too traumatic. Churchill capped the land army at 2.5mil men during WW2.

    13. Populations in India, the Middle East and Latin America stage a successful rebellion against American and British hegemony during the war.
  • India threw Britain out in 1947, well within the timeline we're discussing. As for Latin America, they contributed little to fighting the Axis OTL and I don't see why they'd do more given a stronger Germany. Much of the Middle East was pro-German. Recall that Britain had to invade Iraq, Iran, and Syria to bring them on-side.
Behind a lot of your assertions is a sense that Germany couldn't have projected power farther than it did - into Persia, Turkey, etc. IMO this is based on a gut feeling rather than hard analysis. Germany supported massive armies to the literal border of Asia and deep into Russia. Stalingrad is farther from Berlin than from Tehran. Hurling 150 divisions to the Don is harder than throwing 20 divisions to the Euphrates.
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https://medium.com/counterfactualww2
"The whole question of whether we win or lose the war depends on the Russians." - FDR, June 1942

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