Envision today had Germany won World War II

Not that this would be a good thing by any stretch of the imagination, but envision the world as it would be today if the Axis had defeated the Allies ...

[ 28. October 2003, 09:14 PM: Message edited by: Ahab ]

 

Bump!

 

Well, there´d be big statues of Hitler everywhere and everyone would be wearing an uniform and a swastika on their sleeve. There´d be no families but lebensborn homes. Thebigger cities would have buildings by Speer.Everyone would speak German, if you tried something else you´d end up in the camp. Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad would have been destroyed, and Russia would be a big field of wheat growing. As well there´d be big areas owned by nazi bosses in Russia with castles.There´d be no churches and no priests, pagan rituals would be performed according to the rules that Himmler´s scientists would work up.

 

Holy cow...what a depressing thought. Let's just say this much: Arnold would be the leader of more than just California and Jerry Seinfeld would be dead. I cannot invision a life without comedy...

 

You wouldn't have to worry much, Hitler's "folkish state" that he talks so much about in Mein Kampf would have ensured that you only had an early 19th century high school education at most. So, peasant, be happy!

 

No churches, no half of the world, no African race, no Slavs, no Mediterraneans, no middle easters...

Just a bunch of ignorant blond and blue-eyed giants with nothing in their brain. Libraries, universities and museum would be full with unclassy and filthy material.

As Churchill described it: "A new dark age".

 

Speaking Deutsch would not bother me but the living style would. guess a long stay in the mountains would be necessary.........and that's not bad either.

u will be probed !

 

I see your conclussions far too dramatic. Guess Hitler makes everything right and the nazis win whatever they can win...

Sooner or later Hitler would have died or be killed, being replaced by a probably somewhat more modest dictatorship (exactly what happened with Stalin's Soviet Union).

About America: There was no way to conquer the USA. And they WOULD have had the bomb sooner or later... what then?

Africa: I don't think the Germans would have conquered entire Africa (what for?).

 

It really depends on how big the German victory was. If they took over the world, then I dont think they would have kept it. Once Hitler leaves the picture, its possible the Reich would just disintegrate and the borders of Germany would gradually deflate to cover most of central Europe. It wouldn't be a dark age because of Nazi ideology, but because of a total lack of stable government.

If they only took Europe, the USA would still be around, along with South America and China. If Japan was defeated then she would eventually join whats left of the allies. It would become a cold war scenario except with Germany instead of Russia.

 

For a fictional scenario, I can recommend "Fatherland" by Robert Harris. An excellent novel, the last one I devoured in one go!

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/books_magazines/print_books/fatherland_robert_harris/_review/405511/

 

And would have been replaced by Heydrich - if would have not been killed in some way - or someone like him; younger and ruthlessly efficient. Someone not with the Führer aura but with all the organisation qualities Hitler lacked. But after two generation the nazis would have been so idiot thanks to their own edication system that their government would have collapsed...

Well, Japan was able to isolate them for a while and with a defaeted Great Britain and a Germanised Europe they could have been isolated from that part of the world too. Then whether the three learned to live together or become strong enough to fight a tremendous war of annihilation...

Now I try imagining Hitler saying - with a defeated USSR and UK -: "We'll stop in the Urals and the Mediterranean". Wait, I can't!

 

If Germany amanged to win the war in Europe, one can imagine a Germanic state stretching from Vichy to the Ukraine, surrounded by client states. Britain has fallen and the Government in Exile is n canada, the United States defeated japan and is proceeding to build its vast Victory fleet, while supplying arms and equipment to Russian rebels in the Soviet Rump state east of the Urals.

I dont know where you got the idea of 19th century education, my Uncle was in an AHS and his education was exemplary, though of course structured along racial lines, which interfered with a few disciplines, such as biology. None the less, by and large he was better educated than his western counterparts (if you ignore the indoctrination, of course) Education was a high priority across the HJ, strong modern education with racial lines in everything.

There would quickly have developped a cold war between the US and Germany, neither had the power to reach acros the atlantic to invade the other, so they fight client wars in africa and the middle east instead. Eventually Germany, a system based on bribery, corruption, personal loyalty and fear, collapses under its own weight, and a seris of small bloody local civil wars break out as groups try to reassert autonomy.

In cultural terms, as stated earlier, architecture and art trend towards the massive and the herioc, some sub-classes of art are suppressed entirely, music is also very classical, though germanic pop-type music would inevitably develop as well.

Oh, and of course, there would be no jews left in Europe or Palestine at all.

 

Education? German education in the 1930s involved German heroic history (teutonic knights conquering eastern Europe, knight templars stopping the mongols, Germany winning WWI ), how to obey, how to love the Führer and how superior Germans are. The quality of education was extremely poor. Do you know that between 1933 and 1938 there were 60% less students studying engineering at universities? And the remaining 40% was of questionable capacity (thanks to the nazified education and science - which denied Jewish and non-German science -) and there were 50% less students in every branch of university education? Why? Because all the youth was in the HJ or the Labour Front...

SS officers who wanted to mine Florence in 1944 were certainly not very versed in art history...

 

What I meant by that was that Hitler felt that a high school education with physical sciences grounded where they were at in the late 1800's (eg, classical physics no nuclear physics, basic chemistry etc), applied mathematics and, similar levels of education in other subjects was all anyone needed.
In most theoretical fields of science Germany fell from being a leader to producing almost nothing in the few years between Hitler taking power and the beginning of WW II. I believe it was Hitler himself that said "If Germany must go a generation or two without science to achieve the Socialist ideal so be it" or words to that effect. This was one reason Germany was so far behind in electronics, the nuclear race and, would have been in avaition, rocketry and much else if the latter didn't have direct military applications. Even then, as an example, the jet was delayed into service in good part because of Hitler's cancelling research projects in 1942 that were not on the brink of producability and sending the engineers, scientists and, workers to the Eastern Front as more cannon fodder.
Göring once commented on electronics: "Black boxes with wires and coils! I hate them! Who needs them!" This was in response to being shown new radar equipment for night fighters.
The point I was making was that the Nazi ideal was a pastorial 19th century society, not a 20th century technological one. Science and advanced education had no role in Nazi perfection...

 

In that case, if the nazis would have had a Bismarckian XIX century education, maybe a different present we could have!

By 1914 the BEST education system at all levels in Europe was the German. And during Weimar Germany, the cultural and scienfifical development grew even bigger. The nazis destroyed it all. That's why we haven't heard much about German Art after the 1940s (with some exceptions).

 

Forgive me, I think both you and Fred are confusing two issues. On one side, yes an enormous number of students were taken away from cademic puruits and pushed into military pursuits. Due to the drain of the war, military service was first encouraged, then compulsory over academic stuents. That means fewer students in school, and even fewer taking advanced degrees.

That however, has nothing to do with the quality of the education system, it only speaks to the drain the war was having on human resources.

In most subjexts Germany still ranked at or above the world in secondary school and in undergraduate degrees. There were few to no nuclear physics programs available in the west in 1938 either, I shoul like to point out. Chemistry remained a german strength through the war, as did many other fields, and it is very common to read of graduates from the AHS or other Reich schools being far ahead of their peer when they moved into western school after the war, at least in most subjects. hough I do not base my argument on this anecdotal evidence, it is evidenced by my Uncle, who left Germany when his AHS in Sondhoven was overrun.

Biology, as I mentioned was hoplesly gutted, and with it went agriculture and several other related disciplines. Hitler and Goering's comments on science may have demonstrated a personal distaste, and that may have affected how readily they accepted scientific solutions. But the schools themselves were of very high caliber.

Now one can say that there was little development within some disciplines in universities from 1939 to 1945 in Germany, compared to in the US, UK or even USSR. But again that goes back to the first point, and is not the fault of nazi doctrine in schools, but rather of the pressures of war steadily mounting.

 

You excuse me, Vermillion but it is not a matter of the war. There wasn't a war in the 1930s. And not only the quantity was affected, but the QUALITY. Maybe the Germans knew how to write, read and basic arithmetics but their education was very poor in other aspects. Joseph Goebbels as Education Minister took care of everything that was going to be taught at schools and nazified everything (and we know that nazified things is the same than wrong and contradictory knowledge). The boys were taught only German history (lies, most of it) and forgot about the rest of the world and spent their time learning 'Racial Higiene' and doing too much excercise (not bad, but that's not the point) instead of learning more science and philosophy (which they didn't learn because it would teach them how to think and make them able to realise how contradictory is the ideology). They didn't learn about foreign art and were taught only mediocre nazified artistic currents. German boys didn't know what was cubism, expressionism or even impressionism because the nazis didn't like it. How could the quality had not being affected if all the itellectuals and teachers were arrested, killed or forced to leave Germany? How were the German teens going to learn basic physics if they couldn't know Newton's laws because he was Jewish! And how was German science - chemistry, electronics and physics - not affected if several Nobel prices were expelled from Germany? How many actors, singers and painters suffered the same fate? Thousands. Please, DO NOT say that quality didn't suffer. You perfectly know that the nazis RUINED EVERYTHING THEY LAID THEIR HANDS ON! They made NOTHING good for Germany and even less, for the world.

 

Wow...what a discussion! I'm glad I was here to read it.

 

I will start with this. While it is undeniable that the Nazis were a force for terrible evil, this kind of dismissive generalisation defeats the purpose of in depth study of the regime. Not everything they did was evil or wrong (mind you, a hell of a LOT of it was...) and no massive encapsulating statement to the contrary makes sense.

You seem to believe all that Germans children learned in school was basic maths and bad art, and once again you are making gross oversimplifications. You are also putting an unreasonable burden on the Western education systems as well. I would like to point out that American students also did not learn cubism or impressionism in High School.

Basic physics in the 1930s was the same in the US as in Germany, only advances postgraduate physics suffered initially. In fact German schools taught excellent language, mathematics, logic, chemistry and physics classes, on par with if not better than those in the West. Yes there was a vile racial taint to much of it, and yes their teaching of History was very selective, but in the US south at the time, Darwinism was not being taught in a wide number of schools at all.

If you compare the German educational system of 1941 to the western world today, of course it compares poorly. However, in the context of the time, German schools turned out highly educated and extremely intelligent students, until the school enrolment started to break down under the manpower pressures of the war. As for electronics, Germany was again on par if not more advanced than the west in many fields. Yes they did not develop the cavity magnetron, for example, but their guidance and sonar equipment, for example, was years ahead of the Allies.

Yes, German students were indoctrinated and much of their class work was couched in racial terms, but to then assume from that that they were all being educated like it was the 1800s is silly. I recommend doing some reading into the AHS for example, I have some books I can recommend at home, I will post the titles when I get them, but off the top of my head I know the Noakes and Pridham anthology has some excellent materiel of the topic.

As with most things of course, it varied where you went. Yes, the University of Berlin was famous for its Book Burning, but that was not the same in all of the universities.

Gross oversimplification and mass-categorisation of the regime is similar to demonising it, setting it up as a human exception which did nothing right is counterproductive. After all, one of the scary things about the Nazis is that they DID do many things right, and well, and that they used genuine skill and ability to turn the regime into such a source of monstrous evil.

Lastly, the arts. Here I must agree with you, you are more correct than with the academia, the arts were terribly savaged, anything with a Jewish or Negro taint (real or imagined) was banned, and only art and architecture complimentary to the public order were allowed. Unquestionably the arts were one of the first great victims of Nazi social policy.

 

OK, I may agree about the bases of education having quality (which had nothing to do with the nazis, but with the Bismarckian tradition and German efficience). The nazis may have built more schools and provide more people with BASIC education. But the universities suffered very much because many scientists, artists and professors were forbidden to work there according with the law of Protection of the German Culture of 1933. By 1938 and 1939, many senior officials from the largest chemical factories in Germany complained that they had a lack of qualified engineers. Young geniuoses like Werner von Braun were not educated in nazified universities. If the nazis themselves would have lived in a system like the one they created, there might not have been a Dr Goebbels, a Dr Kaltenbrunner nor a Dr Schacht... Himmler clearly said that all Polish intelectuals had to be killed, beheading the Polish race and making it a servile stupid mass. What he didn't know is that the same thing was happening in Germany - at a much slower rythm. The German Army, Air Force and Navy had almost all the intelligent people and were using those minds for belical porpuses - which explains why Germany got where it got - leaving universtities almost empty (except for some careers as medicine and mechanics) - both completely related to warfare.

I'll concede you the one about basic education. I know the German teens didn't learn about cubism in highschool, but the ones in university studying art history didn't learn it either. That's the problem. What they did learn in highschool was national socialist 'philosophy' and racial views. We know what that caused when those teens had to deal with Untermenschen in the east... Maybe those students learned logic - to develop a flexible military thinking - and other Aristotle theories like slavery being a good thing and they learned the philosophy of "Mein Kampf" along with every bad aspect that German megalomania had created throughout the centuries.

I know that the nazis didn't do just bad things. But the good ones are questionable and were counterproductive many times. Some even that show that Weimar times in the middle of the 29 crisis were better for workers. I think we should open a thread about that.

And as conclusion we know that the very few good things the nazis achieved were secondary and only meant to achiev other things, that they ruined their own achievements later and that anything good can be compared to the bad things they did.