Mussolini, or Otto, or whomever...

my apologies if this doesn’t really fit the "What if" parameters of this section. Since it doesn’t concern a battle or anything, it remains an interesting "concept". However it includes both a personal "moral dilemma" for the reader and an interesting postulate. It does also involve the non-existent and totally impossible idea of time travel. So bear with me; just ‘cause it is fun to think about.

That said, if a person could be transported back in time, to a specific area, and get away with two (seemingly unrelated) murders inside of a four month period would one do so knowing the "future"? Therein lies the moral dilemma, would you kill to stop other deaths, national embarrassment, and human denigeration?

Here is the place and time frame. The Schonbrunn Park in Vienna where Joseph Stalin would sit and write, published later, on the "Austrian Situation", and where a certain Adolf Hitler used to go and sketch. Stalin was renting a room just off the northeast corner of the park, and Hitler was in the nearby Mannerheim for three and half years before he left for Munich in May of 1913. Hitler loved going to the park to paint in water colors and pencil sketch, and Stalin seemed to enjoy the quiet which allowed him to write undisturbed.

Picture it, early 1913 (Stalin showed up in January) a 33 year old man is found dead (stabbed, or shot, or something) in the park. Two weeks later a younger 24 year old man is found dead in the same park. Adolf Hitler is easily identified since he is a registered guest at the Mannerheim, and has been for three + years. His sketching supplies help identify him, the 33 year old Stalin had been a bit more difficult to identify, but is eventually.

Without these two particular men in the picture later, how do you guys think the twentieth century would/could play out?

Would Germany already be leaning more toward the Communist/Socialist political spectrum after the "Great War’s" end and their short-term hyper inflation?

Would a "Hitler-like" personality still arise in the Germany of the twenties and thirties?

Could/would the Soviet Union simply dissolve after Lenin’s death, or would Trotsky save the idea and send it in another direction, i.e. more Marxist/Leninist ?

Two men, same city, same park, same time-frame. Hmmmm.

 

Cool scenario....It is unfortunate to say that the roots of the NSDAP were already in the works in the German Workers Party...
Anti-semitism was abound....the Germans were desperate for change...the German Mark was virtually worthless and unemployment was sickening...and let's not mention the reparations they were forced to repay right after WWI...

I'm sure that someone would have come forth who would "save" the german people, but would he have taken it to the extreme that Hitler did?

Lisa

 

Too true, but the German Workers Party (later the NSDAP) didn' t exist until post "Great War" when the Weimar democratic attempt was getting started. And the German economy only went down the "tubes" for a couple of years directly after the war. Before Hitler even showed up the Dawes Plan had turned the German economy around and with the help of the German economic genius Haljmar Schacht, was on the rebound before the "crash" of 1929, and had been for about six years.

And don't forget that Canadian historical scholar/author Margaret Macmillan takes the position that; "The allies (she says), were not the caricatures history has remembered: vengeful Frenchmen, pusillanimous Brits, or naive and bumbling Americans. And to blame the treaty for World War II (she says), is ‘to ignore the actions of everyone–political leaders, diplomats, soldiers, ordinary voters–for 20 years between 1919 and 1939.’ ‘Whatever the treaty,’ she argues, ‘Germany would have been an unhappy place in the 1920s.’ Even though the reparations were initially set at $33 billion, they were never paid so that had nothing to do with the problem in Germany.

MacMillan maintains that Germany paid only about $4.5 billion in the entire period between 1918 and 1932. Slightly less, she points out, than what France paid after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71–with a much smaller economy. And the French paid in gold, on time and in full. (Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World", McMillan)

Stephen Schuker, a University of Virginia historian and author of "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919- 1933", believes the Germans, by using the proceeds of American loans (Dawes Plan) to pay off their debts in Europe, ultimately paid no reparations at all. And when the Germans defaulted in the early thirties as a result of the "depression" (Schuker argues), American bankers had effectively paid reparations to Germany. Indeed, according to Schuker's calculations, the total net transfer from the United States to Germany in the period 1919-1931, adjusted for inflation, "amounted to almost four times the total assistance that the United States furnished West Germany under the Marshall Plan from 1948 to 1952."

Hitler (for one), claimed in the 1920s and '30s that the European boundaries drawn at Versailles unjustly separated thousands of "ethnic" Germans from their brethren in the Fatherland. But many historians now believe Wilson stayed as close to his declared principle of drawing boundaries on the basis of ethnicity as was economically and strategically feasible at the time. Czechoslovakia and Poland, for example (both of which were "created" by the peace conference) could not have survived ethnic homogeneity. The Czechs needed the mountains to the north, the Sudetenland, to protect their cities and industries in the valleys below, and the Poles, to be commercially viable, required access to the sea. As a result, tens of thousands of those ethnic Germans living in those areas ended up Czech or Polish.

If the Allies had drawn boundaries on ethnicity alone, as Boston University historian William Keylor points out, they would have made post-war Germany bigger than it was in 1914! And that, after four years of fighting and millions of deaths, "was politically impossible (unthinkable)."

When you look at Europe at the end of 1919, says Keylor, author of A World of Nations: the International Order Since 1945, "it (Versailles) comes as close to an ethnographic map as any settlement before or since."

The traditional view is that onerous war reparations drove the German economy to the collapse that brought Hitler and the Nazis to power in 1933. But Ms. MacMillan demonstrates that the reparations demanded of Germany were less than those paid by France after its defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Further, she notes, Germany paid only about one-third of what it owed in compensation for its occupation and destruction of Belgium and northern France.

Rather, she believes, the real problem was that Germany did not feel defeated. "They didn't think they had lost the war," she said during a recent visit to Paris. "They'd never seen foreign troops on German soil. The German army marched back in good order to Berlin. German industry was intact. Germany was still the biggest European country west of the Soviet Union. It never really disarmed, and it was strong enough in 1939 to conquer most of Europe."

In my own opinion here; that Hitler and the Nazis "saved" the German economy is a common, but erroneous position. Check out the "Dawes Plan", the "Young Plan", the German banker Haljmar Schacht, the Krupp family, Fritz Thyssen’s industrial and banking support, and the cancellation of the Versailles reparations all BEFORE Hitler actually came to power.

Post 1929 the entire world was falling into depression, and the new Young Plan might well have pulled Germany out faster than the now superseded Dawes Plan which had done the job from early 20's until the "crash", with Weimar Germany’s unemployment in the single digits, and inflation controlled. After the "crash" of '29 the situation world-wide altered in ways NO-ONE could have predicted. The Young Plan addressed the "new" reality, but before anything besides the forgiving of the reparations payments could be instigated pre-Hitler, there he was spouting his Greater Germany theories!

Those two American plans (Dawes early, Young last), were both before Hitler. He rose to power after the "crash", and before the Young plan could be put into effect in total. Even though the reparations had been "forgiven" before his rise, he took credit for "standing up to the financial interests (read Jew bankers)", even though he had nothing to do with it. The Weimar Government had unilaterally refused to pay any more of the payments, and the Lucerne group overseeing the gathering of the payments took Young's advice and approved the forgiving of the reparations. The rest of the Young plan never was implemented until post-war, but West Germany did get out from under the debts with a combination of the "Marshall Plan" and the pre-war "Young Plan".