Was an alliance between Germany and Russia completely out of the question?

Or was it feasible after Hitler realizes that Russia was really not that bad? In the years leading up to WW2, Russia was one of Germany's only friends and provided some much needed assistance to Germany, including its military. I know Stalin personally admired Hitler and had nothing against Nazism, unlike the British. If Hitler hadn't been as hostile as he was towards Bolshevism and Russia, could true friendship have developed between the two countries?

 

Hello Cross of iron,

What if Hitler actually liked Jews?

What I am trying to tell you is; that it doesn't make sense (at least to me) to impose a mind change or essential change in history in a what if proposition.

Regards
Kruska

 

No. All cooperation between the two states prior to the war and as a result of the non-aggression treaty that allowed for the division of Poland were a "marriages of convenience" rather than true alliances.

I don't think you can postulate a scenario where Stalin and hitler would have seriously considered each other as true allies. All mutually beneficial actions were taken to either gain time or an advantage over the other in what was seen as an unavoidable conflict.

Regards,
Dennis

 

Must agree

Hitler initially heavily relied on the industrialists for support and financing and for those guys communnism was THE enemy!
A true alliance between Hitler and Stalin is highly unlikely as a lot of Hitler's historical power base came from anti-communist forces and communists were outlawed and persecuted in Germany, it's easier to immagine a Hitler allied with the Jews than with a communist power.

 

Nations do not have "friends", they have interests. If the interests of nations converge, they are likely to become allies, either formal or informal. If the interests of nations diverge, they are likely to drift into enmity. It all boils down to how Hitler and Stalin perceived the respective interests of Germany and the Soviet Union.

 

Technically, Hitler praised the Jewish doctor who cared for his mother, even helped him leave Germany and said something like "If all Jews were like XXXXXX*, the Jewish Question wouldn't exist" or something like that.

*I don't remember the mans name.

To answer the original question, I doubt Hitler would as he was at the forefront of the initiative and on many occasions refused to following his General's guidance because he believed the "inferior" people could never defeat the Wehrmacht. Had Hitler and most of the Nazi's been out of the picture, I don't see why not I mean it worked during the First World War albeit in a different way.

 

Mehar

Hello Mehar,

even if not part of this thread, I always wondered about this occurence.

Besides the movie Hitler or young Adolf (can't remember) is there actually a historic proof about this jewish doctor and Hitlers position to him.?

Regards
Kruska

 

The party's success in getting elected had a lot to do with their anti-communist stance. With the people being disgruntled with the republic type of government, the communist party was gaining membership and would have had more had it not been for the Nazis. This having been said, it would be difficult to explain a long term partnership with the USSR. Also, from the very beginning, Hitler laid out his plan for expansion.....towards the East. Too many variables needed to be erased before a successful partnership could be established between the two.

 

Yes, plain and simple - there could not have been any military alliance between Germany and Russia, never. For Hitler, war was an ideology against the SU. Later Hitler was dreaming about the truce with the western allies and even a common allience with the Americans and British against the Russians. But he never considered even a short truce with the Russians.

Even Hitlers internal opposition that tried to kill him aimed to the truce with the western allies when Hitler would have been killed that they could keep the war going with the Russians.

Comparing this matter to the fact that Hitler had some Jewish friend is absurd. Yes, he had some Jewish friends in the past, but would he have stopped killing them by any reason? No. Politics and political decision making wasn't based on sense by any means in Third Reich, it was based only on national socialist ideology that determined all big decisions.

 

I think there is, I remember reading about him late last year and seeing references to such things. Eduard Bloch is his name.

I don't think anyone is trying to say he wouldn't have, the doctor in question according to Hitler's own words was the "ideal Jew".

Jason Cowley

I'm not saying Hitler would have changed his mind had the entire Jewish population of Germany changed to meet his vision overnight.

 

Hitler´s idea was always to get the Eastern people their slaves and the land for them to use for living. Cannot see much change in that with time or any deals with Stalin.

However, it´s always interesting to see how Churchill was such a friend with Stalin as Churchill was trying to destroy the birth of the USSR in its cradle. ( then again Stalin was planning "bad things" for the Western Europe ).

" The statesman who tried to "strangle Bolshevism in its cradle" after World War I made common cause with the Soviets in World War II."

Churchill College : Churchill Archives Centre: Exhibitions: Churchill and Russia

Sorry for making a side-step but not all were friends to start with....

 

Well said. Invading Russia was the point of National Socialist geopolitics. The predecessors of the Nazis, German far right groups, clamored for a colonization of Russia during WWI. Now, had saner heads prevailed, the Germans wouldn't have gone East at all, but that was not the case.

There are also economic concerns. R. Overy argued that German economy was fundamentally FUBAR because Hitler's conquests in the West and North had stretched it far beyond its means. If Hitler didn't invade Russia, the economy might suffer a catastrophic collapse (according to a summary of his book which I intend to read).

The M-R Pact was such devastating news to western socialists precisely because it was unanticipated that the mortal enemies would negotiate for anything. Subsequently many historians wonder if Hitler didn't strike at '41, would Stalin be the one to make the first blow on the Eastern Front?

 

If Hitler had waited until 1942 the Red Army would have had some 3-4,000 T-34´s at least waiting for them, plus another 1-2,000 KV 1´s and 2´s, and nothing new AT weapon against them by the German Army . Does not look that much better than 1941 to me.

 

A true "alliance" was impossible between these two totalitarian states. It was the good Doctor Karl Haushofer who had been a general in WW1 and later had taught the geopolitical policy of Lebensraum (living space) since 1919 in the Munich University, arguing that any state has the right to take land in order to support its population, expanding to include less developed, less civilized peoples since they obviously do not deserve either their own territory nor to hinder the more advanced races who are in neighboring lands. Rudolf Hess was one of Haushofer’s star pupils before either man ever met Hitler, and it could be said that Haushofer actually came up with the entire sphere of geopolitical philosophy.

As the new pseudo-science of Eugenics was becoming more and more popular, worldwide, it certainly appeared that it was the natural order of things for the strong to use or eliminate the weak and of absolute necessity for any state. The relatively young Hess and later Adolf Hitler must have listened eagerly to the learned, globe-traveling Haushofer's geopolitical concepts.

Lebensraum was logically a scientific, political rationale of all the desires he never had a name for in the past. Haushofer gave Hitler seemingly legitimate rationale for his own wishes, Haushofer (influenced by the code of Japanese loyalty) had lived in Japan for years, it is rumored he was a member of the Black Dragon Society, and was also instrumental in the creation of the Schutzstaffel as well. He saw them as Germany's version of the samurai, and it was he who informed Hitler that the Japanese were the "Aryans of the East," as they were from a different racial pool than the bulk of the Asian population.

Hitler agreed with the learned man, as the two states were each only trying to control their own spheres of influence by freeing their lands and their neighbors of lesser, and even alien influences. This would of course make the future open for the rare, cleaner, and more noble Aryan blood. While the new Nazi state was being "organized", all private meetings between the Japanese representatives and the Nazis took place in the Haushofer home, it wasn’t until Hess "flew the coop", and landed in Scotland (possibly at Haushofer’s instigation), that he and his family fell from grace in the Nazi order of things. It was Haushofer's ideas which spawned this from Hitler:

"If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain by the German sword, sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation." (Mein Kampf, p.140)

Stalin had read and underlined in blue pencil many of Hitler’s passages in Mein Kampf, especially those relating to "Russia". It was clearly Hitler’s design to gain the Ukrainian "breadbasket" of the USSR for Greater Germany’s own use at the expense of the lowly "Slavs" who didn’t really know how to do anything but copy their betters (according to Hitler), and at the most were only qualified to; serve the Aryan in menial tasks, and only be educated enough for simple sums and signing their own names.

The two only made "nice" with each other through their representatives for mutual gain, Stalin for time, Hitler for raw material to continue his military build-up. Neither really "trusted" the other, and their world-veiws were at such odds they could never be reconciled for the long term.

 

Very interesting and informative post. I do have a minor quibble with this:

Eugenics is/was hardly a pseudo-science. It had and has as much scientific validity as any controlled breeding program. The problem comes in with whether or not it's ethical to apply it to humans and in defining what constitutes "improvement". Note for instance that some dog breeds have reached the point where they can't breed without assistence and others are noted for their lack of intelligence and other health problems all stemming from what I would argue is a bad defintion of "improve".

 

Eugenics as applied to humans is all I was referring to, and in actual fact that name was only used in the human application. In the realm of animal husbandry it is simply selective breeding, not Eugenics. I believe that Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin or something) coined the term itself and applied it to humans.

 

Indeed, but my points was that it was no more of a psuedo science than any other slective breeding program. It's problems lie in:
1) Is it ethical to slectively breed humas against their will.
2) Coming up with an objective reasonable defintion of the end goal so that the tools may be applied in some rational manor.

Another perhaps one of the strongest examples of a case where just because we can do something doesn't meen we should do it.

 

I too don't disagree, it is only a psuedo-science when applied to the human race.

The fact that it could be seen as "successful" in the animal kingdom only made it acceptable on the fringes of genitic manipulation in the human population.

But it was both attractive and seemingly scientific to those who wished to see themselves as "superior" to their fellow man/humans. This alone makes it a pseudo-science in this instance.

 

Actually, I believe lwd is correct; Eugenics is a solid scientific theory and applies scientific principles whether applied to humans or animals. During the 1920's and 1930's the theory of eugenics as a way to improve the human race was advocated quite widely in many countries including the US, Belgium, Sweden and Canada. During the heyday of Eugenics, it's advocates included, H.G. Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, and Linus Pauling. People considered to have hereditary "defects" were segregated from the general population and often forcibly sterilized. Some of these people are still alive today. Many colleges and universities around the world taught courses in Eugenics, and both medical and political officials encouraged it's application to various classes of people. INternational Eugenics conferences, attended by thousands of doctors and scientists were held in cities like Paris, London, and New York.

The Nazis in Germany were no different in practicing Eugenics, except the Nazi government pushed the theory to it's ultimate conclusion by using it to justify the extermination of large numbers of people considered "degenerate" or "defective". After WW II, when it became obvious that Germany had used Eugenics to justify it's brutal racial policies, it acquired a bad name, and most advocates of Eugenics realized that the science could be abused to legitimize inhumane social and economic policies. Nevertheless, the second largest known eugenics program, created by the social democrats in Sweden, continued until 1975.

 

Well, that would only EVER happen if Hitler had never hated communism. However, if you had to change that that would be like making Hitler like jews. I think this is out of the question.