Fun With Counterfactuals
Loyal reader, historian, and smart dude NDR at Rhine River stretches his fiction muscles with this post commemorating the 60th anniversary of the capture of Adolph Hitler.
I enjoy counterfactuals, particularly ones that don't attribute tremendous consequences deriving from ridiculously obscure moments or personalities. Those stories seem more like vehicles for bored historians to advertise their dissertations, or to showcase how narrowly smart they are, than to tell a spiffy story. Gimme a good, "What if Dubya Dubya Two turned out differently" tale over, "What if such-such minor nobleman had married his mistress instead of murdering her" anyday.
I like the Geisel reference, too. I also don't believe that the country falling apart is peculiar, considering it had only existed for such a short time to begin with, and anyway was effectively bisected in our universe anyway following the war. Seems not too hard to imagine postwar pressures between populations being encouraged by the occupying powers, the better to keep "Germany" weak.
Anyway, it's a neat little read.
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I just read that yesterday,
I just read that yesterday, and was pondering the break up of Germany. It seems to me that no matter what happened following a capture of Hitler and his subsequent trial and execution, the occupying powers would not have allowed a balkanized Germany.
Given the problems presented by the looming Soviet threat - and the beginning of the Cold War, the western powers needed a relatively (if not absolutely) strong, united (at least in the part they controlled) Germany to present a bulwark against communism. The Soviets would certainly not have allowed more than one East Germany, and how could France, Britain and the US act differently?
While Germany had not been a unitary state for very long, only about seventy years, almost every German alive in 1945 would have remembered nothing but a single Germany. Having two Germanies irritated them enough, I think - more would have been humiliating given that German power would be even more attenuated than it was in our world.
The break up of Yugoslavia doesn't really relate to Germany, in that Y. unlike Germany was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious mashup created from the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And, there was no great power interest in the region at the time of the break up, at least in the sense that none of Y.'s constituent parts were deemed 'strategic' in any meaningful way.
The rest of the speculation was really interesting, though. One way that this scenario might have been more plausible would be to imagine that for some reason, the advent of Soviet rule in Russia was aborted. (For example, if Lenin had never been allowed back into Russia, or if the Left SRs had been less gullible, or if the Kerensky government had had a little more macrotesticularity, or if the various White armies had been able to coordinate their activities a wee bit better, or if western intervention in the civil war had been more serious)
If a (for whatever reason) non-communist Russia allied with the Anglo-American west had fought Hitler and won, the squabbles over the future of Germany would not have had the ideological edge that they did. Absent the looming cold war, the great powers might have been very interested in a weakened and divided Germany, and the capture of a unsuicided Hitler could have contributed to that process in very much the manner that NDR described - especially in regard to central Europe.
Fun stuff.
Good lord I don't have a dog
Good lord I don't have a dog in this fight at all. I read NDR's piece and saw he was reasoning on a level far above my own, and Buckethead's comment only confirms that.
On another note, isn't all recorded history in some respect counterfactual? (I'm such an ass.)