A couple of questions for you Mr Check:SanityCheck wrote: ↑Tue Nov 05, 2024 6:12 pm
....The counterfactual of what-if-National-Socialist-Germany-had-survived has to be dialled back to October 1938 to at the latest February 1939 if one is to consider how it might have persisted into the 1960s or beyond. Anything after 1939 involves war, and barring a few contingent forks in the road, like what if Germany had pursued the Mediterranean strategy and conquered the Middle East, that foredoomed National Socialist Germany to eventual defeat. But not, one hastens to add, the destruction of the machine tool park that despite dismantling and reparations was still larger in 1945 than had been the case in the 1930s, and which was then put to good use fuelling West German exports and domestic consumption in the Wirtschaftswunder....
....One can wonder what would have happened if Nazi Germany had been at peace from 1938 to the 1960s; whether the investments of the 1940s into extra machine tools would have happened at the same pace, whether the crucial industries in the west of the country would have expanded so fast. In this counterfactual, Germany does keep Silesia and its coal fields but has to export more to import the oil and fuel needed to maintain the advanced car-centric economy it would have had. Or Germany falls behind France and Britain still further and remains underdeveloped. Are the synthetic fuel plants economically viable? In the medium term maybe not, or maybe the output is reserved for the Me-262s it develops a bit more slowly later into the 1940s, and the battleships which were ordered in 1939 but unfinished. So National Socialist Germany has to negotiate with either communist or Islamic countries to access the closest major sources of oil, since the oil fields of Poland, Romania and Hungary are not going to be enough.
A 'National Socialist Europe', whether overtly imperial or including genuine alliances of equals, was never going to succeed, I'm afraid. The track record from 1939-1945 says otherwise; everybody hated the Germans in their Nazi incarnation by the end of the war, and hated them often more than they hated the already much loathed communists.
But I do think it would behove those inclined to what-if fantasies to consider reading more on the post-1945 world, as this might correct some misconceptions. 'Hitler would have done it differently' cannot explain away change forever, since eventually the man born in 1889 would have died, long before his 100th birthday and continued false sightings of him in a Brazilian jungle or Neuschwabenland.
1) Have you read the Richard Tedor book mentioned in the OP "Hitler's Revolution"? If so, what were your thoughts on that, especially as it relates to policy rather than a personality sketch of Adolf Hitler?
2) While I agree with you that we must be delicate in any sort of what-if scenarios involving National Socialism, your diagnosis seems to me overly negative. For example, you seem to openly agree that NS belonged to a time and a place, with specific solutions to address specific problems arising within. My question: what makes you so sure that NS, had it continued on into peacetime, not evolved with the times in parallel much the same way Western Liberal democracies did? So it would belong to that time and place also, while addressing those problems. Subquestion - remembering that NS Germany was the literal powerhouse of the industrial, scientific and artistic world, wouldn't it be the case that Germany would shape the world in its own image making it more hospitable to NS than the actual Cold War and modern world that we got?