[alyster]

Honor maybe. Austria was an ally. And alot of these men had honor. Russian Temorary goverment continued the World War One to honor the agreements with England and France.

BTW When German Empire declared war on Russian Empire(I mean when the clerk went to give the paper to russians) he was so upset that he cried. He even messed up. He accually had both papers: one to declare war and alternative one that Germany does not declare war cause Russia had stopped the mobilization. He accidentaly gave both to russians....

[imagicnation]

BTW When German Empire declared war on Russian Empire(I mean when the clerk went to give the paper to russians) he was so upset that he cried. He even messed up. He accually had both papers: one to declare war and alternative one that Germany does not declare war cause Russia had stopped the mobilization. He accidentaly gave both to russians...

Lol. Also, didn't Wilhelm hate going to war with Russia mainly because of his relations with Nicholas? Apparently they called each other 'Willy' and 'Nicky'.

[alyster]

Yes but 'Willy' also was the one who ended the Russian - German agreement/alliance in 1890. Altough he tried his best to keep 'Nicky' out of an alliance with France right after that.

[Spin]

Why couldn't Germany have annexed Austria and made Austria's empire there vassal states. Germany would have been oh so much more powerful

Because they couldn't have held much of it.

[Thunderhawk]

Why couldn't Germany have annexed Austria and made Austria's empire there vassal states. Germany would have been oh so much more powerful

The Austrian monarchy would probably have objected.

[imagicnation]

Well maybe Prussia should have risked the European war and extended the Austro-Prussian war, annexing as much of Austria as possible. Bismark's Anschluss.

[Thunderhawk]

I doubt Austria would accept it.


German Austrians were the top of the food chain, in Germany they would be middle class (below Prussian Germans, above non-German minorities). Further more, if the German areas of Austria-hungary are lost to Prussia, "Austria-Hungary" will effectively be a very small German population rulling over a large (and some what resentfull) Hungarian population, who are inturn rulling over minorities.

Allowing the Ethnic German population to be taken by Prussia would eventually lead to a manpower shortage for Austria, civil strife, and probably collapse.

Embracing Hungarian full out might work long term, but the interm would weaken Austria-Hungary probably leading to border 'disputes' with neighbours, secession and civil wars for a few decades.



An extended war might have brought other Austrian regions into Prussia, but Prussia didnt need more Poles, Slovaks and Czechs, and I doubt Prussia - at that time - could afford more losses without appearing as tempting targets for other nations.

[Alfsigr]

i believe by ww1, austro-hungary was a dual monarchy with independence in all but name for hungary. if austria were to be absorbed by germnay, i would expect the austro-hungarian empire to become the hungariian empire instead. and given that the hungarians had some pretty unpleasant ideas for 'magyarisation' of the balkans, i doubt the situation would have remained stable.

incidentally, there is a mod for the ww2 strategy game 'hearts of iron', called 'kaiserriech' which is based on the idea of germany winning the weltkrieg, with an active forum discussing likely consequences of this.

http://z11.invisionfree.com/Kaiserreich ... hp?act=idx

[imagicnation]

In a way, this is a more interesting hypothesis than the more commonly asked question about what the world would be like if the Germans had won World War II. Several historians have noted that both world wars should really be considered a single conflict with a long armistice in the middle. If this viewpoint is valid, then the official outcome of the first phase of this conflict may have been important for reasons other than those usually cited.

As a preliminary matter, we should note that the actual outcome of the First World War was a near thing, a far nearer thing than was the outcome of World War II after 1941. While it is true that the United States entered the war on the allied side in 1917, thus providing vast new potential sources of men and material, it is also true that Germany had knocked Russia out of the war at about the same time. This gave the Germans access to the resources of Eastern Europe and freed their troops for deployment to the West. The German Spring Offensive of 1918 actually succeeded in rupturing the Allied line at a point where the Allies had no significant reserves. (At about this time, British Prime Minister Lloyd George was heard to remark, "We are going to lose this war." He began to create a record which would shift the blame to others.) The British Summer Offensive of the same year similarly breached the German lines, but did a much better job of exploiting the breakthrough than the Germans had done a few months earlier. General Luddendorf panicked and demanded that the government seek an armistice. The German army did succeed in containing the Allied breakthrough, but meanwhile the German diplomats had opened tentative armistice discussions with the United States. Given U.S. President Wilson's penchant for diplomacy by press-release, the discussions could not be broken off even though the German military situation was no longer critical. While the Germans were not militarily defeated, or even economically desperate, the government and general public saw no prospect of winning. Presented with the possibility of negotiating a settlement, their willingness to continue the conflict simply dissolved.

The Germans were defeated by exhaustion. This could as easily have happened to the Allies. When you read the diaries and reports of the French and British on the Western Front from early 1918, the writers seem to be perfectly lucid and in full command of their faculties. What the Americans noted when they started to arrive at about that time was that everyone at the front was not only dirty and malnourished, but half asleep. In addition to their other deleterious effects, the terrible trench warfare battles of that conflict were remarkably exhausting, and the capacity of the Allies to rotate out survivors diminished with the passage of time. Even with American assistance, France and Britain were societies that were slowly falling apart from lack of ordinary maintenance. Both faced food shortages from the diversion of farmers into the army and from attacks on oceanborne supplies. Had the Germans been able to exploit their breakthrough in the spring, or if the German Empire had held together long enough for Luddendorf's planned autumn offensive to take place, its quite likely that either the French or British would have sued for peace. Had one or the other even raised the question of an armistice, the same process of internal political collapse which destroyed Germany would have overtaken both of them.

Although today it is reasonably clear that Germany fought the war with the general aim of transforming itself from a merely continental power to a true world power, the fact is that at no point did the German government know just what its peace terms would be if it won. It might have annexed Belgium and part of the industrial regions of northern France, though bringing hostile, non-German populations into the Empire might not have seemed such a good idea if the occasion actually arose. More likely, or more rationally, the Germans would have contented themselves with demilitarizing these areas. From the British, they would probably have demanded nothing but more African colonies and the unrestricted right to expand the German High Seas Fleet. In Eastern Europe, they would be more likely to have established friendly satellite countries in areas formerly belonging to the defunct empires than to have directly annexed much territory. It seems to me that the Austrian and Ottoman Empires were just as likely to have fallen apart even if the Central Powers had won. The Hungarians were practically independent before the war, after all, and the chaos caused by the eclipse of Russia would have created opportunities for them which they could exploit only without the restraint of Vienna. As for the Ottoman Empire, most of it had already fallen to British invasion or native revolt. No one would have seen much benefit in putting it back together again, not even the Turks.

Communist agitation was an important factor in the dissolution of Imperial Germany, and it would probably have been important to the collapse of France and Britain, too. One can imagine Soviets being established in Glasglow and the north of England, a new Commune in Paris. This could even have happened in New York, dominated as it was by immigrant groups who were either highly radicalized or anti-British. It is unlikely that any of these rebellions would have succeeded in establishing durable Communist regimes in the West, however. The Soviets established in Germany and Eastern Europe after the war did not last, even though the central government had dissolved. In putting down such uprisings, France might have experienced a bout of military dictatorship, not unlike the Franco era in Spain, and Britain might have become a republic. Still, although the public life of these countries would have been polarized and degraded, they would probably have remained capitalist democracies. The U.S., one suspects, would have reacted to the surrender or forced withdrawal of its European expeditionary force by beginning to adopt the attitude toward German-dominated Europe which it did later in the century toward the victorious Soviet Union. Britain, possibly with its empire in premature dissolution, would have been forced to seek a strong Atlantic alliance. As for the Soviet Union in this scenario, it is hard to imagine the Germans putting up with its existence after it had served its purpose. Doubtless some surviving Romanov could have been put on the throne of a much- diminished Russia. If no Romanov was available, Germany has never lacked for princelings willing to be sent abroad to govern improvised countries.

This leaves us with the most interesting question: what would have happened to Germany itself? Before the war, the German constitution was working less and less well. Reich chancellors were not responsible to parliament but to the Kaiser. The system could work only when the Kaiser was himself a competent executive, or when he had the sense to appoint and support a chancellor who was. The reign of Wilhelm II showed that neither of these conditions need be the case. In the twenty years preceding the war, national policy was made more and more by the army and the bureaucracy. It is unlikely that this degree of drift could have continued after a victorious war. Two things would have happened which in fact happened in the real world: the monarchy would have lost prestige to the military, and electoral politics would have fallen more and more under the influence of populist veterans groups.

We should remember that to win a great war can be almost as disruptive for a combatant country as to lose it. There was a prolonged political crisis, indeed the whiff of revolution, in victorious Britain in the 1920s. Something similar seems to be happening in the United States today after the Cold War. While it is, of course, unlikely that the Kaiser would have been overthrown, it is highly probable that there would have been some constitutional crisis which would have drastically altered the relationship between the branches of government. It would have been in the military's interest to push for more democracy in the Reich government, since the people would have been conspicuously pro-military. The social and political roles of the old aristocracy would have declined, since the war would have brought forward so many men of humble origin. Again, this is very much what happened in real history. If Germany had won and the Allies lost, the emphasis in these developments would certainly have been different, but not the fundamental trends.

All the bad and strange things which happened in Germany in the 1920s are conventionally blamed on the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty. We forget, however, that the practical effect of these terms was really very limited. The diplomatic disabilities on Germany were eliminated by the Locarno Pact of 1925. The great Weimar inflation, which was engineered by the government to defeat French attempts to extract reparations, was ended in 1923. The reparations themselves, of course, were a humiliating drain on the German budget, but a system of financing with international loans was arranged which worked satisfactorily until the world financial system broke down in the early 1930s. Even arms development was continued through clandestine projects with the Soviet Union. It is also false to assert that German culture was driven to insanity by a pervasive sense of defeat. The 1920s were the age of the Lost Generation in America and the Bright Young Things in Britain. A reader ignorant of the history of the 20th century who was given samples from this literature that did not contain actual references to the war could reasonably conclude that he was reading the literature of defeated peoples. There was indeed insanity in culture in the 1920s, but the insanity pervaded the whole West.

Weimar culture would have happened even if there had been no Weimar Republic. We know this, since all the major themes of the Weimar period, the new art and revolutionary politics and sexual liberation, all began before the war. This was a major argument of the remarkable book, RITES OF SPRING, by the Canadian scholar, Modris Ekstein. There would still have been Bauhaus architecture and surrealist cinema and depressing war novels if the Kaiser had issued a victory proclamation in late 1918 rather than an instrument of abdication. There would even have been a DECLINE OF THE WEST by Oswald Spengler in 1918. He began working on it years before the war. The book was, in fact, written in part to explain the significance of a German victory. These things were simply extensions of the trends that had dominated German culture for a generation. They grew logically out of Nietzsche and Wagner and Freud. A different outcome in the First World War would probably have made the political right less suspicious of modernity, for the simple reason that left wing politics would not have been anywhere nearly as fashionable among artists as such politics were in defeat.

I would go so far as to say this: something very like the Nazi Party would still have come to power in Germany, even if that country had won the First World War. I realize that this assertion runs counter to the historiography of most of this century, but the conclusion is inescapable. Politics is a part of culture, and the Nazis represented a kind of politics which was integral with Weimar culture. Salvador Dali once said, perhaps ironically, that he approved of the Nazi Party because they represented the surrealists come to power. The connection is deep, as with the Nazi affinity for the modernist post-rationalism of the philosopher Heidigger, and also superficial, in the styles the party promoted. The Nuremberg Rallies, for instance, were masterpieces of Art Deco stagecraft, particularly Albert Speer's "cathedral of ice" effect, created with the use of searchlights. As a young hopeful in Vienna, Hitler once passed up the chance to work as a theatrical set designer because he was too shy to go to the interview. But whether he knew it or not, that is what he became. People with no fascist inclinations at all love to watch film footage produced by the Nazis, for the simple reason that it is very good cinema: it comes from the same artistic culture which gave us METROPOLIS and THE BLUE ANGEL. The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich formed a historical unit, one whose advent was not dependent on the accident of who won the First World War.

The Nazi Party was other things besides a right wing populist group with a penchant for snazzy uniforms. It was a millenarian movement. The term "Third Reich," "Drittes Reich," is an old term for the Millennium. The Party's core began as a sort of occult lodge, like the Thule Society of Munich to which so many of its important early members belonged. It promoted a racist theory of history not unlike that of the Theosophist, H.P. Blavatsky, whose movement also used the swastika as an emblem. The little-read ideological guidebook of the party, Alfred Rosenberg's MYTH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, begins its study of history in Atlantis. Like the Theosophists, they looked for a new "root race" of men to appear in the future, perhaps with some artificial help. When Hitler spoke of the Master Race, it is not entirely clear that he was thinking of contemporary Germans.

This is not to say that the Nazi Party was a conspiracy of evil magicians. A good, non- conspiratorial account of this disconcerting matter may be found in James Webb's THE OCCULT ESTABLISHMENT. I have two simple points to make here. The first is that the leadership had some very odd notions that, at least to some degree, explain the unique things they said and did. The other is that these ideas were not unique to them, that they were spreading among the German elites. General Von Moltke, the chief of the General Staff at the beginning of the war, was an Anthroposophist. (This group drew the peculiar ire of the SS, since Himmler believed that its leader, Rudolf Steiner, hypnotized the general so as to make him mismanage the invasion of France.) The Nazi Party was immensely popular on university campuses. The intellectual climate of early 20th century Germany was extraordinarily friendly to mysticism of all types, including in politics. The Nazi leadership were just particularly nasty people whose worldview bore a family resemblance to that of Herman Hesse and C.G. Jung. The same would probably have been true of anyone who ruled Germany in the 1930s.

Am I saying then that German defeat in the First World War made no difference? Hardly. If the war had not been lost, the establishment would have been much less discredited, and there would have been less room for the ignorant eccentrics who led the Nazi Party. Certainly people with no qualifications for higher command, such as Goering, would not have been put in charge of the Luftwaffe, nor would the Foreign Ministry have been given over to so empty-headed a man as Von Ribbentrop. As for the fate of Hitler himself, who can say?

The big difference would have been that Germany would been immensely stronger and more competent by the late 1930s than it was in the history we know. That another war would have been brewed by then we may be sure. Hitler was only secondarily interested in revenge for the First World War; his primary goal had always been geopolitical expansion into Eastern Europe and western Asia. This would have given Germany the Lebensraum to become a world power. His ideas on the subject were perfectly coherent, and not original with him: they were almost truisms. There is no reason to think that the heirs of a German victory in 1918 (or 1919, or 1920) would have been less likely to pursue these objectives.

These alternative German leaders would doubtless have been reacting in part to some new coalition aligned against them. Its obvious constituents would have been Britain, the United States and Russia, assuming Britain and Russia had a sufficient degree of independence to pursue such a policy. One suspects that if the Germans pursued a policy of aggressive colonial expansion in the 1920s and 30s, they might have succeeded in alienating the Japanese, who could have provided a fourth to the coalition. Germany for its part would begun the war with complete control of continental Europe and probably effective control of north Africa and the Near East. It would also have started with a real navy, so that Britain's position could have quickly become untenable. The coalition's chances in such a war would not have been hopeless, but they would been desperate.

It is commonly said of the First World War that it was pure waste, that it was an accident, that it accomplished nothing. The analysis I have just presented, on the contrary, suggests that the "war to end all war" may have been the most important war of the modern era after all.
By John J. Reilly

http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/wwi.htm

I thought it was one of the more believable scenarios around.

[InterestedInPolitics]

If you ask me, the Germans pretty much had World War I won when the US entered. If the US never entered World War I, the Germans would have won.

[Torwan]

This is an utterly unrealistic scenario.

It would have been in the military's interest to push for more democracy in the Reich government, since the people would have been conspicuously pro-military.

The German military of the Imperial Age was fiercly anti-democratic and would have never supported a democracy or a Republic. It did in the 20s to fight the communists, however the Kapp-revolt also showed that the military and the right-wing elite were never friends of democracy. Ludendorff (a right-wing activist in the early 20s) and Hindenburg (later President) were never democrats and as the victorious Generals of that scenario, they would been in charge and never implemented a democracy.

All the bad and strange things which happened in Germany in the 1920s are conventionally blamed on the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty. We forget, however, that the practical effect of these terms was really very limited.

This is also wrong.

The economic crisis of the 20s destroyed so much private wealth, that after the hyper-inflation, there was more or less a "clean slate start". People with "hard properties" (houses, territory, gold etc.) were in the advantage, others had just burned all they had ever saved. Maybe that didn't have too much influence on national economics, but it burned deeply into the minds of the people. Effects can still be felt today - if inflation rises above 2 %, people in Germany begin to worry a lot.

Weimar culture would have happened even if there had been no Weimar Republic. We know this, since all the major themes of the Weimar period, the new art and revolutionary politics and sexual liberation, all began before the war.

Also no.

Without the Weimar Republic, there would have never been an social-democrat-led coalition with a strong anti-democratic right-wing and a hardcore communist party as opposition. Instead, we'd have had a continued rule of emperor-appointed governments with centrist and right-wings in favor and a left-wing opposition led by social-democrats. The whole political landscape, that dramatically changed between november 1918 and january 1919, would have been preserved in the state of 1912 and progressed from that point on.

Therefore this statement is also wrong:

I would go so far as to say this: something very like the Nazi Party would still have come to power in Germany, even if that country had won the First World War.

The NSDAP thrived on national feelings of betrayal. The right-wing parties of the early 20s created this "legend" (Dolchstoss-Legende) that the left-wing parties were responsible for the defeat because they "stabbed" the victorious Army in the back. The whole political landscape from late 1918 to early 1933 was centered around this topic. The early right-wingers created it and the late right-wingers like Adolf Hitler picked it up to get votes.

A victorious Imperial Germany wouldn't have had that internal conflict, hence no such thing could have happened. Hitler would've come home as victorious soldier without the drive to become a politician.

The rest I also doubt...this is a very unrealistic scenario, all in all. Seems like someone just tried to implement all real-world events into his alternative timeline to make it seem "real", like this cold-war-attitude between Germany and the US and the emergence of a post-war-Nazi-party...

[Unperson-K]

If you ask me, the Germans pretty much had World War I won when the US entered. If the US never entered World War I, the Germans would have won.

Not really. Although the Americans were certainly a welcome addition to the Allied war effort, they arrived too late to do any substantial tide turning. Even when they did arrive, their troops were still very green and unused to the conditions of trench warfare: this is why American losses in World War One are disproportionately high when compared to the amount of time they actually spent in combat.

Because World War One (and especially the western front) was a war of attrition, it is difficult to identify a turning point. Some of the more eminent revisionist historians (the only historians worth listening to with regard to World War One) have identifed the Battle of the Somme as the turning point because of the massive German casualties inflicted.

The two nations that can definitively claim they beat Germany are Britain and France. France held the Germans back in 1914/1915/early 1916 while the British got their act together and deployed larger conscript armies. They were then able to take the burden off the collapsing French and win the war.

At about this time, British Prime Minister Lloyd George was heard to remark, "We are going to lose this war." He began to create a record which would shift the blame to others.)

Lloyd George, while to be credited for his work at the Ministry of Munitions earlier in the war, was not a tactician or a general: indeed, his frequent lack of military sense led to several clashes with Field Marshal Haig and the rest of the British top brass. Considering this (and the rubbish he wrote in his memoirs) I wouldn't rely too much on his military judgement.

While the Germans were not militarily defeated, or even economically desperate

Bull, the Germans were starving in 1918 from the British naval blockade that had been in place for many years.

Even with American assistance, France and Britain were societies that were slowly falling apart from lack of ordinary maintenance

Perhaps true of France in the later stages; however it is not true of Britain.

Had the Germans been able to exploit their breakthrough in the spring,

Meaningless. The Germans did not exploit their breakthrough and could not have done: they had too few troops and the allies too many.

There was a prolonged political crisis, indeed the whiff of revolution, in victorious Britain in the 1920s.

Can a few general strikes be classed as the whiff of revolution? Only if you are a paranoid right wing reactionary.

The article posts lack any real merit and its author has clearly not appraised himself of the most recent academic scholarship.

[getfiscal]

I would call into question the idea that a victorious German Empire could have defeated the nascent Soviet Russia. It seems more likely a long series of wars would have been fought over the dissolving Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Polish and Ukrainian nations. Russia would be in a position of strength when it came to advocating wars of national liberation, especially if Germany moved quickly to secure an "independent" Ukraine under the conditions of Brest-Litovsk.

It seems likely Russia would quickly say that Germany broke the conditions of the treaty in reference to some misstep over national independence, that it refuses to make war reparations to Germany, and so on. Since this would put Russia "back in the war" in a certain sense, it would probably allow the Bolsheviks to enlist the support of more white factions and so on in an appeal to face down German militarism. As importantly, the UK and US would turn from being outright hostile to potentially supportive of what they might have seen as an Eastern European problem for the Germans. They might have believed it impossible that a Soviet state would survive for long but that several new pro-West states could be created over time. As in, once a pro-Western Poland and Ukraine was secured, reaction and dependence on the West could shape the region into an asset against German hegemony.

In any case, the point is that Germany would be a dominant power but would be undercut by real problems from "below" and the East, rather than being a subordinate power trying to struggle against perceived domination from within and abroad. The distinction is important enough because the NSDAP would never come to power, in my mind, in the former situation. You get a much more stable bourgeois government rather than the petit-bourgeois run amok.

[Thunderhawk]

It seems likely Russia would quickly say that Germany broke the conditions of the treaty in reference to some misstep over national independence, that it refuses to make war reparations to Germany, and so on.

When would that happen?
Russia/Soviet Union was finishing its civil war in 1920. The Soviets would not want to start up another war with Germany until, atleast, early 20s. Any earlier and the whites would more likely then not side with the Germans - give up some territory (the rest of Poland, some baltic states, satellite Ukraine, there are options) for their help in restoration of the Czar.

[getfiscal]

The way I read the original scenario, the writer suggests that Germany would have successfully exploited their Spring offensive such that the Brits and others would have been forced on their back heel. This could have scrubbed their summer offensive, or made it falter and unable to exploit it further, and would have at least made the possibility of revolution inside Germany less likely and the war more likely to continue. It seems possible that staring into the Autumn and what would follow (months of paralysis in anticipation of a 1919 German Spring Offensive) that a quick peace might be hammered out if Germany agreed to the basic integrity of metropolitan France.

If that happens, the scenario goes, then Germany would have taken France and the low countries out of the war in a peace process that essentially transfered swaths of Africa and Southeast Asia to German control (since Germany might have dominance over the French, Belgian and Dutch in the bargaining) and a series of claims in foreign ports (a slap in the face to especially China). He then suggests a cold war on the seas between the Anglosphere and a German-led Continent, and that troops would be turned towards pacifying Eastern Europe and the colonies. Presumably in peace settlement the basic conditions of Brest-Litovsk including a line of influence would be included, so that Russia would be prevented from estalished a Soviet republic in the Ukraine. German troops would therefore be pushing to hold Polish territory, help out the Austro-Hungarian Empire in hashing out some solution to the national question perhaps by establishing fairly large realms for certain ethnic groups with small nations divided between them, and most importantly heading for the Ukrainian breadbasket to crush the People's Republic there and further isolate Soviet Russia during the Summer of 1919.

While this was going on, the international force sent to destroy the Soviets and push Russia back into the war would not make any more sense and would probably explicitly be removed in any peace settlement by consensus. As I said, that flips Soviet Russia in the minds of many Western powers as a possible bulwark against German aggression. I'm assuming here that what Germany would plan to do is take time to consolidate their major push in say 1920 would be against the Ukraine. If Russia isn't allowed into this area under Brest-Litovsk, which would have stuck or been written into the peace in some way, then it would have probably allied and worked with volunteers to the groups there, as they would be doing in Poland and elsewhere. At the same time, Western countries might be nice and allow the Soviets to buy and borrow from them instead of totally isolating them, as a thorn in the side while they expect Germany to quite quickly consolidate the Ukraine. The West would be quite clear that Germany would not be allowed to attack the Soviets under the peace treaty, and the West (especially France) would be pleased to use the excuse to undercut Germany's overseas ambitions by flipping back the demilitarization, colonial, naval and port situation that would already be precarious.

However, and let's say we are at 1921 by this point and there is reactionary nationalist government in the Ukraine propped up by Germany. If this is true, then the Soviet position would be precarious because of dependence on Western support and the lack of the Ukrainian breadbasket. However, they could probably still tear up Brest-Litovsk from their side, because the West would only use words against them and otherwise now hope for reaction over the longer-term instead of immediate overthrow. So they wouldn't pay back Germany and would now, given Germany sprawling out over the continent, launch a counter-offensive by supporting revolutions all over Eastern Europe. Each black day of drowing a revolution in blood might actually spring up two or three more that clamour to join the Soviets. Contradictions within German society would become clearer, and force all sorts of concessions in hopes of stopping waves of Soviet revolutions in places like Hungary, Bavaria, Poland and the Ukraine. In cases volunteer Red Army units might turn the tide in a series of proxy wars. The point, again, is that if Germany tried to launch a direct assault on Soviet Russia it would fall apart in all places. So Germany, in practice, would be bound against invading Russia while in many different ways Russia would be unbound.

I think it is worth thinking about, obviously, because if things played out very badly for Germany you could see a series of revolutions and fracturing right in the German Empire itself to the point where Russia quickly becomes the historical spark being assisted in development rather than desperate and encircled.

[Thunderhawk]

The way I read the original scenario, the writer suggests that Germany would have successfully exploited their Spring offensive such that the Brits and others would have been forced on their back heel.

With what manpower would they be able to make such a devestating break out?

Ahistorical pieces are, I think, legitimate if they are done well. However, one must stay within the realm of reason, based on what was available and possible at the time.

[getfiscal]

Oh, yes, I agreed the scenario was quite silly. I just tried to point to one other area where it was especially silly, that is that somehow Germany would trounce Soviet Russia, restore a constitutional monarchy, and move on to other aspects of continental domination. For that purpose I had to concede that somehow the Germans were much more successful in spring/summer 1918 and what might have come of that.

[PBVBROOK]

The Nazi Party was other things besides a right wing populist group with a penchant for snazzy uniforms. It was a millenarian movement. The term "Third Reich," "Drittes Reich," is an old term for the Millennium. The Party's core began as a sort of occult lodge, like the Thule Society of Munich to which so many of its important early members belonged

Not true. A complete mischaracterization of the Nazi movement.

I would go so far as to say this: something very like the Nazi Party would still have come to power in Germany, even if that country had won the First World War. I realize that this assertion runs counter to the historiography of most of this century, but the conclusion is inescapable. Politics is a part of culture, and the Nazis represented a kind of politics which was integral with Weimar culture.

All evidence to the contrary. They would never have existed. And a party like them would have had no appeal whatsoever in the absence of the absurd terms of the Versailles and the collapse of the German economy.

Further. The Nazis came to power without ever holding a majority of the votes. Hitler was made Chancellor in a back room deal that he exploited masterfully.

This article is displays a lack of research and a penchant for jumping to conclusions.

It is wrong.

[Donna]

An interesting article, I read it some time ago - but the assertion that the Weimar Republic and the subsequent rise of Nazism would have still materialized even if the German Empire won the first WW is a bit of a stretch. Nazism was a kind of unthink that could have only arose to power during the "perfect storm" - which happened to be the Treaty of Versailles, anti-Semitic delusions in relation to Germany's loss, economic depression, over-theorizing of the collapse of Empires, a weak post-war republic and general fanaticism among Germans regarding their loss in the Great War. The rather weak democratic institutions that were featurative of the Weimar Republic is what ultimately allowed something like National Socialism to usurp all power.

and Hindenburg

Hindenburg wasn't entirely anti-democratic; in fact, he had great moral/ideological issues with Hitler's rise to prominence grounded mostly in the fact the Nazis would probably abolish any form of democracy in the country. He posed the question during his last years, "How will I face God if I appoint [Hitler] to Chancellor?" This wasn't out of any predetermined belief about National Socialism, but Hitler's disregard for the institutions that Hindenburg represented.

Not true. A complete mischaracterization of the Nazi movement.

Nazism does in fact date back to various Aryan occult movements, particularly the Thule Society. Hitler actually discovered Nazism while spying on National Socialists.

[PBVBROOK]

Hitler actually discovered Nazism while spying on National Socialists

This part is quite true. He was sent to do it by the Army. It was then Drexlers DAP, Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, German Workers Party though.

The thule society business gives the organization too much credit. Hitler banned it in the early thirties if I remember correctly. It never had more than a few hundred members.

Himler's SS mysticism was modeled after the Jesuits.

The Thule society can claim no real historic roots. Not much before 1907-8.

Hitler was much to much of a populist in those days to be interested in real occult stuff and the strongest party in Weimar was, at that time, center and Catholic.

No doubt Hitler borrowed some of his rhetoric from these Clubs. His antisemiticism is something else altogether. He was actually pretty well known for his antisemetic views before he attended his first meeting of the DAP. There is a letter written 4 days before this meeting by Hitler to Mr Gemlish (I think) that details his views on the "Jewish Question". These views probably came from his German Army political education classes that had as its cornerstones antisemiticism, antisocialism and German Nationalism.