"What if Hitler served his full time in jail?" Topic

Hitler was arrested and sent to jail in 1924 for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch. He was released less than a year later.

What if he served his full time in jail? How would that have changed Germany and by extension the world events that lead up to and included WWII?

…what if he'd gotten accepted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907? Or if, after failing to get in, he'd followed their advice and become an architect? How would that have changed Germany and by extension the world events that lead up to and included WWII?

What if he had been allowed to fully express himself in The Dance, and run off with Nijinsky?

Or immigrated to the US and become a pulp SF writer?

…what if he'd gotten accepted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907? Or if, after failing to get in, he'd followed their advice and become an architect?

While also an interesting question, I suspect these moves might have changed his aspirations significantly. He may still have been a heartless bigot but may have been more preoccupied with his work to do much about it.

With just emerging from jail for years later than history tells us, he still would have likely been on the same trajectory just 4 years delayed. And would someone have taken over his role? To your question, if he were out of the picture all together, would someone else be as effective at elevating the NAZI party to its prominence?

He would have had time to proof-read Mein Kampf, improve the prose and work on the organization?
He'd have been a martyr with a huge following cheering his release?
As long as Weimar itself doesn't change, and the rest of Europe's attitude toward Germany doesn't change--well, you might find a way to keep Hitler out of power, but I don't see a happy ending for German democracy.

If you really want to provide a happier post-WWI Europe, I'd suggest you go back to Russia starting about 1890, and start having the Okhrana shoot Bolsheviks instead of sending them into exile. You still couldn't--and maybe shouldn't--save the Tsarist regime, but you improve the chances of the successor state being sane, and not inspiring cadres of fanatics elsewhere.

Fortunately, as a tactical wargamer, I only have to worry about taking the hill or crossing the river. I don't have to concern myself with the long-term impact.

What if he had been allowed to fully express himself in The Dance, and run off with Nijinsky?

Good thing I didn't have a drink in my hand when I read that. Otherwise I'd need a new keyboard.

5x more evil?

I tend to think a Hitler was inevitable. Maybe the other Hitlers were more or less 'evil'. Antisemitism was a deep seated sentiment in Germany [and across much of Europe including the UK and pretty mainstream in the US too].

The desire to avenge Versailles was not Hitler's invention – he just ran with it and exploited it.

WW2 was coming anyway. Sooner or later. IMO A.J.P. Taylor was basically right about this, though he too some flak for it.

The best outcome would have been Gavrilo Princip being a bad shot

…what if he'd gotten accepted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907? Or if, after failing to get in, he'd followed their advice and become an architect?

While also an interesting question, I suspect these moves might have changed his aspirations significantly. He may still have been a heartless bigot but may have been more preoccupied with his work to do much about it.

With just emerging from jail for years later than history tells us, he still would have likely been on the same trajectory just 4 years delayed. And would someone have taken over his role? To your question, if he were out of the picture all together, would someone else be as effective at elevating the NAZI party to its prominence?

Either he's out of the picture altogether and the Nazis never rise to such prominence, or maybe history and the time stream is a tricksy thing, and Hitler would have become an embittered, failed post card artist who still ended up as the head of the Nazi party…

He'd have settled down happily with Big Heinrich, from "D" wing?

"What about the reality where Hitler cured cancer? The answer is don't think about."

It would not change a lot. There still would be a war.

"During the preceding eighty years the Germans had sacrificed to the Reich all their liberties; they demanded as a reward the enslavement of others. No German recognized the Czechs or Poles as equals. Therefore, every German desired the achievement which only total war could give. By no other means could the Reich be held together. It had been made by conquest and for conquest; if it ever gave up its career of conquest, it would dissolve."

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Gotta agree with Joker. Same song, just released 4 years later.

The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were going to kick off WW2 regardless.

Or immigrated to the US and become a pulp SF writer?

Ah, "The Iron Dream" by Norman Spinrad IIRC. One has to be a decent writer to write as bad as that one was (i.e., a pulp
SF novel written by a certain German emigrant writer).

Pretty much the same thing as if Dolfie had slipped in the bath and broken his neck….one of the 'B' team would have just filled the space, probably someone like Goering who was viewed as an actual war hero at the time, or some of the other veterans in the inner circle.

So a less aggressive and possibly more competent party which would have had a significant following, but would it have been enough to grab power or would Germany have just staggered on from one crisis to another, much like France and the rest of the European republics?

Guys, the time travellers already have tried many times to change history. In alternative time lines they eliminated (not only physically, sometimes change of heart or location was enough) one after another many other Germany fuhrers. Every previous options were much worse, much competent. Hitler stayed in our time line – not eliminated by time travellers – since every other potential dictator would be much competent.
We live in best of worlds, it seems.

(3/4 of my mother's family died in KL for being Poles, just saying.)

Gamertom;

Glad to see I wasnt the only one to catch that one :)

Agree with your comments and remember it was done specifically to mirror what was felt to be fascist tendencies in American literature in the 50s. And to bring it full circle the basis for a boardgame "4th Reich" by Task Force Games.

"Pretty much the same thing as if Dolfie had slipped in the bath and broken his neck….one of the 'B' team would have just filled the space, probably someone like Goering who was viewed as an actual war hero at the time, or some of the other veterans in the inner circle"

….. Ernst Roehm.

B

There are a number of post-war conditions which helped Hitler come to power would have existed even if Hitler was not in prison, or was dead. You would still have the myth of being stabbed in the back, a feeling the Versailles terms were grossly unfair, a feeling that the post-war republic was illegitimate, post-war economic problems, fascism, nationalism, antisemitism, the communist threat and the 1929 Stock Market collapse. However Hitler plays a key role first in leading the Nazi's to power and then in what happens afterwards. If you keep Hitler out of the picture for a while longer it is possible others in the Nazi movement might have felt strong enough to challenge Hitler's leadership. It is possible some other right wing movement might have overtaken the Nazis. It is possible Hitler might not have felt strong enough to hold out for power in 1932. Then if you don't have Germany under a dictatorship in the 1930s it is less likely they would have been willing to engage in brinksmanship with France and Britain.

Feeling that the Versailles terms were grossly unfair?

Hell, when the war reparations are 5x your gross domestic product, I'm not sure "grossly unfair" is an adequate description!

It'd be like saying that the US owed $65 USD trillion as a result of the invasion of Iraq… It's a sum that is simply unpayable.

Was Hitler the necessary catalyst for Nazi anti-semitism?
Mussolini and Franco seem to have not found it necessary, but other nations "Fascists" used it as a tool.

What if he was too big to jail and the lead investigator failed to prosecute him?

The tangled web of causality makes the Gordian knot look like a simple piece of string. The idea of this or that changing the outome or course of history are appealing but it assumes that we can KNOW these consequences, and even if we might it assumes that they flow logically from causes to effects. People still make choices but this in no way helps the hypothesis if the person making the choices is mad. If so then a sane person interpreting these causes in no way can account for what a madman will chose. Beyond that, a distant father, an over-indulgent mother, extreme personal tragedy, one testicle, and the effects of syphillus, all can form points of influence we cannot know about in normal persons. Mussolini and Franco did not use it as a tool of power, but Hitler did, but that does not mean that Mussolini and Franco were not anti-Semitic. Even Hitler MIGHT have chosen not to pursue his murderous intentions to Jews. Had he not done so things might have been different in small ways and large ways. We can never know.

What we DO know is that World War Two was an unmitigated horror and a disaster upon humanity, an unparalleled exercise in destruction, cruelty, waste, and tragedy, and would have been so even if the Holocaust had NOT happened. The Soviet terror famine of the 20's, the purges, and the brutal use of slave labor by the Russians killed, it is estimated over 20,000,000 people, which makes Hitlers six almost small cheese by comparision. Add to that the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, the "wars of liberation" by the various communist states, and all that, and if you are going to deal in causality and "if this then that" then you can pile on the whole of World War One, so often seen as simply the first part of the long dark agony of the 20th century.

That is a lot to place on Gavrillo Prinzip's bullet. But there it is, it happened.

If you were transported to another dimension, another parallel universe where World Wars One and Two did not happen, and you produced for that world a history of this dimension where it did, to a publishing agent, he would dismiss your work as the fantasy of a diseased, degenerated, demented and depraved mind utterly untrue and impossible.

Yet… there it is.

If there is anything to be learned in this, it is the wise words of Burke who's argument for conservatism is that a thing is much easier done, than undone.

> the brutal use of slave labor by the Russians killed, it is estimated over 20,000,000 people, which makes Hitlers six almost small cheese by comparision

Hitler and Nazism killed way more than six million. That's only counting Jews! And the manner in which they died also matters, otherwise we're only looking at numbers instead of human lives. The Nazis engaged in a campaign of systematic, planned and coldhearted extermination, *in addition* to the relatively more common crimes of rape, slave labor and robbery. To them, their victims were non-human vermin to be crushed, burned to ashes and experimented on. They had a polite meeting where educated gentlemen gathered to discuss how they were going to slaughter a whole group of people and remove them from the face of the Earth. These are people who, as a matter of policy, gassed, shot or poisoned little children to death. Whatever the many sins and murders of the Soviet Union, they didn't do this. It's true Turkey qualifies with the horrific Armenian genocide, but they didn't manage to do it at the scale Nazi Germany did. Nazism was horror itself. Hitler "wins" hands down -- he is definitely not "small cheese" in comparison to anyone.

Wars of liberation and revolutions -- which of course necessarily have death tolls -- are completely unrelated to the horrors of Nazism.

Ok so Stalin was an equal opportunity killer. That makes it all better?

You're missing the point. It's not who did it, though that tack makes self righteousness sooo much easier. The point is that they happened at all, one, six, twenty million does it matter how much and who did it when you get numbers that high. As for the sins of the soviet union you have obviously not studied them. They sent innocent people to the Gulags to die slow lingering deaths. You excuse their crimes and excoriate the Nazis. Nothing wrong with excoriating the Nazis they deserve it. But that the tragedy of millions of deaths does not affect you with revulsion equally betrays something.

Remember the discussion is not about the sins of the Nazis or the Soviets, but about causality and the cause and effect of events. The discussion is bout the extremely dubious question of "this and that" and several of your compatriots have said that without Hitler it still would have happened. Picking and choosing between atrocities is the problem. Even without Hitler the Soviets would have committed these crimes, but that's OK because you like them, or are willing to excuse them.

So tell me at what point does your moral outrage kick in?

You're confused. Where did I say all these things you accuse me of? Where did I say I "liked" the Soviets or that they didn't commit crimes or if they did, that these crimes were excusable?

What I did actually say can be summed up like this:

1- Hitler was in a league of his own. He wasn't "small cheese" compared to the Soviets or Turkey or anyone else -- his crimes -- and by that I mean those of Nazi Germany, I couldn't care less about Hitler the person (to make this on-topic, I think it's likely Germany would have taken this course even if Hitler was out of the picture) -- were an order of magnitude worse.

2- The abstract count isn't all that matters. People are not numbers. The Soviets sent people to the Gulags, sure, and I'm sure they knew a lot of people would perish as a result, and people did die in famines, but they weren't out to exterminate a "race" of people (and I use quotes because the Nazis couldn't even get biology right). Extermination wasn't their goal. The Soviets didn't consider their enemies subhuman like the Nazis did. They didn't take joy in gassing schoolchildren because they were Jewish and therefore not real people, like the Nazis did. The Soviets had labor camps, but not extermination camps; they didn't put living people in ovens. They didn't perform arbitrary organ transplants on living people just to see what happened. They didn't start a plan to euthanize the old, ill and malformed because they were a burden to society and the purity of race. The Nazis were out to eradicate whole groups of people as if they were weeds or animals. Maybe what Turkey did to the Armenians was similar, but they simply didn't manage to scale it out like Nazi Germany did.

3- The Nazis "only" exterminated 6 million Jews. But that's not the total count because they also targeted Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, dissidents, the mentally ill, and of course militarily they were responsible for one of the most murderous and wasteful campaigns in the history of warfare.

I answered your point because, while time travel and what-ifs are semi-interesting conversation, I'm tired of the old "Stalin vs Hitler, who was worse?" trope. The world would have been better without either of them, but there is no doubt in my mind that Hitler was way, way, waaay worse. An order of magnitude worse. Whenever you have a doubt about this, remember: one of them wanted children gassed and then burned in ovens, and it wasn't Stalin.

Mein Kamph, no doubt it would have been bigger, or had a sequel.

The rise in the Nazi parties vote share is interesting in when it happened.

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in 1928 it was just 2.8% of the vote share

Hitler would have learnt how to burgle, hotwire and talk nedspeak.