Hi Indie ; for all his cruelty Hitler lead somewhat of a charmed life he had several assination attempts on his life and he survived all of them . what if one of these attempts was successful . in November 1939 a worker put a time bomb in a pillar by a podium where Hitler was to speak but because he was in a rush and wanted to return to Berlin he left early and the bomb went off 8 minutes after he left which destroyed the stage and podium he was just standing at . if He were Killed that November Night in 1939 what do you think would have been the outcome of the war ?
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I actually like this question. I’m not sure if we can reasonably guess given Hitler’s likely successors would have been Hess, who was contained during the war so we can’t model his pathologies if any, or Goering, whom might have well become a puppet of Himmler or Martin Borman given his nearly hopeless addiction to morphine. And just with Goering you have three HIGHLY branching paths.
Honestly, and I swear I might get flak for this, I think if Goering was in charge, he would have made peace with the Allies. Goering was diagnosed as a psychopath, something I don’t believe, but he was certainly a narcissist and neither have the capacity for true racism, because it above them. Everything is about themselves and themselves alone. And if Germany was willing to withdraw from western Poland, certainly the French would have made peace given they were tied to the railroad tracks and really couldn’t afford the demograhpic disaster another war would bring and they knew it.
If that happens, well, what about eastern Poland? You are basically setting up the grand alliance of the Western Powers against the Bolsheviks, that Hitler said he’d always wanted. Trigger point probably wouldn’t be over Poland itself given the extremely cynical and rather scandalous behavior of the Entente towards Poland of our timeline (OTL), but very possibly a pre-emptive strike by Stalin later in the 40s or the French having the civil war that had been brewing for a decade.
That’s just ONE possibility. I tend to think there would be no Holocaust as only Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were really in favor of such a thing among the inner circle. Cause in the end, most of the top Nazis were opportunists and brutes, only Hitler was an actual visionary…of the darkest kind.
Hi Charlottev , This is a question with several answers It would have for sure left a huge power vacuum . The German High command I believe didn’t work together very well . it was more or less every man for himself . you’re correct in that Goering would have taken over but he was no general and he had problems just running the luftwaffe Hitler had so kept all the power to himself there was no set process for detailing the handover of power . My guess would be (and this is only a guess ) would be if this happened in November 1939 than maybe Goring becomes the the new leader like you said but the generals would end up running the war . and since Goring lacks Hitler ,s commitment to continuing the conflict he would have offered some sort of deal with France and Britain that would have carved up Poland the Russians taking !/2 and some kind of assurance that the other 1/2 would have been somehow administered by some kind of governing body . In November 1939 there wasn’t too many in favor of another western front like WWI the Allies would have taken the deal with promises of a non agression pact . with Britain and France which would eventually lead to an attack on the Soviet Union or the Soviets attack The Germans .At any rate they would go at each other . The Germans and Soviets with the western allies on the sidelines . just a theory
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It is an interesting question.
The issue with the Hitler system of government was that many of his lackeys (such as Hess and Bormann) had basically no power base of their own. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Hitler’s speech on that November 1939 night had been half an hour longer, he would have been blown to pieces by Elser’s bomb.
Hess would have been sidelined quickly without Hitler, same for Bormann who always derived his power from the presence of the Führer himself. Göring was probably too corrupt to be take seriously by many, Himmler is another one of those who would likely have been nothing without Hitler and Goebbels certainly had a podium (Nazi controlled media, radio) but again he was a Hitler lackey.
It might well have come down to either a coup launched by the generals who would have seen their chance with Hitler gone, or someone like Reinhard Heydrich who had the will, the ability and the ruthlessness to organize effectively (and used it to devastating effect to help start the process that killed so many millions of people). The timeline would have been drastically altered from 1939 forward.
It shall always remain speculation.
The tragedy of Elser’s bomb was that he (before Stauffenberg) got closer than anyone ever did before to actually killing Hitler, and he actually would have succeeded if Hitler kept the schedule he normally kept. Everything went as planned, no one moved the bomb (such as in Stauffenberg’s case) and it went off and exploded the way it was supposed to.
Alas, the blackouts caused Hitler’s speech to start earlier and it was far shorter than it usually was. Hitler was gone for fifteen minutes or so when it went off. Of course, Hitler saw it as just one more sign that he was chosen by providence.
In the case of the Stauffenberg plot (Operation Wälkure) there could still have been millions saved, yet millions were already dead by then. Nevertheless, German casualties might have been much lower. More than 50% of German war dead were after the Stauffenberg bomb. German casualty rates skyrocketed in the last 9 months of the war. Who knows if that plot had succeeded? Millions of German and Soviet civilians and troops not killed. Worth it? I’d say so. Sadly, it ended the way it did.
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