What was the Nazi's plans relationships with nations that they didn't conquer after the war?

Out of the Foxholes Questions
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The more I think about the war the more perplexed I am about why the Nazi’s thought they could win this war. It seems that the Nazi’s just basically went pillaging, destroying and killing in as many countries as they possibly could and never ever even once thought about the consequences of their actions or the thought of losing the war. It’s not even clear to me what the Nazi’s win condition was. It seems to me they wanted to conquer as many nations as possible. However, they never thought about what other countries would think about that and what foreign relations would be like with other countries if the Nazi’s controlled that much area. I can’t imagine any country allowing a nation like Nazi’ Germany to exist that spans from France to Moscow. It’s such a huge problem for many reasons. Britain, United States, Canada, Australia or any other nation would never allow that because it would be a huge security problem for them. Same thing with Japan too. No one would allow one nation to control basically all of Asia. It’s just too much power in to few hands. It’s really forcing the world to fight till they can defeat the Nazi’s and Japan. Yet the Nazi’s nor Japan seem to recognize this and/or care.

This is never really talked about in history. It seems strange to me that its not. The Nazi’s are not stupid. They are highly intelligent, capable and motivated people. They are also extremely committed to this cause. Yet either the Nazi’s didn’t didn’t think about what foreign relationships with other countries would look like if they held all of Europe or it’s been lost to time. Any military or government official in Nazi Germany should have recognize that this would be a problem for many countries. Just getting a good portion of Europe and retaining it after the war would be a challenge. Since they’re going around these countries pillaging, destroying and killing as much as possible. There’s going to be a lot of countries that aren’t going to be very happy. They’re not going to want to do business with the Nazi’s. If they are caught their options will be suicide, execution or many years in jail. Not to mention history will hate them forever. The Nazi’s don’t seem to think about this problem.

Not to mention Hitler was high on Amphetamines’ most of the war and Germany High Command has known this for years! The generals and military in Nazi Germany are suppose to be agnostic to politics and they are intelligent. Yet they throw away their professionalism, honor, buy into Nazi politics and follow Hitler the best they can into this very nasty and bloody war. They know Hitler is going to get them killed and hated by history. Yet, they follow anyway. They just don’t care. No one in Nazi Germany seems to care. The people who do care can’t do anything. The people who try get caught and killed. Nazi’s have the power to suppress any dissention.

When Ewin Rommel died he had to know the war is lost and will be over soon. Yet he would rather commit suicide six months before the war ends than get in a car with his family and drive to allied lines and surrender. Joseph Goebbels will raise six children during the war and then kill them all including his wife. I understand he’s wealthy and he has everything he could possibly need or want, but raising kids is no joke and its hard for everyone. He raise kids and backed Hitler up every step of the way during the worst war in human history! Goebbels has a PH.D degree, a large family and didn’t leave himself any outs. He went through all that work to create a large family and doesn’t have a plan if he lost the war. He’s going to work like hell during a very nasty war and be hated by history and he just doesn’t care.

Nazi’s don’t need to go to war. They can do whatever they want in Germany and no one would care. They could kill all the “Jews” (They really aren’t in my opinion, but anyway) in Germany and no one would care. The Nazi’s could kill half their population and really get their dictatorship on and the world wouldn’t do anything! Nazi party leadership and Germany Military High Command could retire and leave the country. They are already extremely successful. Hitler is probably the best orator in the world. He doesn’t need to be talking about Nazism. He could talk about any topic. Probably make a fortune as a motivational speaker. Goebbels wrote 15 books on Nazism. Could write about anything. Probably make a fortune sitting on a beach, watching women and writing sleazy sex novels. Goring WWI ace. Just about any corporation would take him and this is during the golden years of flight.

It’s so strange to me that these guys would give up successful lives, adopt this extreme ideology, go around Europe pillaging, destroying and killing everything they can. Not care about what any nation would think about their actions or what their relationships with nations they couldn’t conquer look like. They acted like they have a death wish and they are going to be hated by history they just don’t care. I don’t think this is about creating some superior Aryan Race or riding the world of all the Jews. They also don’t care if the live or die or what history thinks about them. This is straight up rage and hate for the world. This is pillage, destroy, kill as much as they possibly can before they get killed themselves.

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Lack of imagination can certainly explain some of this. It wasn’t the job of the OKW or OKH to figure out the “after” … it was their job to implement the “doing”. A rational government would never have undertaken the kind of expansionary war that the Germans did, but as you point out yourself, the German government wasn’t a rational one.

Hitler, to the extent he appears to have conceptualized the “after”, seems to have assumed that German military victory would stamp out all domestic opposition in the conquered lands so that a relatively small gendarmerie would be sufficient to keep the peace and to keep the plunder flowing back to Germany proper. Few of the top Nazis had any business experience, and almost all of them looked down on even German business as a grubby, sordid, dishonorable pursuit, so they never seem to have grasped the economic role of competing businesses in a (relatively) free market. The only exception seems to be for companies producing war goods like tanks, planes, and weapons, where competition was allowed or even encouraged.

But countries of that size existed in the time period (Australia, Canada, China, Soviet Union, USA), so it wouldn’t be an intellectual impossibility.

Leaving the aforementioned huge countries undisturbed except for the war-scarred but vastly expanded Soviet Union.

The nature of the German system did not encourage the kind of strategic thought and planning necessary for a stable post-conquest empire. Here’s how Severian described it at a no-longer-active blog a few years back:

Obviously civilian life isn’t as goal-directed as the military in wartime, but a similar principle applied — given a vague set of generalized objectives from the top (Kershaw’s famous “working towards the Führer” thesis), everyone at every level was encouraged to move the ball downfield as he saw fit … with the added twist that, in the absence of a clearly defined, military-style chain of command, the various “subordinates” would ruthlessly battle it out with each other, Darwin-style, for bureaucratic supremacy.

Thus the Nazis’ infamous plate-of-spaghetti org charts. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure there were more than a few guys who held wildly different ranks in various different organizations simultaneously. He might be a mere patrolman in the Order Police, but an officer in the SS, a noncom in the SA (you could be in both, at least in the early days), and so forth. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more than one guy who technically reported to himself, somewhere deep in the bowels of the RHSA [Reich Security Main Office]. You could spend a lifetime trying to sort this stuff out …

… Which perhaps help explain why “The Nazi’s don’t seem to think about this problem.”

Because they saw what happened to military men who opposed Hitler even before the war began, and at the very start of the Reich, every German soldier re-swore his oath of service … to Hitler, personally, not to the government. It’s difficult for we moderns to accept just how seriously Germans took oaths compared to today’s attitudes. Going against Hitler wasn’t just opposing the current Chancellor (or as the US military opposed Trump during his presidency) but actual, by-the-book treason.

The aftermath of the Great War was far more devastating to Germany’s middle classes than in any other non-revolutionary power. Many, many formerly self-supporting families were made destitute by the hyperinflation of the 1920s, creating a very valuable pool of angry, capable men who could be persuaded to do things they might never have contemplated otherwise. Giving them opportunities to recover their position in society, wear a spiffy uniform and “get back” at anyone they thought had had a part in ruining them was a very potent weapon for the Nazis.

On the other hand, the Nazi economic policies did require them to go to war … the often sneered-at “short, victorious war” was just what they needed to keep the economy ticking over for them. The plunder from the victim nations allowed the German government to keep their economy in mostly “peacetime” mode until years after the war began, and that helped keep homefront morale very high.

Hitler was a brilliant speaker, and his voice was apparently very well suited to the primitive broadcast radio technology of the time, but his talents were nowhere near as useful on film or (if he’d lasted that long) on television. But mere wealth wasn’t his main concern … he wanted power above all else. You don’t get power by selling self-improvement techniques to small audiences. The rest of the top Nazis had similar desires, despite their other talents.

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You really think it’s that simple? No one had the foresight or thought about what would happen if things didn’t go their way? That seems very extremely and utterly stupid and reckless to me. Hitler has been to jail once before so he knows very well what happens when things don’t work out. I’d like to think he’d be smart enough to think about what happens if he loses the war and what comes after it. He’s only fifty.

As for the generals and OKH Hitler is going to tell them to commit serious war crimes that will get them killed. They’re military men and they throw their whole careers and lives away for Hitler without thinking it through?

If it really is that simple where they just went to war and didn’t give any thoughts about what would happen if they lost the war. It’s just so dumb. They spend all their energy getting ahold of Germany, then want to spend the rest of their lives in the most destructive conflict in human history trying to conquer as much land as they can and if they don’t they die.

I find that so hard to believe. These people are smart. They have families. Careers. They aren’t that old. They’re just going to throw all that way like that? It just doesn’t make any sense.