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View Full Version : Other If Germany Had Won World War 1


NorthernWhiteFurball
August 19th, 2010, 07:07 PM
Kind of a followup to the Hitler thread.

Since analysts blame the rise of Hitler on the aftermath of WWI and the punitive measures of the Versailles Treaty, the question is what would have happened had Germany won WWI.

I think that the world just would have developed more slowly, led by more staid, orderly Germany rather than by the more freewheeling USA. Then again, Germany was very technologically advanced - so maybe the only difference would have been that German would be the language of the Internet :).

And Lenin would never have seized power in Russia, so that eventually the Czarist monarchy would have modernized on its own, so that Russian empire would have been no worse off now than parts of it are under Putin and the autocrats in the 'stans. In fact it would have stayed together and presented an economic and political foil to the German empire, perhaps maintaining a balance of power (depending on how far German forces would have gone during the war).

There would be less of a problem in the Middle East, which may well have eventually fallen under de facto German control, and certainly no need for Israel as the German regime during World War 1 and until Hitler was not specifically anti-Semitic.

And of course there would not have been a World War 2.

I actually think the world would have been a better and more orderly, if less exciting, one, had the results of WWI been different.

FuzzyIzmit
August 19th, 2010, 10:44 PM
Reminds me of a 'Sliders' episode I saw long ago...

stephen
August 19th, 2010, 10:58 PM
On a similar note - what if the Versailles treaty wasn't as damaging to Germany as it was? Meaning they still lose WWI, but they aren't left as crippled as Versailles left them.

NorthernWhiteFurball
August 20th, 2010, 12:10 AM
Or what if there had been something like a Marshall Plan after WWI? Either of those scenarios would have prevented the rise of Hitler. Only a desperate people could follow a sociopath of that magnitude.