What if Hitler was never born?

Adolf Hitler 1933 - Wikimedia commons

What if this would be mass murderer had died in his cradle or a World War 1 trench or had been assassinated in the early days of fascism? This type of question is common for anyone speculating whether the second global conflict could have been averted.  Another question is whether or not Germany would have fallen if their leader had died in the early stages of the war.

            It is almost certain that a second global conflict would have occurred because of several factors.  Germany was a changed and traumatised country after the First World War.  Many felt that the terms of the Versailles treaty were too harsh to be imposed on a country impoverished by a major war.  Along with the Versailles treaty came a poisonous notion: the stabbed in the back myth.

            This myth posited that the German armed forces had been betrayed on the civilian front by defeatists, Republicans and above all, the Jews.  Europe always had an undercurrent of antisemitism, but propaganda like this theory only served to popularise the sentiment.  The Nazi party derived itself from one of the many earlier far-right parties, which espoused most of the views that we associate with national socialism.  When Hitler joined the party, it was at its most fluid in its ideas.  It played the anti-capitalist card in one arena and was pro-capitalist in another (when speaking with German industrial leaders).  Its success was that of a chameleon.  It exploited the ideas that were already there in order to gain traction.  The ideas became more cemented with the publication of Hitler’s famous work ‘Mein Kampf’.  It is sometimes assumed that Germanic myth and nationalism was born in this period.  In reality, it was predated by earlier nineteenth-century thought in which theories of Teutonic perfection were first proposed.  Racialist ideas were popular throughout Europe, but these gained a large following in Germany and Austria.  This helped to facilitate the Anschluss, the bloodless annexation of Austria.

            Large-scale industrialisation made the Nazis popular with civilians, while the massive remilitarisation was popular with the demobilised soldiers (many of whom had joined the far-right Freikorps).  The latter policy was illegal, according to the terms of the Versailles treaty and caused a tension between Germany and other countries.  The then popular Nazi view that other peoples were inferior, that Germany needed more space and that Germans should form a great German empire ensured that western Europe would again be at war.

            The question of how Germany would have fared might need to be assessed in light of Hitler’s record of leadership throughout the war.  In the initial stages of the war, Hitler acquitted himself admirably as a military strategist, but as the war progressed, he became increasingly impractical and paranoid.

            Albert Speer, the architect of the Third Reich and author of ‘Inside the Third Reich’ detailed the paranoia, the white elephant projects and wasteful ‘wunderwaffe’ projects that plagued Nazi Germany throughout the war.  Hitler loved these superweapons, while Speer hated them.  In his view, the resources used to create them could have been far more productive in another part of the war.  An example of this was the V1 flying bomb.  All of these bombs combined which descended on Britain did not equal the payload of a single bombing raid by a B17 Heavy bomber formation.

V1 rocket moved into launching position

            While Mein Kampf may have helped Hitler cement his leadership of Germany, it also acted as his personal manifesto.  It was one of the factors in Stalin’s mistrust of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact.  Stalin knew by the contents of the book how Hitler viewed Russia and that it was only a matter of time before Nazi Germany launched its invasion to the east.  The book could serve excellently as propaganda for anyone in the Slavic countries to drum up anti-German sentiment.  The nature of Hitler’s destructive intentions towards the Jews and Slavs was made abundantly clear. This could be considered a grave strategic mistake.

            When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazi armed forces began their extermination of the Jews, killing many other Soviet civilians along the way.  The Soviet citizens, including the army, were considered Untermensch and not really worthy of life.

            Instead of doing this, Hitler could have easily exploited the nationalist sentiment in Eastern Europe and kept his private contempt for the Slavic peoples in check until later, when he could destroy his enemies in detail.  There was already plenty of anti-Soviet resentment in Ukraine alone.  The Holodomor, or Ukraine’s great famine was basically engineered by the Soviets.  The ‘Ukrainian Insurgent Army’, which was around 200,000 strong could have been mobilised in alliance with Nazi Germany.

            Many attempts to assassinate Hitler ended in failure.  The Special Operations Executive speculated on many methods of killing including bombs and even poisoning the water supply on his personal train.  Eventually, they decided it was best not to try and kill Hitler.  Hitler’s own dogma and strategic stupidity in the later stages of the war was judged to be more of an asset to the Allied war effort than his death.  If anything, Hitler’s death may have allowed a more competent leader to take over and use Hitler’s charismatic memory to drive on the Nazi war effort as a martyr. 

            Prior to 1942, Hitler made a number of good choices.  In fact, at one point he might be considered a fairly good general.  A number of his mistakes are criticised in hindsight. For instance, at Dunkirk, he ordered that army, in general, pursue the allies no further; a decision which irked some commanders.  However, this advice was given by Von Rundstedt, who was considered a good general at the time.  Another decision for which he is criticised is that he did not initially push the advance in the east all the way to Moscow, deciding to target Kiev instead.  This resulted in the largest encirclement in military history and one of the greatest victories in terms of casualties inflicted, prisoners captured, and material captured or destroyed. 

Massive Destruction at Kiev 1941

            However, his willingness to listen to prudent advice severely diminished after 1941.  According to Albert Speer, in his book ‘Inside the Third Reich’, he details an incident where the troops in the eastern front desperately required materials such as adequate cold weather clothing.  Hitler was willing to rectify this situation until he heard a certain poetic refrain from the front showing the despair of the troops.  At this point, he judged the problems of the army to be purely based on morale and decided to crack down on ‘defeatism’. 

We can never know what history would read if Hitler disappeared from its pages.  However, all the ingredients of antisemitism, genocide and world war were present before, during and after the first world war.  Hitler was charming, charismatic and galvanised the masses.  However, he only surfed the massive wave of events that culminated in the Second World War.  Moreover, he was certainly not the only great orator in Germany.  He failed utterly in elements of strategic planning later in the war, where more competent leadership could have won the war.  Hitler was a monster, but his incompetence, especially towards the end, enabled an Allied victory which otherwise might not have been possible.