Second Book Read-Along Thread: Hitler's strange ideas about allying the British against Russia

6 posts

Welund

For a long time, this frontier was there for the West. I live in it. Remember, Hitler was a Karl May autist: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May He's said to have learned about what America really was late in life. Russia likewise he may not have learned of in a visual way.

He was a Romantic who wanted to play Cowbows and Indians.

He would belong on Salo.

Yes. Wehrbauer = farmer-soldiers like the original base of the Roman Empire. (Idealized in the USA at the time of Jefferson no doubt in a "liberal" way -- independent farmers in militias, etc.)
Stars Down To Earth
Interesting. I don't know much about Hitler's personal life, or what his personal experiences with Russia or America were, but he wasn't the only one with this vision of a German vs. Slav cosmic struggle - a large chunk of the NSDAP, including Himmler, also held these views. Even at the very end, after Hitler's death, a lot of them were still stupidly hoping that the Anglos would realize their mistake and join Team Teuton where they belonged.

IIRC, someone said that Hitler's genius was his "synthesist" talent - the way he combined all the hopes and grievances of his culture into a single coherent programme. Eastward expansion was one of these old themes. It also fit well into Hitler's idea of grossraum politics; only a continent-sized empire in Eurasia could achieve total self-sufficiency and compete with the big boys like the US.

Based on the Roman farmer-soldiers indeed - it's worth remembering that Mars, their war-god, was also the god of crops and corn. The early Romans conceived of "war" as a turf fight between farmers.
Stars Down To Earth

I notice there haven't been any "Nazi East" alternative-history stories at all, at least none I that know of. Plenty of fascinating fiction could be written about that scenario, but it hasn't been done.

Here's some ideas that come to mind:

- A spergy sci-fi book where the Russian helots do all the jobs to keep the empire running, while the German herrenvolk elite has gone the way of transhumanism and purposeless hedonism. Slavs do everything, they even have Slav spergs operating the tech and computers and super-weapons, while the Germans become an useless aristocracy. It ends with autistic Slavs rebelling against their Nazi masters and stuffing them into a reopened Auschwitz.

- Twelve Years A Slav , the heartbreaking teary-eyed drama of a young Slav who is cruelly separated from his beloved tracksuit and vodka bottle, and enslaved on a potato-plantation in Nazi Ostland . For twelve years, he's traded between different masters: The Cultured One, who stands around in braces and lederhosen while listening to operas (probably Wagner) and being cuckolded. The Aristocratic One, a nobleman with fancy titles and a castle. The Gay Nazi, a latex-coated Gestapo pervert who makes our hero into his sex slave, introducing him to gay BDSM and eating shit from a funnel. Directed by Spielberg.

Poast more ideas here.

Thoughts President Camacho Welund SixtusVIth @NeoBugman

kenshiro
Hitler's failure in Operation Sea Lion is based on a common misunderstanding that still plagues military doctrine today: the extent to which Air Power alone is a credible force in causing enemy surrender. Basically, he at first wanted the defeat of France and other European powers to be the thing that caused the English to throw in the towel, but they didn't. They knew they had a huge Navy, and that a German invasion would require large troop transport across a narrow strip of water to a rocky island with notoriously bad weather. He was persuaded by the idea that the Luftwaffe thought they could bomb the RAF to pieces if they had a lead time of 6-8 weeks, but weather conditions kept them from flying effective sorties, plus the RAF was pretty good on their own. In addition, and this is a mistake America has made over and over, dropping ordinance on civilian populations and enemy infrastructure doesn't do much to hinder morale. People treat bombing raids like a really bad weather event: short-lived panic then back to baseline. Being invaded by an enemy army is much more demoralizing.

To go back to your original point: had Hitler dropped his forum-LARP race doctrine and realized earlier he would need to try to invade Britain, maybe he would shift more resources to the Kriegsmarine in order to facilitate a strong invasion, but maybe not: psychological warfare had worked well for him so far, and people consistently under-estimate British military resolve.
A Gleaming Leprosy
Plagues military doctrine but not military budgets.
Welund
Related topic:

Why do people find Syria so interesting?

It is my suspicion and some others ( @Rodger Young Local Daimyo ) that the West is using the Middle East as a Colosseum, perhaps similar to what Hitler envisioned to make of Russia past the Urals.

People can like whatever they want, but ranking Arabs fighters -- this is incomprehensible, as they're just fighting Arabs and other terrible fighters from Turkey, Iran or Israel. "The Jews are better fighters than the Arabs" is a meaningless sentence.