Would the world be a better place if Germany had won WWI?

[Tattila the Hun]

I'd say, that more interesting question would be, if the war had ended in a stalemate, perhaps after the... Michael-offensive, I think it was, and an equitable peace would have been brokered by swedes or someone. Or, Germany loses like it did, but the Entente feels responsible enough to not sadle her with all of the wars cost... They estimated, that Germany would have paid it's reparations by 1984 or so...

That little snafu ended up costing some 50 million people their lives, later on...

[Imran Siddiqui]

A Q-U-I-C-K War... Germany wouldn't have felt hardly anything or lost close to 10 mil people if they took Paris in that first year.

[reds4ever]

Big "if" though Imran, they ran out of stream like they were always going to.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by reds4ever
Big "if" though Imran, they ran out of stream like they were always going to.

Not necessarily a big if. If the taxi cab drivers of Paris were on strike that week (), it would have most likely happened.

[GePap]

Originally posted by reds4ever
Big "if" though Imran, they ran out of stream like they were always going to.

If the Germans had taken out Russia and France early on, a British blocaked would have been utterly ineffective, and that beyond the fact that Britain would have been utterly incapable of challenging Germany on land.

[reds4ever]

From what I've read there was never the infrastructure in France for Germany to get enough troops, material etc. to the front in time to defeat France before Russia mobilized. The "plan" was flawed from the start.

[Barnabas]

The italians kinda like lost nothing for mussolini, I would have taken trieste from them, and give it to austria

[Patroklos]

France would have probably had to give back the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine that it took from Germany after the Franco-Prussian War.

The opposite happened in 1870, as France was squarely ass raped.

[Patroklos]

But it only took a few years for the Communists to become important in every country in Europe.

.

Interestingly, it took even less for them to become utterly unimportant, reduced to the pitied alternate reality manufacturing kooks* we all know and love today.

That is the problem with communism, no replay value whatsoever, especially with such a mundane story and anticlimactic ending

the rising power of the Klan leads to the first fascist government

*HAHAHAHAHA, as a case in point

[molly bloom]

Re: Would the world be a better place if Germany had won WWI?

Originally posted by Lancer


What am I not thinking of?

That Kaiser Wilhelm was dangerously unstable, for one thing.


There were already avowedly anti-Slavic and Pan-German tendencies and organisations in his empire; genocide had also been attempted in German South-West Africa, and a beaten British Empire might have been forced to recognise an independent Afrikaaner state, or accede to its joining with South West Africa. I don't want to think how that might have turned out for Zulus, Bantus, Bushmen, Hereros and so forth.

I suppose that Jewish/Zionist emigration might have been greatly increased (both from a victorious Germany and a vanquished France), but that this time the Ottomans would have been the ones having to suppress Arab rioters.


I could certainly see a beaten France turning against its minorities (L'Affaire Dreyfus was hardly a distant memory) and perhaps an unpleasant ultra-Catholic ultra-rightist regime being put in place. Possibly even the same kind of covert rearmament would have taken place as took place in Nazi Germany, and certainly French scientific expertise could have been put to more deadly use.

Also, in de Gaulle, France had someone familiar with the concept of Blitzkrieg.


I think there might have been the same kind of little wars we saw in the Cold War fought by the proxies of both armed camps in WWI- Japan would probably still have enlarged itself at the expense of Germany's holdings in the Pacific and in China, and possibly also at the expense of a beaten Imperial Russia.

[Urban Ranger]

Re: Re: Would the world be a better place if Germany had won WWI?

Originally posted by germanos
Then Communism would have remained focussed on its original goal of revolution in industrialized countries, making the victorious Kaiserreich a main target itself.

Which means that it's likely that Germany would become the first communist country, followed by Great Britain and France.

Hmm... wouldn't that be interesting.

[Proteus_MST]

Re: Re: Would the world be a better place if Germany had won WWI?

Originally posted by molly bloom

There were already avowedly anti-Slavic and Pan-German tendencies and organisations in his empire; genocide had also been attempted in German South-West Africa, and a beaten British Empire might have been forced to recognise an independent Afrikaaner state, or accede to its joining with South West Africa. I don't want to think how that might have turned out for Zulus, Bantus, Bushmen, Hereros and so forth.

But in contrast to the genocide during WW2 it happened against the will of the german government because the commanding general in Deutsch-Südwest (General von Trotha) gave unauthorrized orders on its own initiative (after it became known it led to the public being shocked and finally to the german parliament disbanding itself out of protest against the generals actions and after von Trotha returned to germany, he was generally shunned, even from Kaiser Wilhelm himself).

Which is, why I think,too, that a german victory very probably would have prevented the holocaust.

IMHO it would (as already stated by some in this thread) have lead to a prolonged period of imperialism by both, germany and the UK who, after the conquest of france probably would have signed a peace treaty (with germany probably taking over the french colonies). I don´t know what germany would have done to france, very probably it would have seen to it that france doesn´t get into a position that it can hurt germany in the far future (with a treaty containing passages detailing what kind of military france is allowed to have (just like the treaty germany had to sign after loosing WW1) and would definitely had led to dismantling the military fortifications along the french/german border.

Years after this war perhaps another war against russia would have broken out and I don´t know who would have won.

As germany probably wouldn´t have experienced the horrors of WW2, we would still be much more and militaristic and nationalistic, just as america is nowadays, with probably having large military spendings.
And just as Britain we would have a constituional monarchy, as the Kaiser never abdicted.

Israel and the UN either would never have formed, or in a different way than in reality and german would still be an important language in science (alongside english).

It could be that the USA wouldn´t be the power factor it is today (but would have remained more isolationist) and that international terrorism wouldn´t play the role it plays today (because Israel would have formed either a diffferent way or never)

[molly bloom]

Re: Re: Re: Would the world be a better place if Germany had won WWI?

Originally posted by Proteus_MST


Which is, why I think,too, that a german victory very probably would have prevented the Holocaust.

I suspect it would have prevented the Jewish Holocaust, but not necessarily a holocaust of sorts.

Paul Rohrbach, head of German immigration in Southwest Africa, wrote in 1912:

“No false philanthropy or racial theory can convince sensible people that the preservation of a tribe of South Africa’s kaffirs…is more important to the future of mankind than the spread of the great European nations and the white race in general. Not until the native learns to produce anything of value in the service of the higher race, ie—in the service of its and his own progress, does he gain any moral right to exist.”

and in 1915:

When the uprising [of the Hereros] broke out, its suppression was not left to the then Governor Leutwein and his experienced old officers. Instead a commander-in-chief was sent down who had no notion that – in the later word of Dernburg – the natives are the great economic asset of an African colony. A war of extermination was declared against the Hereros and something like half the people perished in the foodless and waterless desert. Likewise did all the cattle fall victim to the inexpedient [!] conduct of the war. Of course the rebels had to be punished and, above all, disarmed, but to exterminate half of them was as absurd as it could possibly be. The dangerous labour shortage now prevalent in Southwest Africa derives mainly from the conduct of the war of 1904-1905. It is responsible for the present slowing down of the economic development of the colony. .

Paul Rohrbach, 'Unsere koloniale Zukunftsarbeit', Stuttgart, 1915, pp. 29f.


It's always worth remembering that:

"...it was, after all, in the nature of the German political system that the Reich administration, while sensitive to the various outside pressures that could be applied by public opinion, business considerations and campaign groups, was nonetheless not under any constitutional obligation to act upon such stimuli, a circumstance which ensured that it very often chose not to do so."

'Rivalry in Southern Africa: The Transformation of German Colonial Policy' by Matthew Seligmann


In saying this, I don't believe that an Imperial Wilhelmine government would have been necessarily any more 'racist' than any of the other imperialist colonizers, including the United States, who in successfully liberating the Philippines from Spanish rule, had then to 'liberate' the freed Filipinos from their dangerous ideas of self-government and independence:

By the end of 1901, Batangas was one of the last places where resistance still persisted. General Samuel Sumner’s attempts to quell rebellion in the 1st District of Southern Luzon might have been succeeding, but were too slow to suit Chaffee. On November 30, 1901, Franklin J. Bell took over Sumner’s command. Unlike Sumner, whose methods had been comparatively humane, Bell had already proven his ruthlessness in eradicating the resistance in northern Luzon. Bell’s plan for Batangas wasn’t much different than that of N. Luzon. On December 8, Bell issued a directive to set up “zones” around selected towns on the pretext of protecting the Filipinos. Nearly all of Batangas’ population was forcibly relocated to the zones and “dead lines” were drawn around the areas. Outside these lines everything was systematically destroyed. People, houses, animals, stores, boats, and crops were burned or killed to demoralize the civilians and cut off supplies to the resistance.

No one will ever know how many died in Batangas, but estimates range as high as 100,000. Bell himself claimed that 1/6 of the population perished, but insisted that “it has been necessary to adopt what in other countries would probably be thought harsh measures.”

"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me...Kill everyone over the age of ten."

General Jacob Smith, Samar campaign

The British also did their fair share of mass murder- ineptly managing to let millions die of starvation in British India:

The world's worst recorded food disaster happened in 1943 in British-ruled India. Known as the Bengal Famine, an estimated four million people died of hunger that year alone in eastern India (that included today's Bangladesh). The initial theory put forward to 'explain' that catastrophe was that there as an acute shortfall in food production in the area. However, Indian economist Amartya Sen (recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, 1998) has established that while food shortage was a contributor to the problem, a more potent factor was the result of hysteria related to World War II which made food supply a low priority for the British rulers. The hysteria was further exploited by Indian traders who hoarded food in order to sell at higher prices.

http://www.indiaonestop.com/Greenrevolution.htm

And to think we staill have apologists for this kind of colonialism today...

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
A Q-U-I-C-K War... Germany wouldn't have felt hardly anything or lost close to 10 mil people if they took Paris in that first year.

"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions." - Robert Lynd

WW1 started with the same illusion, however everybody started to disenchant as soon as fall 1914. If Germany had been fighting a new war shortly after its WW1 victory, war weariness would have appeared very, very quickly.

Edit: also, remember that the French General Staff was certain that Berlin would fall very quickly as well. With the Germans taken between France and Russia, they looked doomed from the French perspective.

[Patroklos]

Molly,

Your obession with a single mid grade functionary is hardly a convincing arguement. You could find far more inflamitory language from French, British, Dutch, Russian and even American officials in the same period. And it is generally accepted that German colonial rule in Africa was far less intrusive in Africa that the other powers. Especially in China.