What if Hitler had been assassinated in 1930?

What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1930?  How would history have been changed?

I believe there would have been no Second World War in Europe.  The more than 20 million troops who died in battle and more than 20 million civilians who were killed would have lived out their natural lives.  But the consequences after that?  A mixture of both good and bad..

Some say history might not have been changed all that much.  They say some other Nazi, such as Goebbels or Goering, would have stepped into Hitler’s shoes.   And that leader, they add, might not have made Hitler’s mistakes.  A more capable leader might have won the war.

Adolf Hitler

I don’t think so.  The Nazi party was organized around the cult of Hitler’s personality.  It wouldn’t have been so easy to find a substitute with his charisma.  I don’t think any of the others would have had his ability to maneuver his way into the chancellorship, then leverage that power into absolute dictatorship and lead a reluctant German officer corps into war.

In the absence of Hitler, Germany might well have become an anti-semitic right-wing dictatorship anyhow, like Poland, Hungary and other European countries.  The German government might have included a few Nazis.  Germany certainly would have re-armed and resumed its place among the great European powers.

But the German generals did not want to go to war with Britain and France.  We now know they would have attempted a coup if the Allies had resisted the remilitarization of the Rhineland or the annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.  If Hitler had not tamed them, they would not have consented to starting a general war in Europe.

After the war, the German generals claimed they might have won if Hitler had not rejected their advice on strategy and tactics.  But Hitler had a better strategic sense than they did.  He recognized that without a dependable source of oil, the blitzkrieg tactic would have stalled, because it depended on large numbers of motorized vehicles moving quickly.  He prioritized the invasion of Ukraine and the Caucasus, but the main objective of his tradition-bound generals was Moscow, the enemy capital.

 No Hitler, no Second World War in Europe.  What follows from that?

There would have been no atomic bomb in 1945 or perhaps.  Without a Hitler, there would have been no reason to undertake such a project.

Only the United States had the wealth and industrial power to undertake the Manhattan Project, and even then, the project would not have succeeded without the help of European refugee scientists.

There probably would still have been a Pacific War between the United States and Japan.  The cause of that conflict was the U.S. oil embargo against Japan to enforce a demand that Japan withdraw its forces from China.

Rather than comply with that demand, Japan seized the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), the only important source of oil in the Far East.  The Japanese attempted to neutralize British and American forces by conquering the Philippines, capturing Britain’s Singapore base and bombing the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Even though the United States would have lacked an atomic bomb, there would have been no need for an American invasion of the Japanese islands.  U.S. forces could have bombed and starved the Japanese into submission without an invasion and without nuclear weapons, probably with as much or more loss of Japanese lives than in the actual war.

Without Hitler’s war, the Red Army would not have marched into eastern and central Europe.  There would have been no partition of Germany, no Soviet satellite nations and no Iron Curtain across Europe.

There would have been no Holocaust, no European refugee crisis and no independent state of Israel in 1948 or perhaps ever.

Europe would not have been devastated by war.  European nations would not have needed U.S. economic aid or wanted U.S. military bases.  None of the industrial nations, neither the United Kingdom, Germany or the Soviet Union, would have been devastated.  All would have been economically competitive with the United States.

There wouldn’t have been a U.S.-led Western alliance.  Instead the great European powers probably would have regarded the United States as an economic and geopolitical rival.  War between European countries would not have been unthinkable.

The League of Nations would have continued to exist.  The United States probably would have joined eventually.

There would have been no European Coal and Steel Community, which was created to aid the recovery of Europe after the war and which evolved evolved into the European Common Market and European Union, which would not have come into .

Italy’s Fascist government would not have been overthrown.  Fascism, anti-semitism and so-called scientific racism would not have been discredited by Hitler’s example.

There would have been no German V-2 rockets, no intercontinental ballistic missiles and no Apollo program.  There would have been no moon landing in 1969 or perhaps ever.

Mao Zedong might well have taken power in China, and there might well have been a Cold War between the United States and Communist China.  But there would have been no Korean Conflict because Korea would not have been partitioned.I don’t know whether there would have been a more general Cold War between the Communist and Western powers.

In the 1920s, there was a kind of low-level cold war as the Soviet Union tried to instigate rebellion among the European working class and the subject peoples of the various European empires.   This died down in the 1930s as Stalin became fearful of the threat of Hitler.

I don’t know what would have happened in the alternate world—whether the Soviets would have continued to support revolution or whether they would prioritized “socialism in one country” and sought good relations with the European democracies.  All the right-wing dictatorships would have been anti-Communist on principle.

We regard Hitler and the Nazis as a benchmark for defining evil.  Who would have filled that role if Nazis had never come to power?  Stalin?  A historical figure such as Caligula or Vlad the Impaler?  A fictional character?  I don’t know.

All this is guesswork.  There is only one thing I am sure of.  Nobody in 2019 would have been aware of the catastrophe they escaped because of Hitler’s death in 1930.

What perils have we escaped of which we wee not aware?

LINKS

The blast of World War II by the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Adam Tooze interview about Hitler and World War Two.

The ROA and UPA were pro-Axis Russian and Ukrainian fighters. Note the chart does not include civilian deaths.  Source: Wikipedia.   Click to enlarge.

World War II casualties on Wikipedia.

World War II casualties by the Centre Robert Schuman.

World War 2 Death Count by the Hitler Historical Museum.

 

Tags: Adolf Hitler, alternate history