Young Pretender,
The Problem is that some of the posters here are so knowledegble about what happened it blinds them to what could have happened. In otherwords they miss the forest for the trees.
People tend to be very definitive about what would happen in a case of a What if? This is b/c they think they know the real answer from extrapolating from real history. However History is not science. People are making broad assumptions on what is probable based on a sample of one.
People always bring up the Nazis since their victory would make a very different world.
Since we never had a WWIII with the Soviets. In many respects we are still living in post war era created by the allied victory in WWII.
As for a German Victory I don't see why it is ASB.
The later the POD the less likely a victory. From any POD from 1943 on I agree it is almost ASB.
By 1942 after the USA declaration of war, a Nazi outright victory becomes impossible, but a negoitated peace (stalemate) is still possible. Not not at all likely, especially if Hitler is still alive but not ASB.
But anytime before the USA declaration of war, the earlier the POD the better, it is entirlely possible that the Nazi's could have won the war.
Kissinger thought Hitler should have declared war in 1938.
Or he could have played nice till 1942 when Germay would have been militarily ready.
Or he or the weather could have prevented Dunkirk.
Or he could have pretended to march in to Russia as a liberator with plenty of slavic figureheads and the Soviet Union would have collapsed like a house of cards
In any case after the fall of France he had a lot of strategic and even some diplomatic possibilites.
Yes if Hitler acted exactly like he did in OTL he would have gotten similar results (we think) but what if he did something different?
And has been said, ad nauseum, proposing that Hitler do something requires it to be something Hitler would have ever possibly conceived of doing, ever. It's common to postulate that Hitler was such an anti-communist that he could have rolled into the Soviet Union posing as a liberator. But in this case, Communism is just a red herring. (1) He wasn't sending out the Einstaztgruppen and preparing the Hunger Plan because he thought the people it would kill were Communists,
he very literally attacked the Soviet Union so he could implement them. The racism, the anti-slav and semticism, is far more of a core of his being than the anti-communism was. The brutality, as a emptier of the land, is the point of the entire program. It cannot be hand waved away as long as we are talking the Hitler of history and fact.
And the willingness of either Churchill or Roosevelt to pursue a negotiated settlement are just not there, in any credible source as long as Hitler is alive. They only become the merest, slightest, maybe maybe maybe ghosts of possibilities if Hitler dies. Once Hitler has invaded anything besides Poland, there's no chance of a negotiated settlement, and Hitler was going for all the marbles - as well as realizing that industrially and economically, time was not on his side. And thus why all of the "Nazi deploy teh super-doooper weapon" threads continue to get shot down.
(1) I just had to.