AHC: Embarrass the Nazis and destroy their legacy

Prince Ire

I'm not really sure you can. Make them less famous? Certainly. Remove any successes? A Nazi Germany without successes is a Nazi Germany that doesn't have the opportunity to enact the Holocaust. And a Nazi Germany that doesn't enact the Holocaust means Nazism probably has the same status in the West as communism: an uncommon political position, but one that you can always find a few mainstream academics advocating for. Italian Fascism vs. Nazism will probably have similar academic debates as Trotskyism vs. Stalinism.

Committing the greatest war crimes known to man and leaving your country a bombed out wreck that has experienced complete and utter defeat at the hands of its enemies as a result of a war you started is about as legacy destroying as you can possibly get, and that's what the Nazi did OTL.
 

Dolnikan

Prince Ire said:
I'm not really sure you can. Make them less famous? Certainly. Remove any successes? A Nazi Germany without successes is a Nazi Germany that doesn't have the opportunity to enact the Holocaust. And a Nazi Germany that doesn't enact the Holocaust means Nazism probably has the same status in the West as communism: an uncommon political position, but one that you can always find a few mainstream academics advocating for. Italian Fascism vs. Nazism will probably have similar academic debates as Trotskyism vs. Stalinism.

Committing the greatest war crimes known to man and leaving your country a bombed out wreck that has experienced complete and utter defeat at the hands of its enemies as a result of a war you started is about as legacy destroying as you can possibly get, and that's what the Nazi did OTL.
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To do that, you can have them repeat their otl successes against the Czechs and even Poland, but when they turn around to go west, they don't succeed at knocking out France and in fact don't even make it to Belgium. After that, they're ground down but in the meantime still commit horrible crimes and execute some sort of miniholocaust before falling apart from ever increasing pressure. That shows them as both evil and clearly stupid.
 

Johnrankins

H.Flashman(VC) said:
No Reichstags fire means that parliament still has a say in finances. Hjalmar Schachts MEFO bills will function as ordinary governmentbonds, not as the eternal loans they were in OTL, thanks to the indefinitive 90 days extensions. In the financial crisis of 1935-1936 investors want their money back. The German Economy collapses even deeper than in 1931.
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How are you going to stop the Nazis from starting a fire in their own building?
 

Cryhavoc101

Mercurial said:
The Nazis are often characterised as being militarily successful and having an efficient government. These reputation are of course unearned and based partly in luck and happenstance and partly in inherited successes like Germany's competent officer corps. Nonetheless, myths persist to this day about Hitler and the Nazis having run Germany well, claiming they brought it back from depression and geared the country up for a conquest of Europe.

Your job in this thread is to suggest ways in which the Nazis are never remembered for anything other than incompetence, stupidity and insanity. Set the basis for a moden narrative in which even the most crazed Neo-Nazis have a hard time pointing to any "successes" of Hitler.

My only rule is that the Nazis have to actually take power. They can't fail to get elected and fade into obscurity, and they can't fail to set Hitler up as the Fuhrer. They need to get to the point where they are clearly in control of Germany and then fail miserably.
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Simple

Tell the truth - explain how and why they managed to gain power including the years leading up to Hitler gaining power and the lengths he went through to keep it.

Explain how they militarised their population, their youth in particular via the Nazification of the classroom and drove away many of the best and brightest (Jewish and other politically unacceptable intellectuals who mostly ended up in the UK and USA) creating a massive brain drain from 1933, disenfranchised German women in denying them access to higher education and greatly reduced the numbers of university students.

Then explain how they committed effective financial fraud on an unsustainable scale during the 30s that would have seen their economy utterly collapse by the early 40s had they not gone to war, but that this allowed them to rearm and buff their industry at a speed that took the Western democracies by surprise and a speed at which they struggled to respond.

Then explain how Hitler used Brinkmanship politics to gain as much as he could, using the Western powers desire for peace in order to achieve it and then finally going to war when this process would no longer work.

Then explain how having been more prepared for war and having their military at a higher level of preparedness and strength than everyone else they managed to win their earlier victory's.

Then explain that by the time the remaining nations had reacted and brought their military's to the same level of preparedness, well colour me surprised, the Nazis stop winning and pretty much start losing all the time.

Explain that while the Allies certainly benefitted from breaking the enigma code etc and air superiority, Germany also benefitted particularly early in the war from its own decryption efforts, radio intercepts and very poor opsec from its opponents (Greatly helping the first 2)

And that's before we get to the horrible things like very poor treatment of Eastern European POWs, mass murder of civilians and concentration camps etc.
 

Pesterfield

Make worse aesthetic choices.
The SS get ugly uniforms, no visionary architect or plans for grand buildings, no matter the content Hitler delivers speeches badly.
 

GeographyDude

Gone Fishin'
Pesterfield said:
Make worse aesthetic choices.
The SS get ugly uniforms, no visionary architect or plans for grand buildings, no matter the content Hitler delivers speeches badly.
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Maybe Leni Riefenstahl gets on some weird experimental kick? And this could be really funny! :openedeyewink:
 

Hugh Third of Five

Mercurial said:
The Nazis are often characterised as being militarily successful and having an efficient government. These reputation are of course unearned and based partly in luck and happenstance and partly in inherited successes like Germany's competent officer corps. Nonetheless, myths persist to this day about Hitler and the Nazis having run Germany well, claiming they brought it back from depression and geared the country up for a conquest of Europe.

Your job in this thread is to suggest ways in which the Nazis are never remembered for anything other than incompetence, stupidity and insanity. Set the basis for a moden narrative in which even the most crazed Neo-Nazis have a hard time pointing to any "successes" of Hitler.

My only rule is that the Nazis have to actually take power. They can't fail to get elected and fade into obscurity, and they can't fail to set Hitler up as the Fuhrer. They need to get to the point where they are clearly in control of Germany and then fail miserably.
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Isn't that OTL? I mean they're mostly remembered for the insanity of the Holocaust and the stupidity of picking a fight they couldn't win.
 
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MahBoi

Hugh Third of Five said:
Isn't that OTL? I mean they're mostly remembered for the insanity of the Holocaust and the stupidity of picking a fight they couldn't win.
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In Star Trek: The Original Series, there is an episode where a character from the Federation (i.e. someone with access to super futurisitc education and knowledge) decides to use Nazi Germany as a template for an alien world in chaos as the Nazis were, in his own words, the most efficient model he could think of.

That's an illustration of how, a mere 12-14 years after WW2 (TOS ran in the late 60's), people believed and perpetuated the myth that the Nazis, for all their evil and tyranny, were "efficient" and "successful".

I, too, grew up hearing the odd person say things like "THE NAZIS WERE EVIL BUT THEY SURE WERE GOOD AT RUNNING GERMANY". I sincerely cannot recall anything in my textbooks that detailed how bad the Nazis were at running things. Instead, they upheld the narrative that Nazi policies like the Reich Labour Sevice were instrumental in ending the depression. And of course, since I had no alternative knowledge source, I believed all this at the time.

It wouldn't be until I was exposed to a wider source of information on the internet that I really understood that the Nazi "successes" were all based in misunderstandings of the truth.

So no, I do not feel that OTL truly destroyed the myths around Nazi success. While things have gotten better since that one Star Trek episode, I'm still not sure I fully believe that the Nazi myths have disappeared. At the very least, there are still people, however ignorant, that believe them.
 

Johnrankins

Mercurial said:
In Star Trek: The Original Series, there is an episode where a character from the Federation (i.e. someone with access to super futurisitc education and knowledge) decides to use Nazi Germany as a template for an alien world in chaos as the Nazis were, in his own words, the most efficient model he could think of.

That's an illustration of how, a mere 12-14 years after WW2 (TOS ran in the late 60's), people believed and perpetuated the myth that the Nazis, for all their evil and tyranny, were "efficient" and "successful".

I, too, grew up hearing the odd person say things like "THE NAZIS WERE EVIL BUT THEY SURE WERE GOOD AT RUNNING GERMANY". I sincerely cannot recall anything in my textbooks that detailed how bad the Nazis were at running things. Instead, they upheld the narrative that Nazi policies like the Reich Labour Sevice were instrumental in ending the depression. And of course, since I had no alternative knowledge source, I believed all this at the time.

It wouldn't be until I was exposed to a wider source of information on the internet that I really understood that the Nazi "successes" were all based in misunderstandings of the truth.

So no, I do not feel that OTL truly destroyed the myths around Nazi success. While things have gotten better since that one Star Trek episode, I'm still not sure I fully believe that the Nazi myths have disappeared. At the very least, there are still people, however ignorant, that believe them.
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Yeah, their reputation was "Evil but efficient".
 

Some Bloke

The Wallies stand up to Hitler during the Sudeten crisis. Hitler gets remembered as a conman who should have folded the moment his bluff was called.
 

GeographyDude

Gone Fishin'
MOD EDIT


First off, the guy doesn’t even look like Hitler!. Which to me, makes it even funnier.

And yes, NC-17 and rather edgy.

And then, okay, to me, I am in favor of using porn as a weapon against powerful, bad-acting men. Not so much in favor of doing the same against powerful, badly-acting women. Basically, because American pop culture already has too much of an imbalance in the direction of casual anti-woman imagery.

Now, if you’re creating your own self-contained mini-universe such as a equal opportunity offender movie, then knock yourself out.

* the above is from the “Oh, Wicked Wanda!” cartoon which ran in Penthouse magazine
 
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Aghasverov

Aghasverov

GeographyDude said:
View attachment 640517
First off, the guy doesn’t even look like Hitler!. Which to me, makes it even funnier.

And yes, NC-17 and rather edgy.

And then, okay, to me, I am in favor of using porn as a weapon against powerful, bad-acting men. Not so much in favor of doing the same against powerful, badly-acting women. Basically, because American pop culture already has too much of an imbalance in the direction of casual anti-woman imagery.

Now, if you’re creating your own self-contained mini-universe such as a equal opportunity offender movie, then knock yourself out.

* the above is from the “Oh, Wicked Wanda!” cartoon which ran in Penthouse magazine
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Seems like I remember reading once, who knows where, that young aspiring painter Hitler would seek out certain... ummm... favours from the Vienna prostitutes. Ew.
Don't know if there was any truth to the story, but if there was, apparently young Adolf thought he had been a very bad boy :p
Doubt if rumours like that would've been enough to tarnish the Nazi brand though (soooo tempting to veer into current politics here ;)) ... there were already some, like Hammerstein-Equord, who thought the Nazis were "a gang of sex perverts" (probably b/c of the Roehm affair)...
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
GeographyDude said:
First off, the guy doesn’t even look like Hitler!. Which to me, makes it even funnier.

And yes, NC-17 and rather edgy.

And then, okay, to me, I am in favor of using porn as a weapon against powerful, bad-acting men. Not so much in favor of doing the same against powerful, badly-acting women. Basically, because American pop culture already has too much of an imbalance in the direction of casual anti-woman imagery.

Now, if you’re creating your own self-contained mini-universe such as a equal opportunity offender movie, then knock yourself out.

* the above is from the “Oh, Wicked Wanda!” cartoon which ran in Penthouse magazine
Click to expand...
IF YOU KNOW it is NSFW why the hell did you post it?
 
Gukpard

Gukpard

Mercurial said:
In Star Trek: The Original Series, there is an episode where a character from the Federation (i.e. someone with access to super futurisitc education and knowledge) decides to use Nazi Germany as a template for an alien world in chaos as the Nazis were, in his own words, the most efficient model he could think of.

That's an illustration of how, a mere 12-14 years after WW2 (TOS ran in the late 60's), people believed and perpetuated the myth that the Nazis, for all their evil and tyranny, were "efficient" and "successful".

I, too, grew up hearing the odd person say things like "THE NAZIS WERE EVIL BUT THEY SURE WERE GOOD AT RUNNING GERMANY". I sincerely cannot recall anything in my textbooks that detailed how bad the Nazis were at running things. Instead, they upheld the narrative that Nazi policies like the Reich Labour Sevice were instrumental in ending the depression. And of course, since I had no alternative knowledge source, I believed all this at the time.

It wouldn't be until I was exposed to a wider source of information on the internet that I really understood that the Nazi "successes" were all based in misunderstandings of the truth.

So no, I do not feel that OTL truly destroyed the myths around Nazi success. While things have gotten better since that one Star Trek episode, I'm still not sure I fully believe that the Nazi myths have disappeared. At the very least, there are still people, however ignorant, that believe them.
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These myths are still alive, just after reading your commentary I went to youtube and saw this video


The THC documentaries from the early 2000s also enforced this myth

Edit I just watched the video, the title is misleading, he tells the truth of how these guns sucked
 
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HelloThere

HelloThere

I don't think that's possible, really. First of all you've got all types of myths sorrounding the Nazis produced during their regime and afterwards. But that isn't even the main problem:

The ideology of Fascism in general and Naziism in particular is an ideology of "might makes right". It appeals to people who feel they are being pushed around unjustifiably and who draw the conclusion that only strength can be the answer. You no longer have to talk to your counterpart and love him, you can become a pure animal and kill him without justification. Because might makes right.

So you can of course prevent the rise of the Nazis. You could have a scenario were they are defeated on the battlefield even earlier. But this won't shatter their legacy if you think that "might makes right". Because the Nazis aren't remembered for what they left (ruins and total obliteration, which is already OTL), but because "they took on the whole world". That "they tried". That they lost just strengthens their status as "tragic heroes".
 
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