I know I am using the basic idea for a backdrop to a novel I am writing and would like to know how Britain's politics would be affected.
British Politics in a Nazi Victory TL
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Eurofed
Banned
Its never enough for something you dislike to just be morally wrong is it. It has to be practically imposible aswell. Overwise it threatens all your preciouse beliefs.
That is indeed one thing that rather annoys me in WWII discussions, and not so rarely pushes me to take the role of Axis' Devil's Advocate. Some people think a proper way to express their moral outrage for the atrocities of the Nazis is to make them rather more outrageously incompetent and hopeless, or the Allies rather more competent and invincible, than they ever were.
Quite true in a general sense (it's the dirty not so little secret of guerrilla warfare, it only works against armies that have serious political constraints against large-scale reprisals on civilian supporters of the guerrillas and/or are unable to clean out the foreign havens), even if the logistical issues and population sizes involved in a counterinsurgency of occupied Russia at large are so huge that genocidal scorched tactics carry their quite heavy burdens nonetheless.
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Eurofed
Banned
Oh Hitler's ruthlessly pragmatic successors in the Nazi ruling clique would surely still stick to genocidal repression of Slav insurgency. No question about that. But I do expect that they would almost entirely scale down purposeful, "industrial" genocide, and to a lesser degree, deportation as well, of the Russian peoples, as a wasteful and burdensome unnecessary, impractical, and harmful effort. The lot of the eastern Slavs would switch from "deported if they are lucky, killed if they are not, in order to make room for (hypothetical and largely impractical) German colonization" to "kept into place and ruthlessly exploited as workforce, killed or deported if they rebel".
Probably the only places where logistics made radical Nazi Germanization by whatever nasty means necessary truly practical in the medium-long term were Czechia, Poland (certainly the western territories they annexed in 1939, quite likely the General Government as well), and the Baltic states, more or less.
The rest was far too expensive, and would have realtively soon shown to be headed into a useless empty wasteland anyway, since 20th century Germany had not the demographic potential to push its ethnic borders much further than the Bug, so to speak, even with Nazi natalist policies. It would have been somewhat (but not substantially; the age of Europe's demographic boom was closing, and even a totalitarian government could push it only so far against deep-seated social trends) different if they had coopted the rest of the Western European peoples to the Lebensraum task. But that would have been wholly against Nazi policies. While they were entirely willing to treat the other "Aryan" European peoples as near-equals if they behaved like good little loyal fascist vassals, Russia was always earmarked as Germany's specific colonization playground (although in all likelihood they would have blessed and supported their French, Italians, and Spanish vassals doing similar things in North Africa).
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Eurofed
Banned
Not only Heydrich. Guys like Speer, Donitz, Rommel, Manstein or perhaps some other "dark horse" candidate from the technocrats and the officer corps may easily end up playing the role of a Nazi Krushev or Deng. After Hitler buys the mausoleum, most of the power base of the radicals is going to collapse, and the pragmatists in the ruling elites (esp. the army, the civil bureaucracy, and the business interests), when faced with the economic and military burdens of managing an empire, and the costs of the radicals' policies, shall support whatever "dark horse" candidate for the leadership that promises a return to imperialist common sense and ruthless pragmatism. In comparison, the radicals are going to have little more than the SS network (and I have serious doubts about the loyalty of many Waffen-SS to the radicals' agency in the end, so it would basically be the Gestapo and the civilian SS). That's why I expect Himmler and its ilk to go the way of Beria (Himmler and Beria were just as thoroughly feared and loathed among their peers) and the Gang of Four.
Moreover, it's not a given that Heydrick's assassination is going to work in any Nazi victory TL, esp. since the vast majority of PoDs that can make it possible need to be already at work in 1941-42.
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I find myself agreeing with Eurofed on the above argument to some, although the peace offer he was thinking of was actually made by Hitler. In reply to the OP, it would probably become similar to Israel with "Dove/Hawk" ideologies replacing Libertarian/Authoritarian ones whilst still keeping the traditional left/right.
Keenir
Banned
on the eve of the invasion of Hungary, the official in charge of rounding up the Jews of Hungary tried to negotiate tried to negotiate with the Allies, trading Jews for trucks -- he also said that it doesn't matter if the extermination of the Jews is not completed soon, because the important thing is the survival of a Nazi Empire which can exterminate the Jews.
its amazing what one can find on PBS.
that's why I'm doubtful that any post-Hitler Nazi government would be any less wipe-them-out than Hitler's government was.
Wyragen-TXRG4P
Banned
Hitler´s named successor in 1939, Goering, was a wilhemist, he wanted Germany to regain its 1914 borders(if me remembers correctly, that is!) but no fantastic expansion to the Urals. Himmler was too distracted with his own things to ambition becoming another Führer, at most he would try to establish an SS state in the east but that is about it.
Concurre. Thought it is more than just some people, more like a fashion wave, just like Hitler-Would-Have-Conquered-America was 50 years ago.
Concurre. Thought it is more than just some people, more like a fashion wave, just like Hitler-Would-Have-Conquered-America was 50 years ago.
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I Blame Communism
Banned
Did somebody say "IBC"?
I don't see how it is making the Nazis any more incompetent and hopeless (which, at diplomacy and economics, they really were) to deny that they had a realistic chance of "winning" with a PoD in September 1939 or after. That's making them just as hopeless and incompetent as they in fact were. Making them win is making them more competent and invincible.
What "typical"? Every major totalitarian regime in history has followed a differant course and ended a differant way. The OTL course of the Nazis was by comparison to others remarkably simple: it radicalised, radicalised, radicalised. By the end, it was turning with ever greater savagery on Germans. Its response to defeats was to commit more to murder and madness rather than necessary military effort. I shudder to think what its response to being left in command of Europe would be; Hitler dies and may be succeeded by somebody with a sliightly less tenuous connection to reality, but it's still going to be Holocaust times ten to the twelfth.
Personally, I consider trapping oneself in an inescapable diplomatic quandry by extreme and gratuitous belligerance to be pretty inept. Bismarck would turn in his grave.
Is Britain being called the aggressor-power? Oh, chuckles.
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Eurofed
Banned
Did somebody say "IBC"?
Actually, there are people in this forum that are much more unreasonable (if not trollish) on WWII topics than you ever were. Some of them are on my ignore list already. You aren't.
And here is where I think that your honest moral-driven wish to see them fail is making you exaggerate a lot. There are plenty of PoDs (quite likely some combination of them is necessary, rather than a single one, but that does not invalidate the point) in 1939-41 that can make reap a full victory, and up to early 1943 that can get them a compromise victory.
True, but I would argue that most of the time, it was defeat, not victory, that made them radicalise more and more during the war. E.g., it was defeat that made them switch from deportation to extermination as the default solution to the "Jew problem". Hence, I expect that sufficiently early victory (and the earlier the PoDs are that shift the course of things towards their victory, the easier to implement they are) would forestall at least some of that radicalization.
Bah. Here's you that you are making the victorious Nazi much stronger, competent, and resourceful than they would actually be. Killing all, or even most of, the Slavs west of the Urals is a huge, huge, huge effort. I tend to regard "they are going to kill every Slav in Europe" in the same field of dystopic fantasy with "they are going to invade America", only somewhat more plausible.
And again, I think you are largely exaggerating the long-term committment of the regime to Hitlerite foibles. IMO there is the same kind of biased hindsight at work here as if many people would assume that Stalinist purges would have gone on forever if the Soviet regime hadn't fallen in a TL where the USSR fell in 1952.
Quite true, but that's not the point here. I was arguing against the ASB claim that victorious Nazi would bring Europe to Third World level by early '50s.
Of course not. Still, Britain had a choice in 1939 NOT to throw around guarantees and enlarge the conflict, since Poland had not yet declared its allegiance to the King. Full agreement that Hitler made his first really serious diplomatic-strategic blunder by invading Czechia, especially by doing it before the issue of Poland was settled, and by totally failing to give a plausible casus belli against Warsaw (and ghost of Bismarck, the interwar Polish regime was far from difficult to goad into doing something stupid and rash to paint itself as the guilty party, for a less hamhanded German leadership). But yet, the choice not to give Poland guarantees was there.
If there was a really good moment for intransigence, it was in 1938, when it would have immediately brought the Nazis down from within, an optimal outcome for the world, not in 1939, when Anglo-French belligerance brought very little positive in the end. At that point, Britain could just as well wait for Nazi Germany to turn directly against Western Europe, if it was ever going to, which is very doubtful. In all likelihood, otherwise Germany and Russia would have exhausted each other into a compromise peace (Russia would have not let itself be caught with its pants down, but neither it would have been able to reap the OTL decisive victory without all the help of the West) and at worst no German or Slav would have died that it did not die IOTL anyway. And if anything, Czechoslovakia was much more deserving of help than Poland (against Hitler, anyway; with any other German regime, Munich with a LoN-managed plebiscite in the Sudetenland would have been the proper thing to do and Poland would have deserved no support whatsoever to keep its bullheaded hold on Danzig).
Dan Reilly The Great
Banned
competence has little to do with it, the nazi political system was a house of cards built largely upon hitler. Without him the entire thing could go up in a bloody grab for power. A ruthless and competent successor is kind of hard to come by, the best chances for success lie with guys like manstein, rommel, and speer. Too bad manstein and rommel did not have the political ambitions that much of hitlers inner circle had, with a victorious reich in europe they are probably sit by the wayside and see who takes power, rather than make their own schemes. And speer didn't have the balls or the personality to take over for hitler, he just wasn't ruthless enough for it.
This ignores the fact that germany was bankrupting itself to conquer europe, with victory achieved it is going to have massive expenses to cover as well as the still massive military apparatus which it will need for defense. In order to exploit all the spoils of conquest there is going to be much infrastructure developement that will be needed all over, development which will cost a fortune, not to mention that the cost of occupation and fullfilling even a fraction of hitler's envisioned lebensraum in eastern europe and russia is going to be very costly. By the early to mid fifties the economy of the German Reich is going to be bankrupt. And I didn't even get into the batshit insane construction projects that were in the works, or the cost of rebuilding the KM which is most likely going to happen no matter who rules Germany post war.
So competence is not the issue, the cost of conquering the continent is just too great for Germany to bear.
Eurofed
Banned
Oh, I have no question with this (which, by the way, is part of the reason why I assume that the "mega-Holocaust of Slavs" is a dystopic fantasy). yet, there is a big difference between bungling into economic breakdown and bringing Europe to Third-World status.
Keenir
Banned
and who's going to pull Nazi Germany out of this pit they've dug for themselves?
(what was that African nation where the exchange rate was around $1=2billion local dollars ? this would be about where Germany would be, having bankrupted themselves and suffering from a severe case of imperial overreach)
so, how would this not drop Germany to where I suggested?
Quite ironically for some I'd imagine a 'Nazi Britain' in many ways to be Churchill's wet dream.
Who cares if the Indians are banging on about independance, screw this free speech malarky, send in the troops and shoot the trouble makers. The Empire must never fall, not one step back!
A thought also occured to be last night when thinking on this independantly (just some film script I keep working on on and off for fun about rebels in Britain around 1970 as the Nazi empire is unravelling)- Britain's racism could be the class system.
Some sort of thinking could emerge whereby the upper classes are of course those of true Germanic stock (as imported by the Normans) wheras the lower classes are really just the native celts (there are those theories that say the British gene pool didn't change too much) and so are inferior people. Not death camp inferior but certainly 'know your place' inferior.
Blacks, Asians, etc... would of course be nigh-on-slaves if there's even many of them around at all, which I doubt.
The Labour party I would have, after a period of occupation and lack of democracy, briefly existing in the late 50s and looking set to re-establish old free Britain until of course its cracked down.
In this world the Tories would be the left with something much worse as the right. And a franchise severely rolled back.
Who cares if the Indians are banging on about independance, screw this free speech malarky, send in the troops and shoot the trouble makers. The Empire must never fall, not one step back!
A thought also occured to be last night when thinking on this independantly (just some film script I keep working on on and off for fun about rebels in Britain around 1970 as the Nazi empire is unravelling)- Britain's racism could be the class system.
Some sort of thinking could emerge whereby the upper classes are of course those of true Germanic stock (as imported by the Normans) wheras the lower classes are really just the native celts (there are those theories that say the British gene pool didn't change too much) and so are inferior people. Not death camp inferior but certainly 'know your place' inferior.
Blacks, Asians, etc... would of course be nigh-on-slaves if there's even many of them around at all, which I doubt.
The Labour party I would have, after a period of occupation and lack of democracy, briefly existing in the late 50s and looking set to re-establish old free Britain until of course its cracked down.
In this world the Tories would be the left with something much worse as the right. And a franchise severely rolled back.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Actually, there are people in this forum that are much more unreasonable (if not trollish) on WWII topics than you ever were. Some of them are on my ignore list already. You aren't.
I'm glad.
I don't believe it's impossible for them to win, or for something almost as bad to "win" (big DoD fan, me) with an earlier PoD. What would be the "moral" purpose of refusing to believe dystopia is possible because of this but accepting it as plausible if we assume that? My views about the war are based on military realities.
Personally, I think that our difference of methods is how I consider what people thought and why to be part of the military realities. Hitler was a fruitbat, the Japanese leadership were rushing determinedly into the abyss, and there's no two ways about it. To have people do things they would never have done (eg, for Italy to base its foreign policy and military effort on the premise of a war with the Entente starting in 1940 way back in 1936) is to me no less "ASB" than time travel and what-have-you. As B Munro recently and hilariously quoted: I'll maintain an attitude of agnosticism if you tell me that Gladstone was haunted by the ghost of Parnell in his final hours. I'm not Gladstone. But if you tell me that on his first meaning with Queen Vic, he kept his hat on in the drawing room, slapped her matily on the back, and offered her a cigar - that I'm not going to believe, perfectly possible as it may be in a scientific sense.
Say what? Heydrich called the internment of the Polish Jews in ghettoes "preparatory" in 1939, so clearly the idea was in the command structure, and the funny thing about the Nazi state was that ideas generally went up towards the Fuehrer and not the reverse.
And were the Nazis being defeated in June 1941? That was when organised, designated deathsquads swarmed across Lithuania and Belarus. Less efficient, but the object was the same.
The ideas, as I said, existed in 1939, and they went up as people jockied for favour with the Fuehrer. Earlier victory just gives them more resources to work with.
"Some"? I don't expect to see German civilians being shot by panicky officers on trumped-up charges to encourage the others without the Allies baring down on the country, but that was a tiny - though edifying - portion of the Nazi death-toll.
Killing 60% of European Jews was an enormous effort which right up to the end diverted considerable resources from the actual military effort. There was no reason to do it except that the Nazis were batshit crazy. And hey, the huge, huge effort did fail, in a horrible sort of way. They were stopped.
So why shouldn't they attempt an enterprise which is hardly any more useless, arbitrary, and insane? 60% of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Armenians, and Turkic peoples would still be pretty staggering.
Also, the Nazis managed to kill off 60% of the Soviets under their most immediate power (prisoners of war) without any effort at all. They just didn't feed them, clothe them, or shelther them. Much simpler than gas-chambers, and the result was much the same.
They killed 20-25% of the portion of Belarus, too, under war conditions (which meant "large areas of Belarus controlled by Partisans so thoroughly that there were actual Kolkhoz behind German lines"). Lots of Jews in that figure, obviously, but in peacetime conditions, what's to stop them keeping it up?
The Holocaust, remember, was a massive piece of organisation. When you single out particular minorities for immediate genocide, that implies eleborate schemes of identification, classification, and transportation.
In Belarus, they just turned up at an arbitrary village, herded the people into a barn, set fire to it, and machine-gunned everything for good measure. Not very neat, but it did the job.
The Soviet Union's war losses amounted to some 14%. Imagine I just shot every tenth person in your hometown? In your country?
It's the difference between crossing an impassable ocean barrier guarded by an excellent navy to overcome the greatest industrial economy in the world, and shooting helpless women and children.
One of those is actually pretty easy, for a certain kind of person.
Thing is, Stalin never came close to killing 14% of Soviets. By the way, why the fixation with purges? The bodycount of purges was pretty small, in absolute terms. Obviously the psychological effects of people in senior positions vanishing at night completely at random are pretty severe for the whole country, but only small classes of the Soviet population were even being purged, and a considerable number were consigned to GULAG rather than killed. This is also pretty much exactly what the Nazis did on a much smaller scale in 1933-5: a few choice executions and lots of detentions to show everybody what is and isn't acceptable. Hardly mass-murder.
Stalin's acts of mass-murder were the decapitations of intelectual life in his conquered territories (and while Katyn was a tragedy, it was by its very nature a one-off and comparatively limited tragedy compared even to what happene dto the Polish people in Volhynia, for instance), artificial famines brought about by economic policy (an economic policy that was by-and-large finished by 1941), and ethnic cleansings. It also bares pointing out that ethic cleansings in the line of sobbing Kalmyks being bundled into packed trains with a bag of belongings and dumped in Kazakhstan (as opposed to carefully selected Lithuanians and Finns being rounded up by NKVD and sent to GULAG) were - along with Soviet attrocities against Axis nationals, the deaths of a considerable number of German PoWs in GULAG, Partisan attrocities against non-Partisans, and so on and so forth - a fairly direct result of the Nazi invasion or, if you like, "Hitlerite foibles".
So the Stalin comparison isn't very helpful. If the USSR had fallen in 1952... we wouldn't remember Stalin as a man who managed to kill off 14% of the Soviet population in four short years under wartime conditions.
Also, I do hope that you understand to what extent the Nazis whacky ideas came from lower down in the hierarchy, from officials playing to the prejudices of a Supreme Leader who had little policy initiative, and filtered up. Hitler didn't stamp his will on the Nazis: subordinates, sometimes rather minor functionaries, made suggestions or just took the initiative and got Hitler's approval. That's how the extermination of the disabled started, and this policy, which didn't originate with Hitler or his cronies, was carried on in the face of public opposition and any semblance of common sense. IIRC, they started killing WW1 veterans... then moved on to killing crippled WWII veterans.
Hey, there's really nowhere quite as third-world as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and if we want to witness Congolese scenes such as gangs of soldiers arriving at arbitrary villages, killing the men, systematically raping the women and then killing them, and killing or kidnapping the children, there'll be plenty of that.
Similarly, the Soviets could have just surrendered in 1941.
I consider any argument that Britain is responsible for what happened because we refused to sit out in 1939 equivelant to the argument that the Soviets had themselves to blame for Leningrad because they could have just surrendered the place.
(Arguments that Britain and the USSR had allowed the situations of 1939 and 1941 to arise by flawed foreign policy are completely valid, but hardly in the same league.)
Had he a choice?
His first really serious diplomatic blunder was breaking with the policies of Stresemann and moving to a policy of making treaties purely in order to break them, which is the diplomatic equivelant of knife-juggling.
His first really obvious diplomatic blunder was his Sudetenland policy. Why did he choose a policy of "I DEMAND by the national will of the Greater German People the righ to invade this territory without any figleaf of justification whatsoever and steal the property of the Czech state and all the Czechs and Jews who live there! TEN DAYS! NO DELAYS, YOU BROLLY-TWIRLING WEAKLING!", rather than a policy of "I believe democratic self-determination should be available to all the people resident in the Sudetenland in accordance with the best doctrines of the late peace settlements - doctrines which, properly applied by agreement by vanquished and victor, will truly bring a lasting peace to the European continent. On those grounds, we should work to bring about a plebiscite in the Sudetenland some time within the year"?
Because he was a loony.
A few secrets of Bismarck's success:
1) Have small ambitions. If you're the dominant power at the centre of Europe, universally admired for both military strength and economic and cultural vitality, keep it that way.
2) Never let what you believe interfere with what you do. Ideals are for cissies. I have the utmost sympathy for the Poles, but we must destroy them, except when we're bluffing to frighten the Russians, obviously. Bismarck wouldn't have hesitated to invoke democracy for the Sudetenland in a completely cynical way.
3) Have a good treaty with Russia, as they say. Good treaties, by the way, last.
Three things no Nazi regime could ever do, funnily enough.
So was the choice to hand over the Royal Navy and a box of conciliatory chocolates in 1940; let's stick to options that anyone in their right mind would take.
I'd absolutely agree that war in 1938 was a much better idea, but whether the Nazi regime is brought down from inside means nothing to me compared to millions of lives saved. Ideally, I'd like Germany to be comphrehensively defeated (which does not necessitate ethnic cleansing or any of that) and various unhealthy things in German society to be thoroughly squeezed out, but that's a concern very far behind saving lives. It's hardly as if the victorious powers didn't have unhealthy things in their society.
That is, Britain could accept German hegemony everywhere east of the Rhine, based on the historically, ah, non-vindicated doctrine of trusting Nazis.
There's only so much that not being caught with your pants down can do when your army is badly disorganised at the end of an ongoing campaign of expansion. My comments about the importance of the Soviet unpreparedness are based on the premise that the Nazis are already at war with Britain in June 1941, and I'm usually talking about the idea of a Barbarossa in 1942, which is a completely differant thing. For the Nazis, there's a lot of factors to consider (strategic bombing, French lorries...) but at worst the Nazis win, and at best they manage to occupy big chunks of Soviet territory for longer.
From a humanitarian standpoint, this is worse, and from a British diplomatic standpoint, this is a lot worse.
Why not? You often say yourself that the Soviets needed LL to pull off the Ten Blows. If they have to win back their territory - even if it's somewhat less of it - by a long hard slog, it's going to kill lots more people. Longer occupation = more starvation, more Partisan fighting, more village-burning. Lots more Soviet military casualties, of course. Soviet military success inherently costs less lives than German military success because 60% of Soviet PoWs died in captivity; the German rate was 30%.
(By the way, Georgians and Armenians and Tatars are people too.)
If German invasion is moved significantly forward, and is able to move through the Baltic States unopposed, there is the possibility that the Soviets just plain lose, and then it gets nasty.
Of course, none of this is plausible because it requires Britain to, as it were, slap Queen Vic on the back and offer her a cigar.
Or "the correct response to making a mistake once is to shrug and make it again"?
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Wyragen-TXRG4P
Banned
Not even in the post-revolutionnary Soviet-Union after Lenin, which is "saying" something. It is what occures after completion of power that might or might not be bloody.
Running out of soldiers to hold the front(s) just doesn´t count, does it?
Years of active fighting, millions of tonnes of ammo, KIA and shells and all other problems that comes with that pales in comparaison to occupation costs, right?
Granted, if Germany had to occupy all other countries on the european continent, imposed the same policies as in the Soviet-Union and Poland, from Portugal to the Urals and from Norway to Greece, while having to defend from a fully mobilized USA, that logic would indeed have a valid point. Except there would be military defeat in conventional war before 1950, oups!
Thing is, outside of axis-wanks, Germany wouldn´t occupy much more than the Soviet-Union than historically, for military reasons. Moscow region and a Reichkomissariat Caucasus at the most, but certainly not significantly beyond that.
Then, problem of occupation would be halved once fighting stops, with deportations (and not mega-holocaust). "Usefull" part of the population would be kept but they would be regrouped, just like Afrikaners where.
By 1950 latest, populations in eastern occupied regions would be less than half that of Germany itself, even assuming massive territorial gains.
If the axis have been pushed back to Kiev and Minsk, it is probably not going to be above 25 millions.
Developpement of the eastern territories where planned over decades, as the German population grew, not over just a few years. The Soviet-Union could not politically afford to refuse millions and millions being expulsed or fleeing on their own.
Western europe? German forces would leave as soon as it is guaranteed no allied forces comes as a result and restart the war, pretty easy step if the US doesn´t join the war. If the US is on allied side, Hitler would readily sacrify Alsace-Lorraine for a peace treaty, just like he did not contest pre-WW1 AH territories to Mussolini.
In any case, Belarus had more resistance fighters in 1944 than France for only a fraction of the industry and agricultural production. So even if occupation of western europe isn´t such a major gain as some would like to believe, it isn´t going to shatter the German economy either.
North Africa? That would be the affair of Vichy France and Italy, at worst join Italian-German problem but certainly no massive drain either. If the US join the war early, no problem altogether, with North Africa being under allied control. Troops that would have occupied North Africa would be freed for French duties.
Middle-east? Again, mostly Italy, Vichy France + various local pro-axis regimes. No muslime holocaust, except in the wishfull thinking of neo-cons. Oil would compensate for defences of the region. Again, if the US is involved, there won´t be any axis presence either, except perhapse in turkey and north-western Iran. In which, occupation troops would be available for duties in western europe.
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If other nations also had "unhealthy things" in their societies, which things were so "special" in Germany that it needed to be "comprehensively defeated"?
I Blame Communism
Banned
That they resulted in Nazis? The point is that when Germany had embarked in genocidal invasions of everybody, the ideal outcome would be a chance to redo german society from the ground up and eliminate the reasons why they did. But if Germany doesn't, then like I said: no point comprehensively defeating Germany any more than anyone else. I at no point said anything was "special" in germany; what I did say is that saving human life on all sides is much more important to me than the exact circumstances under which the war ends.
The existence of the Nazi regime kind of scuppers any argument that Germany was no worse than anybody else. If the Nazis hadn't risen to power - perfectly achievable with PoDs in the 1920s - then "how dare you imply that German society had gone to a bad place" would be a valid argument. This thread, however, is a discussion of PoDs after 1933. Germany is Nazi, France is not Nazi. It's really pretty simple.
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