What if Nazi Germany was cruel to Western Europeans and comparatively nice to Slavs instead of the other way around?

[Garrison]

A large amount of that food from the USSR was not shipped to Germany but rather consumed by the German army in the East.
Most of the food shipped to Germany was from France, Denmark, and Poland.
But yes, the Drang nach Osten plan was followed by much of the Wehrmacht.

Yes it was provided to the Wehrmacht so they didn't have to ship it from Germany and it actually increased the rations in France and elsewhere in Western Europe, which was the intent of the Hunger Plan. The Wehrmacht was a wholehearted participant in the Hunger Plan, they didn't just follow along. Regardless the food Germany needs has to come from the Ukraine, there is no other source.

 

[Garrison]

That's unfair. Every imaginable permutation of Hitler and the Nazis has come up in alternate history discussion before, including ideas like this one. No need for aspersions.

Well that's the thing these questions have been asked and answered so many times it does rather beg the question of why people feel the need to keep asking it, as if they are looking for some answer other than its not plausible or practical.

 

[TRH]

Well that's the thing these questions have been asked and answered so many times it does rather beg the question of why people feel the need to keep asking it, as if they are looking for some answer other than its not plausible or practical.

Because people aren't original and not everyone has our understanding of what is or isn't practical? Remember the OP is a relatively new member as well. At this point I'm more interested in why you want to make more of this than it is.

 

[tus3]

The Wehrmacht was a wholehearted participant in the Hunger Plan, they didn't just follow along. Regardless the food Germany needs has to come from the Ukraine, there is no other source.

Could a 'slavophile' (relatively speaking of course) Nazi-Germany, try to only steal all the food of the East-European Jews starving them to death, instead of doing it to all East-Europeans? Or would that not provide sufficient a food surplus?

 

[Garrison]

Could a 'slavophile' (relatively speaking of course) Nazi-Germany, try to only steal all the food of the East-European Jews starving them to death, instead of doing it to all East-Europeans? Or would that not provide sufficient a food surplus?

The Jews already had no food, they were not farmers by and large and in places like Poland they had already been shoved into ghettos with little or no rations allocated to them.

 

[CHKeeley]

I think the conversation thus far is also missing the important element of communism/Bolshevism as essential to Nazi ideology, popularity, and the very niche it gained support out of in the first place. The NSDAP gained its credentials as a party that contested the communists on the streets, and it took power largely on the basis that it was able to present itself as the only party with the ability to stop the left. Which it promptly did. The NSDAP, from its formative experiences in the revolutionary trauma of 1918 onwards, must be virulently anti-communist. Where is international communism? In the east. Hitler didn’t hate Slavs just because of pre-existing German colonial ambitions in the east, but perhaps equally because of the existence of the USSR and the idea that it was the center of power for international Jewry.

France and the western Entente was despised, but the fear of the USSR and the lived experience of the revolution in Germany forged the NSDAP and thus a practically unchange-able plank was the destruction of Bolshevism. And this plank was what created a lot of their success in local level organizing and campaigning in the first place. To emulate its OTL successes and to even be remotely recognizable as a interwar fascist party, the NSDAP must necessarily be anti-communist. With this, and existing German ideas about Slavs and eastern dreams, plus the very existence of the USSR, overdetermines a drive towards anti-Slav policies. And I’m not even talking about Poland here, which is also a massive elephant in the room. The west simply does not have the same place here. If we suppose Hitler hits his head or just formulates different ideas, the simple answer is that his party won’t be the NSDAP. He necessarily must be less anti-communist, which means an entire change in strategy and messaging, which means it’s doubtful he even achieves anything on a national level at all. Dying France red and painting Russia white creates more problems than it solves here, and Russian emigres were crucial to the ideological formation of the NSDAP anyway.

I think it’s an interesting question worthy of discussion, but this same question has been thoroughly answered before and I stick with the idea that this is just too implausible. It’s plausible if you create an entirely different timeline with a different Great War and interwar with different social, material, and ideological factors driving a mass fascistic party with genocidal designs on certain territories in Western Europe. But it won’t be OTL’s NSDAP or OTL’s Hitler in any meaningful way. You need to change too much to make it happen.

 

[manitobot]

Anyone can be radicalized to do anything, honestly. I don’t know why this is out of the ordinary, considering how truly baffling the ideology was OTL and how things can change (maybe timeframe is a different question all together)

Ask anyone who would have committed a genocide on the Jews in the 1910’s and people would say Russia. Yet 30 years later it was the Soviets who were liberating people from the death camps of Germany. Radicalization that can lead to despicable things is in many ways a step by step process that can go in any direction.

Certainly at least it’s not unreasonable enough to be considered ASB despite how ugly and repugnant it is. Which I mean let’s think about, an inclusive alternate history should view harm against Slavs or Africans as equally likely (POD dependent) compared to Western Europeans or Americans. I am not implying that this hasn’t been the case at all, but rather that’s generally how it works. I think a lot of it is due to education, we get drilled into our head of the atrocities that befell certain people it’s hard to see it the other way around.

As to the prompt, yes I could see it happening, Maybe under a different name or ideology, but all it takes is an alienation (the Germanic is better than the Romance peoples, and the Dutch and English are merely Celtic impostors). The Germans could rehabilitate their relationship with the Soviets, while denigrating Western Europeans. What this means specifically for how the genocide would play out is another thing-
Western Europe was a more educated, developed place than the East and as such had a much larger intelligentsia for the Nazis to target. I also believe they may have had a larger clergy population. The enslavement of occupied peoples and massacres like what happened in Eastern Europe would function much the same way as maybe how the Japanese treated their occupied people. Expect an annexation of areas of Western Germany postwar, which means the Rhineland. Post war Germany would be a lot different (that is assuming the Allies even win, a Nazi-Soviet axis is a powerful foe to defeat).

Another thing to think about is that if the Germans and Slavs are coming together in an Axis, will whatever ideology they are peddling be Anti-semitic? Most likely yes, and that means the large population of Jewry in the Soviet Union could be subject to a genocide, earlier than OTL, and by two forces not just one. Very ghastly.

What may also happen is that the Soviets might end up backstabbing the Germans, and winning as well.

 

[SirHalifax]

As other posters on the thread have pointed out, the German view of supremacy over the Slavs and the need for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe long predated the Nazis.
However, I could easily see Hitler developing genocidal views to the French. The French and Germans had a very long history of conflict, and he could imagine that the French were “Jews pretending to be Latins”, or outright paint all “Latin” peoples as “Slavs/Jews in disguise”. If the latter is the case, Hitler could view all Romance people as subhumans, which would greatly complicate relations with OTL German allies such as Italy, (Nationalist) Spain, and Romania.

 

[PecuTheGreat]

Ideologies don't work this way. Their tenets aren't Lego pieces that you can swap out on a whim.

You can't just say 'oh, Hitler woke up one day and decided he really, really hates French but thinks Poles and Russians are cool'.

Nazism was an extreme version of ideological currents that already existed in Germany at a time when Hitler was still a bum in Vienna. Anti-Slavism was very much a thing in the German Empire, as was anti-Semitism. Prussia tried to 'Germanise' its eastern holdings, though this took the form of legal discrimination and attempts at cultural assimilation rather than genocide and mass deportations. Ober Ost and the Pan-German League had proto-Lebensraum fantasies. Hell, when Hitler lived in Vienna it had a rabid anti-Semite as mayor.

German nationalists viewed France as an enemy and looked down on 'French decadence', but it was seen as a geopolitical rival that needed to be 'humbled' and kept down, not a racial enemy.

The Nazis took existing beliefs and radicalised them to their ultimate extreme. A Nazi movement that has beliefs that are totally at variance with stuff many Germans believe in doesn't get into power. It's the same reason why the Nazis would've had no chance at power if they'd been neo-pagans who wanted to turn churches into Odin temples.

What of a more Pragmatist NAZI Germany. Hitler seems to have been willing to work with Poland to get at his main target of the Soviets, what of a timeline when there's general greater German hate against everyone and it's just a question of chosing which hated enemy is to be destroyed now?.

 

[Maponus]

If Hitler promotes such views he will not be popular in the Volkish movement and will never come to power.

Remember, Hitler had not a single original idea or thought - he merely embodied what the German Nationalist movement believed and packaged it in a way that was appealing to the a boarder part of the population than had previously been the case (drawing in a larger demographic mainly made up of women, young men and farmers). At best he can be said to have uniquely stuck together a bunch of unoriginal notions in a form more potent than others on the political scene had, and at least part of this was because he simplified Volkism thought and strongly deemphasised its more esoteric elements. If he doesn't embody these ideals, and instead promotes an eccentric ideal of his own (something that will be hard for someone of his limited education and intellectual abilities) - he will achieve nothing.

 

[Garrison]

What of a more Pragmatist NAZI Germany. Hitler seems to have been willing to work with Poland to get at his main target of the Soviets, what of a timeline when there's general greater German hate against everyone and it's just a question of chosing which hated enemy is to be destroyed now?.

If the Nazis were pragmatic they wouldn't be Nazis and they wouldn't have gone to war in the first place. Also Hitler and the Nazis did hate the French, revenge for 1918 and reclaiming Alsace-Lorraine were high on Hitler's to do list. Removing the French before turning east is just OTL. And again one has to remember that desire for lebensraum could not be satisfied in the west, and as @SirHalifax mentioned being anti-communist was also part of the Nazis whole raison d'être.

 

[SirHalifax]

If the Nazis were pragmatic they wouldn't be Nazis and they wouldn't have gone to war in the first place. Also Hitler and the Nazis did hate the French, revenge for 1918 and reclaiming Alsace-Lorraine were high on Hitler's to do list. Removing the French before turning east is just OTL. And again one has to remember that desire for lebensraum could not be satisfied in the west, and as @SirHalifax mentioned being anti-communist was also part of the Nazis whole raison d'être.

While you are right on the Nazi views to the French, they merely wished to place them in their sphere of influence and take back A-L, and not commit genocide.

 

[Garrison]

While you are right on the Nazi views to the French, they merely wished to place them in their sphere of influence and take back A-L, and not commit genocide.

True but the notion they could have been less 'cruel' to the Slavs starts from a series of misconceptions about the Nazis as you observed.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

Difficult to imagine a Germany that views its fellow Germanics as subhuman (though not impossible, see the Yiddish) and even more difficult to imagine a Germany that views Slavs as fellow Aryans (though them not viewing slavs as sub human/only viewing the Poles as subhuman is plausible). However, Germany adopting an anti-Latin ideology seems plausible, there's definitely fertile historic ground for that.

If Germany does not seek Lebensraum in the east, then why would it invade the USSR in the first place? Extrapolating from the prompt of an anti-Latin Germany and the reality that Germany can't directly invade the UK, it seems likely that Germany would sooner invade Italy and the Iberian states both for racial reasons (something something Gothic kingdoms?) and to isolate the UK from the continent/acquire launch pads from which to attack the French remnant (there can be no Vichy in a TL where Hitler wants some sort of General Plan West) in North Africa and British SLOCs through the Mediterranean.

 

[marathag]

How could other Germanic speakers be worse than their Slavic neighbours? If you look at the dialect level, Dutch just flows into German and the other way around. I can get along with a better role for the Slavs, but I wonder the reasoning behind treating fellow Germanics this way.

AH as super Catholic, so that puts the South Germans and many Slavs on the 'good' side, while leaving the Protestant North Germans and such as 'bad'

 

[Duke_of_Darkness]

This is one of those questions that makes me more interested in why the OP asks the question rather than in the merits of the question itself.

I made the thread because I wanted to speculate how the Nazis would be remembered differently if they were more or less cruel to other groups. A Nazi Germany that committed genocide on many Western Europeans could butterfly away the EU. A Nazi Germany that was comparatively nice to Eastern Europeans could lead to fascism being more popular in 21st Century Eastern Europe or even lead to a Nazi victory on the Eastern Front.

 

[tus3]

AH as super Catholic, so that puts the South Germans and many Slavs on the 'good' side, while leaving the Protestant North Germans and such as 'bad'

But won't that lead to problems with protestants in Germany? Then there's also that that might lead to Polonophilia, which does not seem like something which would attract the German Militarists.

 

[TDM]

AH as super Catholic, so that puts the South Germans and many Slavs on the 'good' side, while leaving the Protestant North Germans and such as 'bad'

That will put him against the Prussians (and while OTL Hitler had his prejudices against the Prussian military elites he does need them), plus I don't think anyone in Germany wants to risk re fighting the 30 years war .

 

[Evil Crusader]

I made the thread because I wanted to speculate how the Nazis would be remembered differently if they were more or less cruel to other groups. A Nazi Germany that committed genocide on many Western Europeans could butterfly away the EU. A Nazi Germany that was comparatively nice to Eastern Europeans could lead to fascism being more popular in 21st Century Eastern Europe or even lead to a Nazi victory on the Eastern Front.

Another critique is that the very idea of "remembrance" is tied to subsequent events, so by introducing a host of butterflies, the judgement could vary very heavily even with very similar starting points, miring the discussion in too many subproblems.

 

[Booster Gold]

A big part of nazism was anti-communism. If you got a communist France and an anti-communist Russia, it would help