Posted on 07/21/2014 4:22:26 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
The German broadcast is pretty badly garbled. The old short-wave radios picked up every thunderstorm around the world, or so it seemed.
I will try to hack through it this evening, maybe.
With all the bends and loops of the lower Seine, I never thought it was an effective defensive position. It certainly wasn’t for the French in 1940 and won’t be for the Germans in a few weeks, but in both cases there were no effective organized troops to try to defend it.
Von Stauffenberg was mercifully shot before the executions were halted and the interrogations/torture began, followed by the excruciating hanging by wire.
The execution area in Plotzensee Prison, where many of the conspirators were executed, has been converted into a memorial to the German Resistance.
I saw an interview of Berthold Staffenberg. He said that he faced some recrimination from his fellow Bundeswehr officers because of his father. There was still very strong feeling that his father was not a patriot, but a traitor.
With Goering, Himmler, Jodl and Keitel alive I doubt the Army would have rallied to his cause. Even if they had, I doubt Stalin would have made peace, but would have kept right on gobbling up chunks of Eastern Europe.
It's curious Hitler was still using the Wolfschanze as the Red Army is nearing the East Prussia border.
I also believe it was a fool’s errand. The “it was all Hitler’s fault” blame game didn’t come out until the Nuremburg trials. From the perspective of the rest of the world in July 1944, the German General Staff and German officer corps are considered just as guilty as Hitler for starting this war. And the German troops have not made any friends wherever they’ve gone (except for those French girls getting the buzz cuts). There is way too much sentiment among the United Nations to destroy Germany so that she cannot and will not ever start another world war.
Had Hitler been killed, and the conspirators somehow managed to cobble together a government, nobody would have made peace with them. All it would have accomplished would have been the military collapse of Germany a few months earlier, maybe, due to collapse of morale of the armed forces. In war, once the apparent loser starts talking peace, the soldiers vote with their feet.
Interesting discussion.
If Hitler was dead, though, we might not have had the Battle of the Bulge. That was Hitler’s brilliant plan, iirc.
Actual military men would run the war? That could have cost more lives on both sides, by this point I think Germanys’ defeat was inevitable
he might have kept the depression going into the 50’s
I agree. No matter how many mistakes the Allies made on the Western Front, and how well the Germans did, the Russians were unstoppable.
We are in hypothetical land now, but I agree that even if Stauffenberg could have seized power I’m pretty sure the Big Three would have said, fine, but we want your unconditional surrender. The German Army and people were not there yet in mid-1944.
While we are in hypothetical land, we have not yet violated Henkster’s Law of alternate history. We don’t have to worry about Hitler not being Hitler because he’s...well...dead. But the Germans are still the Germans. And that means that they fight. I’ve always been amazed at their resiliency and willingness to put up a stout resistance in 1944 and 1945, even though intellectually they must know the war is lost.
But there were a number of them who were die-hard Nazis, and the Nazi ideology kept them going. It wasn’t until late January 1945 that you saw disintegration in the West. It never happened in the East, because of who they were fighting. If you take away the Nazi fanatics, who now have nothing to be fanatic about, you lose a lot of the hard edge of resistance. And once you start talking peace, the idea of being shot at by the guy on the other side is far less appealing. Without the Nazis, the average German just don’t have a reason to fight that hard in the west, if at all.
Yes, the German generals still run the show, but by now none of them are thinking offensively. There will be no Battle of the Bulge, which was only made possible by the last spasm of production by Speer’s armament industry. And the quality of strategic and operational thought on the German side has been on the wane for a while.
So, I think the German rot in the west starts almost immediately upon the public acknowledgement of peace feelers. And while the Germans will try to resist in the East, tax-chick is correct. The Russians are unstoppable.
My take is that the Red Army meets the Americans on the Oder, not the Elbe, and does so in November-December, not April.
Behind them was a tiny remnant of the 17th SS Panzergrenadiers determined to kill the prisoners. Americans, Germans and Austrians fought off the SS until a larger American unit arrived to rescue them.
Fanatics. 99% of the German Army was trying to surrender to an American or Brit and get rid of any evidence of Nazi involvement and these guys want one last ounce of revenge.
Without Hitler, my guess is the generals in charge would not have used flying courts martials which would have resulted in a rapid collapsa.
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