How do you imagine the world would look today if the Axis powers had won World War II?

[d_dad@sh.itjust.works]

Alternate history is one of my favorite topics, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

[saucepain@lemmy.world]

The Man in the High Castle has a pretty good take on this.

[d_dad@sh.itjust.works]

The book Fatherland by Robert Harris was good as well! But I’m more interested in personal individual takes, since all of us have distinct unique outlooks on things.

[outwit1294@lemmy.today]

I think there is a show about this.

I imagine that we would be more scientifically advanced but more radical, less liberal.

However, everything eventually changes over time. The world has managed to steer towards fascist regimes after the win of USA in WW2. It is not impossible that Hitler would have made us more liberal today.

[tyo_ukko@sopuli.xyz]

I imagine that we would be more scientifically advanced

I highly doubt this. The fascist regimes are not really welcoming for open science having scientists with freedom of thought. The science would be more like in the Soviet Union, where science education was great, but the advances were reduced to "government approved" tracks like space, weapons and maybe some medicine. Hard to see something like computational revolution stemming from a repressed regime.

[dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de]

Let's assume that the Axis winning the war means they keep all territory they've had at the height of their expansion in our timeline but don't expand much more, at least not immediately.

• The EU does not exist but as most of Europe is either occupied by Germany or allied with it, there might be a similar organization with a way stronger Germany at its center.
• If a NATO-like alliance forms, it excludes most of Europe, mainly consisting of the USA, Canada and UK, maybe Spain and Portugal
• The Soviet Union is way weaker than in our timeline with most of Eastern Europe being under German control. They still have control over Central Asia, probably more than in our timeline.
• The Allies still control Gibraltar and are able to intercept ships passing through the English Channel, making the west of France the only safe access to the Atlantic for the Axis.
• Wernher von Braun and other rocket scientists stay in Germany, giving the USA and Soviet Union a massive disadvantage in the development of ICBMs. The USA may have nuclear bombs but their only way to threaten Germany with them would be UK-based bombers which are way slower and easier to defend against. On the other hand, a failure of the Manhattan Project might be the whole reason why the Axis wins the war. Everyone will figure it out eventually but as we see from real life, it might take decades.
• No proper cold war as there are no two super powers exercising mutually assured destruction with ICBMs but probably ongoing tensions along the German-Soviet border. The USA probably stays out of it to avoid becoming a target for either side.
• Italian East Africa (Somalia) becomes the most important rocket launch site in the world, as it is the only Axis-controlled territory that is close to the equator and has open ocean to the east. Some smaller rockets may launch from Japan. French Guiana might be under Axis control but shipping rockets over the Atlantic is dangerous when they could get intercepted by foreign ships. Without competition, manned spaceflight develops a lot slower, maybe not at all.
• Without manned spaceflight and the threat of a nuclear war, there is less incentive to develop computers and the internet.

[dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de]

I imagine that we would be more scientifically advanced

Much of the scientific advances in the second half of the 20th century were driven either directly or indirectly by the Cold War:

• rockets were first developed to deploy nuclear warheads, then to deploy spy satellites and eventually to demonstrate technological superiority
• computers were needed to calculate rocket trajectories
• the internet was developed to connect defense systems in the event of incoming nuclear missiles, either to launch countermeasures quickly or to stay in contact if the surface gets uninhabitable

Without two super powers of similar strength who have access to both nuclear bombs and rockets, all of this would happen way more slowly and the main reason why the USA and Soviet Union developed rockets at a similar pace was because they both employed German rocket scientists after the war. Without this, there would be no space race, just slow and steady progress of one power who can then keep everyone else from catching up.

[outwit1294@lemmy.today]

Germany made some insane progress under Hitler

[5ibelius9insterberg@feddit.org]

Yeah… in optimising weapons and stuff that carries weapons. Imagine what could have been, if the same amount of money/time/whatever would have been invested in medicine or renewable energy.

[matte@feddit.nu]

Great answer, do you see any internal tensions within the Axis that could foreseeably have caused collapse comparable to say Soviet communism's collapse in the real world? How dependant were they on Hitler and Mussolini as individuals?

[outwit1294@lemmy.today]

A lot of scientific breakthroughs are made like this. Internet was made by the military. Rockets were made because we were trying to outarm each other.

While it would be best if we didn’t kill each other, the optimised outcome is getting scientific progress while killing each other. The silver lining of concentration camps is the human experimentation which gave solid evidence for solid science.

[tyo_ukko@sopuli.xyz]

The Soviets also made scientific breakthroughs within their military industrial complex. Not much of that trickled down to ordinary people, which then hindered it from being further applied.

The silver lining of concentration camps is the human experimentation which gave solid evidence for solid science.

How much of "solid science" are we talking about? My understanding is that it was not a lot, and its quality was rather poor.

[dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de]

Hard to say. I'm not a historian, so I can only speculate. I would assume that Hitler would eventually select a successor and there is no way of telling how good that person would be at keeping the Reich in order.

comparable to say Soviet communism’s collapse in the real world

As far as I understand it, the fall of the Soviet Union was preceded by at least a decade of economic struggle that was caused by a multitude of factors. Basically the only thing they had to export was oil and weapons and the only nations they could trade with were relatively poor. When their oil production cost kept rising, they just couldn't keep their exports high enough to import enough food and luxury goods to keep their population happy. This was a prime driver for unrest in regions that bordered the west, especially East Germany who of course got news of what life in West Germany was like. The Soviets were eventually forced to open the Berlin Wall and from there, there was nothing they could do to keep people from just leaving and fully collapsing the economy in the process. To this day, 35 years after the reunion, former East Germany is way behind the rest of the country even though on paper they have the same chances as everyone else, just because there has been a massive brain drain.

So overall, the collapse of the Soviet Union was less a failure of communism itself and more a failure to counteract their economic weaknesses as well as a result of their isolationism. The USA didn't win the Cold War because of the inherent superiority of capitalism but because the world drinks Coca Cola, wears jeans, watches Hollywood movies and works with IBM-compatible PCs. If the Soviet Union had pivoted their economy to those kinds of goods and had managed to export them to the west, they might have become what China is today.

So it all comes down to the question if alternate-history Germany manages to do that. With technology advancing slower overall and therefore becoming less of a factor in global markets, and at the same time keeping a lot of top scientists who in the real world left for the other superpowers, they could probably do it.

[jubilantjaguar@lemmy.world]

This particular alternative history is uninteresting because its premises mean you have to invent a whole parallel universe. In plain English: it could not have happened and would not have happened, for essentially economic reasons.

The interesting alternative histories are ones that turn on a single fortuitous event.

PS: I am saying that OP's question is boring because it is unanswerable. It just invites a hundred other questions. If you want to ask THOSE questions, then ask them.

[dagwoodiii@piefed.social]

You are contradicting yourself.

Hitler left orders not to be awakened so he slept in on D-Day. Rommel had left his post. Think that wouldn't have changed things?

Stalin had dozens of warnings that Hitler planned to invade. What if he'd taken even one seriously?

What if Hitler had let the Army get the glory at Dunkirk and steamrolled the troops on the beach?

I can think of dozens of times the course of the War changed by the actions of one person.

[dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de]

There are several events that might have had the possibility to turn the war:

• Germany doesn't attack France at all, concentrating their forces in the east which gives the UK fewer reasons to join the war
• Japan doesn't attack Pearl Harbor so the USA don't join the war (yet)
• Operation Mincemeat fails and the Axis keeps their troops in Sicily, preventing the Allies from establishing a base in the Mediterranean.
• Axis spies uncover the plans for D-Day before it happens, Germany bombs the landing boats and thousands of Allied soldiers drown before they can reach land
• The Manhattan Project fails to produce a working nuclear bomb. Most of Germany and Italy has already fallen but Japan stays strong and can eventually send troops to Europe.

[kambusha@sh.itjust.works]

We'd be speaking in German on lemmy, wondering what all those weird English memes are that sometimes pop up on the timeline

[mrkawfee@lemmy.world]

The Middle East would be a lot more peaceful I can tell you that.

[makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world]

You may be interested in The Man in the High Castle it's both a novel by Phillip K. Dick and TV show on Amazon Prime that explores exactly that premise

[fluxion@lemmy.world]

Like Russia today.