The date is Thursday, October 29th, 1914. The Great War, the War to End All Wars, rages
across Europe and has become a quagmire of trenches dug along hundreds of miles of central
Europe. Artillery barrages sweep from side to side,
attempting to drive out the men in those trenches, and victories are measured in inches taken
by one side or the other. Always though the men return back to their
holes, huddling in cold, wet mud as enemy artillery takes revenge for the latest assault. Tens of thousands have already died, and today
fresh recruits move to reinforce the German lines. The men are recently drafted from across Germany's
poorer areas, and together make up the 3,000 strong 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. A messenger arrives on horseback bearing critical
news: the British have managed to break through German lines, and if they are not stopped
a large part of the front could collapse. The regiment's commanding officer makes a
quick decision and barks out orders to his sub-commanders, who blow on whistles to order
the men up onto their feet and marching forward at double time. The soldiers hurry the best they can through
a forest shattered by artillery barrages and thick with mud, marching to close the gap
exploited by the British before a total collapse of this part of the front risks the collapse
of Germany's front lines. Through the smoke and fog though the men of
the regiments flanking the Bavarian regiment's march catch only glimpses of gray-green caps,
which look from a distance and through the haze a lot like British uniforms. Alarmed, they begin to open fire, unknowingly
decimating entire swathes of their own troops. By the time the terrible mistake is realized
the thousands of soldiers are reduced to a few hundred survivors, and in one company
there's only a single man left standing- a twenty six year old soldier by the name of
Adolf Hitler. History has well documented the tragedy of
Hitler's survival that fateful day, a deed which he repeated numerous times throughout
the war, cheating death by incredible margins. Once he was ordered out of a tent where military
awards were being presented, only for an artillery shell to strike the tent and reduce it to
a crater- with Hitler just outside it. Another time a gas attack strikes amongst
his line, yet Hitler manages to avoid the worst effects of the gas and is only temporarily
blinded. While other survivors of the gas succumb by
the thousands to disease and injury, Hitler makes a complete recovery and is once more
back on the front lines, where another exploding artillery shell buries shrapnel in his leg
but leaves his body whole and otherwise unharmed. For all intents and purposes, Hitler was invincible,
uncannily dodging the wrath of a grim reaper who every day claimed thousands. As we look at the world that arose from the
ashes of World War II we are prone to asking, how much of the peace of the last eighty years
would have existed if Hitler had never driven the world to its last major confrontation? War has not been abolished, five minutes on
any news program will quickly remind you of that fact. Yet the truth is that war between major powers
has not occurred since the end of World War II, and after centuries- millennia even- of
incessant conflict between major states and empires, it's hard to believe that without
World War II's terrible consequences and the ensuing political order, humanity would have
simply given up on its lifelong hobby of killing each other as frequently as possible. The fruits that were fertilized in the ashes
of World War II have shaped a new world that would be completely alien to any human being
born before the 20th century, a world were major powers pursue diplomacy over war and
imperial ambitions are kept in check by a strong alliance of liberal democracies. World War II gave us the United Nations, an
agency that rose from the rubble of the League of Nations, and gave it a grim determination
to avoid conflict thanks to the League's many failures. Without World War II the world's first attempt
to unify its governments would have failed, and the old order of shifting alliances and
constant conflict would have returned. The war also gave us two rival superpowers
who held the planet at risk of total annihilation for decades- yet it's important to note that
it was two specific superpowers who rose to prominence: the United States and the Soviet
Union. Two opposing ideologies, democracy versus
communism, in a world where violence between communists, federalists, imperialists, and
democrats had raged for decades. In Germany alone political groups split between
the left and right had been killing themselves for years after the fall of the Kaiser and
his empire, and the violence repeated across the whole of Europe as communism found allies
in parties of workers oppressed and exploited by runaway capitalism. It is easy for modern observers to be ignorant
of the extreme violence between these two ideologies, and of the consequences of two
major powers arising from World War II with the means to annihilate each other- along
with the world- and both radically shifted on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Yet, again, it was specifically the United
States and the Soviet Union who arose from World War II, two powers who were almost equally
matched in every regard. The United States maintained a nuclear advantage
while the Soviet Union maintained a conventional power advantage. Both sides found themselves facing the threat
of total defeat in any conflict, and thus an equilibrium was achieved- one which actively
prevented all-out hostilities on several occasions and rescued the world from armageddon during
the Cuban missile crisis. Without Hitler, it's unlikely that it would
have been the evenly matched Soviet Union and United States who rose to prominence,
and this imbalance would almost certainly have led to all-out conflict: either because
one side believed itself capable of achieving complete victory through nuclear weapons,
or because the weaker side believed it would be forever dominated if it did not strike
first with nuclear weapons while it could still potentially win the conflict. There would have existed a tipping point in
history between the two rivals where the larger power reached a point that if the smaller
power did not act immediately, it would never again be able to act to overthrow it. The larger power would have also been aware
of this point, would have been aware of its approach, and would have had every incentive
to launch a surprise attack on the smaller power first in order to annihilate it. The world would have gone up in nuclear fire. This point existed also between the US and
the Soviet Union, sometime around the mid 1950s when the Soviet Union began the mass
production of atomic weapons and testing on long range rockets to deliver them intercontinentally. The US was itself greatly behind the Soviets
in rocket technology, but had far surpassed them in long-range bombers- if the Soviet
Union closed the nuclear gap by developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, it would
forever eliminate the US's only nuclear advantage over the Soviet Union. Many within the American military argued for
a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, believing that war was ultimately unavoidable
and that this might be the only chance to win it with minimal damage to the United States. Sure- Europe would be reduced to nuclear rubble,
but only a few American cities could possibly be hit by Russian long-range bombers, and
even this was unlikely. The Soviet Union would be crushed under nuclear
rubble and the world would be free of the threat of a major, all-out nuclear war forever,
even if it cost the whole of Europe. Thankfully the American presidents didn't
listen to their military commanders, and of course we now understand the consequences
of nuclear war far better than we did back then. We know for instance that while the United
States would have been completely spared any atomic attacks, it and the rest of the world
would have starved to death in the ensuing nuclear winter as trillions of tons of debris
shrouded the world for years. We know that global weather patterns would
have eventually carried massive plumes of radioactive fallout as far as the American
east coast, potentially making large swathes of the eastern seaboard uninhabitable for
decades, perhaps longer. The world would die a cold, dark death, and
the survivors would find little land free of the poison of radiation on which to grow
their crops once the sun returned a decade or more later. It was Hitler, and his rise to power and the
war and atrocities he committed that gave pause to the American presidents being compelled
to strike out at the Soviet Union. But it was also the fact that their enemy
was in fact the Soviet Union- a nation powerful enough to have a level of parity with the
United States. Once more had it not been these two specific
nations that rose from World War II, the odds of an uneven match set of superpowers are
an almost certainly. But who could have arisen? Without Hitler Germany's fate could have taken
a threefold path. The constitutional democracy that arose after
the fall of the Kaiser was unstable, and the President tried daily to maintain a balance
between the opposing political parties. Democratic socialists and full-blown communists
made up a large segment of the left's seats in the German parliament, and hardline Nazis
and imperalist nationalists made up equally large segments in the right's seats in parliament. Not only were the two sides opposed to each
other, the parties were all completely opposed to one another as well, leaving German democracy
so unstable that two elections were called for in 1932 alone. This leaves the possibility of three paths
for Germany without Hitler. Germany could have become a strong, liberal
democracy which would have found itself closely allied with the democracies of Britain and
France. This would have left the entirety of Western
Europe in direct opposition to the expansion of Communist eastern Europe. Without a world war to weaken Germany and
draw the United states into European affairs, the US would have remained as it was at the
outbreak of World War II- isolationist and content to let Europe fight out its own problems. Hostilities between east and west were all
but inevitable, and even during World War II the British considered for the entirety
of the war launching offensives against the Soviet Union after the fall of Germany. Hitler was fully aware of these hostilities
and when he launched his famous counterattack against the allies pressing into Germany which
resulted in iconic battles such as the Battle of the Bulge, his strategy had in fact been
not to completely defeat the British and Americans, but to hand them such a defeat just large
enough that they agreed to a cease-fire. After the cease-fire he hoped to talk the
two sides into joining him against the Soviet Union, and was confident enough in this plan
to consider it a likely path to a German exit from World War II. With a German liberal democracy World War
II may have been postponed a few years, but would have still taken place- albeit without
the United States involving itself. Given Germany's initial lead in developing
the nuclear bomb, the West would have used these bombs the moment they became available,
devastating the European countryside. With its vast reserves of manpower though,
the Soviets could have held out long enough for their spies to steal the secrets of the
bomb and respond with their own in a few years. The devastating nuclear escalation would have
lead to global climate catastrophe. Germany however could also have become an
imperialist state once again. The German President during the early 1930s-
Paul Von Hindenburg- had actually made Hitler chancellor because he expected Hitler to crush
his political rivals and place the nation back on the path to imperialism. This historical outcome would very closely
match a Germany of a third option: one where Hitler died in World War I and the Nazi party
gave the chancellorship to a much more competent and psychologically stable man. With Germany rising once more as an imperial
power, or as a fascist state with a more capable version of Hitler, it's indubitable that the
nation would have launched the same offensives it did in the days before the official start
of World War II. This would have prompted the same response
from Britain and France, and the same start to World War II. The difference this time however would have
been a military leader who respected the opinions of his generals, who would not have foolishly
launched an attack against the Soviet Union until it had secured Western Europe completely,
and who would have practiced war with a more careful and tactically sound approach. A more capable German Fuhrer or Kaiser for
example, would not have called for a halt to the German forces on their way to completely
crush the British as they tried to flee at Dunkirk, a strategic mistake by Hitler which
would have irrevocably changed the course of the war for the allies for the worse. Without Hitler and the rise of a capable Fuhrer
or Kaiser, Germany would have been an unstoppable war machine which would have crushed the allies
before the United States could join the fight. Then Germany could have turned its full might
against the Soviet Union, which facing only roughly half of Germany's power still suffered
near defeat in our real World War II. Facing the full strength of the Wehrmacht
alone, the Soviets would have quickly fallen, and the German empire or Third Reich would
lay claim to all of Europe. Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and countless
other European nations would exist only as governments in exile inside the United States. A different cold war would have fallen on
the planet, one where the United States faced off across the Atlantic against a Germany
far more powerful than itself- its only choice being nuclear war now or total and complete
subjugation forever. The Holy Bible states that “God works all
things for good”, and given the possibilities of a Germany without Hitler, it can be hard
to argue that indeed, history did turn out for the best despite the horrors of World
War II. Millions of lives were lost, yet in the killing
its likely that billions of lives were saved, and instead of a war of nuclear annihilation,
or a continuation of the incessant warmongering between major powers, we inherited a world
of relative international peace, our conflicts between major powers limited to small proxy
wars in faraway corners of the world and largely cultural and economic in nature. We never thought we would say this, but thank
God for Hitler. What do you think a world without Hitler would
actually have looked like? Also check out our other video, what if Hitler
had won! Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next
time!
