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Sticking a finger in the air: Bormann definitely dies very early on. Goebels and Ribbentrop try and sit on the sidelines and survive until a winner appears. Himmler fancies himself the successor but crumbles the first time he finds himself in a room with Goering. A bunch of army officers seriously consider a military coup and the risk really depends on how much a peacetime Wehrmacht has been eaten up and displaced by the SS.
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 21:30 |
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# ? Jun 4, 2024 20:04 |
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Neophyte posted:Who would have been the most hated Nazi chief and would have been enthusiastically killed off first in alt-hist post-Hitler Reich, like Beria after the death of Stalin? There's at least an implicit "and was weak enough to get ganked" in here. I'm so many miles from an expert here, so I look forward to being corrected by someone more knowledgable, but there's a ratio of being a bastard* vs. being weak enough that anyone can do anything about it going on here. To give the most obvious example, Hitler did some morally questionable things[citation needed] but for circa a decade or so he's was pretty unassailable in terms of party leadership so the answer can't be as simple as "did bad things get wrecked". *It should also be kept in mind that for this case the more relevant calculation is being a bastard from the standpoint of other Nazis.
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 21:31 |
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Neophyte posted:Who would have been the most hated Nazi chief and would have been enthusiastically killed off first in alt-hist post-Hitler Reich, like Beria after the death of Stalin? Himmler is the obvious target, but I would argue he was in a much stronger position than Beria was and barring something crazy, would be the one best positioned to take over. Heydrich maybe had he not been assassinated. Borman as well.
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 21:32 |
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Himmler ultimately ran both the SD and the Gestapo, so he's going to be the one with the Beria-esque files on who has a mistress where and who has predilections for little kids and who is 1/8th Jewish and who once said a bad thing about Hitler in the Spring of 1943 etc. More importantly he's also going to have the files on who said poo poo about one of their peers. Does this put him in a position to be kingmaker or to take the crown himself, or does it put a giant target on his head a la Beria? Probably comes down to how loyal the Waffen SS is to him and how it stacks up against the real army, plus how much he's able to rally the support of key members of the Army. If he's been able to make friends in the post-war with the Jodl/Keitel crowd things are going to go a lot better for him. edit: Bormann doesn't survive long enough to see Hitler's body cool. He's that bad mix of being close to the throne while not actually being that powerful himself. He's nothing but a loose end that anyone with a pistol can afford to tie off.
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 21:41 |
I'm going wild card on this theory, a certain Air Marshal decides to try uppers that week instead of opitates.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 00:05 |
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SeanBeansShako posted:I'm going wild card on this theory, a certain Air Marshal decides to try uppers that week instead of opitates. Nah he went out like either Belushi or Candy 10 years before der Fuhrer.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 00:18 |
Cyrano4747 posted:Nah he went out like either Belushi or Candy 10 years before der Fuhrer. Heart exploden.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 02:11 |
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Modern day cast: Jonah Hill as Goering? Bendersnatch Cumperdink as Goebbels? Elijah Wood as Himmler?
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 04:01 |
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That'd be an interesting idea for a game; plotting a coup in a generically authoritarian-militerist regime in a vague unspecified european country; like the end of Fullmetal Alchemist.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 05:00 |
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Modern day cast: Goebbels needs to be played by Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach in the Zach Snyder Watchmen movie)
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 10:31 |
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wasn't goebbels short?
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 13:42 |
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:wasn't goebbels short? Elijah Woods isn't 3 feet tall and Tom Cruise isn't 6 feet, but Hollywood makes it work.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 14:04 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Elijah Woods isn't 3 feet tall and Tom Cruise isn't 6 feet, but Hollywood makes it work. i feel like we can find a short dude with the same pointy rear end rat face
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 14:34 |
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:there were very few western europeans that ended up working in Germany; totals around 2 million with over half of those being French. Mmm. More than you might think. A friend of the family was Belgian and was forced to work in Germany in WW2. He speaks German but refuses to, to this day. Like, 2 million adult males of working age is not actually a small number of people. France has a population of 41 million at the time, assuming it's men being deported and taking out of consideration kids and the old, that would be something like one in five eligible French people. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Feb 1, 2022 |
# ? Feb 1, 2022 15:08 |
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feedmegin posted:Mmm. More than you might think. A friend of the family was Belgian and was forced to work in Germany in WW2. He speaks German but refuses to, to this day. it's hardly "prevent exploitation of occupied economic resources" levels though; other factors were more relevant in preventing the nazis from successfully exploiting western european economic resources. STO was basically just a draft of eligible males and most of the other nations managed to keep their economies going reasonably effectively despite having drafted similar age classes. KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Feb 1, 2022 |
# ? Feb 1, 2022 15:11 |
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:wasn't goebbels short? Jackie Earle Haley is only 5'5"
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 15:15 |
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James Ransone (Ziggy in The Wire, Ray Person in Generation Kill) as Goebbels.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 15:23 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:That'd be an interesting idea for a game; plotting a coup in a generically authoritarian-militerist regime in a vague unspecified european country; like the end of Fullmetal Alchemist. Two tabletop wargames come to mind: Junta, about coups and politics in a fictional Central American country. The object of the game is to have the most money in your Swiss bank account at the end. Kremlin, which came out just before the collapse of the USSR. It can be described as "Death of Stalin, the board game."
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 16:03 |
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An 'Imposter' game in which everyone is the traitor.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 16:20 |
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There's a scholarly book about Germanys exploitation of europe, "Paying for Hitlers War", but I haven't read it. Steen Andersen, again, is one of the authors. The blurb I found agrees that Denmark was treated differently, (from this page in danish, run through google translate): quote:The book is the first research attempt to map the contribution of the occupied countries (and Sweden and Finland) to the German war economy. The contributions are all written by leading researchers within the period and topic. Interesting last paragraphs there. Anyone read it? This one is available in english. catfry fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Feb 1, 2022 |
# ? Feb 1, 2022 17:15 |
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Say, something in bewbie's battleship thread got me curious. So at Jutland, one of the things that people recognized was that the Royal Navy had an inflexible institutional culture that acted against individual initiative, arguably to its cost when multiple captains just watched the High Seas Fleet sail by at night due to a lack of orders. So after the war, and possibly after the battle even, what did the Royal Navy do about it? What changes were made, and how much of an effect did those changes have on the conduct of the Royal Navy in WW2?
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 22:31 |
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You all remember how a few weeks ago someone was asking about the official way to get a war trophy back to the states in WW2, minus the usual "just shove it in your duffel" shennanigans? Someone in TFR just posted some old capture papers: sporkstand posted:I was cleaning out some old stuff last weekend, this fell out of a box and I figured it might be of some interest to people here. Note that the person who signed off on this dude's bringback pistol was a Captain, which gives an idea of how far down the chain that poo poo got pushed. I thought I remembered it being company commanders.
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 01:19 |
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How did he get a French bayonet?
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 01:25 |
Fangz posted:How did he get a French bayonet? When in France...
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 01:32 |
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The ATF didn't exist back then so who would have stopped you from importing any gun you want, anyway
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 01:37 |
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Fangz posted:How did he get a French bayonet? I would not be surprised at all if the dude picked it up off a German thinking it was German and found out later it was French.
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 01:54 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Note that the person who signed off on this dude's bringback pistol was a Captain, which gives an idea of how far down the chain that poo poo got pushed. I thought I remembered it being company commanders. On my grandfather's version of that form, the signer was a 1LT. And I use "signed" loosely, because it's clearly a rubber stamp.
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 02:39 |
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Phanatic posted:On my grandfather's version of that form, the signer was a 1LT. And I use "signed" loosely, because it's clearly a rubber stamp. This does not preclude him being a company commander. 1st Lieutenants were often stepping up to be company commanders in rapid reorganizations of the military, or during times of manpower shortages. Especially in the conclusion of war as units quickly absorbed others and men were transferred back and forth in preparation to transfers and demob, company commander would be any officer who was remaining. I'm on mobile so I can't dig em but I think they've been posted in this thread, too. Assumption of command orders signed to the undersigned himself, basically "As the sole officer present I assume the command of this company until I find someone else" or "Due to being unable to reach anyone, I, 1LT so and so, assume the command of this 69th Transport Battalion until we meet another major formation".
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 02:44 |
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Honestly I don't doubt it got pushed even lower. I suspect the whole thing was basically "get an officer to give it a quick OK"
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 03:10 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Honestly I don't doubt it got pushed even lower. I suspect the whole thing was basically "get an officer to give it a quick OK" I want to see one signed by something like a staff sergeant with some bizarre documentary lineage including accounts of all the officers getting salmonella and being wracked with the shits or something similarly zany whereby some cary elwes style scamp drives home in a stolen hetzer
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 04:11 |
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FAUXTON posted:I want to see one signed by something like a staff sergeant with some bizarre documentary lineage including accounts of all the officers getting salmonella and being wracked with the shits or something similarly zany whereby some cary elwes style scamp drives home in a stolen hetzer I'm reminded of something I read going in the other direction, where some weird series of circumstances lead to squad that was, like, a colonel, two captains, a lieutenant, and one poor private having to make their way across some dangerous terrain.
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 04:41 |
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm reminded of something I read going in the other direction, where some weird series of circumstances lead to squad that was, like, a colonel, two captains, a lieutenant, and one poor private having to make their way across some dangerous terrain. We had 2 Warrants, a Captain, and an LT going on a ground movement in Kurdistan and the SGM wanted to know where was the NCOIC?
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 05:22 |
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At last, a better way to explain my username than Wikipedia. Polyakov posted:Not really, the UK had more shipyards, better shipyards and access to american shipyards. Even if we add French shipyards into the mix they are capable on a raw capacity of outbuilding Nazi occupied Europe. They had the ability to starve nazi germany of resources while maintaining access to their own so the nazis would not have been able to get on a parity footing. The UK had centuries of basically impeccable credit in the international market to draw on so its extremely unlikely they would ever actually run out of borrowing capacity in a reasonable time frame. What chemicals and feedstock were the Germans unable to import due to the blockade, for either world war? And instead of using lots of nukes on a Germany that conquered European Russia, why not anthrax?
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 05:53 |
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White Coke posted:
famously, ammonia for explosives. remember when countries in the late 19th century were fighting over annexing random remote islands covered in bird poo poo? the bird poo poo, collected over centuries, was an extremely rich source of ammonia, which is essential to make explosives and fertilizer, both of which industrial nations need in large quantity. you can dig up nitre from deserts, or you can strip mine the bird poo poo, but there's otherwise no good way to collect ammonia at scale from natural deposits. germany had neither nitre nor rocks covered in bird poo poo, and so encouraged german chemists to figure out a better solution - not strictly because of the war, but because as part of the growing 20th century research into industrial chemical production, being able to make cheap ammonia in a factory would be a big fat money maker. there were multiple attempts at creating ammonia synthetically, but they weren't that good just in the nick of time, about five years before the war, two german chemists named fritz haber and carl bosch figured out a cheap, efficient way to create ammonia out of thin air (literally, reacting atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen) and this was spun up just a year or two before the shooting started. the allies were able to blockade all ammonia imports from germany which should have crippled both the german armaments industry and german agriculture, if not for the haber-bosch process, which iirc is still used today
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 08:00 |
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During WW1 a lot of household materials and food were smuggled across the border from the Netherlands into Germany. The German government was also very eager to buy any livestock and other materials from the Dutch.
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 12:22 |
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:just in the nick of time, about five years before the war, two german chemists named fritz haber and carl bosch figured out a cheap, efficient way to create ammonia out of thin air (literally, reacting atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen) and this was spun up just a year or two before the shooting started. the allies were able to blockade all ammonia imports from germany which should have crippled both the german armaments industry and german agriculture, if not for the haber-bosch process, which iirc is still used today Behind the Bastards had a good episode on Haber Fritz Haber: The Man Who Invented Chemical Warfare
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 12:39 |
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There are quite a few mid-19thC/early-20thC chemists who made breakthroughs thinking 'this will make life so much better for everyone' and then someone discovered the military applications.
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 12:50 |
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Alchenar posted:There are quite a few mid-19thC/early-20thC chemists who made breakthroughs thinking 'this will make life so much better for everyone' and then someone discovered the military applications. See the historical documentary Real Genius
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 12:56 |
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Modernization of the M48 to the M60 standard and a small article TOG flamethrower for T-34 and KV-1 tanks Big articles queue: German tank building trends at the end of WW2, Pz.Kpfw.III/IV, E-50 and E-75 development, Pre-war and early war British tank building, BT-7M/A-8 trials, Jagdtiger suspension, Light Tank T37, Light Tank T41, T-26-6 (SU-26), Voroshilovets tractor trials, Israeli armour 1948–1982, T-64's composite armour, Evolution of German tank observation devices, Oerlikon and Solothurn anti-tank rifles, Gun Motor Carriage T12/M3, King Tigers in Hungary, German King Tiger losses in December of 1944 in Hungary, Tiger (P) Typ 102, T-55 underwater driving equipment, T-34 tanks with M-17 engines, Wartime and post-war anti-tank hand grenades, Soviet "Tigers" in movies Available for request (others' articles): Shashmurin's career GMC T48 GMC M3 7.62 cm F.K.(r) auf gp. Selbstfahrlafette (Sd.Kfz. 6/3) Sd.Kfz.254 Small articles queue: German horse carts, why the Panther couldn't replace the Pz.Kpfw.IV, Jerry cans in Soviet service Small articles available: linked because the list is too long New small articles: T-60 tank with thickened armour FIAT 3000 Howitzer Motor Carriage T88 German tank turret development Vickers-Carden-Loyd M1937 light tank Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Feb 2, 2022 |
# ? Feb 2, 2022 15:37 |
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# ? Jun 4, 2024 20:04 |
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Vahakyla posted:This does not preclude him being a company commander. 1st Lieutenants were often stepping up to be company commanders in rapid reorganizations of the military, or during times of manpower shortages. One of the captains from my unit had been a company commander in Afghanistan as a first lieutenant. He was the XO and both his first commander and his replacement were killed within a relatively short amount of time so they kept him as the commander for the rest of the deployment. He's gotta be in the running for most company command time, 1 command as a 1LT and 3 as a CPT, something like 4 -5 years easy.
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 19:09 |