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!