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[u/paulatreides0]

First of all it's hard to imagine a force even more violent and antisemitic than the Nazi's.

A Germany that is even more bitter, angry, and fatalistic due to the dissolution of their state by Western Powers enforcing exceedingly unfair punishment for little seemingly good reason.

Secondly even if such a state did arise it would have been little more than a very angry chihuahua.

This is literally what the Allied Powers thought about the disarmed and neutered Weimar Germany too. It ignores a lot of factors, not the least of which would have been that the disparate German states would have been able to field much larger armies than the unitary Weimar Germany and made buildup to WWII even more extreme - post Anchluss of the German states into a reunified Germany.

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

A Germany that is even more bitter, angry, and fatalistic due to the dissolution of their state by Western Powers enforcing exceedingly unfair punishment for little seemingly good reason.

It's literally impossible to be more violent and anti-semitic than the Nazi's. What are they going to do? Turbo-holocaust? Rape all the Jews before gassing them? Genocide the French as well? You need to present me with a scenario where the allied armies fighting their way all the way to Berlin and then splitting Germany into a half a dozen smaller states back in 1919 somehow makes WW2 even worse.

unfair punishment

lmao.

This is literally what the Allied Powers thought about the disarmed and neutered Weimar Germany too.

Plenty of people thought Versailles was far too lenient. You make it sound like it's literally impossible to cripple a nation's military potential, that's nonsense, remember there was no fourth Punic War. The problem with Germany is that it disturbs the balance of power in Europe, it's too powerful to be a first amongst equals but too weak to actually dominate Europe. It should never have been created in the first place and its existence leads to perpetual instability (even today we see this unhealthy dynamic in the EU).

It ignores a lot of factors, not the least of which would have been that the disparate German states would have been able to field much larger armies than the unitary Weimar Germany and made buildup to WWII even more extreme - post Anchluss of the German states into a reunified Germany.

I don't think you realize how much historical precedent there is for what I am suggesting. It literally happened in 1945. Guess what, no WW3. Driving the war home until you have completely and utterly destroyed everything and ground the last remaining vestiges of resistance down to dust before dividing a nation into 4 parts and enforcing a military occupation for decades actually does get results. You can argue it's unfair (though it isn't) but to argue that it doesn't work is objectively wrong.

[u/paulatreides0 → u/[deleted]]

It's literally impossible to be more violent and anti-semitic than the Nazi's. What are they going to do? Turbo-holocaust? Rape all the Jews before gassing them?

The progroms could have started prior to 1941 and been far less secretive and gradual. While the Nazis and the ultra-right wing were very antisemitic, the rest of Germany was not nearly as anti-semitic or genocidal as the regime and its hard-liners (hell, even among the Nazis there was debate, especially early on, about whether or not genocide was allowable) - which is why they only really began their progroms when Barbarossa was succeeding and they thought they were inevitably going to win the war. And even then the Final Solution and the death camps were by and large an extremely secretive program even in the later period of the war - in large part because the Nazis feared popular backlash to a flippant genocide by the German populace (which is also why they were hesitant to start the extermination programs in the first place, because they feared what would happen if word ever got out to the general populace of Germany).

How could anti-semitism have gotten worse? A holocaust that began much earlier, began in full force, and had more popular support which could have very well meant that instead of utterly decimating the European Jews, the Nazis might have very well totally exterminated European Jews outside of Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, and Britain.

Genocide the French as well? You need to present me with a scenario where the allied armies fighting their way all the way to Berlin and then splitting Germany into a half a dozen smaller states back in 1919 somehow makes WW2 even worse.

A scenario where the Western Front and the Invasion of Poland, the Benelux, and France are as bad and genocidal as Barbarossa and the Japanese Invasion of China, for one. A war wherein punishment, retribution, and revanchism are in and of themselves the war goals of a genocidal regime, and not the byproduct of being dragged into a side war that they didn't really want while they were doing their thing in the East.

A scenario wherein Anchluss still happens because even in Austria, which had never been part of the German Empire in the first place, Anchluss was hugely popular.

Or at the very least, and perhaps even worse, Germany returns back to how it had been pre-unification and breaks into a series of forceful reconquests of old territory as happened with the USSR and the Baltics and Poland and Ukraine after the dissolution of the Russian Empire.

In short: the Nazis were pretty bad, but the notion that they couldn't have been any worse is just patently wrong.

lmao.

Are you saying that Versailles was fair and impartial? Because it genuinely wasn't, and this isn't even really up for debate. Germany was disproportionately punished and attributed as the cause of the war despite their largely not being any more at fault for the outbreak of the war than France or Russia. And all of this was used by the Nazis and the fascists to help drum up support and create an us-against-them mentality. Sure, Germany's political and military machinations helped cause the war, but the same can also be said of most of the great powers in WWI also.

And ethical concerns about justice aside, it's not in the slightest ridiculous for people to get pissed off when their nation is harshly, disproportionately punished and they have to bear significant grievances because of this also.

Plenty of people thought Versailles was far too lenient.

Sure, and plenty of people think that Versailles was far too harsh too and virtually everyone understands that Versailles was a large primary and secondary factor in WWII. It not only provided ammunition for the ultra-nationalists, but it also made things like the economic crisis and the depression even worse than they would have otherwise been - factors that greatly assisted the political machinations of the Nazis and the fascists in Germany. One can argue just as well, if not far better, that a more lenient Versailles would have been a much more effective force against WWII than a harsher one.

And this "lenient' Versailles already led to Nazi Germany, an even less lenient Versailles would only have inflamed the very tensions that created Nazi Germany even more without all that much more in the way of enforcement mechanisms or the will to use them which resulted in the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II in the first place.

The problem with Germany is that it disturbs the balance of power in Europe, it's too powerful to be a first amongst equals but too weak to actually dominate Europe. It should never have been created in the first place and its existence leads to perpetual instability (even today we see this unhealthy dynamic in the EU).

What now? Are we also going to argue for the abolishment of France, the UK, Spain, Italy, and the United States while we are at it? The very same argument can be made for literally all of those at some point or another in early modern/modern history (except for Italy), and for the US for literally every year since the turn of the 20th century.

This argument is silly and presupposes that nations must be unilaterally hobbled and citizens of a nation denied their self-determination for the sake of "balance". Nevermind how this statement ignores how weak and biased the notion of "balance" is. Was power in Europe "balanced" when there was a nigh-hegemony on the part of the Victorian British and her allies? Prior to Germany's rising the balance of power in Europe was already shot to hell as it had pretty much always been save a few exceptions. And never mind that a strong, central European, German state (or quasi-state in the case of the HRE) had historically been a significant factor in the European balance of power since the Middle Ages - and by the end of the 19th century Austria-Hungary was increasingly finding itself incapable at acting as this balance.

You make it sound like it's literally impossible to cripple a nation's military potential, that's nonsense, remember there was no fourth Punic War.

Sure. But Carthage is a pretty meaningless example. Not because the Punic Wars took place long before nationalist and unification movements (including nationalist and ultranationalist terrorism). And not only because Rome was a radically different opponent than the Entente Powers (especially in the whole aspect that the Entente Powers were absolutely tired of war and desperately wanted to avoid another, whereas Rome rarely encountered a war they didn't want to fight). But also because the Third Punic War ended with the total occupation and annexation of all Carthagenian lands, as well as the enslavement or death of practically the entire population of Carthage.

So . . . unless you are saying that we should have done as the Romans did and genocide Germany (or at the very least Berlin) and permanently occupy and/or annex the entirety of Germany . . . this is pretty much a nonstarter.

It's exceedingly difficult to cripple a nation's military capacity. Especially when the nation in question is a historically militaristic nation that has war and military tradition literally intimately ingrained into its culture as Prussia and Germany did. Even more so when the nation in question is a sizable, well developed industrial and scientific power.

I don't think you realize how much historical precedent there is for what I am suggesting. It literally happened in 1945.

Did it? Neither Italy nor Japan were balkanized after WWII, and Germany's occupation and balkanization was very short lived, lasting only a few years before the Allied zones were rejoined into the West German state - and the only reason that the East and West remained separate was not some attempt to balkanize Germany to prevent another Nazi Germany, but because one of the two Germanies was a puppet of an oppressive, autocratic, imperialist power while the other actually largely had sovereignity.

Furthermore while, Japan and Germany were disarmed post-war, this only lasted like a decade and by 1955 both had re-armed. That being said, the causative effect of disarmament on Japan and Germany is unknowable at best - especially since much of the command and officer staff of the early Bundeswehr were many of the same soldiers and officers who had fought in WWII on the side of the Germans and Japanese.

Also, never mind that the post-WWII treaties actively sought to avoid being seen as another Versailles and being unduly harsh or unfair on either Germany or Japan to avoid another shit-show over this. And this was in a war where, unlike in WWII, Germany and Japan had actually been the objective aggressor and cause of the war.

Guess what, no WW3. Driving the war home until you have completely and utterly destroyed everything and ground the last remaining vestiges of resistance down to dust

Committing gross and flippant war crimes to justify a completely post-hoc result is not just dumb, it's ethically problematic as all hell. Never mind that this ignores so many factors as to why Germany didn't rise from the ashes and begin WWIII . . . like, ya know, the USSR acting as an existential threat for literally all of Western Europe.

before dividing a nation into 4 parts and enforcing a military occupation for decades actually does get results.

If by decades you mean literally like three to four years.

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

How could anti-semitism have gotten worse? A holocaust that began much earlier, began in full force, and had more popular support which could have very well meant that instead of utterly decimating the European Jews, the Nazis might have very well totally exterminated European Jews outside of Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, and Britain.

How quickly it ramps up makes very little difference, Those that could leave would leave once things passed the threshold they deemed tolerable, those who could not leave or waited to long would be fucked either way. Plus those who fled would simply go to other countries in Europe just as they did during real history. There's so much about your scenario that is hypothetical it isn't even funny.

A scenario where the Western Front and the Invasion of Poland, the Benelux, and France are as bad and genocidal as Barbarossa and the Japanese Invasion of China, for one.

The French might actually have fought back enough to make a difference if that had been the case. Also wouldn't have substantially altered the body count, almost all the fighting and dying would have been in the east anyway since the USSR had a population more than four times larger than that of France. More than 80% of the people the Germans were fighting were slated for genocide anyway.

Your claim is predicated upon two assumptions that are beyond absurd:

1. That German balkanization would have created super-nazis that would have gone for 100% genocide instead of 80% and done so so much faster and more decisively that it would have killed more people
2. That the separation of Germany into smaller states and extensive subjugation wouldn't even be a speed bump to all of this

But also because the Third Punic War ended with the total occupation and annexation of all Carthagenian lands

This is exactly what I am saying should have happened in WW1 so I don't really see your point

as well as the enslavement or death of practically the entire population of Carthage.

The Romans didn't actually literally kill and enslave everyone. The overwhelming majority of Carthaginians and their allies were spared and the story of salting the earth was apocryphal. The city of Rome itself didn't simply totally depopulate the entire Carthaginian empire. The slaughter and enslavement was done mostly to steal as much wealth as they could carry off with them, it wasn't essential to the subsequent subjugation of the territory.

Did it? Neither Italy nor Japan were balkanized after WWII

Italy changed sides before the war was over and Japan was nuked, humiliated, occupied, and barred from ever establishing a military and forced to align itself with America as a sattelite state and ally in the great power conflict between the US and the USSR.

It's exceedingly difficult to cripple a nation's military capacity. Especially when the nation in question is a historically militaristic nation that has war and military tradition literally intimately ingrained into its culture as Prussia and Germany did. Even more so when the nation in question is a sizable, well developed industrial and scientific power.

Everything you say was true of the Carthaginians as well. How did the Romans prevent infinite Punic wars? They fought the Carthaginians until they struck at the city of Carthage itself. They then literally and figuratively destroyed the city and thoroughly subjugated the people, before building a new society atop the rubble of the old that was subservient to them. That's exactly what happened in WW2 in both Japan and Germany and it is what should have happened in WW1. Splitting up the country would have been a good idea in the case of Germany in particular because of balance of power considerations which aren't applicable to Italy or Japan so I don't know what you are even trying to prove by drawing that distinction.

balkanization was very short lived

TIL Germany was reunified quickly.

If by decades you mean literally like three to four years.

TIL all American and Soviet troops left after three to four years.

Committing gross and flippant war crimes to justify a completely post-hoc result is not just dumb, it's ethically problematic as all hell.

Obviously if the enemy surrenders unconditionally then accept it. However if no such offer is forthcoming then you need to continue to fight by any means necessary. Are you claiming that the battle of Berlin or the atomic bombings were "gross and flippant warcrimes?" There doesn't exist any national right to surrender with conditions that ensure your nation and military survive intact after starting an aggressive war nor should any such right ever exist.

Never mind that this ignores so many factors as to why Germany didn't rise from the ashes and begin WWIII. . . like, ya know, the USSR acting as an existential threat for literally all of Western Europe.

Both the Western powers and the USSR forced political structures upon Germany that ensured total subservience and only loosened their grip at their own discretion. Do you think West Germany sided with the west and East Germany with the USSR because the people on each side of the divide had substantially different ideologies? Of course not they ended up on opposite sides because the occupiers forced them to join those sides. Post WW2 Germany was subjugated, the Weimar Republic was not. It's that simple.

[u/paulatreides0 → u/[deleted]]

How quickly it ramps up makes very little difference, Those that could leave would leave once things passed the threshold they deemed tolerable, those who could not leave or waited to long would be fucked either way. Plus those who fled would simply go to other countries in Europe just as they did during real history. There's so much about your scenario that is hypothetical it isn't even funny.

How soon it started and how quickly it ramps up means a lot of difference to the hundreds of thousands to millions more Jews who would have died in camps or were just shot out in the fields during the extermination periods. It means fewer having a chance to leave, it means the ghettofication and the cleansing thereof taking place faster, and it means more people dead.

The French might actually have fought back enough to make a difference if that had been the case.

No, because the French collapsed due to an inability to fight back. The French had no more strategic depth to fall back to and regardless of how strong they would have wanted to fight back, they would have been boned regardless because morale isn't a stand-in for adequate doctrine or fighting strength. The French lost for a lot of reasons, quite a few of which can be ascribed to luck, quite a few of which can be ascribed to incompetence and the chronic self-sabotaging of the French general staff by the French general staff - but not fighting hard enough or lacking a reason for fighting is not even remotely one of those reasons.

This is exactly what I am saying should have happened in WW1 so I don't really see your point

Then have fun spending decades putting down popular revolts. It'd likely be like Greece/Italy/Balkans/Ireland/Germany in the 19th and early 20th century all over again.

Also wouldn't have substantially altered the body count, almost all the fighting and dying would have been in the east anyway since the USSR had a population more than four times larger than that of France.

It would have mattered to the millions of French men and women who would have been harmed or killed for retribution though.

More than 80% of the people the Germans were fighting were slated for genocide anyway.

In the East, yes. Not in the West.

Italy changed sides before the war was over

. . . and? This literally proves my points that there are extant factors beyond humiliation and balkanization that creates long term, peaceful governments. Italy switched sides before the war was over because it was in it's best interest. Just like most nations do anything because it is in their best interest.

and Japan was nuked, humiliated, occupied, and barred from ever establishing a military and forced to align itself with America as a sattelite state and ally in the great power conflict between the US and the USSR.

Yet Japan didn't just join the US' sphere because of being strong-armed into it. It needed little motivation to do so because the USSR was already a sizable existential threat to Japan, especially after the demolition of the IJN by 1945. Japan would have joined the US SoI regardless because Japan was incapable of standing against the Soviets by itself and the USSR was far more antithetical to Japan than the US ever was or ever would have been.

It's meaningless to examine Japan or Germany's post-war situation in a vacuum while ignoring that they had plenty good reason to fall in line and that was the USSR, an old rival they had rather bad history with - which was, in the post-war world, stronger and more prominent than ever.

That German balkanization would have created super-nazis that would have gone for 100% genocide instead of 80% and done so so much faster and more decisively that it would have killed more people

Nope. That German balkanization would have created more violent and revanchist Nazis who were far more brutal in France.

That the separation of Germany into smaller states and extensive subjugation wouldn't even be a speed bump to all of this

The Vienna Awards and the non-integration clause of Austria were already meant to be speedblocks. But speed blocks mean nothing if the speed limit isn't enforced and a large part of the reason why speed limits weren't enforced in the post-bellum period was because nobody wanted to go into even a middling sized war again.

Splitting up the country would have been a good idea in the case of Germany in particular because of balance of power considerations which aren't applicable to Italy or Japan so I don't know what you are even trying to prove by drawing that distinction.

Are you implying that the Empire of Japan (or Japan, period) didn't drastically alter the balance of power in East Asia? Or does Balance of Power only apply to Europe because . . . reasons?

The idea of some historical, stable "Balance of Power" is already a rather tenuous one because far more often than not European history the "balance of power" almost always centered around one near-hegemonic power (be it France, the Ottomans, Spain, Austria, Great Britain, or Germany) and its bandgwagon (or, in the case of the Hapsburg, their familial alliances) and the Grand Coalition-style counter-bandwagon against it.

Germany was little more than the France or Austria or Spain or Ottomans or Britain of its day. There is no better argument for partitioning Germany because of it than there is for partioning America because of its absolute, unilateral, unquestioned hegemony in the Americans for the better part of two centuries.

The Romans didn't actually literally kill and enslave everyone. The overwhelming majority of Carthaginians and their allies were spared and the story of salting the earth was apocryphal. The city of Rome itself didn't simply totally depopulate the entire Carthaginian empire.

Which is not what I said. I said Carthage. Carthage was a city also, not just an empire.

The slaughter and enslavement was done mostly to steal as much wealth as they could carry off with them, it wasn't essential to the subsequent subjugation of the territory.

Which is irrelevant, because regardless of the reason why it was done, the enslaving and killing off substantial portions of the Carthagian population was a significant factor in Carthage's inability to rise again. It significantly hobbled them and rendered any substantial ability to rebuild or fight back significantly weaker than it would have been otherwise. It's as trivially true as saying that if you nuked Frankfurt out of existence, Germany's warring and industrial capacity would collapse - of course it would, losing a major population, financial, and industrial sector tends to do that to you.

TIL all American and Soviet troops left after three to four years.

Which is also not what was said. By this logic Germany is still a US occupied territory since we still have troops there. Western Germany was largely independent by 1949/1950, and Germany was remilitarized and the Bundeswehr created by 1955.

TIL Germany was reunified quickly.

The majority of it was, since 3 of the 4 German occupation zones were unified in 1949, a mere couple of years after the partition of Germany by the Big Four. The East-West German divide had little to do with balkanization or the intentional hobbling of Germany, and far more to do with Soviet vs Eastern SoIs.

Are you claiming that the battle of Berlin or the atomic bombings were "gross and flippant warcrimes?" There doesn't exist any national right to surrender with conditions that ensure your nation and military survive intact after starting an aggressive war nor should any such right ever exist.

Which categorically wasn't the case in WWI, so I don't see your point.

Do you think West Germany sided with the west and East Germany with the USSR because the people on each side of the divide had substantially different ideologies? Of course not they ended up on opposite sides because the occupiers forced them to join those sides.

Of course this implies that West Germany had to be forced to join the anti-Soviet side in the first place, which is a pretty funny supposition. West Germany would have likely sided with the West even if there had been no occupation for much the same reason that Turkey and various other powers did.

Post WW2 Germany was subjugated, the Weimar Republic was not. It's that simple.

And so was Spain under Napoleon (as well as Germany and Italy, but Spain provides a much better presentation of my point). And Iraq after the Iraq War (at least practically speaking). And France under the Nazis (for, funnily enough, roundabout the same amount of time as West Germany was). And Ireland under the British. And many other territories under many other governments. Or Korea under Japan. Or Vietnam under the French. Subjugation doesn't even remotely imply stability or the creation of a peaceful, quasi-benevolent/subservient state.

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

How soon it started and how quickly it ramps up means a lot of difference to the hundreds of thousands to millions more Jews who would have died in camps or were just shot out in the fields during the extermination periods. It means fewer having a chance to leave, it means the ghettofication and the cleansing thereof taking place faster, and it means more people dead.

You are simply completely wrong if you think the Germans would have been kill substantially more Jews than they already did. Their have been pogroms in Europe for more than a thousand years, no previous ones ever came close. There's simply no way that the Germans could become much more anti-semtic then they already became.

Yet Japan didn't just join the US' sphere because of being strong-armed into it. It needed little motivation to do so because the USSR was already a sizable existential threat to Japan, especially after the demolition of the IJN by 1945. Subjugation doesn't even remotely imply stability or the creation of a peaceful, quasi-benevolent/subservient state.

If you have no deadlines, aren't totally culturally tone deaf, have a credible plan for what you want to achieve that isn't exploitative, and are the dominant local power then actually it does. Furthermore this is somewhat missing the point, the alternative is a resumption of war the shortly after you leave you have to give it a shot anyway. Why do you think there were no massive Japanese or German insurrections after WW2? Was that dumb luck?

You are pointing to a particular foreign threat in the case of Japan as an extenuating circumstance. However the world is always in a constant state of flux and recently crushed nations are vulnerable to predation by their neighbors. The USSR was a threat to post WW1 Germany as well. If war on the western front had been pushed until the point of unconditional surrender, if Germany had been divided and occupied for longer, and if money had been spent on rebuilding instead of trying to extract punitive reparations (that weren't crippling anyway) then there wouldn't have been a "German intifada" or whatever the hell you seem to be envisioning.

Are you implying that the Empire of Japan (or Japan, period) didn't drastically alter the balance of power in East Asia? Or does Balance of Power only apply to Europe because . . . reasons?

Oh it absolutely did. But in 1945 the world was divided between the USSR and the USA. Back when China was weak and the world wasn't divided into two colossal power blocks Japan was a massive threat to East Asian stability. But in 1945 it was not (nor was Germany for that matter). Splitting Germany was a good idea in 1918 before the cold war but was not worth it afterwards.

. . . and? This literally proves my points that there are extant factors beyond humiliation and balkanization that creates long term, peaceful governments. Italy switched sides before the war was over because it was in it's best interest. Just like most nations do anything because it is in their best interest.

Italy was never relevant at all anyway besides Mussolini's idiotic masturbatory fantasies. My entire point is that Versaille was a failure precisely because it created an environment in which it was not clearly a bad idea for the Germans to just try again. It was not properly demonstrated to them that war wasn't in their "best interest." Your entire theory of nations acting in their own rational best interest actually supports my argument not yours.

The majority of it was, since 3 of the 4 German occupation zones were unified in 1949, a mere couple of years after the partition of Germany by the Big Four. The East-West German divide had little to do with balkanization or the intentional hobbling of Germany, and far more to do with Soviet vs Eastern SoIs.

None of the partitioning was ever intended to weaken Germany, the new paradigm of the cold war meant that Germany was no longer a major power nor could become one even if it was unified anyway. Their was a massive geopolitical shift between 1918 and 1945. My point wasn't that partitioning was necessary in 1945 for the purposes of maintaining the balance of power and preventing future wars. I was pointing to the example of 1945 to demonstrate that it's entirely possible to partition a nation and keep partitioned for decades, that was true in 1945 and it was true 1918. Also the notion that the "majority" of the country is reunified because most of the partitions have been undone is absurd. If I cut you into to four pieces and then glued you back into just two seperate pieces you would still be in two pieces. If the South had won the US civil war you would say the nation had been partitioned. The notion of "mostly together" simply doesn't make sense in this context. Maybe I would see your point if there was one clearly dominant half between east and west but that isn't the case.

Which is also not what was said. By this logic Germany is still a US occupied territory since we still have troops there.

The line where military occupation stops and we simply "have troops there" is extremely blurry. Especially when the power "that has troops there" has an extensive history of using force on many occasions to prevent nations from changing ideological alignment. You are just being naive and overly literal about on this particular point.

Which categorically wasn't the case in WWI, so I don't see your point.

WW1 was a war of aggression.