My hunch, actually, is that if Hitler were assassinated, there would probably be an active, possibly majority, Nazi Party in Germany today. It might not be quite as excessive as Hitler's party, but it would revere him as a martyr, and probably wouldn't have tried to invade Russia during the wintertime.
It depends on if the attempt was successful in killing Hitler AND all the other bigwigs or not -- I can easily picture a 70% deaf, badly scarred Himmler framing the assassination as a Jewish plot and making it stick in the public consciousness, at least enough that anti-Semitism is still considered acceptable to this day. This, in turn, means a major setback for American civil rights and, in all likelihood, no modern state of Israel... unless it's operated more like a Bantustan and less like a sovereign nation. (Then again, I'm not sure that wasn't how it started out anyway, in our timeline.)
America would still enter the war, but it seems likelier that a negotiated settlement could be reached, rather than a total defeat and occupation. So Britain would nominally be free, and instead of a partitioned Germany, we'd have a partitioned France.
Hmm. And if Hitler isn't around to screw Stalin (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is upheld rather than broken), then there's no Eastern Bloc -- more like a Eurasian Bloc.
And, now that I think of it, a Soviet regime fueled by strategic injections of goods/services from the capitalist powerhouse of a modern Nazi Germany might not be quite so impoverished. On the other hand, I imagine the brain drain (Einstein, Von Braun, etc) would be more exaggerated, so huzzah for Yankee research & development.
We still have the bomb, we still have the rockets. The Space Race would probably be tighter, though.
And I really wonder what'd happen to China -- probably not much different, if Japan still gets bombed. The Caribbean would be very different (picture Curacao & St. Maartens as supply bases for Cuba), and I can see some real ugly proxy wars in Africa. Instead of Korea, picture Angola and Namibia (German Southwest Africa). Or rather, picture wars there coming first. Stretching of resources. Bigger role for CIA spooks.
South Africa would be very different -- no communist bugbears, for one thing. I have a strong feeling some strange new ideologies would take root, too.
Hmm. Although now that I think of it, I don't think Soviet communism and National Socialism could really live together for all that long, ideologically. So picture SS (possibly from occupied France) fighting the Viet Cong along with the Americans and Australians. |
