- Location
- U S of A
if we move quickly we might still be able to seize their membership records
Against the Tide - Germany 1932.
- Thread starter KarvokaQueen
- Start date
- Original
KarvokaQueen
Queen of the Coffee Cups
- Location
- City of Coffee, Upside-down land
This, of course, assumes that the beefsteaks in the SA didn't burn absolutely everything after killing Wagner.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Well. That's somewhat expected.
YES! YES! YES! THIS BADASS! THIS LIVING LEGEND!
This unfortunate contributor to the main belief among the german people that is the sword above our heads.
Big Guns Never Tire.
Yeah, I think we'll be fine.
They probably don't want to move them anymore, period.
Well, that was a steamrolling.
Between the Flammpanzer and most secretaries of the time being very loyal to their bosses... they're probably sitting in someone's roaring fireplace right now.
EDIT: Ninja'd.
KarvokaQueen
Queen of the Coffee Cups
- Location
- City of Coffee, Upside-down land
So, in light of a somewhat jubilant update, I'm wondering if you guys would tolerate another dark omake about Hugo's trauma relating to the First World War?
JuliusClonkus
Scatterbrained Speculator
- Location
- Federal Reichspublic of Karlsland
Yeah, but with this revolution under our belt we likely can justify outlawing the Bavarian branch of the SA and go after known leaders to prosecute them on suspicion of armed rebellion.
Fuck catching the average beefsteak brownshirt - gutting the leadership is the top priority now. It also means the NSDAP will have to bring a new force of paramilitary knuckledraggers - meaning we could play SA and the still tiny SS against each other.
I am always interested in Hugo's past.
- Location
- U S of A
Even so it's probably worth checking. Sometimes people make mistakes in the confusion.
KarvokaQueen
Queen of the Coffee Cups
- Location
- City of Coffee, Upside-down land
Well, much of the leadership is already dead. The gauleiter is dead, and the leader of Trupp Leitpold is dead as well. The Munich SA has no real leadership at this stage.
- Location
- Europe
I'd honestly prefer moving the story along right now rather than spending time on how and why Hugo is traumatised about WW1. I feel like the fact that Hugo is traumatised has already been adequately showcased through previous flashbacks and snippets. This is just my personal preference, not an objective statement about what makes a good quest or not, but I'm more interested in the greater political and economic impact Hugo and whatever movement/party he ends up leading can have, rather than exploring his past through flashbacks. However, the decision is of course ultimately up to you and if you feel like it'd make you write a better quest or motivate you to write more, I'd certainly not be opposed to it.
JuliusClonkus
Scatterbrained Speculator
- Location
- Federal Reichspublic of Karlsland
All the better to round up the remainder we know about, and ban the organization from reforming wholesale. If we can get a couple weeks without brownshirts on the streets in force, that's going to be really valuable for organization and restoring order.
...does anyone think we can abuse the damages caused to create some kind of public works program for reconstruction and cleanup to take some pressure off the rather awful level of unemployment, at least temporarily?
I'd rather see the next update instead of a flashback omake, if that's okay with you.
KarvokaQueen
Queen of the Coffee Cups
- Location
- City of Coffee, Upside-down land
Flashback omakes largely occur as they strike me, but I'll always put plot progression first. I just found a particularly inspiring image, is the only reason I'm posing this question.
Also got to remember. Most of the fascists? They aren't dyed in the wool true believers. A lot of them are simply people upset about how things are and thought the Nazis sounded about right about who to blame for all this shitty mess(blame god really, its the geography that led up to it in the end).
Losing the membership records is a blessing in disguise, because it lets the halfhearted members, and the opportunists quietly back away from the sinking ship, pretending they never had anything to do with this failure.
The leaders are the bigger problem though.
Losing the membership records is a blessing in disguise, because it lets the halfhearted members, and the opportunists quietly back away from the sinking ship, pretending they never had anything to do with this failure.
The leaders are the bigger problem though.
obssesednuker
Commander of 10 Million Men
- Location
- In the Kremlin, activating Perimtr.
There's also the guys who got lured in because it seems cool, what with the spiffy Hugo Boss uniforms and bombastic speeches and the sense of unity and brotherhood. A dose of the reality could see many of those guys bolting as well (I say most because there are always those few guys who find the reality as exciting as the promise).
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Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
And those people will go on to influence the actual political movers and shakers: The majority of the citizens. The ones who think the Republic itself is a corrupt, dysfunctional mess that should have never existed. For who the NSDP was the consistent backup choice everyone could agree on.
Which won't help the instability any, but will help making our case easier.
Mark me down for wanting to see Some Shit. WWI stuff rarely comes around on SV.
KarvokaQueen
Queen of the Coffee Cups
- Location
- City of Coffee, Upside-down land
If you want a taste I'd check out the All is quiet omake.
I'll be putting off any further flashbacks until I've got this quest properly into gear.
That's actually quite difficult. Paper sheets burn easily, but stacks of paper are a lot harder to burn. Partial records should still be recoverable, and that's if the NSDAP records haven't survived either since the SA records should show considerable overlap with the NSDAP.
Depends on whether or not you count them as part of Europe. There were (and actually still are to some degree nowadays) trains of thoughts about the British Isles being apart from Europe itself, somewhat similar to how there was/is debate on whether or not Russia counts as part of Europe.
If it makes you happier, though, simply amend "continent" to "continental mainland", instead. The overall meaning, I hope, should have been clear enough.
My issue was with your phrasing, which as I pointed out read as rather severely pro-French, anti-German, making it sound like the Germans were bloodthirsty barbarians who had to be taught the meaning of diplomacy by the poor, gentle French. Hence why I pointed out that many of those points work in reverse, as a reminder that from the German perspective, it's the French who also have a history of military aggression.
Stalin has a pretty extensive list of irredentist claims in Europe alone. If the French ally with Poland - which would not be an unlikely move for the French to make against a resurgent Germany; for example if Austria, the Sudetenland, or Danzig are annexed, even via plebiscites - and the Soviets move against it or its neighbors, France could easily be drawn into a collision course with the USSR, bringing the UK with it.
On the UK's side, they had a fairly long history of conflicting strategic priorities with Russia, and a fair number of the latter's priorities will be inherited by the USSR. For example, Russia wanted control over the Dardanelles, while the British priority was to keep the Dardanelles out of Russian hands. Similarly, both had a habit of competing for influence in Central Asia.
Overall, there are quite a number of potential points of conflicts between the Soviets and the Entente.
As for working for world peace... while it'd be nice, I simply don't see it happening. There's simply too many points of contentions or conflicting interests around the world; in Spain civil war is brewing, Italy and Japan both want to build/expand their own empires, Stalin is looking to extend his influence and weaken the western powers, the locals in southeast Asia want independence from their colonial overlords, and so on, and so forth.
The best we can do, in my opinion, is try and stay out of it for as long as possible, and benefit from it as much as we can. If we can also prevent some potential conflicts from breaking out, then all the better.
And it might've benefited from it in the short-term, but what you and others seem to forget is the long-term cost. Simply trying to fend off Allied bomber raids alone tied up more than a million men, tens of thousands of guns and searchlights, and hundreds of millions of shells. Not to mention the thousands of aircraft with their pilots and ground crews, and their expenditures in ammunition, fuel, and spare parts.
Overall, according to some sources nearly 25% of the Nazi's total war production was devoted to protection against Allied air raids. And even with that massive expenditure of resources, they still suffered significant damage to their industry and infrastructure, with the production of tanks, trucks and aircraft dropping by about a third, and the production of aviation fuel almost stopping entirely.
And all of that is without considering the additional hundreds of thousands of men tied up with occupation and anti-partisan duties, resources invested into the Atlantic Wall, resources invested into the navy, or the troops assigned to campaigns in North Africa or the Balkans.
Altogether, the conquests might've made Nazi Germany stronger in the short-term, but in the long-term the war against the Allies made the whole thing a net loss. Without those conquests, Germany might be weaker on paper, but not being at war with the Allies means it would be able to focus the entirety of its strength on the Soviets, with said strength potentially being comparatively higher than what the Nazis could bring to bear at the Eastern Front OTL.
Well, I said that they were "behind the tech curve", but it's probably more accurate to say that they had differing priorities. The tanks they had were good enough to deal with the forces of the Chinese, and ships and planes were more important for their naval war against the Allies. As a result, tank development received a lower priority until later in the war, at which point the Allies' strategic bombing and naval and aerial dominance quickly made such efforts fairly moot.
If their main enemy is the USSR instead, then yeah, I could see them coming up with some better tank designs. I'm less convinced of Stalin's capability to throw the Japanese out of Manchuria and Korea, though. Even with the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Soviets would be fighting at the end of a very long supply line, while the Japanese supply line would be a great deal shorter. Additionally, the mountains in the north of the Korean peninsula make for great defensive terrain.
I could see the Soviets driving the Japanese out of Manchuria, but whether they'd be able to do the same with Korea would be much more of a toss-up, in my opinion, and heavily depend on what sort of outside factors (such as additional belligerents on either side) might be in play.
The main possibility would be barter trade; exchanging military supplies for raw materials, manufactured goods, or the like, for example. That's how Germany conducted a fair amount of its trade to circumvent its financial difficulties OTL, from what I remember, with a fair amount of success.
Credit is another option; Japan is rather unlikely to win the war, yes, but even if the Soviets drive them out of both Manchuria and Korea, it's very unlikely that they would be capable of staging a successful invasion of the Japanese home islands.
I agree that we don't want to alienate the US by being too close with Japan, but if the main confrontation in East Asia is between them and the Soviets, it might make the US a lot less anti-Japan, because it'd halt and even reverse Japanese encroachment into China (which was one of the biggest contributors to deteriorating relations OTL, from what I remember). It might even turn the US somewhat pro-Japanese, because they wouldn't want for the Soviets/Communists to take over all of China, either.
Getting any sorts of concessions from France regarding A-L is going to be pretty much impossible in the near future.
I think our best bet in this regard would be to push for something akin to a nation-wide plebiscite. It would make the whole thing a less obvious land-grab than if we only asked for a plebiscite in the Sudetenland, could lead to an earlier Czech-Slovak split that might save some headaches in the long run, and it might actually net us some points with the Poles, because IIRC there were some small strips of Czechoslovakian land inhabited by Polish majorities or large minorities. The possibility to gain those lands via plebiscites might make Poland more inclined to agree to plebiscites in other areas, or other treaties we might want from them, at some later point.
Honestly, I consider it pretty much a given that the Austrians will concede to or seek unification with Germany at some point. It even named itself "The Republic of German-Austria", before the Entente explicitly forbade a union between Germany and Austria in the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint Germain, and forced it to rename itself into the "Republic of Austria". Austria's national identity as separate from German only really came into its own post-WW2.
The main issue will be to actually get the chance to hold a plebiscite in the first place, since while most of the populace would be in favor, the Entente, Italy, and the fascists poised to take power in Austria would all be opposed to a unification between Germany and Austria. We'll have to do a lot of sucking up to the Entente/UK and Italy, and work to undermine the Austrian fascists and get them out of power, before we'll have a chance to pull this off.
Luminous
God Save The Queen
- Location
- Victoria, BC, Canada
obssesednuker
Commander of 10 Million Men
- Location
- In the Kremlin, activating Perimtr.
And no interest in pursuing them if the circumstances would see no obstacle to all of the other major European powers reacting by aligning against him.
Funny you should say that, since we have the actual Anglo-French reaction to the Soviet invasion of Poland in late-September 1939 to judge that claim against. That reaction can be summed up as a great big "meh". The British even replied to a request by the Poles with a wonderful piece of sophistry that guarantee of Polish independence wasn't the same as guarantee of their territorial integrity. The Anglo-French were, rather insanely, still courting Stalin as an ally and even the invasion of Poland wasn't enough to make them realize Stalin was running his own scheme of using Hitler as a distraction to profit off of. It wasn't until Finland was attacked a few months later that we saw actual hostility from the Anglo-French towards the USSR.
And you fail to appreciate how the short-term benefits largely paid for those long-term costs and then some. You talk about how Germany gets savings in hundreds of thousands of men? Slave labor from the occupied territories freed up millions of Germans for the front: five times as many slave laborers worked in Germany in January 1944 then the number of German who even fought the Western Allies. The preponderance of the increased German production in 1942-44 was only possible via the exploitation of occupied territories. And that assumes you still sacrifice Germany's civilian industries upon the altar of rearmament like Germany did IOTL 1936-1939 instead of trying for something more sustainable. Strategic bombing may have eventually dropped German AFV, truck, and aircraft production by a third, but the lack of the occupied territories to ruthlessely exploit for manpower, raw materials, and machinery inputs would have seen it collapse down to a quarter of what it was OTL.
During the border conflicts of 1938-39 as well as the final assault in 1945, the Soviets repeatedly showed both the operational skill and logistical ability to mass overwhelming force anywhere against the Japanese line, operating large mechanized formations over hundreds of kilometers distance from major supply centers over infrastructure that can best be summed up as "non-existant". For their part, the Kwangtung Army's responses were completely ineffective and showed a total inability to reinforce against Soviet offensives despite even in time frames of multiple weeks. These are the sort of qualities that would decide a war in Manchuria.
On foreign claims: based on what Hitler managed OTL, you'll be able to pull off Austria and either Sudetenland or the Danzig corridor, but not both, without overly provoking the Anglo-French against you. Forget Alsace-Lorraine, it isn't worth it and those guys won't exactly be loyal anyways.
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Prince Ire
Section XIII
- Location
- the Universe
And of course even if we could somehow get Trotsky into power........... why would we want to? He still believed in widespread use of political violence (albeit tinged by less paranoia than Stalin) and would most likely be more aggressive internationally.
Of course, Italy might decide to go to war with us to prevent union with Austria. They considered doing so in OTL.
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JuliusClonkus
Scatterbrained Speculator
- Location
- Federal Reichspublic of Karlsland
I'm confident in the Heer to keep the Italians from advancing too far into the Austrian Alps.
God knows the Italian commanders of the time were jokes so bad you couldn't tell them in polite company.
KarvokaQueen
Queen of the Coffee Cups
- Location
- City of Coffee, Upside-down land
What Heer?
The Reichswehr is a joke a thousand times worse than the Italian army, especially given it totally lacks for basic things, like tanks or air support.