LAST EDITED ON Sep-23-15 AT 01:18 AM (EDT)
 
>That said, I have no doubt Hitler died in the Neuroi campaign that
>conquered Karlsland, a destitute and depressed failed painter.

This is a can of worms I should probably not open, and I'm certainly not going to open it in-story, but what the hell, for the sake of a small Forum thought experiment, here goes:

Having read as much as I have about the formative influences that led Hitler to found the Third Reich, I find myself suspecting that his life will have unfolded very differently in the Strike Witches setting. So many of the toxic influences that made him the butcher he became simply don't exist in that world (unless you believe in a massive primacy of nature over nurture in the formation of a human being's mentality, which is its own giant can of worms).

Just as an extremely rough sketch:

The seeds of National Socialist politics (as opposed to National Socialism's deeply dubious racial and religious principles, which came from older sources, and which I'll touch very briefly in a bit) stemmed largely from the massive social and political disorder that consumed Austria and Germany when both of their ancient monarchies were destroyed at the end of the First World War. The postwar German Republic, in particular, was an utter mess politically and economically, with many of its institutions actively working against its own survival, and the only force that could realistically have saved it - the army - quite deliberately chose not to do so when the moment arrived, largely because its leaders were themselves authoritarians who had no time for weak-wristed concepts like republicanism. For the most part, they were perfectly happy to let the Nazi Party tear down the Republic; they thought they could subsequently sweep the Party aside in its turn and re-establish a proper military state along the lines of old Prussia. (Spoiler alert: It didn't work out that way.)

Hitler and his cronies were able to co-opt so much of the right, and effectively wreck the center and left, of the Republic's political structure largely because they played more effectively on popular misconceptions about the end of the war than anybody else. The "stab-in-the-back" ideology - the idea that the German Empire would have won the war if the left hadn't seized power from the Kaiser in November 1918 and immediately embarked on a cowardly surrender to the Western Allies - was bunk bordering on silliness, and most of the people who parlayed it into popular support knew it. Certainly the generals did, since they had declared the war impossible to win and forced the Kaiser's abdication, not the left; but they were more than happy to let the detested leftist politicians who proclaimed the Republic and signed the surrender documents take the blame for losing the war.

There's more - a lot more - but my point is, none of that happened in Karlsland and Ostmark. They weren't up against the rest of the world in a pointless losing war that no one could even remember the reasons for. Their monarchies weren't destroyed, their people's way of life not turned upside-down, their economies not crushed by massive punitive demands for reparations, their armies not outlawed. Ostmark wasn't reduced to a miserable, destitute shadow of its former glory in 1918, and Karlsland was neither humiliated before the world nor economically crippled. Instead, they were both prominent members of the great alliance that had (it appeared at the time) saved the world from the Neuroi scourge. In neither country in that world's 1930s was there suitable soil for a movement like National Socialism to take root.

If you add on top of that the fact that the setting's earlier history doesn't lend itself to such key factors as antisemitism (because no Christianity, and for all we know no Judaism either, come to that) and weird 19th-century pan-German racial theories, that's basically all three sides of the Nazi "fire triangle" significantly thinned, if not knocked out altogether.

So, weird as it seems to say it, I suspect that if Adolf Hitler existed in the SW/OWaW world, he was probably both a happier and a better person. Almost certainly obscure, but rather less miserable about it than the real one would have been in obscurity, because most of the forces that made him a megalomaniacal mass murderer with a head full of semireligious pseudoscientific bullshit simply didn't exist. He may well still have perished in the fall of Ostmark (his native country) or Karlsland (where he might still have emigrated before the war), and even if he's still alive in 1946 there is no reason to suspect that anyone in our cast has ever heard of him, but who knows - absent all that weird ferment roiling around in his head, he might even have been a decent architect.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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