| March 18 |  |
Editor says, what if Hitler had never risen to power? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the August 2012 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1869, on this day the future British Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain was born in the leafy West Midlands town of Edgbaston. Founded in the first millenia as the "village of a man called bold sword", by the late nineteen century Edgbaston was an affluent surburb on the outskirts of Birmingham where the trees begin.
Happy Endings Part 12
Where the trees beginEducated at the elite Rugby School, he was sent to the Bahamas to rebuild the family fortune. But the plantation was a dismal failure, and he soon returned from this "faraway place of which we know little". After working in business and local government, he followed his father and older half-brother into politics becoming a Member of Parliament in 1918. Being trusted as a safe pair of hands he was rapidly promoted to Minister of Health and then Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Stanley Baldwin retired in May 1937, Chamberlain took his place as Prime Minister.
The architect of the adjustment policy, he travelled to Munich to negotiate a "grand settlement" between the victor and the resurgent reformist powers. Although Anglo-France had dictated foreign policy during the 1920s, it was now time to bring Germany and Italy back inside the European Security Model. This required the resetting of a delicate balance of global interests between the Anglo-French retention of Great Power status and the ceding of selective territories to satisfy the nationalist interests of Germany and Italy. For creating this new "concert of Europe", he was rightly hailed as a successor to Metternich and Castelreagh, but in truth his framework was a modern adaptation of Victorian era thinking. Tragically, at the height of his prestige, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died in November 1940 and within months, the world would be plunged into a new great power crisis.
Due to the vast size of the British and French Colonial Empires, Chamberlain saw very clearly the challenges of global imperial defence ("We are a very rich Empire, and there are plenty of adventurers not very far away who look upon us with hungry eyes"). Even after the post-war return of Germany's African Colonies, the limited Germano-Italian overseas possessions permitted a European concentration of forces; whereas a year before Chamberlain's death over 90,000 British troops were deployed in the "troublesome" Middle East. Now, a generation who only wanted "peace in our time" would have to confront the irresistible rise of Japan. And with their working classes largely ambivalent about the Empire, the Anglo-French elite would somehow have to make some painful cessations of their own precious overseas possessions in the Far East. At the League of Nations in Geneva, the situation was summed up with a chuckle of self-satisfaction by Benito Mussolini, Che cosa viene intorno, va in giro ("What comes around, goes around").
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Alternate Historian, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Happy Endings Source: Wikipedia Labels: Neville Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, World War 2, Appeasement. Jennifer Harris commented on Facebook: very interesting to know of Mr. Chamberlain...he had done so much before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I really enjoyed this piece...and you know with this it has showed me about Mr. Chamberlain and the accomplishments he had done before he died.. and I like your work..this is just amazing..thank you so very much for sharing this...I look forward to reading more of your work...:)
~ But doesn't this still leave General Ludendorff, who helped create the Nazi Party and promote the stab-the-back theory (the argument that the Marxists had deliberately caused Germany's defeat in WWI). About the best you can say for him is that he hated Jews and Christians equally, which would have made The Final Solution very difficult, since he would have had to kill almost everyone. He died in 1937...but he would certainly have named a successor, and one doubts that it would have been an Austrian upstart rather than a fellow general.
~ Jackie -- Hitler's rise was a fluke, a confluence of disasters. If the Great Depression hadn't happened, who knows what Germany would have been like?
~ That was sort of my point, Stan:The whole concept of this article was "What if Hitler had never risen to power?" I assumed that the Depression would have happened...And my feeling was that someone very similar would have replaced him then.
~ Even if the depression happens Hitler could still have been a flash in the pan. The problem was that the Nationalists[DNVP] and major elements of the Catholic Center Party underestimated him. They thought he could be tamed and create a government coalition of the right and without the Social Democrats. The regime Hitler came to power on was such a front. Hitler was Chancellor but the legal power rested with the DNVP who had the President, the army, the business elites, the bureaucracy and the bulk of the ministries. All the Nazis did was Interior [Police] and the lander administration in Prussia and a few others. Adolph spent two years outmaneuvering his elite handlers.
~ Ah, Chamberlain, the Great Conductor of the Concert of Europe...
~ A delayed war, giving a much more popular Chamberlain a nicer exit. Won't be too long until Stalin starts acting up, but, in a world without the Great Patriotic War (as the Russians termed World War II), his regime might not hold on to great visions of expansion.
~ Stalin was an opportunist. His expectation 1938-early June 1940 was a WW1 type western front between Germany and the Anglo-French. At an opportune moment he would attack one side or the other. The Fall of Paris unhinged his plans as it did Roosevelt's.
~ How long till Stalin gets ideas?
~ Eric, Uncle Joe was an opportunist. He never attacked into strength. Korea was a misjudgment based on believing Acheson when Acheson said Korea was outside the US defense perimeter.
~ And, um . . . "Uncle Joe" didn't attack South Korea. Anyone who believes the North Koreans were the robot slaves of Moscow has been suckered. P eople thought the same of China in '49, and it wasn't true in that case either.
Which isn't to say Pyongyang's regime wasn't Communist--of course it was, though Marx would have been horrified at the form it took and wouldn't have expected a Communst takeover in a backward Third World country anyway (he expeced "the revolution" to come first to developed capitalist democracies). But "monolithic Communism" was a myth even in 1950.
~ Joe gave permission. The documentation came out after the SU fell.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
