good point about that germans would have  surrendered in 1944.. and i think they would have done that if not the fact that they couldn't surrender to the soviets. Biggest life saving scenario would have been to backstab soviets..and  negotiate german surrender in secret to the western allies..let the germans hold the eastern front for some time until allied units could move in and change them effectively blocking soviet advance. Quicker end..less soviet influence on post war Europe

At the time of the D-Day landings, the Germans still occupied some territory in Russia, proper.

The Soviet offensive against the army group center did not begin, IIRC, until June 22.

 

The Germans knew that the Soviet offensive was coming well beforehand.

 

What would have been the result had Germany asked for peace terms by June 15?

 

The farthest West the Red Army was was in the Balkans, IIRC, but anyway without the Red Army having purchased the conquest of  Europe capitals with blood, it's moral basis for a claim to an occupation of Central Europe would have been weaker and possibly subject to Western contention.

 

In the actual outcome, the presence of the Red Army on conquered German soil was a very solid argument in behalf of a prolonged Soviet presence there.

The Soviets would have wanted to go ahead with their offensive regardless. Would the West have waited for the Soviets to carry out their offensive before receiving Reich peace representatives?

 

Maybe, but the peace Germany would have had to endure in that case would almost certainly have been much better than the peace it actually had imposed on it.

I wonder whether the Allies' setting aside the Geneva Accords as applying to Germany and making it clear to German civilians that their doing so was in response to reports about the death camps in the East would have caused a change in Germany's government or a change in Germany's policy towards the Jews. This essentially would entail the neither giving of quarter or the asking for quarter.

 

When those German civilians fully realized the Allies in doing this were entirely expecting that as a result, their own military people would be subject to the same treatment as Soviet POWs by the German military, they would understand that the Allies were really serious about the death camps. Perhaps the total impact in Germany would have brought the issue to a crisis in time to do some good.

 

This might seem to be an extreme idea. But at the same time, it does seem a little ludicrous for the Allies to observe "civilized" rules of warfare with a nation which was, at the same time, systematically exterminating a whole nation of people in production line like death camps.

This might seem to be an extreme idea. But at the same time, it does seem a little ludicrous for the Allies to observe "civilized" rules of warfare with a nation which was, at the same time, systematically exterminating a whole nation of people in production line like death camps.

Let me see ....

 

If this course of action were to be followed, then the Allies would have to duplicate the known German extermination camps to the extent of following their spects to the letter as well as their standard camp operating procedures as much as possible.  Thereafter, put the German civilians and POWs under the same kind of treatment that the Germans have administered, namely that the Allies perform the very same sort of gruesome endeavors that the Germans have done, including forced labor, mass starvation, unsanitary conditions, mass shooting, gas chambers, ovens, all the way including extracting gold teeth and plundering valuable personal items from the Germans.  By the way, also include medical experiments and related perverted activities.  Finally, Allied camp commandants and higher staff ranks should exploit young, good-looking German girls and women.  In short, duplicate the conditions of German camps. 

But actually duplicating the conditions in the extermination camps would not accomplish anything more than asking or giving no quarter in battle.

If the Allies took no prisoners, who would be put in the camps?

So what would you do if you were Roosevelt or Churchill or Eisenhower?

 

What could the Allies have done that would have influenced the German people enough for them to challenge Hitler?

So what would you do if you were Roosevelt or Churchill or Eisenhower?

 

What could the Allies have done that would have influenced the German people enough for them to challenge Hitler?

 

I was using the extreme idea in the previous post as means to literally play 'tit for tat' against the Germans.  Of course, in this scenario, no one is going to give a bloody puke about the number of lives lost.  Perhaps spice up this endeavor by carrying out acts that would even gross out the Germans.  Just make sure to out-slaughter the Germans.

 

In practical terms ... a plenty of cynicism from my part ...

 

Not a whole lot Roosevelt or Churchill could do until a sizeable portion of Western Europe becomes under Allied control.  Aerial bombing alone is not going to put a stop to the Nazi extermination camps.  Even with successfully landing in Europe, not a whole lot they can do about other than taking as much German-occupied lands as quickly as possible, which means they require a chain of battlefield successes.  The Hitler regime has been set up specifically for carrying out wholesale extermination projects; cannot be reasoned with nor bargained with.  Hell ... they even allocated a great deal of their rail capacity in moving thousands of fodders for their extermination camps, even at the expense of the Wehrmacht!  Only a physical conquest will do.

I am kind of interested in how the German people dealt with their predicament.

 

From watching documentaries, I have come to believe that one would not try to resist the regime because they would immediately have been dealt with by the Gestapo and no one could help them and they probably would not have been able to accomplish much of anything by their resistance.

 

Of course there were a few who did resist but what was needed was numbers and that would require organization and organization would have been vulnerable to disruption by the state.

 

I guess it was a case of name your poison for the German people. They could have taken on their own murderous regime in the middle of a war or else endure the unendurable in total defeat and occupation. And that after all the bombing.

 

And they were probably motivated somewhat in wanting to avoid a repeat of 1918. 1918 was much more kind though.

 

----

 

You know, we just don't have a clue what it is to live under the power of a real honest to goodness totalitarian state. That is a big disconnect.

 

 

There were not a whole lot of mass surrendering by Wehrmacht until very late when it was obvious even to a deaf and blind person that the war was over.  The fact that they were desperately fighting the Soviets in the east at the same time probably stiffened their fighting resolve.  Furthermore, as a military institution, unless the commander-in-chief folds, you are just not going to surrender first.  (Paulus was a very good example going back to early 1943; he and the survivors of the 6th Army surrerendered only after tens of thousands were literally consumed by the harsh winter and Soviet encirclement.)

 

Also, Hitler's domestic policies were nowhere as brutal (towards those who were not singled out for extermination) as Stalin was with his subjects.  Hence it was not like an average German would be feeling like liberated from a hell hole by the Allies.

 

As for the Nazi regime; they did their best to insulate the public from their bloody deeds as much as possible.  First of all, one of the first thing they did right away upon taking over was to immerse the population into a sea of propaganda which raised the threshhold for acts of brutality.  Soon after, exterminations were done, but on a small scale, such as removing genetically deformed patients from the general circulation.  They expanded extermination policies one step at a time.  By the time those at the high and the middle ladder of bureaucracy (both civilians and soldiers) got wind of what was going on, most of them looked the other way.  In a way, the problem was not so much that the Nazis were bloody lunatics, but the rest of the society turned out to have become too obedient and too compartmentalized.  Also, by then, the war was in full swing and war efforts overshadowed just about everything else.  A classic case of painting oneself into a corner.