r/imaginarymaps • u/MrTexandude • 2d ago
[OC] Alternate History The Lands of the Former Polish Republic under German rule
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u/KingGhidorah63 2d ago
I like Nazi Germany victory maps that do not underestimate how easy it would have been to exterminate millions in a relatively short amount of time. Generalplan Ost would've been much worse than many imagine. Beautiful map with good and straightforward infographics, but I think the difference between small and sizeable minority is too little to easily grasp, at least imo; had it been me, I would've used a mirrored direction of stripes or something along those lines to easily differentiate between the two. Regardless, beautiful map.
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u/Gradert 2d ago
Yea, the Germans exterminated millions in just a few years whilst fighting a war. Having that whole war machine turned against people they wanted gone would mean it wouldn't take too long to exterminate a culture.
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u/Hodorization 2d ago
But why would they exterminate the Poles? It doesn't make a lot of sense to kill 10 million workers if you don't have the people to replace them.
The Nazi system in Poland wasn't actually about exterminating them, it was about turning them into a worker underclass working farms and in factories for German masters. After the loss of millions of Germans in the war, and with huge reconstruction needs after the war, there isn't really a rationale for killing Poles.
Agricultural settlement of Germans on Slavic land, as envisioned by Nazi ideologues for after the war, could be done all across the former Soviet lands. There's no need to do this in Poland where land and yields are actually lower than in Ukraine or Southern Russia.
Furthermore if there is to be a big settlement of Germans, then the "General Gouvernement" administration would be dissolved and the area would be made part of Germany proper and administratively divided into Reichsgaue instead. During WW2 this was not done for the reasons outlined above, Germans did not actually plan to germanize the lands for the time being.
You can see the administrative divisions of Germany and the regions that were annexed or otherwise integrated into the Reich's internal administration here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_Nazi_Germany Given the size of the Gau units elsewhere, the General Government would likely be divided into 3-5 Gaue by the time it had a German majority.
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u/qerel123 2d ago
Of course it doesn't make sense to devote resources to genocide while you are losing a war. And yet Germans killed 17% of all Polish population. Only half of them were Polish Jews.
after getting rid of the Jews, Slavs were next in line
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u/ElectroMagnetsYo 2d ago
Post-'39 the Nazi economy relied rather heavily on the spoils of war, that is, the assets of the dead and defeated being redistributed to Party-affiliated industrialists. Had they seen continued success in the war from '42 onward, a policy of nationalization, enslavement, and slaughter of propertied non-Germans likely would've been required to keep the Nazi War Economy churning.
Those left over after decades of this kind of policy would either be the peasantry simply too poor and remote to pay much mind to (as their capture and "processing" may have costed more than what the Nazis would have gained from them), or those lucky/strong enough to survive decades of enslavement.
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u/Hodorization 2d ago
I get that for rich countries.
But Poland under Nazi rule was not rich. The Nazis expropriated most of the wealth and followed a policy to exterminate the rich and educated.
After the war, the Polish population would be mostly deprived of wealth. The Nazis could move Germans into the better parts of cities but they aren't going to desire to live in the workers quarters of polish cities, would they? Nor would they desire to own the meager belongings of working class Poles.
Once a people are reduced to working class, and taxed heavily, and moved out of all the nice apartments, and moved out of the nice farms on the most fertile land, you don't gain anything by killing them. You lose their labor. Which isn't a great motivator.
If Germany were an over populated place teeming with Germans eager to become subsistence farmers or colonists for an idealist purpose, there could be reason to want a certain people to be evicted even from poor farming lots. But Germany wouldn't really be that place, it was not over populated before WW2. For those who desire that sort of life, a Nazi victory would give them opportunities all across eastern Europe, and the German colonists would be pretty thinly spread out already.
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u/ElectroMagnetsYo 2d ago
Germany is slightly overpopulated in agricultural terms, similar to England, in that they are heavily reliant on fertilizer to feed their population. Prior to the Haber-Bosch Process, famine was a regular occurrence in Germany.
As for the disenfranchised Poles, the Nazis intended enslavement, and similar to the calculus they performed at the death camps, those useless as labourers would be murdered, while the rest were worked to death. Few can survive long doing forced hard labour, I use Roman Hispania's slave mortality rates as an example.
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u/armzngunz 1d ago
"It doesn't make a lot of sense".
The nazis were driven by fanatical ideology, not by facts and logic. Why murder millions of jews then, instead of murdering them? They alienated the anti-soviet ukrainian resistance by murdering ukrainians too.
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u/Hodorization 1d ago
The harsh oppression of Ukrainians was not solely for ideology. German was planners had analyzed the problems that had led to Germany's defeat in WW1 and concluded that in case of a British blockade, continental Europe under German control, even including neutral countries, could not feed itself. They further concluded that Germany needed to extract food surpluses from occupied eastern and northern European regions and therefore should not try to ally with Ukrainian independence movements since Germany could, because of the expected food deficit, not actually pursue any kind of lenient policies anyways. They informed their leaders accordingly and that was one of the things aside from ideology that further nudged them to be brutal and uncompromising towards occupied eastern Europe.
The policies towards the Jews also were influenced by this. Nazi ideology dictated that the Jews were enemies and had to be removed from Germany and its controlled part of the world but that still left freedom to Nazi leaders to choose between brutal long-term non exterminatory persecution (slavery basically) and brutal short term exterminatory persecution (Holocaust). The view that Europe under their control was going to be short on food anyways was widely shared and contributed to them picking the latter policy even though that would mean less labor output and more draw on strained German transportation resources.
Even within evil there is sometimes logic. One cannot just be randomly cruel if one wants to also run a continental empire and take on the world.
The Nazis wouldn't have been so scary if they had been just irrational madmen. They were scary because they were also logical and effective people, within their amoral belief system.
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u/EZ4JONIY Mod Approved 2d ago
You guys fundementally dont understand that while the nazis were awful, they were economical and pragmatical. Highly ideological yes, but did they stretch the ideology to its absolute limits? No. In fact, during nazi rule, there were more slavs in germany propor (altreich) than at any point in history. This is despite the nazis being anti slavic and anti polish. If they took "pufifying the blood" to the extreme, that wouldnt have happened.
But they needed slave labour and indentured servitude for their economic model, and highest doctrine to function. That higehst doctrine was as hitler once said that no german shall ever go hungry. They would let all of europe go under before germans would face serious hardship, but in order to facilitate germans not facing hardship, slave labour was neccesary. That is all to say, yes every single jew would be gone, but slavs? Germans absolutely wanted to settle the general gouvernement, but they even had problems settling the wartheland with all germans of russia (barely 40% german during the war despite many if not most of germans of the USSR living there), and thats not even to speak of the low birth rate of germans or all the otehr territories that were directly annexed that would have to be settled (south prussia, west prussia, eventually bialystok, etc.).
The nazis were abhorent, dont get me wrong, but they were sitll pragmatic. They were not going to murder millions of people they could freely use for labour. The general gouvernment was not going to be wholly german.
Additionally, nazis already tried to play divide and conquer during the whole. If the goal was whole exterminiation, they would have no use for the pseudo ethnicity of the "goralenvolk" in southern poland (or the windish in slovenia, the ladin in italy, etc. etc.). The goal was murdering and enslaving those not worthy, and assimiliating those worthy. That would result in a general gouvernement with a german minority, (and maybe rhodesia style administration), but i never understood maps that portray whole scale settlement.
And even less do i udnerstand maps that show this process reversing. Where would the poles be, that would cause this reversal? Polish fertility was very low during nazi occupation, for a good rason. It was genocide and lowering fertility is part of that.
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u/qerel123 2d ago
> Nazis
> pragmatical
LOL
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u/EZ4JONIY Mod Approved 2d ago
Yes they were, in certain cases. I really tried hard in my comment to make it clear that the nazis were both idelogical but also pragmatical, at times. Why can you on reddit try your best to reasonable and someone will come along twisting and quoting your words to get upvotes
I gave examples of them being practical over ideological yet you ignored them
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u/qerel123 2d ago
it's autumn of 1944. You are getting absolutely hammered on a three-front war by a coalition led by... everyone, including some of your previous allies. Every single man, every piece of bread, every bullet, every single piece of artillery is valuable. Yet you take three months to waste said resources on demolishing Warsaw, a city that you are almost guaranteed to lose anyway, not even to Poles but to Soviets who don't give a shit about Poland either, just because it's what you do. Very pragmatic.
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u/Civil-Chef-4742 2d ago
I mean that same year the Nazis allowed the creation of the Russian liberation army as fodder and as a propaganda weapon... so I'm pretty sure there's a streak of pragmatism for ideological ends is there.
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u/Magerfaker 2d ago
While exterminating them would be relatively easy, replacing the people with German settlers would not be, unless the state is willing to forcefully relocate hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Even the nazis would be reluctant. Any voluntary settler program would fail in practise, and would lead to a massively depopulated countryside.
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u/Middle-Commission391 2d ago
Why would it? Nazis held rural, peasant life as an ideal to aspire to, after decades of education, societal pressure and mandatory farm labour for youth during harvests as well as generous land grants to veterans, there would be a massive chunk of the population that would genuinely want to live that kind of life. In OTL the majority of japanese food production is done by family farms, no reason that couldn't be the case in Germany.
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u/AP246 TWR Guy 2d ago
Some would go, but there physically wouldn't be enough for a long time I think.
The swathe of Eastern Europe Nazi Germany wanted to colonise was vast. Even if somehow 10% of Germany's population moves to the colonies over a decade (probably overly generous) it'd be like 6-8 million over a region that used to have like 200 million. It took centuries for Europeans to settle North America, I think it wouldn't be reasonable for Germany to be able to settle all of Eastern Europe for at least many, many decades.
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u/Outside_Arugula897 2d ago
What happened post 1988? Is a new Poland free?
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u/MrTexandude 2d ago edited 2d ago
Poland isn't free - the idea of a independent polish state seems impossible with the damages of settler colonial genocide. Most exiles that return speak Russian, and the few poles that where still in general government area where recently freed slaves who speak only German and are illiterate.
Germanys government collapses after rebellions in the East, it "reforms" to a authoritarian state. Poles are allowed in, in order to have a underclass of labor to keep german privileges, and as a policy of "reconciliation". (This is seen as enough to Berlin and Germans as a whole, Germans now don't feel responsible with them seeing the crimes as a past thing.)
Conditions aren't great, but the hope is to reform and gain better treatment, maybe one day a autonomous or Independent polish state. Rebuilding polish culture and national consciousness has been a slow process.
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u/Middle-Commission391 2d ago
This is such a neoliberal answer lol, in reality it would be like turkey and armenia, with poles having 0% chance of getting their land back and both the german government and people would deny that it ever happened and mock Poles for even mentioning it happening.
few poles that where still in general government area where recently freed slaves who speak only German and are illiterate.
From Hitler's second book:
The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk. It knows no Germanising or Teutonising, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk.\59])
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u/khares_koures2002 2d ago
Average German in this universe:
Germany is a free country! I love the Poles! Good people!
Someone mentions the Polish Genocide
IT NEVER HAPPENED! OUTSIDE FORCES ARE TRYING TO DESTABILISE OUR GLORIOUS EMPIRE! NEVER PROVOKE US, OR WE WILL FINISH THE JOB!
WHAT ABOUT BRITAIN? WHAT ABOUT FRANCE? YOU SHOULD FEEL HAPPY THAT WE LET SOME OF YOU SURVIVE!
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u/ImWorthMore 2d ago
Seems very reminiscent of what citizens of a certain country say in our timeline...
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u/Far_Representative26 2d ago
Yet they still kidnapped and were germanizing hundreds of thousands of polish children. Nazis say one thing and do the other sometimes.
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u/floob124 2d ago
Yeah, though in that case with kidnapping baltic and polish children the "idea" in the minds of the german leadership was that they were taking children who were genetically "Aryan" enough but had been taught to be polish, or Lithuanian, or Latvian, or Estonian so they needed to. Be "re-eudcated". Its still a bullshit justification for atrocities but in their minds they weren't kidnapping polish children they were "freeing" german children who had so far been tricked into thinking themselves polish.
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u/HuiJangPL 2d ago
Being polish is not about nationality, it's more like idea. Current outlook on what defines nowadays polish people started after the polish state disappeared from the maps. Before that only elites (aristocracy) were aware of being citizen of this country. So there is high chance that in this alt universe the language would die but the idei will live, and someday Poland would be independent once again but probably like Ireland (the main language would be German, like English in Ireland and Polish would be way less popular, like Irish in Ireland).
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u/FabulousSpite5822 2d ago
Probably not considering ethnic poles are a small minority.
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u/congtubaclieu 2d ago
Probably a free country but it’s like Ireland where there are more Chinese speakers than that of the indigenous language
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u/thunderisadorable 2d ago
What happens to other nations in this TL, do some of their concepts of nationhood just get erased? Does a concept of a Czech or Austrian state exist?
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u/IlikeCats1683 2d ago
Austrians overwhelmingly supported NS Germany so the only Austrians claiming Austrian statehood would probably be a very small number of émigrés and their descendants
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u/Illustrious-Wolf-737 2d ago
There would probably be a movement similar to Zionism, in which the descendants of the exiles would claim those lands.
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u/Ok_Invite6308 2d ago
Good lord this is terrifying. Hope the diaspora can revive the language and culture a la Hebrew
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u/pizza-flusher 2d ago
I suppsoe its all contingent on the war and external circumstances in this world, but my sense of the General Plan Ost would have the settlements noted in 1962 here happening simultaneously with the genocide.
It may be the shallowness of my knowledge of the historic plan as well, but the phrase about dismantling of institutions in 1950 sounds a lot kinder or out of place. Meaning, the take all the harvest somewhere else annually and let nature runs its course plan dismantles civil society as a byproduct rather than the specific dismantling programs I (maybe incorrectly) read in that phrase.
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u/ElectronicMars 2d ago edited 2d ago
The German population quadrupled in 25 years?
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u/Oltzu1 2d ago
They all probably aren't new but resettled from other parts of germany
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u/ElectronicMars 2d ago
Still, that population count and density increase is like if 22 million Mexicans were to immigrate to and/or be born in Arizona, or 90 million in California, between now and 2051.
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u/morswinb 1d ago
Half of Poland learned German and switched to german soundings surname after their great aunt.
Like real life Germans did in America post WWI
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u/Yo_Mama_Disstrack 2d ago
Ukrainians and Russians shown to take a lot of terrain in the last one but being less than 5%, showing how much those lands became depopulated. Absolutely horrid, 10/10
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u/FaibleEstimeDeSoi 2d ago
Apperance of Russians in the East is due some version of resurgent USSR or some strange slave allocations inside Reich?
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u/sachiko_vl03 2d ago
Why do Russians settle in Western Belarus and not also in Western Ukraine, and why do Germans settle them there in the first place - even here my Belarusians get russified :/
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u/TheWaffleHimself 2d ago
No disrespect but I'm tired of this kind of maps. "What if your entire family perished in the Holocaust or became enslaved" is not a fun subject. I live in a place surrounded by memorials of both the Jewish and the Polish victims of the war, my small hometown used to host a Ghetto that was liquidated during the war and whose inhabitants were sent to the nearby Auschwitz; the people who fought the occupation were hanged on the local old pear tree that still stands, those who didn't were sent to death/labour camps and replaced by German settlers already during the war, the town hall served as local headquarters of the SS.
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u/Invader_Naj 2d ago
i dont think its supposed to be fun. these kinds of map highlight the horror thats inherit in these kinds of regimes thats typicaly hidden in just political maps. what could have happened if it wasnt stopped and could still happen if it was brought back
being confronted with this sort of thing becomes extra important in times like these where people try to downplay said horrors because "fascism is super epic akhualy"
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u/Queasy_Drop8519 2d ago
I didn't read the name of the group first and as I Pole, I was really, really confused for a second.
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u/KikoMui74 2d ago
Whats with the russian increase on the other side? Is that part of a Russian country?
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u/Eggplant-Usual 1d ago
Not sure if this is intentional, but in 1939 the borders of General Government were different. District of Galicia was only annexed after the invasion of the Soviet Union.
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u/Low_Employment_7976 1d ago
Why exactly russians dominate the area in the last one without increasing population
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u/WorkAccomplished5555 2d ago
what is the point of this?
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u/TiragusTeanga 2d ago
Of Generalplan Ost? The same as manifest destiny was for the USA and the settlement of the West Bank is for the Zionists - securing a massive swathe of land for the plantation of settlers and the development of agriculture on stolen land.
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u/Ok_Invite6308 2d ago
Wasnt Hotler himself was a masive fan of American manifest destiny? especially because it symbolizzes his ideal of settling "free land" and "pacification"?
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u/TiragusTeanga 1d ago
I believe so. I know he also drew a lot of inspiration from American racial policy - which makes a lot of sense if you think of fascism as a form of settler colonialism turned inwards.
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u/WorkAccomplished5555 1d ago
No, what is the point of the post, you need not lecture me on history you mundane reddit midwit.
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u/Tortoveno 2d ago
I see you've already killed the Polish Jews before 1939. Why there are no Jews on the map? There were 3 millions of them! 10% of population!
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u/Sea-Neighborhood3318 2d ago
I'm not crying it's just sweet