YT YouTube2Text

YouTube2Text → Transcripts → Here was the world Hitler planned

Here was the world Hitler planned — Transcript

by Elephants in Rooms - Ken LaCorte · 3,550 words · 546 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

Open in transcriber Summarize with AI Download SRT/VTT

Full transcript

0:00What if Hitler had actually won the
0:02Second World War? Look, I've seen a few
0:04videos on this topic and they were all a
0:06bit fantastical. More like a dystopian
0:09novel instead of a clear-headed look at
0:11history. So, this is less Man in the
0:14High Castle where Nazis are running the
0:16United States, but a much more realistic
0:18look at how a few singular events
0:21actually could have turned the tide for
0:23Hitler and what that subsequent reality
0:25might have been. Because Hitler, as he
0:28often did, told us exactly what he would
0:30have done. He wrote it down in detail
0:32with maps. And the real question is
0:35whether that world could have held
0:36together and what could have stopped it.
0:39I'm Ken Lecourt and today's elephant in
0:41the room is about understanding a
0:42realistic alternative history that we
0:45actually could have faced. We'll start
0:47with how close he came because the
0:49Allied victory wasn't a sure thing.
0:52Then, the blueprint he was planning to
0:54build on top of a victory. Then, we'll
0:56look at some of the problems with the
0:58Third Reich and how it may have been
1:00built to break. Finally, we'll take a
1:02look at the America problem because that
1:04stood between Hitler and global
1:07domination.
1:08So, let's first take a look at how close
1:10he came to winning the war. I mean, to
1:12our modern thinking, the Nazis were
1:14doomed from the start and and the good
1:16guys were always going to win. And
1:18that's a comforting story, but it's just
1:21not true. At the very least, there were
1:22at least three moments where a different
1:24decision could have given Hitler all of
1:26Europe. Take late May 1940. France is
1:30falling faster than anyone imagined. The
1:32British army is pinned down on the beach
1:34at Dunkirk and a serious faction inside
1:36their war cabinet is pressing Churchill
1:39to cut a deal with Germany. The argument
1:41had some merit. I mean, Britain was
1:43alone. Their army was trapped and
1:45fighting looked like national suicide.
1:48If that faction won that argument, the
1:50war in the west would have been over
1:52before the United States ever showed up.
1:55Or September 1940, Battle of Britain.
1:57British pilots are dying faster than
1:59they could be replaced. Airfields are
2:01getting hammered and the whole force is
2:03close to breaking. If the RAF collapses,
2:06Germany owns the skies over the channel
2:09and an invasion of Britain goes from
2:10fantasy to something real. Or the winter
2:13of 1941 outside Moscow. The German drive
2:17on the capital that had moved forward
2:19all autumn. In mid-October, the Soviet
2:21government panicked and began
2:22evacuating. They loaded up files onto
2:25trains. Government buildings were wired
2:27for demolition. By early December,
2:29German reconnaissance units had pushed
2:31to the very edge of Moscow. Close enough
2:34to see it through field glasses. Like
2:36like 15 to 20 miles from the Kremlin.
2:38The entire Eastern Front was balanced on
2:40a razor. And Hitler, the same man who
2:43came that close, he also made mistakes
2:45that saved us. He halted his tanks at
2:47Dunkirk and let the British army slip
2:49away. He invaded the Soviet Union with
2:52Britain still in the fight, which every
2:54general since Napoleon could have warned
2:56him against. And after Pearl Harbor, he
2:58was under no obligation to Japan to
3:00declare war against the United States,
3:03but he did it anyway.
3:04Hitler came terrifyingly close to
3:07winning Europe. And if he did, what were
3:09his plans? Well, here's the blueprint.
3:12The historian Gerhard Weinberg, who
3:14wrote an outstanding history of the war,
3:16explained Hitler's plans in detail. It
3:18ran in phases. Phase one was Europe.
3:22First, annex Denmark, Norway, Sweden and
3:24Finland as fellow Germanic territory.
3:27Turn France, Britain and Ireland into
3:29controlled puppet states and knock Spain
3:32and Portugal down to satellite states.
3:34Phase two was the real prize, the East.
3:37I mean, this is where it stops being
3:39conquest and becomes something else
3:41uglier. I mean, not ruling a people, but
3:43erasing them. The plan had a name,
3:46Generalplan Ost, the master plan for the
3:49East. It called for the extermination or
3:51deportation of over 30 million people
3:54across Poland, the Baltics, Belarus,
3:57Ukraine, and stretches of Russia. The
3:59percentages are staggering on their own.
4:01Over 80% of Poles marked for removal,
4:04about 75% of Belarusans. Jews were
4:07marked for total extermination. The
4:09others, they were to be deported east or
4:12worked to death. Slavs, they'd be pushed
4:14east into Siberia or kept as slaves.
4:17Then Germans would move in and resettle
4:19the emptied land. Running right
4:21alongside that was the hunger plan,
4:23which really gets mentioned and is one
4:25of the more chilling things that I've
4:27come across in this research. But before
4:29we get to that, I want to talk about
4:31today's sponsor and professional
4:33therapy. Now, I've only done that once
4:35in my life for some marriage counseling.
4:38And for someone like me, I just didn't
4:40like the logistics. I mean, trying to
4:42find the right person, then driving
4:44there, and then having the waiting room
4:46experience, all before you even start.
4:48And when one counselor didn't work out,
4:51it's even uncomfortable to change them.
4:53Better Help, our sponsor today, fixes
4:55all of that. You take a short quiz and
4:57they match you up with a licensed
4:59therapist. There's no commute, no
5:01waiting room. You can do sessions by
5:03phone, video, even text, whatever fits
5:05your schedule and your comfort level.
5:07That allows you to find a therapist well
5:09beyond your immediate area. And if the
5:11match isn't right, you can switch
5:13anytime, no extra cost, no awkward
5:15conversation. Over 6 million people have
5:18used Better Help so far. So if one of
5:20the things standing between you and
5:22therapy has been the hassle of how the
5:24process works or finding someone in your
5:26area, this takes care of that for you.
5:28Head to betterhelp.com/kendallcourt
5:31and get 10% off your first month. Okay,
5:34so back to the war and Hitler's hunger
5:36plan. The architect was an agricultural
5:38official named Herbert Backe. And the
5:41logic was coldly practical. Germany
5:44wanted the food grown in the Soviet
5:45breadbasket to feed its own army and
5:47people. So, the plan would have diverted
5:50that food westward. The planners wrote
5:52that number down, 20 to 30 million
5:54people in the occupied East were
5:56expected to starve to death.
5:58I mean, the Nazis understood that going
6:00in and it was part of the policy. His
6:02model for all this was the United States
6:05and he said so explicitly in his
6:06writings. In fact, he considered the
6:08Slavs he planned to clear off the land
6:10to be the new Native Americans.
6:13He looked at what European settlers had
6:14done in the Americas and he was going to
6:16use that as a guide. The resettlement
6:18plans got very specific. Crimea was to
6:20be cleared and handed to German
6:22settlers. Great highways would push East
6:25into the conquered land with new German
6:27towns strung along the way, all built
6:29with slave labor. Phase three was meant
6:31to come later.
6:32After taking Europe, Hitler expected to
6:34claw back Germany's old African colonies
6:37and help redraw the continent under Axis
6:39control. He was even counting on regimes
6:42like apartheid South Africa as
6:44sympathetic partners, not enemies. So,
6:46the Nazi genocide that we saw killed
6:49over 12 million people, but that was
6:51only the opening act. The full plan for
6:53the East would have stacked tens of
6:55millions more on top of that in a
6:57deliberate, organized genocide running
7:00across the continent. As always with the
7:02Nazis, this wasn't a mob of thugs
7:04figuring things out as they went along.
7:06Heinrich Himmler ran the machine and
7:08even had professors design the racial
7:10classification systems that would decide
7:12who lived, who died, and who became
7:15slaves.
7:16It was genocide with footnotes. While
7:18all this was being planned, Hitler was
7:20moving forward with his favorite
7:22architect, Albert Speer, on a project
7:24they called Germania. It was a total
7:27rebuild of Berlin as the capital of the
7:28world. The centerpiece was a hall meant
7:31to hold 180,000 people with a dome
7:34bigger than St. Peter's in Rome and with
7:37a triumphal arch big enough to fit the
7:39Arc de Triomphe several times over.
7:42Their aim was also to reshape religion
7:44as well.
7:45We tend to picture the Nazis as just
7:47being cynical about religion, you know,
7:49willing to use the church when it was
7:50convenient and ignored otherwise. But
7:53they were planning on destroying it as
7:55potential opposition. Inside Germany,
7:57they even had a name for the halfway
7:59step, positive Christianity. It sounded
8:02harmless, but in practice, it meant
8:04stripping out the parts of the faith
8:06that clashed with the Nazi doctrine.
8:09Downplaying the divinity of Christ,
8:11erasing his Jewishness, minimizing the
8:13Old Testament, and tying what was left
8:16to the cult of the Führer.
8:18It was marketed as a more German
8:19Christianity, but the point was to bend
8:22the church around the state. Long-term,
8:25they wanted Christianity gone from
8:27Germany altogether. Now, there's a
8:28famous 30-point program for a so-called
8:31National Reich Church that gets quoted
8:33everywhere. Bibles being replaced by
8:35Mein Kampf, crosses replaced by
8:37swastikas, but the wartime Gestapo
8:40traced it to a single zealot, so it
8:42wasn't official policy and the state
8:44really never adopted it. But what isn't
8:46in doubt is that Alfred Rosenberg, the
8:48Nazi Party's main architect on religion,
8:51intended to hollow out German
8:53Christianity and eventually replace it
8:55with something built around blood and
8:57nation. Before the war, he'd already
8:59been put in charge of the party's
9:01philosophical education, which meant
9:03shaping the worldview of storm troopers,
9:05Hitler Youth, and rank-and-file Nazis.
9:08Church leaders in the 1930s saw his rise
9:11to power and openly worried that the
9:13state had just put an anti-Christian
9:15crusader in charge of the nation's soul,
9:17and they weren't wrong. And the church
9:19was already bending.
9:21In 1938, about 90% of Germany's
9:24Protestant pastors swore personal oaths
9:27of loyalty to Hitler. I mean, the
9:28wording was pretty blunt. I swear that I
9:30will be loyal and obedient to the Führer
9:32of the German Reich and nation, Adolf
9:35Hitler, so help me God. So, the regime
9:38didn't have to break the church by force
9:40because intimidation was already working
9:42pretty well. But even if Hitler won on
9:44the battlefield, the government he
9:46created had some fundamental problems
9:48and in many ways was built to break.
9:51Start with the money. The Nazi economy
9:53was It was a time bomb and the regime
9:56knew it. Germany was chronically short
9:58of the foreign currency it needed for
9:59raw materials, lurching from one
10:01exchange crisis to another throughout
10:03the 1930s. The rearmament boom, tanks,
10:06planes, uniforms, they ran on Mefo
10:08bills, government IOUs that were
10:11basically printed promises to pay later.
10:14Those promises came with a countdown and
10:16the maturities were all due between 1939
10:18and 1942. So, the war was essential if
10:22Hitler wanted to keep dodging the bill
10:23collectors. There was a four-year plan
10:25that was supposed to make Germany
10:27self-sufficient, but it failed. The
10:29economy, it ran on conquest. It had to
10:32keep swallowing territory to loot the
10:34resources, seize gold, grab slave labor.
10:37If they stopped conquering, the math
10:39collapsed. Now, that said, it wouldn't
10:42have collapsed overnight. There was a
10:43less accepted view from economists
10:45working in Britain in the late 1930s.
10:47Thomas Balogh and Claude Gibault, they
10:50pushed back on the popular idea that
10:52Germany was about to fall apart. In
10:54their view, the Nazi system was tougher
10:56than the people wanted to believe and it
10:58was held together by raw authoritarian
11:00control. So, from their point of view, a
11:03victorious Germany, it could have limped
11:05along a lot longer than we would have
11:07like to have thought. But perhaps a more
11:08urgent problem for the Third Reich was
11:11keeping the conquered under control.
11:13Look at Yugoslavia. Germany had to keep
11:15over a half million Axis troops just to
11:18hold on to the place. And they got
11:19vicious about it, as they always did.
11:22They had orders to execute 50 to 100
11:24civilians for every German soldier
11:25killed. Now, that was brutal, but those
11:28reprisals, they only increased the
11:30resistance because genocide often makes
11:33the problem worse. When the only
11:35alternative is death,
11:37people don't always lie down. They fight
11:39because they've got nothing left to
11:41lose.
11:42Mass murder gives every able-bodied
11:44person a reason to pick up a rifle.
11:46Doesn't always happen, but sometimes it
11:48does. Now, spread that across an entire
11:50conquered continent, the ones that are
11:52marked for slavery or removal or death,
11:55and the Nazis could have been stamping
11:57out fires in a lot of places. On top of
11:59that mess, they had some serious
12:01political infighting, always. The Nazi
12:04leadership, it was a pit of vipers even
12:06in peacetime.
12:08Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, they were
12:10always angling for power. A movement
12:12built on a single strong man has an
12:14obvious problem. Hitler even tried to
12:16solve his succession problem as early as
12:181941. He signed a formal decree naming
12:21Göring as his heir. But 4 years later,
12:24he'd stripped him of all those titles
12:26and ordered him arrested for treason.
12:28Then he did the same thing with Himmler
12:30days before his own death. The two men
12:32he'd officially designated as his heirs
12:34both ended up thrown out before the end.
12:37And the problems weren't just internal.
12:38On paper, Germany and Japan were
12:40partners. They even split the world
12:42between them, drawing a line down the
12:4470th meridian. Germany claimed
12:46everything west of it, Japan everything
12:48east. But nobody serious in Berlin
12:51thought that those borders would outlast
12:52the war. Once Japan had done the dirty
12:54work in China and the Pacific, the plan
12:56was to turn on them as well. I mean,
12:59when you've built a movement based on
13:00Aryan racial superiority, the Japanese,
13:03well, they just didn't fit that bill.
13:05The regime had tried to get around that
13:07by slapping the label honorary Aryan on
13:09the Japanese and kind of hoping nobody
13:11would laugh. And some theorists even
13:13went further, tying themselves in knots
13:15to argue that the Japanese were an Aryan
13:18people of the East who developed
13:20independently. But not even Japan was
13:22fooled with that stuff. It refused to
13:24hand over Jewish communities in its
13:26territories. It rejected the Nazi racial
13:28doctrine outright, and it ran its own
13:31war largely independent of Berlin. A
13:33victorious Axis doesn't give you a
13:35stable new order. It gives you two tired
13:39conquerors eyeing each other across that
13:41Meridian, each planning to betray the
13:43other. Winning the war wouldn't have
13:45ended the wars. It would have just
13:46decided who fought whom next.
13:49So, look, this is a good time to mention
13:51that if I get any serious facts wrong
13:52here, let me know in the comments. I'll
13:54address it in a pinned comment below.
13:56Down there, you'll see sources and
13:58research notes as well. All right. So,
14:00Hitler kind of thought America was a
14:02joke. And he never took seriously the
14:05America problem that was going to await
14:07him after the war. He called Americans a
14:09race of mongrels, and he assumed the
14:11country would rot from the inside long
14:14before it could ever threaten him. As
14:15late as 1944, when American tanks,
14:18planes, and men were doing the heavy
14:20lifting in Western Europe, Hitler was
14:22still more worried about Britain than
14:24about the United States. And the
14:26economic and military production power
14:28of the United States, it was massive. I
14:30mean, numbers that were larger than
14:32Germany and most of Europe combined. In
14:345 years, America produced over 300,000
14:37aircraft, 100,000 ships, and millions of
14:41vehicles. But, Hitler's contempt came
14:43with a theory.
14:44America was spiritually weak. In his
14:47mind, it was addicted to consumer
14:49comforts, divided by immigrants, and
14:51corrupted by Jewish influences. He
14:53figured that kind of society wouldn't
14:55hold up under any kind of a serious
14:57stress, and it would eventually tear
14:59itself apart on its own.
15:01His military planners, though, they
15:02weren't so sure, and they had some ideas
15:04of their own. One program was nicknamed
15:06the America bomber. It was a serious
15:09effort to design a long-range aircraft
15:11that could fly from Europe, hit New
15:13York, and then just not bother coming
15:15back. Their V2 rocket scientists, they
15:18sketched out a two-stage monster, some
15:21called the America rocket. And it was an
15:23intercontinental missile meant to lift
15:25off in Europe and come down on the East
15:27Coast. As an alternative, they even
15:30plotted towing rockets across the
15:32Atlantic behind submarines if the
15:34intercontinental things didn't fly.
15:36Every one of those plans was meant to
15:37tackle the same problem. Germany just
15:40couldn't get an army across the Atlantic
15:42Ocean.
15:43I mean, even if they could bomb cities,
15:45you can't occupy a country that you
15:47can't reach with troops. So, that's why
15:49most historians think that a post-war
15:51reality would have been a sort of
15:53permanent Cold War with Nazi-controlled
15:56Europe on one side and an isolated and
15:58untouchable United States on the other.
16:01Now, that standoff probably wouldn't
16:03have left America untouched internally
16:05though. Because a democracy locked in a
16:07permanent Cold War with a continent-size
16:10fascist state, that would have instilled
16:12fear here. It would have likely been a
16:14more extreme version of the Cold War
16:16with the Soviet Union. And that kept
16:18America with a big military,
16:20McCarthyism, and red scares, nuclear
16:22drills in schools. Against a more
16:24powerful, vicious Nazi regime,
16:27America would have been fixated on that
16:29threat for as long as it existed. How
16:31would that have affected the United
16:32States?
16:33You know, it's not hard to imagine
16:35loyalty oaths turning into loyalty tests
16:37or emergency powers becoming more normal
16:40powers. And the line between security
16:42state and police state getting blurrier
16:45every year.
16:46Internally, America could have looked
16:48like a different country than the one
16:50that entered the war. But for a time at
16:52least, there would have been an ace that
16:54only the United States had.
16:56Nuclear weapons.
16:57The irony is that German scientists got
16:59there first on the pure science.
17:02In 1938, German scientists split the
17:04atom in Berlin, discovering nuclear
17:06fission. Then, they walked away from it.
17:09In 1942, Hitler's people told him a bomb
17:12wasn't coming in any useful time frame,
17:14so the priority dropped. I mean, German
17:17teams, they never achieved a sustained
17:19chain reaction.
17:21They didn't lose the nuclear race as
17:22much as just wander away from it. By
17:251948, the United States had about 50
17:27atomic bombs. Germany, even in a total
17:30victory scenario, almost certainly had
17:33zero, at least for a while. So, Germany
17:35owns the continent, America owns the
17:38nuclear bombs.
17:39But, would they have used them?
17:41Well, as we saw in Japan, and I did a
17:42whole video on this, the US military,
17:45they didn't have the kind of special
17:47moral qualms towards nuclear bombs that
17:49we have today. There wasn't a whole lot
17:51of debate by Truman or the generals.
17:53They were happy to have a big bomb to
17:55end the war that was killing Americans,
17:57and they used it as soon as they could.
17:59The only real variable in this scenario
18:01is when Hitler's win happens. If it
18:04comes early, before the United States is
18:06committed into Europe, there's no war
18:08left to end with a bomb, and no reason
18:10to use one. If it comes later, after
18:12years of fighting and thousands of
18:14American deaths, Truman probably uses it
18:17the moment he can, the same as he did
18:19with Japan. That nuclear advantage,
18:21though, doesn't last forever.
18:23Once Germany builds its own bombs, the
18:25US loses its one-sided leverage, and
18:28you're back to a stalemate. I came out
18:30of this less sure that the Nazis were
18:31doomed, and more sure about how much it
18:34mattered. So, a successful Germany in
18:36Europe, look, that wasn't going to last
18:38a thousand years. It just had too many
18:40headwinds and problems within it. So,
18:43that Reich would have collapsed at some
18:45point, but that could have been 10
18:46years. That could have been 50 years.
18:48And that gap, that means tens of
18:51millions of people dead. So, doomed
18:53eventually isn't the same as being
18:55stopped the way it was.
18:57What we know is that freedom wasn't
18:59inevitable. It got chosen by real people
19:02in real moments who could have chosen
19:03otherwise. And by most reasonable looks
19:06at the past, Germany could have won
19:08Europe, but America would have been the
19:10the to win the century. History has a
19:12way of creating questions that sometimes
19:14seem obvious until you dig into them
19:16deeper. World War II certainly. And so
19:19does the modern Middle East. And there
19:21one thing I could never understand about
19:23the war in Gaza was that despite most of
19:25them being forced from their homes, not
19:28one Arab country ever offered to take in
19:31any of their refugees. In fact, it was
19:33very much the opposite. The answer isn't
19:35simple. I mean, it has to do with
19:37histories in multiple countries over
19:39different generations. This video
19:41explains that all and I think you might
19:43find that interesting.
19:44Hey, thank you so much for your time. I
19:46hope this look at the past was worth
19:48your while. Until next time.

About this transcript

This page contains the full transcript of Here was the world Hitler planned by Elephants in Rooms - Ken LaCorte, generated from the public captions YouTube serves with the video. The transcript has 3,550 words across 546 segments, with the original timestamps preserved so you can click any line to jump to that moment in the embedded player.

What you can do with it

Use the transcript to take notes, quote the speaker, build a study guide, generate a summary with ChatGPT or Claude via the YouTube Summary tool, or export it as a timed subtitle file with YouTube to SRT. You can also re-open it in the transcriber to translate the transcript into 100+ languages.

Free YouTube transcript tool

YouTube2Text is a free YouTube transcript generator — no signup, no daily limit. Paste any YouTube link and get the full transcript instantly, with timestamps, click-to-jump, translation to 100+ languages, AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, or Markdown.