Adolf Hitler thought he was going to win. The Nazis didn’t just take battle plans and explosives into World War II; they had plans for a whole new world order. When the fighting and the bloodshed were done, they were going to build a new fascist empire over the ruins of Europe.The Nazis already had already written up the blueprints for their new order. If everything had gone according to Hitler’s plan, the world today would be a different place. And in many ways, the Nazi new world order wouldn’t have been what you’d expect.
5 Returning American Land To The Natives
The Nazis might have been genocidal white supremacists, but when it came to Native Americans, they were surprisingly accepting. Once America was theirs, the Nazis promised, they were going to give American land back to the natives.They had worked with a group called the American Indian Federation and won them over as fascist sympathizers. Some members of the group went well beyond sympathy and turned into outright rabid Nazis—like “Chief Red Cloud,” who tacked a swastika onto his clothes and gave speeches that called Jews the “children of Satan” and claimed that they “controlled the Indian service.”(“Chief Red Cloud” was a fake identity adopted by Portland attorney Elwood A. Towner, who was Native American. The real Chief Red Cloud died in 1909 and had nothing to do with Hitler.)The Nazis loved the actions of their Native American sympathizers. In fact, the Nazis publicly declared that Native Americans were Aryans and sent undercover propaganda officers to America to convince them to overthrow the US government. In exchange, the Nazis swore, they would give the Native Americans their land back.[1]Whether the Nazis were telling the truth or not, a lot of people listened. “Chief Red Cloud” (Towner) claimed that he had an army of 750,000 Native Americans ready to fight for Hitler. The moment a Nazi army set foot on American soil, he said, they would help him tear the United States apart.
4 A Giant Space Mirror
Without a doubt, one of the stranger Nazi plans was the giant space mirror—which was exactly what it sounds like. The Nazis planned to put a gigantic mirror that was 1.6 kilometers (1 mi) in diameter in orbit 35,900 kilometers (22,300 mi) above the Earth—and if they’d had a bit more time, they just might have pulled it off.[2]The idea was basically the giant space-Nazi equivalent of a cruel little boy burning ants with a magnifying glass. Whenever somebody made the Nazis angry, they were going to tilt the mirror to reflect the Sun’s rays onto the offending party’s city. Supposedly, the Sun’s rays would have become beams of burning hot light that would engulf in flames anything they touched.The Nazis were even going to set it up as a full space station. They had plans to keep a crew of men inside the mirror at all times, surviving off the food and oxygen scavenged from a crop of pumpkins.Today, there are some doubts about whether it would have worked. But the scientist behind it, Hermann Oberth, was so confident in the idea that, after the war was over, he tried to get the Americans to build it instead. If he’d had a bit more time, the Nazis probably would have finished it and the world would have lived under the terror of a gigantic mirror in the sky.
3 Enslaving Eastern Europe
It’ll come as no surprise that the Nazis were hell-bent on eradicating every Jewish person on the planet, but their plans for genocide didn’t stop there. The Slavic people in Eastern Europe were that next “racially undesirable” group to be eradicated. By the time the war ended, Hitler had already put some of his plans into motion.The plan was called Generalplan Ost,[6] and it was a systematic operation to wipe the Slavs and their culture off the face of the planet. The first to go were the leaders. Before the war ended, the Nazis were already “liquidating” Soviet elites and anyone with cultural influence as quickly as they could clear out anyone who might encourage the people of Eastern Europe to take pride in their own identities.But if the Nazis had taken Russia, they would have started deporting 31 million Slavs to Siberia to work as slaves in forced labor camps. Others would be sent out on a slave trade modeled on American slavery. And to replace them, 10 million ethnic Germans were to be sent in to start new, racially pure families.Within 30 years, 50 million people were to be either deported into slave camps or murdered. Nearly every Eastern European would be wiped out.
2 Letting Muslims Rule The Middle East
Hitler was surprisingly pro-Muslim. Both he and Heinrich Himmler complained that Germany was a Christian country. Hitler said, “The Mohammedan religion would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity.”Early on, he’d promised the Middle East to Italy. But as the war went on, he started to change his tune. He found a kindred spirit in Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who told him that they had the same enemies: “The English, the Jews, and the Communists.”Al-Husseini wanted to lead a fascist revolt against the British, but Hitler told him to wait until the war with the USSR was over. But the two already had a pact and were already working together to send a death squad into Palestine to massacre every Jew living there.When it became clear that the Nazis were going to lose, Hitler blamed the failure on not allying himself more closely with the Muslims—especially after Italy turned on him. “We could have emancipated the Moslem countries,” Hitler complained. “Just think what we could have done to help them!”[9]And if he’d turned the tables and won, he would have done just that. He would have made the Middle East the land where fascism and Islam reigned together.
1 Shooting Gandhi
In 1938, before the war began, Hitler gave the British foreign minister a little advice. “Shoot Gandhi,” he told him. “And if this doesn’t suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of the Congress.”As far as Hitler was concerned, the British were taking too light a hand with the peaceful protests of Mahatma Gandhi. Hitler felt that Indians were a “lower race” who needed to be subjected to Aryan rule—and if he’d taken over the world, he planned on putting his advice into action.As the war raged on, Hitler’s disdain for India cost him some golden opportunities. At one point, a resistance army led by Subhas Chandra Bose traveled to Berlin and offered to help lead an Indian revolt against the British.[7] He got thousands to sign up to fight with him, but Hitler’s prejudices ran so deep that he never even put the men to use.In the end, Bose teamed up with the Japanese instead and India was marked as a part of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. But if a third world war came and the Nazis conquered Japan, Hitler had made it perfectly clear how the people of India would be treated.