Dilandu wrote:Firstly, let's find the way how so-called "kaiser" would explain peoples of Germany that they should fold back and left Poland and Alsace & Lorraine DESPITE seemingly winning everywhere. Basically, how the situation would looks like? "Okay, we sacrificed a lot, we achieved all our goals, and now we must give it all back, because I want that".
The most probable outcome would be immediate counter-coup by dissatisfied military & Nazi members. And it would almost guaranteed to succeed, because the popular uproar against the idea of "folding back and suing for peace" would be enormous. Just try to imagine, what would happens if in spring 1945 Truman would suddenly declare: "we have a good fun, but now it's time to go back, and return everything we won to Japan". Or Stalin, suddenly deciding to sue for peace, while Soviet troops are at the gates of Berlin. Plausible? Clearly not.
Even if - somehow - "kaiser" would be able to held some resemblance of power despite being despised by absolute majority of German population, the revolt, the subsequent in-fighting would essentially destroy the German war machine. It would be impossible in such scenario to implement any kind of "de-nazification", without essentially destroying the German military. You know, that Western historians put a lot of blame about 1941 Red Army failures on Stalin's purges? Well, you basically would have the same situation, during the actual war. And, I must stress this again: the only real advantage German army have during the first years of the war, was the high competence of its low-ranking officers and noncoms, trained in Reichswehr. If "kaiser" starts to shatter his army, the whole "mighty, competent" Wehrmacht would quickly turn into its 1944 state.
And what would such turbulence in Germany means for Churchill and Darlan? Exactly, that the Germany is NOT as powerful and stable as it tries to look like, and they are desperate for peace because otherwise they could not fight anymore. And so what? The Britain lost an army? It could draft more. The France occupied? They still have their fleet and troops in North Africa. And of course, there are comrade Stalin, who would NOT sit idly - and who would immediately start to probe the ground both in Berlin and in London.
And let's not even start now about such weird act of "kaiser" as publishing some "secret treaties" with USSR... Which would not only antagonize Stalin (the only one around who currently have no particular dislike toward "German Empire"!), but would also demonstrate, that the new German regime have no intention of obliging to any treaty at all. So if you wanted to isolate the GERMANY, yes, it would be the perfect way - after that, Germany would literally have no major European power which is NOT hostile toward it.
Okay, so now we don't have to shoot Churchill and de Gaulle, the Kaiser is going to be overthrown by his own subjects.
Why?
He came to power specifically because the Nazi party, from its leadership elements on down, had been utterly discredited by the squabble for power after Hitler's death. The Nazi party in the Germany in Benjamin 2's universe had civil-warred itself to death. That's why there was a power vacuum, rather than simply putting the highest ranking surviving Nazi into the Chancellor's office. So, not going to be very many Nazis around to organize a countercoup.
The regular military are the ones who proposed the Hohenzollern return. They can justifiably rest on their laurels for the way in which they totally trounced everyone they came up against. Even the most ardent Nazis didn't have any territorial claims on France — aside from that pesky Alsace Lorraine — and the Kaiser was keeping the Sudetenland, the rest of Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Czechoslovakia might be negotiable; the rest wasn't. He was prepared to give up a sizable chunk of what had been German territory pre-World War I, for three reasons. First, the people living on it were predominantly Polish. Second, he knew that if Germany wasn't going to be the pariah of Europe it had to make genuine concessions. Third, he was already thinking in terms of revealing the secret protocol and he was pretty sure that Stalin wouldn't give up eastern Poland. Which, of course, would be a talking point in his favor as the reasonable successor to a pair of lunatic dictators.
The German military never
wanted to invade Russia, and unless the restored Empire was willing to make some really significant concessions, it was going to find itself up against Russia all alone at sometime in the very near future (whether or not Stalin actually intended to come further west is actually moot in this case; what matters is what Germany
thought he was going to do), quite probably with France and Great Britain poised to hit Germany from the back in conjunction with Russia. Mind you, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom would've made strange bedfellows without Germany doing them the favor of attacking both of them, but one could argue that a German-Soviet war while the war against France and the UK was still unresolved would've been just that. I very much doubt that the German military would have objected to giving back France or the BEF in return for a peace treaty that lets it keep its own 1939 borders and the Polish corridor. Not only would they have accomplished the majority of their strategic goals, but they would be as aware as you are of the temptation a "shattered" German military would pose for the currently defeated French and British. I doubt very much that the French fleet would have worried them very much, but they would be aware of the French troops in Africa and Indochina. At the same time, they would be very much aware of how disenheartened France is and of how difficult it would be to convince the French people to support a continuation of the war when the Germans are offering them everything they would be fighting the war to obtain aside from the destruction of Germany.
The Kaiser hasn't betrayed any of the participants in pre-World War II diplomacy, because he wasn't
involved in in it. He has inherited (in more than one sense of the word) a really dirty job and he intends to do the best at it that he can. France and the UK declared war on
Germany, not the other way around, when Germany invaded Poland. Now, having kicked the Allies' ass, the new Emperor of Germany is saying "Look, this whole damned war was never
my idea. It was those lunatic Nazis, most of whom are now dead, and a lot of the rest of whom are in prison. I don't want to fight you guys, and you sure as hell don't want to fight me when I already occupy half of France, I can take the other half anytime I want, and the peacetime British army is now in POW cages in Pomerania. And, believe me, you
really don't want to get me started on U-boat warfare while I control the north French coast and have no intentions of frittering away my resources in a war in the East. So, I am prepared to admit that Germany started the war this time around. I am prepared to return all occupied territory in the West — yes, including Alsace-Lorraine. I am prepared to repatriate the British army and release all of my French POWs. In return, I will keep the Polish corridor but return to Polish control the rest of German-occupied 1939 Poland. I will keep Austria and the Sudetenland. And I will keep the rest of Czechoslovakia, because I am looking to the threat on my eastern frontier. You don't have to accept my terms, but if you don't, you will leave me with no choice but to prosecute the war until I am convinced that neither France nor England will be any threat to Germany at the time that I confront the Bolsheviks."
Now, you may think that no German would make that offer. I disagree, given the circumstances which brought him back to the throne. And I also disagree with the notion that he would automatically be faced with some sort of mass revolt or that the German military would tear itself apart because it is so furious that he has disgorged the territories in the west
that no one wanted in the first place. And the German people at this point are sick and tired of the violence which has swept back and forth across Germany, worse than the worst days of the Weimar Republic. The Nazi party has pretty much ceased to exist and has been systematically routed out of positions of power, and the rest of Germany is probably pretty pissed at them for the mess they've made. The only points at which I think German pride might cavil would be the return of Alsace Lorraine and sizable portions of Poland, and I think that the Emperor would make the point to his subjects that "This is the price we pay for having allowed the lunatics to lead us into a lunatic war. And if it removes us from the category of rogue nations, it's worth every penny."
As far as publishing the secret protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty is concerned, why on earth shouldn't he? The treaty was negotiated not by his government, but by the Nazi government which has now been overthrown to create his. He's not breaching any secret diplomacy to which he or any member of his current government were parties. Instead, he's revealing what he characterizes as a "criminal conspiracy" and he's doing it for multiple reasons.
He's doing it because, cynically speaking, it is entirely to his benefit to further criminalize and marginalize Adolf Hitler, who hasn't carried out the Holocaust in this universe. The worse he can make Hitler look, the better it makes
him look as an alternative to der Fuhrer. He's also doing it because he's "coming clean" with France and Great Britain. He doesn't expect them to suddenly embrace him, but he's putting his cards on the table. He's also doing it because it
discredits Stalin, who he regards as Germany's most dangerous true enemy. In particular, since he's pretty damn sure Stalin won't give up the portion of Poland the USSR occupied, he shifts Western animus from no-longer-Nazi Germany to still-communist USSR as the true threat to peace in Western Europe. And I don't think very many people in Western Europe would be thinking in terms of the Curzon Line in 1942. Stalin could certainly make that argument, but the Polish counterargument would be "Yeah, and Russia took them away from the Polish monarchy." If you think that a Soviet Union which declined to give back territory which had been part of Poland (however it became part of Poland) at the time that Britain and France guaranteed Poland's borders wouldn't be regarded as a pariah by the British and the French, then you have a very different read of human nature from my own.
The bottom line is that I think all of this is entirely plausible. You may not. However, Jacob and I are the guys writing the novel, and I expect that the majority of our readers will find the history entirely plausible.
By the way, there is no comparison at all between the position of the restored German Empire in Benjamin 2's 1942 and Stalin at the gates of Berlin or Truman after the occupation of Japan.
Total German fatal casualties in Poland or about 15,000. I don't have numbers for WIA in Poland. Total German casualties in Western Europe in May-June 1940 were 27,000 KIA, 18,400 MIA, and 111,000 WIA. That's about 171,000 total casualties, or about half of German casualties at Verdun, alone, in World War I. It certainly bears no comparison whatsoever to the
20,000,000-plus dead the USSR lost in World War II.
As for the US, the United States military suffered 407,300 KIA and about 672,000 WIA, so the total that Truman would be looking at — after fighting his way clear across the Pacific against someone who had begun the war by launching a surprise attack on a US military base in time of peace — would be about 1,079,000, or about six times Germany's casualties in both campaigns. Adding US MIAs (for which I don't have numbers) probably would shift that ratio a bit, but not enough to change my point that German losses in Poland and France were trivial in comparison to those suffered by the Soviets on their way to Berlin and by the US on its way to both Berlin and Tokyo. And both the Soviets in 1945 and the Americans in 1946 could legitimately claim that they were the side which had been
attacked, not the side which
started the war, which creates a whole different level of motivation. So equating either of them to my fictional Kaiser is a totally false comparison.
And I might point out that the US did, basically, give Japan back to Japan by 1952. There were a lot of ulterior motives for doing that, given the perceived threat of communism and the 1947-48 economic crisis in Japan, but then again, the Kaiser in Benjamin 2's universe had a few ulterior motives of his own, didn't he?
Just saying.
It's moot by definition. The line at which Poland was divided 
) reasoned arguments in a second language very impressive. Back in the misty days of my youth, I was reasonably fluent in both French and Spanish. These days, I am mostly back to English through sheer lack of practice. There is no way in the universe that I could offer such cogent critiques of a Russian writer writing in Russian.