Would the Third Reich have lasted for 1000 years?

Nazi Germany tried to take on the world and lost. Although if they had succeeded, they would not have held onto it for very long.

Deep within Europe’s dark and violent past, one distraught, fanatical First World War veteran with a silly moustache dreamt of overturning what he saw as the betrayals and humiliation of the past, while plotting to forge a grand Germanic empire that would last forever (or a millennium at least).

In reality, the rule of the Third Reich lasted barely a decade. An optimistic Fuhrer decided to bite more than he could chew when he invaded the Soviet Union, led by the equally ruthless Josef Stalin, with Britain allowing her island to be used as a launching pad for the liberation of Western Europe – both from the SS and the Red Army.

Although if this art school reject had managed to garner surrender treaties from both London and Moscow, how long would the Nazi’s iron grip on the European continent last? Certainly not a thousand years, so how about 500? 250? I’m willing to bet that it would have lasted closer to 100 years than ten times the figure.

Of course we are all aware of the atrocities that would have continued and expanded under the direct control of a monstrous regime which was, by its very nature, openly totalitarian, utopian, genocidal and iconoclastic. Through this mindset, they did not believe in the notion of soft power and definitely thought that they were invincible through some sort of divine right (the Nazis were proud atheists who longed for the volk to worship them and them alone).

For all the talk of eternity, no strong-man dictatorship whose primary method of governance is the hammer ever lasts long. The twentieth century saw numerous centralised, one-party states driven largely by ideology and corruption become devoured by their own political terror and economic failures. Nazi Germany would have suffered the same fate, perhaps in half the time.

The Soviet Union began to shake on its very foundations immediately after Stalin passed away. Purges and gulags are excellent short-term initiatives to cement one’s own power and authority, but they cripple the nation in the long run, as terror must continuously be applied, complete with all the societal and political unrest that it entails. The Third Reich could have had as many brainwashed Aryan babies as it desired, but violent resistance was always bound to burst forth from the shadows, especially in the occupied lands housing millions of strong, fighting aged men.

Should the Second World War have belonged to the Swastika, the Wehrmacht would have found itself in a state of perpetual guerrilla war against the nations it had defeated. With war - as Germany rightfully discovered - ensuring that items necessary to human survival are always in short supply, along with the real risk of civilian death through bombings and assassinations, as well as losing loved ones on the battlefield, the legitimacy of the thousand-year Reich would have been crippled beyond repair.

Let’s not forget that, in July 1944, Adolf Hitler was nearly assassinated by his own generals inside his own headquarters because they believed that his death, followed by their leadership, could have wiggled Germany into a conditional surrender. It had become abundantly clear, by the summer of 1944, that further fighting was meaningless.

If Hitler had died a natural death, say in 1965, then a back-stabbing power struggle would have immediately stormed the offices and halls of the Reich Chancellery building. Realising that the brutal reign of Mr. Moustache would hang the Third Reich in a noose it had tied, the new Fuhrer would promise that the inner party would not face any culls, concessions would be given to the conquered but rebellious nations, and the rivers of political freedom would begin to break through the dam (but only in elite rhetoric, for the time being).

When Khrushchev assumed control of the USSR in the 1950s, the shadow of Stalinism still hung like a dark cloud, but its venom had been nullified. There were marches and street fighting in the Eastern Bloc that were ruthlessly crushed and covered up, but the seeds had been sown for the fall of Communism in this part of the world and indeed the Motherland itself. With Stalin’s demise, the fate of the USSR became inevitable.

Due to their fixation on face rather than colourblind proletarian solidarity, the Nazis would have faced an overwhelmingly vicious backlash from the ethnicities it deemed as second-class citizens or sub-human entirely. If the choice is to perish silently and without hope in a death camp or to die in a hail of bullets trying to free your homeland, please tell me, dear reader, which option do you accept? The Nazis gave the people of Europe this choice, which is why many became partisans.

Nazi Germany tried to take on the world and lost. Although if they had succeeded, they would not have held onto it for very long.