Plans Hitler Would Have Put In Motion If The Nazis Had Won

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.

10 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.

9 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.

8 The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Japan, of course, had plans of its own. In their war rooms, the Nazis and the Japanese had already sliced up and served out every part of the world. Japan, they’d agreed, was to rule over every part of the world east of the 70th meridian—giving them most of India and everything beyond it.

Japan’s empire was to go by the friendly sounding name “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”^[3] It was an empire full of friendly sounding words chosen to distract you from their dark, menacing meanings. The people of each conquered nation would be trained to be “leaders of their people” by turning them into puppet leaders of Japanese states.

They’d already started putting it in motion. The Japanese sold it as independence from Western imperialism, fighting under the slogan “Asia for Asiatics.” But the people of Asia would have been forced to accept Japanese rule.

Japanese would have been the official language of the whole Eastern Hemisphere, and Japanese teachers would have been in every school. They would have been tasked with providing “the guidance of Japanese culture” to the young minds of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Australia and New Zealand, too, would have been under Japanese control. If the Nazis won the war, Hitler believed, it would mean the end of every white person who lived there.

7 A Great Wall Of Baby-Makers

The Nazi defense against the new Japanese empire had to start at the 70th meridian east. In time, they were sure, there would be a war between the two new rulers of the world, and they needed to be ready when it came.

The plan was to make a “living wall” of German colonists who would reside along the border, reproducing as madly as they could. Any man of worth who had served 12 years in the Nazi army was to be sent to the eastern border, given a farm and a gun, and ordered to have as many babies as possible.

The men in the baby-making squad of Nazi veterans were required to marry locals. They couldn’t bring German wives with them. This was supposed to distill the gene pool on the border and make a new generation of half-German babies. It could only work if those Nazi soldiers spent a lot of time in the bedroom. For the sake of his country, Hitler demanded, every man on the eastern front was expected to father at least seven babies.^[4]

6 Pitting America And England Against Each Other

Despite what he told Chief Red Cloud in private, Hitler publicly claimed that he had no plans to invade the United States. The idea, he once told a Life magazine reporter, was “as fantastic as the invasion of the Moon.” He blamed the paranoia on “warmongers” who thought fear was “profitable for business.”

But when the Americans weren’t listening, he sang a different tune. “My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance,” he once told his staff. “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified.”^[5]

Still, he didn’t think he would have to invade America. Before America entered the war, he was sure that they would jump on the opportunity to attack Great Britain. And when they did join, he insisted that it was all just part of a long-term plan to take out the British.

No matter how the war ended, Hitler believed, the Americans would attack Britain. He wouldn’t have to invade the US because he thought the British would do it for him. “England and America will one day have a war with one another which will be waged with the greatest hatred imaginable,” Hitler insisted. “One of the two countries will have to disappear.”

If they didn’t, he’d make them. If the US still stood after Europe fell to the Nazis, Hitler promised, they would have to face the full onslaught from the Third Reich.

5 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.

4 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.

3 Enslaving All British Men

As the war raged on and the British refused to surrender, Hitler’s fond feelings for the English spirit started to fade. After a while, he just wanted to ruin their lives—and he already had a plan for how he was going to do it.

If Britain had fallen to the Nazis, they were going to introduce a new law. Every able-bodied male between the ages of 17 and 45 was to be transferred to continental Europe where they would be forced to work as slave laborers.

Women and children would get to stay in their homes—until the boys turned 17, at least. Everything they owned, though, was to be plundered, and anyone who tried to resist Nazi rule was to be killed on the spot.

It was a horrific plan, but it wasn’t the worst they had. Heinrich Himmler wanted to take it even further. He’d planned on exterminating 80 percent of the population outright as soon as England fell.^[8]

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 Converting Eastern Europe Into Jehovah’s Witnesses

That doesn’t mean the whole Nazi empire would have been Muslim, though. If Heinrich Himmler had gotten his way, Eastern Europe would have converted to a different religion: Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Nazis slaughtered tens of thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses in concentration camps. But for all he’d murdered them en masse, Himmler had a strange respect for the religion. “If their fanaticism could be harnessed for Germany,” he once said, “we would be stronger than we are today!”^[10]

In Himmler’s eyes, Jehovah’s Witnesses had the perfect combination of fanatical work ethic and pacifism that would keep them working hard and stop them from violently resisting the fascist regime. He even gave specific orders to one of his officers, Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to push the religion on Eastern Europe.

That would have been the strange reality of life under a global Nazi regime. There would have been slavery, genocide, and weapons of mass destruction, but there also would have been a whole lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses.