Current Events > How different would history have been if Hitler won the lottery after WW1?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's well known that after WW1 Hitler went to Munich and found it in chaos. The economy was dead, his art career had failed, he had no skills or prospects and he ultimately rejoined the army because he had nothing else to do and WW1 was the only part of his life he enjoyed.

Then the army sent him to infiltrate DAP and once he started he never left politics until killed himself.

So let's say NEET Hitler after WW1 buys a lottery ticket from some tabaccoist in Munich after dejectedly being turned down from another job. Then wins the jackpot 3,000,000DM which is what? $20,000,000 in todays money?

What would have happened? There's no way he would have gone back to the amy, would have no entry point into politics, no Beer Hall Putsch, no prison time.

The Nazi party built it's resurgance around him and his stupid speeches. They would obviously still exist but without him would be like Republicans without Trump. Just as vile but never winning anything.

At the time he had no legal citizenship, would he have gone crawling back to Austia or get his German ceritizenship sorted sharpish?

Would he still develop the same drug habbits and paranoia? What would he spend his money on? What would he invest in?

He used to live in England and absolutely loved right-wing America, do you think he might have moved back to Liverpool or move to New York amongst the people he was just fighting to properly enjoy his riches outside of the post war wreck that was Germany?

Would WW2 still occur? And either way, would they invade Russia? Would the Nazis even rise to power in the first place?

I think this is a more interesting alternate history than him dying after coming into power.

Armchair historians get on this

Not to throw a wet blanket on your whole scenario, but German Lotto did not start until 1955.

Lotteries were basically outlawed around 1890, and weren't really reestablished until after WWII to start funding countries rebuild.

bigblu89 posted...

Not to throw a wet blanket on your whole scenario, but German Lotto did not start until 1955.

Lotteries were basically outlawed around 1890, and weren't really reestablished until after WWII to start funding countries rebuild.

Considering there was leglislation introduced that forbid the sale of lottery tickets to Jews in August 1st 1939.... I don't believe you.

Would be like if Biden passed a law today forbidding the National LeprechaunFederation from handing out pots of gold to Muslims if the lottery didn't exist

I think what you're refering too is that the lottery was greatly expanded and advertised in the 50s

If someone had just bought his damn paintings, none of this would have happened.

UnfairRepresent posted...

Considering there was legislation introduced that forbid the sale of lottery tickets to Jews in August 1st 1939.... I don't believe you.

I think what you're referring too is that the lottery was greatly expanded and advertised in the 50s

Possibly. Unless I was reading about lotteries just in the U.S.

But I know the German lottery, as it currently constructed, didn't start until 1955.

The Wiemar Republic was such a mess, that three million Deutsche Marks in lottery winnings would have been worthless in about a couple weeks or so.

As a historian of German Lotteries lets just keep going with this hypothetical question instead of harping on that

I don't think very much would have changed at all.

I do think WWII still happens. Hitler was a very charismatic figurehead, but someone would have taken his place instead. The state the German people were left in was dire enough to cause it.

I figure that Hitler was all pissed because Germany was broken and poor after WWI.

I also heard that his dislike for the Jewish was because they wasn't putting anything back in.

But hell, maybe Hitler had PTSD from his WW1 experiences and the dope he was on.

PrettyBoyFloyd posted...

But hell, maybe Hitler had PTSD from his WW1 experiences and the dope he was on.

I mean it's possible but he went on record multiple times inclduing his auto-biography that WW1 was the happiest time of his life and he loved fighting in it.

Dude got decorated twice for going above and beyond in the field (possibly literally since he was a runner)

Armchair psychologist in my would think the constant drug abuse fucked his brain but I think he relished WW1 as opposed to being truamatized by it. WW1 gave him purpose, direction and focus. He never got that again before or after

PrettyBoyFloyd posted...

I also heard that his dislike for the Jewish was because they wasn't putting anything back in.

Oh sure, because anti-semitism wasn't already deeply ingrained in pre-war Austria or Germany.

The truth is that anti-Jewish prejudice in German states was old even before the unification of 1871, let alone before WW1. When the lower house of the Bavarian parliament passed a bill in December 1849 to grant Jews full civil equality, there was a furious popular backlash; petitions protesting the bill were collected from somewhere between 10-20% of the entire adult male population of Bavaria within just three months. Berlin, Baden and Frankfurt also saw bitter political fights over attempts to confer on Jews the status of German subjects or citizens.

The prejudice intensified after German unification. A whole generation of parties and organizations with anti-semitic programmes emerged: the League of Anti-Semites (1879), the Christian-Social Workers Party (1878), the Social Reich Party (1881), the German Antisemitic Alliance (1886), the German Social Party (1893) and the Antisemitic People's Party (1890) -- both of which folded into the German-Social Reform Party (1894) and, in turn, into the German-Populist Party (1914) -- the German National Commerce Clerks Association (1893), the Agrarian League (1893), and the Pan-German League.

This wasn't just a hobby for outfits on the lunatic fringe of politics, either. In 1880, a nationwide campaign calling for the rescinding of Jewish rights in Germany gained 265,000 petition signatures and led the national parliament, the Reichstag, to consider the demand in a debate that lasted two full days. The German Conservative Party -- the main parliamentary supporter of Bismarck and the Wilhelmine Reich -- made a formal declaration in its Tivoli Programme of December 1892 that it would "combat the widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life."

On March 6, 1895 the speaker of the Reichstag, Ahlwardt, told deputies that: "If it is now pointed out ... that the Jew is human too, then I must reject that totally." He added: "A Jew who is born in Germany is still no German; he is still a Jew."

Ahlwardt went a little too far when he called upon deputies to wipe out "these beasts of prey" [Rotten Sie diese Raubtiere aus], but he qualified it by saying that he didn't want to go quite as far as the Austrian anti-semites in the Reichsrath and "reward everybody who shoots a Jew, or ... decide whoever kills a Jew, inherits his property." Wasn't that nice of him?

Oh, and I might point out that were twelve trials of Jews for the age-old charge of "ritual murder" in Germany and the Austrian Empire between 1867 and 1914, while nineteen publications by prominent anti-semitic writers that appeared between 1861 and 1895 in Germany called for the physical extermination of the Jews.

This was the milieu in which Hitler grew up, and it gave Hitler any number of ready-made excuses to hate Jews because it was such a popular pastime already.

Scapegoats is a political cheat-code. Always has been.

In October 1916, the Supreme Command of the German Army, OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung), pandered to right-wing populist pressure and carried out a "Jew census" of the army. The investigation was meant to prove that Jewish soldiers weren't pulling their weight on the battlefront in WW1 -- even though by that time around 3,000 had been killed in combat while over 7,000 had been decorated for bravery. Because the statistics disproved the case that OHL was hoping to make -- namely, that Jews were frontline-dodging cowards and shirkers -- the results were suppressed (surprise, surprise) .

That's the kind of political baggage Hitler would have taken away with him when he left the German army after WW1.

^ Yeah the stabbed in the back myth was 100% bullshit

Jews in Germany not only fought and died in WW1, they punched above their weight and the stats backed it up

It was just easy for the right wing to ignore real problems and get their base to hate on minority groups instead.