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Imagine Europe without the destruction of WW2.

So like many people Im a bit obsessed with what was lost during WW2, and coming from the far end of the globe decades later, as an architectural historian, it just seemed such a waste – so i started imagining what might have happened had Germany not gone to war with the rest of Europe ? If say Hitler had been killed in the Beer hall Putsch of 1923, and the Nazi’s just never got that popular ? If Germany just muddled through the depression like everyone else ?

That would mean that all those German, Polish and Russian cities that were largely destroyed, would still be there – and the blitzed British towns and cities too.

Images popped into my head of happy Brazilian instagrammers thronging the streets of Koenisgburg, a delightfully picturesque city on the Baltic in East Prussia that no longer exists. The medieval heart of Frankfurt would still be there, perhaps instead of the skyscrapers there now, and the Baroque heart of Dresden would be very expensive real estate, still owned in part by the Saxon nobility. Maybe Berlin would have just kept growing and changing, and might have hosted some of Europe’s tallest buildings from the 1950s, designed by those Bauhaus figures that wouldnt have fled to the US.

Then of course I began to sketch out what might have happened, the events that led to the Reichstag not burning down in 1933, German politics from then on, and other countries too.

So these blog posts will be various episodes in this history, allowing side steps into alternatives and the history of other places too, like my own country Australia.

Here’s some basic (alternative) facts though :

• Right wing but not fascist governments dominate Germany in the late 1930s
• Japan still goes to war with the US and the British Empire in 1941
• Stalin does not invade anyone. So no Eastern Bloc.