By 1933 Berlin was not only filled with wild expressionist or radical modernist buildings, many buildings and locations were brightly lit at night since everything was open late if not all night.

Most of this kept going in the 30s despite the takeover, the Nazis didn’t end nightlife, but the more salacious places closed, and Jewish names like FV Grunfeld linens and whitegoods, disappeared.

The Titania Palast cinema (1927, Schöffler, Schlönbach & Jacobi), which was way down in Stieglitz, is the only one still intact complete with lighting.

Karstadt, Hermannplatz, quite speccy, biggest dept store, but located way to the south west[/caption]

 

   

Titania Palast

I’m assuming that Stalin wouldn’t have have had any interest in starting a war, since he wasn’t an internationalist, and he had executed many of his generals in the Great Purge in the 1930s in any event. He was much more into eliminating enemies and re-building Moscow into a showpiece of the revolution. The rebuilding started with such massive piles as the House on the Embankment, and the Hotel Moscow, and a general plan for the complete rebuilding of Moscow was adopted in 1935, but the most massive of all was the Palace of Soviets. This was a giant wedding cake pile skyscraper that started out as a meeting venue for the party then doubled in size and height, topped by a 100m high statue of Lenin, that was taller than the Empire State building. I had thought it was just an idea, but the foundations were laid by 1940. So it would have been built, though maybe not by 1942 as planned – in fact these things changed during construction, so maybe it would have ended up with an even taller spire, and with just a star on top. Anyway, of course Russians love it, and they’ve done images of it on today’s Moscow skyline. Plus there’s loads of material on what it would have looked like, eg here.

Great collection of home movies from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum showing Jewish life. There’s a lot from eastern Europe especially small towns in Poland, towns that were often largely Jewish, and some are well dressed while many are in more or less peasant outfits, some even a bit raggedy, it was a hard life on the shtetl. Gombin in Poland had one of those great big wooden Synagogues, of which not a single one is left. Even many people shown in cities like Krakow and Warsaw look rather poor, or dressed in black coats with beards, they did look different, but then that’s why they were filmed. Others are very middle class, like the families in Holland, Berlin, and Prague, just living their lives like anyone else, going to school, the beach, having a picnic. Awful to think that most of them were murdered in the course of WW2, but in my alternative universe of course, they just carried on – and maybe one of them would have invented something useful, or written a great book, or made a stunning film, but most of them would have just worked hard and watched their children grow with pride (or not, Im sure plenty would have married the wrong man/woman, or stopped going to Temple, oy vey !)

The Polish economy was picking up rapidly in the late 1930s, and new construction in Warsaw was heading upwards until curtailed by the uncertainties next door, and then by the 1939 invasion. There are plenty of hints where it was heading though, and here are some of them.

The Main Railway Station had been under construction since 1932, damaged before opening in 1939, repaired and finally opened during the occupation, and it looked very splendid (before 1945); there was plan to build a high rise hotel in the street behind where the old station was too.

Another landmark that was about to be built was for Polish National Radio (Budynek Polskiego Radia), on a triangular site on the Plac Unii Lubelskiej, a lot like Corb’s Centrosoyuz in Moscow, a great collection of forms – including a 20 storey tower. It was designed by Bohdan Pniewski, a towering figure in Modernism in Poland from the late 20s right into the 60s. The radio building has been rendered in VR by pictureworks with some 2D images too.

There are some fine building from the earlier 30s that certainly indicated where the city was heading, like the National Museum, an elegant, but also a bit severe, stripped classical design by Tadeusz Tolwiński , built between 1927-1938 (and which survived the war).

There are also a few things bult early after the war that pretty much carried on the Modernism of the 30s, representing what would have been built in the early 40s had the war not intervened. The Central Department Store ‘Smyk’ (and recently stripped to the concrete and reconstructed), designed by Zbigniew Ihnatowicz and Jerzy Romański, was built 1948-52, has rounded corners and timber-framed strip-windows, very much carrying on pre-war design trends.

The House of the Party (aka ‘White House’ or Biały Dom) was designed in 1947 by young architects W. Kłyszewski, J. Mokrzyński, E. Wierzbicki (so-called Tigers), in a restrained Modernist gridded yet suitably monumental form, that was given some more clearly classical elements when built (and was always stone -clad brick not the grey concrete that it looks like). I can image say the Bank of Poland might have commissioned something similar in maybe 1940.

Nuremberg was 3/4 destroyed in WW2 and then mostly reconstructed after the war, but not quite as picturesque as it was.  Most of the houses are in the same plots and outline, with the same steep tiled roofs, so the cityscape is still there, but they were mostly rebuilt plain, without the half-timbering that made it so flammable in the first place.

Most of the landmarks like the churches and the old walls with many towers, and the bridges and some of the more famous old buildings were rebuilt, sometimes restoring elements not there in the 30s, sometimes simplified. Some of the most elaborate ‘houses’ were not rebuilt at all. Restoration is however still going on.

Im surprised that no effort was made to rebuild the synagogue, maybe because there was no use for it, but I suspect also because as a domed mid 19th century exotically styled building they might have thought it didnt fit, which is the main reason the Nazi’s gave for demolishing it in August 1938, which was before the widespread destruction of Kristallnacht (and also surprisingly there’s no wiki on it in English or German, only French and Italian !). It was quite extensive too. Anyway, here’s what it looked like before, in photos from 1900-1930s.

If WW2 didn’t happen it would still look like this, since Nuremburgers loved their historical city, and today it would be (even more ?) full of tourists.

The point of the blog is to pretend that none of the destruction of WWII happened. What did happen was most German cities were specifically targeted in order to demoralise the population, and the old towns of many cities were full of ancient half-timbered houses which burnt very well, but that doesn’t seem to have hastened the end of the war. I think cities were heavily bombed partly because that’s all the British could do before D Day, and of course in retaliation for bombing UK cities. The Germans were almost as bad, bombing many British cities (but with less marked effect), and purposely destroying Rotterdam and Warsaw just because, and destroying many Russian cities completely. And the Russians did the same to Konigburg after they had over-run the half-ruined city. So, here’s a list of all that horror – all the major cities partly or mostly destroyed in Europe in WW2 :

Completely destroyed

Netherlands : Rotterdam

UK: Coventry

France : Le Harve

Poland :Warsaw

Germany but Poland or Russia: Konigsburg (Kaliningrad), Breslau (Wroclaw), Danzig (Gdańsk), Stettin (Szczecin).

Germany : Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, Nuremburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Mannheim, Hannover, Mainz, Düsseldorf, Bremen, Hamburg

USSR : Minsk, Stalingrad (Volgograd), Kharkov, Sebastopol, Smolensk, Dnipro, Voronezh, Novorossiysk , Kursk, Bryansk, Vitebsk, Novgorod

Cities party destroyed

UK : London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Bristol, Southampton, Belfast, Hull, Clydebank.

Germany : Berlin suburbs

Poland : Poznan

USSR : Kiev, Rostov on Don, Vyborg (ex-Finland)

Italy : Palermo, Messina, Rimini

This whole blog was inspired by discovering that there was a whole city on the baltic coast next to Lithuania that now longer exists – Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia, a part of Germany that lay way to the east, and which was wiped off the map in 1945. That city is now a Russian one called Kaliningrad, and in the centre, amongst dull postwar apartment buildings, there’s an island with huge C14th red brick church, once the heart of a centuries old city, surrounded by …. nothing ! Just grass and trees, and

Unlike the Germans and the Poles did with almost every other city blown up in WW2, the Russians did not rebuild Konigsburg, they didn’t even put something else there. Which just makes it more intriguing, imagining ghost images of happy Konigs-burgers – taking a tram into town, wandering the medieval streets, going shopping, going to the theatre, getting some strudel from their favourite conditorei, hanging out at the bierhalle for some Klopse, going to church, going to the bank….. The city was built around that island, with 7 bridges, a lake, a castle, winding streets, so it was pretty picturesque. There are many photographs of the city from the 1920s and 30s, here’s a selection of streets scenes.

So what happened to him ?

I was bit surprised to read about the Beer Hall Putsch in 1922, when quite a few Nazis were actually killed, including Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter who was right next Adolf. So what if it had been Hitler instead ?

Then he does not go to prison (with a lenient sentence). He does not write Mein Kampf, which goes on to eventually be a best seller. The National Socialists do not have anyone else nearly as charismatic as a public speaker. I dont know who would have been leader instead, perhaps Rudolph Hess (a bit young), perhaps Ludendorff, but both were attracted to the party by Hitler in the first place, so maybe someone else. With Hitler apparently the brains, the National Socialists went on to gain publicity, and get more organised through the 1920s, so without him, maybe they dont have the same success (and in fact lost popularity between the July and November 1932 election in any event), and continue to be more like the other extremists, and spend their time picking fights with Communists and printing crazy leaflets about Jewish conspiracies. So they just do not get as popular, and for instance maybe never get more than 100 seats, though some rightist party would have done well, because politics and the economy of course was such a mess, so someone vowing to clean it all up would have been popular.

Lets say that without the option of Hitler as Chancellor the bickering between Hindenburg, Von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher continues in 1932 and 1933, with the army continuing to back Shchleicher. Apparently he introduced a public works employment scheme which actually worked (but was taken by Hitler to be his idea), so lets say by late 1933 he gains in popularity. Despite ongoing political instability, the economy improves. A succession of rightist governments / coalitions, sometimes including the Nazis, follows. Gradual decrease in liberties, increase in authoritarianism, army maintains position, re-armament begins. Shchleicher again becomes Chancellor in 1935, with a coalition of rightist and centre parties, increases tariffs, supports more public works, including rearmament. Something like that.

So if the Nazis dont take power, and do not invade in 1939, what might Poland have been like in the 40s ?

Firstly a completely different shape – the Second Polish Republic before 1945 was bigger and a bit to the right, with a large area that’s now divided between Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Secondly it was multi-ethnic, with the western area in particularly very mixed linguistically, with Polish in the majority in the big cities of Vilnius (Wilno) in the north, and Lwów in the south, which for instance was surrounded by villages where Ukrainian or Yiddish was more common.

Poland had been pretty unevenly developed before 1918, with an industrial west and agricultural east, and crippled by trade embargos by both Germany and Lithuania (and I assume trade with the USSR was limited ?). I’m assuming that even though a non-Nazi German rightist state would be still pretty upset that Poland had some areas that had been German before 1918, they would see the advantage by the mid or late 30s of opening up trade, as Nazi Germany did when they re-opened trade in 1934. Perhaps they would wait longer, but then make Poland agree to something a bit one sided, rather than secretly plan an invasion. Poland gets German technology, Germany gets Polish grain, and perhaps probably the road connection to East Prussia. Poland in turn would probably still push Lithuania around, for instance still force them to establish diplomatic ties like the 1938 Polish Ultimatum, which would also be (economically) good for both of them.

Historically the Polish economy had picked up to 1929 levels by 1939 so by 1940, with this increase in trade, and Polish initiatives like Gdynia, the Polish Trunk Coal Railway, and the Central Area Industrial Region are completed and start to bear fruit, the economy picks up more and more through the next decade.

So this means that Warsaw is spared both the 1939 blitzkreig and later leveling (other current Polish cities that were heavily damaged are still in Germany in this alternative history). So perhaps Warsaw begins to rapidly expand (again), maybe even sees a few tall buildings, like the Prudential tower of the early 1930s, in fact at least 2 new towers were planned.

And this is also a vast improvement for the Jewish population, but it wasn’t all a bed of roses; the Polish government had various anti-Semitic policies, which got worse in the later 1930s, but that was no doubt partly inspired by the German approach to the ‘problem’. So in my alternative Poland of the 40s, there is still discrimination, especially in Universities and government jobs, and a fair amount of tension, so maybe there would be a steady stream of emigrants to Palestine, and maybe even the UK and the US, but presumably without much stronger encouragement (like actual pogroms), most would stay. So there would be a Jewish population of 3.5 million, 3/4 in urban areas, nearly 400,000 in Warsaw alone, maybe mainly speaking Yiddish, but increasingly Polish too, with their own schools, newspapers, and of course that mystical Yiddish theatre tradition.