Quote Originally Posted by Brenus View Post
“The Holocaust would have probably been quietly halted and covered up.”
Yeap, but what to do? To stop the convoys (which would be use much better for reinforcing the Eastern lines) would be easy, but what with the millions of deportees? A lot of war industries were using the forced labour…
What about the survivors of the Death Camps? To finish them off wouldn't be possible without the Allies to know, to release them wouldn’t help in gaining sympathy to Germany, even not in not any more Hitlerian one.
Just trying to resolve this would be a logistical nightmare, just to stop the deportees to stop dying of typhus or Cholera, or hunger. How to increase their daily rations in a besieged Germany? What to do with them? And if the Generals were not aware of this, it would make their task even harder...

“Peace (alliance) with the Western Allies”
Why the Allies would accept a Peace that would save Germany, and under which conditions?
As the debate on Versailles showed, a too lenient and soft Treaty just fuelled the next war…
So even in a will to save what left of Europe out of Communism, would Churchill and Roosevelt (as De Gaulle was still not in full control of France at this moment) would have accepted the risk of a confrontation with Stalin (which Roosevelt trusted) in order to save a Germany they were fighting with the help of the Soviets?
Even if the 2 leaders had no real idea of the scale of the holocaust, they knew what the Nazis were doing.
As the German population, they couldn’t imagine the reality of it. To know and to accept the reality of it is different. I am one of think the Germans knew of the deportation, I ma not sure they were aware of the physical reality…

More, as we know, Roosevelt always distrust De Gaulle as he was a general and he wasn’t elected… How and why he would have trust putchist German Generals?
As mentioned, there is no more a political credible German opposition thanks to the efficient Gestapo.

Now, if we look at the maps in July 1944, the Russian are deep in Europe.
They can decide to halt THEIR offensive in the East, giving the Germans time to regroup and to stop the Allies offensive.
They have in their ranks a political alternative to Nazism as they have a “German Communist Government” in Exile.
In case of a successful coup, they could claim the throne…

And considering the difficult logistic faced by the Allies in 1944, I am far to believe that the Allies would have been victorious in front of the Russians…
And I don’t want to start again a comparison between Sherman and T 34 or JS, Patton against Zukov, Koniev or Vatutine.
Defeating Bagration would have been indeed a difficult task but I am not sure that the British soldiers would have been so happy to fight the Russian even if they would be able to reach this front…
As for the French Army fighting during Anvil operation, I quite sure that they wouldn’t.

“The full extent of the Holocaust and its cultural and historical significance emerged after the war.” Agree, but only for the civilian population. I interviewed during my research a Leclerc 2DB veteran and he was still horrified by what he saw in some trains in an abandoned railways station…
So, the Allied soldiers who would have to see this kind of things would not fight to save Germany from Communism, as the horrors of communism became apparent even latter in history than the ones from Nazism…
All good points, especially about the difficulty in figuring out how to repatriate a population you were previously systematically killing.

Essentially, my whole scenario hinges on the Allies viewing the assassination of Hitler as a dramatic change in German leadership and intentions and swallowing their moral and historical issues with Germany in the preservation of their own self interest, as they did when allying with the Soviet Union.

Quote Originally Posted by Tincow
You seem to be assuming that the USSR/West split had already occurred in July of 1944. That's simply not true. The Western Allies didn't begin to re-align themselves against the Soviets until early 1945, and even then the Cold War didn't really start until 1947. Despite the 'what-if' posturing a lot of people like to make, with numerous cites to Patton, there was essentially no chance whatsoever that the US and UK were going to turn on the USSR, even in 1945. The US, UK, and USSR were all extremelly committed to supporting each other against Germany in July of 1944. Unconditional surrender was first discussed at Casablanca in January of 1943, and it was all but accepted by Tehran in November of 1943. That's long, long before the events of Overlord and July 20th. Unconditional surrender was a near-certainty by that point. The Soviets had also demanded that Poland's borders be redrawn at Tehran... they would not have accepted an end to the war that left Poland in Germany's hands.
Even at their most congenial, the West and the Russians were extremely suspicious of each other. Read Churchill's opinions on Stalin and communism as a good example. Their alliance was one of necessity, and while I agree with you wholeheartedly that there was no way the two would turn on each other as long as their common enemy, Nazi Germany, existed, the proposed scenario changes everything. With Hitler dead and the Nazis (presumably) out of power, Germany suddenly becomes the lesser of two evils/threats