I'd be interested in seeing what the postwar situation is going to be like. Suffice it to say I imagine that unrest and socialist uprisings are going to be even more intense throughout the 20s. With their European position much more secure I could also see the Soviets focusing more on their Asian fronts, particular with regards to supporting the Gilan Soviet, as exporting the revolution to Iran would open up a path to India and linking up with the Arab uprisings against the British and French at this time, as well as securing an alliance with Turkey. A Communist Bloc of Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Soviets would also be a lot more self-sufficient than the OTL Soviet Union and would depend much less on dealing with capitalist countries to meet its needs (said capitalists would also probably be a lot less eager to work with them), potentially taking a huge chunk of Eurasia out of the World Market. Finally there's the question of China and anti-colonial struggles. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were major supporters of the right to national self-determination among colonised people. This, as well as geopolitical concerns, was a major factor in them forming alliances with bourgeois liberal revolutionaries in various parts of Asia, particularly Turkey, Iran and China. IOTL the German Communists were a lot more sceptical of national self-determination, seeing it as a nationalist deviation, and ITTL they're going to be in a much stronger position to push their line when it comes to Comintern foreign policy. Would the Communists powers still form an alliance with Sun Yat-sen and the KMT or would they push for the nascent Chinese Communist movement to forge their own path independently from them?
Nothing to Lose but Your Chains! / a German Revolution TL
- Thread starter Teutonic_Thrash
- Start date
My original timeline had a couple of chapters on Socialist Iran which I'll be reusing some of. I'm not yet decided on what exactly is going to happen to the rapidly collapsing Ottoman Empire, but the greater success of international socialism could result in Franco-British taking a much harsher stance against forces that are disrupting the status quo too much, such as the Turkish nationalists. On the other hand, more conservative forces such as the Hashemite attempts at a "pan-Arab" monarchy might get more support as a bulwark against radicals.
Yeah, the capitalist economies are certainly going to be hit hard, especially with them not receiving the reparations payments from OTL.
From my understanding of the KPD's opposition to national self-determination, it was focused specifically on Europe and the idea of the large multinational empires splitting into multiple nation-states rather than sticking as single socialist federations. Therefore I see the KPD, and perhaps some ultra-left groups, still supporting the strategy of allying with non-socialist anti-colonial group; after all, many of the Spartacists and other German revolutionaries wanted to stay in the SPD (and then the USPD) and return it to its original revolutionary Marxist intentions. A similar policy of having communists and other revolutionaries 'turn' those anti-colonial groups is plausible/feasible (an OTL example of this would be Bose's All India Forward Bloc within the INC).
I'm doing something different for the Dramatis Personae/character biographies: instead of a single post, I'm going to add in the OTL biographies at the end of each chapter. This is for people who I consider to be lesser known from OTL but will/may have a more important role in this timeline.
Deleted member 143777
I think it's quite possible that Italy would be included here
Italy could go either way. The only issue is that if Italy flips I could see revolutionaries sweeping all of Europe, or at the very least would be able to plow through the Balkans and Adriatic coast.
At the very least, Italy is going to be a shitshow with the Biennio Rosso intensifying and likely lasting for more than two years. Another possibility is a Kaiserreich-like split between a socialist north and monarchist south, but I'm not sure how realistic that would be.
A lot is also going to depend on what France is doing. IOTL they were actually pretty stable during the postwar revolutionary wave. ITTL I could see them pulling out all the stops to secure their neighbors against revolution. I could see them propping up a rump White German state in South Germany and the Rhineland as well as giving the Italians all possible aid to prevent a full scale revolution. Of course jumping back into war could cause a whole wave of domestic unrest.
Yeah expect a lot of strikes and mutinies against further war effort. Though material support is possible.
I've finally added OTL biography sections (for lesser-known figures) to the end of all the previous chapters, so be sure to check them out if you haven't already.
Thanks for the praise. The next chapter is mostly done, so it should be out soonish.
The Battle for Bavaria
The Battle for Bavaria
The 2nd Royal Bavarian Army Corps established its base at Bamberg on 19th March. With 22,000 soldiers in all, Generalleutnant Otto von Rauchenberger reasonably assumed that his force would by outnumbered by the socialists. To alleviate this perceived shortage he decided to appropriate control of the local Freikorps units and other right-wing militias; these groups were only too happy to finally expel the ‘foreign’ revolutionaries from their state. The largest of these militias was the Republican Protection Force commanded by Alfred (von) Seyffertitz, a failed soldier who had founded the militia with funding from the Anti-Bolshevik League.[1] Von Rauchenberger’s efforts increased the size of his corps to 35,000 men. During this short period, Kurt Eisner’s socialist government had not been passive because their position was weaker than the reactionary forces believed them to be. The revolutionaries’ firm control only extended from Munich to Nuremberg, Ingolstadt, and Augsburg. As such, the Rote Garde units totalled only 15,000 men as of the 17th March. Eisner reached out to Karl Gandorfer, left-wing leader of the Bavarian Farmers’ League (BBB) and friend of Karl Liebknecht, for aid in recruiting the farmers’ militias. Even though the BBB was influential among the farmers’ councils which had appeared across Bavaria, of those who sympathised with the revolution not too many were willing to risk their lives at this stage and so only 5,000 farmers joined the Rote Garde. Max Levien, the elected Korpsführer in Bavaria, telegraphed his poor appraisal of the situation to the Council of People’s Deputies in Berlin.
Red Guard soldiers on patrol in Munich
The Council of People’s Deputies were aware of the disheartening news as of the 20th March; the three Chairmen (Hermann Paul Reisshaus, Liebknecht, and Emil Barth) and People’s Deputy of Defence Heinrich Dorrenbach decided to raise an army in Saxony to reinforce the beleaguered Bavarians. Fritz Heckert dutifully complied with his orders, but was dismayed to see that the adventurist, ultra-leftist, and potentially irresponsible Max Hoelz was being elected up the command chain. Heckert’s headache was partially relieved when Arnold Vieth von Golssenau, a former officer during the war and recently a commander in the paramilitary Dresden Security Police, volunteered for the Rote Garde.[2] However von Golssenau’s status as a noble limited his popularity outside of those who personally knew him, and so he remained as a subordinate to newly elected Korpsführer Hoelz. The recruitment for the new army, bolstered by Hoelz’ Robin Hood-like notoriety, was perhaps too effective. In the Czechoslovak Sudetenland unemployed German workers and former soldiers flocked across the border to join the German Revolution. The Reichenberg/Liberec branch of the SDAPÖ, dominated by revolutionaries and led by Karl Kreibich, took it upon themselves to help organise the volunteers. Czechoslovak Prime Minister Karel Kramář, the staunch opponent of communism that he was, immediately attempted to order police units from Czech towns to restore order in the Sudetenland and close the border. He was however overruled by President Tomáš Masaryk who knew that such an action would destroy the government’s authority in the north; Interior Minister Antonín Švehla, leader of the Republican Party of the Czechoslovak Countryside (Republikánská Strana Československého Venkova/RSČV), also opposed the move. With Heckert’s recruitment efforts uninterrupted, he had mobilised an army of 70,000 volunteers by the 26th March; 20,000 were to be left to garrison Saxony while the rest departed the state the next day.
The bolstered forces of reaction began their assault on Nuremberg on 22nd March. The 6,000 men of the Rote Garde, led by Divisionskommandeur Rudolf Egelhofer, had prepared trenches just to the north of the city. Opposing them were 25,000 soldiers, including two artillery brigades; the socialist defenders lacked their own artillery. The Rote Garde fought on into the following day before retreating into Nuremberg proper. The city was not spared the bombardment of the Deutsches Heer artillery prior to the Whites’ (as they came to be known) advance. The subsequent fighting in the city descended into disorganised but brutal street-by-street warfare which gave an advantage to neither side. By the evening of the 24th, Egelhofer gave the order to those men he was still in contact with to retreat and regroup at Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz to the southeast. Altogether approximately 3,000 Rote Garde combatants reached the rendezvous, the rest were presumed dead, wounded, or deserted. The Whites had fared much better, losing only 2,000 men. Von Rauchenberger ordered his soldiers to thoroughly secure the city before moving on. A strict curfew was enacted and civilians who were suspected of Red sympathies, or of providing aid to them, suffered the fate of being shot “while trying to escape from arrest”.[3] Egelhofer made the decision to retreat further to Ingolstadt; along the way they ran into Divisionskommandeur Erich Wollenberg’s belated reinforcements. Reaching Ingolstadt on the 26th, the 9,000 Rote Garde soldiers fortified the city to the best of their ability.
While the Red and White forces had been manoeuvring and fighting each other in Nuremberg, the SDAPÖ in Austria had been preparing themselves for the possibility of the war reaching the Austrian-Bavarian border. In the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s collapse, the SDAPÖ had created a People’s Army (Volkswehr) from the ethnically German remains of the previous military. Through the work of Julius Deutsch, successively Undersecretary and then Secretary of State for Army Affairs, the Volkswehr was constructed as a left-leaning republican organisation which could seamlessly merge into the German army if needed. Furthermore the phenomenon of soldiers’ councils had affected the Austro-Hungarians just as it had the Germans. In total the Volkswehr numbered 55,000 soldiers spread throughout the provinces of German-Austria, though the conservative local government of Tyrol had officially disbanded their branch of the Volkswehr while the soldiers in Carinthia were observing a tenuous ceasefire with the newly-formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Deutsch and Chancellor Karl Renner discretely redeployed loyal battalions of the Volkswehr to Vienna and the Bavarian border while they waited for further developments in the German Civil War. The army’s conservative commander-in-chief Feldmarshallleutnant Adolf von Boog was also forced to resign, officially because of his plan to invade Hungarian Burgenland, but in reality so that he could be replaced by the SDAPÖ-sympathising Theodor Körner.[4] During this period the conservative and monarchist militias remained disparate and organised on a regional basis, with the strongest groups based in Tyrol and Vorarlberg.
The defence of Ingolstadt presented the Rote Garde with a dilemma; to focus their forces on the city’s more defensible southern bank of the Danube, forsaking the city’s northern population, or to defend the city’s north, which risked a greater chance of defeat. Egelhofer and Wollenberg reluctantly agreed on the southern bank as their line of defence, as they knew that holding out for reinforcements for as long as possible was their best hope for victory. The radical and unpopular suggestion of collapsing the bridges was dismissed out of hand by the two officers. While the Reds had been preparing their defence of Ingolstadt, the Whites had took Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz with little trouble and subjected the town to the same repression with which they had meted out to Nuremberg. Moving on from the market town, the Deutsches Heer artillery began its bombardment of Ingolstadt on the 29th March; the north of the city was devastated, but the 9,000 Red defenders on the Danube’s southern bank remained relatively unscathed. As a result, the Rote Garde were able repel the White assault that day and the next. On the 31st, Brigadekommandant Ernst Niekisch reached the city with reinforcements of 3,000 men. Despite the fortuitous increase in the number of defenders, Egelhofer and Wollenberg stuck with their plan of holding the bridges over the Danube.
While the Bavarian proletariat were desperately defending Ingolstadt, the 50,000 men of the Saxon Rote Garde reached the outskirts of Bamberg, the temporary headquarters of the 2nd Royal Bavarian Army Corps, on 30th March; there were only 10,000 White soldiers garrisoning the city. Accompanied by their own artillery, Korpsführer Hoelz ordered the bombardment of the city for the remainder of the 30th and throughout the 31st. Some of Hoelz’ subordinates, including Divisionskommandeur Golssenau (who had dropped his noble title), warned of the unnecessary collateral damage, but the Korpsführer pressed on regardless. On 1st April the Rote Garde entered the city, facing little resistance; only the most radical of the Freikorps volunteers refused to surrender while Generalleutnant von Rauchenberger had escaped to the south sometime in the early stages of the artillery barrage. Hoelz ordered 5,000 men to stay and garrison the city, with the rest marching on the next day. Nuremberg had only been left under the control of local reactionary militias during von Rauchenberger’s flight south, and so the Rote Garde experienced little trouble in recapturing the city on 4th April. After Nuremberg’s liberation, the proletariat emerged and engaged in violent reprisals in retaliation against those who had aided in the previous White Terror. Hoelz ordered his subordinates to not intervene in the violence and instead elected to march on toward Ingolstadt.
Meanwhile in Ingolstadt, the initial numerical advantage for the Whites was slowly deteriorating, but the Rote Garde were also facing worrying losses. By the 3rd April, Divisionskommandeurs Egelhofer and Wollenberg contemplated an orderly retreat from the city; the next day they gave the order to that effect, not knowing that reinforcements from the north were en route. The Rote Garde had lost approximately 4,000 men, compared to 6,000 casualties for the Whites. The revolutionaries retreated south to Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, as part of their strategy of delaying the Whites in their march towards Munich. The reactionary army did not reach Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm however, for they had become aware of the much larger Red reinforcements bearing down upon them. Instead von Rauchenberger ordered what remained of his army to retreat west to friendlier territory in Württemberg. Hoelz was eager to give chase to the Whites but his subordinates, Golssenau and Otto Karl Bachmann, convinced him that consolidating control of conservative Bavaria was the more sensible strategy. The Korpsführer reluctantly acquiesced to the advice and went to Munich to coordinate with his colleague Levien. The two commanders agreed to spread their forces out through the state to root out and repress any remaining Freikorps and other militia units, as well as to aid in socialising further industry.
[1] The noble title “von” is bracketed because, despite Seyffertitz’ noble descent, due to some legal trouble he wasn’t officially allowed to use his noble title.
[2] Better known as Ludwig Renn IOTL after a character in one of his novels.
[3] A common euphemism for being summarily executed.
[4] OTL, von Boog was forced to resign on 27th May.
Dramatis Personae (OTL biographies)
Max Levien: A Russian who participated in the Revolution of 1905 and became a Socialist Revolutionary, Levien eventually settled in Germany and became a supporter of the Bolsheviks. He volunteered for the Bavarian army before the war and afterwards was a founding member of the KPD. Levien was one of the leaders of the Bavarian council republic and fled to Vienna after its suppression, where he was arrested but successfully avoided extradition to Germany. In 1921 Levien returned to Russia and worked for the Comintern, from where he supported the KPD left. Levien was arrested in 1936 and executed in 1937.
Max Hoelz: A soldier during the war, Hoelz only became politicised afterwards when he was elected to a soldiers' council. He joined the USPD and then KPD upon its founding. Hoelz became a popular figure among the unemployed and engaged in a guerilla campaign against the bourgeoisie, distributing their wealth to the poor. His lack of discipline resulted in his expulsion from the party in 1920 after which he joined the KAPD. Hoelz was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1921 but an international campaign led to his release in 1928. The next year he moved to the USSR where he died in 1933, possibly victim to a Stalinist purge.
Arnold Vieth von Golssenau/Ludwig Renn: A noble who personally knew the Saxon royal family, Golssenau served as an officer during the war. Afterwards he was leader of an SPD-aligned paramilitary in Dresden, then entered academia in 1920. In 1928 Golssenau joined the KPD as well as its Red Front Fighter League. Meanwhile he published military novels and adopted the name Ludwig Renn. Imprisoned regularly by the Nazis, Renn fled to Spain in 1936 and became commander of an International Brigade during the civil war. He was later president of the Free Germany Movement from 1941-1946 before returning to Germany, joining the SED, and remaining a prominent academic and writer until his death in 1979.
The 2nd Royal Bavarian Army Corps established its base at Bamberg on 19th March. With 22,000 soldiers in all, Generalleutnant Otto von Rauchenberger reasonably assumed that his force would by outnumbered by the socialists. To alleviate this perceived shortage he decided to appropriate control of the local Freikorps units and other right-wing militias; these groups were only too happy to finally expel the ‘foreign’ revolutionaries from their state. The largest of these militias was the Republican Protection Force commanded by Alfred (von) Seyffertitz, a failed soldier who had founded the militia with funding from the Anti-Bolshevik League.[1] Von Rauchenberger’s efforts increased the size of his corps to 35,000 men. During this short period, Kurt Eisner’s socialist government had not been passive because their position was weaker than the reactionary forces believed them to be. The revolutionaries’ firm control only extended from Munich to Nuremberg, Ingolstadt, and Augsburg. As such, the Rote Garde units totalled only 15,000 men as of the 17th March. Eisner reached out to Karl Gandorfer, left-wing leader of the Bavarian Farmers’ League (BBB) and friend of Karl Liebknecht, for aid in recruiting the farmers’ militias. Even though the BBB was influential among the farmers’ councils which had appeared across Bavaria, of those who sympathised with the revolution not too many were willing to risk their lives at this stage and so only 5,000 farmers joined the Rote Garde. Max Levien, the elected Korpsführer in Bavaria, telegraphed his poor appraisal of the situation to the Council of People’s Deputies in Berlin.
Red Guard soldiers on patrol in Munich
The Council of People’s Deputies were aware of the disheartening news as of the 20th March; the three Chairmen (Hermann Paul Reisshaus, Liebknecht, and Emil Barth) and People’s Deputy of Defence Heinrich Dorrenbach decided to raise an army in Saxony to reinforce the beleaguered Bavarians. Fritz Heckert dutifully complied with his orders, but was dismayed to see that the adventurist, ultra-leftist, and potentially irresponsible Max Hoelz was being elected up the command chain. Heckert’s headache was partially relieved when Arnold Vieth von Golssenau, a former officer during the war and recently a commander in the paramilitary Dresden Security Police, volunteered for the Rote Garde.[2] However von Golssenau’s status as a noble limited his popularity outside of those who personally knew him, and so he remained as a subordinate to newly elected Korpsführer Hoelz. The recruitment for the new army, bolstered by Hoelz’ Robin Hood-like notoriety, was perhaps too effective. In the Czechoslovak Sudetenland unemployed German workers and former soldiers flocked across the border to join the German Revolution. The Reichenberg/Liberec branch of the SDAPÖ, dominated by revolutionaries and led by Karl Kreibich, took it upon themselves to help organise the volunteers. Czechoslovak Prime Minister Karel Kramář, the staunch opponent of communism that he was, immediately attempted to order police units from Czech towns to restore order in the Sudetenland and close the border. He was however overruled by President Tomáš Masaryk who knew that such an action would destroy the government’s authority in the north; Interior Minister Antonín Švehla, leader of the Republican Party of the Czechoslovak Countryside (Republikánská Strana Československého Venkova/RSČV), also opposed the move. With Heckert’s recruitment efforts uninterrupted, he had mobilised an army of 70,000 volunteers by the 26th March; 20,000 were to be left to garrison Saxony while the rest departed the state the next day.
The bolstered forces of reaction began their assault on Nuremberg on 22nd March. The 6,000 men of the Rote Garde, led by Divisionskommandeur Rudolf Egelhofer, had prepared trenches just to the north of the city. Opposing them were 25,000 soldiers, including two artillery brigades; the socialist defenders lacked their own artillery. The Rote Garde fought on into the following day before retreating into Nuremberg proper. The city was not spared the bombardment of the Deutsches Heer artillery prior to the Whites’ (as they came to be known) advance. The subsequent fighting in the city descended into disorganised but brutal street-by-street warfare which gave an advantage to neither side. By the evening of the 24th, Egelhofer gave the order to those men he was still in contact with to retreat and regroup at Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz to the southeast. Altogether approximately 3,000 Rote Garde combatants reached the rendezvous, the rest were presumed dead, wounded, or deserted. The Whites had fared much better, losing only 2,000 men. Von Rauchenberger ordered his soldiers to thoroughly secure the city before moving on. A strict curfew was enacted and civilians who were suspected of Red sympathies, or of providing aid to them, suffered the fate of being shot “while trying to escape from arrest”.[3] Egelhofer made the decision to retreat further to Ingolstadt; along the way they ran into Divisionskommandeur Erich Wollenberg’s belated reinforcements. Reaching Ingolstadt on the 26th, the 9,000 Rote Garde soldiers fortified the city to the best of their ability.
While the Red and White forces had been manoeuvring and fighting each other in Nuremberg, the SDAPÖ in Austria had been preparing themselves for the possibility of the war reaching the Austrian-Bavarian border. In the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s collapse, the SDAPÖ had created a People’s Army (Volkswehr) from the ethnically German remains of the previous military. Through the work of Julius Deutsch, successively Undersecretary and then Secretary of State for Army Affairs, the Volkswehr was constructed as a left-leaning republican organisation which could seamlessly merge into the German army if needed. Furthermore the phenomenon of soldiers’ councils had affected the Austro-Hungarians just as it had the Germans. In total the Volkswehr numbered 55,000 soldiers spread throughout the provinces of German-Austria, though the conservative local government of Tyrol had officially disbanded their branch of the Volkswehr while the soldiers in Carinthia were observing a tenuous ceasefire with the newly-formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Deutsch and Chancellor Karl Renner discretely redeployed loyal battalions of the Volkswehr to Vienna and the Bavarian border while they waited for further developments in the German Civil War. The army’s conservative commander-in-chief Feldmarshallleutnant Adolf von Boog was also forced to resign, officially because of his plan to invade Hungarian Burgenland, but in reality so that he could be replaced by the SDAPÖ-sympathising Theodor Körner.[4] During this period the conservative and monarchist militias remained disparate and organised on a regional basis, with the strongest groups based in Tyrol and Vorarlberg.
The defence of Ingolstadt presented the Rote Garde with a dilemma; to focus their forces on the city’s more defensible southern bank of the Danube, forsaking the city’s northern population, or to defend the city’s north, which risked a greater chance of defeat. Egelhofer and Wollenberg reluctantly agreed on the southern bank as their line of defence, as they knew that holding out for reinforcements for as long as possible was their best hope for victory. The radical and unpopular suggestion of collapsing the bridges was dismissed out of hand by the two officers. While the Reds had been preparing their defence of Ingolstadt, the Whites had took Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz with little trouble and subjected the town to the same repression with which they had meted out to Nuremberg. Moving on from the market town, the Deutsches Heer artillery began its bombardment of Ingolstadt on the 29th March; the north of the city was devastated, but the 9,000 Red defenders on the Danube’s southern bank remained relatively unscathed. As a result, the Rote Garde were able repel the White assault that day and the next. On the 31st, Brigadekommandant Ernst Niekisch reached the city with reinforcements of 3,000 men. Despite the fortuitous increase in the number of defenders, Egelhofer and Wollenberg stuck with their plan of holding the bridges over the Danube.
While the Bavarian proletariat were desperately defending Ingolstadt, the 50,000 men of the Saxon Rote Garde reached the outskirts of Bamberg, the temporary headquarters of the 2nd Royal Bavarian Army Corps, on 30th March; there were only 10,000 White soldiers garrisoning the city. Accompanied by their own artillery, Korpsführer Hoelz ordered the bombardment of the city for the remainder of the 30th and throughout the 31st. Some of Hoelz’ subordinates, including Divisionskommandeur Golssenau (who had dropped his noble title), warned of the unnecessary collateral damage, but the Korpsführer pressed on regardless. On 1st April the Rote Garde entered the city, facing little resistance; only the most radical of the Freikorps volunteers refused to surrender while Generalleutnant von Rauchenberger had escaped to the south sometime in the early stages of the artillery barrage. Hoelz ordered 5,000 men to stay and garrison the city, with the rest marching on the next day. Nuremberg had only been left under the control of local reactionary militias during von Rauchenberger’s flight south, and so the Rote Garde experienced little trouble in recapturing the city on 4th April. After Nuremberg’s liberation, the proletariat emerged and engaged in violent reprisals in retaliation against those who had aided in the previous White Terror. Hoelz ordered his subordinates to not intervene in the violence and instead elected to march on toward Ingolstadt.
Meanwhile in Ingolstadt, the initial numerical advantage for the Whites was slowly deteriorating, but the Rote Garde were also facing worrying losses. By the 3rd April, Divisionskommandeurs Egelhofer and Wollenberg contemplated an orderly retreat from the city; the next day they gave the order to that effect, not knowing that reinforcements from the north were en route. The Rote Garde had lost approximately 4,000 men, compared to 6,000 casualties for the Whites. The revolutionaries retreated south to Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, as part of their strategy of delaying the Whites in their march towards Munich. The reactionary army did not reach Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm however, for they had become aware of the much larger Red reinforcements bearing down upon them. Instead von Rauchenberger ordered what remained of his army to retreat west to friendlier territory in Württemberg. Hoelz was eager to give chase to the Whites but his subordinates, Golssenau and Otto Karl Bachmann, convinced him that consolidating control of conservative Bavaria was the more sensible strategy. The Korpsführer reluctantly acquiesced to the advice and went to Munich to coordinate with his colleague Levien. The two commanders agreed to spread their forces out through the state to root out and repress any remaining Freikorps and other militia units, as well as to aid in socialising further industry.
[1] The noble title “von” is bracketed because, despite Seyffertitz’ noble descent, due to some legal trouble he wasn’t officially allowed to use his noble title.
[2] Better known as Ludwig Renn IOTL after a character in one of his novels.
[3] A common euphemism for being summarily executed.
[4] OTL, von Boog was forced to resign on 27th May.
Dramatis Personae (OTL biographies)
Max Levien: A Russian who participated in the Revolution of 1905 and became a Socialist Revolutionary, Levien eventually settled in Germany and became a supporter of the Bolsheviks. He volunteered for the Bavarian army before the war and afterwards was a founding member of the KPD. Levien was one of the leaders of the Bavarian council republic and fled to Vienna after its suppression, where he was arrested but successfully avoided extradition to Germany. In 1921 Levien returned to Russia and worked for the Comintern, from where he supported the KPD left. Levien was arrested in 1936 and executed in 1937.
Max Hoelz: A soldier during the war, Hoelz only became politicised afterwards when he was elected to a soldiers' council. He joined the USPD and then KPD upon its founding. Hoelz became a popular figure among the unemployed and engaged in a guerilla campaign against the bourgeoisie, distributing their wealth to the poor. His lack of discipline resulted in his expulsion from the party in 1920 after which he joined the KAPD. Hoelz was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1921 but an international campaign led to his release in 1928. The next year he moved to the USSR where he died in 1933, possibly victim to a Stalinist purge.
Arnold Vieth von Golssenau/Ludwig Renn: A noble who personally knew the Saxon royal family, Golssenau served as an officer during the war. Afterwards he was leader of an SPD-aligned paramilitary in Dresden, then entered academia in 1920. In 1928 Golssenau joined the KPD as well as its Red Front Fighter League. Meanwhile he published military novels and adopted the name Ludwig Renn. Imprisoned regularly by the Nazis, Renn fled to Spain in 1936 and became commander of an International Brigade during the civil war. He was later president of the Free Germany Movement from 1941-1946 before returning to Germany, joining the SED, and remaining a prominent academic and writer until his death in 1979.
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tukaram bhakt
Banned
Great stuff
I love that you are expanding on the central european scenario, and that we might see communist victories in that area.
I love that you are expanding on the central european scenario, and that we might see communist victories in that area.
The plan at the moment is that (at the least): Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Transcaucasia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechia/Slovakia all go socialist. The Baltics are still to be decided, and France and Italy (especially the latter) are going to be absolute shitshows.
IMVHO: You are looking at the collapse of Yugoslavia...and then there goes Greece and Bulgaria and Romania as well. In OTL the Capitalist powers only barely avoided such an event. Post-WW1 exhausted Europe was like dominoes. If Germany went red successfully, it would fucking implode all of Eastern Europe. You are looking also at an US that remains in the League of Nations, which will basically become the League for the Defence of Capitalism, and look more like an Alt!NATO, and British and French Empires getting massively financially indebted to the US to try to keep pace with the Comintern. The Cold War, 30 years earlier.
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