The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
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Considering Nasser got executed ITTL, will Pharaonism have a longer-lasting influence in Egyptian politics and shape Egyptian national identity in this world?
Operation Aurora (Summer 1945)
Excerpts from the AH.com thread “Was Order No 371 a War Crime?”
The Brandenburg Offensive (Operation Aurora)
When the summer Sun rose at 5:00 A.M. on Saturday 14 July 1945, millions of men from the Army of Work lept from their trenches, bayonets gripped with hardened hands. Tens of thousands of guns erupted along a front stretching from Stettin on the Baltic coast to Reichenberg in the Sudetenland. Their goal: tear down the Third Reich and entomb the Nazi leadership in Berlin.
The culmination of five years of bloody toil was finally at hand. Soldiers and volunteers from almost every member of the Communist International would play a part in the offensive. While the Western Allies pinned down large concentrations of German troops in defending the Low Countries and the Rhineland, the forces of the Comintern were pushing deep into the German heartland.
Overall command of Red Army forces for the operation was entrusted to Marshal Mikhail V. Frunze. His opponent would be Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s praetorian and now de facto leader of the Greater German Reich. With Hitler virtually convalescent due to his physician’s (mis)care, there would be little political meddling from above.
In the campaigns of spring and early summer, the Red Army had fought through Poland and the Balkans. The 2nd Ukrainian Front had smashed the Gothic Line and occupied Silesia in June. Advanced elements were probing second echelon defenses in occupied Bohemia.
Southeast, the 3rd Ukainian Front remained an army in being, holding down the sizeable Hungarian Army and German forces of Army Group J from its toehold in eastern Hungary. Their probing attacks misled Axis intelligence about events further south until it was too late.
The 4th Ukrainian Front, in cooperation with Yugoslav partisans under the communist-led Council of National Liberation, had launched a major offensive in May, retaking Belgrade and much of Serbia from Italian occupying forces. With promises of amnesty by Marshal Tito towards collaborator forces, the Italian position was in a state of total collapse.
Disposition of forces
Comintern forces in the Brandenburg Offensive consisted of four fronts, collected administratively under the Central European Theatre: the 1st Baltic, 1st Byelorussian, 2nd Byelorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts. A total of 2.9 million men would take part in the operation.
In the north, the 1st Baltic Front would break through German defensive works in western Pomerania, assisted by amphibious operations across the Stettin Lagoon. With fire support from the Soviet Baltic Fleet, the 1st Baltic Front would hold the northern flank of the operation, and penetrate as deep into central Germany as practical to disrupt the movement of reinforcements eastward.
1st Baltic would consequently be the smallest of the four, with proportionally fewer tanks and heavy armored fighting vehicles. American General Maurice Rose would be in overall command, with the amphibious operations commanded by a Marine, Lieutenant General Malcolm Howard*.
Once breakthrough could be achieved along the full frontage, the several cavalry-mechanised groups and the 9th Tank Army would advance rapidly, screened by the deployment of the 105th Guards Airborne division. The final operational goal would be the city of Hamburg, and the blocking of the evacuation of German occupying forces in Denmark.
Just south, the 1st Byelorussian Front would break through the heavier defensive positions in eastern Brandenburg. The front would make a sickle cut through Brandenburg, destroying armored formations and securing the investment of Berlin by linking up with 2nd Byelorussian west of Berlin. Forces would push westward rapidly to destroy German reinforcements on the march, with the goal of reaching Hanover by September.
The second half of the investment of Berlin would be mirrored by the 2nd Byelorussian Front, tasked with sweeping through southern Brandenburg. Secondary objectives were to encircle and destroy the 1st SS Panzer Army before it could reinforce Berlin proper and proceed to Hanover.
The 1st Ukrainian Front would guard the southern flank of the operation. Once achieving breakthrough into the German interior, 1st Ukrainian would cordon off the large concentration of German men, artillery and armor in Bohemia and wheel southward to Bavaria. Subsequent operations in Silesia and Yugoslavia would support this operational objective.
Strategy
With the Inter-Allied Council unable to achieve any agreement about occupation zones in Germany, the political consideration driving much of the operational planning for the summer offensives was to secure as much territory as possible for the post-war period. The Revolutionary Military Council deeply mistrusted Western Allied intentions with regards to Germany. Publicly, the Franco-British War Council had been opaque about post-war plans. But moles embedded within British intelligence had been able to discover a number of plans by the Cherwell Commission to territorially dismember Germany and completely deindustrialize the country.
Even the Soviet leadership were disgusted by such barbarism. General of the Army Zhukov remarked that “millions of Soviet soldiers did not die so that English pirates could cart away the wealth of the Ruhr.” Marshal Frunze stated unequivocally in a January meeting of the State Defense Committee that “such an assault on the German proletariat must be regarded as an act of war,” and must be resisted by the full might of the Red Army.
But no one was enthusiastic about a continuation war against the Western Allies. While it became clear with the disintegration of the French State and the rate of Allied progress on the Western Front would make a total liberation of Germany likely infeasible, securing the bulk of German territory and population was ambitious but still possible. The Franco-British may occupy the Ruhr and the Rhineland, but they could never command the loyalty of the working class there, and they would provide the political power to force the reunification of Germany into a socialist republic.
Operation Liebknicht, the late spring counteroffensive into Silesia, had set the ball rolling. To a certain extent, the Reich Main Security Office and the propaganda arms of the Nazi state could downplay or hide the enemy incursions into East Prussia. But the loss of the Ford Front industrial projects in Silesia had sent shockwaves through the German war economy. Over half of German coal liquefaction capacity was lost. Critical mining and industrial labor camps for the production of ball-bearings, rare earths and explosives were taken as well.
The advancing Soviet forces sent refugee waves westward into Germany. With this conduit, the National Committee for a Free Germany sent infiltrators and supplies to support resistance groups in the German heartland.
Rote Kappelle, the network of communist agitators and spies operating within Germany, had been laying the groundwork for defeatist actions for years now. The small core cadres of stay-behinds had been diligently grown since the Battle of Stalingrad. This dangerous, thankless work persisted even amidst the murderous attempts by the RHSA to stamp out dissent. With networks now spread among all major German industries as well as the masses of slave labor imported to the Reich, the Red Orchestra could with the right catalyst hobble the German war effort.
An unexpected boon came in January, as the Nazi program of Totaler Krieg was expanded. Workers in even the most critical of war industries were now pressed into the Volkssturm. The arms and ammunition were kept under the watchful eyes of SS commissars, but the program was all too honest. German workers were expected to die to the last man in defense of the Reich.
Rations which had once remained steady had fallen drastically. German workers had already given millions of their sons to the war effort for a regime that had never held them in much esteem, and now they were being asked to fall on their sword for Hitler’s pride. The morale situation on the home front had collapsed in the past three months, far faster than even the RHSA had anticipated. The implementation of Fordist production methods in the 30s may have strengthened the German war economy, but had cost the NSDAP what support it had among the artisanal skilled workers. Germany was a powder keg waiting for the right spark.
Stavka had predicted with confidence that the buildup of forces near the German heartland and the start of offensive operations would provoke a general withdrawal of German expeditionary forces to defend the heartland. As forces marshalled in Poland in June, Army Group B began withdrawing its forces from Hungary and Italian-occupied Yugoslavia. Forces supporting the French-state remnant and guarding the west embarked eastward, supported by Volkssturm levies. The die had been cast.
Countdown to D-Day
In the weeks before the offensive, the Red Army Air Forces stepped up bomber offensives into Germany. With the Luftwaffe shattered, tactical bombers and fighters reave across eastern Germany. Casualties to anti-aircraft artillery are high but sustainable. Luftwaffe forward air bases are suppressed in the initial waves. Fuel and ammunition stores are bombed with incendiaries. The centralized electrical grid is hit with chaff bombs, causing rolling blackouts in core German industries. Anything that moves by road, rail or canal is bombed, rocketed and strafed.
German soldiers on the march are easy prey to interdiction. The need for speed prevents easy movement in the short summer night, and in the day the green German formations practice poor camouflage discipline. Reinforcement of the front is slow and perilous as a result.
Leafleting campaigns continue to encourage surrender and defeatism. “Do not obey the SS gangsters, their time will come” states one. “German worker! Your liberation is at hand!” says another.
German frontline forces continued to dig-in deeper even as the bombing and shelling intensified. Heavy long-range bombardment by frontal artillery assets ground down forces at the front. Several feints and probing actions by special cadres kept German commanders off balance. It was not known when the attack would come, and several times forces had begun mobilizing only for no major attack to commence.
Aurora
The initial attacks began along the Baltic Sea in the north. Heralded by a thunder of naval and army artillery, Marines hit the lightly defended beaches on the western bank of the Stettin Lagoon. A rolling curtain of artillery fire shielded the initial attacks. As the Marines pressed inland, the Soviet 12th Shock Army hit German fortifications in a pre-dawn assault. By first light, the mines and barbed wire had been cleared, and the hardened Soviet riflemen engaged in close-quarters battle with the mostly Hitler Youth draftees of the 549th Volksgrenadier Division.
The boys of the 549th fought tenaciously, but were quickly overwhelmed by superior Soviet firepower. The haunting experience of fighting and killing teenage boys would be recounted in post-war Soviet novels such as The Binding of Isaac.
But with such overwhelming superiority in numbers, artillery and tanks by the Red Army, and the relative paucity of heavy anti-tank guns on the German, the incomplete defensive positions could not hold for long. Close support by T-44 tanks ensured that many of the German reinforcements succumbed to tank shock. The effective infantry-tank cooperation suppressed the effectiveness of the numerous panzerfaust weapons. Soviet light and medium tanks would soon be able to break into the operational rear.
Meanwhile, the forward deployed airborne troops secured bridges and strongpoints, slowing the movement of reinforcements from the rear. In spite of tales of Communist barbarism, morale was brittle. Surrenders at the first sign of the enemy had been unthinkable mere months ago. They now occurred regularly.
In the rapid advance through the coastal villages, the Red Army encountered a frightened civilian populace. Heaps of SS uniforms and Nazi regalia were left discarded in town squares. Sometimes the burgers ratted out the men of the SS who tried to hide, especially those who’d been zealous in the application of Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres Schörner’s methods.
Four hundred kilometres to the south, the 1st Ukrainian Front began its assault on the southern end of the Hitler Line. Army Group Centre was better entrenched here, and the terrain better favored the defender. But in the past three weeks, the Twelfth SS-Army had been shifted northwards to defend Berlin itself, and the Eighth Panzer Army that was to replace them had been arriving in a trickle from Bohemia.
Still, on the whole the German position was more robust. The batteries of 8.8 cm Pak 43 guns available to Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner have been concentrated in major strong points in towns and crossroads. Covered by earthworks, concrete bunkers, and guarded by infantry guns and lighter anti-tank units, these fortresses would be a tough nut to crack. Still, Steiner had perhaps 240,000 battle ready men, four hundred tanks and three thousand guns to cover a ninety-four kilometer frontage.
The 1st Ukrainian Front would hammer Steiner with ten thousand artillery pieces, two thousand tanks, and the full might of the 8th Air Army. A total of nearly 700,000 men would be involved in this part of the operation.
The attack came sooner than expected. German strongpoints were reduced with a furious expenditure of bombs and artillery shells. The mechanized infantry at the vanguard probed and infiltrated the weak points. Once the initial cracks in the defensive lines were opened and secured by pioneers, the 9th Tank Army was able to bypass the major strong points and begin operational encirclements.
The Volkssturm levies and third-rate Wehrmacht divisions in the second and third defense echelons did not fight as tenaciously as the SS-men in the first echelon. The 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend” counterattacked as ordered. But as they crashed into the spearheads of the 9th Tank Army, they too began to wither under aerial attack. Well prepared for their riposte, the American tankers turn the clash outside of Bautzen into a bloodbath. The fields outside the town are littered with the burning wrecks of Jaguar tanks.
Three days after the assaults began at Stettin and Reichenburg, the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts began the investment of Berlin. The fighting is intense all along the front, but the overwhelming Comintern superiority in numbers and firepower mean the front cannot hold for long. It does not matter how many men Commander-In-Chief Schörner has shot for “cowardice”, the lines begin to break.
The Soviet spearhead, the 62nd Army, advances inexorably, encountering the fiercest resistance at the Seelow Heights. Additional forces from the Polish 2nd Army and the Soviet 41st Army arrived a day later to continue the assault. The progress is slow over the flooded lowlands, but the opening of the reservoir can only work once. As the mud dries in the summer heat, progress picks up.
The 2nd Detachment of the Chinese New Fourth Army, augmented with the Nisei 100th Infantry Regiment, finished the assault on the morning of 20th July, taking General Georg-Wilhelm Postel’s command post west of the town of Seelow, along with the general and his staff.
Major General Chen Geng had come to the Soviet Union with a token force as a symbol of Comintern unity. But with grit and cunning, he’d come to Seelow a conquering hero, gazing at the outskirts of Berlin in the distance.
Encircling the Mark of Brandenburg
Once German forces were unrooted from their defensive positions, they were now bypassed. The 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts began their sickle-cuts around the city of Berlin, isolating much of the province from the rest of Germany. The tank armies at the vanguard advanced as fast as logistics would feasibly allow, pushing forward to disrupt the arrival of reinforcements and secure territory quickly.
Göring would not give in so easily. Undaunted by the total collapse of forward positions, the Reichsmarschall continued to give orders for vigorous counterattacks even as he and the rest of the Nazi leadership sheltered in Hitler’s Führerbunker. Schörner obeyed the orders of the few men above him without question. As the Soviet and American tanks pushed deeper into Germany, he ordered the First Panzer Army and detached elements of the Eleventh Army to attack southeast from Wittstock, and hit the 2nd Guards Tank Army on its flank near the town of Orianberg, about sixty kilometres north of Berlin.
Sixth Army, with its collection of depleted infantry divisions augmented by heavy tank battalions, would attempt to drive between the 1st Baltic and 1st Byelorussian Fronts and make time for forces to move to defend Berlin.
Army Detachment Dietrich would counterattack north from near Dresden. With the largest remaining concentration of heavy tanks, this collection of SS and Wehrmacht divisions would attempt to chop off the 2nd Byelorussian Front’s spearheads near Luckau.
Despite their misgivings, the commanders began their counterattacks on 20 July. Well telegraphed by aerial reconnaissance, short on food, fuel and ammunition, they were an exercise in vanity. Tanks and trooper carriers endured a withering hail of bombs and rockets from the Red Army Air Force. Many of the heavier tanks never made it into battle from fuel shortage or breakdowns. The tanks that did make it were heavily outnumbered, and faced a well-positioned screen of infantry anti-tank units as well as tank destroyers.
In the end, no amount of harsh discipline could overcome the material reality. Officers and young boys of the Volkssturm shot “for cowardice” may have ultimately backfired in upholding morale. The sight of the mighty heavy tanks from the Tigers to the even more outlandishly large vehicles such as the Smilodon left burning or abandoned further broke what hope the soldiery had remaining.
While these bloody counter attacks caused many casualties in the Red Army, they proved to be only speed bumps in operational tempo. As soldiers began to take their chances with the enemy rather than die for the ungrateful, desertions and surrenders increased.
Just after noon on 25 July 1945, the leading elements of the 2nd Guards Tank Army linked up with the 5th Guards Tank Army in the town of Brandenberg an der Havel, seventy kilometres west of Berlin.
The bulk of four German armies (First, Fourth, Ninth, Twelfth SS) are now trapped in two cauldrons. The smaller, wrapped tightly around the city of Berlin itself. The larger comprised much of the southern half of the Mark of Brandenburg itself, hemmed between the Lusatian Neisse and the Elbe River.
Deep Operations
300,000 German soldiers and Ostruppen are now trapped in Brandenburg Cauldron. A further eighty thousand, half of them Volkssturm, are invested in Berlin itself. Attempts to relieve both pockets begin immediately. Panzer Detachment Peiper, a corps sized task force consisting of SS and Wehrmacht units rushed from the Western Front has only just detrained in Leipzig on the 25th when its commander, Brigadeführer Joachim Peiper, receives the OKW’s urgent order to relieve the cauldron.
His troops have barely enough time for a hot meal before they begin the march. But by the time he reaches the starting point for the hasty offensive plan, Peiper finds it already occupied by a Mexican motorized rifle division, the 1st Infantry Division Magonista. The depth and strength of the cordon continues to grow, and the abortive attack fails.
Stavka is content to reduce these pockets carefully. Once lines of communication are secured, the offensives continue westward. Divisions moving eastward run into advancing Red Army forces piecemeal. By 30 July, most of the land east of the Elbe River had been secured. The noose is tightening around Berlin with every minute.
Throughout these body blows, the state apparatus of the Greater German Reich had remained intact. But on the morning of the 30th, when the Gauleiter of Hamburg issued a proclamation ordering the city’s Volkssturm to mobilise and defend the Reich to the last man, woman and child, the first spark flew.
Dockworkers and machinists attached to the Ford Front’s u-boat facilities reported to their units and received their arms and ammunition. The uprising began soon after, as the armed workers quickly overwhelmed the small police detachments. Organized by communist militants, the uprising quickly spread through the city. By the evening, the revolutionaries had secured most of the major governmental buildings as well as the local Nazi Party headquarters.
Wehrmacht units in the region quickly organized to suppress the uprising. The old men did not have the stomach for it. In those crucial early hours, they failed to act. Some even broke ranks and joined the revolutionaries, convinced with good reason that the war was lost.
The Waffen-SS were not so conflicted. Most of their ranks had been conscripted straight from the Hitler Youth. Counterattacks were organized for the next morning. But by then it was perhaps too late. The powderkeg had already been lit, and the pirate radio broadcasts had encouraged sympathy actions elsewhere.
I’m Not Dying For These Bastards
If there was one thing that motivated the revolutionaries of 30 July 1945, it was a sober belief that the war was lost and there was no sense in dying for those jumped up shits in the NSDAP party uniforms. The communist agitators had been the core militants that set the ball rolling, but it had been the masses of workers who’d kept their head downs for the past decade and went with the flow of history that made it happen.
The strikes and armed uprisings spread through most of the towns and cities of Germany, concentrated most heavily in the Ruhr, northern Bavaria and eastern Austria. These movements quickly linked up with the slave workers who’d been imported by the millions to feed the German war machine.
Some of them had been prisoners of war. Others veterans from a dozen armies in Eastern Europe. They’d been worked in starvation conditions and replaced steadily with new trainloads when they perished from starvation or pestilence. And while the German strikers had major reservations about actually shooting their fellow Germans, the men and women from the slave labor units had no such reservations.
Many died in the first week of the uprising. But they secured food and weapons through cautious cooperation with German communist militants, and took their revenge on the SS overseers.
The cost in human life will never be fully known. The Nazi security state tried to suppress the strikes by any means necessary. But events were already far out of anyone’s control. The Nazi war economy ground to a halt. The bombs continued to fall. The frontline forces continued to fight on. But they did so mortally wounded.
In the West, spurred on by a fear that these events could spread out of control, Franco-British Forces began their assault on the remnants of the traitor French and German forces that occupied Belgium and northeastern France. German military resistance would rapidly crumble. The war entered its final phase, as the Western Allies and the Reds raced to secure as much of Germany as possible.
Götterdämmerung
The noose wrapped around Berlin slowly tightened. Troops of the Red Army advanced slowly and methodically, shielded by relentless curtains of artillery fire. The experience of block by block, house by house fighting at Kiev, Smolensk, and Stalingrad had prepared the Red Army well, but the process could not be rushed.
The once pristine streets of Germany’s capital had been filled with rubble. Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, one of the Heer’s leading defense experts, had been given command of the Berlin defense zone. With his initial plans and counterattacks routed, Heinrici lobbied to regroup and prevent further exploitation, hoping that a separate peace in the west would allow a rebuilding of forces and counteroffensive to expel the Soviet and American occupiers in the winter.
Schörner had him dismissed as a defeatist for this, and he only barely escaped court-martial. During the chaos as SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich assumed command, the garrison of the city was left to its own devices, with only the occasional meddling coming down from Goebbels. Generalleutnant Rudolf Sieckenius had taken command of the garrison on 27 July after his predecessor, General der Infanterie Joachim von Kortzfleisch, had been grievously wounded by shell splinters.
Sieckenius followed his orders to the letter, and gave ground as slowly as he could. But ammunition was short, as was fuel for the few armored fighting vehicles available. Rather than lose them entirely, Sieckenius transformed the handful of Panzer 50s into anti-tank pillboxes at key crossroads.
Sieckenius adopted, with mixed success, Soviet General Chuikov’s tactic of “hugging the enemy” to minimize his artillery advantage. The trained troops of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS could manage such a harrowing tactic, but the Volkssturm often broke under the pressure.
The 3rd Guards Army, commanded by General Vasily Chuikov, spearheaded the advance through the city of Berlin. With corps from the Soviet Union, America, and IVA allies, 3rd Guards had been chosen deliberately for this symbolism.
General Chen’s detachment advanced steadily through the suburbs on centre-left of 3rd Guards’ line of advance. Through careful use of small unit tactics and unashamed use of corps and army level artillery assets, Chen and his WFRA liaison officer Acting Lt. Colonel Young-Oak Kim had kept casualties low while keeping pace with the advance. Kim’s organizational skills shone through, finishing most planned attacks in daylight and ensuring troops remained vigilant and rested for the next day’s operations.
As the Red Army advanced, the men penned in Hitler’s bunker stewed impotently. Göring would allow no talk of surrender, especially during Hitler’s few appearances. Nor would he tolerate Goebbels’ impotent talk of dying by his own hand. The arguments became more fierce, especially after Himmler’s men returned on the 30th empty handed. Entreaties to a separate peace with the West were rejected out of hand.
A brief cease-fire began at 0030 on 1 August, as a delegation led by General Wilhelm Krebs took an offer of armistice to the headquarters of 3rd Guards Army. As it so happened, Frunze and his entourage were present for the brief meeting. After a few pleasantries and reminisces of their work together when the Weimar Republic had conducted clandestine military cooperation with the Soviet Union in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, Krebs got down to brass tacks.
Carrying a sealed order from Göring, Krebs stated he was authorized to explore what terms would be amenable for the capitulation of the Greater German Reich. Frunze replied, “No terms. You will surrender.”
By the time Krebs returned to the Führerbunker, Göring had already made his escape. The daring test pilot Hanna Reitsch had landed on a makeshift airfield in downtown Berlin. Göring and his aide-de-camp quickly embarked. Evading anti-aircraft artillery, Reitsch flew westward beyond the front lines of the 1st Byelorussian Front.
Göring relocated the Reich government to the Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) bunker complex in rural Hesse. Taking the title of Reichsprotektor, Göring had efficiently and neatly deposed Hitler and all of his rivals to power in the final days of the war. His firm show of leadership quelled talk of surrender and improved flagging morale in the West.
But for the armies in the direct path of the Red Army’s advance, it had the opposite effect, especially in Berlin. Away from the RHSA Göring had usurped from Himmler’s control, the troops in the East felt abandoned and betrayed by both Hitler and Göring. Hitler, it became clear, had lost his nerve and now his treacherous subordinates struggled over the scrapheap that was Germany.
At 1445, on Sunday 12 August 1945, troops of the 3rd Guards Army raised the crimson banner of the Communist International atop the Reichstag. Within hours, the garrison of Berlin surrendered. General Krebs and a small armed guard led Hitler, who was barely aware of his surroundings, out of the bunker under a white flag. Krebs delivered Hitler into the custody of the 150th Rifle Division, thwarting a plot by Goebbels to martyr him for the National Socialist cause.
The Anticlimax
Any sane man in the German government knew that the war was over. The Red Army continued to advance on all fronts. Operation Spartakus, the planned invasion of Fascist Italy, was set to begin on 30 August. Supporting operations by the 2nd Ukrainian Front were pushing into occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and planned to link up with 1st Ukrainian in Bavaria. The 1st Baltic Front continued to race through the lightly defended Baltic coast, and threatened to link up with the revolutionaries in Kiel and Hamburg. Even with the troops evacuating Denmark assisting, the German defenders would still be outnumbered and outgunned. And with the cauldrons in Brandenburg now liquidated, resulting in the death or capture of over three hundred thousand of Germany’s best troops, the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts were preparing to push westward into Central Germany.
The west was beginning to collapse as well. Even the unwieldy army of the Western Allies, which outside of the small core of mostly British mechanized troops advanced at the speed of horse-drawn carts, was racing towards the Ruhr as fast as their legs could carry them. The German state continued to dissolve to revolution out from under Göring’s feet. The war would be over soon, but the Reichsprotektor ensured it wouldn't end before many thousands more died.
Weimarer Republik said:
HectorValiente said:
EmpireOfEndlessMonologues said:
Mekasutōmu said:
The Brandenburg Offensive (Operation Aurora)
When the summer Sun rose at 5:00 A.M. on Saturday 14 July 1945, millions of men from the Army of Work lept from their trenches, bayonets gripped with hardened hands. Tens of thousands of guns erupted along a front stretching from Stettin on the Baltic coast to Reichenberg in the Sudetenland. Their goal: tear down the Third Reich and entomb the Nazi leadership in Berlin.
The culmination of five years of bloody toil was finally at hand. Soldiers and volunteers from almost every member of the Communist International would play a part in the offensive. While the Western Allies pinned down large concentrations of German troops in defending the Low Countries and the Rhineland, the forces of the Comintern were pushing deep into the German heartland.
Overall command of Red Army forces for the operation was entrusted to Marshal Mikhail V. Frunze. His opponent would be Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s praetorian and now de facto leader of the Greater German Reich. With Hitler virtually convalescent due to his physician’s (mis)care, there would be little political meddling from above.
In the campaigns of spring and early summer, the Red Army had fought through Poland and the Balkans. The 2nd Ukrainian Front had smashed the Gothic Line and occupied Silesia in June. Advanced elements were probing second echelon defenses in occupied Bohemia.
Southeast, the 3rd Ukainian Front remained an army in being, holding down the sizeable Hungarian Army and German forces of Army Group J from its toehold in eastern Hungary. Their probing attacks misled Axis intelligence about events further south until it was too late.
The 4th Ukrainian Front, in cooperation with Yugoslav partisans under the communist-led Council of National Liberation, had launched a major offensive in May, retaking Belgrade and much of Serbia from Italian occupying forces. With promises of amnesty by Marshal Tito towards collaborator forces, the Italian position was in a state of total collapse.
Disposition of forces
Comintern forces in the Brandenburg Offensive consisted of four fronts, collected administratively under the Central European Theatre: the 1st Baltic, 1st Byelorussian, 2nd Byelorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts. A total of 2.9 million men would take part in the operation.
In the north, the 1st Baltic Front would break through German defensive works in western Pomerania, assisted by amphibious operations across the Stettin Lagoon. With fire support from the Soviet Baltic Fleet, the 1st Baltic Front would hold the northern flank of the operation, and penetrate as deep into central Germany as practical to disrupt the movement of reinforcements eastward.
1st Baltic would consequently be the smallest of the four, with proportionally fewer tanks and heavy armored fighting vehicles. American General Maurice Rose would be in overall command, with the amphibious operations commanded by a Marine, Lieutenant General Malcolm Howard*.
Once breakthrough could be achieved along the full frontage, the several cavalry-mechanised groups and the 9th Tank Army would advance rapidly, screened by the deployment of the 105th Guards Airborne division. The final operational goal would be the city of Hamburg, and the blocking of the evacuation of German occupying forces in Denmark.
Just south, the 1st Byelorussian Front would break through the heavier defensive positions in eastern Brandenburg. The front would make a sickle cut through Brandenburg, destroying armored formations and securing the investment of Berlin by linking up with 2nd Byelorussian west of Berlin. Forces would push westward rapidly to destroy German reinforcements on the march, with the goal of reaching Hanover by September.
The second half of the investment of Berlin would be mirrored by the 2nd Byelorussian Front, tasked with sweeping through southern Brandenburg. Secondary objectives were to encircle and destroy the 1st SS Panzer Army before it could reinforce Berlin proper and proceed to Hanover.
The 1st Ukrainian Front would guard the southern flank of the operation. Once achieving breakthrough into the German interior, 1st Ukrainian would cordon off the large concentration of German men, artillery and armor in Bohemia and wheel southward to Bavaria. Subsequent operations in Silesia and Yugoslavia would support this operational objective.
Strategy
With the Inter-Allied Council unable to achieve any agreement about occupation zones in Germany, the political consideration driving much of the operational planning for the summer offensives was to secure as much territory as possible for the post-war period. The Revolutionary Military Council deeply mistrusted Western Allied intentions with regards to Germany. Publicly, the Franco-British War Council had been opaque about post-war plans. But moles embedded within British intelligence had been able to discover a number of plans by the Cherwell Commission to territorially dismember Germany and completely deindustrialize the country.
Even the Soviet leadership were disgusted by such barbarism. General of the Army Zhukov remarked that “millions of Soviet soldiers did not die so that English pirates could cart away the wealth of the Ruhr.” Marshal Frunze stated unequivocally in a January meeting of the State Defense Committee that “such an assault on the German proletariat must be regarded as an act of war,” and must be resisted by the full might of the Red Army.
But no one was enthusiastic about a continuation war against the Western Allies. While it became clear with the disintegration of the French State and the rate of Allied progress on the Western Front would make a total liberation of Germany likely infeasible, securing the bulk of German territory and population was ambitious but still possible. The Franco-British may occupy the Ruhr and the Rhineland, but they could never command the loyalty of the working class there, and they would provide the political power to force the reunification of Germany into a socialist republic.
Operation Liebknicht, the late spring counteroffensive into Silesia, had set the ball rolling. To a certain extent, the Reich Main Security Office and the propaganda arms of the Nazi state could downplay or hide the enemy incursions into East Prussia. But the loss of the Ford Front industrial projects in Silesia had sent shockwaves through the German war economy. Over half of German coal liquefaction capacity was lost. Critical mining and industrial labor camps for the production of ball-bearings, rare earths and explosives were taken as well.
The advancing Soviet forces sent refugee waves westward into Germany. With this conduit, the National Committee for a Free Germany sent infiltrators and supplies to support resistance groups in the German heartland.
Rote Kappelle, the network of communist agitators and spies operating within Germany, had been laying the groundwork for defeatist actions for years now. The small core cadres of stay-behinds had been diligently grown since the Battle of Stalingrad. This dangerous, thankless work persisted even amidst the murderous attempts by the RHSA to stamp out dissent. With networks now spread among all major German industries as well as the masses of slave labor imported to the Reich, the Red Orchestra could with the right catalyst hobble the German war effort.
An unexpected boon came in January, as the Nazi program of Totaler Krieg was expanded. Workers in even the most critical of war industries were now pressed into the Volkssturm. The arms and ammunition were kept under the watchful eyes of SS commissars, but the program was all too honest. German workers were expected to die to the last man in defense of the Reich.
Rations which had once remained steady had fallen drastically. German workers had already given millions of their sons to the war effort for a regime that had never held them in much esteem, and now they were being asked to fall on their sword for Hitler’s pride. The morale situation on the home front had collapsed in the past three months, far faster than even the RHSA had anticipated. The implementation of Fordist production methods in the 30s may have strengthened the German war economy, but had cost the NSDAP what support it had among the artisanal skilled workers. Germany was a powder keg waiting for the right spark.
Stavka had predicted with confidence that the buildup of forces near the German heartland and the start of offensive operations would provoke a general withdrawal of German expeditionary forces to defend the heartland. As forces marshalled in Poland in June, Army Group B began withdrawing its forces from Hungary and Italian-occupied Yugoslavia. Forces supporting the French-state remnant and guarding the west embarked eastward, supported by Volkssturm levies. The die had been cast.
Countdown to D-Day
In the weeks before the offensive, the Red Army Air Forces stepped up bomber offensives into Germany. With the Luftwaffe shattered, tactical bombers and fighters reave across eastern Germany. Casualties to anti-aircraft artillery are high but sustainable. Luftwaffe forward air bases are suppressed in the initial waves. Fuel and ammunition stores are bombed with incendiaries. The centralized electrical grid is hit with chaff bombs, causing rolling blackouts in core German industries. Anything that moves by road, rail or canal is bombed, rocketed and strafed.
German soldiers on the march are easy prey to interdiction. The need for speed prevents easy movement in the short summer night, and in the day the green German formations practice poor camouflage discipline. Reinforcement of the front is slow and perilous as a result.
Leafleting campaigns continue to encourage surrender and defeatism. “Do not obey the SS gangsters, their time will come” states one. “German worker! Your liberation is at hand!” says another.
German frontline forces continued to dig-in deeper even as the bombing and shelling intensified. Heavy long-range bombardment by frontal artillery assets ground down forces at the front. Several feints and probing actions by special cadres kept German commanders off balance. It was not known when the attack would come, and several times forces had begun mobilizing only for no major attack to commence.
Aurora
The initial attacks began along the Baltic Sea in the north. Heralded by a thunder of naval and army artillery, Marines hit the lightly defended beaches on the western bank of the Stettin Lagoon. A rolling curtain of artillery fire shielded the initial attacks. As the Marines pressed inland, the Soviet 12th Shock Army hit German fortifications in a pre-dawn assault. By first light, the mines and barbed wire had been cleared, and the hardened Soviet riflemen engaged in close-quarters battle with the mostly Hitler Youth draftees of the 549th Volksgrenadier Division.
The boys of the 549th fought tenaciously, but were quickly overwhelmed by superior Soviet firepower. The haunting experience of fighting and killing teenage boys would be recounted in post-war Soviet novels such as The Binding of Isaac.
But with such overwhelming superiority in numbers, artillery and tanks by the Red Army, and the relative paucity of heavy anti-tank guns on the German, the incomplete defensive positions could not hold for long. Close support by T-44 tanks ensured that many of the German reinforcements succumbed to tank shock. The effective infantry-tank cooperation suppressed the effectiveness of the numerous panzerfaust weapons. Soviet light and medium tanks would soon be able to break into the operational rear.
Meanwhile, the forward deployed airborne troops secured bridges and strongpoints, slowing the movement of reinforcements from the rear. In spite of tales of Communist barbarism, morale was brittle. Surrenders at the first sign of the enemy had been unthinkable mere months ago. They now occurred regularly.
In the rapid advance through the coastal villages, the Red Army encountered a frightened civilian populace. Heaps of SS uniforms and Nazi regalia were left discarded in town squares. Sometimes the burgers ratted out the men of the SS who tried to hide, especially those who’d been zealous in the application of Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres Schörner’s methods.
Four hundred kilometres to the south, the 1st Ukrainian Front began its assault on the southern end of the Hitler Line. Army Group Centre was better entrenched here, and the terrain better favored the defender. But in the past three weeks, the Twelfth SS-Army had been shifted northwards to defend Berlin itself, and the Eighth Panzer Army that was to replace them had been arriving in a trickle from Bohemia.
Still, on the whole the German position was more robust. The batteries of 8.8 cm Pak 43 guns available to Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner have been concentrated in major strong points in towns and crossroads. Covered by earthworks, concrete bunkers, and guarded by infantry guns and lighter anti-tank units, these fortresses would be a tough nut to crack. Still, Steiner had perhaps 240,000 battle ready men, four hundred tanks and three thousand guns to cover a ninety-four kilometer frontage.
The 1st Ukrainian Front would hammer Steiner with ten thousand artillery pieces, two thousand tanks, and the full might of the 8th Air Army. A total of nearly 700,000 men would be involved in this part of the operation.
The attack came sooner than expected. German strongpoints were reduced with a furious expenditure of bombs and artillery shells. The mechanized infantry at the vanguard probed and infiltrated the weak points. Once the initial cracks in the defensive lines were opened and secured by pioneers, the 9th Tank Army was able to bypass the major strong points and begin operational encirclements.
The Volkssturm levies and third-rate Wehrmacht divisions in the second and third defense echelons did not fight as tenaciously as the SS-men in the first echelon. The 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend” counterattacked as ordered. But as they crashed into the spearheads of the 9th Tank Army, they too began to wither under aerial attack. Well prepared for their riposte, the American tankers turn the clash outside of Bautzen into a bloodbath. The fields outside the town are littered with the burning wrecks of Jaguar tanks.
Three days after the assaults began at Stettin and Reichenburg, the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts began the investment of Berlin. The fighting is intense all along the front, but the overwhelming Comintern superiority in numbers and firepower mean the front cannot hold for long. It does not matter how many men Commander-In-Chief Schörner has shot for “cowardice”, the lines begin to break.
The Soviet spearhead, the 62nd Army, advances inexorably, encountering the fiercest resistance at the Seelow Heights. Additional forces from the Polish 2nd Army and the Soviet 41st Army arrived a day later to continue the assault. The progress is slow over the flooded lowlands, but the opening of the reservoir can only work once. As the mud dries in the summer heat, progress picks up.
The 2nd Detachment of the Chinese New Fourth Army, augmented with the Nisei 100th Infantry Regiment, finished the assault on the morning of 20th July, taking General Georg-Wilhelm Postel’s command post west of the town of Seelow, along with the general and his staff.
Major General Chen Geng had come to the Soviet Union with a token force as a symbol of Comintern unity. But with grit and cunning, he’d come to Seelow a conquering hero, gazing at the outskirts of Berlin in the distance.
Encircling the Mark of Brandenburg
Once German forces were unrooted from their defensive positions, they were now bypassed. The 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts began their sickle-cuts around the city of Berlin, isolating much of the province from the rest of Germany. The tank armies at the vanguard advanced as fast as logistics would feasibly allow, pushing forward to disrupt the arrival of reinforcements and secure territory quickly.
Göring would not give in so easily. Undaunted by the total collapse of forward positions, the Reichsmarschall continued to give orders for vigorous counterattacks even as he and the rest of the Nazi leadership sheltered in Hitler’s Führerbunker. Schörner obeyed the orders of the few men above him without question. As the Soviet and American tanks pushed deeper into Germany, he ordered the First Panzer Army and detached elements of the Eleventh Army to attack southeast from Wittstock, and hit the 2nd Guards Tank Army on its flank near the town of Orianberg, about sixty kilometres north of Berlin.
Sixth Army, with its collection of depleted infantry divisions augmented by heavy tank battalions, would attempt to drive between the 1st Baltic and 1st Byelorussian Fronts and make time for forces to move to defend Berlin.
Army Detachment Dietrich would counterattack north from near Dresden. With the largest remaining concentration of heavy tanks, this collection of SS and Wehrmacht divisions would attempt to chop off the 2nd Byelorussian Front’s spearheads near Luckau.
Despite their misgivings, the commanders began their counterattacks on 20 July. Well telegraphed by aerial reconnaissance, short on food, fuel and ammunition, they were an exercise in vanity. Tanks and trooper carriers endured a withering hail of bombs and rockets from the Red Army Air Force. Many of the heavier tanks never made it into battle from fuel shortage or breakdowns. The tanks that did make it were heavily outnumbered, and faced a well-positioned screen of infantry anti-tank units as well as tank destroyers.
In the end, no amount of harsh discipline could overcome the material reality. Officers and young boys of the Volkssturm shot “for cowardice” may have ultimately backfired in upholding morale. The sight of the mighty heavy tanks from the Tigers to the even more outlandishly large vehicles such as the Smilodon left burning or abandoned further broke what hope the soldiery had remaining.
While these bloody counter attacks caused many casualties in the Red Army, they proved to be only speed bumps in operational tempo. As soldiers began to take their chances with the enemy rather than die for the ungrateful, desertions and surrenders increased.
Just after noon on 25 July 1945, the leading elements of the 2nd Guards Tank Army linked up with the 5th Guards Tank Army in the town of Brandenberg an der Havel, seventy kilometres west of Berlin.
The bulk of four German armies (First, Fourth, Ninth, Twelfth SS) are now trapped in two cauldrons. The smaller, wrapped tightly around the city of Berlin itself. The larger comprised much of the southern half of the Mark of Brandenburg itself, hemmed between the Lusatian Neisse and the Elbe River.
Deep Operations
300,000 German soldiers and Ostruppen are now trapped in Brandenburg Cauldron. A further eighty thousand, half of them Volkssturm, are invested in Berlin itself. Attempts to relieve both pockets begin immediately. Panzer Detachment Peiper, a corps sized task force consisting of SS and Wehrmacht units rushed from the Western Front has only just detrained in Leipzig on the 25th when its commander, Brigadeführer Joachim Peiper, receives the OKW’s urgent order to relieve the cauldron.
His troops have barely enough time for a hot meal before they begin the march. But by the time he reaches the starting point for the hasty offensive plan, Peiper finds it already occupied by a Mexican motorized rifle division, the 1st Infantry Division Magonista. The depth and strength of the cordon continues to grow, and the abortive attack fails.
Stavka is content to reduce these pockets carefully. Once lines of communication are secured, the offensives continue westward. Divisions moving eastward run into advancing Red Army forces piecemeal. By 30 July, most of the land east of the Elbe River had been secured. The noose is tightening around Berlin with every minute.
Throughout these body blows, the state apparatus of the Greater German Reich had remained intact. But on the morning of the 30th, when the Gauleiter of Hamburg issued a proclamation ordering the city’s Volkssturm to mobilise and defend the Reich to the last man, woman and child, the first spark flew.
Dockworkers and machinists attached to the Ford Front’s u-boat facilities reported to their units and received their arms and ammunition. The uprising began soon after, as the armed workers quickly overwhelmed the small police detachments. Organized by communist militants, the uprising quickly spread through the city. By the evening, the revolutionaries had secured most of the major governmental buildings as well as the local Nazi Party headquarters.
Wehrmacht units in the region quickly organized to suppress the uprising. The old men did not have the stomach for it. In those crucial early hours, they failed to act. Some even broke ranks and joined the revolutionaries, convinced with good reason that the war was lost.
The Waffen-SS were not so conflicted. Most of their ranks had been conscripted straight from the Hitler Youth. Counterattacks were organized for the next morning. But by then it was perhaps too late. The powderkeg had already been lit, and the pirate radio broadcasts had encouraged sympathy actions elsewhere.
I’m Not Dying For These Bastards
If there was one thing that motivated the revolutionaries of 30 July 1945, it was a sober belief that the war was lost and there was no sense in dying for those jumped up shits in the NSDAP party uniforms. The communist agitators had been the core militants that set the ball rolling, but it had been the masses of workers who’d kept their head downs for the past decade and went with the flow of history that made it happen.
The strikes and armed uprisings spread through most of the towns and cities of Germany, concentrated most heavily in the Ruhr, northern Bavaria and eastern Austria. These movements quickly linked up with the slave workers who’d been imported by the millions to feed the German war machine.
Some of them had been prisoners of war. Others veterans from a dozen armies in Eastern Europe. They’d been worked in starvation conditions and replaced steadily with new trainloads when they perished from starvation or pestilence. And while the German strikers had major reservations about actually shooting their fellow Germans, the men and women from the slave labor units had no such reservations.
Many died in the first week of the uprising. But they secured food and weapons through cautious cooperation with German communist militants, and took their revenge on the SS overseers.
The cost in human life will never be fully known. The Nazi security state tried to suppress the strikes by any means necessary. But events were already far out of anyone’s control. The Nazi war economy ground to a halt. The bombs continued to fall. The frontline forces continued to fight on. But they did so mortally wounded.
In the West, spurred on by a fear that these events could spread out of control, Franco-British Forces began their assault on the remnants of the traitor French and German forces that occupied Belgium and northeastern France. German military resistance would rapidly crumble. The war entered its final phase, as the Western Allies and the Reds raced to secure as much of Germany as possible.
Götterdämmerung
The noose wrapped around Berlin slowly tightened. Troops of the Red Army advanced slowly and methodically, shielded by relentless curtains of artillery fire. The experience of block by block, house by house fighting at Kiev, Smolensk, and Stalingrad had prepared the Red Army well, but the process could not be rushed.
The once pristine streets of Germany’s capital had been filled with rubble. Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, one of the Heer’s leading defense experts, had been given command of the Berlin defense zone. With his initial plans and counterattacks routed, Heinrici lobbied to regroup and prevent further exploitation, hoping that a separate peace in the west would allow a rebuilding of forces and counteroffensive to expel the Soviet and American occupiers in the winter.
Schörner had him dismissed as a defeatist for this, and he only barely escaped court-martial. During the chaos as SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich assumed command, the garrison of the city was left to its own devices, with only the occasional meddling coming down from Goebbels. Generalleutnant Rudolf Sieckenius had taken command of the garrison on 27 July after his predecessor, General der Infanterie Joachim von Kortzfleisch, had been grievously wounded by shell splinters.
Sieckenius followed his orders to the letter, and gave ground as slowly as he could. But ammunition was short, as was fuel for the few armored fighting vehicles available. Rather than lose them entirely, Sieckenius transformed the handful of Panzer 50s into anti-tank pillboxes at key crossroads.
Sieckenius adopted, with mixed success, Soviet General Chuikov’s tactic of “hugging the enemy” to minimize his artillery advantage. The trained troops of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS could manage such a harrowing tactic, but the Volkssturm often broke under the pressure.
The 3rd Guards Army, commanded by General Vasily Chuikov, spearheaded the advance through the city of Berlin. With corps from the Soviet Union, America, and IVA allies, 3rd Guards had been chosen deliberately for this symbolism.
General Chen’s detachment advanced steadily through the suburbs on centre-left of 3rd Guards’ line of advance. Through careful use of small unit tactics and unashamed use of corps and army level artillery assets, Chen and his WFRA liaison officer Acting Lt. Colonel Young-Oak Kim had kept casualties low while keeping pace with the advance. Kim’s organizational skills shone through, finishing most planned attacks in daylight and ensuring troops remained vigilant and rested for the next day’s operations.
As the Red Army advanced, the men penned in Hitler’s bunker stewed impotently. Göring would allow no talk of surrender, especially during Hitler’s few appearances. Nor would he tolerate Goebbels’ impotent talk of dying by his own hand. The arguments became more fierce, especially after Himmler’s men returned on the 30th empty handed. Entreaties to a separate peace with the West were rejected out of hand.
A brief cease-fire began at 0030 on 1 August, as a delegation led by General Wilhelm Krebs took an offer of armistice to the headquarters of 3rd Guards Army. As it so happened, Frunze and his entourage were present for the brief meeting. After a few pleasantries and reminisces of their work together when the Weimar Republic had conducted clandestine military cooperation with the Soviet Union in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, Krebs got down to brass tacks.
Carrying a sealed order from Göring, Krebs stated he was authorized to explore what terms would be amenable for the capitulation of the Greater German Reich. Frunze replied, “No terms. You will surrender.”
By the time Krebs returned to the Führerbunker, Göring had already made his escape. The daring test pilot Hanna Reitsch had landed on a makeshift airfield in downtown Berlin. Göring and his aide-de-camp quickly embarked. Evading anti-aircraft artillery, Reitsch flew westward beyond the front lines of the 1st Byelorussian Front.
Göring relocated the Reich government to the Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) bunker complex in rural Hesse. Taking the title of Reichsprotektor, Göring had efficiently and neatly deposed Hitler and all of his rivals to power in the final days of the war. His firm show of leadership quelled talk of surrender and improved flagging morale in the West.
But for the armies in the direct path of the Red Army’s advance, it had the opposite effect, especially in Berlin. Away from the RHSA Göring had usurped from Himmler’s control, the troops in the East felt abandoned and betrayed by both Hitler and Göring. Hitler, it became clear, had lost his nerve and now his treacherous subordinates struggled over the scrapheap that was Germany.
At 1445, on Sunday 12 August 1945, troops of the 3rd Guards Army raised the crimson banner of the Communist International atop the Reichstag. Within hours, the garrison of Berlin surrendered. General Krebs and a small armed guard led Hitler, who was barely aware of his surroundings, out of the bunker under a white flag. Krebs delivered Hitler into the custody of the 150th Rifle Division, thwarting a plot by Goebbels to martyr him for the National Socialist cause.
The Anticlimax
Any sane man in the German government knew that the war was over. The Red Army continued to advance on all fronts. Operation Spartakus, the planned invasion of Fascist Italy, was set to begin on 30 August. Supporting operations by the 2nd Ukrainian Front were pushing into occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and planned to link up with 1st Ukrainian in Bavaria. The 1st Baltic Front continued to race through the lightly defended Baltic coast, and threatened to link up with the revolutionaries in Kiel and Hamburg. Even with the troops evacuating Denmark assisting, the German defenders would still be outnumbered and outgunned. And with the cauldrons in Brandenburg now liquidated, resulting in the death or capture of over three hundred thousand of Germany’s best troops, the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts were preparing to push westward into Central Germany.
The west was beginning to collapse as well. Even the unwieldy army of the Western Allies, which outside of the small core of mostly British mechanized troops advanced at the speed of horse-drawn carts, was racing towards the Ruhr as fast as their legs could carry them. The German state continued to dissolve to revolution out from under Göring’s feet. The war would be over soon, but the Reichsprotektor ensured it wouldn't end before many thousands more died.
What happens to all the German and fascist POWs? Will they try deprogramming the Hitler Youth?
StephenColbert27
Banned
So do the Soviets suffer similar manpower shortages that they did OTL at this point of the war, or is it mitigated by the fact that they're splitting the heavy cost of the Eastern front with the Americans? From the little I know they were having some in terms of a lot of units not being up to strength, even if it was a moot point considering what the Germans were facing.
Overall, great stuff, as usual.
Overall, great stuff, as usual.
A nice climax! One minor note though, Goering would not use 'Reichsprotektor' since that was the title of the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and decidedly not grandiose enough. Goering being Goering, he might opt for 'Reichsverweser' (Imperial Regent, or Imperial Deputy).
Penal labor while the war is still going on, they get weeded through for the more egregious war criminals. After the war is over, they're slowly repatriated to the post-war sovereign German government, who decides who gets let go and who gets tried in subsequent war crimes trials.
Minors get treated more delegately, but there is a definite effort to deprogram in post-war civic organizations and education.
Yes. While casualties per year have been lower, the war has also lasted another year, and many of the people liberated from German occupation aren't fit for military service due to malnourishment. Overall, it means that the Soviets are fielding fewer divisions, but the divisions they are fielding are closer to authorized strength.
We'll look into it.
What is the quality of the forces facing the Anglo-French forces right now? I am assuming the Anglo-French are largely facing second-rate forces with most of the Wehrmacht sent to fight the Soviets and the Americans.
Let's say, theoretically, there was a communist take over of the FBU. Would they split into France and Britain, or would they establish a new Entente? I know that's INCREDIBLY unlikely post-WW2, but I'm still curious on the stance of the Entente Section of the Communist International.
The Azad Hind
Special thanks to @Aelita for one of the discussion posts.
AH.com Thread, “WI: Savitri Devi at the Red Fort Trials
Excerpt from The History of India: 1900-1950, generic history textbook, c. 2003
Subhas Chandra Bose would come out of his American trips in 1936 and 1939 with a new and strong appreciation for the American system of socialism. As opposed to the Soviet Union, Bose saw “a fully industrialized democracy in action, a productive functioning society from the ashes of civil war.” He was especially intrigued by the technocracy employed by the higher functions of government.
Upon his return, he sought to push Congress for a similar approach, especially keeping in mind the early success of the American Socialist Labor Party in building mass support. However, while the Congress Socialist Party and the Communist Party of India (allied in a Comintern popular front) backed his proposal, both Nehru and Gandhi felt that aligning themselves to Comintern would remove their autonomy.
Eventually the difference would cause Bose and the Congress Socialists to split from the mainline Congress. In 1939, Bose and PC Joshi announced that the newly independent Congress Socialist Party would merge with the Communist Party to form the Indian Workers’ Party, with the aim of supporting Comintern action.
[...]
The formation of the Franco-British Union and the declaration of war in 1942 was shortly followed by Lord Linlithgow’s declaration that India would join the war effort on behalf of the newly formed Union. Congress president Jawaharlal Nehru and Muslim League President Muhammad Ali Jinnah announced that their respective organizations would back the declaration of war.
Nehru and Jinnah had, just prior to the war, secured a promise of full dominion from Atlee cabinet member Staffold Cripps, in exchange for Congress support for the planned declaration of war.
However,Mohandas Gandhi strongly opposed the measure, (despite Nehru’s pleas) as he had wanted full independence. Gandhi would announce that he would oppose any wartime mobilization, despite the announcement of Congress support. Frustrated, Nehru and fellow Congress leader Vallebhbhai Patel attempted to convince Gandhi otherwise, but he refused anything less than full independence.
Bose, having spent months with General Secretary Bhagat Singh helping raise Indian volunteer battalions for the Comintern war effort, supported the declaration of war, as did much of the Indian Civil Service.
Gandhi, with other allies, attempted to enact civil disobedience with his allies without Congress support, straining the relationship between him and Nehru. Gandhi was subsequently imprisoned for an extended period during the war.
[...]
Rash Behari Bose, an Indian nationalist exiled in Tokyo (no relation to Chandra Bose), formed the Indian National Army at a 1942 conference to serve as the military arm of the Japanese backed Indian Independence League for the express purpose of Indian independence . Its ranks expanded with Indian POWs captured during the early Japanese campaign in South-East Asia, under the command of Mohan Singh. In a second conference, Bose invited Asit Krishna Mukherjee to join the League.
A Bengali Brahmin, Mukherjee lived in the Soviet Union for several years, but soon grew to despise Marxism, and instead admired Hitler and Nazism. With his newspaper, The New Mercury (partly funded by the German Consulate in Calcutta), he would draw parallels between Nazism and the burgeoning ideology of Hindutva, advocated by VD Shavakar’s Hindu Sahabha (itself pro-Nazi) and K.B. Hedgewar's Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Indeed, he would form contacts with both organizations through the late 30’s. His destiny would forever change in 1939, when he met Savitri Devi.
Born Maximiani Portas in Lyon, France, of French, Greek, Italian, and English descent, she would become heavily involved with Greek nationalism in the 1920’s. However, she gradually distanced herself from Christianity and grew to become fascinated with the idea of an Hellensitic Aryan culture that influenced the ancient Greeks. To that end, she immigrated to India in 1930, and soon fell in love with Hinduism, which she regarded as a pure Aryan religion. She took the name Savitri Devi (or “Sun Goddess”). Devi became involved in the Hindutva organizations like the Mahasabha and the RSS. Her affinity grew when she volunteered at Swami Satyanand’s Hindu Mission in Calcutta. She impressed the Swami by her determination to not allow the last “pagan Aryan” religion to fall to Judaism and claimed Adolf Hitler was going to restored Aryan rule and religion. The Swami (himself an admirer of Hitler) told her that Hitler was the reincarnation of Vishnu. Devi would go on to write A Warning to Hindus in 1939 as an attempt to rally Hindus as an “Aryan religion” against the forces of foreign, Jewish influences.
After their marriage in 1940, Mukherjee and Devi became involved in German intelligence efforts in India, despite India not being at war at the time, with the goal of a Hindu fascist state in time. Through this work and the New Mercury, they managed to get their ally VD Savarkar, already pro-Nazi, and the Hindu Mahasabha to publicly oppose a war with Germany and support a Hindu fascist state. Devi also created contacts with Japan and RS Bose in Tokyo.
When the declaration of war was sent, The New Mercury was shut down and the Hindu Mahasabha was outlawed for pro-Nazi sentiments. However, Mukherjee and Devi were smuggled out into pro-Japanese China, and from there, to Tokyo to join the Indian Independence League.
By the end of 1942, significant differences between Bose and the Japanese led to his removal and the appointment of Mukherjee as the new head of the League. In February, 1943, Mukherjee announced the formation of the “Provisional Government of Free India” (Arzi Hakumat-e-Azad Hind in Hindustani, shortened to “Azad Hind”) with himself as Head of State, his wife as “Minister in Charge of Women's Organization”, and in a move meant to attract Hindu nationalists to the cause, VD Savarkar (recently arrived in Tokyo after the Hindu Mahasabha was banned) as Minister of Internal and Religious Affairs, along with a revived Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj)
[...]
Gandhi’s death in prison exacerbated tensions within the war alliance. While the official cause of death was tuberculosis, some were skeptical, believing there was a possible cover-up of the real death. Not helping matters was a news article in The Daily Telegraph purporting Deputy Prime Minister Winston Churchill had celebrated the death.
While Churchill denied this, his staunch opposition to Indian independence and active contempt for Gandhi led some to believe he had orchestrated the murder.
These tensions and conspiracies may have led to a splinter had news of the Japanese breakthrough at Imphal not come out.
With their victories in the Northeast and the formal establishment of Azad Hind rule in India proper, MS Golwalkar, Hedgewar’s successor as RSS head, was convinced to pledge the support of the RSS to the Azad Hind Fauj and was made into a cabinet member under Mukherjee. The combined radicalized memberships of the RSS and Shavakar’s Hindu Mahasabha bolstered the INA as they supported the Japanese advanced
[...]
With the Japanese capture of Calcutta and the mass evacuation of the local government to Darjeeling, Azad Hind would be consolidated in the Bengal region, with the command headquartered in the city to coordinate the continued Indian campaign.
With a state mostly established, the central government would move to enact their Hindutva policies.
Immediately, policies against Muslims were drawn up, modeled on the German Nuremberg laws. Muslims were excluded from local government and eventually expelled from most occupations. Muslims were excluded from certain establishments, Muslim Friday prayers were banned, and vegetarianism was strictly enforced.
Along with this, mobs of Hindu nationalists would enact pogroms against Muslim communities, attacking them on the streets, destroying mosques and burning their homes and businesses. Christian missions were also destroyed. “Hindu Missions” were established to convert Muslims and Christians into Hinduism, sometimes by force. “Agitators” and “communist spies” were sent to hard labor alongside POWs.
For Devi, this was not enough, and through her influence with Mukherjee, began to enact measures to indicate their admiration for Nazism. RS Bose’s initial tiger flag design for the Azad Hind was replaced with one featuring a left-facing swastika. A mandate was sent strictly enforcing the caste system, with lighter skinned Brahmins being preferred, and Dalits being excluded from most establishments. Caste could also be “reassigned”, primarily off skin color.
Post-war communiques revealed further plans, including the eventual eradication of Muslims and dark-skinned Dalits and encouraging European immigration to further “Aryanize” Brahmins, as well as the formal recognition of Hitler as “Kalki”, Eradicator of Worlds. Their Japanese handlers and advisors (with some exceptions) declined to reign in these actions, the reigning Kohoda being themselves biased against Abrahamic religions and indifferent towards internal colorism and racism
For traditional nationalists Savarkar and Golwalkar, however, Devi’s actions were becoming increasingly deranged and divorced from their ideology, and they attempted to protest some of these more extreme measures. However, Mukherjee would defend them as “necessary” for the preservation of “Aryan Hindu culture”
[...]
Despite his frustration with the British response to Gandhi’s death, ultimately, Nehru would rally Indians of all political stripes to set aside their differences and fight the Japanese to ensure that their tyranny did not extend to the whole country. Jinnah, horrified by reports of the pogroms and the discrimination, would also rally Muslims to join the army and fight to free their countrymen.
Once estranged, Nehru and Jinnah would ultimately form a united front. A photo features the two formally shaking hands, visiting bombing victims in Madras, and speaking on continuing the war.
Meanwhile, at the request of Bose and their organizer in the Soviet Union Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, many Indian IVA battalions were withdrawn from the Eastern Front, and returned to India to fight for their homeland. Bose and Bhagat Singh would take command of these returning battalions, and would support the Royal Indian Army.
[...]
The ultimate death kneel to the Azad Hind was the famine caused by the ineffective distribution of food and the appropriation for land. This and the increasing racist distribution caused a collapse in public support for the government, bolstering communist fifth columns to sabotage the war effort even further.
Mukherjee and Devi evacuated to Japanese held Rangoon in mid-1945, but Shavakar choose to stay and led the forces. This would prove disastrous when his headquarters was bombed, killing him.
MS Golwalkar, who also stayed behind, was captured outside of Calcutta by a squadron of IVA volunteers. Shortly after, Mukherjee flew back to Tokyo to reorganize army strategy. On November 20th, 1945, the plane Mukherjee was on was reported missing, likely shot down by an American garrison.
With the British approaching Rangoon, Devi soon used her German intelligence contacts to flee and reach escaped Nazis in the South African territory of Namibia.
[...]
With the Japanese expelled, Nehru immediately worked with new Viceroy Lord Mountbatten to ensure a smooth transition to home rule along with rebuilding Bengal from the damage of the war.
However, many looked towards Bose as a hero for his leadership of the Indian Comintern units. Despite supporting the declaration of war, he would return to an opposition to dominionization and would agitate for complete independence.
When members of the Indian Navy mutinied with support from the Indian Workers’ Party, talks accelerated and a Commonwealth plan was established with Nehru as Prime Minister and liberal C. Rajagopalachari as Governor-General. This would ensure a stable country not torn by war or revolution.
[...]
[Short feature next to the article]
The Death of Savitri Devi
Devi comfortably settled in a Namibian farm, where she would regale fellow Axis war criminals with her ideals of Hitler as the reincarnation of Vishnu and the symbol of Aryan paganism against the Jewish world orthodoxy. She would also entertain visiting neo-Nazis and old associates from the INA, and publish manifestos (underground, of course) about the evils of communism, the righteousness of Nazism, and defend her actions in India.
In 1961, Palestinian Shin Bet agents, with the help of the American Section 1, captured Josef Mengele in his large farm to stand trial. This prompted other Nazis to flee. In Devi’s case, she was invited by a former INA affiliate named Chandra Mohan Jain, now known as Acharya Rajneesh[1] to stay at his ashram in Nairobi, completely anonymous.
She would go on to stay and teach about Hindu supremacy. Eventually, in 1976, Nazi hunters exposed Devi’s location in Nairobi. Just as she was about to meet with authorities to discuss being charged, a Tamil leftist named C. Rabishan, a radical of the Indian “Red Summer” of the early 70’s, assassinated her before she could go to trial.
[1] Known later OTL as Osho.
AH.com Thread, “WI: Savitri Devi at the Red Fort Trials
Krishna said:
Ma’at said:
SkaelingQueen said:
Krishna said:
SkaelingQueen said:
Krishna said:
SkaelingQueen said:
Krishna said:
NestorMakhno said:
Excerpt from The History of India: 1900-1950, generic history textbook, c. 2003
Subhas Chandra Bose would come out of his American trips in 1936 and 1939 with a new and strong appreciation for the American system of socialism. As opposed to the Soviet Union, Bose saw “a fully industrialized democracy in action, a productive functioning society from the ashes of civil war.” He was especially intrigued by the technocracy employed by the higher functions of government.
Upon his return, he sought to push Congress for a similar approach, especially keeping in mind the early success of the American Socialist Labor Party in building mass support. However, while the Congress Socialist Party and the Communist Party of India (allied in a Comintern popular front) backed his proposal, both Nehru and Gandhi felt that aligning themselves to Comintern would remove their autonomy.
Eventually the difference would cause Bose and the Congress Socialists to split from the mainline Congress. In 1939, Bose and PC Joshi announced that the newly independent Congress Socialist Party would merge with the Communist Party to form the Indian Workers’ Party, with the aim of supporting Comintern action.
[...]
The formation of the Franco-British Union and the declaration of war in 1942 was shortly followed by Lord Linlithgow’s declaration that India would join the war effort on behalf of the newly formed Union. Congress president Jawaharlal Nehru and Muslim League President Muhammad Ali Jinnah announced that their respective organizations would back the declaration of war.
Nehru and Jinnah had, just prior to the war, secured a promise of full dominion from Atlee cabinet member Staffold Cripps, in exchange for Congress support for the planned declaration of war.
However,Mohandas Gandhi strongly opposed the measure, (despite Nehru’s pleas) as he had wanted full independence. Gandhi would announce that he would oppose any wartime mobilization, despite the announcement of Congress support. Frustrated, Nehru and fellow Congress leader Vallebhbhai Patel attempted to convince Gandhi otherwise, but he refused anything less than full independence.
Bose, having spent months with General Secretary Bhagat Singh helping raise Indian volunteer battalions for the Comintern war effort, supported the declaration of war, as did much of the Indian Civil Service.
Gandhi, with other allies, attempted to enact civil disobedience with his allies without Congress support, straining the relationship between him and Nehru. Gandhi was subsequently imprisoned for an extended period during the war.
[...]
Rash Behari Bose, an Indian nationalist exiled in Tokyo (no relation to Chandra Bose), formed the Indian National Army at a 1942 conference to serve as the military arm of the Japanese backed Indian Independence League for the express purpose of Indian independence . Its ranks expanded with Indian POWs captured during the early Japanese campaign in South-East Asia, under the command of Mohan Singh. In a second conference, Bose invited Asit Krishna Mukherjee to join the League.
A Bengali Brahmin, Mukherjee lived in the Soviet Union for several years, but soon grew to despise Marxism, and instead admired Hitler and Nazism. With his newspaper, The New Mercury (partly funded by the German Consulate in Calcutta), he would draw parallels between Nazism and the burgeoning ideology of Hindutva, advocated by VD Shavakar’s Hindu Sahabha (itself pro-Nazi) and K.B. Hedgewar's Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Indeed, he would form contacts with both organizations through the late 30’s. His destiny would forever change in 1939, when he met Savitri Devi.
Born Maximiani Portas in Lyon, France, of French, Greek, Italian, and English descent, she would become heavily involved with Greek nationalism in the 1920’s. However, she gradually distanced herself from Christianity and grew to become fascinated with the idea of an Hellensitic Aryan culture that influenced the ancient Greeks. To that end, she immigrated to India in 1930, and soon fell in love with Hinduism, which she regarded as a pure Aryan religion. She took the name Savitri Devi (or “Sun Goddess”). Devi became involved in the Hindutva organizations like the Mahasabha and the RSS. Her affinity grew when she volunteered at Swami Satyanand’s Hindu Mission in Calcutta. She impressed the Swami by her determination to not allow the last “pagan Aryan” religion to fall to Judaism and claimed Adolf Hitler was going to restored Aryan rule and religion. The Swami (himself an admirer of Hitler) told her that Hitler was the reincarnation of Vishnu. Devi would go on to write A Warning to Hindus in 1939 as an attempt to rally Hindus as an “Aryan religion” against the forces of foreign, Jewish influences.
After their marriage in 1940, Mukherjee and Devi became involved in German intelligence efforts in India, despite India not being at war at the time, with the goal of a Hindu fascist state in time. Through this work and the New Mercury, they managed to get their ally VD Savarkar, already pro-Nazi, and the Hindu Mahasabha to publicly oppose a war with Germany and support a Hindu fascist state. Devi also created contacts with Japan and RS Bose in Tokyo.
When the declaration of war was sent, The New Mercury was shut down and the Hindu Mahasabha was outlawed for pro-Nazi sentiments. However, Mukherjee and Devi were smuggled out into pro-Japanese China, and from there, to Tokyo to join the Indian Independence League.
By the end of 1942, significant differences between Bose and the Japanese led to his removal and the appointment of Mukherjee as the new head of the League. In February, 1943, Mukherjee announced the formation of the “Provisional Government of Free India” (Arzi Hakumat-e-Azad Hind in Hindustani, shortened to “Azad Hind”) with himself as Head of State, his wife as “Minister in Charge of Women's Organization”, and in a move meant to attract Hindu nationalists to the cause, VD Savarkar (recently arrived in Tokyo after the Hindu Mahasabha was banned) as Minister of Internal and Religious Affairs, along with a revived Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj)
[...]
Gandhi’s death in prison exacerbated tensions within the war alliance. While the official cause of death was tuberculosis, some were skeptical, believing there was a possible cover-up of the real death. Not helping matters was a news article in The Daily Telegraph purporting Deputy Prime Minister Winston Churchill had celebrated the death.
While Churchill denied this, his staunch opposition to Indian independence and active contempt for Gandhi led some to believe he had orchestrated the murder.
These tensions and conspiracies may have led to a splinter had news of the Japanese breakthrough at Imphal not come out.
With their victories in the Northeast and the formal establishment of Azad Hind rule in India proper, MS Golwalkar, Hedgewar’s successor as RSS head, was convinced to pledge the support of the RSS to the Azad Hind Fauj and was made into a cabinet member under Mukherjee. The combined radicalized memberships of the RSS and Shavakar’s Hindu Mahasabha bolstered the INA as they supported the Japanese advanced
[...]
With the Japanese capture of Calcutta and the mass evacuation of the local government to Darjeeling, Azad Hind would be consolidated in the Bengal region, with the command headquartered in the city to coordinate the continued Indian campaign.
With a state mostly established, the central government would move to enact their Hindutva policies.
Immediately, policies against Muslims were drawn up, modeled on the German Nuremberg laws. Muslims were excluded from local government and eventually expelled from most occupations. Muslims were excluded from certain establishments, Muslim Friday prayers were banned, and vegetarianism was strictly enforced.
Along with this, mobs of Hindu nationalists would enact pogroms against Muslim communities, attacking them on the streets, destroying mosques and burning their homes and businesses. Christian missions were also destroyed. “Hindu Missions” were established to convert Muslims and Christians into Hinduism, sometimes by force. “Agitators” and “communist spies” were sent to hard labor alongside POWs.
For Devi, this was not enough, and through her influence with Mukherjee, began to enact measures to indicate their admiration for Nazism. RS Bose’s initial tiger flag design for the Azad Hind was replaced with one featuring a left-facing swastika. A mandate was sent strictly enforcing the caste system, with lighter skinned Brahmins being preferred, and Dalits being excluded from most establishments. Caste could also be “reassigned”, primarily off skin color.
Post-war communiques revealed further plans, including the eventual eradication of Muslims and dark-skinned Dalits and encouraging European immigration to further “Aryanize” Brahmins, as well as the formal recognition of Hitler as “Kalki”, Eradicator of Worlds. Their Japanese handlers and advisors (with some exceptions) declined to reign in these actions, the reigning Kohoda being themselves biased against Abrahamic religions and indifferent towards internal colorism and racism
For traditional nationalists Savarkar and Golwalkar, however, Devi’s actions were becoming increasingly deranged and divorced from their ideology, and they attempted to protest some of these more extreme measures. However, Mukherjee would defend them as “necessary” for the preservation of “Aryan Hindu culture”
[...]
Despite his frustration with the British response to Gandhi’s death, ultimately, Nehru would rally Indians of all political stripes to set aside their differences and fight the Japanese to ensure that their tyranny did not extend to the whole country. Jinnah, horrified by reports of the pogroms and the discrimination, would also rally Muslims to join the army and fight to free their countrymen.
Once estranged, Nehru and Jinnah would ultimately form a united front. A photo features the two formally shaking hands, visiting bombing victims in Madras, and speaking on continuing the war.
Meanwhile, at the request of Bose and their organizer in the Soviet Union Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, many Indian IVA battalions were withdrawn from the Eastern Front, and returned to India to fight for their homeland. Bose and Bhagat Singh would take command of these returning battalions, and would support the Royal Indian Army.
[...]
The ultimate death kneel to the Azad Hind was the famine caused by the ineffective distribution of food and the appropriation for land. This and the increasing racist distribution caused a collapse in public support for the government, bolstering communist fifth columns to sabotage the war effort even further.
Mukherjee and Devi evacuated to Japanese held Rangoon in mid-1945, but Shavakar choose to stay and led the forces. This would prove disastrous when his headquarters was bombed, killing him.
MS Golwalkar, who also stayed behind, was captured outside of Calcutta by a squadron of IVA volunteers. Shortly after, Mukherjee flew back to Tokyo to reorganize army strategy. On November 20th, 1945, the plane Mukherjee was on was reported missing, likely shot down by an American garrison.
With the British approaching Rangoon, Devi soon used her German intelligence contacts to flee and reach escaped Nazis in the South African territory of Namibia.
[...]
With the Japanese expelled, Nehru immediately worked with new Viceroy Lord Mountbatten to ensure a smooth transition to home rule along with rebuilding Bengal from the damage of the war.
However, many looked towards Bose as a hero for his leadership of the Indian Comintern units. Despite supporting the declaration of war, he would return to an opposition to dominionization and would agitate for complete independence.
When members of the Indian Navy mutinied with support from the Indian Workers’ Party, talks accelerated and a Commonwealth plan was established with Nehru as Prime Minister and liberal C. Rajagopalachari as Governor-General. This would ensure a stable country not torn by war or revolution.
[...]
[Short feature next to the article]
The Death of Savitri Devi
Devi comfortably settled in a Namibian farm, where she would regale fellow Axis war criminals with her ideals of Hitler as the reincarnation of Vishnu and the symbol of Aryan paganism against the Jewish world orthodoxy. She would also entertain visiting neo-Nazis and old associates from the INA, and publish manifestos (underground, of course) about the evils of communism, the righteousness of Nazism, and defend her actions in India.
In 1961, Palestinian Shin Bet agents, with the help of the American Section 1, captured Josef Mengele in his large farm to stand trial. This prompted other Nazis to flee. In Devi’s case, she was invited by a former INA affiliate named Chandra Mohan Jain, now known as Acharya Rajneesh[1] to stay at his ashram in Nairobi, completely anonymous.
She would go on to stay and teach about Hindu supremacy. Eventually, in 1976, Nazi hunters exposed Devi’s location in Nairobi. Just as she was about to meet with authorities to discuss being charged, a Tamil leftist named C. Rabishan, a radical of the Indian “Red Summer” of the early 70’s, assassinated her before she could go to trial.
[1] Known later OTL as Osho.
It was easy to extrapolate from her OTL beliefs and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Warning_to_the_Hindus
It's a name given by an earlier incarnation that wasn't as Hindutva influenced. It stuck, though had it lasted longer, they probably would've changed it.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Is Gandhi going to have less than-ideal reputation in India ITTL? Because he opposed what most see as a just war?
Not anymore than his opposition caused OTL, given he died before the Japanese entered India proper. He's viewed as either a tragic figure or a maytr.