"Our Struggle": What If Hitler Had Been a Communist?
- Thread starter The Red
- Start date
IOTL the real isolationist period in US foreign relations was under FDR. Previous Republican administrations had played important parts in the various trade and arms conferences since the war. Historiography, largely written by FDR fans, has tended to ignore this.
Yeah there is a certain whiggishness when it comes to FDR (as with many prominent historical figures) to present his internationalism as something that was always there when in fact it only really seems to have gathered strength after the immediate post-Munich optimism had soured. He had diplomatic achievements prior to that time but they were usually economically motivated; Good Neighbour Policy, recognition of the USSR etc. The domestic sphere was always the primary focus before 1938, arguably 1940, and to be fair he did have a lot on his plate. You can't really justify a crusade for world peace when the priorties of your legislative agenda include "avert a famine."
I'm pretty worried that this debacle is going to legitimise fascism and far-right governance in general in the eyes of the West. "Reasonable" fascists like Franco and Mussolini getting whitewashed is going to send the Overtone Window spinning off in directions I very much would be disturbed by.
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Combined industrial potential of USSR and DAR will be more than enough to bash capitalist and imperialist. And 18 million soldiers that died in OTL will show total war to Japanese and Americans. Usa will not like to lose millions and millions of soldiers.
What? Libya? That was just a tiny bit of ethnic cleansing. It's not like all arabs were killed. Just the ones that were unwilling to italianize properly.
This is very much a tongue-in-cheek / in-world statement. Please no ban.
xsampa
Banned
Furthermore, support for white governments-in-exile against Arab or African rebels will naturally appeal to the British and American far right
You make deals with who you need to in order to win. Just ask Roosevelt and Churchill.
There's a pretty large gap between an alliance of desperation with a tyrannical dictatorship that's nonetheless facing a genocidal onslaught from your mutual enemy and supporting colonial regimes that make up the minority of a country's population. It'd be worse than supporting South Vietnam; it may have been filled with colonial collaborators but they were also members of the native population in question unlike, say, Rhodesia.
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Mussolini was pretty popular with the ruling elites IOTL as was Franco, at least to begin with. Even Hitler had Ford, Rothermere, etc. France had a pretty large homegrown far-right which enabled Vichy to slip into place almost overnight although the relative youth of the Third Republic's institutions didn't help, even if they did hold out for longer than might have been anticipated during the thirties. The institutions in the UK and US were older and stronger and the active far-right there was fringe and usually led by messianic figures like Coughlin or Mosley who weren't exactly ideal coalition builders but war is a potent source of political shake-ups and although the Third Republic had to ultimately be brought down by foreign military might, no capitalist system is invulnerable to fascism.
"Did I say Italianisation? I meant de-radicalisation! Libya must be freed from the scourge of Sultan-Galiev fanaticism!"
It's worth remembering that those 18 million losses caused the German economy to implode and left the Soviets in a perilous state which they arguably never recovered from. The DAR and the USSR are a formidable alliance but, to quote Maurice Thorez, "everything isn't possible."
This video sums it up fairly well although I would recommend reading Glantz's Stumbling Colossus as well. It goes beyond exposing Suvorov's hackery to provide a comprehensive look at the state of the Red Army prior to Barbarossa.
Certainly, there have been a couple of excellent maps so far courtesy of @Tsar of New Zealand
Revolutionary Activity in Germany, 1918-24
Central Europe, 1936
Gary Johnson is a guy with a name so generic that I could probably say he was the President in the present day ITTL and people would presume I'd just made him up to avoid butterflies.
Frightening Bob wouldn't have bothered about that back in the day.
Naturally there's the anti-imperialist line and I could see them indulging Pan-Arabism as well to a certain extent although I'd don't think they would go as far as to use Sultan-Galiev when they have their own Islamic populations who might pick up on such ideas. They might come to "incorrect" conclusions. I could see the DAR taking him off their hands however, he fits into German Ideology a bit better than Marxism-Leninism.
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Chapter CXI
The Communists do him an injustice by calling him a renegade, as do the Social Democrats by calling him a convert. He was an international revolutionary Socialist of the Rosa Luxemburg school, he never denied it.
~ Carl von Ossietzky
Ernst stretched out in the comfy interior state car and tried to relish it for as long as possible. Such indulgences were generally frowned upon these days, particularly outside Social Democratic Party headquarters. Willi Munzenberg’s example of even the most senior public officials making their own way back and forth to work had put most of his colleagues to shame. An exception was made for Ernst’s travelling partner, he wasn’t long after having an operation after all.
Hermann Muller, Foreign Minister and former Chancellor, retained the same austere expression he had worn for much of the train ride back from Geneva. If his health allowed him a state car it also apparently disallowed from flying despite its increasing popularity. Ernst would have preferred to take the plane, if only so that the new experience might have shaken Muller up a bit.
They had been making several such trips back and forth to Geneva for the best part of a year and Ernst had witnessed Muller’s enthusiasm decline throughout. It seemed this would be their last. The World Disarmament Conference opened with so much promise and there had seemed to be a genuine enthusiasm on display, at least from the American and British delegations. Ernst and his fellow members of the German delegation had tried to make their country proud by going in with a similar spirit of optimism but they had soon been made to feel like the ghosts at the feast by the French and Italians. They seemed to be outraged that the Germans were here as equal partners rather than merely receiving another diktat like the one handed down in the Treaty of Versailles.
Muller had been part of the German delegation in 1919 and Ernst could forgive the man’s darkening mood as their delegation was faced with Franco-Italian aggression, then the Japanese and Soviets bickering with one another and eventually the Americans deciding they had lost their enthusiasm for world peace in favour of dealing with their domestic problems. The Foreign Minister was returning with bad news once more, even if it was better to return empty handed than with the humiliating terms brought back from Versailles. At least this time he was less likely to end up with a target on his head.
“We did what we could, we’ll always have that to remember.” Muller said, perhaps to himself. He continued to look out of the window at the expanding metropolis around them. The evening lights were beginning to brighten up the city.
“I think we came out of the whole process looking good. At least better than most.” Ernst replied, hoping to motion towards all that was going well in the capital.
Berlin was growing beyond any anticipated size once more. The expropriations and tax hikes which had seized much of the wealth of the old industrial elites had been plunged into infrastructural development and housing. This had made the economy shudder to life and now unemployment was lower than before the Wall Street Crash. People might not have always enjoyed their new jobs but they were able to eat again.
New urban development projects led the advance of the city and its workers. The formerly middle class clerks and officials who had found themselves without their old status in the wake of the civil war were now living in newly built complexes amongst the proletariat, where they were encouraged to behave like part of a larger family. In many cases they had to build their own complexes over wrecked homes which had once been their own. Ernst was privately glad of this private perk to his role in the conference delegation, it meant the party had stopped encouraging him to give up his own flat.
“That will only make us more paranoid now.” Muller responded. “We might be coming together as a people but the world will be seen to be hardening against us in response. World peace is off the agenda and the Soviets are our only real friends. That isn’t a situation to feel pleasant about.”
“Well we have the new American President to look to, he might be turning inward but he’s still interested in what the National Reconstruction Council has achieved, and the Soviet trade we can enable. If we can get a delegation into the White House we can perhaps turn ourselves towards the Americans and fully recover together.”
“That was my aim as Chancellor.” Muller remarked, Ernst had his attention now but the older man’s face still had that jaded look to it.
Suddenly it turned to confusion. The car was slowing to a halt in the middle of the road. It seemed there was a hold-up despite the fact they should only have been a few moments away from Social Democratic headquarters.
“Police blocking the road.” Their driver called out absentmindedly. A policeman approached the driver’s window but he seemed more concerned about having the end of his shift delayed than anything else. Ernst took it upon himself to find out what was going on.
There were a lot of police huddled around and it soon became clear that they were outnumbered only by the press.
“What's happened?” Ernst asked in his most official tone. The policeman wasn’t forthcoming regardless.
“Can’t say, there’ll be a statement shortly.”
“Are we allowed to get through?”
“No sir, the area’s cordoned off to the general public.”
“The foreign minister is in that car,” Ernst jerked out his arm towards the vehicle for emphasis. “He's expected back at the party headquarters. Would you like to be his reason for being late?
That got the policeman to relent to a satisfying degree. He had a deference as traditional as his Prussian uniform. Ernst wondered if that was something that would survive the United Front. In returning to the car, his animated state seemed to faze Muller as they spoke through the window.
“There’s been some sort of incident. The police won’t let the car through but they say we can pass. Are you alright to walk the rest of the way?”
“With those vultures? Hardly likely. I knew we’d end up having to explain ourselves."
Ernst nodded and went off on his own, reassuring Muller that he would be back to explain what was happening. In spite of having to be escorted through the crowd of photographers and reporters he seemed to slip by unnoticed. To be asked if he was a detective was grating and perplexing at the same time.
The reporters were kept well away from party headquarters and even the numbers of police seemed to thin as Ernst drew nearer. They were replaced by large numbers of distraught party workers, many in tears, some apparently hysterical whilst others huddled around to comfort them.
Hermann Gott was wandering in a circle, it looked like he was lost. Ernst tried to approach him. The man was still the party’s head of internal disciple but it seemed he might be struggling to pull himself together.
“He fell.” He said in a dreadful monotone.
“What? Who fell?”
“Levi, he just fell from the building. We didn’t realise until we heard the cracks.”
“Cracks?”
“He’s dead. Paul Levi’s dead.”
Amidst the confusion Ernst soon found himself just as lost as everyone around. There was a bloody shape lying on the cobblestones. There was no light on it but people were keeping a wide berth. He approached the scene warily. It seemed there was some uncertainty as to whether the body should be moved but someone had had the decency to throw a blanket over the Chancellor.
Ernst felt like he could sob.
Levi had always been an adventurous dreamer but his commitment to the United Front had seemed unshakeable. There had been unconditional decency to the man, one that had seen him welcome Ernst back into the party when many would have disparaged him. Now Levi was gone and the United Front might follow suit.
If it were to survive, he feared there was only man who would be viewed as up to the task.
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The painting is Portrait of a Man by Aleksandr Kolomenkov
So was this a legitimate accident or was this a two shots to the back of the head type "suicide" is the question I've got.