A Phoenix From the Ashes

while back I did a TL about what would have happened if Germany had won the First World War. Unfortunately that has died a death, so I am going to do something different and a bit more modern (the PoD is in 1930, instead of 1917).

[FONT=&quot]PoD:[/FONT][FONT=&quot] Hitler is assassinated in 1930 by a German communist. As a result, the NSDAP descends into chaos, with various different factions emerging. This leads to a very different type of regime taking power in Germany in the early 1930s...[/FONT]


Germany; 1932, was a nation on the brink of war with itself. Since the Wall Street Crash of 1929, rising domestic dissent had led to an upsurge in political violence. Multiple public figures including the industrialist, Ferdinand Porsche and the right-wing politician Adolf Hitler were assassinated by extremists on both ends of the political spectrum between 1929 and 1932.
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Above: Adolf Hitler (April 20th 1889-April 9th 1930), picture taken during the First Great War[/FONT]


The death of Hitler in April 1930 led to the break-up of the right-wing coalition Hitler had headed, known as the NSDAP. A rump party under Josef Goebbels managed to hold together but many of the more socialist leaning elements of the party drifted away. The most notable and significant of these was Ernest Rohm, who had just returned from South America (where he served as a military advisor), who headed the NSDAP’s main paramilitary force; the SA. With the death of Hitler and the breakdown of the NSDAP in the latter half of 1930, Rohm and the SA defected to the Communist KPD.
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The defection of the SA decisively swung the balance of power on the streets in favour of the KPD and the party made impressive gains in the September 1930 elections, where they gained twenty percent of the vote and gained over one hundred seats.

[FONT=&quot]For the time being however, the KPD was unable to capitalize on its success as Chancellor Heinrich Bruning used Article 48 of the constitution, which gave President Hindenburg the power to pass ‘emergency decrees’, to sustain his administration. His attempts to reboot the German economy simply worsened the deepening recession and led to widespread poverty. As a result, he was nicknamed the 'Hunger Chancellor'.
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[FONT=&quot]Above: Heinrich Bruning; the Hunger Chancellor[/FONT]

Tensions continued to mount in Germany throughout 1931, with hundreds being killed in clashes between the SA reinforced Red militia and the police and army. Despite the growing threat the KPD posed to law and order, Hindenburg did not move against it. The simple truth was that in a fight between the KPD and the Wehrmacht, there was no guarantee the Wehrmacht would come out on top.
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[FONT=&quot]Above: The German government was unable to cope with mass civil unrest between 1930 and 1932
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[FONT=&quot]To make matters worse, the presidential election of 1932 was coming up and it was becoming increasingly clear that the KPD could win the election. The KPD used a combination of mass intimidation in many areas and the promise of major reform, which following the breakup of the NSDAP, only they could provide, to drum up support for their candidate, Ernst Thalmann. This was in spite of efforts by the government to discredit Thalmann as a 'Moscovite puppet', due to Thalmann's commitment to a close relationship with the Soviet Union.
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[FONT=&quot]Above: Ernest Thalmann, the head of the German KPD. Was he a puppet of Moscow?
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Alarmed by the growing power of the KPD, the head of the army, Kurt von Hammerstein held a series of top-secret meetings with both President Hindenburg and other senior military officials to form a plan against the KPD. In its essence, the plan involved rigging the election and using the Wehrmacht to restore order if the KPD attempted to launch a coup. As worried as Hammerstein about the possibility of a KPD takeover, Hindenburg quickly agreed to the plan.

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[FONT=&quot]Above: A few of the conspirators in Potsdam in late 1931[/FONT]
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In preparation for the expected trouble, Hindenburg also authorised the training of special Handlungstrupp, or action squads. They were units of plain-clothed men who were both loyal to the regime and trained like a normal soldier. Effectively they were a means to get around the Treaty of Versailles, which had formally limited the German army to just 100, 000 men. Training of the Handlungstrupp quickly gathered pace and by March 1932, it is estimated there were close to 50, 000 of them.

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[FONT=&quot]Above: The Handlungstrupp gave many young German men the chance of work and with it some degree of economic security.[/FONT]
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On the day of the first round of the presidential ballot, March 10th, soldiers were stationed outside many polling stations in areas where the KPD was powerful. Soldiers frequently followed voters into the polling booths and there were several incidents of the ballots being ‘examined’ by Handlungstrupp and Wehrmacht officials they were sent off. By the evening of March 10th, there were riots in several German cities over what was considered a rigged election.
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Despite the massive fraud, Hindenburg ‘only’ gained 70% of the votes compared to Thalmann’s 22%. Enraged by the result, but not particularly surprised, Thalmann and other senior members of the KPD held a secret meeting in Essen in the early hours of March 11th. They agreed that the only viable option now was armed revolution against the Weimar Republic. With several major cities already in the hands of the Communists and the divided SPD in chaos, they were the only major left-wing organisation in Germany. Their logic followed they could rely on the support of a large portion of the German people.
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By March 12th 1932, Germany was on the brink of civil war.

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All critique is welcome, particuarly spelling as I am terrible at proof reading.

Enjoy

Edit: Is there any way to edit the pictures to make them less massive? I've already had to delete one I had planned to put in because it was too big.
 
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A communist Germany will certainly mean a very different WWII.

The Entente powers will surely be worried if civil war erupts in Germany and then a few years later in Spain (will there still be a Spanish Civil War ITTL?)
 
And here is the second update
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[FONT=&quot]At 10 o’clock on March 13th, Ernest Thalmann appeared on every KPD controlled radio frequency in the country. In a brilliant ten minute speech, he declared that Germany was in a state of revolution. The Weimar Republic, the Reichstag and the Wehrmacht were to be dissolved while warrants for the death of Hindenburg, Hammerstein and several other leading members of the Potsdam Conspiracy.
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[FONT=&quot]Within five hours of Thalmann’s speech, a series of carefully planned uprisings took place across the whole of Germany. The industrial Rhineland and the Ruhr quickly fell into the hands of the Communists, along with the cities of Hamburg, Lubeck, Dresden and Leipzig. A narrow strip of land between Dortmund and the sea also fell easily into the Communists lap.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Above: KPD agitators in Essen in early 1932
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[FONT=&quot]In other parts of Germany, the uprisings went less well for the Communists; the strongly Catholic Bavaria and Silesia remained loyal to the government and the concentration of Wehrmacht and Handlungstrupp personnel around Berlin prevented the city from falling into Communist hands (although fighting would continue for days within the city). Crucially, large sections of the centre of the country including Frankfurt-on-Main and Erfurt remained in government hands.[/FONT]

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[FONT=&quot]By the morning of the 16th March 1932, even the most optimistic members of the KPD Central Committee were forced to admit the uprisings had not succeeded as fully as they had hoped. The German government remained intact and the mass defections among the Wehrmacht had failed to materialise; the Communists were going to have to fight and win a civil war against the German government (who were termed the Nationalists by the British and American press).[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Despite the failure of the revolution to secure immediate victory, Thalmann went on the radio again on March 17th to declare the Union of Soviet German Republics. The new state was immediately recognised by the Soviet Union, but they were only universally recognised independent state to do so. For the moment, Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald of Britain and President Albert Lebrun of France both buried their heads in the sand for the moment.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot] Above: Neither Lebrun nor his counterpart in Britain; Ramsey McDonald, were willing to intervene to stop the growing chaos in Germany
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[FONT=&quot]In the first weeks after the revolution, hundreds of volunteers entered Germany through the relatively porous border between the USGR and the Low Countries. Some also arrived by ship (mostly from Britain) but this was risky due to the weakness of the USGR’s Navy. These volunteers also brought with them arms and supplies, and were rapidly organised into International Brigades. As March faded into April, the first international army formed on the battle-lines in western Germany, preparing for battle with its Nationalist opponents.[/FONT]
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Above: Spanish memebers of the International Brigade posing for a photograph in Dortmund, April 1932

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SVeach94: No there won't be a Holocaust in this timeline, thank god.

Gridley: Whoever said Germany was going to go Communist? They still have to win the civil war.
As for Britain and France, their attitudes at this point are addressed in this update. Effectively, both states are refusing to intervene themselves but are only half-heartedly attempting to stop their citizens joining the International Brigade. Italy's stance will be addressed in a future update.

putins apprentice: Thank you for the support?

Again, any feedback and criticism is welcome (but please, no flaming)
 
Subscribed!

Edit: Is there any way to edit the pictures to make them less massive? I've already had to delete one I had planned to put in because it was too big.

Maybe others know some neater tricks; the only images I've ever posted here have been files I uploaded from my own computer. To come up with versions within the limit has been a matter of copying the originals into Photoshop, (manipulating them there in other ways if necessary), and saving new versions that have been downsized accordingly. With Photoshop one has the "Save to Web" option that allows varying the size and seeing what that does to quality before saving the new version.
 
Here is the next update. It involves military history, which isn't particuarly my strong point so any advice on the plausiability on what I am writing is greatly appreciated.

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With the failure of the March Revolution, Thalmann and Rohm (who became the USGR’s Chief of Staff) began planning for extended operations against the Nationalists. The first major they had was to link up the main body of the USGR with the Communist hold-outs in Hamburg, Lubeck, Dresden and Leipzig. Although Thalmann would have liked to have waited for more forces to become available to them, Rohm insisted on pushing the first offensive operations as quickly as possible. This was partly due to his personality, but also the analysis that the USGR did not have the resources to sustain a prolonged fight with the German government. They needed to act now.

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The Red Army in early April was composed of about twenty divisions, consisting of former SA men, Red Militias and defecting Wehrmacht troops. The most high ranking Wehrmacht officer to join the Communists was Lieutenant-Colonel Guderain, who was quickly promoted to the rank of Major General and given the task of squeezing the Nationalists away from the North Sea coast.
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Above: Although a succesful general, Guderain's practise of wearing his old Wehrmacht uniform and his moderate stance on socialism increasingly led to suspicision from his superiors


Guderain was from an army family, but unlike the majority of his colleagues, had been totally disillusioned by the incompetence and corruption in the Weimar Republic. Thalmann had first contacted him in early 1931 and through a series of letters, slowly turned him into a moderate socialist who was willing to work with the
Guderain was an excellent commander and using truck hauled artillery (as a crude substitute for proper tanks) was able to cut to pieces the weak Handlungstrupp and Wehrmacht units defending the cities of Bremen and Bremhaven. Bremen fell on April 12th and Bremenhaven a week later. On April 20th, the advance units of Guderain’s army made contact with Red Army troops operating out of Hamburg. Guderain had achieved his main objective in less than a month.
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Above: Nationalist troops retreating away from Lubeck

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Following this triumph, Guderain was now given an additional task by Rohm; the capture of Kiel and the Kiel Canal. Again, Guderain moved with skill and speed, reaching the Canal before May Day and reaching the Danish border within two weeks. Unfortunately, when he turned his army to siege Kiel, he found the city defended by a force of German marines and supported by artillery from several of the Nationalist Navy’s big ships.An attempt by Guderain to attack the city was beaten off with heavy casulaties on May 18th, allowing the Nationalists to begin withdrawing their forces from the city by sea. To appease Rohm, Guderain launched a series of half-hearted attacks against the transports removing the Nationalist troops from the city, but these quickly became too costly due to artillery fire from the big ships off the port. His nose bloodied, Guderain then was content simply to wait until the Nationalists fled from the city rather than risk more of his men or further damage to the port itself.
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Despite Rohm’s mounting frustration, Guderain was proved correct and by the end of May, the last Nationalist forces had been withdrawn from Kiel. The Red Army then entered the city in triumph with only a handful of die-hard Nationalists putting any form of resistance. The Wehrmacht had however committed systematic sabotage to the port facilities, meaning the Communists had to spend months clearing them out before ships could pass through the Kiel Canal again. [FONT=&quot]
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[FONT=&quot]Above: Between them, the Nationalists and Communists reduced much of Kiel to rubble.
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Its interesting so far, but I do have great difficulty watching France just sit there while the Communists take over Germany...which is such an obvious threat to her.
 
Its interesting so far, but I do have great difficulty watching France just sit there while the Communists take over Germany...which is such an obvious threat to her.

It isn't quite as simple as that; Lebrun has a big Communist movement in France to contend with, and the Nationalists are mutating into a reborn Second Reich. Basically Lebrun doesn't really have a faction he can support and be gurranteed it will not be a threat to France. For the moment he is picking the Communists just to avoid trouble at home.
 
Apart from spelling his name wrong - it is Guderian, not Guderain - I have difficulty seeing him joining with a communist movement, especially in the case here where there is a legitimate German government. I would be interested in hearing other opinions though.
 
I guess I should have said something earlier about the plausibility of Roehm joining the KPD.

Many of his Stormtroopers did vacillate like that between the extremist parties, but it's a little hard for me to accept someone as deeply committed to Naziism as Roehm as we knew him OTL involving himself with the Communists, or the Communists accepting him; this needs a bit of explanation!

Sure, compared to Hitler himself, and as seen through the wary eyes of the industrialists and old-line conservatives in the Army, Roehm stood somewhat to the Left; he was liable to insist on bringing down the old ruling classes and raising up a kind of Naziism that was rather more collectivist and working-class.

That said--Roehm and the SA were still Nazis. Still racist, still glorifying violence as such, still nationalist in the most chauvinistic sense, still authoritarian.

If they'd thought otherwise they'd have joined the Communists from the beginning, and stayed with them.

The Communist Party was perfectly capable of accepting someone who'd dabbled with the Brownshirts but was basically motivated by a desire to belong to some gang of thugs with delusions of grandeur; they just enrolled them in their own muscle gangs, and hoped that the finer points of Leninist doctrine would gradually dawn on them. But to do that at the higher theoretical level that would allow Roehm's conversion would be to pretty much discard ideology itself.

Unless Roehm had some sort of Saul at Damascus moment and embraced internationalism, the universal equality of humankind, the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, and the notion that ideally anyway no one was supposed to be beating up anyone, and if they were going to be beating up someone it should be the bosses and not scapegoats foreign or domestic. But then would Roehm the Communist convert carry over any of his former followers?

Mind you in a way it makes sense that the KPD scorned to compromise and form a coalition with the SPD, but then turned around and recruited disgruntled actual Nazis even OTL. They were much more on the lookout for being ideologically seduced by moderates.

I guess I just have a bad feeling about any sort of movement that can accept Roehm as I know him as a member in good standing. I want to know this is a different sort of Roehm--but then politically speaking he'd hardly be the man we know OTL at all, and would take no followers with him.

Frankly I'd rather see the timeline talking in terms of some other general of the Communist uprising, someone that perhaps we'd never heard of at all OTL, than trying to white---um, red--wash Roehm!
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On the IT front, I notice you are posting multiple pictures in one post. Since I can only post one per post the way I do it, I guess you know a lot more about how AH handles graphics than I do!

However most of the pix in your last post are invisible to me.
 
Apart from spelling his name wrong - it is Guderian, not Guderain - I have difficulty seeing him joining with a communist movement, especially in the case here where there is a legitimate German government. I would be interested in hearing other opinions though.

Ah damn, thanks for telling me.

As for him joing the Communist movement, I'll admit I was not particuarly happy with the idea but he seems marginally more likely to join the Communists than Manstein.

Could anyone suggest a more plausiable candidate?

I'm portraying him as a moderate socialist and I'll probably include an excerpt of a biography of him later on in the timeline, which will explain his actions better.

I suspect that Thalmann would win Guderian over by promising to expand the size of the army and restore its honoured position in German society, which the Weimar Republic seems incapable of doing. Any comments on how plausiable this is are welcome.
 
Goebbels was actually very far to the left, often playing with the idea of Communist-Nazi unity and actually tried to ingratiate himself with the Soviets after the war. Also, according to an account given by Otto Strasser, he pretended to be in favour of a left-wing coup against Hitler before running back to master with his tail between his legs. According to Strasser, he was 'always more Catholic than the Pope' when it came to leftism within the NSDAP.

The most likely leader of a left-wing spilt would probably be the organisational strongman Gregor Strasser, with his idealistic brother Otto trailing behind with his two-men and a dog left-wing Nazi group, the so-called Black Front or the Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten. They had a awesome symbol which suits this TL perfectly.
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I'd say alliance between the KDP and a left-wing National Socialist Party, lead by either Roehm or Gregor Strasser would be more likely than the Brownshirts simply converting en masse to the KDP.

However, this is an interesting premise. There was a strong trend in German Nationalism after WWI that saw Bolshevism as essentially an opportunity to get Germany back on it's feet and restart the war with the Western Powers, a view iterated by no less a figure in Germany's intellectual elite than Oswald Spengler. Lenin himself counted on the support of these types in the 'inevitable' conflict with the Entente that would arise once Russia trounced Poland. Luckily, Poland trounced Russia. Hitler, of course, stifled this tendency with his overt hostility to Russia.
 
Goebbels was actually very far to the left, often playing with the idea of Communist-Nazi unity and actually tried to ingratiate himself with the Soviets after the war..


That must have been a wee bit difficult as he killed himself just hours after Hitler?:confused:
 
The SA joining the KPD (in 1930!) is beyond ludicrous. It boggles the mind that anyone can believe this is plausible.

They defect to fighting for what they were previously engaged in a fight to prevent, from every ideological angle, from all historical precedent. It's difficult to express just how nonsensical it is because there is no possible coherent argument for it to actually argue against.
 
After reading a few of the comments, I have decided to suspend writing of this TL for the moment. This is not anything personal but you are right; a lot of the stuff I wrote is ASB. This has arisen simply because I did not plan this timeline as well as I should have done and I drew too many conclusions from too little research.

I intend to restart this TL at some point, but in hindsight I don't really have enough time (exams) to do the necessary research and planning to make it work.
 
After reading a few of the comments, I have decided to suspend writing of this TL for the moment. This is not anything personal but you are right; a lot of the stuff I wrote is ASB. This has arisen simply because I did not plan this timeline as well as I should have done and I drew too many conclusions from too little research.

I intend to restart this TL at some point, but in hindsight I don't really have enough time (exams) to do the necessary research and planning to make it work.

I'd look forward to it, like I said, it's an interesting premise to have a Nazi-Communist alignment, but a full merger is too far out.

Nice try though.
 
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