Greater German Democratic Republic

(I'm aware a similar thread exists, however this one I hope will go more indepth since the other one is essentially just a question without background to it)

I've recently joined a forum game wherein each person roleplays a country during the cold war, I've taken over East Germany

I've managed to negotiate (despite being occupied, we Germans are great diplomats apparently) a deal with the Soviet player along the lines of "If the allies do not carry through with the Morgenthau plan on their portion of Germany we'll take steps to ensure East Germany is a feasable challenge to the West"

DanceDanceSovietRevolution.png


This is the German division I've managed to negotiate, yellow goes to Poland, Green is Soviet, Red is East Germany and Purple is West.

If my plan works and I manage to get this going, could it be possible to make East Germany pull its own weight in the comintern? Could we keep people from trying to leave? Could we do anything to get West Germans to flee to us?

any opinions appreciated
 
I've recently joined a forum game wherein each person roleplays a country during the cold war, I've taken over East Germany

I've managed to negotiate (despite being occupied, we Germans are great diplomats apparently) a deal with the Soviet player along the lines of "If the allies do not carry through with the Morgenthau plan on their portion of Germany we'll take steps to ensure East Germany is a feasable challenge to the West"

This is the German division I've managed to negotiate, yellow goes to Poland, Green is Soviet, Red is East Germany and Purple is West.

If my plan works and I manage to get this going, could it be possible to make East Germany pull its own weight in the comintern? Could we keep people from trying to leave? Could we do anything to get West Germans to flee to us?

any opinions appreciated
I'll start with the easiest thing: the Comintern was dissolved in 1943.

The Germans in 1945 were in absolutely no condition to negotiate anything with the Allies, including the Soviet Union, about politics whatsoever.

I do not quite understand your negotiating position which I repeat word for word here: "If the allies do not carry through with the Morgenthau plan on their portion of Germany we'll take steps to ensure East Germany is a feasible challenge to the West" Perhaps the sentence would make sense if you left out the "not" in "do not carry through with the Morgenthau plan". The Morgenthau plan, the forced de-industrialisation of Germany, might have caused the starvation of millions of Germans if it had been carried out. Just supposing the Western Allies carry out this plan in their occupation zones, and Stalin does not carry it out in his, then East Germany might become more attractive than the Western part of Germany, whatever political shape it might have.

But the idea that the Western Allies treat their part of Germany so much harsher than Stalin treats his is very, very farfetched indeed. Not only was Stalin more brutal than the Western politicians, the Soviet Union suffered infinitely heavier losses than the Western Allies in World War II, both in human lives and in material goods.

Then there is the question why Stalin should treat Poland so much worse and Germany so much better than in OTL. After all it was Germany which had attacked and ravaged the Soviet Union in WWII, not Poland. Poland was a victim of German and Soviet aggression in WWII, but nevertheless Polish soldiers fought on the same sides as the Soviets because they considered them the lesser evil. Poland lost large territories to the Soviet Union at the end of WW II and could consider the newly acquired German territories as a compensation. If Poland does not receive these territories, (except for its part of East Prussia), this practically means that the Soviet Union has punished its ally Poland and let its enemy Germany almost go free!

Unless the unthinkable happens and the Western Allies carry out the Morgenthau plan (or some similarly radical plan) while the Soviets do not, West Germany will inevitably become more attractive than East Germany, because democracy allows people a freer life than totalitarian dictatorship and because a market economy provides far more wealth than a command economy. Giving East Germany more territory does not change this fact.

My last point is a bit more speculative, but I am writing it all the same. I do not know for sure what Stalin thought about it in 1945, but it appears to me very unlikely that he seriously thought that people might flee from East Germany to West Germany one day. In theory he believed (like all Marxists) that not only was a socialist economy superior to a "capitalist" one, but also that socialism would one day lead to a communist paradise. People fleeing from socialism to "capitalism" have absolutely no place in this view of the world.

While this was the Marxists' (and therefore Stalin's) theoretical view, Stalin had been wading through streams of blood in the civil war and in the purges himself and he was only too aware that millions of his countrymen had died at the Germans' hands. If you have used so much violence yourself and have seen so much violence from your enemies, making the life of your former enemies attractive for other former enemies is unlikely to be your top priority, especially if the socialist way of life that you are forcing on your former enemies is not just supposed to be attractive anyway, but also supposed to lead to paradise.
 
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