Well, last week video on the timeghost channel showed how the nazis rose in 1933 and how the KPD while influent, was not great enought to be elect.
Let's say that Hitler get's killed in the beer hall putsch and most of the nazis remain self exiled, so the KPD takes over Germany, how does Ernst Thalmann leads the country? Can we expect a german stalin, a german lenin or Thalmann was someone different? Could Thalmann breaks with moscow and claim that he is the real leader of communism?
My own belief is that the only way to get a KPD-led Germany is conquest by the Red Army. In any event, I am sure that the absence of Hitler is not going to bring it about. I'll recycle two old posts of mine:
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(1) How are the Communists going to gain power in Germany? Obviously not by free elections, as I noted at
https://www.alternatehistory.com/disc...37&postcount=9 And the conditions for a successful Communist revolution simply did not exist. Germany in the 1930's was not Russia in 1917--even apart from the obvious fact that it was not at war.
Unlike Russia in 1917 there was a strong middle class opposed to Communism and a strong reformist labor movement represented by the SPD. (The employed working class largely continued to vote for the SPD even in 1932--the Communists were mainly the party of the unemployed, and it is really hard to bring down a government with a general strike of the unemployed...) And of course the military are hardly likely to look kindly on a Communist attempt at a takeover. (In Russia in 1917, of course, the military had been largely destroyed, partly as a result of Bolshevik agitation--of the kind which appealed to war-weary Russian "peasants in uniform" but it hardly likely to undermine the Reichswehr in the 1930's.) Moreover the prospects of the KPD would probably become even weaker after 1933 as the economy improved (as it would with or without Hitler--there was a pretty general world economic recovery from 1933 to 1937).
The Communists never came close to winning control of Germany, and the reason is *not* that Hitler got support that would otherwise have gone to the KPD. in fact the NSDAP attracted few voters of the sort who would otherwise favor the KPD. "Relatively few KPD voters switched to the Nazis, despite a popular stereotype. Workers were far less likely than middle-class elements to be members of the NSDAP or to vote for the party...The massive rise in the NSDAP vote between 1930 and 1932 left the combined SPD/KPD vote more or less solid, again suggesting that previously organised workers were more immune to Nazi propaganda than many other groups in German society."
https://books.google.com/books?id=deGGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA25
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(2) Richard F. Hamilton in *Who Voted for Hitler?* has concluded through an analysis of election results in fourteen cities, that the NSDAP had a higher-than-average vote in districts inhabited by the upper and upper-middle classes.
https://books.google.com/books?id=dcX_AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA219 In fact, in some cities, such as Berlin, Hamburg, Essen, and Dortmund, such wards were the very best wards for the NSDAP in the city. It hardly seems likely that in the absence of the NSDAP such voters would turn to the KPD.
Another major source of NSDAP support was farmers (especially Protestant ones--Catholic farmers largely stuck with the Zentrum or the BVP)--again a group unlikely to go for the KPD.
The NSDAP did enjoy substantial working-class support. However, it was more in areas of artisan or cottage industry than in heavy-industrial areas like the Ruhr or large cities. "More than half of all those registered as 'workers' in the occupational census of 1925 lived in small towns or villages of under 10,000 inhabitants. Thus there existed significant potential for Nazi success without that success undermining traditional working-class support for the SPD (or the KPD), which had been largely concentrated in the big cities. "
https://books.google.com/books?id=deGGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA27
In short, the NSDAP's strongest support was in segments of society unlikely to support the KPD, even if there had been no NSDAP.
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I realize that this does not answer your question of what a KPD-led Germany would look like if the KDP
did somehow gain power in 1933. (I guess my answer to that would be that by 1933 the party was pretty thoroughly Stalinized, so it would follow the Soviet pattern.) But I do think it is important not to contribute, however unintentionally, to the "Hitler saved Germany from Bolshevism" myth.
