Perhaps this is this TL's version of the "phony war"? The calm before the storm?
"Our Struggle": What If Hitler Had Been a Communist?
- Thread starter The Red
- Start date
Excellent as always, The Red! So happy to see the present and future segments getting closer and closer together.
With women more readily accepted in military (and I’m assuming industrial jobs) then the Rote Armee will have a far larger manpower pool to draw upon.
I’m gonna assume this is during TTL’s Phony War equivalent. Fascist Italy couldn’t possibly survive, but it may be able to evacuate a large chunk of its military to Libya. Also allowing Fascism to endure as a viable ideological alternative to Democracy and Communism.
Also I feel like Italy will be like Norway in OTL. The Germans and the Brits fight over it, Germans win but the native (Italian) Government evacuates and fights on. The German Army is forced to leave hundreds of thousands of soldiers to garrison the country, soldiers that could be better used elsewhere.
Also though taking out Italy would seriously hurt the Fascists/Allies, it would cause Germany to get entangled in the Mediterranean, possibly having to take action in the Balkans to secure their south-eastern flank and Iberia for their south-western flank.
I’m assuming Spain (if the Nationalists come to power, or even if less Communist influenced Republicans win) will be taken out, as probably will Portugal due to its ties with Britain.
So the Germans will physically conquer Iberia, Italy and France, plus possibly the Balkans. Leaves a lot of territory for them to garrison. British raids might be somewhat common as they test German/Comintern defenses and to scout out potential landing zones for any kind of invasion.
Oh, I just thought ignore something. This TTL’s WW2 begins in 1936 right? And the German soldiers feel like they got pulled into the war, that Germany was forced to join it... maybe the Spanish Civil War leads directly to WW2.
What if the British, French and Italians openly support the Nationalists in fear of another Communist country changing the scales of power. This open support (funds, equipment, volunteer soldiers) of Fascism/Democracy against Communism gives Hitler the material he needs to show that the two other great ideologies are working together to stop Communism and national self determination so he sends a lot of supplies to to balance the Civil War our into a stalemate but this causes tensions to skyrocket so after a few months of the Spanish Civil War, Germany declares war on Italy to knock out the weaker neighbor before turning its attention to France and Britain.
With women more readily accepted in military (and I’m assuming industrial jobs) then the Rote Armee will have a far larger manpower pool to draw upon.
I’m gonna assume this is during TTL’s Phony War equivalent. Fascist Italy couldn’t possibly survive, but it may be able to evacuate a large chunk of its military to Libya. Also allowing Fascism to endure as a viable ideological alternative to Democracy and Communism.
Also I feel like Italy will be like Norway in OTL. The Germans and the Brits fight over it, Germans win but the native (Italian) Government evacuates and fights on. The German Army is forced to leave hundreds of thousands of soldiers to garrison the country, soldiers that could be better used elsewhere.
Also though taking out Italy would seriously hurt the Fascists/Allies, it would cause Germany to get entangled in the Mediterranean, possibly having to take action in the Balkans to secure their south-eastern flank and Iberia for their south-western flank.
I’m assuming Spain (if the Nationalists come to power, or even if less Communist influenced Republicans win) will be taken out, as probably will Portugal due to its ties with Britain.
So the Germans will physically conquer Iberia, Italy and France, plus possibly the Balkans. Leaves a lot of territory for them to garrison. British raids might be somewhat common as they test German/Comintern defenses and to scout out potential landing zones for any kind of invasion.
Oh, I just thought ignore something. This TTL’s WW2 begins in 1936 right? And the German soldiers feel like they got pulled into the war, that Germany was forced to join it... maybe the Spanish Civil War leads directly to WW2.
What if the British, French and Italians openly support the Nationalists in fear of another Communist country changing the scales of power. This open support (funds, equipment, volunteer soldiers) of Fascism/Democracy against Communism gives Hitler the material he needs to show that the two other great ideologies are working together to stop Communism and national self determination so he sends a lot of supplies to to balance the Civil War our into a stalemate but this causes tensions to skyrocket so after a few months of the Spanish Civil War, Germany declares war on Italy to knock out the weaker neighbor before turning its attention to France and Britain.
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Would it? Again this is not Libya nor Greece or Norway, there will be no coup de main on the major cities nor will the army be caught mobilizing, the Italians have been preparing to fight in the terrain for decades, any advances here will be slow costly and bloody, look at the 11 Isonzos if you want some examples or the fighting in the Vosges mountains in France. Italy will not fall in a week and the comparison to Norway is kinda ridiculous, the Italian military is compared to the size of the economy well funded, most of those funds OTL went to the Navy but the Alpine corp never lost its edge. The Italian campaign will be long and drawn out and its deciding factors likely won't be the Alpine front. also, Italy is much bigger than Norway and has more strategic depth.
As for the maximal extent of Germany well its hard to say until we have more information about both the world and the German army. Italy is a maybe as is France with the German generals who planned Fall Rot likely fighting for the other side taking France may well be a bloody drawn-out process, Britain is much stronger with no campaign in the med to worry about. This war will definitely be interesting
I agree with GDIS Pathe on this one. It doesn't seem like Italy is a state that will fold easily to the German onslaught. They have been, after all, preparing for another war in the Alps in OTL, and I believe it's the same here. Also the fact that the Alpini are being referred towards with the terms such as "Dreaded" does seem to imply that the armed forces of Fascist Italy are capable of holding back the Germans in the mountains.
Also while yes, fascism has been talked about negatively in previous chapters, there are several reasons why it would make sense that it would be seen far more positively in this timeline. Firstly, while the horseshoe theory does seem to be quite a bit more prominent, Hitlerism doesn't seem to be usually defined as being a fascist ideology, which means that all the warcrimes that Germany will commit won't be associated with fascism. Secondly, while of course, there is a chance that Italy will collapse in an extremely anticlimactic battle. There is a chance that Italians will be considered the member of the Allies who contributed to the (if the allies win of course) victory over the evil with the bodies and blood of their people.
Also while yes, fascism has been talked about negatively in previous chapters, there are several reasons why it would make sense that it would be seen far more positively in this timeline. Firstly, while the horseshoe theory does seem to be quite a bit more prominent, Hitlerism doesn't seem to be usually defined as being a fascist ideology, which means that all the warcrimes that Germany will commit won't be associated with fascism. Secondly, while of course, there is a chance that Italy will collapse in an extremely anticlimactic battle. There is a chance that Italians will be considered the member of the Allies who contributed to the (if the allies win of course) victory over the evil with the bodies and blood of their people.
That's spot on, taking a much more literal stance on the nature of "class struggle" means that the DAR being at "war" or at "peace" is basically just two different stages of the same and as such militarism and "aggression" are entirely justifiable if not actively desirable.
I really like the German Ideology btw - it's probably one the best original ideology I've seen in fiction (even if it is based on real ones) - most fictional ideologies are just real world ones with a new coat of paint or are rather out-there and illogical, making it unclear why anyone would ever follow it in large numbers without guns being pointed in their face. Marxism-Leninism-Hitlerism manages to be convincingly different and advocate red militarism while still being something that you could see a communist movement supporting, even if it requires a bit of pressing and cutting to make it fit. Fantastic work The Red!
Thanks! I tried to do my homework and get something that would fit alongside ITTL's Hitler's personal ambitions alongside the reality of an industrialised socialist state and how the two might relate to each other. As you say it takes a bit of pressing and cutting but German Ideology is something I'm still working on and as we get to the KPD assuming you'll get to see more of the practice as well as the theory.
Thanks! I hope you all had a good one.
It's a bit of a complicated one; essentially women can volunteer for service in the Rote Armee directly, but they can also opt for it instead of industrial or other home front activities when conscripted for war work. So women can't be directly integrated into the military but they do orbit around that general area.
There were so many instances of conflict and strife in the mid to late Thirties IOTL that you can more or less take your pick and those were without a Communist Germany, although as I mentioned a while back you'll be witnessing major butterflies by that point so I'd be wary of too much parallelism.
Here's hoping!
I should add that although I have mentioned the horseshoe theory a few times ITTL I wouldn't give it anymore credence than it gets IOTL; the references are mainly an in-joke to the fact that a communist Hitler is rather difficult to pull off whereas according to the horseshoe theory it should be relatively simple. Not I have anything against ideologies being arbitrarily simplified into everyday things, that's why I made this ideological steak chart:
First and foremost a belated Merry Christmas to everyone in this thread.
Honestly I'm looking forward to the point we start to see major butterflies in the wider world. Based off my prior interactions with your work you have a knack for creating interesting settings, and I can't help but be curious about what's in store for this one.
Somewhere in the vast expanse of the multiverse I'm sure someone is muttering the opposite complaint.
Where did you get this? Did you make this by yourself? I like it tho, because she looks beautiful.Also, as an addition to the Christmas Eve update, Rosa Muller on the Alpine Front:
And I'm not a gun history expert. But the gun looks too advanced for a ww2 era gun
Looks like a Gewehr 3 if it had been made in the 30/40s. Not necessarily too advanced - semi-auto rifles have been experimented with for a while and I doubt what appears to be a marksman's rifle will fire in full auto, maybe, so it's not entirely implausible. And we've already had mention of F-86s flying in 1947.
Here's a thought, what would be the result if one were to combine Our Struggle with Reds!
What happens when the Americans fall to Communism alongside the Germans (other then pure unadulterated terror in France and the UK)?
What happens when the Americans fall to Communism alongside the Germans (other then pure unadulterated terror in France and the UK)?
Well I guess by economic determinism alone we'd be looking at an outcome where the capitalist world is finished in the not-so distant future, that is if the disruption in the immediate aftermath of the American and German revolutions doesn't just spread the same fervour to the remaining capitalist countries and their empires. If the socialist powers can stick together then they're going to be effectively unstoppable, so I guess they're lucky that socialists have never, ever, had problems sticking together.
Honestly if Reds happened the Allies would not allow the Germans to thrive, as soon as it looked likely Hitler would take power British and French trying to would be going straight into crush this revolution in the Cradle.
Chapter LXI
"A new period of revolutionary upsurge matures. In this situation, we need more than ever the internationalism, the revolutionary solidarity of the toiling masses of the world in alliance with the oppressed colonial peoples. We had to lead the struggle against Trotskyism several years. In this great struggle Leninism prevailed as the undisputed winner in the entire Communist International. Even more than before, the spirit of internationalism emerged from this hard struggle, the spirit of unconditional loyalty to the Communist International and the solid confidence in its leading party, the CPSU. This revolutionary spirit must guide all our thinking and actions, and must a,ways be maintained in us. Our victory will be for certain if we strengthen our revolutionary energy, if we firmly and unwaveringly believe in the revolutionary power of the proletariat and all the working people led by the Communist International, the only genuine International throughout the world."
~ Ernst Thalmann
~ Ernst Thalmann
When the dust settled over several days of infighting within the Communist Party of Germany, it was evident that a clear winner had emerged.
Ultimately Adolf Hitler's ability to persuade certain former Thalmann allies that he represented the best hope of them achieving revolutionary ambitions, alongside ensuring the loyalty of a party militia and a party bureaucracy that he had helped build, allowed him to accomplish what Thalmann himself had hoped to achieve, to tighten his own control of the party by removing his only true rival. Many in the party's leading Zentrale body who had wavered between the two over the years now stood firmly behind Hitler, in the name of concilitation if nothing else.
The way in which the power struggle had played out was initially unremarked upon publicly within the international Communist movement although the members of the Communist International watched the events unfold with a great intrigue, as did Joseph Stalin. Having successfully solidified his own total control of the Soviet Union, Stalin had sought to do the same to Communist parties in other countries where the preferred candidates for "Stalinising" their respective parties would usually find favour and a greater leadership role. It is likely that Thalmann would have been Stalin's preferred candidate; the two enjoyed a good personal relationship with each man's talents despite their humble origins impressing the other. Hitler and Stalin had reportedly only met once, and briefly, but it is not completely unlikely that Stalin would have accepted Hitler's sole leadership of the KPD had the newly empowered General Secretary not unilaterally pulled the party out of the Comintern; a direct snub at Moscow in favour of a more exclusively German line that would eventually form the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Hitlerism, or "German Ideology" as it is more commonly known.
Stalin demanded Hitler come to Moscow to explain himself and when Hitler refused the Soviet leader instead unleashed a slew of denunciations which snowballed into rejections of Hitler and his party from most leading communist movements around the world that happened to be somehow affiliated with Moscow. Within Germany itself, many prominent members of the party split to join with Thalmann and his fellow outcasts. Whilst the Red Front militia stayed almost exclusively loyal to Hitler's KPD, the same could not be said for the party's many sister organisations; the Young Communist League largely went with Thalmann, as did the Women's League and the Red Pionners. As was expected, Hitler's attempts to woo the General Congress of Trade Unions, the ADGB, paid off with an expression of support from those who had previously been wary of the Moscow orientated KPD, and for the first time since he had stood on stage with Paul Levi a couple of weeks beforehand, members of the Social Demoratic Party began to openly praise Hitler's attempts at clemency, if often with guarded rhetoric. To Thalmann these signs of support for Hitler were to be expected, and he and his remaining supporters decided to try and muddle through.
Having benefitted from being part of a successful double act for so many years, and having helped to build the Communist Party of Germany, Thalmann's failure to seize control of the organisation would now lead to him attempting to supplant it. The Communist Party of Germany (Marxist Leninist) would prove to be Ernst Thalmann's last stand in German politics, as well as the Soviet Union's final attempt to gain a direct foothold in German politics.
The launch of the Communist Party of Germany (Marxist-Leninist) took place in Hamburg with much fanfare despite increasingly harsh crackdowns on major left-wing events, it has been suggested by some that the conservative and increasingly authoritarian government of Chancellor Heinrich Bruning was attempting to aid the popularity of Thalmann's new party in the hope of splitting the left-wing vote to the greatest extent. If this is true then Bruning must have believed he had succeeded, given the announcement of a federal election a mere two weeks after the birth of the KPD (ML), earmarked for August 1930.
In establishing the new party as a serious challenger in German politics, and with an election coming up to put that to the test, the KPD (ML) could rely on several large grants from Moscow, some of which have been estimated to have been in the hundreds of thousands of German Marks, although it is likely we will never know the full amount that was invested in the party's success. Stalin's commitment to Thalmann's new party was clear, and was arguably one that the Soviet Union could not afford in the late Summer of 1930 but not all of the members of the KPD (ML) were equally as invested in the party's success. This became readily apparent when, in the last week of July, the Party Treasurer John Wittorf disappeared having cleaned out the party's accounts.
Wittorf had been a close friend of Thalmann for over a decade and with his history of financial expertise and sound management Thalmann had lobbied for his friend to replace Willie Munzenberg as KPD treasurer, a move Hitler blocked whenever his erstwhile ally brought it up given the General Secretary's respect for Munzenberg as an operator and suspicion of Wittorf following rumours of embezzelment that he had never quite managed to evade. If Thalmann had been aware of any truth in these rumours he clearly hadn't taken them that seriously when he had appointed Wittorf to control the finances of the KPD (ML), with Hitler no longer in the way he could finally have his friend where he wanted him to be. It would spell the end of his political career. Wittorf, apparently unable to resist the large sums of money coming from Moscow, had taken out several large loans to handle the party's day to day expenditures, all the while siphoning of the liquid assets into an account he had recently established whilst on a "fraternal visit" to the headquarters of the KPdS, the Communist Party of Switzerland. Wittorf would quite literally surface in Cuba some years later, on a Havana beach, apparently having enjoyed himself too much the night before and fallen into some bad company. Whether the Mob had gotten tired of a man who was according to many a particularly loathsome patron of their Casino empire, or if the NKVD had in fact decided to invoice Wittorf at long last, has been the subject of some debate but at any rate the damage was done.
The so-called "Wittorf affair" would be the pivotal moment in the short, unhappy history of the KPD (ML) and would bring about the party's downfall. Unable to pay its debts and with Moscow having largely written off the party the campaigning season when it arrived was a farce of activists who were few in number and increasingly demoralised, trying to string together a campaign based on favours and what they could scrape out of their own pockets. Thalmann rose to the occasion, focusing his campaign almost solely on the city of Hamburg where he could count on his name alone bringing large crowds of admirers amongst the dockers and labourers but few others were willing to listen and many were simply unable to.
The election itself yielded predictable results for the breakaway in the face of a a surge in the vote both for Hitler's KPD and Crown Prince Wilhelm's Volkisch Bund, Thalmann being elected as the sole deputy for the party almost more mocking than the party having none at all as he was forced to sit and listen to the derision and mocking from the swelled ranks of his former comrades in the new Reichstag.
Thalmann would not have to endure the derision for long, the 1930 constitutional crsis meaning that the affairs of a single deputy for a micro-party no longer held much attention. In the resultant fracas his name and reputation would largely be lost to the ether of a new era of German politics. It was a rather depressing end to a figure who had once been a hero to both the German and international left, his many talents having been overshadowed by his willingness to follow the Moscow line on too many matters, and in his inability to Stalinise the party he hoped to solely lead into the revolution.
Thalmann left for the Soviet Union shortly after the events that followed, not to return to Germany until the latter stages of the Second World War.
~ Andrea Clark, “The Revolutionary Hammer”: A History of the RFB
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The statue of Ernst Thalmann in the above picture can be found in Berlin, within the park that also bears his name.
Happy New Year everyone!
Happy new year!
One thing I am curious about is what will happen to Japan - the Nazis victories in Europe inspired them to launch attacks on European colonies in Asia so will the same happen here? Will they also go to war with the US? Or perhaps if the US gets involved in WW2 earlier maybe the Japanese will just rampage around East Asia and try to secure as much as they can before the US tries to engage them. That could be nasty. Or maybe it'll be the reverse - Japan and the US go to war first and the US doesn't really get involved in a war with the Entente (Allies?) until Japan is defeated. I dunno.
The update mentions the increased crackdowns by the conservative forces. I am curious as to how they will be seen in the post-war world, regardless of how the TL ends, given it looks like their attempted coup kicks off the German Revolution. I think it would be easy for them to paint themselves as a heroic group of individuals that tried to "save" the Weimar republic from the communist threat, rather than the power-hungry autocrats they actually are. This might be even easier if the DAR takes over the continent and creates volksfestung Europa, as some have predicted, since there would be less sources for the Allies (Entente?) to access since they will all be in the DAR.
One thing I am curious about is what will happen to Japan - the Nazis victories in Europe inspired them to launch attacks on European colonies in Asia so will the same happen here? Will they also go to war with the US? Or perhaps if the US gets involved in WW2 earlier maybe the Japanese will just rampage around East Asia and try to secure as much as they can before the US tries to engage them. That could be nasty. Or maybe it'll be the reverse - Japan and the US go to war first and the US doesn't really get involved in a war with the Entente (Allies?) until Japan is defeated. I dunno.
The update mentions the increased crackdowns by the conservative forces. I am curious as to how they will be seen in the post-war world, regardless of how the TL ends, given it looks like their attempted coup kicks off the German Revolution. I think it would be easy for them to paint themselves as a heroic group of individuals that tried to "save" the Weimar republic from the communist threat, rather than the power-hungry autocrats they actually are. This might be even easier if the DAR takes over the continent and creates volksfestung Europa, as some have predicted, since there would be less sources for the Allies (Entente?) to access since they will all be in the DAR.
I do have some plans for East Asia, naturally this TL is going to be more Eurocentric but the butterflies will start to flap across the globe sooner than you might think. I don't want to spoil anything but I can confirm that Japan will end up better off here than they did in my last TL.
That's an interesting point, I kinda presumed that the conservatives would be blamed for helping to further destabilise Germany but I suppose it could be spun that they were merely trying to save Germany from Communism (omitting everything else that they were trying to "save" her from) but tragically failed in the attempt. When you consider the fanfare that's heaped upon Stauffenberg and the other July plotters despite their intentions being, at best, cynical and the farcical nature of their attempted coup whilst heroes like Georg Elser and Sophie Scholl are often overlooked then it's not impossible to see a similar narrative forming ITTL. Alternatively, you could have people coming to the conclusion that Germans are just always going to be prone towards violent despots regardless of ideology, whether calculating like Bismarck, erratic like Kaiser Wilhelm, or a bit of both like Hitler.