Should the KPD Have Been *More* Subservient to Moscow in 1925?

Strangely enough, the doom of the Weimar Republic may have been in part caused by the German Communist Party in 1925 not yet being *subservient enough* to Moscow! Ben Fowkes writes in *Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic*, p. 125:

"However, the changing climate of opinion in Moscow led Maslow to switch over and propose a bloc with the SPD and the centre for defence against the monarchists. This initiated a rightward move by the leadership of the KPD, carried out against strong opposition from Scholem and Rosenberg. The initially united left was now split into a moderate and an ultra-left camp. The divisions and the great difficulty experienced by Maslow and Fischer in making their views prevail were revealed by the confusion over the presidential election of March and April 1925. For the first round (29 March) Maslow advocated the withdrawal of Thälmann and support for the SPD's Otto Braun. He was outvoted, and Thälmann duly stood, receiving a miserable 7 percent of the votes. For the second round the bourgeois parties were able to agree on Field Marshal Hindenburg as their sole candidate, and there was thus a very real danger that a monarchist would be elected president of the Weimar Republic. Only a joint republican candidate could prevent this. At the Fifth Enlarged ECCI [Executive Committee of the Communist International], which was meeting just then in Moscow, Zinoviev stated that the choice facing Germany was bourgeois republic or monarchy 'and for the working class there is a real differnece between the two'; the KPD should support the former against the latter.

"In a last gesture of defiance the Central Committee rejected Zinoviev's advice and stood Thälmann a second time. Thälmann's own *amour-propre* may have induced him to take the side of the ultra-leftists on this occasion. The second round resulted in a victory for Hindenburg, with 48.3 per cent of the vote; if Thälmann's 6.4 percent had swung behind the 45.3 percent of the republican candidate Wilhelm Marx, Hindenburg would have lost..."

https://books.google.com/books?id=1qSvCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA125

So suppose the KPD had gone along with Zinoviev and withdrawn Thälmann's name in the second round? Before we assume that this would guarantee a victory for Marx, we have to consider two facts: (1) Not all rank-and-file German Communists would have followed the Party's instructions to vote for Marx; I can certainly see a considerable number abstaining. (2) Would not the very fact of Marx's being backed--even passively--by the KPD cause at least a few of his OTL voters (some of whom weren't even terribly happy about voting for a candidate backed by the SPD!) to vote for Hindenburg or at least abstain?

Anyway, if Marx does win there still remains the question of whether he can win re-election in 1932 or will lose to Hitler--in which case a Marx presidency may actually result in the Third Reich coming several months earlier than in OTL...
 
Strangely enough, the doom of the Weimar Republic may have been in part caused by the German Communist Party in 1925 not yet being *subservient enough* to Moscow! Ben Fowkes writes in *Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic*, p. 125:

"However, the changing climate of opinion in Moscow led Maslow to switch over and propose a bloc with the SPD and the centre for defence against the monarchists. This initiated a rightward move by the leadership of the KPD, carried out against strong opposition from Scholem and Rosenberg. The initially united left was now split into a moderate and an ultra-left camp. The divisions and the great difficulty experienced by Maslow and Fischer in making their views prevail were revealed by the confusion over the presidential election of March and April 1925. For the first round (29 March) Maslow advocated the withdrawal of Thälmann and support for the SPD's Otto Braun. He was outvoted, and Thälmann duly stood, receiving a miserable 7 percent of the votes. For the second round the bourgeois parties were able to agree on Field Marshal Hindenburg as their sole candidate, and there was thus a very real danger that a monarchist would be elected president of the Weimar Republic. Only a joint republican candidate could prevent this. At the Fifth Enlarged ECCI [Executive Committee of the Communist International], which was meeting just then in Moscow, Zinoviev stated that the choice facing Germany was bourgeois republic or monarchy 'and for the working class there is a real differnece between the two'; the KPD should support the former against the latter.

"In a last gesture of defiance the Central Committee rejected Zinoviev's advice and stood Thälmann a second time. Thälmann's own *amour-propre* may have induced him to take the side of the ultra-leftists on this occasion. The second round resulted in a victory for Hindenburg, with 48.3 per cent of the vote; if Thälmann's 6.4 percent had swung behind the 45.3 percent of the republican candidate Wilhelm Marx, Hindenburg would have lost..."

https://books.google.com/books?id=1qSvCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA125

So suppose the KPD had gone along with Zinoviev and withdrawn Thälmann's name in the second round? Before we assume that this would guarantee a victory for Marx, we have to consider two facts: (1) Not all rank-and-file German Communists would have followed the Party's instructions to vote for Marx; I can certainly see a considerable number abstaining. (2) Would not the very fact of Marx's being backed--even passively--by the KPD cause at least a few of his OTL voters (some of whom weren't even terribly happy about voting for a candidate backed by the SPD!) to vote for Hindenburg or at least abstain?

Anyway, if Marx does win there still remains the question of whether he can win re-election in 1932 or will lose to Hitler--in which case a Marx presidency may actually result in the Third Reich coming several months earlier than in OTL...

The problem is the more subservient to Moscow the German Communist Party was the more obvious it would become that the German Communist Party was merely a puppet of Moscow and the Russians would be the rulers of Germany in all but name. How many people will vote for that?
 
The problem is the more subservient to Moscow the German Communist Party was the more obvious it would become that the German Communist Party was merely a puppet of Moscow and the Russians would be the rulers of Germany in all but name. How many people will vote for that?

Well, *in this case* the Comintern was urging a sensible policy, so the KPD would have done well to go along. Where they went disastrously wrong was blindly following the disastrous policies Moscow dictated *in later years*--above all, regarding "social fascists" as the main enemy...
 
I think its a really interesting question @David T . Hard to say what a Marx Presidency would look like [not someone I know a great deal about] but judging by the figures he would only need about half of the KPD votes to split in his favour. I think you are right about dissenters and abstainers in the KPD in this scenario, but it wasn't the most unruly Communist Party in the period and had reasonable internal discipline. I think its reasonable to assume that at least half the voters who supported it would be swayed by party dictat into voting for Marx.

Whilst I don't know enough about Marx to speculate about knock-on in Germany, it is interesting to think what either a successful or a disastrous government would have done for the developing Comintern idea of the 'Popular Front'. Does a successful result here in Germany in 1925 up pressure on the PCF, for example, to get on board with the Cartel des Gauches in France?
 
Well, *in this case* the Comintern was urging a sensible policy, so the KPD would have done well to go along. Where they went disastrously wrong was blindly following the disastrous policies Moscow dictated *in later years*--above all, regarding "social fascists" as the main enemy...

Maybe in this particular case but the thread title was "Should the KPD Have Been *More* Subservient to Moscow in 1925?" which is a question about it in general and I think if it was too subservient in general it would be too obvious a tool of Moscow.
 
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