Spartacist Revolt Averted in Germany

As most on this board will know, the Spartacist Revolt was an attempt by German communists under Karl Liebknicht to overthrow the teetering postwar government of Germany. It failed spectacularly when the demobilized veteran brigades known as Freikorps stormed Munich and killed the revolters.

Now, most of the KPD leadership considered Liebknicht's plan to be a bad one, but still went along with it. This has had repercussions echoing into the century since, so I'm interested in the opposite. What if Rosa Luxembourg and the rest of the KPD leadership was able to convince Karl to hold off?

The most immediate change I can think of is averting (or lessening) the split between social democrats and communists. The SPD's decision to ally with the conservative militarist against the communists has created a wound that's never truly healed. Even today, Rosa's death is a bloody shirt that gets pulled out and waved when tensions flare between left factions.

The question is, can it be sustained? It's often cited that if the SPD and KPD had more cooperative, they might have stopped the Nazis. But there's plenty of room for second order counterfactuals to put things back on track. So, here's a few scenarios for discussion, and I would be interested in hearing thoughts on their likelihood, or alternatives:

1. More or less same as OTL: The SPD and KPD find something else to squabble about and history proceeds generally the same as it did. The DDR might have a few of the KPD members who didn't die running it after the war, with long term butterflies.

2. Peace in our time: SPD-KPD cooperation gets them through the 20s and the great depression in government by the skin of their teeth, using make work programs to revitalize the economy. The Nazis fade into the background once the economic crisis passes. Conservative government returns to Germany in the 40s with the rise of the Christian Democrats, but it has little of the old military aristocracy in it.

3. Red Dawn: The KPD consistently increases in power, and manages to radicalize a large swathe of the returning veterans and SPD membership. When the depression hits in 29, they decide the time is ripe and launch a revolution, overthrowing the government and forming a communist Germany closely allied with the Soviet union. The old Entente are furious but unwilling to directly intervene.

Thoughts? Opinions? Hateful screeds?
 
Last edited:
As most on this board will know, the Spartacist Revolt was an attempt by German communists under Karl Liebknicht to overthrow the teetering postwar government of Germany. It failed spectacularly when the demobilized veteran brigades known as Freikorps stormed Munich and killed the revolters.

Now, most of the KPD leadership considered Liebknicht's plan to be a bad one, but still went along with it. This has had repercussions echoing into the century since, so I'm interested in the opposite. What if Rosa Luxembourg and the rest of the KPD leadership was able to convince Karl to hold off?

The most immediate change I can think of is averting (or lessening) the split between social democrats and communists. The SPD's decision to ally with the conservative militarist against the communists has created a wound that's never truly healed. Even today, Rosa's death is a bloody shirt that gets pulled out and waved when tensions flare between left factions.

The question is, can it be sustained? It's often cited that if the SPD and KPD had more cooperative, they might have stopped the Nazis. But there's plenty of room for second order counterfactuals to put things back on track. So, here's a few scenarios for discussion, and I would be interested in hearing thoughts on their likelihood, or alternatives:

1. More or less same as OTL: The SPD and KPD find something else to squabble about and history proceeds generally the same as it did. The DDR might have a few of the KPD members who didn't die running it after the war, with long term butterflies.

2. Peace in our time: SPD-KPD cooperation gets them through the 20s and the great depression in government by the skin of their teeth, using make work programs to revitalize the economy. The Nazis fade into the background once the economic crisis passes. Conservative government returns to Germany in the 40s with the rise of the Christian Democrats, but it has little of the old military aristocracy in it.

3. Red Dawn: The KPD consistently increases in power, and manages to radicalize a large swathe of the returning veterans and SPD membership. When the depression hits in 29, they decide the time is ripe and launch a revolution, overthrowing the government and forming a communist Germany closely allied with the Soviet union. The old Entente are furious but unwilling to directly intervene.

Thoughts? Opinions? Hateful screeds?
After the Bolshevik revolution, almost all European socialist parties split into a reformist socdem rump and a communist splinter-group, depending on your point of view. If there was no Spartacist revolt, people like Luxembourg and Liebknicht would probably die in the '30s along with the rest of the moscow communists from foreign countries who were executed during the purges.

I like your scenario names, btw. Good way of mapping out the discussion.

In my opinion, Red Dawn is the least likely of the three. A communist takeover in Germany is kind of like Trotsky taking power in the USSR. So many people considered it a possibility that pretty much every other political actor except Trotsky/KPD organized to stop it.
The SPD went out of its way to burnish its anti-Communist and parliamentary republican credentials, the catholic Zentrum wanted no part of dynamited cathedrals or clergy in labor camps, and the KPD didn't offer much to the protestant right-wing establishment that supported Hitler OTL.

Peace in Our Time: Not very look likely either, it would require changes outside of Germany. The KPD was the most doctrinaire Stalinist party in Europe, so it was parroting line doctrine about the SPD being social fascists up until the very end. You'd have to trigger a major change in Moscow's party line before the late '20s or so. The communist dismissal of parliamentary democracy as a tool of bourgeois domination failed to recognize that the same liberal democracy gave communists the basic civil rights to organize and agitate as a parliamentary organization.

Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany is a great work on the relationship between Germany's political factions. By the mid '30s the underground leadership of all the non-communist parties had seen the need for a rejuvenated, post-Hitler democracy. Part of the reason postwar German democracy was so stable was the remarkable consensus built by the parties during the war.
Germans believed in liberal democracy in the early '20s, but political polarization over the course of the decade made Germany ungovernable, and destroyed people's faith in liberal democracy. A Zentrum-SPD grand coalition wasn't likely in the early '30s, but the KPD cooperating with another party is even less likely.
 
That sounds like a very interesting book, I'll have to check it out!

Another question might be about the Freikorps themselves. Wilhelm Canaris, IIRC, spoke of his time in the Freikorps suppressing the Spartacists as one of the fondest memories he had, and it helped bond together many disillusioned veterans against a new common foe. Would they play as large a role in postwar German politics? Might they attack in less organized fashion, with sporadic "Freikorps Riots" attacking left-wing gatherings? What effect would it have on the Nazis (or their analogue) if Rohm or Himmler don't get a name for themselves in the Freikorps? The most optimistic outcome could just be that they fade away, and Weimar politics are less dominated by street battles between radical factions.
 
That sounds like a very interesting book, I'll have to check it out!

Another question might be about the Freikorps themselves. Wilhelm Canaris, IIRC, spoke of his time in the Freikorps suppressing the Spartacists as one of the fondest memories he had, and it helped bond together many disillusioned veterans against a new common foe. Would they play as large a role in postwar German politics? Might they attack in less organized fashion, with sporadic "Freikorps Riots" attacking left-wing gatherings? What effect would it have on the Nazis (or their analogue) if Rohm or Himmler don't get a name for themselves in the Freikorps? The most optimistic outcome could just be that they fade away, and Weimar politics are less dominated by street battles between radical factions.
There's a communist Hitler TL where the alt-Hitler leads a kind of photo-Nazbol guerrilla campaign against the French in the Ruhr. The Freikorp might play a larger role in an alternate Kapp Putsch, and the KPD might be more willing to attempt a half-hearted uprising during the Kapp putsch or Ruhr occupation.
 
Top