WI - Communist and Nazi Parties unified in 1925

On late November 1925 in Germany, the Communist and Nazi parties failed to unify over whether Lenin and Hitler can be compared or contrasted in a party meeting, which apparently led to riots.

How would subsequent events play out if the Communists and Nazis did manage to unify into one party?

19060138_1893248354221623_5678972612602573035_n.jpg
 
The basic problem is this: While there were indeed some Nazis who thought of Soviet Russia as a potential ally for Germany, Hitler was dead-set against them. As I once noted at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/hNwIqczsQbc/JYwYlrhDmvYJ:

In the edition of Mein Kampf I read (Houghton Mifflin edition 1943, translation by Ralph Manheim), Hitler seems, well, a bit *hostile* toward Bolshevism (pp. 660-2):

[The current leaders of Russia are] "common blood-stained criminals...the scum of humanity...[who] for almost ten years have been carrying on the most cruel and tyrannical regime of all time....Do not forget that the international Jew who completely dominates Russia today regards Germany, not as an ally, but as a state destined to the same fate...

"*The danger to which Russia succumbed is always present for Germany.* Only a bourgeois simpleton is capable of imagining that Bolshevism has been exorcised...*In Russian Bolshevism we must see the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twentieth century to achieve world domination.*...

"Germany today is the next great war aim of Bolshevism...How can we expect to free our own people from the fetters of this poisonous embrace if we walk right into it? How shall we explain Bolshevism to the German worker as an accursed crime against humanity if we ally ourselves with the organizations of this spawn of hell...

"The fight against Jewish world Bolshevization requires a clear attitude toward Soviet Russia. You cannot drive out the Devil with Beelzebub."
 
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What if Hitler died during the Beer Hall Putsch and the Strassers took over the Nazi Party. I believe that they were in favour of an alliance with the Soviets. Of course getting the Communists to go along with merging with the ultranationalist anti-Semites would have been tricky.
 
What if Hitler died during the Beer Hall Putsch and the Strassers took over the Nazi Party. I believe that they were in favour of an alliance with the Soviets. Of course getting the Communists to go along with merging with the ultranationalist anti-Semites would have been tricky.
Stalin would do it, all the while using his dialectical gymnastics to say they're totally not siding with anti-Semites and how theirs is "an Anti-Imperialistic alliance against Franco-British aggression". While the Strassers would use Goebbles' propaganda machine for some sweet-talk about how they were toooootally not anti-Semitic and "just hated the Jewish financial Capitalism" while finding loopholes for those Jews who they considered to "hold a truly German Volkisch spirit" (aka, WWI vets) or "are proletariat comrades in the fight against Capitalism" (the Yiddish folks in the Soviet Union).

If they take over, this new National Bolshevik Party and their Soviet Pals would possibly end up supporting the Spanish Republic out of a purely pragmatic strategy, then invading either Poland or Austria, sparking WWII, which leads to the raw power of the Soviet Union and NazBol Germany (and Spain, and maybe China or a rebel India if they play their cards right) against the full might of the French and British Colonial Empires (and their allies in the more "standard" Fascist nations like Italy, Romania and the like, plus Finland for purely "fuck the Soviets" attitude, as well as maybe Japan as the wild card).

One thing for sure, the US sure ain't gotta get involved this time.
 
Stalin would not be above a KPD *alliance* with German nationalist radicals under certain circumstances. But merger? No. He would insist on keeping control of the KPD, and the Strassers obviously were not under his control.
 
I think there have already been a TL about a leftish Hitler, but we could imagine Hitler seing Stalin as a savior of national socialism and a purger of Jewish influence.?

Under such a scenario a merger is potentially possible and if worst comes to show, might see the power grasping Hitler asserting control of the joint faction and removing it from Soviet control, but not an alliance?

Just an offer.
 
The Comintern did see the occupation of the Ruhr as an opportunity for the KPD to appeal to German nationalism--but definitely not for a merger, let alone a merger under nationalist leadership! Rather, the idea was to attract rank-and-file Nazis and other nationalists to the KPD:

"Nikolai Bukharin publicly, if ironically, thanked French president Raymond Poincare for having disrupted an incipient European stability and in March announced to the Twelfth Parry Congress that the national defense of Germany now had a completely different meaning than in 1914. Moscow discounted warnings by the KPD representative and others concerning what the latter termed the "fascist danger" in Germany.

"One consequence was Karl Radek's "Schlageter speech" to the Comintern executive Committee (ECCI), which declared that the "counterrevolutionary" Karl Schlageter, recently executed by the French for sabotage, should be considered at the same time a hero of the revolution, because supporting the nation in Germany should now be considered a "revolutionary act." Radical German nationalists should be seen by Communists as "erring brothers," not in the sense of political union but with the goal of attracting them to a pro-German Communism (the sort of thing briefly successful in Hungary), once they saw that only revolution would restore the nation. This, after all, was sound Leninist policy, since the now-stricken Soviet leader had always stressed the importance of the national question, which could be resolved only by revolution. Even though Hitler was viewed as a "caricature of Mussolini," many members of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and other nationalist groups might be won over. Leaders of the KPD, who knew much better the temper and doctrine of German ultranationalists, were more skeptical. As it turned out, the debates with German nationalists that summer in the pages of the KPD's Die Rote Fahne did not feature any Nazi leaders, only a few theorists of the tiny "National Bolshevist" sector of German nationalists, as well as a few "conservative revolutionaries," though Communists addressed several Nazi meetings before Hitler broke off contact..." https://books.google.com/books?id=zP4ikZ_o3V8C&pg=PA80

In any event, the Comintern, at least from the mid-1920's on, wanted national leaders totally loyal to the CPSU leadership. People showing any streak of independence were purged. Neither Hitler nor the Strassers nor any other NSDAP leader would remotely qualify. Trying to attract "erring brothers" is not the same thing as putting the KPD under their leaders' command...
 
Weren't a lot of these German nationalists former Freikorps, who had gleefully slaughtered German communists during 1919? How could the KPD even countenance an alliance with the political parties of Freikorps?
 

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What if Hitler died during the Beer Hall Putsch and the Strassers took over the Nazi Party. I believe that they were in favour of an alliance with the Soviets. Of course getting the Communists to go along with merging with the ultranationalist anti-Semites would have been tricky.

The idea that Stalin would be opposed to anti-Semites is a bit rich...
 

Anchises

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On late November 1925 in Germany, the Communist and Nazi parties failed to unify over whether Lenin and Hitler can be compared or contrasted in a party meeting, which apparently led to riots.

How would subsequent events play out if the Communists and Nazis did manage to unify into one party?

19060138_1893248354221623_5678972612602573035_n.jpg

Well the problem ist that there still is a fundamental ideological difference that isn't going away. And TTLs NSDAP is much weaker. So we are probably looking at a VERY different timeline.

What if Hitler died during the Beer Hall Putsch and the Strassers took over the Nazi Party. I believe that they were in favour of an alliance with the Soviets. Of course getting the Communists to go along with merging with the ultranationalist anti-Semites would have been tricky.

Assuming this is the case:

Strasser takes over the party and the NSDAP embraces National Bolshevism.

It is ASB territory to assume that KPD and the NSDAP would merge. They were arch enemies. Sure now they have a similiar economic policy but apart from that? The NSDAP still consists of virulent anti-communists that served in the various Freikorps.

So I could see the occasional alliance in specific questions (economy etc.) but nothing more.

The NSDAP meanwhile would never reach the strength it did OTL. No industrialists would be supporting them and most reactionaries would be opposed to them aswell.

The perception of the Junker that they could work with Hitler and "tame" him was one of the key elements that allowed the rise of the NSDAP. Strasser is more revolutionary and critical of the reactionary elites so that isn't going to happen.

A lot of core groups are also not supporting TTLs NSDAP. The more revolutionary ways would scare shopkeepers and bureaucrats who were core voter groups of the NSDAP IOTL.

The Weimar Republic would be taken over by a reactionary clique of DNVP (much stronger ITTL), some DVP members, the Reichswehr and industrialists.
 
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The idea that Stalin would be opposed to anti-Semites is a bit rich...

Whatever Stalin's personal feelings, open anti-Semitism was not allowed in Communist parties until Stalin's last years (and even then, it resorted to euphemisms, though increasingly transparent ones, like opposition to "cosmopolitanism," "Zionism," etc. ). The most the Comintern would allow in the 1920's was that some anti-Semites could be made to see the error of their ways and won over to Communism--"they mistakenly think 'the Jews' are the enemy; we should teach them that their real enemy is the capitalists, whether Jews or gentiles."

The official line was stated by Stalin in 1931:

"National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

"Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

"In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/01/12.htm
 
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