u/Then_Championship888

My goal in the run was to create a Reichswehr militaristic dictatorship

Now that I’ve completed three major paths in GTS:

1. Lambach’s Christian “Socialist”/Christian Corporatist

2. Trevy’s Young Conservative/Tory Democratic

3. Westarp’s National Conservative/Authoritarian Capitalist + Militarist

I will soon write a comprehensive guide on how to achieve the ultimate success and total DNVP consolidation of power in all three paths

Three Reasons to hate Ludwig Kaas:

1. Irl: He was politically naive as hell and trusted Hitler. He whipped Zentrum to vote for the EA, even when Bruning and his Reichstag colleagues were heavily opposed to it, and brought eternal shame to the party’s credibility
2. In dynamic: Often prevents you from forming a popular front; fucks you over when you become too economically leftist and socially progressive
3. In GTS: FUCKING PREVENTS THE CVP FROM FORMING EVEN WITH A MODERATE DNVP LEADERSHIP

We really need an option to exile this stupid cleric to Vatican for the sake of Germany and peace in the KPD mod

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pzB4c0MmxcA

It’s a well-sourced and historically informed video to warn us that never again should any country or people allow those extremist totalitarian regimes to come to power

A relatively successful GTS playthrough as Trevy Tory Democratic DNVP v.1.00

The red fascists’ response to the rise of the reactionary right are, as always, the KPD stands alone, no matter what!

Jokes aside, is Placedstone teasing his own KPD mod? (please tell me this is true)

Paul von Hindenburg: After the Marburg Speech made by Papen, he privately threatened the Nazis that he would suppress the SA with military force if he doesn’t purge them. Otherwise, he gave full public support to Hitler until his death as a frail old reactionary man, manipulated by Hitler and his advisors.

Franz von Papen: During the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler would kill his close friends, and he would be politically exiled to become the German ambassador to Türkiye, even though he was vetoed multiple times by both Atatürk and İnönü. He would make a series of maneuvers, otherwise threats, to prevent Türkiye, previously a staunch ally of the West advocating for a Western-Soviet alliance against Nazi Germany, from joining the war on the side of the Allies and into the German sphere of influence.

After Germany’s loss was inevitable and he was expelled from Türkiye, which eventually joined the war in the last minute, he would contact the Americans to help him establish a right-wing dictatorship, which was obviously rejected.

He would be banned from formal political life and sentenced to hard labor for years by the Western allies, even though the Soviets preferred him to be convicted. Papen’s response to the refounded Federal Republic of Germany was, as always, more reactionary criticisms.

Much like Hugenberg, Papen had zero reflections on his past actions in his final years and tried to justify them in his writings. Papen would finally die peacefully in 1969, outliving nearly all Weimar-era politicians.

Kurt von Schleicher: Upon being ousted from power, the Red General would pin the blame on Papen and tried to convince the funny mustache man that he was the best partner, not Papen. Hitler’s response to his demand for defence minister was to kill both him and his wife in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives, when he was already dying.

Oskar von Hindenburg: After Hitler’s ascension to Führership, he would join the Nazi Wehrmacht and rise to the rank of Generalleutnant (Lieutenant General), who supervised prison camps before his resignation. He would serve as a witness to Papen’s trial and presumably defend his old friend. He would die in 1960.

Otto Meissner: As a pragmatic bureaucrat and an opportunist, he would continue serving as an advisor to Hitler throughout the entirety of the existence of the Third Reich after the death of Hindenburg. He was similarly arrested and charged like Papen, but the proceedings against him were halted, likely due to the end of de-Nazification. Nevertheless, he would publish a book <<Ebert, Hindenburg, and Hitler>> in his final years, shortly before he died in 1953.

Despite the roles they played in enabling Hitler’s rise to power and supporting Hitler’s regime, nearly all of them died naturally and peacefully instead of facing justice they deserved.

One of the fundamental tenets of the FRG's postwar political order was Basic Law (Grundgesetz), which assured the fundamental rights of German citizens and secure the future of democracy within Germany. One component of Basic Law was the the Federal Constitutional Court's ability to ban political parties or groups that sought to obstruct or abolish democracy. The position of Basic Law was that the the new Germany would not countenance any political party that acted in an antidemocratic manner. The first test case for the Court's power to restrict political choices was the banning of the Socialist Reich Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei) in 1951/2. The SRP was a far-right political organization with many former NSDAP members and maintained that the Third Reich still legally existed. The relative success of the SRP in Lower Saxony's 1950 elections prompted the federal government into action and the Constitutional Court ruled that the SRP's ideology was inimical to Basic Law's guarantees of democracy and the SRP would be dissolved as a political party.

While the banning of the SRP was a relatively open and shut case, the banning of the KPD was another matter. One unique aspect of Basic Law was that it applied to all Germans, not just the citizens of the FRG. The position of the Adenauer government was that the FRG was the sole legitimate German state and the GDR was only a temporary entity. This led to the curious use of Germany's pre-1938 borders when depicting the country in early FRG electoral materials. Basic Law emerged as a component of Adenauer's legitimation strategy and the naturally, the GDR's ruling party, the SED rejected Basic Law as an attempt to effect a permanent division of Germany. The elements of the KPD operating in the FRG hewed to the SED's line and operated as an oppositional party within FRG. The KPD sought to actively hinder efforts of the FRG to reestablish a German military and often acted as a mouthpiece for the SED by claiming that Adenauer's policies of soft denazification had allowed former NSDAP members to slither back into positions of power.

The KPD's increasingly strident opposition to the regular operation of the FRG's government led it to become a marginal political party in local and national elections. Although the KPD inherited a strong membership postwar and possessed a degree of legitimacy from its opposition to the Third Reich, the KPD increasingly winnowed down its leadership to SED loyalists in a series of internal purges in 1951. These active connections to the SED and its knee-jerk opposition to the elected governments made it a target of the Constitutional Court after the SRP decision. Unlike other Western European communist parties, the close connection of the KPD to the SED, and by extension, the USSR, gave anticommunist officials a solid pretext upon which to act. In addition to the KPD's actual activities, documentation forged by the CIA about the KPD and other communist parties' attempts to sabotage the implementation of the Marshall Plan gave further ammunition for the prosecution of the KPD.

Nonetheless, this was a highly contentious issue in the FRG. The banning of an oppositional party summoned up an uncomfortable parallel to the Third Reich's own seizure of power. Furthermore, although the KPD's electoral fortunes waned and its attempt to form a KPD-led large labor front came to naught, some of its positions enjoyed a degree of currency within FRG public opinion. German rearmament in particular was not a terribly popular initiative and the reinstitution of selective service for German youth created wide-spread sentiment of "without me' (ohne mich). Adenauer's position that the FRG was the sole sovereign German state looked increasingly odd in light of the emerging Cold War meant that reunification looked like an unrealistic dream. The FRG's close alliance with NATO and the US also summoned up fears that Germany would be caught up in yet another war.

The deciding factor in the five-year trial on the KPD's legality was its commitment to proletarian revolution which the prosecution argued was fundamentally incompatible with Basic Law. The prosecution framed KPD's reliance upon mass strikes, disruptive opposition, and internal political purges as indicative of an antidemocratic ethos. Ritter von Rex, the state prosecutor closed with the argument that the KPD was "a dangerous source of infection for the body of our people, sending poisonous substances into the bloodstream of the Federal Republic's state and social organism." Even though the KPD had little chances for electoral success, the Constitutional Court ruled that a party could be deemed unconstitutional even if it had little chance for immediate electoral victory.

Its federal ban caught the KPD off-guard and many of its offices and files were raided. For its part, the SED saw the dissolution of the KPD as a tactical victory as its press arm would portray the ban as a further sign that the FRG was a sham government whose commitments to democracy were a fig leaf for the money capital interests that supported Hitler. For the FRG radical left, the Court's decision exiled them into the political wilderness. Magazines like Konkret vocalized the radical left's critiques of the FRG's materialistic society and the government's close alliances with undemocratic states in the name of fighting communism, but there were no real mainstream political parties to represent these interests. The gradually thawing of the FRG's anticommunism of the late 1960s led to a reconstitution of sorts of the KPD into the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (DKP) in 1968, but it never became more than a marginal party in German elections. By the late 1960s, the West German left had increasingly gravitated to a more youth-orientated Maoist ideology which saw the strict Marxist-Leninist hierarchy of the DKP as staid and constraining.

Disclaimer: This was not written by myself, but a copy paste of something I found really interesting and helpful to understand why the KPD was banned by the West German court with limited backlash from the public.

Sources

Bark, Dennis L., and David Gress. From Shadow to Substance 1945-1963. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Major, Patrick. The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Concluding the reasons for the ban of the KPD according to West German government and their court:

1. It’s increasingly rigid Stalinist ideology and purges initiated by the SED/Moscow (basically like 1928 KPD doing it all again)
2. Close connections with the SED and Moscow
3. Opposition to the rearmament of the FRG
4. Disruptive opposition
5. It’s revolutionary goals and incompatibility with the Basic Law.

But even before the ban, the KPD was on a trajectory of rapid electoral decline due to the same method they employed in 1928-1933 no longer being an effective way of gaining popularity at all, and even the SED and Moscow viewed them as deposable. It only scored 2.2% of the votes in West Germany in 1953 and failed to cross the 5% electoral threshold, despite initially scoring 5.7% in the first West German Election in 1949.

After the ban of the KPD, Marxism-Leninism/Stalinism and communism in general would decline in popularity and cease to be an active political movement in the FRG. The successor party of the KPD, the SKP, would become nothing but a footnote of history.

With the SPD abandoning Marxism and adopting Godesberg Program 3 years later, all major West German parties would have accepted the social market economy consensus established by the Adenauer-Erhard CDU/CSU-led government. Leftism and socialism lost the ideological battle in mainstream politics against the conservatives and the capitalists in FRG ever since.

Opinion on Willy (Willi) Münzenberg, the KPD’s presidential candidate in 1934, if the conciliators are in charge of the party?

“Willi Münzenberg was a towering figure in the anti-fascist movement during the first half of the twentieth century. He was acquainted with many of the leading left wing activists and thinkers of his day including Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Karl Radek. He also played a foundational role in several important transnational organisations such as the Socialist Youth International, the largest anti-war movement in opposition to the First World War, the International Workers’ Relief organisation, and the League against Colonialism and for National Independence.

As a film distributor and promoter, he brought modern Soviet films to western Europe. As a publicist and manager, he built up the most influential left-wing media empire in the Weimar Republic and initiated the pioneering use of photography and photo montage. He was also a long-time member of the Reichstag. He was a pioneer in the use of a variety of media and the way he gained the support and collaboration of progressive politicians, artists and intellectuals ensured that he would become the leading, and most effective, opponent of Hitler’s and Goebbels’ propaganda machine, as he exposed the venality and brutality of the Nazis. Late in life, his turn against Stalinism almost certainly led to his mysterious death.”

“Willy Münzenberg-an Old Bolshevik who was also a self-promoting tycoon-became one of the most influential Communist operatives in Europe between the World Wars. He created a variety of front groups that recruited well-known political and cultural figures to work on behalf of the Soviet Union and its causes, and he ran an international media empire that churned out enormous amounts of propaganda and raised money for Communist concerns. Sean McMeekin tells Münzenberg's extraordinary story, arguing persuasively that his financial chicanery and cynical propaganda efforts weakened the non-Communist left, enraged the right, and helped feed a cycle that culminated in Nazism. Drawing extensively on recently opened Moscow archives, McMeekin describes how Münzenberg parlayed his friendship with Lenin into a personal fortune and how Münzenberg's mysterious financial manipulations outraged Social Democrats and lent rhetorical ammunition to the Nazis. His book sheds new light on Comintern finances, propaganda strategy, the use of front organizations to infiltrate non-Communist circles, and the breakdown of democracy in the Weimar Republic. It is also an engrossing tale of a Communist con man whose name once aroused fear, loathing, and admiration around the world.”

He was an ardent revolutionary communist and internationalist throughout his life, who was pejoratively called the “der rote Millionär” for owning a major media conglomerate during the Weimar Republic, which was responsible for spreading pro-communist and pro-Soviet KPD propaganda through films and documentaries.

As a KPD party line loyalist in the Third Period of Marxism-Leninism. His publications vehemently attacked and weakened the SPD, and made bourgeois right hate communism even more. His media empire’s weakened support of democracy and the foundation of the Weimar Republic, which indirectly but catastrophically led to the rise of the NSDAP. However, he also engaged in factional struggles with Thalmann since 1931 to advocate for reconciliation with the SPD.

Formerly a staunch Marxist-Leninist loyal to the Comintern turned anti-Stalinist communist by his disgust of the purges and later the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He was described by Stalin and Moscow as a “public enemy No.1” for refusing to travel to the Soviet Union.

He had been advocating a united front with the SPD and the social democrats against Nazism. He supported both the French and Spanish Popular Fronts against fascism as a former member of the International Brigade of Spain to fight against the Spanish fascists.

Münzenberg died in June 1940 for mysterious reasons, several months after barely managing to escape the imprisonment of the bourgeois PRRS Daladier government (who also appeared in the French Popular Front as the defense minister) for being a communist.

Whether his death was attributed by the French right-wing government forces, the Gestapo, or the NKVD remains a mystery today.

“Münzenberg had quipped in 1937 that Stalin and his secret policemen would “shoot me as they have the others, then ten years later they’ll say they have made a big mistake.” In the end, it took more like twenty years before he was celebrated as a hero in East Germany, but elsewhere, he gradually came to be forgotten.”

Villifed as a Trotskyist by the then Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union that actively sought to purge him, Münzenberg was finally rehabilitated in DDR in 1957 as an anti-fascist hero by the Ulbricht-led East German government.

References:
https://www.routledge.com/Willi-Munzenberg-Fighter-against-Fascism-and-Stalinism/Green/p/book/9780367344726

https://jacobin.com/2021/03/marxist-left-media-empire-willi-munzenberg-iah

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Millionaire-Political-Munzenberg-Propaganda/dp/0300098472

Redux’s content update is really meaty. Not only the capital strike and business losing confidences have become much harder to deal with with a new class war mechanics that requires empowering the SPD left, the Hitler scheme in Austria, and a bunch of other things like ZCA formation (you need to have good relations with Zentrum or outright ban it to prevent it joining force with the DVP) and landtag updates have so far been really enjoyable.

I’d say Redux is now more fun than Dynamic, and would be even better if it implements the colored texts and the images of the Dynamic

1. I enabled the legislative changes, the landtags, and started the game on 1925
2. I passed the DDP’s referendum on Expropriation of the Princes by putting pressure on the DVP
3. I passed the WTB plan under Weimar Coalition later on and helped Marx to win an overwhelming victory in 1932
4. I started a civil war and won against the fascists.
5. I banned the NSDAP, the DNVP, and the DVP after the war, and passed constitutional reforms to transform the country into a parliamentary democracy
6. I beat both the Nazis led by Hitler and the Austrofascist regime after deporting Hitler
7. I empowered workers to seize factories with the left plan, and began the transformation to a socialist economy with various class war options
8. I had trade unions take over the SPD
9. I secured 60% in the election after setting a 5% electoral threshold.
10. I passed all major social reforms on gay and women’s rights

In the end, Wilhelm Marx’s presidency and Weimar Coalition became stepping stones to socialism in this playthrough

1. Most left-wing interconfessional policies (except economic policy being the Lautenbach Plan rather than corporatism because it fits DNVP under Young Conservatives)
2. President-Chancellor Treviranus with CVP Majority in Reichstag
3. Restoring Kingdom of Bavaria
4. Reunification with Austria
5. Minimum remilitarization and friendship with the West

The dark woke CVP has been born

Even with a hostile Zentrum and a radical DNVP with many attempts of self-sabotage, I always got Kaas elected as their leader no matter what

I am wondering how to get a popular front in the mod

Fuck Ludwig Kaas, all my homies hate this stupid theocrat

An interesting change of the KPD’s ideology if the Volkisch faction took over

Dear KPDers and communists of r/RedAutumnSPD, you claim to be Marx-loving, capitalism-hating, and social fascists bashing revolutionary visionaries

Yet, your party failed to support the god-blessed Catholic communist revolutionary Wilhelm MARX in 1925 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925\_German\_presidential\_election.

This single disastrous decision handed victory to the old chud, fat, reactionary Hindenburg. Eventually, it led to the rise of Hitler and the destruction of the KPD and the German revolution.

How did this happen? What else needs to prove that the biggest pseudo-Marxist force in the Weimar Republic wasn’t the social fascist SPD, but the KPD?

(Second image: Soviet Germany if MARX won the 1925 Presidential Election)