Small Talk: Reinvent Your Own History

[Meredith Quill]

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[Roseanna]

On 4/16/2020 at 3:24 PM, Milburn Stone said:

Related to everything you just wrote, @scrb, the other show I'm watching, Babylon Berlin (Netflix), which takes place in the last years of the Weimar Republic, is educating me as to how serious the Communist threat was in Germany before Hitler. In a word, serious. I always knew there were rich industrialists who backed Hitler because of fear of a Communist revolution in Germany, but I always thought their fears were exaggerated. BB is showing me that they weren't. It helps explain why there was widespread support among the German people for conquering Russia and overturning the Russian Revolution. (And probably significant support among Americans for Germany doing so. The idea that Communism could spread through the West wasn't mere paranoid fantasy.) 

If I remember right, in Babylon Berlin the misdeeds of Communists were in fact fabricated by the Nazis. It's true the Communists had street fighters but so had the Nazis, and one of the Hitler's most obvious and ruthless lies was presenting himself as the guarantor of ending violence when at the same claim that his cronies shouldn't be sentenced for murders of opponents. And once in power, the opponents were suppressed with violence.

It's true that Communism was feared, but the best way to oppose it was to give workers so good living conditions that they wouldn't vote the Communists. But in Germany, as in many other countries, the employers were unwilling to do it or even to negotiate with trade unions.

One of the special problem in Germany was the Conservatives had never accepted Weimar Republic and refused to cooperation not only with Social Democracts but even with the Catholic Centre Party. Thus, the supporters of Democracy were a minority in Germany.     

 

[Roseanna]

On 4/16/2020 at 8:21 AM, scrb said:

Well under Lindbergh, US never does Lend Lease, presumably.

US poured billions in materiel to all the allied nations, including over $30 billion to the U.K.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Lend Lease started in 1941.  Even with Lend Lease, US had to enter the European theater, though Soviets were tying up a lot of German resources.

Even if Lindbergh doesn’t directly send troops against allies, it helps the Axis because Germany Doesn’t have to fight a U.K. being supported by Lend Lease.  Same for Russia, which also got over $10 billion in 1940s dollars.  Or China which got US aid to fight off Japan.

That means a stronger Japan which doesn’t have to fend off the US in the Pacific Theater can attack the Soviets from the eat or from the south through China.

I agree. 

Maybe Russia would have still survived even if the Red army would probably have to retreat behind Moscow. After all, Germany had prepared only to a short summer war. Already in August 1941 the highest German command came to the conclusion that Plan Barbarossa was failed and the Soviet forces had been roughly underestimated. 

But it was not only about fighting but about policy. Hitler had one strategy that he could have won the war with: to present himself as a liberator to all those oppressed by Stalin: peasants in kolkhozes, relatives of beheaded and prisoners and national minrities. But just that Hitler was unable to do because of his ideology. Instead, Stalin who could be flexible if necessary appealed to patriotism.   

[Milburn Stone]

5 hours ago, Roseanna said:

If I remember right, in Babylon Berlin the misdeeds of Communists were in fact fabricated by the Nazis.

Not to get too far off the track, but what I was referencing in Babylon Berlin were not the misdeeds (true or false) of the Communists, but the sheer strength of their numbers in the Berlin population as portrayed. If BB is accurate, anti-Communists were not paranoid to imagine a Communist revolution in Germany was possible.

Edited April 25, 2020 by Milburn Stone

[Roseanna]

4 hours ago, Milburn Stone said:

Not to get too far off the track, but what I was referencing in Babylon Berlin were not the misdeeds (true or false) of the Communists, but the sheer strength of their numbers in the Berlin population as portrayed. If BB is accurate, anti-Communists were not paranoid to imagine a Communist revolution in Germany was possible.

How? What can even tens of thousands of demonstrators (even if some of them have guns) against the police and the army. The loyalty of the latter institutions towards the government must collapse first, as it did in Russia in 1917.

The Spartakists tried to make a revolution in 1919 but failed, when the Social Democratic War Minister Noske asked help from Freikorps (unofficial armed bands of the Right) who murdered the leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

After that, Social Democrats were called "Noskes" by Communists and the parties couldn't unite even against Nazis. According to the Communist theory in the beginning of the 30ies, Fascism was only one form of Capitalism.