this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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I wasn't trying to put words in their mouth; just saying how it sounded to me if they were upset that when they took up arms against the SDP in 1919, what came back to them was violent and unfair. There's also the issue (which is maybe why I'm so unsympathetic in general) that it's silly to still be upset in 1932 about something that happened in 1919, when the way to stay alive and keep alive a whole bunch of people who had nothing to do with either SDP or KPD, would have been for both of them to let it go and start fighting the bigger enemy.
But yeah, maybe I picked an unkind / unfair way to make the point, you're right. And like I say, we're into the detail points that I really don't know about, so I am learning also from you about all of this for the first time.
I won't launch into the end of WW1 or the civil wars and revolutions replacing monarchies and empires overnight, so I'll just give a contextual thought.
1932 and 1919 are thirteen years apart.
Donald Trump was elected eight years ago.
It isn't too crazy of a timeline, politically speaking. And for the germans their leadership was summarily executed by paramilitary groups sent by the government.
(Assuming you meant in 1919)
Yeah, but wasn't that after the KPD did an uprising and was doing battle with the SDP?
I'm genuinely asking; I'm just not familiar with it. If you want me to read up and get back to you I can do that too.
Not quite. The German communists rebelled against the German Empire in the final days of World War 1 in 1918. The SPD were apart of the revolutionaries that rebelled against the German Empire. They split apart over issues on whether to support continuing the war, etc.
So when the Kaiser dissolved the Empire in 1918 the legitimacy and boundaries of the successor state: the German Republic wasnt clear. Elections werent held until Jan 1919 and importantly the infamous peace of the Treaty of Versailles wasnt even signed until June 1919. Like in this time Poland was restablished as a country out of the defeated empires. Yugoslavia was just... made.
So a majority faction of the SPD won the elections 1919 and quickly moved to crush the communes and soviet republics that had been set up across the former empire.
The Freikorps, which were paramilitary groups mostly still loyal to the monarchy, were used by the SPD led government to suppress the communists. Those Freikorps did so, including extrajudicially murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht, while the other prominent communists fled to Russia or elsewhere.
Which really ended up putting the influence of german communism in soviet russia's hands, especially after the bolsheviks won their revolution in 1922 and especially after Stalin came to power in 1924.