this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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During the Weimar Republic, the German Communist Party, taking its marching orders from Stalin, derided any cooperation with the Social Democrat/Democratic Socialist party of the SPD as cooperating with "Social Fascists". This despite the fact that the SPD was the only other major left-leaning party in the Weimar Republic, and larger than the KPD. They did this because they believed that once a right-wing authoritarian administration was in power, it would create a 'revolutionary crisis' wherein the Workers(tm) would rise up, singing the Internationale, and allow the KPD to seize power unilaterally.
Obviously, it didn't work out like that. The Nazis won power, and the KPD was violently suppressed without so much as a peep - at times with the cooperation of the Soviets. Great success!
isn't this a vast oversimplification? after all, SPD killed Liebknecht and other revolutionaries. and KPD split a bunch of times, no?
Yes, when the Spartacist uprising decided that force was preferable to elections, they were responded to with force by the new Weimar government, which, at the time, was unfortunately reliant on unaccountable freikorps due to the dual-problem of the dissolution of the Imperial German Army and the already very right-conservative leaning of what was left of it, resulting in the extrajudicial execution of captured revolutionary leaders instead of a fair trial. That was in 1919.
The KPD was largely united through the 20s and 30s, and there were no major splinter groups by 1933.
but doesn't collaborating with the freikorps mean collaborating with what later became the nazi party?
don't get me wrong, i hate tankies as much as anybody should! i am just not sure whether the SPD way was more certain to succeed or better in general
The Freikorps weren't really the basis for the Nazi Party, which drew its support largely from the middle-class. The Freikorps were a bunch of separate independent paramilitary orgs filled with WW1 veterans who'd been officially thrown out of the German military by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles reducing the size of the German military, not any single, united group. The term is more for convenience.
The primary relation of the Freikorps with the Nazi Party was that the Nazi Party put great effort into courting disaffected WW1 veterans. The Freikorps themselves were effectively dissolved as the Reichswehr (the German military, still filled with old Imperial German officers, traditionally very 'independent' from the civilian government) became more closely aligned with the civilian Weimar government, and that dissolution (~1920) was, itself, long before the Nazis had become a major force in German politics (1923 at the earliest; more realistically 1928).
I would say that SPD was better positioned to succeed and better than the KPD. That doesn't, however, mean that their hands were clean, or that their ideological approach was the best possible in the circumstances.
However, as the saying goes, you play with the hand you're dealt, not the one you want - the SPD was the best realistic choice available in Weimar Germany. And the SPD, until Thalmann came into power in the KPD, was willing to work with the KPD to present a united front against the German right-wing - even after a second attempt at couping the Weimar government in 1923. It was only after Thalmann took over the KPD in 1928 and obediently took Stalin's marching orders that the united front fell apart - not coincidentally, ushering in a period of increased right-wing electoral success and ending previously successful left-wing intiatives in Weimar Germany, culminating in the election of the far-right Nazi-Conservative coalition in 1933.