IceBreakChron II: THE NAZIS ARISE

Started by JasonPratt, April 04, 2020, 02:17:38 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

JasonPratt

June 26 to July 13, 1930, at the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) (the parethetical clarification is actually part of the Party's title, by the way, historically distinguishing them from the Menshaviks): Stalin is giving a speech about his Soviet political opponents. He has no particular evidence to present to the Congress about their nefarious schemes, but as he dryly quips, "How many times have I told you? -- do whatever you want, but do not leave behind any documents, do not leave any traces!"

The congressional transcript here notes the "Homeric laughter of the entire audience." By the end of this year, Stalin will have executed a good number of his political rivals, including almost all the delegates present at the Sixteenth Congress who are laughing so Homerically (whatever that means). He will leave a very minimal number of documents about those executions.


1930: the first peak of the secret police terror operations (operating since 1917) coincides with the climax of the First Five Year Plan, as Stalin grips more tightly upon seizing governmental control of the people, in the name of the people, as the fundamental means of production.

Until now, Stalin has relied on the butcher of blood, Tukhachevsky, to occasionally purge the military of any high ranking officers he deems untrustworthy. This year, the military intelligence branch OGPU (eventually to become the GRU in 1942), forces two officers to testify that Tukhachevsky is plotting to overthrow the Politburo in a coup.

Suvorov doesn't mention this specific detail of the terror operations (doubtless a mere oversight, since it fits into his narrative), but Montefiore (via the mil-wik entry) reports this in his "Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar", pp.58-59.

Stalin tests whether his powerful ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze will agree to cooperate with Molotov in purging Tukhachevsky; but Sergo defends the butcher of blood as one hundred percent clean in his loyalty to Stalin and to Party ideology.

Stalin will continue using the butcher to keep the Red Army officers freshly watered with the blood of sacrificial lambs for a while longer. But he clearly foresees a day when the butcher himself must be thrown into the abattoir.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

1930: Stalin creates the world's first airborne assault arm. (Hitler will create the second in 1936.) Along with this, Stalin will spend monstrous sums (selling grain away from starving Soviet citizens), creating a civilian parachute training program, with a full industry to support it. It is no exaggeration to say that this move will eventually save the Soviet Union many times over! -- though not by using them as airborne troops. More on this later as we go...

In parallel, Stalin promotes a civilian glider mania, and creates the industry to support that, too. This was not intended for the amusement of the workers: before Hitler even comes to power, the Soviet Union will create the world's first cargo-landing glider (the G-63, engineered by Urlapov).

Soon the Soviets will create the first glider capable of carrying a truck -- or a two-ton tank!

Designer Gorokhovsky will also soon develop an inflatable rubber glider: pointless for recreational use (at least in the Soviet Union of the 30s), but able to be quickly loaded aboard a transport plane, brought home, and reused -- assuming there was ever any need to do such a thing, such as in a high intensity airborne assault.

It must be stressed that the civilians are not learning to fly single-seat recreational gliders, but troop gliders.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

December 24, 1930, a ship carrying two tractors leaves New York. Ultimate destination, the Soviet Union.

The agricultural tractors are not agricultural tractors; the documents have been faked. These tracked vehicles were designed by the great American tank genius George Walter Christie.

An entire family of tanks will be created based on their designs: the BT-2, BT-5, BT-7, BT-7A, and BT-7M. From these will come other families such as the BT-28, and T-34 models; and eventually the Soviet Union will segue the design ideas after WW2 into the world's top-class infantry fighting vehicles, recon vehicles, and armored personnel carriers, famous (or infamous) throughout the coming cold war. The tank design principles themselves meanwhile will be eventually (after WW2) adopted by all Western nations, to overtake Soviet tanks in quality, but still the Soviets will be producing very decent tanks from these designs out to the end of the Soviet government and beyond. Lots and lots and lots of those tanks...

What does the BT designation mean, by the way? -- aside from being a clear precursor to the famous BTR and other Soviet vehicles of the Cold War? This will be revealed at a more opportune time...
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Welcome to the new decade with 1931! Soviet fighter and bomber airfleet training manuals continue to focus teaching one massive ground strike instead of dogfighting.


February 5, 1931, Stalin (not anonymously) in Pravda, "We are doing a deed that, if it succeeds, will turn the whole world upside down and will free the entire workers' class." Well, he has some plan in mind it seems.

This same month, Stalin declares the first contest for designing the Palace of the Soviets, intended to be large enough to welcome and include the delegates of all nations on earth as they become Soviet Republics (under control of Stalin, or of whomever controls the Supreme Soviet at that time.)

May 1931, no winners are selected at the end of the contest for designing the Palace of the Soviets. Also, there's the minor problem that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior still exists in the way.

June 2, 1931, a conference of Party elders formally agrees upon the site of the future Palace, and condemns the cathedral to destruction.

July 16, 1931, the Supreme Soviet formally endorses the recognition of the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior as the most appropriate 'palace' to be destroyed for erecting the Palace of the Soviets.

July 18, 1931, the magazine Izvestia announces the 2nd contest for designing the Palace of the Soviets, this time expanded to include international submissions. State commissioners start an inventory of the Cathedral properties. A small fraction will be removed and stored, partly at state expense and partly at the expense of the Donskoy Monestary. The remainder will be destroyed.

August 18, 1931, demolition of the cathedral begins.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Say, weren't the Nazis supposed to be arising now? Let's check in on how they're doing...

August, 1931, the Social Democrats hold majority power in East Prussia. The Nazis initiate a referendum to oust the Social Democrats.

Naturally the German Communists oppose this referendum, since if it succeeds it may bring a day closer when Hitler will be shooting or gulaging all German Communists! Stalin gives them orders, therefore...

...to march with the Nazis under a common red flag on which the swastika intertwines with the hammer and sickle!  :o :o

The Communists call this a "Red Referendum" in solidarity with the National Socialist Workers' Party, and call the Nazis "working people's comrades".  <:-)

The referendum fails to gain a majority, and the Social Democrats stay in power in East Prussia instead of the Nazi Party gaining control.

Communists run by Stalin, openly siding with Hitler's Nazis, evidently makes people panic into supporting the Social Democrats more and/or the Nazis less!

So noted...
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

October 1931, from Trotsky's "Opposition Bulletin," Vol. 24, p.12: if a communist overthrow of Germany succeeds, "all the Manuels and Remmeles [in the German Communist Party] would have proclaimed it to have been Stalin's initiative. If, instead, it failed, Stalin still had every opportunity [working mostly behind the scenes as 'only' General Secretary] to find himself a scapegoat. This, after all, is the quintessence of his strategy. This is an arena where he excels."

November 1931, from Trotsky's "Opposition Bulletin", Vol.25, p.11, "Stalin's personal dictatorship clearly nears its sunset." Ah, good, no reason to worry, then, about Stalin invading Europe and trying to take over the world!


December 5, 1931: the Cathedral of Christ the Savior has proved surprisingly difficult to demolish for whatever reasons, but today it is finally brought down by two rounds of explosions. Hauling out the rubble will take more than a year.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

1932: Soviet fighter and bomber airfleet training manuals continue to focus teaching one massive ground strike instead of dogfighting.


1932: The Second Five-Year Plan begins, expanding and developing infrastructure under Stalin's oversight. Stalin pays for this (and preceding) infrastructure by selling off the accumulated treasures of pre-Soviet Russia from the past thousand years; not only gold reserves but icons, paintings, statues, medals, books, antique furniture, furs, and jewelry -- mercilessly confiscated and sold abroad. In precious metal reserves, not only did Stalin purchase infrastructure in gold, but in platinum and diamonds. In only a few years, Stalin has sold all that the nation had gathered for centuries -- the bank robber plundering all banks, all homes, all churches, in his grasp.

Does he replace this with gold mining? Yes, although this will not peak until around 1940. Stalin will sell off his newly mined gold on the world market, too, along with coal, nickel, manganese, petroleum, cotton, lumber and the quintessentially Russian caviar and furs. In 1930, the sale of oil and oil products, along with timber and timber products, produced 430 million gold rubles, plus another 500 million for flax and furs. The main Soviet export in 1930 became grain, however, at 883 million gold rubles.

1932 starts years of grain overproduction in the United States, so Soviet yearly revenue from grain exports will fall to 369 million gold rubles.

The point is that Soviet citizens are not personally benefiting from the use of any of this export; what isn't directly used in creating and sustaining factories and the military, is sold to help create and sustain factories and the military. Even half of the grain sold during 1932 and 1933 would have been enough to avoid the great starvations (per Rogovin's article "Hunger" in "The Power and the Opposition, 1923-1933", 1993, chapter 48).

Fortunately for Stalin, the Great Depression will make it easy for him to buy Western technology at cut-rate prices from inventors and businessmen in America, Germany, Great Britain, and France. By this process, the USSR will become the world's biggest importer of machinery and equipment.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

1932: In the Ukraine, four battalions of mobile railway guards stand ready as demolition teams, to totally wreck key junctions and main lines by sabotaging tracks and placing powerful time bombs to deter invaders destroying the lines. Other key items are prepared to be packed up and taken along: railway switch assemblies, communications facilities, telegraph lines, even some tracks where it seemed like quick replacement might be feasible (per Starinov's "Mines Awaiting Their Moment", p 24.)

These of course are primary defensive measures against a major military invasion. No one on the western side of Russia is preparing in any way to invade Russia at this time, but a murderous dictatorship can never be too careful!
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Speaking of anyone in western Europe making plans for invading other nations, however...

1932: Triandafillov writes in his military doctrinal manual, "The Nature of Modern Army Operations", pp. 177-178: "When organizing Revolutionary Committees it will be very difficult to find local forces to count on. Only some of the technical personnel and the lowest-ranking staff, will we be able to come by locally. All higher-ranking cadres and even some support personnel, we will have to bring with us... The number of staff members needed to carry out sovietization of newly conquered areas will be enormous."

The Russian government still plans to expand the Soviet Union by invading other nations and overthrowing the property owners, setting up local governmental control of the means of production as soon as possible.

Triandafillov devises calculations for planning the requirements to supply and manage millions of invading soldiers deep into enemy territory, at all stages of offensive operations and political overthrow. This includes, as a small illustration for his readers (the Soviet military marshals), calculating the personnel needed for five Polish administrative districts ("voivodships", roughly translated into English) from the Soviet border to the River San: the portion swallowed seven years later thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But he has planned out operations reaching to Europe's west coast, before Hitler has even come into control of Germany.  :o

Triandafillov proposes special-purpose military units of some sort to pacify and sovietize conquered nations, so as not to distract the main Red Army from its task of invading and defeating the enemy. Hitler will soon propose and enact the same plan, training the SS to set up the "New Order" (to be the New World Order of socialism) after the Wehrmacht defeats any invaded nation.

In the Soviet Union, these occupational military units will be comprised by the NKVD, which has been training by occupying and pacifying Russian home areas first and foremost! Their purpose during Soviet military invasions, however, is to back up "people's representatives" and "servants of the people" by (Suvorov seems to be quoting Triandafillov or someone else here but doesn't source it) "helping the insurgent workers and peasants entrench the power of the proletariat".

This is the standard Soviet military concept: the workers have been instigated to rise up in revolution against the property owners, and so the Red Army isn't supposed to be aggressively invading but just moving in to help the newly Sovietized workers protect and defend their newly conquered nation from reprisal by any former (and still-current) property owners resisting the workers' revolution.

Therefore, NKVD "border guards" are assigned to be first to cross the border into the invaded nation. From the Soviet Journal of Military History, 1970, #7, p. 85, "Operating in small groups, they would seize and hold river crossings and highway junctions."

This of course works best during a surprise blitzkrieg invasion. By the same token, it's better to invade before the workers' revolution actually starts, so as not to lose the element of surprise!
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

#54
March 23, 1932, the Soviet Union becomes the first nation in the world to create a heavy bomber corps. Soviet doctrine still focuses on one massive groundstrike with close air support, of course. But it's nice to have a heavy bomber corps anyway!


April 20, 1932: the USSR Revolutionary Military Council decrees that invasion armies (soon to be designated strike armies for diplomatic purposes) will effect cover for other armies through invasion. This is the basis for why strike armies gathering near a border, preparing for invasion, shall later be called "covering armies".

Such covering armies must not plan to invade the enemy upon the outbreak of war, of course: that would be ineffectively too late! They must start the war by invading, thus seizing the strategic initiative.

More specifically: the point of the Revolutionary Military Council, as its title suggests, is to discuss what will be necessary to launch and support the ultimate and final worldwide war to smash capitalism and bring about world socialism under control of the Communist International. Chief of Staff Marshal Yegorov during his report to the Council, believes the massive war will need tens of millions of troops mobilized. But mobilizing this freakish number will be a clear sign to the property owners that the workers and peasants are about to raid and take control of all property under the socialist government of the people!

Therefore, to succeed there must be a decisive invasion of enemy territory already prepared, and ready to go at the moment worldwide mobilization is announced. Thus, today, April 20, 1932, the First Strategic Echelon is proposed: a standing group of peacetime invasion corps and divisions. Their job is to cross the border the moment nationwide total mobilization is announced, disrupting the enemy's mobilization and covering the Red Army's own general mobilization and deployment of main force bodies, so that they may enter the final world war (the revolutionary one predicted by Marx) under the most scientifically ideal circumstances.

Fortunately for the Soviet Union, Tukhachevsky disagrees (from his Collected Works, Vol 2, p.219).

Not about a surprise decisive invasion of their neighbors in peacetime; he agrees that part is obviously correct!

No, he disagrees about using divisions and corps rather than whole invasion armies! The First Strategic Echelon must be composed of invasion armies, already created in peacetime, kept right at the border ready to go once the final revolutionary uprising of workers and peasants is announced. "The make-up and positioning of front-line armies must first and foremost be geared toward making it possible to cross the borders the moment mobilization is announced," and "mechanized corps have to be placed 30 to 40 miles from the frontier [translated from metric of course], to cross the border the very first day of mobilization."

Stalin will eventually decide the ruthless murderers Tukhachevsky and Yegorov have to be shot. These traitors to the people and to the world revolution are too timid, by Stalin's expectations, to succeed! -- they talk a good theory but will have done nothing by 1937 to create even one such army on the western border!

We're going to be hearing tons about the "First Strategic Echelon" in coming years, so it's going to be important to keep in mind what the purpose of the First Strategic Echelon is in Soviet military doctrine, as established by this Revolutionary Council in April 1932 -- and in the context for which this Revolutionary Council was convened.


Winston Churchill, incidentally, understood the concept of covering armies very well. In his "History of the English Speaking Peoples", written before and after WW2, he dedicates a good part of Volume 3 to the career of his esteemed ancestor John Churchill, made Earl and eventually Duke of Marlborough, who for ten straight years campaigned on the Continent against French interests, and who despite adverse military and political support never once lost a battle or failed at a siege. On several occasions, particularly while sieging, Marlborough would deploy what Churchill describes repeatedly as a "covering army" or "covering force": its purpose was to take control of the fighting space by invading the opponent's territory, and then to provide hasty mobile cover for the main force to arrive and deploy, especially for purposes of besieging a target. The covering force shifts from offense to defense on enemy territory, to protect the heavier and slower offensive force coming in behind.

(I just happened to run across this while working on the Icebreaker Thesis Chronology, so I decided to include it for context.  O:-) )
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Spring 1932: up through 1931, the Voroshilov 4th Cavalry Division, housed in palatial quarters in the Leningrad Military District, was considered the peerless masterpiece of the entire Red Army in its training and capabilities.

In 1932, however (Suvorov is a little unclear on the timing, might have been early 1931), the Division was tossed out onto an ill-equipped base. By spring 1932 (or 1933), the Red Army's finest had hit "rock bottom" and had "become unfit for action" according to its new incoming commander; its former commander was assigned most of the blame with predictable consequences, but People's Commissar of Defense Voroshilov (whom the Division had been named after) wanted a new commander to restore the quality and former glory of the 4th Cav.

That new commander? Zhukov!

He didn't assign all the blame to the former commander. From Zhukov's "Recollections and Reflections", p.118, "Over the next year and a half, the Division had had to put up its own barracks, stables, headquarters, living quarters, and depots, as well as a whole training facility. The result was to turn a splendidly trained division into a third-rate outfit of military laborers! Construction material shortages, rainy weather, and other adverse circumstances, made it impossible to get ready for winter in time, which hammered the Division's overall fitness and combat readiness. Discipline went downhill..."

Zhukov does indeed restore the Division to its former glory, and this starts the rise of his star (including promotion to general) in the Red Army, under his mentors, the grateful and impressed Voroshilov (who rises to Politburo Member, a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and Chairman of the Defense Committee), and Timoshenko (also a People's Commissar of Defense, and Marshal of the Soviet Union).

Consequently, all three will know from personal experience that even the finest division in the Red Army needs a year and a half to build sufficient (hardly palatial) new quarters themselves, if no one else is around to do so; and all three of them will know that this will destroy the effectiveness of the division.

Therefore, if Timoshenko and Zhukov should happen to later decide, with Stalin, to move nearly two hundred divisions out of their permanent bases into an area where there are no bases, they will only have two options for each arriving division, no matter when it arrives in the area: sacrifice building new bases to keep up the training, or else spend a year and a half building new bases and lose their training. But some of that training needs base areas for gunnery ranges, vehicle courses, and other training centers; and proper bases (even palatial luxury) provide conditions suitable for keeping combat readiness.

Even if a division is training as much as possible without these things -- and without such things their training will be mostly mobile assault -- leaving them to face one or two winters with only forest canopy, some tents, or maybe dugouts, will steadily erode the capabilities of even the best units.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

All right, enough about Stalin and his crew making plans to invade their neighbors and overrun the world for the past several years, and especially this year. What about the Nazis?! -- when are the Nazis going to arise?! Any time now??!

July 31, 1932: during the elections of the German Parliament (the Reichstag) today, Hitler's National Socialist Workers' Party earns 13.7 million votes. Although this tallies 37.3 percent of the total vote, the largest percentage for this year, it isn't enough of a majority to form a government.

This is, and will be, the peak of the Nazi party. After today its popularity will start to decline.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

November 6, 1932: an emergency Reichstag election takes place in Germany. Several days before now, a public transportation strike began in Berlin. The Communists (on Stalin's orders of course) jointly coordinated the strike. Nazi storm troopers (in their signature brown shirts) and Communist 'rotfronters' (a paramilitary group in signature red shirts) paralyzed public transportation for five days, dug up tram tracks, picketed, beat up those who came to work, and used force to stop the cars that the authorities managed to put to work.

Now it's election day: the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) tallies 11,705,000 votes: a loss of 2 million in a little more than three months. The Social Democrats earn 7,231,00, and the German Communist Party gathers 5,971,00.

Hitler is still the most popular politician in Germany, but he still lacks an absolute majority and so cannot form a (legal) government. His party also has the major weakness of being the Nazis! -- and so they took their prior high watermark as a license to act more and more like a thuggy gang, costing them those votes.

It also costs them money, both in expenditures and in a lack of donations. Goebbels around this time writes in his diary, "All hope has disappeared... There is not a pfennig in our cash boxes... Nobody gives us any credit... We are on our last breath."

It looked like the Nazis were finally getting off the ground into the air, but now they are in a stall and about to crash and burn like the Hindenberg.

Stalin should be pumping the air with his fists all day long! -- his chief militant rival for control of Germany's population, material, and means of production, is failing and will soon be politically irrelevant, while Stalin's own Germany Communist Party (which has always been working for Lenin's gang, and which Stalin has carefully taken direct and personal control of in recent years) is increasing its popularity with the German people.

December 23, 1932, the world's tiniest violin is playing sad music for Goebbels as he writes in his diary, "I am overwhelmed by a terrible feeling of loneliness, which borders on a sense of total loss! The year 1932 was a sequence of one misfortune after another. It should be erased completely... We have no prospects, no hopes left."

Only a miracle can save the Nazi Party now!

Ah, but don't worry, it's Christmas! It is the time of miracles...
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

#58
December 31, 1932: the influential newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung rejoices at the "disintegration of the NSDAP myth."

Around this time, Harold Laski, a leading English leftist intellectual (as quoted in Joachim Fest's "Hitler: A Biography", 1993, Vol.2, p.234) is assured that "The day when the National Socialists presented a lethal danger has passed... If we discount chance, it is not so improbable that Hitler will finish his career as an old man in some Bavarian village, telling tales to his friends in the evenings in some beer hall, about how he once almost orchestrated a takeover in the German Reich."

What is Hitler's opinion about his chances here? Goebbels says in his diary (unsourced by Suvorov) that Hitler is considering only two options: flight from Germany, or suicide!

Hitler, in one of his famous table talks, will later on May 6, 1942, reflect on this time: "The situation was at its worst in 1932, when we were forced to sign many debt obligations in order to fund our press and election campaigns, and keep the party running... In the name of the National Social Workers' Party, I signed for these obligations, knowing that if the NSDAP stopped functioning, everything was lost." He will have good reason in early May 1942 to remember his previous worst time by then! (Quoted by Suvorov from Piker's "Hitler's Table Talks", Smolensk edition, 1998.)

Those debts are about to come due tomorrow, after the end of 1932, and when they do Hitler and the Nazis will be finished -- even suicidally finished! Who can save you now, Hitler!?  L:-)

All Stalin has to do is literally nothing, and the Nazis will implode with a giant sucking sound; but if he wants to crush the Nazis politically even harder, all he has to do is order the German Communist Party to team up with the German Social Democrats.

True, Stalin (as previously noted and quoted) regards the pacifistic Social Democrats as a major stumbling block because they don't want war, and war is the mother of revolution. But Stalin has teamed up with his enemies before in order to set up a situation where he can look awesome by crushing them later. He could easily explain that right now it's best to team up with the hated Social Democrats to eliminate the menace of Hitler should that deranged madman ever take power in Germany! -- at least you can be sure the Social Democrats won't cause Stalin and Russia military problems! They'll be easy to roll over, too, when the time comes! What else would Stalin do anyway, other than literally nothing? -- team up with Hitler??

Stalin is well aware that if a militant post-Marxian revolutionary socialist like Hitler comes to power, he's going to throw the German Communists (along with the Social Democrats) into concentration camps as soon as feasibly possible! -- whereas the Social Democrats will allow the German Communists to grow from a newly strengthened second place to who knows where, how soon?

Certainly if Stalin is going to trigger a revolutionary uprising with his German Communists, he needs them alive and well, not dead or in the Nazi equivalent of a gulag. Just team up with the SDs for a little while, or at least just be quiet for a little while, and the situation will take care of itself, no muss, no fuss.

So..... Stalin orders the German Communists to commit delayed suicide by strengthening their attacks on the Social Democrats.  :o :wow: :timeout:

The Communist Party's public policy? -- there is no significant difference between a regime of parilamentary democracy, and a fascist tyranny.

That sounds one thousand percent insane, but in Comintern propaganda both Social Democracy and National Socialism are forms of bourgeoise dictatorship growing more and more reactionary against the true workers' revolution of Communist socialism. The only difference (according to this propaganda push) is that the Social Democrats are (supposedly) hiding their true motives more than Hitler.

Specifically, the Social Democrats are (being painted by Stalin's German Communists as) "social fascists" conducting a policy of "hidden fascism" more dangerous than Nazi policy! Why? Because the Social Democrats refuse to go to war; therefore they prevent the revolution that follows from the social destruction of war, and thus ultimately the Social Democrats prevent the victory of the proletariat (the working class). Nazi policy, on the other hand, clearly enhances the chances for war, and thus brings nearer the scientifically inevitable revolutionary world war which shall free the working class!

This won't be the first time that Stalin has ordered his German Communist Party to support the rise of the Nazis; remember East Prussia, August 1931.


January 30, 1933: the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler and his gang, are still the largest party in the German Parliament, yet still not the majority. The former chancellor Franz von Papen and other leaders persuade President Paul von Hindenberg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor anyway.

Hitler and his Nazis will take around a year and a half to transform the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany, a one-party totalitarian socialist autocracy, with Hitler as the new head of state with a new official title of Leader (as well as continuing the title of Reichskanzler).

In one month, Stalin's German Communist propaganda, by appealing to Germany's war spirit over against the National Socialist Party's unwillingness to fight, has given Hitler and his Nazi Party their Christmas miracle.

For this, there will be consequences...

[Next up: PREPARING THE WAR]
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!