This overview provides historical perspectives on the KPD playable faction in The Weimar Republic, as well as some insight as to how the faction functions in gameplay terms. Future posts will highlight the other playable factions and the game’s general mechanics in a more detailed manner. For an overview on the NSDAP faction, be sure to check out my earlier post on that faction.

Introduction

Born from the ashes of the ultra-radical Spartacus movement and building on the legacy of its recently murdered leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands  grew rapidly in the bloody aftermath of the 1918 November Revolution. Positioning themselves as a radical alternative to the reformist SPD (who they later dubbed “Social Fascists”), the German Communists envisaged a continuation of the Revolution that, according to them, had been betrayed by the reformists. As the Party’s ideological stance and political strategies gradually aligned with those of the Russian Bolsheviks, this vision soon became synonomous with a German Soviet State. To many industrial workers at the time this was an attractive prospect, while the middle classes and the conservatives, as well as many moderate leftists, perceived it as a major threat to the nation.

Consequently the KPD had many enemies but few allies, and as the Republic and its democratic institutions fell apart in the early 1930s the Communists faced a dificult situation – not least because the NSDAP managed to attract huge segments of the working classes. After Hitler’s power seizure Communists became the first prime target of persecution, with many leading KPD members murdered or forced into exile.

While the ideological differences between KPD and NSDAP were vast and they definitely acted as sworn enemies throughout the Weimar era, the two factions shared several traits. They were both mass movements, appealing to public sentiments of righteous  anger, frustration and a general lack of trust in liberal and social democracy. They both envisaged a strong, totalitarian state as a major political goal, and none of them shied away from violence as a means to achieve that goal. Both movements competed for the attention of the working classes, with Hitler even adopting the fashionable term “socialist” for his radically anti-socialist movement.

The differences and similarities between the KPD and the NSDAP, or between Communism and Fascism in general, is a complex and controversial topic that is still being discussed today, often in a polarized manner. The Weimar Republic makes no attempt to solve this issue, yet the game mechanics reflect its dynamics in a way that, hopefully, provides food for thought and further reflection. 

Propaganda and agitation

The main currency of The Weimar Republic is influence. By placing influence cubes in Germany’s regions and major cities, the game’s factions gainmore traction and power. This abstractly represents the spreading of your movement’s message through e.g. agitation, mass meetings, networking and mass media.

Each region and city has both a population and a political value, with the former being an absolute limit on the total number of influence cubes it can hold, and the latter reflecting its overall importance in Weimar politics (needless to say, both these values are abstractions based on history, not historical simulations). While the exact procedure for influence placement and removal varies slightly between factions, both KPD and NSDAP will find the masses far more susceptible as the economy trends towards mass unemployment in the final stage of the game.

The economy track represents the oscillation between hyperinflation and mass unemployment that characterized the Weimar years. As the track moves towards the right, both KPD and NSDAP can place and remove more influence cubes in a single action, representing the working classes flocking to these radical mass movements. The economy track has several other effects as well, which will be discussed in future posts.

Staying power and political strategies 

KPD’s stance track is an indicator of which strategy the party is currently following – a democratic stance means working within the democratic system to eventually overthrow it, while a revolutionary stance opens up for more overtly violent methods. Of course, “democratic” in no way indicates that KPD actually supported liberal or even social democracy. From its earliest days the party followed the increasingly totalitarian policies of the Soviet Union which, had they been successful in Germany, would have spelled the end of free elections and the parliamentary system as a whole.

Like NSDAP, the Communists have access to a number of faction-unique cadres that represent e.g. networks of loyalists, meeting halls, printing houses, and so on. In a way, cadres are influence on steroids; they are harder to remove, give extra staying power, recruitment capacity, and election bonuses. By adopting a democratic stance, KPD gets access to more cadres, which are also made available when the Democratic Coalition faction strikes deals with the Soviet Union – the Moscow Bolsheviks would hardly miss an opportunity to improve the odds for their German comrades.

Should KPD opt for a revolutionary stance instead, less cadres become available. However, this stance opens up for a more direct route to revolution, as it makes both strike counters and the sudden victory Revolution counter available. Strikes are convenient ways of messing with your opponents, as they remove any economic leverage from a space, block Coalition reforms, and also slows down unit movement. With three strikes in play, a general strike is called, paralyzing the whole country’s transport infrastructure and severely affecting the economy. But strikes are also precursors to more violent revolts and in the long run to KPD victory, as they can be flipped to their uprising side and thus pose a serious threat to the Republic. With four uprisings on the map, or three uprisings and supremacy (in effect, military control) in Berlin, the KPD may place their Revolution counter on the timeline and potentially win the game through sudden victory.

Bringing the revolutionary message to the streets

As mentioned in the previous spotlight article on NSDAP, every self-respecting movement needed its own paramilitaries to be successful in Weimar Germany’s aggressive political  climate. The KPD were certainly no exception to this rule. From the early days of the Republic, more or less organized street fighters formed the militant arm of the movement, providing security for demonstrations and meetings as well as participating in assaults on the party’s political enemies. In the numerous Communist uprisings that sprung up throughout Germany in the early 1920s, worker militia acted as paramilitary forces (often poorly equipped and lacking in military training), clashing with both the regular army, police forces, and the brutal right-wing Freikorps -who were regularly employed by the democratic government despite their explicit lack of loyalty to the democratic system. 

In 1924 the Communist forces were given a more formal organization in the Roter Frontkämpferbund who, while officially an independent organization, effectively functioned as the KPD’s street army. Its presence in Germany’s cities became more and more pronounced as the 1920s progressed and the Nazi Sturmabteilung gradually came to replace Freikorps as the major right-wing paramilitary force. The violence reached unprecedented heights during and immediately after May Day 1929 (later dubbed Blutmai or “Bloody May”)  when RFB clashed with police in Berlin, leaving over 30 people killed and many more wounded. Shortly afterwards the militia were officially banned by the authorities, but continued to operate illegaly up until the Nazi power grab in 1933.

In game terms, KPD’s street muscle is represented by worker militia units, capable of acting both offensively by assaulting other factions’ units, and defensively by increasing the survival chances of strikes and uprisings. While not on par with the Freikorps or the regular army Reichswehr units when it comes to fighting prowess or survivability, they are more readily available and also unquestionably loyal to the cause, making them a crucial part of any victorious KPD strategy.

The Communists’ continual conflict with the National Socialists is represented by the sworn enemies special rule, which states that worker militia and SA units can not enter a space where the other faction’s units are present without assaulting them. As any assault on KPD or NSDAP automatically moves their respective stance towards revolutionary, continual clashes will escalate the overall use of political violence in a destructive spiral, relfecting historical events. Of course, this can also be used by cunning players to mess with any of these factions’ plans to “play it nice” and force them in a more confrontational direction.

Oppositions and overlaps; the asymmetry of political struggle

As previously mentioned, KPD’s conflict with the National Socialists increasingly came to define this period as a time of struggle between mass movements offering ideologically opposed answers to similar questions, often using aligned methods for spreading their message. The superficial similarities between the factions means that KPD and NSDAP share several game mechanics, while at the same time functioning as polar opposites. This is also reflected in these two factions’ interplays with the other two factions.

NSDAP have a parasitical “frenemies” relationship to the Radical Conservatives, competing for the same Middle Class Sympathies, benefiting equally from higher Reaction levels, and sharing some counters. The Radical Conservatives can even usurp an NSDAP electoral victory, potentially succeeding where their historical counterparts failed. This represents the fact that National Socialism began as a fringe splinter group within the larger reactionary movement, maintaining strong bonds and connections even when NSDAP staked out its own path during the 1920s.

The same logic applies to KPD and the Coalition, albeit less directly. There were numerous ideological and organizational overlaps between moderate Communists and left-leaning Social Democrats, stemming from shared roots in nineteen-century socialism as well as common struggles before, during and after the 1918 revolution. While the two movements gradually split and eventually became bitter enemies, the Social Democratic SPD maintained a strong influence on the worker’s movement and the trade unions. In game terms this is reflected by the Coalition’s economic leverage being able to remove both strikes and KPD cadres – often a more effective method than blunt force.

In general, the asymmetric nature of the factions make for constantly evolving power dynamics and also opens up for some interesting makeshift (and unorthodox) alliances. An example of this is the united front rule, which allows any faction to use any other faction’s units in an assault as long as that faction allows it. So while the new enemy of your current enemy may become your temporary friend, you might well find yourself in a very different position as the balance of power shifts. This being the Weimar Republic, such changes could come at any moment – only the ones who keep their backs clear will prevail.

Hopefully this overview has provided some insight as to how the KPD faction functions, as well as to the KPD’s historical role in the Weimar Republic and its relationship to the other factions. The next TWR faction spotlight post will deal with the right-wing Radical Conservatives, a faction with several faction-unique traits and mechanics.

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