The world known as Theta- 862 diverged from our reality in October 1916, when Private Adolf Hitler of the Bavarian Reserve Infantry was killed by an exploding shell at the Battle of the Somme. Two years later, after Germany surrendered, Anton Drexler, a German Nationalist from Munich, formed the Committee For Independent Workmen, which later became the Germany Socialist Workers Party, but the party never became a major political force. During the 1920’s and ’30’s, the German state was hit by various economic catastrophes, struggling to keep the country viable. In 1932, the popular President Paul Von Hindenburg left office, due to his term being up and his old age and mental state preventing him from running for a second term. He was replaced by his Chancellor Kurt Von Schleicher. However, Von Schleicher became increasingly less popular as the economic situation worsened until, in 1934, the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) lead a Socialist uprising, overthrowing the government in a similar fashion to the Russian revolution of 1917. The KPD pronounce Germany a Democratic Republic (DDR) and cancel debt paying to its main creditor, the USA. Through a number of Marxist economic, employment and rearmament schemes, Germany is brought out of depression quicker than any other European country and soon starts to ally its self with the USSR, spreading Socialism throughout Eastern Europe. The USSR successfully defeats Japan in the second Sino-Japanese War, utilising its new atomic weapons development, and socialism starts to spread across East Asia, Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam all becoming Socialist Republics within ten years. However, by the 1950’s the US and its European allies, Britain, France, the Italian Social Republic and Spain form an alliance to stop the spread of Communism in Europe. This leads to a Cold War between East and West which lasts for decades. With both sides building up enough armaments to destroy the world many times over, the two sides turn to trying to out do each other in scientific development, a battle which culminates in a joint Russian- German team landing a man on the moon in the early 1970s.
