To be fair to the German SPD, that seems to have been a formality, and they pretty much gave up on Marxism in practice long before. In 1919 and the early '20s they were actually working with the hard-right Freikorps to crush Communist skulls in Germany's streets, directly causing the execution of Karl Liebknecht & Rosa Luxembourg (Germany's top commie bigwigs at the time).

They gave the KPD such a hard time that the latter (and Stalin, their puppeteer) declared the Social Democrats to be 'social fascists', to be opposed as vigorously as the Nazis. There's no excuse for the horrific degeneracy of Weimar of course, but if nothing else, the SPD's switch (in practice if not quite in name) to defending republicanism against the various extremist factions seems to have been genuine - Friedrich Ebert was no Kerensky (ie. a leader who bent over for the far left and enabled their revolution's success in his country).

There were other democratic paramilitary forces in the Weimar period, such as the Iron Front (fun fact: they came up with the antifascist three arrows symbol that Antifa uses sometimes these days, despite fighting Communists as hard as they fought Nazis), but those tended to be smaller and more obscure than the Reichsbanner.

To be fair to the German SPD, that seems to have been a formality, and they pretty much gave up on Marxism in practice long before. In 1919 and the early '20s they were actually working with the hard-right Freikorps to crush Communist skulls in Germany's streets, directly causing the execution of Karl Liebknecht & Rosa Luxembourg (Germany's top commie bigwigs at the time).

They gave the KPD such a hard time that the latter (and Stalin, their puppeteer) declared the Social Democrats to be 'social fascists', to be opposed as vigorously as the Nazis. There's no excuse for the horrific degeneracy of Weimar of course, but if nothing else, the SPD's switch (in practice if not quite in name) to defending republicanism against the various extremist factions seems to have been genuine - Friedrich Ebert was no Kerensky (ie. a leader who bent over for the far left and enabled their revolution's success in his country).

There were other democratic paramilitary forces in the Weimar period, such as the Iron Front (fun fact: they came up with the antifascist three arrows symbol, despite fighting Communists as hard as they fought Nazis), but those tended to be smaller and more obscure than the Reichsbanner.

To be fair to the German SPD, that seems to have been a formality, and they pretty much gave up on Marxism in practice long before. In 1919 and the early '20s they were actually working with the hard-right Freikorps to crush Communist skulls in Germany's streets, directly causing the execution of Karl Liebknecht & Rosa Luxembourg (Germany's top commie bigwigs at the time).

They gave the KPD such a hard time that the latter (and Stalin, their puppeteer) declared the Social Democrats to be 'social fascists', to be opposed as vigorously as the Nazis. There's no excuse for the horrific degeneracy of Weimar of course, but if nothing else, the SPD's switch (in practice if not quite in name) to defending republicanism against the various extremist factions seems to have been genuine - Friedrich Ebert was no Kerensky (ie. a leader who bent over for the far left and enabled their revolution's success in his country).