Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 130, April/May 1996
Despite the fall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989 and the new ‘united Germany’, the ideological battle of the class war continues. An important element of this centres on Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in World War Two. Conservative historians now argue that it was Germany’s ‘right’ to ‘defend’ itself against Soviet ‘aggression’; that Hitler’s attack on the USSR pre-empted a ‘planned’ Soviet attack on Germany. This debate has inevitably given rise to a discussion of the role of German communist resistance in Nazi Germany with reactionary commentators seeking to write them out of history. Yet a cursory examination of the facts shows that, within Germany, members and supporters of the German Communist Party (KPD) were the most consistent and self-sacrificing of all the opponents of the Nazi regime.
To understand the KPD’s role in the Resistance, its position in pre-1933 Germany must be established. The KPD was founded in November 1918 in opposition to the pro-World War I Social Democratic Party (SPD), whose leaders, supported by the armed forces and Freikorps militia, formed the Weimar Republic on the dead bodies of revolutionary workers. By 15 January 1919 the KPD’s two leading members, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, had been murdered by the SPD-sponsored Freikorps. Responding to workers setting up workers’ councils, SPD leader Noske declared: ‘Any person found bearing arms against the government’s own troops is to be shot immediately.’ Little wonder that the KPD and SPD were bitterly opposed.
For the SPD, representing the better-organised and better-off section of the working class, the Weimar bourgeois democracy was a gain to be defended. The KPD was implicitly revolutionary and saw the Weimar Republic as an obstacle to a Soviet Germany. In Weimar Germany KPD and SPD hostility was deepened by the communist blood spilt by Social Democratic authorities.
The KPD ‘in various ways provided a voice for the least experienced, least well-organised and most ill-paid of the proletariat.’ (Rosenhaft) The overwhelming majority (almost 90% of KPD members by 1932) were unemployed. The KPD was regarded as the second party of the Comintern and was an enthusiastic proponent of implementing the ‘Third Period’ policy which saw the Great Depression as the ‘final’ crisis of capitalism and the Social Democrats and Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) as ‘social fascists’.
Although the KPD was the smaller of the two parties, its electoral successes seemed to confirm its positions. In the last three pre-Nazi Reichstag elections, the number of KPD deputies increased from 77 to 89 to 100 in November 1932. In contrast, the SPD dropped from 143 to 133 to 121. However the combined 13 million-odd votes they received was declining as a percentage of the electorate. Of more pressing importance was the KPD’s lack of preparedness for underground life and anti-fascist activities. In February 1932 Wilhelm Pieck admitted: ‘We have a situation in which fascism can come to power in Germany without the Communist Party being able even to begin a serious fight.’ The killings of two police captains in August 1931 led to a two-week ban on the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne, the occupation of their offices in Karl Liebknecht Haus and mass searches. This gave the KPD ‘a taste of illegality’ but also ‘revealed how ill-prepared it was’. (Rosenhaft)
At the end of 1932 the SPD had 650,000 members; the Reichsbanner, an SPD-inspired paramilitary organisation, one million members; and the independent trade unions 5.8 million members. The KPD was smaller with approximately 360,000 members of whom 286,100 were paying dues. and the RGO (Revolutionary Trade Union Organisation) and Red unions which had approximately 256,000 members. By the end of 1932, three years after the Great Crash on Wall Street, German national income had dropped by 4 %, one third of the population was unemployed — amongst male industrial workers it was even higher at 40%.
These conditions led to the continued growth of support for the KDP and the loss of two million votes by the Nazis in November 1932. This helped propel the German bourgeoisie to form a united front against the ‘Red’ menace. In their war against communism, the Nazis had the approval of a wide strata of German society, the state apparatus, big business and the armed forces.
The KPD’s mistaken analysis of the Nazi seizure of power, an analysis shared by the Comintern, did not help prepare for illegal work. The KPD saw ‘the Nazi dictatorship not as a major working class defeat but as a final desperate move of the monopoly bourgeoisie to stave off the growing threat of the workers’ revolutionary movement’ (Mason). The disaster for the German working class and eventually the peoples of Europe was that the Nazis did indeed break the workers’ revolutionary movement.
Nevertheless whilst the KPD’s analysis can be criticised, the heroic resistance of its members and supporters cannot. No matter what losses they suffered, those active communists not incarcerated or dead continued to struggle. Many Reichsbanner and social democratic trade union movements awaited the call for active resistance from the SPD leadership. It never came.
Quite remarkably, during the so-called ‘seizure of power’ by the Nazis, the KPD attempted to continue as before producing newspapers (two million local and district papers in the first five months of Nazi rule), collecting dues and so forth, actions which laid the remaining members open to arrest. Following the Reichstag fire in February 1933 10,000 regional and local KPD members, ‘including many of those who had been designated as reserves in the event of such a ban’ (Merson), were arrested.
Nevertheless at least 60,000 communists were engaged in anti-fascist activity from 1933 to 1935 — of whom 18,243 were prosecuted and tens of thousands held in concentration camps. Ten thousand more communists emigrated.
While in 1933 and 1934 SPD overtures to the KPD were rejected (in September 1934 a Comintern leader, Pianitsky, said, ‘We must do everything in our power so that the Social Democratic Party of Germany, as such, should no longer be able to exist’), it must be emphasised that the average KPD member by 1925 was strongly opposed to the SPD. Events such as the Social Democrat banning of the Berlin May Day demonstrations in 1929, leading to the deaths of 30 communists, only emphasised KPD opposition. The possibility of a united front between the SPD and KPD exists only in the fantasies of British Trotskyite sects.
When in 1935 the KPD changed its position its overtures were this time rejected by the SPD. The SPD now looked to a return to democracy and towards the bourgeois democratic parties, none of whom had opposed the Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers. By August 1935, ‘the Nazis had destroyed the above-ground KPD and sent up to 100,000 German communists to prisons and concentration camps’ (Herf). Despite such losses and bearing in mind that the SPD membership was more than twice that of the KPD) in 1933, Gestapo arrest figures for 1936 (KPD 11,678, SPD 1,371) and 1937 ( KPD 8,086, SPD 733) show, whatever the qualifications, that the KPD was the cutting edge of the resistance to the Nazis and the Nazis knew it.
On 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a Non-Aggression Pact, followed on 28 September by a Border and Friendship. The effect of these Treaties was to isolate the KPD from the other, much less active German anti-fascist forces, as well as causing difficulties for many KPD members. SPD luminaries such as Hilferding (author of Finance Capital) spoke openly of ‘Red imperialism’. Nevertheless, even in this total isolation, German communists maintained a continuous opposition to the Nazi regime that makes the ideological defenders of German imperialism so eager to seize on any failings and errors that German communists made in the conduct of their unremitting anti-fascism.
Alongside their resistance to Nazism in Germany, KPD members demonstrated a sterling internationalism in the 1930s. During the Spanish Civil War, German volunteers were the largest foreign contingent in the International Brigades — 5,000, 90% of whom were KPD members. Three thousand Germans were killed fighting the Spanish fascists and their international backers, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
The only significant action of the conservative-military opposition to Hitler was the assassination attempt in July 1944. Heroic though this was, it must be seen in the context that the plotters knew Germany was beaten — previous grumblings in the military had been silenced by military success, promotions, honours. However Andreas Hillgrüber saw the 1944-45 period as a heroic endeavour by the German Wehrmacht to defend Germany from the approaching Red Army. To such historians the would-be assassin would be viewed as a traitor. Yet the almost successful killing of Hitler in November 1939 by one dedicated individual, George Elser, shows what a determined military opposition could have achieved. Radio Moscow praised the assassination attempt and called for similar actions. Britain and the USA preferred to remain silent.
Nazi expansion from 1938 onwards made communist resistance more difficult. The conquest of Czechoslovakia curtailed much of the external support for the resistance. At the outbreak of the Second World War mass arrests of communists took place in Germany and France. Nevertheless, instructors arrived secretly from Sweden to assess the situation inside Germany and to organise communist cells. Through the war, communist instructors voluntarily went into Germany from Sweden and the USSR, many being caught and executed. Within Germany itself, separate communist groups were the most active opponents of the imperialist war.
In early September 1939 Heinz Kapelle, a young communist, and his group distributed anti-war leaflets in Berlin. Communists such as Robert Uhrig, released from a concentration camp in 1936, had by 1938 built up an organisation of 200. By 1940 he had contacted several other active groups in Berlin. The Uhrig organisation lasted until 1942. Such communist resistance activities were replicated in Hamburg, led by Bästlein, Saefkow and Abhagen and in Mannheim by George Lechleiter. In central Germany, an anti-fascist group organised in various factories and towns survived the war, intact. Throughout, efforts were being made to form an internal leadership.
In Germany one of the two largest anti-fascist organisations were the famous ‘Red Orchestra’, one of whose members had infiltrated the Nazi war machine so effectively as to be an adviser to Goering. The other was the Knoechel Organisation with networks in the Ruhr, the Rhineland and Berlin. They were discovered by the Gestapo just as the impact of the Battle of Stalingrad made the thought of the possibility of defeat apparent to many Germans.
Outside Germany, German communists in countries overrun by the Nazis joined the various national resistance groups, most notably in France and Greece. In the USSR German communists worked to create disaffection amongst German troops, to win German POWs in the Soviet Union to the anti-fascist cause, and took a leading role in the setting up of the National Committee for a Free Germany in late 1943, which was intended to unite all German anti-fascists and democrats, and the German Officers’ League, which it was hoped could be used to prise the German army from the Nazi regime.
Whatever one’s view of the former GDR, we know what its leaders were doing against the Nazi regime. Walter Ulbricht was in the trenches of the Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad trying to get German soldiers to surrender. Erich Honecker was imprisoned from December 1935 until liberated by the Red Army in 1945. KPD activists post-1933 cannot be accused of even passive acceptance of the regime. So they are cynically attacked for mistakes made as resistants or attempts are made to discredit them by linking their resistance activities with events, especially the Wall, in the former GDR. But the reality of communists’ leading role in the struggle against Nazism in Germany cannot be gainsaid.
Tony Bidgood
Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the fascists? The German communists and political violence.
Allan Merson, Communist resistance in Nazi Germany.
Timothy Mason, Social policy in the Third Reich: the working class and the national community.
Jeffrey Heil in Michael Geyer & John Boyer (eds), Resistance against the Third Reich 1933-1990.
