The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  III

  The Third Reich’s elaborate apparatus of policing and repression was directed in the first place at hunting down and apprehending Nazism’s enemies within Germany. Organized opposition to Nazism was offered only by the Communists and the Social Democrats in the early years of the dictatorship. The left-wing political parties had won 13.1 million votes in Germany’s last fully free election, in November 1932, to the Nazis’ 11.7 million. They represented a huge chunk of the German electorate. Yet they had no effective means of standing up to Nazi violence. Their entire apparatus, along with that of their paramilitary wings, the ‘Red Front-Fighters’ League’ and the Reichsbanner, and associated organizations such as the trade unions, was ruthlessly swept aside in the first months of 1933, their leaders exiled or imprisoned, their millions of members and supporters, many of them looking back on a lifetime’s commitment to the cause, isolated and disoriented. Former activists were placed under more or less permanent surveillance, shadowed, their correspondence and contacts monitored. Divided, mutually hostile and taken by surprise at the speed and ruthlessness of the Nazi seizure of power, they were initially helpless and uncertain how to act. Reorganizing to form an effective resistance movement seemed out of the question.87

  Yet in some ways the Social Democrats and Communists were better prepared for resistance than any other groups in Nazi Germany. The labour movement had been repeatedly banned or suppressed in the past, under Metternich’s police repression of the early nineteenth century, in the post-revolutionary reaction of the 1850s and early 1860s, and most notably during Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law of 1878-90. Going underground was nothing new. Indeed some veterans of the Anti-Socialist Law, when the Social Democrats had developed a whole network of secret contacts and communications, were still active forty-odd years later, under the Nazis. Fuelled by their stories of heroism and derring-do in the 1880s, and disillusioned with the compromises the party had made in the later years of the Weimar Republic, many younger Social Democrats relished the prospect of returning to the party’s revolutionary traditions. Where the international statesman Bismarck had failed to crush them, surely the beer-hall demagogue Hitler was unlikely to succeed. Social Democratic activists quickly began cyclostyling illegal broad-sheets, pamphlets and newspapers and distributing them secretly amongst sympathizers to try and strengthen their resolve to resist the new regime’s attempts to win them over. Many were sustained by the belief, rooted in the Marxist theory that still dominated the thinking of the Social Democrats in this period, that the Nazi regime was unlikely to last. It was a final, desperate attempt at self-preservation by a capitalist system plunged into its deepest ever crisis by the crash of 1929. All that was needed was to stick together and prepare for the Third Reich to self-destruct. By spreading clear and accurate information about the true state of affairs in Germany, it would be possible to destroy the ideological foundations of the regime and get the masses poised to remove it.88

  In many parts of Germany, above all in its industrial heartlands, with their decades-old traditions of labour movement solidarity, clandestine groups quickly organized and sprang into action. Even in less secure cultural environments, Social Democrats managed to regroup and continue their activities in secret. In Hanover, for instance, the young Werner Blumenberg, later to make a name for himself as a Marx scholar, set up a ‘Socialist Front’ that counted some 250 members and produced a series of mimeographed newsletters, the Socialist Flysheets (Sozialistische Blätter), in editions of 1,500 that were distributed to contacts throughout the region.89 Similar, smaller groups were established in the Bavarian towns of Augsburg and Regensburg, and even in the ‘capital’ of the Nazi movement, Munich. Their activities included such actions as pasting up posters in the streets at night and urging people to vote ‘no’ in the plebiscite of 19 August 1934. Leaflets were left in workplaces with slogans or brief news items criticizing the Nazi propaganda machine’s portrayal of events. All over Germany, thousands of former activists in the Social Democratic Party were engaged in this kind of work. They concentrated in particular on maintaining contacts with the party’s leadership in exile, in Prague. Their aim was not just to rouse the masses, but to keep old party and trade union loyalists within the fold and wait for better times. Most of them lived a double life, maintaining outward conformity with the regime but engaging in resistance activities in secret, in their spare time. Some collected the leaflets and newspapers the exiled party organization printed, such as the New Forwards (Neue Vorwärts) on journeys across the border, smuggled them into Germany and distributed them to the remnants of the party’s membership. And they fed detailed information to the exiled leadership about the situation in Germany in turn, providing it month by month with a remarkably sober and increasingly realistic assessment of the chances of staging a revolt.90

  Yet these activities stood little chance even of achieving the most basic of their aims, that of maintaining solidarity amongst former Social Democrats, let alone of spreading the resisters’ message to the masses. For this there were many reasons. The resisters lacked leadership. The most prominent Social Democrats had mostly gone into exile. Even those who wanted to stay on were too well known to escape the attention of the police for long: the Silesian Reichstag deputy Otto Buchwitz, for example, had a number of narrow escapes while travelling around Germany distributing illegal party literature, before he finally bowed to the inevitable and allowed the underground movement to smuggle him into Denmark at the beginning of August 1933.91 By this time, almost all the other leading Social Democrats who had remained in Germany were in prison, in a concentration camp, silenced or dead. The leadership in exile proved to be an unsatisfactory substitute. Its uncompromising position had already alienated many of those comrades who had elected to stay in Germany in 1933, and it made matters worse in January 1934 by issuing the ‘Prague Manifesto’, which called for a radical policy of expropriation to destroy big business and the big landed estates once Hitler had been overthrown.92 This was unpalatable to many local opposition groups, while failing to convince others that the party leadership had really shaken off the passivity and fatalism that had hampered its will to resist in 1932-3.93 Dissatisfied with what they saw as the party’s feebleness, small, more radical groups acted independently, taking a variety of names such as the International Socialist Fighting League, the Revolutionary Socialists of Germany or the Red Shock-Troop (a purely Berlin organization). These in turn quarrelled with other underground groups that remained loyal to the exiled leadership in Prague, disagreeing not only over policies but also over tactics.94

  In such circumstances, any idea of rousing the masses to outright opposition to the regime, the traditional goal pursued by underground movements in European history, was doomed to failure from the start. Finding a basis in the masses was almost impossible. The tattered remnants of labour movement culture that remained under the Third Reich were few and usually unimportant. The Nazi ‘co-ordination’ of local associational life of all kinds had simply been too thorough. Rabbit-breeding circles, gymnastic clubs and similar groups that changed their names by dropping Social Democratic terms from their titles but kept the same leadership and membership as before were quickly recognized for what they were and closed down by the police or the municipal authorities. The Social Democratic resistance was thus never able to expand beyond small, locally organized elite groups of activists. Moreover, the Nazi regime could not be convincingly portrayed, like the regimes of Metternich or Bismarck, as the representative of a tiny, authoritarian elite; on the contrary, its rhetoric announced from the start that it intended to represent the people as a whole, mobilizing them in support of a new kind of state that would overcome internal divisions and create a new national community for the whole German race. This was a dispiriting fact with which Social Democratic activists quickly came to terms. 95

  It was probably loyalty to the memory of the Social Democratic-oriented trade unions that lay behind the mass abstentions that met the annual
elections legally required of shop-floor representatives in 1934 and 1935. There were so many blank or spoiled ballots that the results were kept secret in 1934 and 1935 and the process was abandoned thereafter.96 The Gestapo tracked down many of the ‘Marxists’ who distributed leaflets urging a ‘no’ vote in the plebiscite of 19 August 1934, arresting over 1,200 of them in the Rhine-Ruhr area alone. Massive waves of arrests of Social Democrats rolled over other parts of Germany such as Hamburg. The issue of a special leaflet by the Social Democratic resistance on 1 May 1935 prompted a further series of arrests. By the end of the year, the formal underground organization of the Social Democrats had been effectively destroyed. Yet the sheer size of the party’s former membership and the enduring power of its former cultural milieu and traditions ensured that hundreds of thousands of old Social Democrats remained loyal in their hearts to the fundamental values of their party. Loosely organized, informal, decentralized groups of Social Democrats continued throughout the rest of the Third Reich to keep these values and ideals alive, even though they could do nothing to put them into effect.97

  A small number of radical Social Democrats, gathered since 1929 in a group that called itself New Beginning (Neu-Beginnen), took the view that the main prerequisite for a successful workers’ resistance was the reunification of the German labour movement, whose bitter division between Social Democrats and Communists they thought had opened the way to the rise of fascism. Its hundred or so members, backed by a rather larger number of sympathizers, expended a great deal of effort in trying to bring the parties together, using tactics such as infiltrating Communist cells and working to change the party’s line from within. The organization’s manifesto, written by its leader Walter Loewenheim and published in Karlsbad in August 1933 in an edition of 12,000, aroused some debate in resistance circles when it was secretly distributed in Germany. But Loewenheim concluded in 1935 that the prospects for success were so small that there was no point in carrying on. Although some members, like the future historian Francis Carsten, tried to continue, waves of arrests by the Gestapo soon crippled the remnants of the movement; Carsten himself went into emigration and began a doctorate on the early history of Prussia. Other small groups in exile and within the country worked along similar lines, including the International Socialist Fighting League and the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, one of whose leading members was the young Willy Brandt, who left Germany for exile in Scandinavia and became Mayor of West Berlin and then Federal Chancellor of West Germany after the war. All these groups, however, rejected the politics of both the major working-class parties as divisive and outmoded, without really developing any coherent political concept to put in their place.98

  The hardline attitude of the Communists made any idea of creating a united front quite impossible to fulfil. Since the end of the 1920s the Communist Party of Germany had been following the ‘ultra-left’ party line in Moscow, which damned the Social Democrats as ‘social fascists’ and regarded them, indeed, as the main obstacle to a proletarian revolution. Nothing that happened in 1933 or 1934 changed this. In May 1933 the German Communist Party’s Central Committee reaffirmed what the Cominterm praised as the party’s ‘absolutely correct political line’ against ‘social fascism’. ‘The complete exclusion of the Social Fascists from the state apparatus, the brutal suppression of the Social Democratic party organization and its press as well as our own, do not alter the fact that now as before they constitute the main social support of the dictatorship of capital.’ Critics of the ultra-left line and advocates of co-operation with the Social Democrats, such as Hermann Remmele and Heinz Neumann, had already been removed from the party leadership in 1932, leaving the ever-faithful Ernst Thälmann at least nominally in charge, though he had in effect been out of action since his arrest and imprisonment immediately after the Reichstag fire in February 1933. ‘For the working class,’ trumpeted the leading German Communist Fritz Heckert at the end of 1933 despite all the evidence, ‘there is only one real enemy - that is the fascist bourgeoisie and Social Democracy, its principal social support.’99

  Such grotesquely unrealistic views were not simply the result of unconditional obedience to Moscow. They also reflected the long legacy of bitterness between the two major working-class parties since the Revolution of 1918 and the murder of the Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by Free Corps units raised at the behest of the Social Democrats. In their turn, Social Democrats knew that the Bolshevik regime in Russia had murdered some thousands of its opponents, and that their counterparts there, the Mensheviks, had been among the first victims. Unemployment, which affected Communists more than Social Democrats, had driven a further wedge between the two parties. Nobody raised the prospect of united action within either the Social Democratic Party or the Communist Party with any success in 1931-4.

  The Social Democrats could boast a much larger membership than the Communist Party - over a million at the beginning of 1933, as against only 180,000 or so for the Communists - and their members tended to stay loyal to their party for longer than Communists did to theirs. However, years of purges and the repeated disciplining of internal dissidents had left the Communists well disciplined and united, while a tradition of clandestine work and secret organization more recent and more effective than that of the Social Democrats ensured that illegal Communist cells were quickly set up all over Germany once the shock of the first months of 1933 had passed. The party’s lack of realism about the situation was, ironically, another positive factor. Believing fervently that the final collapse not only of Nazism but also of capitalism as a whole was now only just a matter of months away, Communists saw every reason to risk their freedom and their lives in a struggle that would surely end before long in total victory for the proletarian revolution.100

  Yet what did that struggle consist of? For all the Nazis’ alarmist propaganda in 1933 about the imminence of a violent Communist revolution, the fact was that the reconstituted German Communist Party could do little more than its Social Democratic counterpart. There were a few acts of sabotage, and a handful of Communists tried to obtain military information to feed to the Soviet Union. But the vast majority of the scores of thousands of Communists active in the resistance could only concentrate on keeping the movement alive underground, ready for the day when Nazism fell, along with the capitalist system they thought sustained it. They held secret meetings, distributed illicit imported political propaganda, collected membership dues and produced and circulated crude mimeographed flysheets and newsletters, sometimes in quite large numbers, in pursuit of their aim of reaching as many people as possible and rousing them to oppose the regime. They set up clandestine distribution networks for magazines and leaflets produced by the Communist apparatus outside Germany and smuggled into the country by couriers. There was also extensive co-operation between the resistance within Germany and the leadership outside: the newspaper The Red Flag, for instance, was edited in exile but printed in a number of centres within the country, including for example at an illegal press in Solingen-Ohligs, which produced about 10,000 copies of each edition once or twice a month. In a few places, the Communists staged secret demonstrations on Mayday, running up red flags, or the hammer and sickle banner, on high buildings, and daubing slogans on railway stations. Like the Social Democrats, the Communists leafleted for a ‘no’ vote in the plebiscite of 19 August 1934.101

  There is no doubt that the Communists were more active and more persistent than the Social Democrats in organizing resistance in the early years of the Third Reich. Apart from the greater commitment - some would say fanaticism - of its members, the Communist Party was also under instructions from its leadership in exile to maintain as visible a presence in Germany as possible. Couriers and agents came and went from Paris, Brussels, Prague and other outside centres, often under assumed identities, constantly attempting to keep the movement going or to revive it where it had been destroyed. Raids and arrests were frequently followed by jauntily assertive mass leafleti
ng to expose the brutality of the police and demonstrate the regime’s failure to destroy the resistance. But such tactics proved the party’s undoing, since they inevitably rendered it visible not just to workers but also to the Gestapo. 102 The party’s bureaucratic structure and habits also helped the police identify and track down its members, as branch treasurers and secretaries like Hans Pfeiffer, in Düsseldorf, for example, meticulously continued to keep copies of letters, minutes of meetings, records of subscriptions and lists of members, all of which proved invaluable to the regime when they fell into the hands of the police.103 The same problems that afflicted the Social Democrats also plagued the Communists - difficulty of communication with the exiled leadership, destruction of the social and cultural infrastructure of the labour movement, exile, imprisonment or death of the most experienced and talented leaders.104