Rise of the Nazi Party
The German ruling class were happy to let Hitler deceive the petty bourgeois masses. From the late 1920s the Nazi Party received huge financial backing from the German capitalists – including Jewish capitalists – who saw it as an insurance policy against Bolshevism. They did not attach much importance to his racial ravings. They were more interested in his attacks on Bolshevism and his ability to compete with the workers' parties. Robert A. Brady comments:
"As early as 1930 almost any businessman one might have talked to in Germany would frankly have admitted the eventual success of 'Communism' unless recognised trends could be reversed. In the spring of 1931 an interviewer in the main offices of the great Steel Trust at Dusseldorf, was told by an official spokesman of the industry that the alternative to Hitler and National Socialism was 'Communism to the Rhine by 1935." (Robert A. Brady, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, p. 33.)
The Bonapartist Bruening government did not last long. In September 1930 Hindenburg was compelled to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. Under conditions of sharp social polarisation, the moderate socialists lost ground. The SPD vote fell by 6 percent, while that of the KPD rose by 40 percent. However, their combined vote fell from 40.4 per cent of the electorate to 37.6. The most striking element in the equation was the Nazi vote, which shot up by 700 per cent. The Nazis went from ninth to second-largest party.
The KPD called the election result a victory for the Communists and "the beginning of the end" for the Nazis. This was plain foolishness. While deceiving everybody with declarations of peaceful parliamentary intentions, Hitler was preparing to seize power and crush the working class. The alarm bells were sounding. Yet the Stalinists closed their eyes to the danger and continued with their irresponsible policy of splitting the workers' movement.
At this time there was one lone voice appealing to reason. In one urgent letter and article after another, Trotsky called on the German Communist Party to return to Lenin's united front policy to stop the Nazis. If they had paid attention to Trotsky, the whole history of Europe and the world could have taken a different course. Unfortunately, they ignored his advice and instead continued to follow the disastrous line of Stalin and the Stalinised Comintern. In August 1931 he wrote:
"We must therefore talk openly to the Social Democratic, Christian, and non-party workers: 'the fascists, a small minority, wish to overthrow the present government in order to seize power. We Communists think the present government is the enemy of the proletariat, but this government supports itself on your confidence and your votes; we wish to overthrow this government by means of an alliance with you, not by means of an alliance with the fascists against you. If the fascists attempt to organize an uprising, then we Communists will fight with you until the last drop of blood-not in order to defend the government of Braun-Bruening, but in order to save the flower of the proletariat from being strangled and annihilated, to save the workers' organizations and the workers' press, not only our Communist press, but also your Social Democratic press. We are ready together with you to defend any workers' home whatsoever, any printing plant of a workers' press, from the attacks of the fascists. And we call on you to pledge yourselves to come to our aid in case of a threat to our organizations. We propose a united front of the working class against the fascists. The more firmly and persistently we carry out this policy, applying it to all questions, the more difficult it will be for the fascists to catch us unawares, and the smaller will be their chances of defeating us in open struggle.'" (Against National Communism, in The Struggle against Fascism in Germany, pp. 108-9.)
Frightened by the size of the Nazi vote, the SPD leaders decided to support the Bruening government as "the lesser evil". This false policy enabled Bruening to remain Chancellor for another 26 months, carrying out unpopular anti-working class policies. This played into the hands of the Nazis. Hitler combined a policy of parliamentary sabotage with violence against the workers' movement on the streets.
The "Red Referendum"
By 1931 there were over 4 million unemployed. The Nazis began a campaign to oust the Social Democrats from their traditional stronghold in Prussia, the largest state in Germany, where over two-thirds of the population lived. They organized a referendum to oust the Prussian SPD-coalition government. Incredibly, the KPD leaders called upon the workers to back the Nazi campaign, which they dubbed the "Red referendum". Communists campaigned together with Nazis against the SPD in Prussia, but in the end they failed to remove Prussia's SPD-led government.
The opportunist policies of the SPD leaders led to a crisis in the Party, with splits and expulsions of Social Democrats who opposed the leadership and demanded a united front with the KPD against Hitler. Trotsky analyses this phenomenon, which Marxists call centrism – a tendency that vacillates between Marxism and left reformism. This led to the formation of a new party, the SAP (Socialist Workers' Party). But although the centrists had a base among the Socialist Youth and even some of the Parliamentary Faction, when they stood as an independent party in the elections of July 1932, they failed to get a single member of parliament.
The SAP got only 72,630 votes and in the November 1932 elections, their vote fell further still. Trotsky explained that the working class does not easily abandon its traditional mass organisations. The workers will test a party like the SPD many times before they finally decide to abandon it and seek an alternative.
In December 1931, the SPD leaders set up the Iron Front for Resistance Against Fascism. This organization united the Social Democratic militia - the Reichsbanner – with the SPD youth, with other labour and liberal groups. The SPD leaders wanted to limit the scope of the new organisation to peaceful activities like mass demonstrations. But the Social Democratic workers wanted to go further. They armed themselves and fought the Nazis in the streets.
This opened up tremendous possibilities for the Communist Party. In August-September 1917, the Bolshevik Party won over the masses that supported the Mensheviks and SRs by offering them a united front against Kornilov. Remember this was at a time when the Mensheviks and SR leaders were persecuting the Bolsheviks ferociously. The Bolsheviks concentrated all their efforts on defeating the immediate threat of reaction, and in the process won over the decisive majority of the workers in the soviets, and then went on to take power.
In his writings of this time, Trotsky draws the analogy with the tactics of the Bolsheviks in order to show the criminal nature of the policies and tactics of the German Stalinists, who instead of linking arms with the rank and file Social Democratic workers, were collaborating with the Nazis in the so-called "Red referendum" against the Social Democrats.
Fascism and democracy
The deepening economic crisis, which pushed unemployment up to five million by 1932, demanded urgent measures to defend the living standards of the masses. This required an independent socialist policy. But instead the Social Democrats clung to the shirttails of the bourgeoisie, arguing that it was necessary to defend democracy by uniting with the "democratic" bourgeoisie, though the latter was preparing to abandon parliamentary democracy and pass over to fascism.
In the Presidential elections of March 1932 there were three main candidates: the monarchist militarist Hindenburg, Hitler, and the KPD candidate Thaelmann. The SPD supported the right-winger Hindenburg, as the "lesser evil" against Hitler. The Iron Front, which should have been a weapon of struggle against the Nazis, instead was turned into an electoral machine for a right wing Junker.
This policy of class collaboration had fatal results. It discredited the Social Democrats, who assumed responsibility for the criminal policies of the German bourgeoisie. As a result, the Nazi vote continued to increase. In the second elections of April 1932 (the result of the first elections was inconclusive), Hindenburg won, but the Nazi vote had doubled in 17 months.
The same month Bruening presented Hindenburg with a decree outlawing the Nazi militias, SA and SS, in a bid to halt the Nazi advance. But the Nazis merely continued their activities under different names. It was not possible to stop them with the methods of bourgeois legality. Within one month, Chancellor Bruening was forced to resign and replaced by Franz von Papen of the Centre party.
The right-winger von Papen, however, had no base in the Reichstag. In June 1932 he was forced to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. At the same time von Papen rescinded the ban on Nazi private armies. The street fighting reached a new pitch of intensity, with hundreds dead and wounded. In July the Nazis marched, under police escort, through proletarian Hamburg. The result was 19 dead and 285 wounded. Using the Hamburg clashes as a pretext, von Papen carried through a coup d'etat in Prussia. Claiming that the Prussian government was unable to maintain law and order, he deposed the Social Democrats and appointed himself Reich Commissioner for Prussia.
We must bear in mind that the German labour movement at this time was the most powerful in the world. Not only did it have mass trade unions, but the Social Democrats and Communists had armed militias that probably numbered a million members between them. Had they been united, they would have been a formidable fighting force that could have scattered Hitler's gangs. The German workers were waiting for a call to action. But no such call ever came. Instead, the SPD leaders promised to appeal to the courts. Naturally, they did nothing.
The appeals of the Social Democratic leaders to the existing bourgeois legality were both useless and counterproductive. The bourgeoisie was far more worried about the threat from the working class than the fascists. The law courts and the police were secretly sympathetic to the Nazis and hostile to the labour movement. Therefore, the slogan of the Social Democratic leaders, "Staat, griff zu!" (State, intervene!) only served to confuse the workers and divert their attention from what was necessary.
The masses paralysed
The only way to defeat the Nazis was by confronting them with the united might of the working class. What was necessary was not the defence of the existing government and legality but that the working class should fight to defend its own organizations, as Trotsky pointed out in 1931:
"In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy, by utilizing it, by fighting against it, their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sport clubs, the cooperatives, etc. The proletariat cannot attain power within the formal limits of bourgeois democracy, but can do so only by taking the road of revolution: this has been proved both by theory and experience. And these bulwarks of workers'* democracy within the bourgeois state are absolutely essential for taking the revolutionary road. The work of the Second International consisted in creating just such bulwarks during the epoch when it was still fulfilling its progressive historic labour." (Trotsky, What Next? In The Struggle against Fascism in German, pp. 158-9.)
Despite their appearance of strength, Trotsky pointed out that the Nazis were "human chaff" – petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarians who would run for their lives when confronted with a serious proletarian fighting force. But the policies of both the Social Democrats and Stalinists kept the movement divided and helpless in the face of the Nazi menace.
Yet the Stalinists remained deaf to all these warnings. This is how Thaelmann, the main leader of the KPD, answered Trotsky's call for a united front:
"Trotsky wants in all seriousness a common action of the Communists with the murderer of Liebknecht and Rosa (Luxemburg), and more, with Mr Zoergiebei and those police chiefs whom the Papen regime leaves in office to oppress the workers. Trotsky has attempted several times in his writings to turn aside the working class by demanding negotiations between the chiefs of the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party. (Thaelmann's closing speech at the 12th Plenum, September 1932, Executive Committee of the Communist International." (Communist International No 17-18, Page 1329.)
In an article published in Die Internationale (November, December 1931, page 488), Thaelmann indignantly repudiated the proposal of a united front with the Social Democratic Party:
"It (the Social Democratic Party) threatens to make a united front with the Communist Party. The speech of Breitscheid at Darmstadt on the occasion of the Hesse elections and the comments of Vorwaerts on this speech show that social democracy by his manoeuvre is drawing on the wall the devil of Hitler's fascism and is holding back the masses from the real struggle against the dictatorship of finance capital. And these lying mouthfuls...they hope to make them more palatable with the sauce of a so-called friendship for the communists (against the prohibition of the German CP) and to make them more agreeable to the masses."
And again:
"In his pamphlet on the question, How will National Socialism be Defeated? Trotsky gives always but one reply: 'The German CP must make a bloc with the Social Democracy...' In framing this bloc, Trotsky sees the only way for completely saving the German working class against fascism. Either the CP will make a bloc with the social democracy or the German working class is lost for 10-20 years.
"This is the theory of a completely ruined fascist and counter-revolutionary. This theory is the worst theory, the most dangerous theory and the most criminal that Trotsky has constructed in the last years of his counter-revolutionary propaganda." (Thaelmann, closing speech at the 13th Plenum, September 1932: Communist International, No. 17-18, page 1329.)
In their madness, the Stalinists openly incited the communist workers to beat up socialist workers, break up their meetings, etc, even carrying the fight to the school children in the very playgrounds! Thaelmann put forward the slogan "Chase the social fascists from their jobs in the plants and the trade unions." Following on this line of the leader, the Young Communist organ The Young Guard propounded the slogan: "Chase the social fascists from the plants, the employment exchanges, and the apprentice schools." The organ of the Young Pioneers which was aimed at the children of CP members, even put forward the incredible slogan: "Beat the little Zoergiebels in the schools and the playgrounds".
This line was uncritically accepted by all the parties of the Communist International: "It is significant", wrote the paper of the British CP, the Daily Worker of May 26th, 1932, "that Trotsky has come out in defence of a united front between the Communist and Social Democratic Parties against fascism. No more disruptive and counter revolutionary class lead could possibly have been given at a time like the present".
This policy led to complete demoralisation and impotence. I remember conversations I had years ago with a marvellous old worker comrade, Dudley Edwards, who was a young shop steward in the early 1930s at the Morris car factory in Cowley, Oxford and a member of the Communist Party. Dudley visited Germany shortly before Hitler came to power and stayed in the house of a German Communist worker. The worker showed Dudley a revolver he had, but Dudley told me: "I could see from his face that he would never use that revolver." The workers were paralysed by the actions of their leaders.
The KPD called for a general strike. But the Social Democratic workers had not forgotten the "Red referendum." They regarded the KPD with suspicion and hostility. But without the support of the Social Democratic workers, however, no general strike was possible. The Reichstag elections of July 31, 1932 revealed the shocking truth: the Nazis were now Germany's largest party.
The leaders of the labour movement were not the only ones who underestimated Hitler. The German bourgeoisie also made the same mistake. They imagined that Hitler would be their obedient tool. They gave him money while ridiculing him behind his back. But they were to receive a rude shock once Hitler held in his hands the reins of state power. Right wing politicians like von Papen thought he could manipulate Hitler and make him do his bidding. But in fact, the boot was on the other foot. The Nazis supported a vote of censure against von Papen in the Reichstag, which was passed by 513 votes to 32. The Reichstag was dissolved and new elections called for November 6.
Hitler prepares for power
In the elections of November 1932 - the last free elections before Hitler took power - the combined vote of the Socialists and Communists was greater than that of the Nazis. They had, in fact, lost two million votes:
Party Vote Percent
National Socialist 11,737,000 33.1
Social Democratic 7,248,000 20.4
Communist 5,980,000 16.9
Centre 4,231,000 11.9
Nationalist 2,959,000 8.8
Bavarian People's 1,095,000 3.1
Others 2,635,000 7.6
Fascism is a special kind of reaction, which uses the frenzied mass of petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarians to smash and atomise the working class. The bourgeoisie temporarily loses control of its own state, which passes into the hands of the fascist bandits. A mass petty bourgeois movement, however, can only succeed if it goes from one victory to another. By the end of 1932, it was clear that the Nazis had passed their peak. Their petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarian supporters were beginning to get tired of Hitler's parliamentary games. They desired decisive action, and when this was not forthcoming they became discouraged and apathetic. This is what is reflected in these results.
Hitler therefore was forced to move quickly, or lose his base. Since he did not have a majority for taking power, he had to resort to manoeuvres with the bourgeois parties and Hindenburg. In December 1932, Hindenburg appointed a new Chancellor, Schleicher, but this was only a temporary arrangement, as the bourgeoisie prepared to hand over power to the Nazis.
The Schleicher government lasted barely a month. On January 30 1933 Hindenburg duly appointed Hitler, as Chancellor and Von Papen as Vice-Chancellor. To the last minute Hitler maintained his tactic of deception, modestly agreeing to take only three of 11 cabinet posts. But this parliamentary charade was only a legal cover for the real preparations that went on uninterruptedly outside parliament.
Even at the eleventh hour, the total Communist and SPD vote exceeded that of the Nazis. The combined vote of the workers' parties was 13,232,000. And, as Trotsky explained, the superiority of the workers over the Nazis was not merely numerical. The German workers' movement was still intact. A serious resistance would have scattered the Nazi riff raff to the wind. But this was definitely the last opportunity to stop Hitler. Trotsky still hoped that the workers' parties would mobilize to resist the Nazis. But this did not occur.
The SPD leaders announced that Hitler's appointment was constitutional and refused to support any action against the Nazis. On February 7, 1933, the head of the Berlin Federation of the SPD gave the following advice to the workers:
"Above all do not let yourselves be provoked. The life and health of the Berlin workers are too dear to be jeopardised lightly; they must be preserved for the day of struggle." (Quoted by Ted Grant in The Menace of Fascism, p. 54.)
For their part, the Stalinist KPD concentrated on denouncing the Social Democrats. Like the Social Democrats, they continued to deny that the Nazis could come to power. Their public statements were almost identical to those of the Social Democrats. The Stalinist Wilhelm Pieck stated on February 26, 1933: "Let the workers beware of giving the government any pretext for new measures against the Communist Party!" (Ibid.) Unfortunately, the Nazis did not need any pretext for crushing both the Socialists and Communists.
The mighty German labour movement surrendered without firing a shot. Hitler could scarcely believe his luck. He later boasted that he had come to power "without breaking a window pane." Yet he could have been stopped. He did not yet control the state. The army and the police were not yet in his hands. Once he had manoeuvred himself into power, however, it was too late.
Unlike the Socialist and Communist leaders, Hitler acted decisively. He got Hindenburg to dissolve parliament, supposedly to call new elections. But this was only a legal façade to cover up the initiation of a reign of terror against the workers' movement. KPD meetings were banned and its press shut down. The police force was flooded with storm troopers. The whole might of the state was brought down on the labour movement.
On February 27 1933 the Nazis burned down the Reichstag and blamed it on the Communists. The very next day President Hindenburg suspended all Constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression, press, assembly and association. Thousands of KPD and SPD officials were arrested. Only the Nazis and their right wing Nationalist allies were permitted to campaign in the last week before the election.
Now, at last, the KPD called for national strikes. But it was already too late. The morale of the workers was completely undermined. Despite everything, the Nazis could not get a majority. But that did not matter. Hitler asked the new Reichstag to grant him dictatorial power. That required a two-thirds Reichstag vote. But since the Communist deputies were in prison, and the remainder were thoroughly intimidated, the result was a foregone conclusion. The Liberal and conservative parties voted for Hitler's proposal. Only the Social Democrats voted against it.
Hitler skilfully used parliament and elections to strengthen his position, while working to undermine and destroy bourgeois democracy. The Nazis made no attempt to conceal their contempt for democracy, while making use of every democratic opening to build their forces. Goebbels wrote: "The masses were for me a dark monster (ein dunkles Ungeheuer). National Socialism does not, like the democratic-Marxist parties, blindly adore the masses and numbers." (Quoted in Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business, p. 173.). Roehm, the leader of the SA, declared: "Many values that are sacred to democracies […] have been devalued in the modern Germany […] the absolute equality of all who wear a human face, the deification of the will of the majority and of numbers." (Ibid.). And according to Moeller van den Bruck, "The masses realise very well that they cannot direct themselves." (Ibid.)
However, the hostility of the Nazis to bourgeois democracy was really an expression of something else: the fact that the class struggle had gone beyond the boundaries of the institutions of bourgeois democracy. Although it bases itself on the frenzied masses of ruined petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarians, fascism in fact represents the interests of the big monopolies. Monopoly capitalism creates its opposite in the modern proletariat and its organizations. Sooner or later, the two antagonistic classes confront each other in open struggle. When that critical point is reached, the old mechanisms of parliamentary democracy and bourgeois legality prove insufficient to contain the protests of the workers. The capitalists are compelled to mobilize the mass reserves of reaction to crush the workers. The bourgeoisie can make the transition from formal democracy to open reaction and dictatorship with the same ease of a man changing from the smoking to a non-smoking compartment of a train.
Fascism is an attempt to destroy the embryo of the new society in the womb of the old. The main aim of Nazism was not so much the destruction of bourgeois democracy (which it also naturally accomplished) but above all the complete destruction of the organizations of the working class. The Nazis not only smashed the trade unions and workers' parties – they even closed the workers' chess clubs.
The Comintern refuses to learn
Thousands of KPD members were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. They were soon joined by the Social Democrats and trade unionists, as Hitler closed down the trade-union movement and replaced it with the Nazi Arbeiterfront. Yet the Stalinists to the last refused to recognise the seriousness of the situation. Under the slogan "after Hitler, our turn", the Comintern predicted that Hitler's victory would be only the prelude to proletarian revolution.
At the plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in April 1931, Thaelmann, leader of the German Communist Party, denounced the "pessimists," in the following terms: "We have not allowed the moods of panic to rout us.... We have soberly and firmly established the fact that September 14 [1930] was in a certain sense Hitler's best day, and that afterwards will come not better days but worse. This evaluation, which we made of the development of this party, is confirmed by the events.... Today, the fascists have no reasons for laughing." (Quoted in Trotsky, The Tragedy of the German Proletariat, March 1933. See The Struggle against Fascism in Germany p. 376.)
The real reason for the defeat of the German working class was explained by Ted Grant: "The truth of the matter is that the Stalinists devoted the major part of their energy to ridiculing the danger of the nazis and concentrated their whole attention on fighting the social democrats as the 'main enemy'. They fought viciously against Trotsky's suggestion that the united front was the only means of smashing Hitler and preparing the way for the victory of the working class." (Why Hitler came to Power, Dec. 1944.)
The policy of the workers' leaders led to a terrible defeat, which was made even worse by the fact that the workers knew that they had allowed Hitler to triumph without a fight. This produced profound demoralisation among the German workers. So deep was the demoralisation that not a few former members of the KPD joined the Nazis.
In Britain the following year there was uproar in the TUC. Delegates indignantly asked the leaders how it had happened that the powerful German labour movement could be defeated without a fight. The TUC leaders answered: "If our German brothers would have fought there would have been civil war. The streets would have been running with blood." But as it was, the victory of Hitler was a death sentence for thousands of worker activists. That was followed by the Second World War in which 55 millions perished, and the horrors of the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and an unknown number of gypsies and other members of "inferior races."
Yet all that was unnecessary. Hitler could have been stopped and should have been stopped. The way in which this could have been done is explained in these pages. If Trotsky's advice had been heeded, the whole history of the world could have been different. That is why it deserves the most careful study by every conscious worker, trade unionist or young person.
Bourgeois or workers' democracy?
Today the spectre of fascism seems to be a bad dream of times long past. There are no longer mass fascist parties like those that existed before the Second World War, although there are extreme right wing and xenophobic parties like that of Le Pen in France. But that does not mean that reaction is off the agenda permanently. The worldwide crisis of capitalism means that the ruling class can no longer tolerate meaningful reforms as in the past. On the contrary, they are attempting to take back the reforms that the working class had conquered in the past.
The stage is set for an explosion of the class struggle everywhere. And the ruling class is preparing. Under the pretext of the so-called "war on terror", they are systematically whittling away the democratic rights won in struggle by the labour movement. They are placing on the statute books reactionary laws that can be used in the future against the labour movement.
For the time being the capitalists prefer the system of formal democracy. It is the most economical system from their class point of view. But when the polarization between the classes reaches an extreme point, the mechanism of formal bourgeois democracy begins to break down. History shows that in such circumstances the bourgeoisie will not hesitate to abandon democracy and rule by other means.
Under present day conditions it is not likely that reaction will assume the forms of classical fascism as in the 1920s in Italy or the 1930s in Germany. The bourgeoisie had a very bad experience with Hitler and Mussolini, and are in no hurry to repeat it. They will not easily relinquish control of the state to a fascist madman again.
The small fascist groups that resort to terrorist methods against immigrants and left-wingers make a lot of noise and occasionally win some seats in local elections. But they are really impotent. They have no possibility of taking power, although in the future they can be used by the bourgeoisie as auxiliary forces to intimidate the labour movement.
More likely the bourgeoisie will move to some kind of Bonapartist regime – that is, a classical military police state. But under modern conditions such a state can have a ferocious character, utilising the same methods of murder and torture that were used by the fascists in the past to intimidate the working class and the labour movement.
The labour movement will ignore this threat at its peril! We must fight for the preservation and extension of all democratic rights, rejecting the curtailing of rights under the pretext of the "war on terror" or anything else. We will combat reaction in all its guises, mobilising the might of the labour movement to oppose the fascists wherever they raise their heads. We will combat racism and strive to unite the working class, cutting across all lines of racial, linguistic, and religious or national distinctions.
However, for the working class the struggle to defend democratic rights is not an end in itself but only a means to a greater end. We recognise that as long as capitalism exists, democracy can never be more than a fragile, incomplete and unstable plant. Formal bourgeois democracy, while infinitely preferable to fascism or Bonapartism, is only a façade that aims to disguise the dictatorship of the big banks and monopolies.
We are fighting, not to defend the existing society and its legal and constitutional regime, but to transform society from top to bottom, sweeping away the dictatorship of Capital and replacing it by a real democracy – a democracy of all the working people: a workers' democracy that will prepare the way for a movement towards a higher stage of human society, when classes, wars, the nation, the state, and all other remnants of barbarism will only be bad memories of the past.
February 25, 2004
See Part One
See also: