Anti-Fascist Series #13: The Real Story

 “The German Communist Resistance 1933-1945”by T. Derbent, Preface by D.Z. Shaw, 2008/2021

Unlike the fable sold by anti-Communist historians and journalists, this thin book shows that, after the failed and flawed fight against Hitler, the Communist Party underground was still the most effective and widespread anti-fascist movement in Germany. Some of it's members spread through Europe and fought fascism there. This is its untold story.

The book occasionally mentions other labor anti-fascists. It wasn’t the Christians, the liberals, the intellectuals or the aristocrats that were the main force fighting Hitler inside Germany. You might think this given William Shirer's 100 pages dedicated to their efforts, while having one footnote dedicated to the resistance of the Kommuniste Partei Deutschland (KPD). This historic ignorance was repeated by other bourgeois historians. Their erroneous political perspective equating totalitarian Nazism = Communism couldn't make sense of the actual facts so they had to hide them. This remarkable volume shows in extraordinary detail the wide range of heroic and effective anti-fascist activity by KPD members after the Nazi takeover in 1933.

The author of the preface, Shaw, is a philosophy prof at Douglas College. He seems to be an anarchist or Maoist who advocates an initial anti-fascist united front of socialists, anarchists and communists in the U.S. This front would embrace all forms of struggle, unlike liberal anti-fascism which trusts the courts or police to protect them. He claims the U.S. is a settler-colonial state, not a capitalist and imperialist one, as if U.S. capital has not developed at all.  This is a typical position from this tendency.

Derbent points out that the KPD's idea of 'After Hitler, Us!' was folly. He wobbles on the designation of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as 'social-fascist' by Stalin. The SPD leadership protected Nazi demos, arrested and killed Communist anti-fascists and treated the KPD as a bigger enemy than the Nazis. They refused to participate in anti-Nazi strikes, left the Socialist International and actually endorsed Hitlerite foreign policy proposals. While seemingly accurate, Derbent points out this view blocked any attempt at a 'united front from below' with anti-fascist SPD workers and led to splitting the trade union movement. Another result of this strategy is that the KPD blocked with the Nazis in a referendum against the Prussian SPD in 1931 - joint work with the Nazis that was not an isolated incident. The collaborationist German-Soviet pact also disoriented German anti-fascists. Stalin later gave up the failed 'social-fascist' perspective for a political 'popular front' with capitalists, one of his famous zig-zags.

THE BATTLE AFTER 1932

Derbent provides dates, numbers, names, locations and organizations for the activity carried out by the KPD underground. The period is from the Hitlerite attacks in early 1933 after the Reichstag fire to the Nazi defeat in 1945. The KPD worked in many factories, in concentration and extermination camps, inside the Reich's administration and military, infiltrated the Nazi Party, in guerrilla operations, in sabotage in war factories, in propaganda and radio, in strikes and union struggles, in assassinations, in prison breakouts, in mutinies, in espionage. They endorsed all forms of resistance. Repeatedly their networks were discovered and brutally dismantled by the Nazis, then reconstituted.  Many comrades were executed, tortured or sent to camps.

Derbent notes that the Nazi 'labor' organizations and the Nazi Party vote never penetrated the vast bulk of the working class, as Hitler's electoral victory came from the former voters of the peasant, petit-bourgeois and middle-class liberal parties. After the Nazi victory workers were not allowed to change jobs, were paid what the owners wanted and any dissent was heavily punished, including strikes. The Nazi's ostensibly opposed 'Corporate Marxism' but they were the actual corporatists. Any perpetuation of class struggle was opposed by the fascists.

The KPD was outlawed in January 1933 and top leaders of the KPD were arrested in February. 20,000 KDP members were arrested later and 15,000-20,000 went into exile. In November 60,000 more Communists were arrested. Unions were dissolved when the Nazis came for the SPD in May. This is long before major deportations and murders of Jews, as the labor movement was the first target of the fascists. The 100K members of the League of Red Front Fighters and the 250K members of the Antifa League, which had engaged in confrontations with fascists before 1933, were further targets. A figure of above 1 million Germans were arrested, jailed or killed for anti-fascist activity from 1933-1939.

No section of the KPD bowed to the the Nazis. Many escaped abroad, including the remaining leadership, which settled in Paris. KPD members fought in anti-fascist units in Spain, France, Yugoslavia, Slovakia, Greece, Austria and elsewhere – especially in France's maquis and earlier in Spain, where 5,000 left-wing Germans battled Franco and Hitler.

Armed KPD prisoners greeted U.S. troops at Buchenwald  

Some of the notable things that happened: In 1933 escaped KPD members brought back the first information on the Nazi camps. Their cadre repeatedly warned the Soviets of the impending 1940 Nazi invasion – information that was ignored. They gained intel in Tokyo that Japan would not invade the Siberian USSR, which allowed the Soviets to shift troops west. Walter Ulbricht, a head of the KPD, had taken refuge in Moscow. He was on loudspeakers at Stalingrad urging a German surrender. Saboteur KPD dockers hid explosive material in coal shipments, which sank many ships in the North Sea when the coal was burned. Ulbricht called for an armed uprising in Germany in February 1945 and KPD units attacked, trying to set up dual power. Most amazing is the armed Communist insurrection at Buchenwald that preceded the arrival of U.S. troops, which stopped 20,000 deportations and defeated the Gestapo guards. In many camps the Left controlled the civilian side – Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Dora and others.  You don't see that in any movies.

The Gestapo and SS were well aware of the strength and spread of KPD underground activities from their documents, something that escaped Shirer and his cohort. According to Derbent in 1944 the KPD still had 10,000 active underground workers in 100 German cities in spite of immense casualties, along with a broader base of supporters. Under orders from Moscow, KPD rhetoric about a German Soviet republic was ended in 1943 in favor of one for a 'German Democratic Republic'. This was the program of the Soviet-backed 'National Committee for a Free Germany' which was designed to appeal to liberals and bourgeois anti-fascists, part of a political bloc with the liberal bourgeoisie in a popular front.

Derbent points out that 'de-Nazification' in West Germany was pathetic, while in East Germany it was almost total. Only 5,234 Nazi murderers were convicted in the west, then given light sentences. Nazi judges and prosecutors that had ordered tens of thousands of deaths were reinstated. Collaborators escaped notice. Prominent ex-Nazis gained positions of power in the 'new' Federal Republic. Many of the July 20 conspirators in the celebrated plot to murder Hitler had also been associated with the Nazis – yet these people are celebrated as heroes. A good number of Nazi's were imported into the U.S. in Operation Paperclip. There's a pattern here.

All together an excellent and brief look at the facts of the German anti-fascist resistance led by the KPD after 1933.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Anti-Fascist Series,” 'East Germany" or 'GDR.'

And I bought It at May Day Books!

Red Frog / July 13, 2024