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Chapter III: The hostile ideological states in peace 1933-1941
This below is Chapter 3 Section 1:
1. National Socialist Germany and the communist Soviet Union in 1933/34
How quickly Germany became a National Socialist state after Hitler came to power was seen with stunned amazement by numerous contemporaries at home and abroad. The Bolsheviks had in fact eliminated the other socialist parties very quickly, but they were not formally banned until 1921; Mussolini had only been pushed by events of a serious nature, such as the Matteotti crisis, to put an end to other parties in the fourth year after the March on Rome. In Germany, however, the process of conquest of power by a single party came to an end as early as July 14, 1933, through a legislative act, namely through the “Law Against the Re-Formation of Parties.” And it this was not a mere superficial overpowering. In each of the parties, including the German National People’s Party, there was reluctance and even resistance; but in each of the parties, including the Social Democratic Party, not only resignation was widespread, but so was also a willingness to collaborate in the new national community, as well as insight into one’s own failures or undesirable developments in the Weimar Republic. The behavior of the leadership and the members of the center and the remnants of the liberal parties, but also of the Catholic and Protestant churches, made it seem justified to assume that they were not unwilling to be forced into an agreement, to which there had previously been no little inclination, although the increasing emergence of the National Socialist revolution gave rise to new resistance movements. Even for the Communists, the months after January 30 meant not only external persecution, but also internal confusion and helplessness, caused not only by the unexpected ferocity of the blows that fell on the party. Herbert Wehner’s memoirs give a vivid picture of this confusion and of a widespread tendency among officials and members to throw in the towel or even capitulate. Masses of disillusioned members flocked into the NSDAP and the SA, two formerly particularly radical functionaries published a brochure entitled “From the Soviet Star through the Concentration Camp to the Swastika,” several top functionaries collaborated with the Gestapo. Ernst Thälmann was arrested, and the rumor soon spread that he had been betrayed by one of his closest associates. The workers’ poet Max Barthel, who had been a close friend and comrade-in-arms of Willi Münzenberg for years and had been a member of the Social Democratic Party since 1923, published a “Letter to Friends Who Crossed the Border” in Goebbels’ Angriff, which contained the sentence: “Compared to the old workers’ parties, the NSDAP is a blossoming spring meadow.” In the summer, the Comintern journal admitted that in March-April there had been a “flow of working class masses to fascism” and that “feelings of panic” were widespread, indeed that the first impression was of a “colossal triumph of fascism.” But now the party had rallied again and it had turned out that although the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization had indeed captured a large part of the working class, only a small fraction was “really National Socialist, fanatically Hitlerite.” Strikes and demonstrations were already taking place in many places, and in Chemnitz even a group of armed workers had taken the lead in a demonstration procession. Therefore, he said, the hopes for an early unification of the entire working class under the banner of the Communist Party have grown strong again, and in countless workers the conviction is alive and well: “Bolshevism must come after Hitler, and the Soviet star will shine victoriously over the rotting ruins of the swastika dictatorship.” The statements made by leading Comintern officials sounded quite similar, emphatically declaring the party’s previous policy, and in particular its struggle against social-fascism, to be correct and unwaveringly endorsing the maxim that the party must show recognizable activity. It soon became apparent, however, that all attempts by the communists to regroup and to prove their continued existence through leaflets and slogans were quickly crushed by the Secret State Police and again brought heavy losses to the party. On the other hand, those Social Democrats who had not withdrawn in resignation merely tried to maintain contact with each other and wait for better times. It was not long before the “Germany Reports” were distributed from the headquarters of the émigré party executive in Prague, proving how carefully conditions in Germany were being observed by numerous members of the banned party. Of course, they not only registered voices of discontent in all sections of the population, because the labor battle had achieved more apparent than real successes and because the standard of living had gotten worse than better, because they had to state again and again that Hitler was far more popular than the NSDAP, especially in large circles of the working class.
So in the course of a few months, Hitler had achieved something that no bourgeois politician before him had even remotely come close to achieving: he had eliminated the Communist and Social Democratic parties and the trade unions, but yet found so much support among the workers that the milieu of the working-class quarters began to dissolve and even the neighborhoods were no longer safe havens for persecuted communists. Here, and also in the colonies of the Ruhr area, there lived at least one convinced or even fanatical National Socialist in almost every house, who worked as a “janitor” or “block leader” and exercised a surveillance function that even the most perfect police in a hostile environment could not have performed.
Germany had thus become an ideological state in which political power was undivided in the hands of one man and one party, with the enthusiastic approval of a sizeable section of the population. Nevertheless, the “Germany Reports” were able to defend with good arguments the assertion that basically little had changed in Germany, because the real masters were still the big industrialists, the landowners of the East and the generals of the Reichswehr, Hitler was merely carrying out their will. In fact, Hitler had already declared the revolution to be over in July 1933, and if a large number of those who had fallen in March poured into the NSDAP, the old civil service remained essentially the same for that very reason; there had been no significant change in the leadership of the Reichswehr; the industry’s umbrella organization had only changed its name and some officials; the Catholic Church had abandoned political Catholicism with the conclusion of the Concordat, but had consolidated its legal position; major changes were taking place in the Protestant Church, but the protest against the introduction of the Aryan paragraph and against the nationalist tendencies of the “German Christians” went almost unchecked. While one might see in the passing of the Enabling Act of March 23 a counterpart to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, especially since direct threats of violence had also played a role, but even the persecution of the communists could not be equated with an attack on the bourgeoisie. Admittedly, in addition to the murders in the concentration camps, there was the terrible Köpenick’s week of bloodshed, but mass shootings did not take place anywhere, and there were only very distant and weak analogies to the nationalization of businesses, to the expropriation of land ownership, to the evictions from apartments, to blocking of accounts for entire population groups. The most conspicuous measure was the boycott of Jewish businesses from April 1, which, however, met with little public approval and was called off after three days. Therefore, it has often been rightly said that the National Socialists’ takeover of power was, in its further course, a political upheaval, but not a social revolution. This means, however, that it was a revolution that did not result from a war, did not lead to a civil war, and did not sever economic and political ties with the rest of the world. Within this framework and under these conditions, however, it was the most extensive and profound political revolution that had ever taken place in a European state during the 19th and 20th centuries.
The same could be said of foreign policy. After Hitler came to power, not a single one of the many diplomatic relations that connected Germany with the countries of the world was broken off; no thought was further from the mind of Foreign Minister Neurath than that of “closing the deal” (as Trotsky had wanted to do as Foreign Commissar in 1917); the concerns, which were certainly great in Paris and London, were largely dispelled by Hitler’s “Peace speech” of May 17, which the Social Democrats also agreed to, and the conclusion of the “Four-Power Pact” in July 1933, much encouraged by Mussolini, meant that Germany placed itself on an equal footing with the great Western European powers of England, France and Italy. But on the other hand, Germany withdrew from the League of Nations in a spectacular act in November 1933, and that too was unprecedented in Europe, because until then only Japan (in March 1933) had set an example, and Japan was in fact already at war with China involved in Manchuria. Even in terms of foreign policy, National Socialist Germany was far less revolutionary than the Soviet Union, which had signed the Versailles Treaty even after the fact, which in 1918, through the mouth of Lenin, had announced its intention to “declare war on the whole world” when the opportunity arose, and which, while recognizing the independence of their former Baltic provinces, but never ceased protesting against the separation of Bessarabia. If Germany had become an ideological state under Hitler, then the term did not have the same comprehensive meaning as in the case of the Soviet Union.
The extent to which Hitler’s ideology was primarily determined negatively by opposition to the Soviet Union and to communism was revealed on two occasions during 1932 even more unequivocally than by the statements he made soon after coming to power. In his speech to industrialists in Düsseldorf on January 27, 1932, he had assumed that actual dominance of the white race over the world and traced it back to hereditary superiority, which is therefore a right, but an endangered right. For against it a world view has arisen which had already conquered a state and which would bring the whole world to collapse if it is not destroyed in time: “In 300 years, if this movement develops further, one will see in Lenin not only a revolutionary of the year 1917, but the founder of a new world doctrine, with a worship perhaps like Buddha.” Obviously, Hitler did not treat such a “gigantic phenomenon” with contempt, and polemicized explicitly against those entrepreneurs who did not consider a comprehensive industrialization of Russia to be possible. Rather, he sees himself quite unmistakably as anti-Lenin, as the only man capable of stopping this development, fundamentally exactly as Trotsky did when he called him the “Over-Wrangel of the world bourgeoisie.” But everything that is progress and emancipation for Trotsky is human decay and decadence in his eyes, because the industrialization of Russia and the presumed spread of Bolshevism to Asia can only be based on the exploitation of Western achievements and on the ruthlessly lowering of the living standards of Russian and Asian masses. Admittedly, Hitler does not credit the Western world with having improved the living conditions of the Asians and other peoples, and he does not shy away from declaring himself to be the champion of Western or occidental egoism, which for him is nothing other than the natural dominance of the higher and more cultivated humanity over the lower and the barbaric. But whether that is a hitherto unimaginable commitment to the most reactionary imperialism or whether it is an exaggeration of an insight that is essentially correct: in any case, a man can undertake nothing greater than to play a decisive role in the service of a cause in the overarching world-historical process, and therefore any view that wants to see Hitler merely as a German nationalist must be considered insufficient. A mere nationalist would certainly not have said something like Hitler did to Colonel von Reichenau in December 1932: he considered Soviet diplomacy to be incapable of negotiation and contract, because contracts could only be concluded between opponents on the same ideological level.
Consequently, the manifold relationships that Hitler entered into as a statesman with France and England, with Italy and the USA, with Poland and the Vatican, had to have only a subordinate status, intended only to ward off momentary dangers, and the relationship with the world-historical adversary had to gain paramount importance, even if not the diplomatic relationship. But even the Soviet Union must have realized that the global political situation had changed completely since there was a second and hostile ideological state of comparable potential strength in Europe. The diplomats on both sides tried to have a calming effect, but Hitler’s speech of March 2 already roused violent protest, and then a chain of incidents continued, in which Soviet trade missions and, above all, the extensive network of “Derop” gas stations became objects by sometimes violent attacks by the SA and SS. Hitler, however, had hardly expressed himself more sharply than Soviet politicians were in the habit of expounding on conditions in the capitalist countries, and even Soviet diplomats could not deny that Derop’s employees were often communists, but relations were now deteriorating rapidly, cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army was coming to an end, Karl Radek suddenly expressed himself in Pravda very resolutely against revisionism as a threat to peace, and the French were exploiting their opportunities with great skill.
However, there was not a complete lack of counteraction: after March 2, Hitler avoided sharp statements in public, he even received Ambassador Chinchuk for a talk, and above all he declared his readiness to ratify the protocol to the extension of the Berlin Treaty, which had been in effect since 1931 but had not yet acquired legal force. According to a May 15 report by the German Ambassador in Moscow, Herbert von Dirksens, there were also different tendencies on the other side: the Red Army and politicians close to it were still positive and friendly towards Germany, while among the intellectual Soviet politicians were there continued to be a “dogged and bitter mood against Germany.” But the peculiar, special relationship between Germany and Russia, which was based on common revisionism, had unmistakably come to an end, and on August 14 Dirksen even wrote of the “increasing concern, almost fear, of the ideological repercussions of the National Socialist victory in Germany on Bolshevism and world revolution” and of the “suspicion that has increased to the point of hysteria as to whether the Germany of the national revolution, despite all official assurances, is not pursuing or will not soon pursue hostile plans against the Soviet Union (severing the Ukraine).”
If, therefore, the motives of the Soviet Union were quite different from those of France, the two powers were now drawing more and more unmistakably closer together, and Germany, after leaving the League of Nations, found herself almost completely isolated. In January 1934, Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Poland, who had been toying with the idea of a preventive war in the spring of 1933, thereby proving that he was firmly in the saddle and that at the head of the German ideological state it was possible to make decisions that throughout the Weimar Republic would have immediately led to the fall of the government because they seemed to imply a recognition of the eastern borders. But Hitler was able to be guided to a large extent by his sympathy for Marshal Pilsudski, which was rooted on the common anti-Bolshevism. He was not a politician with ideological convictions, as Stresemann and Brüninghad been, but an ideologue with political will and tactical versatility, whose decisions alone were decisive in all questions of major politics from the beginning of 1934.
At the same time the Soviet Union underwent a change in its foreign policy of an even more profound kind. For fifteen years its reason for existence had been the denunciation of the imperialists, of Versailles, and of capitalism in general, of which France, England and the USA had to be regarded as the main representatives. The non-aggression pacts with Poland and France were not to mean fundamental change, but after Hitler came to power the tone of the Soviet press changed very soon, and Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov became the chief spokesman—though certainly not the originator—of that new Western line which the Soviet Union was associating with the anti-revisionist powers and which was soon to culminate in entry into the League of Nations, which had so long been regarded as an association of anti-Soviet warmongers. Any resistance to the swing was not discernible, for it virtually imposed itself, and it was apparently already taken for granted that Stalin said his policy was oriented “toward the USSR and only to the USSR.” If the Soviet Union was not an ordinary state, as Stalin adamantly believed, then it was not a question of mere nationalism, and Lenin could be invoked in exploiting divisions and difficulties of the imperialist enemy. Moreover, Stalin did not commit himself unconditionally, but tried not to sever all ties with Germany, and on the other hand mistrust of the Soviet Union remained alive in France and especially in England.
The most significant change in the situation, therefore, lay in the successful implementation of Lenin’s plan to electrify, i.e. industrialize, the country through communism. The triumphant reports of the completion of huge industrial buildings and the maps of the giants of the Five Year Plan—such as the Stalingrad tractor plants, the Magnitogorsk ironworks, the Molotov sawmill near Arkhangelsk, the Stalinsk chemical combine, the blast furnaces near Dnepropetrovsk—at first met in the West with great skepticism, and there was no lack of awareness that these marvels of modern technology were built to a large extent from the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of deported kulaks, the starvation of the entire population and the agonizing deaths of several million peasants, and that the benefits of the Baltic-White Sea Canal and even the Dnieprostroy power plant was by no means out of the question. The year 1932 in particular was extremely difficult and gloomy in the Soviet Union. The suicide of Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva should probably be seen in this context, and opposition movements arose in the party that saw Stalin as the cause of the disaster. Could there be a more extreme measure than the “Law on the Protection of Property of State-Owned Enterprises and Collective Farms,” which gave the death penalty for petty theft? The same applies to the introduction of domestic passports at the end of 1932, which created a new inequality unimaginable in Western Europe, since the collective farmers were not given passports and were thus tied to the soil like their ancestors. As compensation, the population was offered a resurgence of national feeling and pride in Russian history, as Stalin had already released in a letter to Demjan Bedny as early as 1930, when he wrote reproachfully to the proletarian poet that in his poems the Russia of the past appeared as “a vessel of abomination and uncleanliness.” A little later, the Marxist view of the leading historian Pokrovsky was replaced by a much more positive assessment of Russia’s past, including some tsars and generals, and ostracized concepts made their return in June 1934 when the law on “treason to the homeland” was issued, which threatened the attempts to flee the Soviet Union with death and all members of the traitor’s family were sent to a camp, even if they had not known about the plans.
What was going on in the Soviet Union, then, was industrialization under wartime conditions on the basis of a doctrine that called itself Marxist. In both its violence and its rapidity it contrasted sharply with the Industrial Revolution as it had unfolded first in England and then in the rest of the West for long decades. Since it necessarily meant, with its primacy of heavy industry, that the largest country in the world in terms of area was building up a vast armaments potential, it was bound to arouse concern and fear throughout the West, but it also found much sympathy among intellectuals, who sometimes criticized the decadence, sometimes the alienation, and sometimes the bellicosity of Western states, but sometimes all at once. Sidney and Beatrice Webb wrote a book about the Soviet Union as “a new civilization,” and Bernard Shaw believed he was returning from a “land of hope” to a world region of hopelessness as he made the journey back to London from Moscow.
So some spoke of the country of state slavery and the new-old despotism, and others of the completely new ethos of the Russian workers who expected from their labor “something better and greater than money can buy.” Both parts were right in their own way: there had never been an industrialization like this in the world before.
When the harvest of 1933 had turned out well and people were able to breathe more freely again for the first time, Stalin was able to present a record of success at the XVII. Party Congress in January 1934, the “Party Congress of the Victors," a track record that definitively confirmed what had not yet found universal credence in the world when he had spoke in January 1933 about the “results of the first Five-Year Plan” and said: “We had no iron and steel industry, the basis of the industrialization of the country. Now we have it…We didn’t have the tractor industry. Now we have it…We didn’t have the machine tool industry. Now we have it…We didn’t have the aircraft industry. Now we have it…All of this has resulted in our country changing from an agricultural country to an industrial one.” Now he presented figures intended to show that the Soviet Union had quadrupled its industrial production compared to 1913, while the USA and France had remained at about the same level, and England and Germany had not even reached the pre-war levels.
As questionable as the individual figures were in detail, there was still little doubt that a new industrial superpower had emerged whose development did not depend on the crisis-generating and thereby balancing effect of a global economy and was therefore on the way to becoming a politico-military world power. Thus, Hitler’s “political testament” in “Mein Kampf” had actually had a solid basis in reality even as late as 1926, despite all the assurances in the communist press of the time that the Soviet Union was a world power, but it had now become obsolete, and there were even good reasons for fearing that Germany would now fall further and further behind in the military field. And if Stalin may not have had Hitler’s speech of January 27, 1932 in mind when he gave his grand report to the party congress, he confronted it directly when he was dealing with the theory of the superior and inferior races. He said: “As is well known, ancient Rome looked at the ancestors of today’s Germans and French in the same way as the representatives of the “higher race” now look at the Slavic tribes…The result was that the non-Romans, i.e. all “barbarians,” banded together against the common enemy and ran over Rome…Where is the guarantee that the writing fascist politicians in Berlin will have better luck than the old, battle-hardened conquerors in Rome? Wouldn’t it be more correct to assume the opposite?”
In May 1933, in an interview with Raymond Robins, who, since the 1917 revolution, had led what was finally a successful campaign for US recognition of the Soviet Union, Stalin had expressed the same idea in a more general form with the phrase: “The question of how the workers of this or that nation master technology, is not a biological question, not a question of genetic endowments, but a question of time: if one has not mastered it today, one will learn it and master it tomorrow. Anyone can master the technique, including the bushman, if you help him.” Hitler, on the other hand, had spoken of the fact that industry in Bohemia had only been set up by the Germans, and had overlooked the fact that between 1800 and 1850 the industry in Germany had been built up to a considerable extent by the English. Stalin, then, despite all his recourse to Russian history, still maintained the position of temporal universalism, while Hitler championed the immutability of different racial substances. There is a high probability that Stalin was right. But the worldview of the self-assertion of the Slavic barbarians against the onslaught of the superior races bore little resemblance to the ideas of Marx and Engels, and it may have had a sinister portent that Stalin alone named Churchill among bourgeois politicians whose war plans were doomed to failure. And possibly his confidence was already obsolete that in a war against the USSR the battle would also take place “in the enemy's rear.” The GPU saw to it that in the Soviet Union there would be no battle behind the lines. But wasn’t the GPU or the Cheka the model for the Gestapo, at least objectively and presumably also in the minds of those involved?
Meanwhile, could Stalin be sure that the GPU would obey him unconditionally? Weren’t there still numerous Trotskyists and Bukharinists in his state who now advocated peace and reconciliation? What did it mean that Kirov, the Leningrad party secretary, received more votes than he did in the elections held by the party congress? Of course, Kirov’s personal loyalty was beyond question, and it was precisely at this party congress that he called Stalin “the greatest man of all times and peoples.” But the enemies might hide behind him, and Stalin still saw enemies in great numbers. Presumably, in his congratulatory telegram on the 15th anniversary of the GPU in December 1932, he did not call the “work of exterminating the enemies of the proletariat” completed, but “complicated.”
The kulaks had been destroyed, but he gave a new target to the Party’s hostility in the “warehouse managers, economic managers, accountants, secretaries, etc.” of the collective farms, a good part of whom were representatives of the “former,” the “dying classes.” He was angry with those members of the Politburo and the Central Committee who had prevented him from shooting those enemies of the Party who were hiding within the Party itself. For a almost a decade, statues of Stalin had stood all over the country, he was called the “great leader of the peoples” in a constant stream of flattering addresses, major cities and countless streets bore his name, but he had not become definitively the autocrat, while he still had enemies in the party.
But even Hitler was not the sole ruler during the first half of 1934. The determination with which he then got rid of his enemies seems to have made a strong impression on Stalin. It was a mere copy of the Soviet model when pictures could be seen everywhere in Nazi Germany that showed Hitler alongside Fredrick the Great, Bismarck and Hindenburg as the consummator of national unification, just as in the Soviet Union Stalin was pictured next to Marx, Engels and Lenin as the champion of the working class. But with the Röhm affair, Hitler became a role model for the first time, at least objectively and presumably also in the mind of his opponent.