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This below is Chapter 2 Section 9:
9. The limited civil war in Germany
It was only the world economic crisis that created the conditions in Germany under which two civil war parties could win large numbers of supporters, but it did not create these parties themselves. Rather, both had a special relationship to the crisis, and nothing was more likely than that they would now find a wide hearing.
The Communist Party was the embodied doctrine of the general crisis of capitalism. It could claim to be vindicated by world developments when, on Black Friday, October 24, 1929, stocks and other securities on the New York Stock Exchange experienced an unprecedented plunge and as a result there was an equally unprecedented decline in production, which quickly spread to other industrialized countries and dovetailed with a severe agricultural crisis that had been looming for some time. It had caused surprise and even ridicule when the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, in the summer of 1928, announced the end of the stabilization phase of capitalism, for at that time the world economy was still in a period of boom; at the beginning of 1930, however, unemployment was rising steadily, especially in Germany, and the partners in the grand coalition could not agree on whether the employers, who were squeezed by high wages and non-wage costs and whose competitiveness on the world market had been weakened, or the workers, whose incomes were often not far from the subsistence level, should bear the brunt of the crisis. This led to the fall of the Müller government and the formation of a presidential government under Heinrich Brüning at the end of March 1930. Ernst Thälmann claimed that fascism had thus taken over Germany as a result, but if the Reich President, through the Reich Chancellor on the basis of Article 48, practiced a kind of dictatorship, it was undoubtedly a provisional dictatorship, which differed from normal party democracy no more than the crisis state of the economy differed from the normal state of a medium-sized business cycle. And looked at in the light of day, there was no fundamental difference between a boom and a crisis; in the capitalist system, i.e. in the world market economy, production and consumption are not directly related to each other as they are on a self-sufficient farm or in an isolated rural community, but are linked to one another through numerous intermediate stages of independently acting actors. The system is therefore in itself a permanent crisis, i.e. in an incessant process of adaptation and development, in which larger crises occur again and again like knots in a net. But since the communists oriented themselves to that farm and rural community as a model and wished to make them a reality anew at a higher level by means of a planned economy, they were the best spokesmen and champions of all those who suffered most from the crisis or who took the greatest offense at the injustices and inequalities which necessarily resulted from the individualism of this system, i.e. from the freedom of movement of individuals and companies aimed at profit. The question of whether the system, in its overall character, which was not merely economic and determined by many hundred years of history, was nevertheless able to grant all individuals a higher degree of security and prosperity than any other, provided that it was on the way to being more fully formed, was not asked by the communists; for they took it as self-evident that the replacement of this unjust, chaotic, opaque, and inefficient system with socialism would end misery and exploitation, hostility between nations, and war, forever. In the world economic crisis, therefore, they were once again able to become the great party of protest and hope that they had been at the end of the war with their rejection of the massacre of nations.
But there were undoubtedly also special causes which perhaps explained the unusual severity of the crisis. Already in the early 1920s, none other than John Maynard Keynes wrote a booklet about the economic consequences of the peace treaty, in which he warned of the incalculable consequences that would have to result from the German reparations payments, since these were politically justified thus as non-systemic capital transfers. Wouldn’t the crisis be greatly alleviated if tribute payments stopped? If this smaller solution was probably more realistic, it also presented extraordinary difficulties, since the reparation creditors England and France were themselves obliged to repay large amounts of war loans to the USA. If America was not willing to renounce its claims, then National Socialist agitation against the tribute payments would have to amount to the establishment of German autarky. The German Nationalists and National Socialists did not shy away from this consequence when, even before that Black Friday, they unleashed large-scale agitation against the Young Plan, which the Allies and the German government wanted to replace the Dawes Plan. It offered considerable benefits to Germany, but also set an end date for reparations payments, 1988, which seemed to imply the enslavement of the German people for two generations.
Opposition to this plan was unavoidable and in line with the system, but the way in which the Reich Committee for the German People’s Initiative, in which Hugenberg and Hitler worked together on an equal footing with representatives of the Stahlhelm and the Pan-German Association, exercised this opposition, contributed significantly with its demagogic intensity to the NSDAP’s rise to national prominence and its ability to significantly increase its number of votes in state and local elections. Although the referendum in December failed miserably, it nevertheless showed in a strange way what demagogic agitation was capable of despite obvious folly, because a rejection of the Young Plan by the German people would not have eliminated the tribute payments but merely left the Dawes Plan in force. But when the Reich President dissolved the Reichstag in July 1930, which had demanded the repeal of an important emergency decree, the Communist Party of Germany published its “program statement for the national and social liberation of the German people” in August 1930 for the new elections, which considerably exceeded the National Socialist in radicalism and irresponsible demagogy. The party solemnly pledged that in the event of its seizure of power it would declare null and void all obligations arising from the Treaty of Versailles and would not pay a penny of interest on imperialist loans, credits and capital investments. It also demanded the introduction of the seven-hour day and the four-day work week and promised to ensure that those German areas that would express the wish (including South Tyrol and the Sudeten areas) the possibility of annexation to Soviet Germany, “in agreement with the revolutionary workers France, England, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, etc.” Demagoguery and naiveté could not reach a higher degree, and Hitler, who always advocated for the payment of private debts, had to appear in comparison as a measured and reasonable man, or at least as a Western-oriented politician who did not want to tear apart Germany’s connection with the world economy from the outset, while the communists demanded a German-Russian world domination, provided that they did merely instrumentalize nationalistic phrases. Nevertheless, the elections of September 14 brought them a great success and they never tired of celebrating their electoral victory, which made them the strongest party in Berlin and increased their number of seats to 77. But the success of the National Socialists was even greater; 6.5 million voters brought more than 100 National Socialist deputies to the Reichstag, and no party in German parliamentary history had ever made such a leap—from 12 to 107 deputies.
The Rote Fahne was able to proudly print the congratulations of Pravda and the Comintern, and its leading article of September 16 spoke confidently of the preparations for the storm for Soviet Germany, “in which no Hitler and Goebbels, but also no social-fascist pioneers of fascism” would exist.
The National Socialists, in turn, saw in the election result as “a verdict of annihilation for the entire policy of compliance,” and on September 25 they were allowed to publish an article by Lord Rothermere, which the press magnate had written for his Daily Mail, and which ascribed to the National Socialists the task of definitively protecting all of Europe from Bolshevism, for which they might expect considerable concessions from Poland and also from Czechoslovakia.
When the Reichstag opened on October 13, 1930, the 107 National Socialists in their brown uniforms moved in and, as a conspicuous splash of color, took up by far the most space on the right-hand side of the building. But even two and a half years earlier, at the opening of the Reichstag in 1928, the observers were no less struck by the Red Front Fighter uniforms in the ranks of the Communists and the powerful figures of many of their deputies. In fact, violent scenes of noise immediately ensued. Two parties of civil war, intent on annihilating one another and by no means merely German in importance and purpose, now faced one another in considerable strength in Parliament, and it is time to take a look at the civil war that was unfolding in the streets Germany, but also in a different way at the newspaper stands and in the bookshops, and last but not least within the parliaments.
The first thing to emphasize, however, is that this civil war was only a limited one, because the government, despite all the street fighting and all the verbal violence in brochures and magazines, ultimately held the reins firmly in its hands. In Russia, after the Bolsheviks seized power, a real civil war had raged between large armed formations which had no higher authority over them, mainly because the country was still at war and was too large spatially for the victorious party in the capitals to have prevailed everywhere right away. But also in Italy, where for the first time in world history a parliamentary government had been confronted with two strong civil war parties during the years 1920-1922, the struggles between socialists and fascists had completely dominated some regions at times, with the virtual elimination of the state. In Germany, on the other hand, Brüning’s presidential government and the long-established government of the Weimar coalition in Prussia held their own during the crisis with police operations, newspapers confiscations, bans on uniforms, restrictions on the right to demonstrate, and even with forced newspaper circulations. In Prussia, for example, all newspapers had to print a government statement when a referendum was held in August 1931 on the dissolution of the Prussian state parliament, which was supported by the Stahlhelm and the NSDAP and which the communists joined in the last hour under the quickly invented name “Red Referendum.” The high point of this self-assertion was the ban on the SA and SS issued by Interior Minister General Groener, after Hindenburg, through Brüning’s efforts and after a symptomatic change of heart by the Social Democratic Party, had been elected Reich President for the second time in April 1932 and had prevailed over Hitler by a considerable margin. The history of this government has often been told, and it is therefore sufficient to cite a few keywords here: the support of the Social Democratic Party, which made it its primary aim to prevent a “Italian-style fascist government against the working class,” the increased credit withdrawals after the September elections, the policy of austerity and deflation, which aggravated the crisis but brought closer the foreign policy goal of canceling reparations, the rise in unemployment to 6 million in 1932, the failure of the planned German-Austrian customs union as a result of French counteractions , the “Hoover Moratorium” in July 1931, the challenge of the “Harzburg Front” to national Germany in October 1931, the surge in National Socialist votes up to the culmination of the elections to the Prussian state parliament on April 24, 1932, the increasing loss of confidence in Hindenburg and the Chancellor’s resignation on May 30 1932. At none of these times was there a danger that the government would lose control, but neither there yet was any fear that Communists and National Socialists might come together in anything other than negative voting unions in the parliaments.
But even if the civil war was limited, it did not only take place in street fights, but also and even primarily in theoretical treatises, in polemical pamphlets and in combative newspaper articles, and as an intellectual civil war it certainly did not begin with the Brüning government, but from the very beginning of the republic it took place apart from the normal disputes between the state-supporting parties as the mutual negation of the right to exist between communists and militant anti-communists.
These beginnings have already been described, but even during the phase of stabilization and then during the crisis, the starting point and the most important basic component remained completely unchanged: the talk of the communists about the death sentence, executioner and grave, which were identical with their belief in the imminent end of the capitalist system. The descriptions of the successes of socialist construction in Russia, where the workers could finally feel like masters of the state, served this belief; that prediction was to be confirmed by the voyages of delegations, who, on returning from chosen routes and given special treatment, would find that the villas of the German capitalists might soon be turned into children’s homes and schools like the palaces of the Russian nobles. How could it not have aroused indignation when it was pointed out that Otto Wolff’s Mansfelder mining company received 7 million marks from taxpayers’ pockets just because the multimillionaire threatened to lay off workers, because “millionaires who lay off workers belong to be put up against the wall, not be rewarded more.” No distinction can be made between Christian and Jewish capitalists in the struggle to liberate and secure the workers, as the National Socialists want, for both are equally exploiters and equally condemned to death by history, while German and Jewish proletarians (if any) belong together.
Thus, between 1925 and 1933, despite the strong emergence of the National Socialists, there was basically only a slight shift in emphasis, since the real enemy remained the capitalist system, and within the system, social democracy attracted the most attention for a long time. In 1925, Karl Radek made no less use of the Barmat affair than the National Socialists did, and in his brochure “The Barmat Social Democracy” he also spoke of the “Polish-Jewish-Dutch-German speculators” who were particularly obliging towards social democracy, while Stresemann, for example, relied heavily on the concern of the “Russian Jew Litvin.” According to Radek, however, the deepest reason for all corruption is that social democracy supports capitalism. Therefore, only the elimination of the leaders of this party can create uncorrupted, i.e. create healthy conditions: “If the German revolution hangs the Scheidemanns and the entire social-democratic Barmat clique, then…it may carve out a marble monument for them: a dog that unselfishly licks its master’s whip.”
Walter Ulbricht, on the other hand, did not overlook in 1932 (as did Radek in other passages) that some of the workers were also bribed by the bourgeoisie with higher wages and that the Nazis, due to the coalition policy of the Social Democratic Party and the General German Trade Union Federation, were able to “gain influence in the petty-bourgeois and sometimes even the working class strata,” and therefore he postulated “the expulsion of the capitalist parasites, the big industrialists, bankers, Junkers, large merchants, bourgeois politicians, worker traitors, speculators and profiteers” after the “shining example” of the Soviet Union.
It is not difficult to see why the German public was not particularly excited about Hitler’s “heads will roll” and even about his anti-Semitism: even Radek tried to use anti-Semitic emotions, and Ulbricht’s monumental concept of annihilation also had to victimize the majority of Jews , albeit only in the manner of total expropriation.
Despite all this, the attraction of communism, especially for intellectuals and ethically minded people, was hardly diminished. For example, the city pastor Eckert in Mannheim justified his conversion from the Social Democratic Party to the Communist Party of Germany by saying that he had gone where people really tried to help the weary and the burdened: “Capitalism must die so that the people can live.” Only through Bolshevism could the enormous mass impoverishment be put to an end to, for Bolshevism today was nothing other than the working, suffering people themselves.
It was not easy for National Socialist propaganda to counter such simple and moving arguments. The Russian example was not a deterrent even for all peasants from the outset, especially since the Communist Party of Germany was careful not to speak of collectivization, but the workers could not fail to see how deeply Marxist views were, so to speak, innate in them; therefore, the “National Socialist Factory Cell Organization” criticized exploitation, entrepreneurial arbitrariness and capitalism in general no less harshly than the Marxists did, and they sought merely to substitute a national concept in the place of the international one.
The task was easier when it came to maintaining the traditional values. Thus Hans Schemm in his pamphlet “The Red War. Mother or Comrade?” set to the readers the alternatives “Christian affirmation of life or barbaric annihilation!...Hitler or Stalin!” and he asked them to say the emergency prayer at the end of the day: “Protect us, God, from pestilence, from annihilation by Bolshevik animals.”
Joseph Goebbels expressed himself a good deal more crudely in his work “The Nazi-Socialist,” where the anti-bourgeois polemics are just as prominent as the anti-Jewish ones, without an identity being made plausible: “There is nothing more mendacious than a fat, well-fed man bourgeois who protests against the proletarian idea of class warfare…Certainly the Jew is also a human being. But the flea is also an animal and not a pleasant one. And since the flea is not a pleasant animal, we…have no duty to kill it to guard and protect...but to render him harmless.”
How strong the internal dependency was can already be seen in titles such as “The Communist Servants of Capitalists,” which took its evidence from the advertisements of large department stores in the Rote Fahne, but also from Wall Street loans to the Soviet Union.
As for the Soviet Union itself, it was of course easy to emphasize the other side to the communist eulogies, not least by quoting and reprinting from the writings of disappointed communists such as Panait Istrati’s “Russia Naked,” where a picture is developed from personal experience and from Soviet newspaper literature that no longer primarily focuses on the Cheka atrocities, but rather on working conditions and wages.
The events of the agitprop groups had no equivalent on the National Socialist side, since one can hardly cite the first attempts with Thingstätten (translator: outdoor amphitheaters) or the fight for German culture. It was characteristic of the recitation evenings and theatrical performances of these groups that they were by no means content with attacking the National Socialists, but attacked everything connected with capitalism. A mocking song entitled “Suleika Destapar” about the “German State Party,” the successor organization to the German Democratic Party, says:
"...The mixture is very fatal So volkish-Jewish-national! The Beene are rachitic, The Neese is Semitic, The Oogen are blue and purebred And no one claims it was."
In the same example of the Rote Sprachrohr (translator: communist agitprop theatre) a stage scene is reproduced in which Hitler, Goebbels and a few simple Nazis utter the cry “die Judah.” On the other side of the stage are capitalists, among them Jews, and one of them says: “It will cost me but so what, the money will come back.” At the end, the Nazi actors tear off their armbands, hold communist emblems in their hands and sing: “…And the Jews are also tolerable if they donate something for your fund; if you also want to risk a few pogroms, it must not end in class hatred.” Obviously, National Socialism is conceived here as a deficient mode of Communism, and anti-Semitism is regarded as a first step on the right path, as far as it relates to the Jewish capitalists.
Strikingly often the priests and the center were mocked, apparently in context of protecting the Soviet Union. The positive resolution was formulated in a "troop song" like this:
“We protect the Soviet Union, You, our red fatherland ...Fascism threatens the whole world... Prole, there is only one way, the red avenger republic.”
The direction of the domestic political attack was expressed with just as much emphasis: “Death to the bourgeoisie!...Civil war!...Our fatherland is the Soviet Union.”
According to police reports, extremely violent songs were often sung by groups of children: “We incite, we’re rushing to class warfare, fists ready, a kick in the body of the bourgeoisie…Grab the throats of the bourgeois state…” At the end of the chanting, the Red Pioneers attacked the members of the ensemble, who were dressed up as police officers, and knocked them to the ground to thunderous applause from the spectators. After that, some portraits were put up on the wall and the question was asked: “Who do we want to fire the first shot at? At Hitler…at Goebbels…at Brüning…at Severing…at Grzesinskil.”
As a rule, such bloodthirsty speeches and scenes did not take place at National Socialist meetings, and it is not at all incomprehensible that the Prussian police during the years 1930-1933 sometimes also regarded the Communists as the main enemy and the National Socialists almost as allies, especially since extensive dismantling work, which was only successful with a small part of the troops, came only from the communist side. It was just as unsurprising that an Social Democratic Party functionary was of the opinion that the fascist spook would disappear, but that the decisive question for the future was: “For or against Bolshevism.”
Nevertheless, the most disturbing expression of this intellectual civil war is found not in communist literature, but in the organ of the left-wing intellectuals, the Weltbühne, and the attack was not directed against the National Socialists but against the German educated classes in general. Under the heading “Danish fields” Kurt Tucholsky wrote in the summer of 1927: “May the gas creep into your children’s playrooms! May they slowly sink, the little dolls. I wish the wife of the church councilor and the editor-in-chief and the mother of the sculptor and the sister of the banker that they will meet a bitter, agonizing death, all together. Because they want it that way, without wanting it. Because they are lazy. Because they don’t hear and don’t see and don’t feel.” There is no doubt that Tucholsky was guided here by the noblest pacifist motives. But what is bad is never a consequence of average feelings and seldom the consequence of base sentiments. Tucholsky adopted a collectivist attribution of guilt that made it all too likely that the extermination measures of a civil war would not stop with the popular speculators or even the bourgeoisie, indeed that they would not even spare women and children.
To his credit, however, Tucholsky knew of the brutalities of the Landsknechts, which must have had a far more bitter effect than even the femicides of alleged or actual traitors. In any case, as early as 1928 he could have read the description of a truly repulsive situation given by the former Freikorps officer and current high SA leader Manfred von Killinger in his booklet “Serious and Cheerful Stories from the Life of a Putsch.” Here Killinger tells how, during the fighting in Munich in 1919, a Malweibchen (translator: art hoe) who had behaved rebelliously had been brought to him. He then ordered a non-commissioned officer, with the help of two soldiers, to push up her skirts and to give her salutary lashes with a whip on her bare buttocks. Indeed, it is difficult to decide whether the unrestrained imagination of Tucholsky or the all-too-real brutality of Killinger must have evoked the deeper resentment and unbridled hatred within the groups denounced and threatened with annihilation.
It was extraordinarily difficult for those who, in the midst of these orgies of hatred, trusted in reason and strove for objectivity, to take a superior yet politically effective stand, when they themselves were being violently attacked. Social Democrats tended to direct their polemics against the pre-1914 ruling classes who today were constituting the real force of the brown ranks, while the middle class and workers really belonged on the side of the Social Democrats. Anton Erkelenz, member of the Reichstag, wrote that the Prussian Junker and the backwoodsman from Pomerania smelled like Asia. But although he declared the communists to be the stirrup holders of fascism, he wanted to oppose the old battle cry “war on the palaces” to the carnage of the war of nations that the browns were planning.
Very rare are the words of understanding and approval of the German conditions as a whole. Herbert and Elisabeth Weichmann found such a word at the end of their travelogue about the Soviet Union, in which they described “everyday life in the Soviet state” in a way that was both non-polemical and credible: the uniform classless misery, the absence of any tranquility and leisure after the destruction of the old intelligentsia, the “hurrying, smoky everyday life filled with the noise of the machines and the struggles of the people.” So they returned with a new insight: “…that we can have a little more patience and love for our own conditions in Germany, knowing how much freer and more humane our existence is than we sometimes imagine.”
But Herbert and Elisabeth Weichmann were also nothing more than social fascists in the eyes of the communists. Even in the realm of theory and seemingly detached reflection, the intellectual civil war was taking place. However, the concept of social fascism did not emerge primarily from theoretical considerations, it was deeply and emotionally anchored in early experiences and evaluations, namely in the hatred of the orthodox Marxists for the reformists and then, during the war, for the traitors, the social patriots and social chauvinists. Nevertheless, a new dimension of polemics was reached when, after the German October defeat, Zinoviev declared the left-wing Social Democrats to be a “wing of fascism” in January 1924, and Stalin followed him in September 1924 with the thesis that fascism and social democracy were twins. It was a logical step when, after the September 1930 elections, it was claimed that “Brüning fascism” now ruled and that everyone who opposed the proletarian revolution was on the side of fascism. In fact, the question arose as to what could still be characteristic of fascism when bourgeois democracy is nothing other than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and when only one of the two main classes can exercise the dictatorship. So the simultaneous struggle against both auxiliaries of the bourgeoisie had to be the order of the day: against the NSDAP as national fascism and against the Social Democratic Party as social fascism, and in doing so the main thrust had been to target social democracy as the more insidious of the two hostile forces.
It was the opposition groups of the Communist Party of Germany who saw fate in this view and, starting in the early 1930s, told the party leadership: “Under this sign—the concept of social fascism—you will succumb.” The most important of these groups was the Communist Party of Germany Opposition, in which the right-wingers expelled from the party gathered, headed by Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer. But the Red Fighters also made important contributions, all of which the communists tried to bring back into the unity of the workers’ movement, although the sharp criticism of bureaucracy and party dependence, as well as their own adherence to the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” made the attempt seem hopeless from the start.
The critics of the theory of social fascism received a powerful comrade in Leon Trotsky, who after 1929 could be counted among the Russian emigrants. Far more sharply than anyone else, Trotsky saw the danger by the communists’ struggle against social fascism that the seizure of power would be suggested to National Socialism and that Hitler would then not be overthrown after a few weeks or months by the proletarians, who had finally united under the leadership of the Communist Party of Germany, as was expected in the Comintern. Rather, the National Socialist government would be the only one of all bourgeois governments capable of waging a war against the USSR, and in this war Hitler would be the executive of all world capitalism, the “Over-Wrangel of the world bourgeoisie.”
This was an amazing prophecy, but Trotsky, in fact, needed only to project his own case against Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks onto bourgeois Germany, and his wars of aggression against Poland and Georgia, to arrive at this prediction. Trotsky again derived his hopes from an analogy to the Russian revolution, namely from his contempt for a quantitative preponderance of votes: "On the scales of electoral statistics, a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand communist votes. But on the scales of revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in a large company weigh a hundred times greater force than a thousand officials and clerks with their wives and mothers-in-law. The bulk of the fascists consist of human dust."
Here Trotsky, for his part, was wrong, for he neglected the fact that, while many millions of petty bourgeois and unenlightened workers had flocked to the NSDAP, the nucleus of the party consisted of a large number of World War officers, whose Russian counterparts had been destroyed by the Bolshevik Party or forced to join the Red Army. But there could not be the slightest doubt about Trotsky’s opposition to National Socialism, any more than there could be about the opposition to the Communist Party of Germany Opposition or the Red Fighters.
It was different with the opposition groups within National Socialism or on its fringes. They, too, took offense at the party’s bureaucracy and bigwigs, and not least at Hitler’s tactics of legality, but they did not conclude from this that the party had to wage a more decisive and promising struggle against communism. Rather, they called for more decisive action against Versailles, the Western powers and capitalism, and in doing so they approached or even went over to the Communist Party of Germany. The most famous example was Ernst Niekisch, who in his magazine Wiederstand fought the National Socialists as a Romanized enemy power on German soil, which was breaking off the fight against Versailles, the big city, bourgeois decadence and the capitalist money economy by negating with Bolshevism the Russian-Asiatic way of life, in which alone the hope for a liberation of Germany from the “cesspool of English prostitution” was founded. The greatest sensation, however, was caused by Richard Scheringer’s transition to communism, one of the three lieutenants from Colonel Ludwig Beck’s regiment stationed in Ulm, who had been sentenced to imprisonment in 1930 for National Socialist subversion of the Reichswehr. Hitler had sworn his oath of legality in these proceedings, and Scheringer vehemently rejected the legality tactics after he had entered a kind of communist university at the Gollnow Fortress and had understood there that a real “policy of violence against the western powers” was only possible if if liberalism, pacifism and western decadence had first met their end with capitalism. For a while after April 1931, the Communist Party of Germany followed the so-called Scheringer Line, which roughly corresponded to Radek’s Schlageter course of 1923, and it attracted quite a few National Socialists and National Revolutionaries, including Bodo Uhse, the former leader of the Bund Oberland, Captain Beppo Römer and Count Stenbock-Fermor. All of them, like Richard Scheringer himself, were filled with the feeling that they had moved from a merely pseudo-radical party to a genuinely radical party. And there was not a single prominent communist who would have gone to the National Socialists with the corresponding reason. It was obvious that the fight against the Jews was just a weak partial and diversionary maneuver when the real task was the fight against capitalism or the West.
But wasn't anti-Semitism a sign of self-deception and complacency, when the main concern was the fight against communism? In any case, Scheringer could afford to point out that not a single Jew sat on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany, while there were several at the top of the Hugenberg-concern. Perhaps the phenomenon of communism was not really acknowledged if it was given the easy interpretation that a specific and easily identifiable group of people as its originator? But it could also be asked whether this simplified concretization did not correspond to the other concretization of the capitalists or even the speculators and only showed a lower degree of abstraction.
In any case, where the spiritual civil war presented itself as an instruction for violent civil war, the communists had a great advantage. Since 1923 they had circulated a periodical entitled On Civil War, which later became Oktober; they published books containing specific advice on armed insurrection, although mostly in the form of accounts of past civil wars, successful or unsuccessful, such as the Russian October, but also the uprisings of Reval 1924 or Canton at the end of 1927. In the book by “A. Neuberg” from 1928, “The Armed Uprising,” on which Erich Wollenberg and Hans Kippenberger, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Ho Chi Minh also worked, the various problems of a violent seizure of power are discussed most carefully. For example, the Hamburg uprising of 1923 is described in detail, and is considered as a whole as a not entirely successful replica of the revolution in Petrograd; individual terror is fully affirmed for revolutionary times, and the demand, citing Lenin, is “to liquidate the leaders of the counter-revolution” or “to get finish off the enemy’s top leadership in good time.” All in all, what is decisive is that “the enemy’s living power is liquidated,” and this also includes the use of “class terror” against the bourgeoisie. All of this advice could be based on actual events; there was not the slightest doubt that the writers were experienced fighters and really meant what they expressed in words.
In contrast, the so-called Boxheim documents, which caused a stir at the end of 1931 and were regarded as evidence of the preparations for civil war by the National Socialists, were little more than a thought experiment. The author, Dr. Werner Best, by no means drew up plans for a violent seizure of power, but he proceeded from the hypothetical and not impossible situation that after a communist uprising, the supreme state authorities that had existed since then would disappear, so that the nation could only be represented and protected by the other militant party (SA, Landeswehr). In this case, a course of action is envisaged which is very harsh, but which goes little beyond what the military authorities would do in the event of an insurrection. The most striking difference is that only “every German (not Jew)” from the age of 16 is obliged to serve as ordered by the authorities. As certainly as the document shows a radical determination to fight, it is not appropriate to equate it with the Armed Insurrection or similar publications of the communists.
In the concrete descriptions of the limited civil war on the streets and in the statements, declarations and demands on it, a broad similarity can be observed in the main organs of the two parties.
A selection of keywords, headlines and short statements from the Roten Fahne might be as follows: "Murderers of the swastika… murder bandits… Zörgiebel Soldiers’ Association… Nazis and police soldiers shoot at the Liebknechthaus… Nazi hordes attack red students… Orgy of murderous incitement (through the bourgeois press after the murder of the police officers Lenk and Anlauf)… Nazi murder den… principal murder den… march into the district of the warmongers… in the west, the residential districts of the warmongers and fascists… They (the members of the Chinese Red Army) put the Chinese Siemens and the Chinese police officers and generals against the wall… In the Berlin police headquarters the communists are seen as the enemy par excellence (quote from an article by Ossietzky)… Our leader: Stalin… (Pictures from Siemensstadt) Works from the future Leninstadt… Today Siemens-Schaltwerk. In the future Marx plant. Today still Wernerwerk. In the future Stalinwerk… SA civil war against working-class districts of Berlin… brown killers.”
In the Völkischer Beobachter, the corresponding formulations are as follows: “Desert murder raids by the Bolshevik rabble… Red murder continues to rage… The Bolshevik underworld in Berlin… Communists shoot at National Socialists… Representatives of the Soviet Russian Foreign Legion… The Reds want civil war… red murder bandits… beastly atrocities by red beasts… Hörsing-bandits... the bloodstream of Marxism: 8359 dead and badly injured National Socialists.” “…Hitler Youth Herbert Norkus stabbed to death by communists… bloodlust of the Marxist ‘Iron Front’… Moscow cavalry general Thälmann… red murder in Upper Silesia… red sub-humanity… the murderous Reichsbanner.”
Despite all the similarities, the differences are nonetheless remarkable: neither of the two parties fights exclusively against the other, but the communists also count the police among their opponents (“Zörgiebel bandits”), while the National Socialists align the Reichsbanner with the communists. The communists take great advantage in making a sociological characterization and charging as a worker-killer any policeman who has used self-defense against a threatening mob; the Nazis, on the other hand, can bring into play the communists’ self-identification with Moscow and the fact that the lumpenproletariat sided predominantly with the communists. (However, the communists also made use of this well Marxist term and applied it to the unemployed SA men.)
Three examples will illustrate this civil war.
On March 20, 1927, the Berlin SA (then barely a tenth of the strength of the Red Front Fighters’ League) celebrated its one-year anniversary with a night-time event in Trebbin (Mark) with a fiery speech by Gauleiter Dr. Goebbels. On the return trip the next evening, the SA men noticed that the front compartments of the arriving train were occupied by Red Front Fighters’ League men. They greet them with clenched fists, and the SA men perceive this as a provocation, so they try to break into the compartment. The Red Front Fighters’ League people draw pistols and thus hold their opponents back. Their excitement is tremendous. Wherever the train stops, they open a stone bombardment on the wagons. The SA got off the train at the Lichterfelde-Ost station and tried to storm the communist compartment. The Standartenführer received a shot in the stomach. Another SA man falls under the shots. But the communists’ car, who are very much outnumbered, is now badly damaged by stones thrown, and when a police ambulance finally arrives, it turns out that almost all of the 23 communists are seriously injured. From the train station, around 1,000 SA men march through Steglitz and Friedenau to Wittenbergplatz. “Insolent Jews were beaten up without further ado.” But already on the following day no uniformed SA man was allowed to be seen in the streets of Berlin. The Prussian government banned the Berlin branch of the NSDAP.
On July 17, 1932, the Hamburg SA carried out a demonstration march under the protection of the police, which was mainly intended to move through the working-class district of Altona. This intention was perceived as a provocation by the communists and apparently by large sections of the population. It was not clarified who fired the first shot, but in any case the SA and the police were exposed to violent attacks from all sides, just as they were in enemy territory, which they responded to in a similar way as the police had done in the bloody May of 1929. 18 dead and 16 seriously injured were the victims of a process that was at the mercy of the communists when the right to demonstrate was undisputed, and for which the National Socialists were responsible, when a march of uniformed and presumably armed men in hostile neighborhoods was not a demonstration but a constitutes an intolerable provocation.
When the newly elected Prussian state parliament, the majority of which consisted of the communists and the three times stronger National Socialists, convened for its first session on May 25, 1932, a heated debate quickly erupted about the Prussian judiciary, which was accused with great passion by both sides of of partisanship and bias, and when Wilhelm Pieck had taken the floor, he shouted at the National Socialists: “The mass murder of revolutionary workers was only introduced when your party appeared in political life. There are an enormous number of murderers in your ranks:" As a result, National Socialist deputies rushed to the lectern to drag Pieck down; members of the communist faction came to his aid and a regular battle ensued in which the outnumbered communists were soon driven out of the hall and several were seriously injured. The Social Democrats, like the center faction, had left the meeting room when the violence began, and the Communists reproached them severely for this, which in the meantime was answered with the counter-question whether one could fight for those of whom one so often referred to as “worker murderers” and threatened with “short trials.”
For the bloody Sunday of Alton, however, one could with good reason assign the real blame to the new Reich government, the Reich government of von Papen, which had been formed after Brüning’s dismissal under the significant influence of the chief of the ministerial office in the Reich Ministry of Defense, Lieutenant General von Schleicher. It was the first government in the Reich whose formation was based on the limited civil war between the communists and the National Socialists, and it was the first government that had to seriously reckon with the possibility of an unlimited civil war against both extremist parties. With it began the eve of the National Socialist takeover of power.