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This below is Chapter 2 Section 7:
7. The Period of Stabilization of the Weimar Republic 1924-1929
The stabilization of the currency was not enough to magically stabilize the situation in Germany: The Reichstag elections of May 4, 1924 were still dominated by a deeply agitated mood, and the Volkish parties achieved considerable successes, as did the Communist Party of Germany. The National Socialist Freedom Party, a new entity made up of Volkisch and Hitler supporters, now had 32 seats, but the Communists significantly outnumbered them with 62 seats. The Social Democratic Party only had 100 seats, and the German Nationalists were about as strong. Nevertheless, the center politician Wilhelm Marx, who had replaced Stresemann in December 1923, was able to continue to govern and, with the help of some of the German Nationalists, to push the Dawes laws through, which put German reparation obligations on a new basis and started the influx of foreign credits into Germany. The government knew how to take advantage of the improvement in the situation, and in the Reichstag elections of December 7, 1924, the Communists fell to 45 and the Volkish to 14 seats, while the Social Democratic Party won back 30 seats and the German National People’s Party maintained its position. But the Social Democrats continued to remain outside the government, and until 1928 a bourgeois bloc of changing composition under the Reich Chancellors Luther and Marx formed the governments, which the German Nationalists belonged first in 1925 until their departure as a result of the Locarno Treaties and then belonged again in 1927/28. The Reichstag election of May 20, 1928 brought substantial gains for both the Social Democrats and the Communists and led to the formation of a Grand Coalition cabinet under the Social Democrat Hermann Müller, which had after a year and a half, at the end of 1929, already been severely shaken by the effects of the deepening global economic crisis, before the era of genuinely parliamentary governments came to an end in March 1930 with the appointment of the presidential cabinet of Brüning.
If one does not focus primarily on the election results and the events in the Reichstag, one can see the end of the crisis of 1923 and the beginning of stabilization symbolized in two trials that pronounced judgment on the behavior of the National Socialists and the Communists, the Hitler trial in Munich and the Cheka trial in Leipzig. Both trials ended very lightly for the defendants, but the statement is only correct because the Leipzig trial was joined by a trial in Moscow, the so-called Student Trial.
The trial of Adolf Hitler, Erich Ludendorff and several other defendants took place from the end of February to the end of March 1924 before the People’s Court in Munich. It quickly became clear that Hitler played the leading role and attributed to himself the main responsibility for the events of November 8th and 9th. His defense consisted in the thesis that he had the same goal as the Bavarian rulers Kahr, Lossow and Seisser and that the motive of all those involved was the love of the fatherland, which was in mortal danger as a result of the communist attempts at revolution and the weakness of the bourgeois-Marxist Berlin government. The partners only differed in the extent of their energy and determination, and the chance of this national rescue attempt lay in the fact that he and his party had pulled together the Bavarian state, the Reichswehr and the police forward on their common path. Mussolini and Kemal Pasha were role models for him, and he did not consider the pursuit of ministerial posts worthy of “a great man.” “What I wanted to become was the breaker of Marxism,” because Marxism had caused the defeat in the world war through its activities for disintegration and was standing in the way of that “last judgment of God” to which “we are ready and willing” to go under the old flags.
Hitler's closing speech, which evidently made a deep impression both on the court and on the audience, thus was, above all, an accusatory speech, directed largely against the same men who were also accused by the communists, namely “Ebert, Scheidemann and comrades,” but from a radically opposite impulse, not because of alleged social treason, but because of treason against the country and high treason. On the whole, it was nothing more than a potential declaration of war on a hostile world and, moreover, an affirmation of war in general. It thus formed the sharpest contrast to the internationalist passion of that First World Congress of the Communist International. But undoubtedly there was also in it the breath of a great passion capable of sweeping away vast masses, a nationalistic and state passion, in the background of which, however, a social passion was easily discernible. Attack and defense were closely linked, and since the court was evidently permeated by similar sentiments, Hitler, with express recognition of his "patriotic merits,” was sentenced to a minimum term of five years imprisonment at the fortress for high treason, and he was promised the prospect of an early suspension of his sentence on probation.
The so-called Cheka trial, which took place a year later, from February 10 to April 22, 1925, before the State Court for the Protection of the Republic in Leipzig, had a completely different result. Its real subject was the communist attempt to seize power in 1923, and the occasion was that the authorities had succeeded in arresting the head of the T-(terror)group, Felix Neumann, and even the Soviet supreme military leader for the uprising, Alexander Skoblewsky (alias Rose, Gorev or “Helmut”). Neumann made a comprehensive confession, referring mainly to the murder of a traitor and a planned assassination attempt against General von Seeckt. This trial was also highly political and propagandistic, as the lawyers were either communists or openly showed their sympathy for communism. The presiding judge, on the other hand, showed no leniency whatsoever, and frequent clashes occurred.
The court considered it proven that the Cheka group had acted on behalf of the relevant party authorities, and the defense’s objection that the Communist Party did not support individual terror was rejected with good arguments. But only a small part of the great revolutionary movement of 1923 was made the subject of the trial, although the public prosecutor’s thesis was not contradicted, that for the communists the constitutional powers were also fascist and the appeal to the will to defend the legal workers’ governments was one been a mere concealment of the intent to go on the offensive. Three of the main defendants, including Neumann and Skoblewsky, were sentenced to death, the rest of them received long prison sentences.
Certainly, the two trials, also in the way they were conducted, were remarkable examples of the difference in behavior towards the right and the left, which was then particularly denounced by Emil Julius Gumbel and today almost universally. But surely the first question to be asked is whether in the history of the world an attacked system has treated its enemies and those who wanted to help it according to the same standards, and whether one does not rob the communists of the honor that they can claim if one does denies that the violent overthrow of the capitalist, i.e., the European-industrial system, had to be a far more serious and revolutionary event than the establishment of an anti-parliamentary dictatorship to repel this attack. And the most remarkable thing is that the Reich government did not initiate any further trials against those actually found guilty, namely the leadership of the Communist Party, and that the death sentences were not carried out. General political and foreign policy considerations may have been decisive for first, but the second cannot be understood without a third trial, the so-called Student Trial in Moscow in June and July 1925.
The accused were the German students Dr. Kindermann, Wolscht and von Ditmar. In September 1924, with regular papers and after lengthy negotiations with the Soviet embassy, they had started a research and lecture tour to the Soviet Union, and after a 14-day stay in Moscow they had been arrested by the GPU and taken to the Lubyanka. After the trial had been prepared over a long period of time, the charge was brought that the three students had been sent to Russia by the “Consul Organization” to spy and shoot “Stalin and Trotsky.” During the trial, cartoons appeared in Pravda and Izvestia; one of them showed the massive, brutal figure of a student at arms with with a swastika band on his arm, shooting at pictures of Stalin and Trotsky with his pistol. The trial reports claimed that this was the “first shock troop of fascism” that had invaded the Soviet Union and that it had to be rendered harmless. The embassy counselor Hilger, the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt Theodor Wolff and even the former Reich Chancellor Michaelis were named as those behind the attack. Mainly, however, Captain Ehrhardt and the (long since disbanded) “Organization Consul” were targeted. Initially, Ambassador von Brockdorff-Rantzau placed so much trust in the investigating authorities that he believed their claim that these “murderous fellows” had been sent to kill him as well, but then he did not fail to act in their defense. The German press also paid great attention to the trial. It quickly became apparent how meager or trivial were the realities viewed by the prosecution as evidence of a widespread anti-Soviet conspiracy, such as Theodor Wolff’s money payments. Gustav Hilger was also able to refute the suspicions in a convincing manner. Nevertheless, the defendants were sentenced to death. The outrage over the “Moscow Shameful Justice” was enormous in Germany. The Vossische Zeitung recalled the principles of revolutionary judgment developed by the Frenchman Sadoul during the trial of the Social Revolutionaries in 1922, which contradicted all conceptions of the rule of law because they made “the good of the revolution alone” and not the individual guilt of the defendants as the criterion; the Vorwärts turned sharply against “the eastern direction in the Foreign Office,” which wanted to avoid at all costs a German-Russian disgruntlement. Friends of Kindermann testified that he went to Russia with strong illusionary sympathies and that he could not have had any connection with right-wing radical organizations simply because he was Jewish. But for the insiders very early on, there was no doubt that the students had been arrested as objects of exchange; for in February 1925 the President of the Council of People’s Commissars Rykow had told Brockdorff-Rantzau that the charges against the students would be put down if the proceedings in Leipzig were abandoned. In the end, things came to just that: in October, Skoblewsky and Kindermann and their comrades were pardoned at the same time. In the end, the Weimar judicial authorities were no harsher against the Soviet communist Alexander Skoblewsky than they had been against the Austrian National Socialist Adolf Hitler.
The further development of the Communist Party of Germany during the period of prohibition from November 1923 to March 1924 and afterwards was primarily determined by the disputes over the October defeat, which in turn were closely intertwined with the first disputes between Stalin, Zinoviev and Trotsky in the Russian party leadership. It was quite natural that the leftists, who had sharply criticized Brandler’s united-front policy, i.e., his cooperation with the left Social Democrats, now came to the fore. After every failure of the attempts to expand right to the social-democratic workers and to some of their leaders, the pendulum regularly swung back to the left-wing demarcation of all waverers and the undecided. Thus, at the 9th Party Congress in Frankfurt in April 1924, a radical change was made: the left took over the party leadership, i.e. Ruth Fischer, Arkadij Maslow, Werner Scholem, Ernst Thälmann, Arthur Rosenberg, Iwan Katz, etc. The rightists or Brandlerians were completely eliminated. The emerging talk of a stabilization of capitalism was not believed, and the new program of action, while it proclaimed a united front from below, which was to also include proletarian middle-classes, demanded with even greater determination the arming of the proletariat and the disarming of both the legal and illegal bourgeoisie state organs, i.e. the preparation of the masses for the impending final battle. Indeed, the party’s call for the Reichstag elections in May 1924 obviously appealed to many people because it directed an extremely violent indictment against the Weimar system and, of course, against the capitalist system as a whole. In the foreground of the indictment, besides the capitalists, “Christian as well as Jewish,” are the Social Democrats, who have once again stabbed the fighting proletariat in the back. Hitler is mentioned only in passing, with a contemptuous expression, as a “megalomaniac philistine,” and as a creature of big business, while the Communist Party is again apostrophized as the “leader in this struggle for liberation of all the oppressed”
But after the second Reichstag elections of the year, there was no mistaking that stabilization had actually occurred, and while Weimar Germany, under the leadership of Foreign Minister Stresemann, was working towards a reconciliation with the Western powers and entry into the League of Nations, the Communists seemed to be tearing each other apart. In fact, the party leadership launched a fierce struggle against Trotskyism and Luxemburgism in the party, and in return an ultra-left opposition formed, which increasingly came to take anti-Bolshevik or anti-Stalinist positions because it criticized the NEP and the prevalence of the foreign policy interests of the Russian peasant state in the Comintern policy.
Particularly characteristic of this stage was the writing of the young Heinz Neumann, the intellectual son of a wealthy Jewish home, “What is Bolshevization?” which appeared in early 1925. In the present age of “incessant national struggles and civil wars,” according to Neumann, the Communist Party of Germany’s struggle against Social Democracy becomes a class struggle which must be “fought to the knife against the opportunist party of the labor aristocracy.” But only with the strictest unity and centralization can the party really be the section of a world party; only then can it prepare itself efficiently for the armed insurrection and have military formations as well as an intelligence apparatus that informs the party headquarters about “where the police stations and barracks, the positions and forces of the enemy are,” what are the militarily important factories and the course of their manufacturing system. Only then can it effectively work towards the disorganization of the capitalist state apparatus and disturb the “peace of the production process” sought by the capitalists. The Communist Party will only achieve victory in absolute Bolshevik unity, nevertheless with perseverance and in complete harmony with the international headquarters: “Give us a Bolshevik party in Germany and we will unhinge Germany.”
It was not surprising that these views aroused opposition in the party and that they led the opponents, not least the Social Democrats, who were counted among the bourgeoisie and thus threatened with extermination, to the thesis that this Communist Party of Germany was nothing more than the fighting machine and espionage organization of a foreign power . And when, in the spring of 1925, after the death of Friedrich Ebert, whom it was still cursing in his grave, the party held on to its candidate Thälmann in the second round of the Reich presidential elections, it in fact actually secured Hindenburg’s victory, although it received only just under 2 million votes, far fewer than in the Reichstag elections. It thus became apparent that at the moment when it was a question of trusting a specific person rather than approval of a radical protest program, the Communists were only able to win over a small minority of little more than 5% of the electorate. The candidate of the National Socialists, Ludendorff, received fewer than 300,000 votes: in the spring of 1925, Hitler and his party were, so to speak, no longer perceptible.
It would, of course, be a great mistake to think that Hitler and his party were over immediately after November 9, 1923. For many weeks after the putsch, the people of Munich and Bavaria were in a state of intense anti-government agitation; Alfred Rosenberg founded a substitute organization on Hitler's behalf, the Großdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft (Greater German National Community); the public took the liveliest interest in the Hitler’s trial; a postcard depicting Hitler as a lonely prisoner in Landsberg was distributed in millions of copies; Hitler had become a national figure for the first time, albeit for a short period of time. The electoral successes of the “Volkish Block” in Bavaria and the “National Socialist Freedom Party” in the Reich far exceeded expectations. But Hitler soon realized that he could not control the various successor organizations from Landsberg, and he therefore withdrew completely from day-to-day politics in order to devote himself exclusively to work on the book that was later to be named “Mein Kampf.” After his release at Christmas of 1924, he found the situation much changed, and paid a visit to the new Bavarian Prime Minister Held to assure him that he did not want to fight against the government, but only against Marxism. On February 27, 1925, he then re-established his party by a speech in the Bürgerbräukeller. He succeeded to put those present into a frenzy of enthusiasm and to bring about a touching scene of reconciliation among the quarreling followers. This time it was completely clear from the outset that he would be the alone at the head of the party and would have no Ludendorff beside him. However, the Bavarian authorities imposed a ban on his speaking, which most of the German states joined, and thus he was deprived of his best and most important weapon. But on July 18, 1925, the first volume of Mein Kampf was published by Eher-Verlag. In the present context it is not appropriate to give an account of the contents, an analysis or a critique, but it is still central to ask the question of how the relationship between the basic motifs is compared to the early speeches and whether anti-Marxism or anti-Bolshevism is still the main focus.
The life story is completely new, and then becomes the starting point of a party history, which in turn is repeatedly interrupted by diverse reflections on questions of a general political and anthropological nature. From the life story it is clear that the Greater German motif emerges already on the first pages and that Hitler appears above all as an Austrian German. But the account on his experiences in Vienna, despite all the self-stylization, makes clear in an almost striking way how much he felt like an European citizen. This is already proven by his story of the first encounter with Social Democrats at the construction site, and even more conclusive is the report of how one day he encountered a mass demonstration by Social Democratic workers and watched “with bated breath the monstrous human dragon worm” that slowly rolled by. “I finally left the square in fearful depression and wandered home.” That was, in an almost paradigmatic way, a “bourgeois” reaction, but by no means “the” bourgeois reaction, because men like Max Weber or Clement Attlee reacted quite differently. The fact that Hitler was outraged by an early and overlooked claim to totality by the labor movement, namely by the “brutal demands” to attend only red meetings and read only red books, cannot be denied, but it is precisely at this point that he puts forward the equally totalitarian postulate of opposing social democracy with “a doctrine of better truthfulness, but the same brutality of execution.” Nevertheless, it is not without consequence when, in the same context, he sharply criticizes the bourgeoisie’s lack of understanding of social issues, which is clearly burdened with responsibility for the disastrous development. But a few pages later Hitler writes: “When I recognized the Jew as the leader of Social Democracy, scales began to fall from my eyes…The names of Austerlitz, David, Adler, Ellenbogen will stay in my memory forever.” Obviously, Hitler makes a concomitant phenomenon the cause here, fundamentally no different than the war profiteers and speculators who are accused in the Spartacus letters as the originators of the war. It is certainly no coincidence that the “scales falling from the eyes” appear so often in the life accounts of Marxists. But with Hitler the accusation against “pathogens” and “originators” of the disaster is still much more intense, presumably because it is less plausible and precisely because of this reason it can lead to downright monstrous statements, such as the one that the planet will again move through the ether deserted as it was millions of years ago, if the Jew succeeds in triumphing over the peoples of this world with the help of his Marxist creed. But only in this way does Hitler gain a mission for himself and his imagined “Germanic Reich of the German Nation,” a mission which in its own way is supposed to be as universal as the one that Marxism ascribed to itself: “By defending myself against the Jew, I fight for the work of the Lord.” And so, in addition to the long narratives and reflections on the “aristocratic principle of nature” or the “free play of forces,” one also finds in Mein Kampf, quite as in the early speeches, there is on the one hand the affirmative and national pathos of the positive world war experience and, on the other hand, the negative and social pathos that arising from the continuing horror of the “Russian example” and the “annihilation of the national intelligentsia”: “Now the great last revolution begins. By gaining political power, the Jew throws off the few covers he still wears. The democratic Jew of the people becomes the Jew of blood and the tyrant of the people. In a few years he tries to exterminate the national bearers of the intelligence…The most terrible example of this kind is Russia…”
Around the same time, one of Hitler's best known brother-in-arms, Colonel Max Bauer, wrote a travelogue from the “Land of the Red Tsars,” in which he frankly admitted that he had changed his opinions about the Soviet Union and the leading men of its state party after he had seen too much there that conflicted with his conservative and military principles. Hitler, too, was the traditionalist of an old faith, as Rosa Luxemburg had been in her very different way, and by keeping the past alive, he wrote a Bible for his movement that differed in characteristic ways from the basic books that Karl Marx had written for the workers’ movement in 1867 and Lenin had written for young Bolshevism in 1902. None of the three books was a reflection of reality or an accurate blueprint of the future, but each stood positively in the midst of powerful historical developments. Yet the situation in which and for which Mein Kampf was written was the most particular and least repeatable. This, even for those who had not joined in the mockery of Hitler’s ramblings but took his book seriously, the probability had to be high that this man and this party would be no match with their democratic and Marxist opponents. Perhaps at no moment was the presumption better founded than in 1926, when the Communists brought the question of the expropriation of the princes to the general public, and a large part of the Democrats and Republicans went in the same direction.
In and of itself, the united-front policy, which was the precondition of this success, was not to be expected from a left party leadership. But the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in the summer of 1924 had sharply condemned the right, but at the same time it had prescribed the line of mass struggle, which would certainly take the form of a united front from below, but which nevertheless offered many opportunities for conciliatory gestures toward the Social Democrats. In addition, the party leadership was increasingly harassed by the ultra-leftists, and it in turn adopted some of their theses, so that fears arose in the Comintern that, in connection with Stresemann’s turn to the West, anti-Bolshevik or Western European tendencies were gaining strength within the Communist Party of Germany. Stalin forced Zinoviev to send an “Open Letter” to the members and organizations of the Communist Party of Germany, dated September 1, 1925, which Ruth Fischer also had to sign, even though it meant the end of her party career. The long letter already exhibited a number of features of the future Chinese Party, but its meaning was clear. It emphatically demanded the implementation of a practical Bolshevization of the party in the sense of the struggle against the formation of factions and anti-Bolshevik tendencies, as well as the clear subordination of party work to the main point of view of the interests of the Soviet Union, but also a stronger turn toward mass struggle. This Open Letter became the starting point of fierce disputes, and the apostasy of the left and ultra-left communists soon emerged, but the party leadership reacted as it was expected: Ernst Thälmann’s group took over the party leadership. A short time later, it was presented with a great opportunity to launch a mass struggle.
The overthrow of the monarchies in Germany in 1918/19 had not lead to the radical consequence that had been chosen in Austria, namely the confiscation of the entire property of the ruling dynasties. Rather, as was the tradition, a distinction had been made between state and private assets and the delimitation was left to the federal states and the courts. After the end of the inflation, some new court rulings caused considerable stir within the disputes, some of which were still ongoing, and the disquiet was heightened because some princes made revaluation claims for their pensions etc., which had been destroyed by the inflation, and which went far beyond what the small pensioners and savers had been granted in appreciation. In December 1925 the Communist Party of Germany therefore introduced a bill that provided for the expropriation of all assets of the former royal houses without compensation.
Undoubtedly, this demand, which came under the slogan “Not a penny for the princes!” was extremely popular among those who had suffered by revaluation and no less with the unemployed and war-disabled, who, according to the bill, were to benefit from the proceeds. On the other hand, a right to expropriate entire groups without compensation for political reasons could not be derived from the constitution, and the Communists made no secret of the fact that what was to be made was only the first breach in the property system as such. However, they proceeded very cleverly, and had a non-partisan committee under the leadership of the left-liberal professor Robert René Kuczynski take the initiative for a referendum. This put the Social Democratic Party leadership in a difficult situation and, for fear of losing numerous supporters, it had to agree to act jointly with the Communist Party of Germany. The referendum achieved the astonishingly high number of votes of 12.5 million votes, far more than was required, and this cleared the way for a referendum after the Reichstag, as was to be expected, had rejected the bill. Now a passionate public debate developed, in which the Reich President von Hindenburg also intervened. Since the bill was constitution-amending, 20 million votes were required for its adoption, and on June 20, 1926, only 14.5 million yes-votes were cast. Nevertheless, it was a great success for the Communist Party of Germany. It had forced the Social Democratic Party leadership into her tow and also managed to get a large number of center voters to vote “yes” as well. For the first time, the deterrent force of the Russian example seemed to have been lost, and voters largely voted according to sociological lines: communist, social democratic and Christian workers seemed to be on the same front under communist leadership.
Nevertheless, the following was the main result: with the most popular and apparently most moderate of all conceivable slogans, the Communist Party of Germany had brought the Social Democratic Party into line and appealed not only to the centrist proletarians but to a large number of left-wing democrats (including probably all left-wing intellectuals), but it still did not get more than 40% of the vote. It was virtually impossible that it would ever legally enforce its own slogans, such as that of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was undoubtedly right in saying that even in the face of a serious crisis, only “armed insurrection” would lead to victory.
The counteraction of the National Socialists in the context of these important and, above all, symptomatic events was merely episodic and contributed to making deputies Frick and his comrades appear as comic as they were insignificant. They introduced a motion in the Reichstag for the expropriation of the property of “the bank and stock exchange princes and other parasites of the people,” which was an exact counterpart to the communist-social-democratic bill and of course had no prospect of even being seriously discussed. But subversive it undoubtedly was, and in future this party could hardly count on the natural sympathies of the capitalists. If the referendum was ultimately a failure for the communists, they had won a triumph over their most radical enemies that was not merely quantitative or material.
But they hardly took these enemies seriously anymore, and the intra-communist clashes that took place over the next few years were unambiguous proof of this. They were not at all about the relationship to fascism and the best methods to fight it. Rather, it continued to be about the Bolshevization of the party, which Thälmann and his supporters were only able to push through and enforce after difficult struggles. The fiercest opponents were the ultra-leftists, who were joined by a section of the left around Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow after the loss of the party leadership. The earliest group formed in 1925 around Werner Scholem, Iwan Katz and Arthur Rosenberg. It leveled accusations against the communist leaders, who seemed to believe “that the Prussian army before the war was roughly the embodied ideal of a Leninist party.” The counter-accusations were that the ultra-leftists viewed Bolshevism as a bourgeois aberration, and this undoubtedly hit on something correct. But since Katz, Rosenberg, and Scholem were “Jewish intellectuals,” some observers believed they perceived anti-Semitic undertones in the campaign against the intellectuals launched by the Thälmann group on the model of Stalin’s polemics against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. The intellectuals were by no means united among themselves, however, and there were also a number of workers among the opposition’s champions. At times there were no fewer than ten opposition groups, and nearly a dozen members of the Reichstag were left-communists. The party leadership proceeded tactically very cleverly and excluded one of the opposition groups after the other. The first to suffer this fate was the group around the former head of the municipal department in the Communist Party of Germany headquarters, Iwan Katz. It was very radical indeed, wanting it to be considered an honor to be called anti-Bolshevik as long as it was Bolshevik to set aside “the interests of the international proletariat in favor of the Russian state, that is, the Russian capitalist peasant majority” and to replace party discipline with cadre obedience within the Communist Party of Germany. Later the group joined the council communists around Franz Pfemfert, who called Stalin a “peasant Napoleon” and even believed to recognize in Russia the “last bulwark of the bourgeoisie,” namely a national-capitalist great power and enemy of the proletariat.
Leftists and ultra-leftists such as Karl Korsch, Hugo Urbahns, Arthur Rosenberg, Arkadij Maslow and Ruth Fischer took different, yet similar paths: some of them moved away from communism and even from Marxism, others later returned to the party. The splits and disputes are not to be traced in detail here, because in the present context it comes down to one observation: none of these groups took credit for themselves for being closer to National Socialism or fascism than the party leadership, despite serious differences. And the same applies to polemics. Even if Stalin’s “socialism in one country” was fiercely opposed, it was not called fascist, and even when Trotsky applied the term “National Socialism” to Stalin's practice in 1930, he did not want to establish any connection with the Hitler’s party, which remained for him in result of counter-revolution, while Stalin was, after all, a Thermidorian. This was considerably different in the disputes that took place within the NSDAP at around the same time, and in this, too, one can see evidence of the priority and of the far greater importance of communism up to 1930.
This is the dispute between right-wing and left-wing National Socialists that began soon after the re-establishment of the party and lasted until 1930. The North German party organization, the establishment of which Hitler had entrusted to Gregor Straßer, a pharmacist and highly decorated front-line officer from Landshut, was considered left-wing. He was joined by his brother Otto, who had been a member of the Social Democratic Party and had led a student company against the Kapp troops. The potential from which this wing had to draw was to a large extent volkish-Protestant. On the other hand, the proletarian masses in the Ruhr area and in Berlin could only be won over to nationalistic socialism if capitalism and at least the philistines were opposed. Both of these potentially contained a conflict with Munich, because it was not without reason that Hitler made his peace with Rome and was looking for contacts with leading business circles. In any case, a “Working Group of the North and West German Districts” was formed in September 1925 and published as its organ the National Socialist Letter from October 1st, published by Gregor Straßer and edited by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the managing director of the Rhineland district in Elberfeld. An initial draft of the program envisaged the transfer of large-scale industry into partial state and municipal property and the conversion of all landowners into leaseholders. There was just as little applause in Munich as an initial and positive resolution on the expropriation of the princes, and at a Führer-meeting in Bamberg on February 14, 1926, Hitler prevailed completely with a speech lasting several hours and won over Goebbels in particular, whom he made Gauleiter (translator: district leader) of Berlin at the end of the year. In spite of this, the north German party wing retained its own and predominantly left-wing characteristics, and in the Kampf-Verlag publishing house it created a strong power base for itself. In its newspapers and in the Nazi letters the war of extermination against (international) capitalism could be proclaimed, and here there was a great deal of understanding for the Marxist class struggle doctrine, which was therefore by no means considered a Jewish invention in accordance with Hitler. Above all, however, there was a pronounced orientation towards the East, because the ultimate goal of tearing apart the dictates of Versailles and Saint-Germain could not be achieved without the help of the Soviet Union and without an alliance with all the oppressed peoples of the world. Bolshevism as such is firmly rejected, mostly on anti-Semitic grounds, but in the speech “Lenin or Hitler?” which Goebbels first delivered in Königsberg in February 1926, Bolshevism and National Socialism as the two revolutionary movements of the twentieth century were paralleled to such an extent that the contrast was ultimately only seen in the fact that Lenin wanted to redeem Germany through the world, while Adolf Hitler’s aim was to redeem the world through Germany. Some left-wing National Socialists went so far as to make outright offers of alliance to the Communist Party of Germany, because they believed that the Communist Party of Germany and the Soviet Union saw “in the present situation, as far as possible, our allies against Weimar, Versailles and Wall Street,” although they ultimately pursued other goals. The Social Democrats, in turn, relied on such statements to prove the close kinship of Communists and National Socialists.
It can be assumed that Adolf Hitler had not least the left-wing National Socialists in mind when he wrote the second volume of Mein Kampf in 1925 and 1926, which appeared in December 1926. Here he made it clear once again that for him the anti-bourgeois polemics did not in the least mean a weakening of radical anti-Bolshevism, and above all he worked out the hitherto only rudimentary theory of living space in a way that made any compromise with the concept of eastward orientation impossible. But the strong emphasis on racial doctrine should also be seen in this context. An alliance with the oppressed nations can therefore be completely ruled out because their situation is due to racial inferiority. Thus the second volume is filled much more strongly than the first with that pointed and hardened “Europeanism” which regards the rule of the English master people and the Germans allied with them as a “racial” determination of nature and derives from this the right to “land policy of the future,” which will mean the end of the Russian state, since after the fall of the Bolsheviks, those “blood-stained common criminals,” there will no longer be a leadership class who could hold the state together. However, the extent to which Hitler is still oriented towards the situation of the Russian civil war can be seen in the “Political Testament” with which he closes Chapter 14 on “Orientation towards the East or Eastern Policy”: “Never tolerate the emergence of two continental powers in Europe. See in every attempt to organize a second military power on the German borders…an attack against Germany…see to it that the strength of our people is based not in colonies but in the soil of our homeland in Europe…” Just as Hitler wants to fix the English supremacy in the world during the second half of the 19th century through a racial doctrine and thus the inclusion of Germany, so he wants to fix at this point the situation of the years 1917/18, when the second, the Russian military power on the borders of Germany had ceased to exist, which had been a self-evident fact throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The fear of one’s own annihilation, which had so strongly marked the early speeches and the first volume of Mein Kampf, now results in a foreign policy and state will to annihilate, which was far removed from the left National Socialists with regard to Russia.
There were thus genuine differences between Munich and northern Germany. In 1928, it had not yet been decided whether Hitler's concept of identifying nationalism and socialism or Strasser's national socialism was more promising. It was also uncertain whether the party would eventually split or there would only a small group of people turning away. An important preliminary decision was the Reichstag elections of 1928, which meant a defeat for the National Socialists and a considerable success for the Communists.
The main winner, however, was the Social Democratic Party. It won 152 seats, and was thus stronger than in any of the previous parliaments with the exception of the National Assembly. In contrast, the German Nationalists fell from over 100 to 78, and the center parties also lost a number of seats. The communists rose from 45 to 54 seats, and despite the greatest propaganda efforts, and the NSDAP, despite its greatest propagandistic efforts, was only able to conquer 12 seats, while it had previously had 14. But these 12 were now all Hitler supporters, and there was no longer any left-communists among the communists. Nevertheless, the result of December 1924 seemed to be confirmed insofar as the National Socialists looked like an insignificant splinter party compared to the Communists. In fact, they received little attention from the new government of the grand coalition, and the Prussian government lifted the party ban it had pronounced for Berlin. It seemed much more important that a more radical tendency was now rapidly establishing itself among the German Nationalists, which in October led to the election of the press magnate Alfred Hugenberg as party chairman, while the more moderate forces were pushed onto the path of secession.
In retrospect, the time of the grand coalition from summer 1928 to spring 1930 often appears to be the last good time of the Weimar Republic. Contemporaries, however, did not always feel that way, and a symptomatic sign of weakness in the government was the dispute over the “armored cruiser A,” which brought the Social Democratic ministers and the Reichstag faction into a very peculiar opposition. But the so-called “Bloody May” of 1929, which gave popular sanction, so to speak , to the ultra-left turn of Stalin and the Comintern of 1928, was a downright ominous sign.
The dispute over the construction of a new armored cruiser had already started in 1927, and the main arguments had already been exchanged at that time: the armored cruiser was unnecessary and merely a dangerous toy, since disarmament and not armament had to be on the program, said the representatives of the Social Democratic Party and the German Democratic Party; it was a matter of a replacement construction provided for in the Versailles Treaty, which was indispensable for the defense of East Prussia, replied German Nationalists and People’s Party members. Proponents prevailed, and so the warship was drawn into the election campaign. The Social Democrats led it partly with the slogan food for children instead of armored cruiser, which probably contributed significantly to the election victory. But in August 1928, the Social Democratic ministers, together with the other cabinet members, decided to begin construction in order to avoid rupture of the coalition, which was still very fragile. In the new parliamentary disputes, however, the Social Democratic ministers, as members of parliament, voted against the decision they had made as members of the cabinet. The communists, in turn, introduced a referendum in September that consisted of a single sentence: “The building of armored ships and cruisers of any kind is forbidden.” This time, however, their votes were far below those they had received in the Reichstag elections. Thus their motion was not popular, presumably for several reasons and not least because of the suspicion that the section of the Communist International wanted to give its state, the USSR, an armaments advantage. Characteristic, however, was also the attitude of the Social Democrats, which had to nourish the suspicion in the right half of the German people that this large party had still not found a relationship with the elementary state necessities, because their arguments against the armored cruiser could also be carried on to the thesis that the Reichswehr was superfluous and that its budget could be directed towards unemployment aid or feeding children. The old assertion that there was a total Marxism thus received new nourishment.
At about the same time, however, the old opposition within this overall Marxism found a new and extremely bloody expression in the May events.
In December 1928, the Social Democratic police chief of Berlin, the former cooper Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel, banned all outdoor demonstrations and gatherings because of recent heavy clashes between the Red Front Fighters League and the SA. The Prussian Minister of the Interior, Albert Grzesinski, published a “final warning” on March 29, 1929, in which he almost openly threatened to ban the Communist Party of Germany. It was very understandable, however, that the Communist Party of Germany agitated the strongest against the decision, because the marches on May 1st were a particularly old and venerable heritage of the entire workers’ movement. In fact, the authorities were considering lifting the ban on demonstrations on May 1st, but the murder of two Reichsbanner (translator: veterans’ federation) people aggravated the situation anew. And the agitation of the Communist Party of Germany was not far from calling for an armed insurrection: “The revolutionary élan and the will to fight of the German workers will show the social-democratic police minister of the trust-bourgeoisie that the proletariat doesn't give a damn about their prohibitions.” The Social Democratic Party, on the other hand, circulated phrases like “The Communist Party of Germany needs corpses” or “On Moscow’s orders,” and thereby aggravated the situation on its part. The communists, in, had several hundred Red Front Fighters League members and Party Youth attacked traffic policemen at intersections on the evening of April 30th, and on the morning of May 1st the Rote Fahne with the headline “May Fight 1929,” while the editorial of spoke the “signals of a new rising wave of the proletarian revolution.” However, only a few thousand demonstrators gathered in the streets, and it is therefore doubtful whether the party mobilized even all Red Front Fighters League members and prepared them in civilian clothes to enforce the demonstration. This is what the police apparently assumed, and they used very sharp methods to break up the marches. The first shots were fired around noon in the main trouble spots on Kösliner Street in Wedding and on Hermannplatz in Neukölln, presumably by the police, who were greeted with a hail of stones and bottles and outraged shouts like “bloodhounds.” The response consisted of the use of armored vehicles, the storming of the barricades and the dreaded shout “Get away from the windows,” since open windows were immediately shot at because of fear of snipers. Already in the evening of the first day there were 9 dead and 63 seriously injured. Up until May 4, there were repeated serious clashes, which were particularly caused by groups of youths, and which sparked shows of sympathy among the population. On May 2, the Rote Fahne had brought passionate denunciations against the “murderous party” and the “bloodstained coalition government” and brought a call for a “mass strike,” which, however, was hardly heeded. Excited scenes took place in the Prussian state parliament: Deputy Jendretzky appeared in full Red Front Fighters League uniform, Wilhelm Pieck hurled the word “Murderer gang!” in the faces of the Social Democrats, the parliamentary group sang the Internationale standing up, and then marched out of parliament. In all, more than 30 deaths were reported, most of them bystanders, including women; the police, on the other hand, suffered no fatalities and only one of their wounded received a bullet wound. Nonetheless, the Red Front Fighters League, the Red Young Front and the Red Navy were banned on May 6th.
From the bourgeoisie, too, there was much criticism of the harsh actions of the police, who behaved “as if they were in enemy territory,” and not just from the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt. The Vorwärts, on the other hand, expressed itself in a militant manner: “The communists needed corpses and mobilized the lumpenproletariat…Down with the communist pests of the workers’ movement!” One could indeed assume without any particular malice that the Communists did not want to carry out in this occasion the armed insurrection they invoked again and again, but wanted to rehearse it and that the deep indignation which now filled considerable parts of Berlin population against the “Zörgiebel Cossacks” and the “police beast” was very welcome to them and was certainly shared by them. The language of the right-wing newspapers, for their part, was of the utmost vehemence: again and again there was talk of the German Kerensky epoch into which one had apparently entered anew, the Deutsche Zeitung spoke of the “agglomerated depravity of the dregs of humanity of our machine century,” and the Deutsche Tageszeitung demanded that “the criminal nests of the troublemakers be so thoroughly fumigated that no one can again establish himself in them.” The old fear of civil war and memories of the years from 1918 to 1923 came back to life, especially since the first signs of the looming global economic crisis were becoming apparent. However, the communists still saw the social democrats and the Weimar state of the trust-bourgeoisie as their future main opponents in the civil war, according to the Russian example. But another party, which, like the Communists, but for opposite reasons, shouted their “Away with Grzesinski, Severing, Zörgiebel!” and was already in ascendancy, and it would not be long before Germany’s streets, but in a different way Germany’s newspapers and theaters, also became the scenes of a civil war, which of course remained limited because the government, police and Reichswehr essentially kept the reins in their hands. However, it was not easy for them to achieve the required equidistance, because until then they had been attacked primarily by one and by far the stronger of the two parties.
But there was also a second state involved, and just on May 1, 1929, it interfered in Germany’s affairs with a serious way through a speech by its war commissioner. These influences, however, were not all negative and hostile. It is time to take a look at the state relations between the German Reich and the Soviet Union before making that internal German civil war the subject.