In mid-February, there were rumours that the Nazis were planning a “bloodbath” by faking an assassination attempt on Hitler as a pretext for taking revenge. In the midst of this ominous atmosphere, news broke in the evening of 27 February 1933 that the Reichstag was on fire.
Although the origins of the blaze had yet to be investigated, Goering raged: “This is the beginning of the Communist uprising. Now they will strike. We have not a minute to lose!” After the war, Rudolf Diels, whom Goering named head of the Gestapo, recalled:
“Hitler yelled … Now there’ll be no more mercy. Anyone who gets in our way will be cut down…Every Communist functionary will be shot on the spot. The Communist deputies must be hanged from the gallows this very evening. Everybody connected with the Communists is to be arrested. There’s no more taking it easy on the Social Democrats and the Reich Banner either.”
Hitler would not hear of it when Diels said he thought the man arrested, Marinus van der Lubbe, was a lunatic. “This is a very clever, carefully planned matter,” he argued, “The criminals thought this through very thoroughly.”
Who was responsible for the fire? The question has never been resolved. What is beyond doubt is that (a) not a shred of evidence showing the involvement of KPD was ever presented and (b) the Nazis were not at all unhappy about the Reichstag fire. On the contrary, it was a welcome excuse to strike a decisive blow against the KPD. Later that evening, when the Nazi leadership assembled in the Hotel Kaiserhof, the mood was positively relaxed. “Everyone was beaming,” Goebbels noted. “This was just what we needed. Now we’re completely in the clear.” As is suspected in the case of the Godhra train fire incident of 27 February 2002 in India, taking all circumstantial evidence into account historians have inferred that the Nazis started the Reichstag fire themselves and blamed it on the communists.
By the night of 27–28 February, the KPD’s leading functionaries and almost all of the party’s Reichstag deputies had been arrested. On 3 March, KPD Chairman Ernst Thälmann was located and detained. The material allegedly confiscated in the Karl Liebknecht House suggested that the Communists intended to form “terrorist groups,” set public buildings on fire, poison the food served in public kitchens and take “the wives and children of ministers and other high-ranking personalities hostage.” Although it was easy to see that this nightmare scenario was a crass invention, Hitler’s colleagues concurred in issuing a Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which “suspended until further notice” fundamental civil rights including personal liberty, freedom of speech and the press, the right to assemble, and the privacy of letters and telephone conversations.
The decree of 28 February has been correctly described as “the emergency law upon which the National Socialist dictatorship based its rule until it itself collapsed” and as the “constitutional document” of the Third Reich. In a speech in Frankfurt am Main on 3 March 1933, Goering made it abundantly clear what he intended to do with the new powers he had been granted. The measures he ordered, Goering promised, would not be diluted by any legal considerations: “In this regard, I am not required to establish justice. In this regard, I am required to eradicate and eliminate and nothing more!”
As in other cases, here also Hitler faced no opposition from others in the government. Hindenburg had no qualms about signing the emergency decree, which was sold to him as a “special ordinance to fight Communist violence.” Unwittingly or not, he helped transfer political authority from the office of the Reich president to the Reich government.
A Farce of an Election
The U.S. ambassador, Frederick Sackett, termed the elections on 5 March 1933 a “farce,” since the left-wing parties “were completely denied their constitutional right to address their supporters during the final and most important week of the campaign.”
Yet, despite an extraordinarily high voter turnout of 88.8 per cent, the NSDAP came up clearly short of their stated goal of an absolute majority. They got 43.9 per cent of the vote — an increase of 10.8 per cent over the November 1932 election. They registered strong gains in many of those regions including metropolitan Berlin where they had hitherto performed poorly. And it was the Nazis who seemed to have mobilised the majority of previous non-voters.
On the other hand, the SPD took 18.3 per cent of the vote (down 2.1 per cent), and despite everything, the KPD still polled 12.3 per cent (down 4.6 per cent). Notwithstanding all the obstacles placed in their way, the two left-wing parties still managed to capture nearly a third of the vote. Overall, the results demonstrated that left-democratic opposition to Nazism was still quite strong.
Repeatedly snubbed at the hustings, and even the Reichstag fire failing to deliver the coveted majority and thus the authority to rule alone, Hitler now pushed through another set of measures that would make him de-facto dictator, and that too with an apparently ‘constitutional’ sanction. On top of this was the “Enabling Act” passed soon after the election.
23 March: The Enabling Act
The Reichstag met in the Kroll Opera House (the Reichstag building was not usable after the fire) on 23 March 1933 in an intimidating backdrop. As SPD Deputy Wilhelm Hoegner later recounted,
“The entire square in front of the Kroll Opera House was swarming with fascists. We were received with wild chanting: “We want the Enabling Act.” Young men with swastikas on their chests look us up and down insolently and blocked our way. They made us run the gauntlet while they shouted out insults like “Centrist swine” and “Marxist sow”…When we Social Democrats had taken our seats on the outside left of the assembly, SA and SS men positioned themselves in a semicircle in front of the exits and along the walls behind us. A gigantic swastika flag hung at the front end of the grandstand, where the members of the government were seated, as if this was a Nazi Party event and not the session of an institution representing the people. Hitler appeared again in a brown shirt, after presenting himself in civilian clothing two days before.”
The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich, as the Enabling Act was officially known, was a bill to amend the constitution. And article 76 of the constitution stipulated that (a) any constitutional amendments had to be approved by a two-thirds parliamentary majority, (b) with at least two thirds of the deputies being present. Since it was not possible to fulfill these conditions depending on the votes of Nazis and their allies, a mischievous plan was worked out. To take care of the first condition, 81 seats held by KPD members who had been arrested under the Reichstag Fire Decree were invalidated. This brought down the total number of eligible mandates from 647 to 566, of which 378 (not 432) deputies would need to vote in favour of the Act. And in order to comply with the second condition, parliamentary rules (which the cabinet had powers to modify) were changed so that “Reichstag members absent without excuse” would also be considered in attendance. Thanks to these manipulations the Act was passed, with only the SPD members (KPD members, being already arrested, were not present) boldly opposing it.
The Act “enabled” Hitler’s government to issue decrees/laws independently of the Reichstag and the presidency. It was permissible for such laws “to deviate from the constitution” and in place of the president, the chancellor was allowed to formulate and publish laws.
The immediate fallout: the KPD having been brutally suppressed with the help of the aforementioned Reichstag fire decree, the regime now took immediate repressive action in response to the Social Democratic parliamentary faction’s refusal to support the Enabling Act. Disappointment and resignation spread among SPD members and increasing numbers quit the party. And then there were many far-reaching, long-term consequences.
First, it gave the cabinet the authority to make laws without legislative consent but in practice this power was vested in the chancellor. The trick was that serious deliberations more or less ended at cabinet meetings and it met only sporadically, so Hitler could do anything in the name of the cabinet. Moreover, it divested the president of his power of issuing emergency decrees over the head of the cabinet. The chancellor was now free to rule as he wished, although Hitler was wily enough to avoid unnecessary confrontation with the charismatic Marshal. For all intents and purposes, Hitler thus became almost a dictator.
Secondly, by driving the last nail in the coffin of the constitution and the parliament, which had already been rendered largely obsolete and useless by Papen and Brüning during their chancellorships, the non-Nazi political parties supporting the bill unwittingly forfeited their raison d’être. What role can political parties play without a representative institution?
Thirdly, the Act, initially limited to four years, was extended three times and remained the basis of fascist rule – of all its crimes against humanity – until the demise of the regime. Given that the Act did not contravene the letter of the Constitution, and that it was actually passed by a majority vote in Parliament, it ended up as a constitutional charter of self-abnegation.
Auschwitz concentration camp, with the slogan on the entrance ‘Work sets you free'
March-April:
Concentration Camps and Economic Boycott of Jews
The draconian powers the government acceded to itself was now vented on Jews on a much larger scale than before. The first concentration camp was established in a former munitions factory near the small city of Dachau in March 1933. Initially, as a state facility, it was guarded by the Bavarian police, but on 11 April the SS assumed command. It became the first cell from which a national system of terror germinated. It was a kind of laboratory where experiments could be carried out with the forms of violence that would soon be used in the other concentration camps. Stories about what went on in this camp acted as a powerful deterrent to opposition to the Nazis.
The concentration camps served another purpose. The heightened sporadic violence perpetrated by frustrated SA men in the wake of the lost election of 5 March (even judges were intimidated; they were afraid for their lives if they convicted and sentenced a storm trooper for cold-blooded murder) was seen by many, including business people, as a law and order nuisance, which the Nazi leadership had promised to solve after the civil-war-like conditions of the past few years. The move from scattered to centralized or institutionalized terror partially solved this problem – partially, because uncontrolled violence on the ground did not stop totally.
The need for state intervention was felt in another area. Few people had responded to repeated Nazi calls for blacklisting Jewish businesses, lawyers and doctors. On the morning of 1 April, SA men took up positions with placards in front of Jewish businesses, doctors’ offices and legal firms all over Germany and tried to get people to participate in the boycott. “The Jewish businesses were open, and SA men planted themselves, their feet spread wide apart, before their front doors,” wrote journalist Sebastian Haffner, who witnessed the boycott in Berlin, in retrospect. “A murmur of disapproval, suppressed but still audible … went through the country”. The British ambassador, Horace Rumbold, observed that the boycott had not been popular but neither had public opinion swung around in Jews’ favour. There were plenty of contemporary stories about customers who deliberately visited Jewish businesses, doctors and lawyers on 1 April. But these people were no doubt a courageous minority. The majority seem to have followed the wishes of the regime.
“And all because they are Jews”
“I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews!”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
[Anne herself, and her sister Margot, died in the Bergen Belsen
concentration camp in 1945)
Many German Jews were deeply shocked by the first government-organised national anti-Semitic initiative. “I always felt German,” Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary. These feelings were very similar to what the tortured and ostracized Muslims feel in Modi’s India.
On 7 April the regime issued the Law Concerning the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service, which not only allowed the government to dismiss state employees considered politically unreliable, but also mandated that civil servants from “non-Aryan backgrounds” be sent into early retirement. On Hindenburg’s request, Jewish state employees who had fought at the front in the First World War, or whose fathers or sons had fallen, were exempted. Once again, the similarity with the current Indian scenario stands out: are not the ‘good Muslims’ spared – even awarded – by the Sanghi government? But it is equally pertinent and necessary to remember too that ultimately, no one who was Jewish or belonged to other targeted minorities was spared in Nazi Germany.
7 April: Governors as Nazi Agents
A candidly titled Second Law for Bringing the States into Line with the Reich, issued on 7 April, installed “Reich governors,” eradicating once and for all the sovereignty of the regional German states. This law gave Hitler the leverage to reorder the power structure in Prussia as well. He himself assumed the authority of Reich governor, rendering Papen’s position as Reich commissioner obsolete. Only three days later, Goering was named Prussian state president, and two weeks later Hitler assigned him the authority of the governorship. The vice-chancellor, who as recently as 30 January had depicted himself as the ringmaster taming the Nazis, had been pushed to the political margins.
April-May: “Trade Unions Forced Into Line”
From his life’s experience Hitler knew that the only force strong enough to stop his cavalry charge was the working class organised under the banner of the Confederation of German Trade Unions (ADGB). So he allowed – rather encouraged – the SA to engage in scattered battles of attrition with this formidable foe, so as to weaken it as much as possible, but deferred the final battle till the time he had more or less finished with all other internal enemies and created the right kind of political atmosphere.
By April, that decisive moment seemed to have arrived. He had neutralised first the communist and then the social democratic functionaries, thereby depriving the working class of mature political leadership; destroyed the organs of parliamentary democracy and the free press; paralysed those who could throw a challenge to his authority from within the cabinet and even the President; monopolised all power in his own hands; had at his beck and call, in addition to the Brownshirts, a Nazified police force and a friendly Army; secured full support of a bourgeoisie that nurtured, until recently, serious doubts about the movement he led; and created an atmosphere of total panic by bloody persecution of Jews and working-class vanguards.
Despite all this, Hitler proceeded cautiously and step-by-step, with a carrot and stick approach, in the final battle against the German working class. Soon after the Reichstag fire, the right to strike was practically abolished; any instigation of strike was subject to imprisonment of one month to three years. Some Houses of the People[1] were occupied by the stormtroops. At the beginning of April, the privileges and rights of the factory committees were restricted: elections were put off; members in office could be recalled “for economic or political reasons” and replaced by members nominated by the Nazis. The committees themselves could be dissolved for “reasons of state”. Employers were authorised to dismiss a worker suspected of being “hostile to the state” without allowing him any recourse to the defence procedure granted by the social legislation of the Reich.
Collective Punishment
[This sentence by Anne Frank, teenage diarist who documented two years of hiding from the Germans and died in a German concentration camp, resonates in today’s world. Try replacing the word ‘Jew’ with Muslim in today’s world, and in India, replace ‘Christian’ with ‘Hindu’.]
“What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews”
― Anne Frank,
The Diary of a Young Girl
Side-by-side with the stick – the sledge hammer would be a more correct description – there were some carrots also. To lull the workers and their leaders before it struck the final blow, the Nazi government proclaimed May Day as a national holiday, officially named it the “Day of National Labour” and celebrated it as it had never been celebrated before. The government arranged for the labour leaders to be flown to Berlin from all parts of Germany. The leaders were taken in by this unbelievable display of friendliness toward the working class by the Nazis and extended full cooperation in making the day a success. Union members and Nazis marched together under swastika banners. Before the massive rally, Hitler himself received the workers’ delegates, declaring, “You will see how untrue and unjust the statement that the revolution is directed against the German workers is. On the contrary.” Later in his speech to more than 100,000 workers, which was again broadcast on all radio stations, he pronounced the motto, “Honour work and respect the worker!” (Narendra Modi has a more concise copy: Shrameva Jayate - Work Will Be Victorious!). In a clever and crafty move, Hitler appropriated the traditional symbolism of 1 May for the German labour movement, attempting to conflate it with the idea of the “ethnic-popular community.”
The surprise attack came the very next day. As planned, stormtroopers occupied union headquarters and took labour leaders into “protective custody.” All Houses of the People everywhere were quickly taken over. A few days later, a law was promulgated for the foundation of the German Labour Front, a mammoth umbrella organisation that brought together all the unions and associations which had been ‘forced into line’, grouping them into fourteen profession-based federations. The Front took in not only wage and salary earners but also the employers and members of the professions. It was not a class organization but a vast propaganda body that proved to be a most effective tool for integrating the working classes into the Nazi state. Its aim, as stated in the law, was not to protect the worker but “to create a true social and productive community of all Germans.” German labourers no longer had a body independent of the government to represent their interests.
The right to strike was finally abolished on 16 May. On 19 May, a law deprived the unions of their right to make collective agreements. From early the next year, the fourteen profession-based federations would be dissolved one after another.
May-June: Liquidating All Political Parties (But One)
After the unions, came the turn of the parties – one by one. Goering confiscated the DSP’s assets on 10 May. In late June and early July, the DSP, the German State Party and the German People’s Party dissolved. Gradually the other bourgeois parties also dissolved themselves under pressure of threats/attacks by the SA and SS, opportunist defection to the NSDAP, or simply because they lost the will to continue. On 14 July, the Reich government issued the Law Prohibiting the Reconstitution of Parties. It proclaimed the NSDAP to be the “only political party in Germany” and made the attempt to preserve or found any other party a prosecutable offence. The one-party state became a reality.
SA Members Seize the Union Office on Engelsufer in Berlin (May 2, 1933)
Mid-1933: Grappling With the Unemployment Problem
Communists were arrested
In his very first radio address on 1 February, Hitler had announced a “massive, blanket attack on unemployment” that was to overcome the problem “once and for all” within four years. However, he was intelligent enough to know that populist rhetoric alone would not suffice, incentives were needed to stimulate a recovery. So in mid-1933 the Law for the Reduction of Unemployment was passed. It allocated first 1 billion and then another 500 million reichsmarks for the creation of additional jobs, particularly in what we call infrastructure development. Other measures were also adopted, such as interest-free “marriage loans” to women leaving the workforce on the day of their wedding. Simultaneously the regime launched a campaign against what it called the “double-earner syndrome,” aimed at forcing women out of the labour market. Nazi patriarchy thus cast its shadow on its economic programme too.
The government also expanded the Volunteer Labour Service, a state employment programme that had been introduced in the final years of the Weimar Republic. All these measures led to some reduction in the numbers of people officially registered as unemployed. The “Reich Autobahn” (a national highway network) was launched later in the year. Hitler personally dug the first turf for the stretch of motorway between Frankfurt and Darmstadt—a gesture with the propaganda aim of suggesting the Führer was leading the way in what was called the “labour battle.” Employment in road construction and the car industry gradually picked up, especially after Hitler mooted the idea of producing a small car suitable for German conditions and the Volkswagen—the people’s car affordable to the working classes – began to roll out and sold in larger numbers.
The strongest long-term stimuli driving economic recovery and the decrease in unemployment came from the rearmament of Germany. “Sums in the billions” would have to be found, Hitler declared, because “the future of Germany depends solely and alone on the reconstruction of the Wehrmacht (The Unified Defence Forces).” The military-industrial complexes would kill three birds with one stone: providing employment, satisfying the national chauvinist ego, and laying the necessary foundation for a war of aggression.
Song of The SA Man
Bertolt Brecht
My hunger made me fall asleep
With a bellyache.
Then I heard voices crying
Hey, Germany awake!
Then I saw crowds of men marching:
To the Third Reich, I heard them say.
I thought as I’d nothing to live for
I may as well march their way.
And as I marched, there marched beside me,
The fattest of that crew
And when I shouted ‘We want bread and work’
The fat man shouted too.
The chief of staff wore boots
My feet meanwhile were wet
But both of us were marching
Wholeheartedly in step.
I thought that the left road led forward
He told me I was wrong.
I went the way he ordered
And blindly tagged along.
And those who were weak from hunger
Kept marching, pale and taut
Together with the well-fed
To some Third Reich of a sort.
They told me which enemy to shoot at
So I took their gun and aimed
And, when I had shot, saw my brother
Was the enemy they had named.
Now I know: over there stands my brother
It’s hunger that makes us one
While I march with the enemy
My brother’s and my own.
So now my brother is dying
By my own hand he fell
Yet I know that if he’s defeated
I shall be lost as well.
“One Opinion, One Party and One Faith in Germany”
After monopolising political power, Hitler redefined certain key ideas. Revolution, he announced to his Reich governors on 6 July, could not be allowed to become a “constant state of affairs.” The revolutionary “current,” he proclaimed, had to be “redirected into the secure riverbed of evolution”, to “people’s education.” Goebbels rendered this idea more profound in a radio address: “We will only be satisfied when we know that the entire people understands us and recognises us as its highest advocate.” The goal, Goebbels stated with utter frankness, was that “there should be only one opinion, one party and one faith in Germany.” (The echo of this goal of uniformity can be heard unmistakeably in Modi’s slogan during his 2014 campaign for the Sardar Patel Statue, calling for “one emotion, one nation, one culture, one voice, one resolution, one goal, one smile”; in the calls by the BJP for a ‘Congress-mukt’ India, which basically means an ‘Opposition-free’ India; and in the attempt by BJP and Sangh cadres to brand any and everyone differing with Sangh ideology as an ‘anti-national’ who should have no place in India.) This meant that all sectors of media, culture and education were to be brought into line with Nazi ideas.
Fascist Patriarchy: Nazi Version of the ‘Love Jehad’ Bogey
One of the key aspects of Nazism was the deterring and prohibition of inter-racial relationships between men and women.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler accused Jewish men of seeking to deliberately ‘pollute’ the ‘Aryan’ race by seducing, and encouraging Black men to seduce, white ‘Aryan’ women. He wrote, “The black-haired Jewish youth lies for hours in ambush, a Satanic joy in his face, for the unsuspecting girl whom he pollutes with his blood and steals from her own race. By every means, he seeks to wreck the racial bases of the nation he intends to subdue. Just as individually he deliberately befouls women and girls, so he never shrinks from breaking the barriers race has erected against foreign elements. It was, and is, the Jew who brought Negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates, by persistent bastardisation, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend to them as its masters. He deliberately seeks to lower the race level by steady corruption of the individual…”
One model that Nazi Germany wanted to emulate was that of racist US laws enforcing segregation and prohibiting ‘miscegenation’ (inter-racial relationships). In 1934, leading Nazi lawyers met to draft the anti-Jewish ‘Nuremberg Laws’, and took for their model the notorious racist ‘Jim Crow’ laws of the USA. Anti-miscegenation laws that criminalized inter-racial sexual relationships and marriage were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court as late as 1967. Hitler and the Nazis also admired another aspect of US racism – eugenics (forced sterilisation to prevent the birth of humans of genes deemed to be ‘inferior’). In the US in the 1930s, there were laws allowing forced sterilization of women deemed to be genetically ‘immoral,’ ‘criminal’ or disabled. A large proportion of such women were poor and/or Black. Hitler’s eugenics program (that finally led to genocide in the gas chambers) was also inspired by these racist laws.
Hitler also admired the genocide of the American Indians – the original inhabitants of the land now known as ‘USA’. “Indeed as early as 1928, Hitler was speechifying admiringly about the way Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” (Hitler’s American Model, The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press, 2017)
In the era of the ‘Jim Crow’ laws, Black men in the US could be killed for having or even being suspected of having consensual relationships with white women. Mob lynching of Black men – often on the pretext of allegations of ‘raping’ white women – was common. We have seen how Nazi Germany admired and wanted to replicate racist laws that provided a pretext and a rationalization of such mob lynchings.
In India, too, we can easily see how the ‘love jehad’ bogey raised by the Sangh Parivar and its various outfits is a copy of the ‘Jim Crow’ and the Nazi models. These outfits make no secret of their hatred for the Indian Constitution that allows inter-caste and inter-faith marriage. In the name of combating ‘love jehad’, they justify violence against relationships and marriages between Muslim men and Hindu women.
Nazification of Media, Education and Culture
Goebbels had already brought about a thorough shake-up in German radio, now a good many newspapers were simply banned and others subjected to strict government monitoring and economic pressure. Some of the larger liberal newspapers were granted a measure of freedom, but even these were constrained by daily governmental press instructions and self-censorship.
In the realms of music, film, theatre, the visual arts and literature, the process of Nazification ran parallel to the removal of Jews from of cultural life. Jewish artists and intellectuals had always been hated by the Nazis for their modernism and intellectual/cultural accomplishments and defamed as advocates of “cultural Bolshevism”; now they were completely ostracised. Not just because they were Jews but because many of them represented the rationalism, scientific spirit, artistic creativity and freethinking of which the Nazis were mortally scared. Why else should the 20th-century inquisitors organise book-burnings – where the best of German literature and those of other nations were committed to the flames -- in university campuses and elsewhere all over the country?
The bonfires organised by the students were in most cases supported by university authorities. The latter also helped the government cleanse the campuses of ‘undesirable elements’; the few who resisted were unceremoniously thrown out. Thanks to this atmosphere of savage intolerance, the very first year of the Nazi regime saw a mass exodus of artists, writers, scientists and journalists. Such outstanding members of the German intelligentsia and exponents of German culture as Einstein, L. Feuchtwanger, T. Mann, A. Zweig and many others were compelled to leave the country.
The establishment of the Reich Cultural Chamber, which was inaugurated with Hitler in attendance at the Berlin Philharmonic Concert Hall in November 1933, completed the reshaping of the entire arena of German culture. Anyone who wanted to work in film, music, theatre, journalism, radio, literature or the visual arts was required to be a member of one of the seven chambers that comprised this institution.
30 June 1934: “Night of the Long Knives”
The first major Nazi massacre was directed against its own people – the SA. And the reason was entirely political.
When the Nazi party consolidated its power with the Enabling Act, the SA found itself robbed of their most important raison d’être: terrorising and neutralising the Nazis’ political opponents. Indeed, the Brownshirts’ violent activism had become superfluous and politically counter-productive. So in early August 1933 the government rescinded the decree which had made the SA an auxiliary police force. The consequent disgruntlement among SA men was accompanied by disillusionment among sections of the population triggered by price hike and stagnant wages, corruption and nepotism, unrealistic expectations from the Messiah remaining unfulfilled, and so on. Hitler was still very popular, but not all his colleagues. A report compiled by the SPD in exile based on information from sources within Germany, recorded as typical the sentiments of a Munich resident: “Our Adolf is all right, but those around him are all complete scoundrels.”
The Regime
(excerpt)
A foreigner, returning from a trip to the Third Reich
When asked who really ruled there, answered:
Fear.
Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but
The rulers too.
Why do they fear the open word?
Given the immense power of the regime
Its camps and torture cellars
Its well-fed policemen
Its intimidated or corrupt judges
Its card indexes and lists of suspected persons
Which fill whole buildings to the roof
One would think they wouldn’t have to
Fear an open word from a simple man.
But their Third Reich recalls
The house of Tar, the Assyrian, that mighty fortress
Which, according to the legend, could not be taken by any
army, but
When one single, distinct word was spoken inside it,
Fell to dust.
Bertolt Brecht
The conjunction of popular discontent, still at a primary level though, with the palpable disquiet among the Brownshirts worried the ruling party bosses. They were especially perturbed when SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm referred to the popular dismay in an article published in June 1933 and observed that the “national uprising” had thus far “only travelled part of the way up the path of German revolution.” The SA, he asserted, “would not tolerate the German revolution falling asleep or being betrayed by non-fighters halfway towards its goal.” He made it clear that the SA did not want to be reduced to a mere recipient of commands from the party leadership. On the contrary, he laid claim to a position of power for himself and his organisation within the Third Reich. Röhm envisioned transforming the SA into a kind of militia army, thereby challenging the regular army’s monopoly on the right to wield weapons.
This was just too much for both the Nazi party and the military. After collecting incriminating material against the leaders of the SA and making necessary organisational preparations on the sly, Hitler decided on a double blow – against SA leaders and also against his old rivals such as Papen (who had in the meantime openly criticised the cult of personality surrounding Hitler and excessive violence).
The blow was handed out on the night of 30 June and over the next two days in what came to be known as the “Night of the Long Knives”. Hitler personally led the surprise campaign with SS men headed by Heinrich Himmler. Papen was allowed to escape death but placed under house arrest, Strasser and Röhm were murdered, about 180 SA men (thirteen of them were Reichstag deputies) killed and hundreds arrested.
Hitler was quick to get the cabinet approve a draft law that would legalise the series of murders ex post facto: “The measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July to put down treasonous acts against the nation and states are a legal form of emergency government defence.”
The Burning of the Books
Hitler Youth members burn books
When the Regime commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.
Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged — he’d been excluded!
He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fiery letters to the morons in power —
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen
Haven’t I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!
Bertolt Brecht (translation by Michael R. Burch)
“Führer and Reich chancellor”
A fortnight later, Hitler defended his unlawful action adamantly and eloquently in the Reichstag, invoking once again “the nation” and “the people”: “Mutinies are broken according to never changing laws. If someone tries to criticise me for not enlisting the regular courts, I can only say: in that hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and was therefore the supreme judge of the German people.”
On 1 August, with Hindenburg on his death-bed, Hitler got a law to merge the offices of Reich president and chancellor and transfer the powers of the former to the “Führer and Reich chancellor,” approved by the docile cabinet. The old man died the next day and on 17 August the law was overwhelmingly confirmed in a plebiscite.
"Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.”
On the night of 10 May 1933, a crowd of some 40,000 people gathered in the Opernplatz – now the Bebelplatz – in the Mitte district of Berlin. Amid much joyous singing, band-playing and chanting of oaths and incantations, they watched soldiers and police from the SS, brownshirted members of the paramilitary SA, and impassioned youths from the German Student Association and Hitler Youth Movement burn, at the behest of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, upwards of 25,000 books decreed to be "un-German”….
The volumes consigned to the flames in Berlin, and more than 30 other university towns around the country on that and following nights, included works by more than 75 German and foreign authors, among them (to cite but a few) Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Lenin, Jack London, Heinrich, Klaus and Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Karl Marx, John Dos Passos, Arthur Schnitzler, Leon Trotsky, HG Wells, Émile Zola and Stefan Zweig. Also among the authors whose books were burned that night was the great 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who barely a century earlier, in 1821, had written in his play Almansor the words: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" – "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.”
- Jon Henley, ‘Book Burning: Fanning The Flames Of Hatred’, 10 Sept 2010, The Guardian
Having apparently eliminated all potential sources of conflict and opposition, and with no one to share power with, the Great Dictator was now free to prepare for leading the “master race” in a conquest of the world.
Note:
1. Institutions created around 1900 by the SDP to be used for social gatherings and political discussions and schooling of workers. They functioned as centres of the trade union movement.
1932 was proving to be a year of great instability, uncertainty and turmoil. For the end-July elections, the main slogans coined by Goebbels were “Germany awaken! Give Adolf Hitler Power!” And “Down with the System, its parties and its exponents!” In his speeches Hitler would condemn the Weimar “system” for the general economic and political decay and promise to get rid of “the nepotism of parties”. As he thundered in one of his last pre-election speeches, he will “sweep the thirty different political parties out of Germany”. The hint of a single-party dictatorship was clear enough. But the Nazis, Hitler proclaimed, were interested in “the future of the German people,” not in parliamentary seats or ministerial positions. The NSDAP did not present itself as a party representing narrow interests or classes of people: instead as a “party of the German people”. However, this time around he avoided shrill anti-Semitism, presumably in an attempt to gather some votes from the liberal middle classes also. (Much like our own Hitler, who at times tries his hand mobilising Muslim votes too!)
The results were impressive. With 37.3 percent of the votes cast (19 percent more than what it got in the last Reichstag elections of 14 September, 1930) and 230 seats, the NSDAP formed the largest parliamentary group. Yet it was quite clear that the 50 percent plus vote needed for government formation would remain a far cry. A round of negotiations on forming a coalition government failed because Hitler doggedly insisted on the post of chancellor for himself, while the Reich president, though eager to rope in the NSDAP, considered Hitler too risky as chancellor. Therefore no new government was formed. Hindenburg asked Papen to head an unelected “presidential cabinet” as chancellor.
With the stalemate lingering on, the stormtroopers’ patience was running out. Belying Hitler’s assurance that they would not take a single step from the path of legality, in August the SA engaged in a whole series of politically motivated acts of violence directed primarily against members of the KPD, trade union buildings, left-wing newspapers and also the Reich Banner and Jewish locations. Particularly ghastly was the murder of a mine worker and KPD activist in Potempa, who was dragged out of bed at night by a gang of uniformed SA men and killed in front of his mother and brother. Hitler openly came out in defence of the murderers, letting slip his mask of peace and legality.
The rightist parties, hungry for power, chose to see the killings and rioting as the work of fringe elements (as if the SA did not belong to the Nazi Family!) and to pursue the goal of a grand rightist coalition. But there was hardly any progress to that end. Papen had come no closer to his goal of tying the National Socialists to the government, just as Hitler had made no progress towards securing the chancellor’s post — his cherished launching pad for erecting a dictatorship. In a situation where no party or coalition had the numbers, the only proper course would have been to seek the people’s verdict again, but that was indefinitely postponed by the Hindenburg-Papen government on the ground that an “emergency of state” required extraordinary measures. The Reichstag met for the first time after the July elections on 12 September 1932.
Before the proceedings started, KPD deputy Ernst Torgler seized the floor, demanding an immediate vote on the motions brought by his party, which included rejecting emergency governmental measures and a declaration of no confidence in the Papen government. To the surprise of all, Nazis supported the communist move. Hitler’s intent was to demonstrate, for all to see, how little parliamentary support the Papen government enjoyed. The SDP and the Centre Party also voted for the move and it was passed with a very big margin. Papen was compelled to dissolve the parliament. New elections were announced for 6 November.
Setback, Dejection and Division
The Nazi campaign for what would turn out to be the last free election in Germany before the end of World War II saw a peculiar combination of two thrust points. On one hand, taking a sharp U-turn from the July campaign, Hitler fully indulged in anti-Semite hate speeches and tried to combine this with his diatribe against the incumbent government, making the false allegation that Papen’s economic program was drafted by the Jewish banker Jacob Goldsmith and served Jewish interests. On the other hand, Nazi propaganda this time contained an unusually distinct anti-capitalist tone (as Goebbels wrote in his diary, “right now the most radical socialism has to be advanced”) presumably because the Great Depression was already taking its toll and generating anti-capitalist feelings among the working people and the middle classes. Goebbels indeed walked the talk when, as the party leader in charge of Berlin, he ensured that the NSDAP supported a strike by the city’s public transport workers a few days before the election. Together with the communist -led Revolutionary Union Opposition (RGO), the Nazi Factory Cell Organisation (NSBO) formed picket lines and brought traffic in Berlin to a grinding halt.
The Nazis thus used all instruments in their kit to attract different classes and strata, but the result was even more disappointing than the July verdict. In the November elections, they lost 2 million voters, their share of the vote declined by 4.2 per cent to 33.1 per cent and they won 196 parliamentary seats, down from 230 four months earlier. Along with the DNVP, the big winners of the election were the KPD, who increased their share of the vote from 14.5 to 16.9 per cent and took 100 seats in the Reichstag. With the SPD mopping up 21.58 percent of the vote, the combined share of the two left parties far surpassed the Nazis’. In terms of seats also, SPD got 133 and KPD 100, i.e., a total of 233 compared to NSDAP’s 196 in a 584 seat Parliament. But the left parties did not come together to try and utilise this historic opportunity, which would never again come their way.
After the November setback, the 4 December 1932 election in Thuringia came as another shock. Some forty percent of votes were lost compared to July and this was seen as a personal failure of Hitler, because he had personally led the campaign. The repeated failures led many political observers in Germany and abroad to conclude that Hitler’s obstinacy in demanding complete power had caused him to miss the bus. Harold Laski, the British political scientist and Labour politician, remarked that Hitler would likely end up as an old man in a Bavarian village.
Not a few party insiders were thinking along similar lines. For the first time, Party members declined: from 455,000 in August to 435,000 in October 1932 and so on. From around the country came reports of a “downcast” mood and a “tendency to complain.” Within the top leadership, a political debate was launched by Gregor Strasser, the ideologue who in 1925 played the principal role (with support from Goebbels) in trying to bolster the socialist strain vis-a-vis the nationalist one in the party program. (See box)
The Strasser Rebellion
After the election defeat in November, Gregor Strasser expressed the opinion that the party should move from opposition into government without insisting on the chancellor’s office as a categorical precondition. He spelled that out to Hitler in no uncertain terms. Hitler interpreted this as a challenge to his authority and reacted with commensurate venom. According to Goebbels, he wanted to strip Strasser of power, but that was far from easy. Being the Reich organisational director, Strasser enjoyed great respect with the party rank and file; he was also considered by German industrialists as one of the few National Socialists with whom one could do business.
On the eve of the first session of Reichstag, Hitler ordered NSDAP deputies to take a hard line, arguing that “Never has a great movement been victorious if it went down the path of compromise.” Strasser on his part summoned the NSDAP state inspectors and argued that Hitler had not been following a “clear line” since August 1932 other than “wanting to become chancellor at all costs.” Since there was no realistic chance of that happening, Hitler was risking the disintegration and decay of the movement. There were two ways to achieve power, Strasser argued. The legal one—in which case Hitler should have accepted the position of vice-chancellor and tried to use it as a political lever. And the illegal option—which would have entailed trying to seize power violently through the SS and SA. He would have followed his Führer down either path, Strasser said, but he was no longer prepared to wait indefinitely. So he was leaving the party, he told the distressed audience.
After receiving the information of this meeting, Hitler met the state inspectors in his hotel suite to refute the arguments put forward by Strasser. Becoming vice-chancellor, he said, would have quickly led to fundamental differences with Papen, who would have dismissed any initiative on his (Hitler’s) part and thus shown that Hitler was incapable of governing. “I refuse to go down this road and still wait until I’m offered the chancellorship,” Hitler said. “The day will come, and probably sooner than we think.” Even less promising was the illegal path to power, he pointed out, since Hindenburg and Papen would not hesitate to issue orders for the army to shoot. Mustering all his powers of persuasion and melodrama, Hitler succeeded in securing the loyalty of the state inspectors.
Behind the scenes, another plot was being worked out. Aware of Strasser’s position, General Schleicher, former defence minister under Papen and currently Reich chancellor, briefly tried to rope in the moderate forces in NSDAP under Strasser for government formation. He introduced Strasser to Hindenburg, and the latter said he was amenable to the idea. But Strasser failed to mobilise any support from his colleagues. Schleicher’s game plan failed.
Hitler came to know of Strasser’s secret meeting with Hindenburg and saw his fears of a conspiracy confirmed. Finding himself in a very tight corner, Strasser resigned from all his party positions, gave up his Reichstag mandate and promised to keep away from political activism for two years. He was completely isolated. On 30 June 1934 (“the Night of the Long Knives”) to be precise, Hitler would have Strasser shot dead.
Suddenly, Hitler is Chancellor of Germany
The Strasser episode gave the NSDAP another rude shock. The party seemed to be going into free fall from the zenith of its career. But Hitler stuck to his guns. He was “utterly decided”, he said, “not to sell the first-born child of our movement for the pittance of being allowed to participate, without power, in a government” The question of ‘what next’ remained unresolved. The year 1933 opened in utter confusion.
But suddenly, the NSDAP saw light at the end of the tunnel. On 30 January 1933, Hitler became the chancellor of the most powerful state in central Europe at a relatively young age of 43. The KPD called for a general strike and urged the SPD and all trade unions to join a common front of resistance against fascism. The social democrats, rather than joining the strike, asked its members to continue the battle within constitutional parameters, and to steer clear of “undisciplined behavior”. Echoing this defensive attitude, the General German Trade Union Association chairman, Theodor Leipart, stated on 31 January, “Organisation and not demonstration is the watchword of the hour”. No significant resistance, not to speak of a general strike, could be organized by a pathetically divided Left.
But how did the great breakthrough come to materialise? It was actually a product of sinister intrigues behind the scenes in which a handful of figures, most notably DNVP leader Alfred Hugenberg, former Chancellor von Papen and the incumbent chancellor Schleicher, pulled the strings.[1] Papen, eager to play the kingmaker and thus wield real power himself, met and urged Hitler to bury the hatchet and seal a deal with him for getting into Schleicher’s shoes. For his part, Hitler reckoned that an understanding with Papen offered a chance of getting out of the stalemate and reaching his cherished goal. He knew that the ex-chancellor retained privileged access to the president and could help break down Hindenburg’s resistance to the idea of Hitler becoming chancellor. So he did not hesitate to take a chance.
And the secret plan did click. Under attack from various quarters for various reasons, very soon Schleicher lost Hindenburg’s confidence and with continuous prodding by Papen, the president dismissed him, asking his trusted ex-chancellor to find ways of forming a new government. Papen, after much effort, finally overcame Hindenburg’s resistance to the idea of Hitler as chancellor—on the condition that the NSDAP leader formed his government “within the framework of the constitution and with the assent of the Reichstag.” Papen and Hitler now lost no time in finalizing their deal. It was agreed that the NSDAP would get the post of chancellor and just two ministerial positions, with Papen as vice chancellor.
On the face of it, this was a great concession from the Nazi side, who had to contend themselves with only two posts in an eleven-member cabinet. With an overwhelming majority, Hitler’s conservative partners believed, they would be able to use Hitler as a tool. When an acquaintance warned Papen about Hitler’s thirst for power, he replied: “You’re wrong. We engaged him for our ends.” Many others including foreign observers also thought that Papen and Hugenberg as Minister of Economy would hold the real power in the cabinet with the support of Hindenburg, whose closeness with Papen and distaste for Hitler was well-known.
How Hitler made it to the Chancellor's Chair
“The September 1930 electoral result immediately created a hitherto unprecedented situation. Both the leaders of the bourgeois parties and important ‘captains of the economy’ were suddenly confronted with a party that had mushroomed from an 800,000 voter organisation to a six million one, thus turning the NSDAP into a powerful political force and the second most powerful party. The NSDAP had thus become a force that could no longer be overlooked, but equally as important, a power that opened up quite new, surprising, and welcome possibilities for overcoming the parliamentary obstacles for the ‘legal’ transition to a dictatorial form of domination.
… However, its possible role and the leadership under which this was to happen became a matter of contention…. To simplify matters the following four major groups and strategies can be observed:
1. Alfred Hugenberg and his party [DNVP] as well as the circles from heavy industry and the landed aristocracy behind his party, relying on Reich president Paul Von Hindenburg, resolutely pressed for an alliance with the NSDAP, with the NSDAP as a junior partner, attracting the masses – in other words, an alliance that would assure the Hugenberg party of supremacy in the bourgeois camp and leadership in the desired ‘National Dictatorship’, the culmination of which should in due course be the restoration of the monarchy.
2. The Centre party (Bruning) and those circles in heavy industry, chemicals, the electrical industry, the export sector, and the bankers behind it, wanted to win over the NSDAP for a government alliance. With the assistance of the NSDAP it thereby hoped to move from the Weimer democracy to and authoritarian regime that in the long run would similarly culminate in the restoration of the monarchy.
3. In contrast to these strategies, Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen – both principal spokesmen of a group of industrialists and bankers particularly strongly linked to the US finance capital – were not anxious to subordinate the Hitler party to one of the old bourgeois parties. Instead, using Herrmann Goring, whom they backed very generously as their go-between to the NSDAP, they pressed Adolf Hitler to stake a claim to the chancellorship as a precondition for the NSDAP’s joining the government. [Gossweiler adds after two pages, “Both Schacht and Thyssen ... feared that Hitler, given the signs of decline in his party, might be influenceable and agree to a compromise solution as suggested, for example, by Schleicher and Strasser. Therefore, [they] did everything possible to periodically prop up Hitler’s confidence in the final, successful outcome.”]
4. General Kurt Von Schleicher cooperated with the NSDAP organization head Gregor Strasser, until his demise in December 1932, in attempting to set up a military dictatorship.
-- Kurt Gossweiler, ibid, pp 132-33
But very soon such naïve hopes fell flat. It was not a government formed by a proper coalition of parties but a presidentially appointed cabinet in which the ‘majority’ (barring Papen and Hugenberg) was actually a motley collection of men without any party affiliation and political experience. Secondly, the other members of the cabinet were no match for Hitler’s tactical cleverness and his notorious mendacity. Within weeks, he succeeded in securing the sort of favour with Hindenburg that Papen had formerly claimed for himself and had their backs against the wall. With Wilhelm Frick as the minister of the interior and Hermann Goering initially as minister without portfolio (many more would be added to the cabinet as time passed) the Nazi triumvirate now set out to replicate the experience of the Thuringia laboratory on a grand national scale.
30 January: Manipulating the Cabinet
Hitler was sworn in on 30 January 1933, and in five hours he was conducting the first, privately held, cabinet meeting. The cabinet did not command an absolute majority in the Reichstag, and a solution had to be found. Hugenberg suggested banning the KPD and redistributing their parliamentary seats, which would yield a parliamentary majority. Hitler was a more intelligent politician; he did not wish to start his rule with such a draconian move. Banning the Communist Party would cause domestic unrest and perhaps lead to a general strike, he told the cabinet. He added: “It is nothing short of impossible to ban the 6 million people who stand behind the KPD. But perhaps in the coming election after the dissolution of the Reichstag, we (meaning the cabinet as a whole) can win a majority for the current government.” To allay the apprehensions of his conservative coalition partners, he promised that even if his party fared extremely well relative to the others, the composition of the cabinet wouldn’t change. Then it was Papen—and not Hitler—who made a radical suggestion. It should be made clear, the vice-chancellor declared, that the next election would be the last one and that a return to the parliamentary system would be ruled out “for ever.” Hitler gladly endorsed this proposal, saying that the upcoming Reichstag election would indeed be the final one and that a return to parliamentary democracy was “to be avoided at all costs.” With the whole pack of reactionary power-grabbers having a negative consensus on questions of democracy, communism and the people’s right to elect their representatives, the first meeting thus ended on a happy note.
1 February: Messages to the People
A Presidential decree dated 1 February 1933 announced new elections on 5 March 1933. The real motives were suppressed and the decision was justified as giving the German people the opportunity to “have their say on the formation of a new government of national solidarity.” “Now it will be easy,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on 3 February, “… for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.”
The same day the nation heard the chancellor’s man ki baat for the first time on public broadcast. He combined his customary attacks on the democratic “betrayal” of November 1918 and the Weimar Republic (such as “fourteen years of Marxism have brought Germany to the brink of ruin”) with appeals to conservative, Christian, nationalist values and traditions. The first task of his government, Hitler said, was to overcome class hostilities and restore “the unity of our people in spirit and will.” Christianity, Hitler added, was to be “the basis of our morals,” the family the “basic cell of our body as a people and a state,” and respect for “our great past” the foundation for the education of Germany’s young people (replace ‘Christianity’ with ‘Hinduism’, and you are easily transported from Nazi Germany to RSS India!). On foreign policy he said a Germany that had recovered its equality with other states would stand for “the preservation and solidification of peace, which the world needs now more than ever.” He also announced a “massive, blanket attack on unemployment” that would overcome the problem “once and for all” within four years. Hitler ended his speech with the same appeal he was to utter innumerable times in the future: “Now, German people, give us the span of four years and then you may pass judgement upon us!”
All such fine words of peace and democracy were, however, contradicted by another presidential decree issued on 4 February 1933 -- the Decree for the Protection of the German People -- which allowed the government to curtail the right to free speech and free assembly and subjected the SPD and the KPD to stringent restrictions.
3 February: Getting the Generals on Board
In his introductory visit to the commanders of the German army and navy, Hitler defined his government’s first goal as to “reclaim political power,” which would have to be the “purpose of the entire state leadership.” Domestically there would have to be a “complete reversal” of present conditions. Pacifist tendencies would no longer be tolerated. “Anyone who refuses to convert has to be forced,” Hitler declared, and Germany’s youth and the entire population had to be aligned with the idea that “only battle can save us and everything else must be subordinated to this thought.” The “sternest, authoritarian state leadership” and “the removal of the cancerous damage of democracy” were necessary to strengthen Germany’s “will to defend itself.” As regards foreign policy, Hitler said his first goal would be “to fight against Versailles” by achieving military equality and rearming the Wehrmacht. “Universal conscription has to be reintroduced,” Hitler demanded. He also dropped clear hints about his preferred foreign policy direction once Germany had regained its status as a major military power — “conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless Germanification.”
The World’s One Hope
The compassion of
the oppressed for
the oppressed is
indispensable.
It is the world’s one hope.
- Bertolt Brecht
The generals could easily identify with a battle against Marxism and pacifism, demands for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, a rearming of Germany’s military and the restoration of its status as world power. They were especially pleased to hear Hitler promise that the Wehrmacht would remain the country’s only legitimate military force and that it would not be used to put down domestic opponents. The latter, Hitler declared, was the job of National Socialist organisations, particularly the SA.
The early bonding between the Fuhrer and the military leadership reassured and benefited both sides. The chancellor could now concentrate on crushing the political Left and bringing German society as a whole into line with Nazi ideals without any fears of military intervention. Moreover, unflinching army support would really stand him in good stead at all critical junctures in his political career, including the war years from the late 1930s. The military leadership in turn had received a guarantee for its monopoly position and was assured that its concerns would enjoy the highest priority within the new government.
20 February: Cozying Up with Business Magnates
Though support from big business was growing over the years, some of the biggest corporations were somewhat hesitant. So on 20 February 1933 a meeting was arranged with 27 top industrialists and bankers including Krupp von Bohlen, the president of the Reich Association of German Industry, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. Hitler and Goering clearly spelt out the government’s attitude to industry. The former once again reaffirmed his belief in private property, denied rumours that he was planning any wild economic experiments and stressed that “only the NSDAP offers salvation from the Communist danger.” He promised that he would restore the Wehrmacht (the unified armed forces) industry, which was of special interest to such industrial concerns as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament. At the end, Hitler declared, “Now we stand before the last election,” and promised that “regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat.” If he did not win the majority, he would stay in power “by other means . . . with other weapons.” The leaders of the business world were visibly impressed with everything Hitler said, and said so candidly.
Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of “financial sacrifices” which “surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years.” After both leaders left the hall, the host passed the hat and collected no less than three million marks.
Having effectively denied their main opponents SPD and KPD a level playing field in the forthcoming elections through the decree of 4 February 1933, NSDAP leaders believed an early election would give them an absolute majority that would allow them to jettison the coalition and make a smooth transition from the ramshackle parliamentary democracy to naked one-party dictatorship. To ensure this, and to leave nothing to chance, they took recourse to all sorts of administrative shake-ups, underhand means and repressive measures on concocted charges. And once again they had the full support of the pack of reactionaries in the Cabinet and of the Monarchist president, none of whom realised that by undermining the parliamentary system, they were actually digging their own graves.
February: Nazification of German Radio and the Police Force
While Goebbels had been busy overseeing a comprehensive change in personnel in German Radio, the most important medium of political and ideological indoctrination, Goering in his capacity as acting Prussian interior minister had already begun to “cleanse” the Prussian police and administration of the few remaining democrats. Prussian police departments were instructed to “support the national propaganda with all their might, combat the activities of organisations hostile to the state with the most severe means and, if necessary, to have no qualms about using firearms.” To be perfectly clear, Goering added: “Police officers who use their weapons in the performance of their duties will be covered by me regardless of the consequences. Conversely, those who hesitate to do their duty will suffer disciplinary action.” This “fire-at-will decree” was in effect a license to kill anyone who dissented from the official ideology.
On 22 February 1933, Goering also ordered the creation of an auxiliary police force consisting of members of the “national associations”— the paramilitaries the SS, the SA and the Stahlhelm—ostensibly for the purpose of combating “increasing unrest from radical left-wing and especially Communist quarters.”
Per instructions from above, the police did nothing to prevent the SA from terrorising people. Social Democrats were mistreated, but Communists got the worst of it. As early as the first week of February, it became practically impossible for the Left to assemble in public even in Berlin, till recently a stronghold. Almost without exception, Communist newspapers were banned. During 1933-34, the political police was gradually centralised to form the Secret State Police (Gestapo).
Campaigning For the Last Election
On 10 February 1933 the National Socialists kicked off the campaign with a lavish event in Berlin’s Sportpalast, where Hitler was presented as “the leader of young Germany”. The chancellor repeated his attacks on the “political parties of disintegration,” promised to replace “lazy democracy” with “the virtue of personality and the creative power of the individual” – thus preparing the public mind for a transition to dictatorship -- and asked for “four years” to bring about the “renewal of the nation.” His speech was very well-received, not so much for the content but for the oratorical frenzy and emotional appeal of the concluding lines which, as almost always, sounded like a political echo of the Lord’s Prayer.
The Nazis carried on election propaganda such as Germany had never seen before. Under Goebbels’ expert direction, the NSDAP also sought to co-opt Hindenburg’s aura for their own propaganda. One of their campaign posters showed Hitler, the anonymous First World War soldier, and the former field marshal standing shoulder to shoulder. The caption read: “The marshal and the private fight with us for peace and equal treatment.” They also sought to exploit Hindenburg’s mythic status by playing up Papen’s connection to the Reich president. “If Hindenburg trusts him, so can Germany,” read one campaign poster featuring images of both men. “Vote for his close associate, Vice-Chancellor von Papen.” In addition to drawing votes for the cabinet, this line of propaganda aimed at keeping the two important political figures under the false impression that the Nazis were really sincere about the coalition.
The sign says - Germans, Attention! This shop is owned by Jews. Jews damage the German economy and pay their German employees starvation wages.
Charlie Chaplin:
Excerpt From ‘The Great Dictator’ Speech
Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
Note:
1. For a brief but insightful account of the political developments and intrigues that eventually led to Hitler being chosen as chancellor, see box based on a paper written by Kurt Gossweiler, which we have taken from the aforementioned compendium Resistible Rise. Born in 1917, Gossweiler served in the German Army till 1943 and then defected to the Russian Army. At the end of the war he became a well-known scholar on fascism in the GDR.
From day one Hitler was the party’s most active and authentic leader, delivering speeches at crowded meetings, some in rural areas, and various panel discussions. His central concern at this stage was to attract public attention. “Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf describing his mind in the initial years, “the point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.” The police and military bosses on their part were quite appreciative of the “beneficial patriotic effect” of the NSDAP activities.
The NSDAP leader was always absolutely focused on his own political agenda. In January 1923, French and Belgian troops entered the Ruhr Valley, the country’s industrial hub, for exacting delayed reparation payments as decided in the Versailles Treaty. A huge protest arose across the country, united demonstrations against the intruders were organised, but the militant nationalist party led by Hitler – much to the surprise of others -- stayed away. It tried to redirect the general hostility at the enemies within -- the “November criminals.” By “stabbing the army in the back,” Hitler said in a public meeting, political leaders at the end of the First World War had left Germany defenceless and exposed to “total enslavement.” He was alluding to the leaders who signed the Versailles Treaty and those responsible for the foundation of the Weimar Republic. The task, he insisted, was to see that those criminals (social democrats and communists in the main) were punished and a new and strong Germany was built up. So, he argued, the “babble about a united front” would only distract the German people from their main task.
But in hot pursuance of this “main task”, and emboldened by the indulgence shown him by the Bavarian police and the Central military leadership, Hitler committed a couple of costly mistakes.
Punished for Adventurism and Putschism
Hitler felt that the situation was rapidly hotting up and mere propaganda was not enough. So he ventured into a direct clash with his most organised political enemy number one – the working class parties – on the occasion of May Day. He tactfully demanded that the Bavarian government must ban the traditional May Day celebrations because it was also the anniversary of Munich’s conservative “liberation” from the revolutionary councils set up in 1919. Predictably, the government refused to take this harsh, provocative step. Hitler then decided to stop the May Day parade himself. On his call, some 2000 armed freikorps (armed paramilitaries) assembled to forcibly block the parade. Hitler himself, in full military attire complete with the steel helmet and the Iron Cross, was proudly in command. But the authorities this time decided that the upstart should not be allowed to take them for granted andthe army was called in. While some hotheads among his followers were willing to fight, Hitler backed away from a hopeless armed confrontation with the state rather than risking his entire political career. In the meantime, the massive May Day celebrations had ended peacefully.
The fiasco meant a huge loss of prestige for Hitler. His comrades and followers, particularly members of the SA (the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, also known as the Stormtroopers or Brownshirts), were highly disappointed. Many political observers felt the Nazis were on the wane. But the objective situation was developing in their favour. Since the summer of 1920, inflation was going through the ceiling and in August the incumbent Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno had to step down in the face of strikes and demonstrations, mainly organised by the SPD-led trade unions. Speculation of a right-wing coup d’etat was rife and there were wild expectations in broad right-wing circles that the brightest young leader would come up with some drastic action – like Mussolini’s “March on Rome” just a year earlier – to oust the liberal-left federal government and install a hard-core right-nationalist one.
This latter goal was cherished by other rightist forces as well, including the “triumvirate” virtually ruling Bavaria in intense animosity with the Republican government in Berlin -- Kahr (state commissar of Bavaria), Lossow (head of Reichswehr troops in Bavaria) and Seisser (head of the Bavarian police). Hitler publicly demanded that the Bavarian rulers must take immediate action: “It’s high time. Economic misery is so pushing our people that we have to act or risk our supporters going over to the Communists.” He thus tried to force their hands, but they kept dilly-dallying. The Nazi leader then plunged into his second adventurist act of the year.
The Abortive Beer Hall Putsch
Crowd outside Rathaus during Beer hall Putsch - US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Kahr had called a meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller (one of the largest beer halls in Munich) on 8 November inviting all ministers, officials and political VVIPs. Hitler reckoned that if his supporters succeeded in seizing the Bürgerbräukeller, they would have a unique opportunity to bring the entire political class of Munich under their control. The plan was to leave the triumvirate with no other option but to rebel against Berlin (the Berlin-Munich acrimony was already very intense in any case) by presenting them with a fait accompli.
With truckloads of armed SA men on guard and accompanied by his elite bodyguards, Hitler stormed into the beer hall, fired a shot to quiet the crowd, and proclaimed excitably: “National revolution is under way. The hall is under the control of 600 heavily armed men. No one is allowed to leave. If things don’t immediately quieten down, I will have a machine gun posted on the gallery. The Bavarian government has been deposed. The Reich government has been deposed. A provisional government has been formed.”
Hitler then asked Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, at gun-point, to accompany him into an adjoining room, guaranteeing their safety. There he both threatened and apologized to them, exacted their word of honour, and then came back to the hall. Everybody was angry and disgusted. But, in a short speech Hitler completely turned the mood in the beer hall around.
Hitler then persuaded the triumvirate to return with him to the hall to publicly seal the agreement. Before the crowd dispersed, an SA commando arrested all the members of the cabinet in the audience. Hitler left Kahr, Lossow and Seisser under ex-General Ludendorff’s supervision and went out to help the uprising in other parts of the city. But the General allowed the triumvirate to leave the beer hall with only a promise that they would stick to the agreement. The latter, once freed, took all necessary initiatives to put down the uprising. The putsch failed. Hitler and his associates were arrested.
But the failed putsch made Hitler a hero for large sections of people who were fed up with the ruling cliques in Munich and Berlin. There were spontaneous demonstrations against the triumvirate – who were now called “clique of traitors” — in Munich and other Bavarian cities. Students in particular tended to sympathise with Hitler and his co-conspirators. At a mass event at the University of Munich on 12 November, speakers were repeatedly interrupted by cries of “Up with Hitler, down with Kahr.” As the university dean called upon those present to sing the German national anthem, the audience sang the freikorps song “Swastika on a Steel Helmet” instead.
Imprisonment and the Second Innings
At the trial Hitler and other leaders of the putsch were found guilty of the “crime of high treason” which carried a minimum sentence of five years’ imprisonment; however, the court declared that the sentences could be suspended for good behaviour after just six months. The court also ruled that Hitler, who “is so German in his thinking and feeling,” was exempt from possible deportation to Austria. The sentences were scandalously mild and the ruling came in for sharp criticism. “Judicial murder has been carried out against the republic in Munich,” wrote the left-wing journal Die Weltbühne. In fact, the court’s verdict praised the defendants as “having acted in a purely patriotic spirit, led by the most noble, selfless will.”
The prison term came as a boon in disguise. As Hitler recollected later, while in prison he “became convinced that violence would not work, since the state is too established and has all the weapons in its possession.” He also claimed that he achieved conceptual clarity about things “he had largely intuited” before and that helped him write the first volume of Mein Kampf. It had been stupid of the government, Hitler commented, to imprison him: “They would have been better off letting me speak and speak again and never find my peace of mind.”
Enamoured of what they saw as the Nazis leader’s heroic nationalism, the Supreme Court of Bavaria cut short the five-year jail term to just one year. Released in late December 1924, he reconstituted the NSDAP to further concentrate all decision-making authority in his own hands. He also resisted a proposal to shift the party headquarters to Berlin because he felt that, being his personal power base, Munich must remain the seat of the party. For public consumption, of course, he argued that Munich, after all, was the birthplace of Nazism “Rome, Mecca, Moscow —every one of these places embodies a world view!” he proclaimed. “We shall remain in the city that saw the first party comrades shed their blood for our movement. It must become the Moscow of our movement!”
Out of prison, Hitler found the situation much less conducive to his kind of politics. From 1925, following the stabilisation of the currency, the German economy recovered quickly. Industrial production, employment, and even real wages in some cases went up. Germany was ceremoniously inducted into the League of Nations and the Weimar Republic was on stronger grounds. The NSDAP’s political activism waned compared to the early 1920s and membership was growing very slowly. Hitler appealed to the Bavarian government to lift the ban on his party, and in view of its shrunken profile and also the goodwill he personally commanded among the public, the authorities relented. “The beast is tamed”, BVP leader and “Minister President” (a position comparable to the Prime Minister) Heinrich Held is said to have remarked, “now we can loosen the shackles”. But Hitler’s first post-imprisonment speech was so inflammatory (“either the enemy will march over our dead bodies”, he fumed, “or we will march over his”) that the government banned him from speaking in public. After about two years, with the party’s popularity waning, even this ban was lifted.
The party fared poorly in the May 1928 Reichstag elections, polling only 2.6 per cent, slightly less than their last election results in December 1924. The SPD came to power, with Hermann Müller as chancellor, at the head of a so-called “Great Coalition” that included four bourgeois parties: the Centre Party, the BVP, the DDP and the DVP.
Great Depression - Nazi Graph Rises Again
The economic recovery in Germany petered out by late 1928 and next year the worldwide Great Depression brought the country back to severe crisis. In February 1929, the number of people registered as unemployed once more crossed the three-million mark. Prices for agricultural produce were falling. In north Germany, farmers staged demonstrations under black flags. A radical group led by a farmer named Claus Heim even carried out bomb attacks against local tax and government offices. The popularity of the NSDAP was growing rapidly in rural as well as urban areas. The Nazis also achieved spectacular results in the elections to Germany’s student parliaments in 1928 and 1929. In November 1928, Hitler spoke to an audience of 2,500 Munich University students in the Löwenbräukeller and was greeted with rapturous applause.
Thuringia: the Nazi Gujarat?
In Landtag elections in December 1929, the NSDAP got six seats and 11.3 per cent of votes in Thuringia. The conservative and liberal parties wanted to govern without the SPD, but then they needed the support of the National Socialists. Hitler decided that the party would join a governing coalition, but only if it were given two key ministries, those of the interior and of culture and popular education. “He who possesses these two ministries, and uses his power within them unscrupulously and with determination, can achieve the extraordinary,” Hitler wrote in a confidential letter on 2 February. The Interior Ministry gave the NSDAP oversight of the state police force; the Culture Ministry put the party in charge of the entire Thuringian school and educational system. Hitler was not interested in participating in government per se: he was aiming to take over the executive branch from the inside. As his candidate for both ministerial posts, Hitler put forward Wilhelm Frick, his comrade from the Beer Hall Putsch. The DVP initially demanded some other name, but Hitler insisted “that either Dr. Frick would be our minister or there would be fresh elections”. The centre-right parties, aware that new elections would further strengthen the NSDAP’s position, gave in to Hitler’s ultimatum.
During his fourteen-month term in office, even the one-man Nazi army in the coalition government amply demonstrated, in miniature, what a future Nazi rule at national level might look like. Experienced and efficient civil servants suspected of sympathising with the SPD were fired and replaced with Nazi stooges. Prayers were made mandatory in schools in order, as Frick told the Landtag, to “prevent the people being swindled by Marxism and the Jews.” The University of Jena was given a chair in racial sciences, which was filled by the notorious anti-Semite Hans F.K. Güntherar overruling the vote of the professoriate. The new director of the Weimar Academy of Art and Architecture, the National Socialist true believer Paul Schultze-Naumburg, removed modernist works of art from the city’s Royal Museum. Frick forbade the playing of “Nigger Jazz” (an abusive term for extremely popular jazz music with roots in African-American culture) in pubs and forced Nazi-flavoured prayers in schools. He infiltrated the police department, including the post of police president in Weimar, with Nazi members. In the face of mounting criticism, Frick was ousted on 1 April 1931 by a vote of no confidence in the Landtag.
In a situation like this, the two radical parties at two poles of the political spectrum – the Communists and the Nazis – grew swiftly at the cost of the middle-roaders.
An interesting experience was gained in the State of Thuringia, which would serve as a laboratory for Nazi rule a couple of years before the party came to rule the whole of the country. (See sidebar) Then in March 1930 the SPD Ministry headed by Muller collapsed. In the September elections to the Reichstag, SPD votes tumbled by six percent while the KPD vote share rose by 40 percent compared to May 1928. However, in absolute terms the KPD’s rise did not compensate for the SPD’s loss. So their combined vote share went down, while the Nazi vote share rose by a whopping 700 percent – pushing the NSDAP from the ninth to the second position in the Reichstag.
In utilizing the excellent revolutionary situation, in this case the fascists thus beat the militant left by a long margin. But this was not a general pattern: only two years later, in November 1932, the Nazi vote share would decline compared to July that year, while that of the KPD would rise. In any case, the major contention remained between the far right and the revolutionary left.
The astounding success had three major political fallouts. For one, in a bid to block the Nazis in parliament, the SPD lent support to the minority government led by Centre Party leader Heinrich Brüning, which had just replaced their own government. This enabled the Brüning government to continue in office for another two years – a period of bad governance that proved to be only a pathway for Hitler’s ascendance to power.
Second, the capitalists learned to see the NSDAP as a real claimant to power and began to contribute somewhat freely to its coffers. To facilitate this, Hitler met former chancellor Wilhelm Cuno, the chairman of the Hamburg-America ocean line HAPAG, in the election month itself. He tried to assure Cuno, and through him other business magnates, that the NSDAP would support entrepreneurial initiative and private capital, and only intervene in cases of illicitly acquired wealth. Still the industrialists remained somewhat suspicious about the party’s economic program and their doubts grew stronger the very next month (October 1930) when the NSDAP moved a number of parliamentary motions that were not only anti-Jewish but also against finance capital – such as nationalisation of large banks, restricting interest rates at 5 percent and banning the trading of securities (share market operations).
These motions showed that the NSDAP chairman did not want to alienate the ‘socialist’ wing of the party even as he tried to allay the fears of the capitalists. Referring to the political influence of the latter, he told Otto Wagener, a close confidante who saw such overtures to the capitalists as useless if not harmful, “I have the feeling that we won’t be able to conquer [the Chancellor’s office in] Wilhelmstrasse over their heads.”
Legalism as a Subterfuge
Third and most important, with a veritable membership explosion in both the party (from nearly 3, 89,000 at the end of 1930 to approximately 8,06,000 a year later) and the SA (from 77,000 in January 1931 to 2,90,000 in in January 1932 to 4,45,000 by August 19 1932), the question of “what next” became the hottest talking point in the Nazi fraternity. State power seemed to be in striking distance, and the SA men in particular were restless for action – for a coup to be precise. But Hitler was not prepared to risk another term of imprisonment and a ban on the party, or even a ban on his public appearance, all of which had proved so detrimental to the party’s growth only recently. He warned SA men to be on guard against “spies and provocateurs” trying to tempt them into breaking the law: “Our legality will smash and deflect all measures taken by those currently in possession of state power.” At a meeting of the Munich SA brigade in early March 1931, he had to defend himself against the charge that he was “too cowardly” to fight with illegal means. He did not want to send them out to be cut down by machine guns, Hitler said, because he would need them for more important tasks, namely constructing the Third Reich.
Hitler had good reasons to believe that the SA and perhaps the NSDAP as a whole could be banned in the event of an adventurist step. An emergency decree issued by the President implied that very clearly. So on 30 March he ordered that anyone violating the decree would be summarily expelled from the party. He actually had to fire Walter Stennes, head of the Berlin chapter of the SA, for refusing to provide security to party events and for excessive anarchic activities. Stennes and his supporters staged a revolt in Berlin, but it did not spread to other cities and collapsed in a few days.[1]
This episode, however, did not stop Count Wolf-Heinrich Von Helldorf, the next head of the Berlin SA, fromleading some 500 armed men in vandalising Jewish shops and brutalising people they thought to be Jewish on 12 September 1931, the Jewish New Year’s day. “Germany Awaken, Judah must die”, they shouted. Some of the rioters, including the gang leaders, were tried but let off with minor sentences. Hitler’s response, as expressed within the party, was that the SA leaders must not get provoked; they must understand that “the legal path is the only secure one at the moment.” At the same time he suggested that in large cities, the SA faced the necessity “of undertaking something to satisfy the revolutionary mood of the people.” The party would have to publicly distance itself from the SA leaders who had been involved, but he assured his henchmen: “You can be certain that the party will not forget their services and will restore them to their posts as soon as the time is ripe.”
Vagaries of Electoral Politics
In 1932 the NASDAP contested several major elections, with the performance card showing sharp ups and downs. The first was the presidential elections in March, where Hitler was the main contender against Hindenburg. In an effort to project himself as a future head of government, he accepted an invitation to address the prestigious Industrial Club of Dusseldorf representing, among others, the Ruhr Valley tycoons. As was his wont on such occasions, he avoided openly anti-Semitic comments. But for conquering a “living space in Russia”, he promised, a revitalised Germany under his leadership would live in “peace and friendship” with its neighbours. But the lacklustre speech failed to cut much ice. Top industrialists like Krupp and Duisberg came out in support of Hindenburg and Hitler’s party received comparatively much less in donations.
Belying wild expectations among Nazis including Hitler himself, the incumbent president got 18 million votes compared to Hitler’s 11 million. Nazi ranks and supporters were so demoralised that in many places the swastika flags were flown at half-mast.
A run-off election was announced for April 10 because Hindenburg just stopped short of majority vote share. More resolute after the defeat, Hitler embarked on his first “flying tour of Germany,” one of the first such initiatives in history. The slogan “Hitler over Germany,” which party newspapers published in screaming headlines, suggested not only that Hitler was omnipresent: it also symbolised his claim to be above classes and parties and anticipated the coming “ethnic community.” And the fact that Hitler never cancelled an event, even when the weather made flying risky, solidified the myth that he was a “national saviour” willing to sacrifice himself and unafraid of any danger. Hindenburg was re-elected, but Hitler gained around 2 million additional votes. However this was partly due to the withdrawal of one nationalist candidate in favour of Hitler.
In late April elections were held to Landtags in Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg and Anhalt along with civic body polls in Hamburg. Everywhere the NSDAP performed brilliantly. For example in Prussia, the largest and most important state in Germany, they became the largest party with 36.3 percent vote share, up from 1.8 percent in 1928. But except for Anhalt, the party could not convert this strength into positions of government because it refused to form or join any coalition. It was a peculiar situation indeed. Amidst all the euphoria over the NSDAP’s “phenomenal victory,” Goebbels noted in his diary: “What now? Something has to happen. We have to gain power. Otherwise we will triumph ourselves to death.”
Blows on Parliamentary Democracy
Meanwhile, a way out of this imbroglio seemed to be opening up for the Nazis thanks to a political rift between the centrist chancellor and the hard-core right nationalist president. The latter had the impression that Brüning was taking stern action against the SA rioters (he even persuaded the president to issue an emergency decree dissolving Nazi paramilitary units) but remained blind to “the communist menace”. So he expressed his “urgent wish” to the chancellor that “the Cabinet should be reformed and moved to the right”. The latter, himself largely responsible for undermining parliamentary democracy by considerably distancing the Reichstag from political decision-making and thus bolstering the powers of the president and the military top brass vis-a-vis the Parliament, had to bow down to this autocratic diktat and resigned at the end of May. Franz Von Papen became the new Chancellor.
“ … before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.”
Georgi Dimitrov
Political report to the Seventh World Congress,
The Communist International, August 1935
The banning of the SA did not go down well with many in the government, who viewed the armed gangs as a potential tool for rebuilding Germany’s military prowess. The most influential among these people was defence minister General Kurt Von Schleicher, who, like Hindenburg, strongly believed that a correct approach to the NSDAP must be to try and tie the party to a governing coalition and thus tame it.
Schleicher secretly met with Hitler to discuss the conditions under which the NSDAP chairman would join or at least tolerate a governing coalition. The latter refused to join the government but he agreed to engage in “productive cooperation” (in today’s terms, support from outside the cabinet) with a more right-wing, interim presidential cabinet under Papen, if fresh elections were scheduled and the ban on the SA and SS lifted. On both counts he received assurances. Hitler was very happy: he had not tied himself down and still held all the trump cards. This understanding was duly carried through under the Hindenburg-Papen disposition. The Reichstag was dissolved on 4 June and 31 July was set as the date for new elections. On 16 June, the ban on the SA was lifted. The Brownshirts who were merely operating in semi legal fashion – since there had been no arrests, no crackdowns on them after the ban was imposed two months earlier – now resurfaced in their true colours. Violence escalated to previously unseen levels as fascists now engaged in bloody street battles on a daily basis.
The next blow to parliamentary democracy came in July in the form of deposition of the Social Democratic government and imposition of military emergency in Prussia. The pretext was that the SD government was failing to maintain law and order (a recent bloody clash between armed Nazi gangs and workers was cited as evidence) and had lost its majority in the state legislature. Papen appointed himself Reich Commissioner for Prussia. The SPD was expected to mount vigorous street protests: after all, their government had been arbitrarily overthrown and it still had the support of powerful trade unions. But it only appealed to the court, for justice, and nothing came out it. The KPD did call for a general strike but with the SPD and the unions remaining passive, it was a non-starter. Thus there was hardly any effective resistance from the Left.
Immediately after the ‘constitutional coup’ the new rulers began to “cleanse” the Prussian civil service of democrats – a process the National Socialists would zealously take over once they came to power. As the historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher rightly pointed out, the “Prussia coup” was a prelude to the Nazi assumption of power six months later.
It is interesting and instructive to note that none of these reactionary autocratic blows to the parliamentary system was dealt by Hitler (he of course played the role of a catalyst or instigator in some cases) yet at the end of the day he alone would reap all the benefits, knocking all his contenders, facilitators and fellow travelers off the road to power as he went.
Note:
1. But the events of the spring of 1931 had long-term political consequences as they led to the rise of the SS, which at the time was still subordinate to the SA. During the crisis, the SS had proved absolutely loyal to the party leadership, and the resulting political capital left that group able to rival the SA. The SS would play a very crucial part in the history of Nazism by enacting the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934 when Hitler deployed it to kill and disarm rebellious SA leaders and men. SA violence on the other hand was a double-edged sword for the party leadership, for it constantly threatened to get out of hand and give the lie to Hitler’s assurances that the party was acting within the bounds of the law.
Fascism and its state form – like its other, bourgeois democracy and the parliamentary system – is a product of class struggle. But the course of class struggle varies widely from country to country and so do its outcomes.
Back in 1848 the authors of The Communist Manifesto had good reasons to declare that the German proletariat was expected to be the first in the world to usher in socialist revolution. Actually that happened in Russia and the victorious Russian communists expected the working class in neighbouring Germany to be the next in line. Indeed, post-First World War Germany, being in the throes of the most severe economic crisis, social instability and political breakdown, found itself at a historical crossroads marked by two opposite prospects: socialist revolution or capitalist consolidation. The most advanced sections of the working class in Germany boldly espoused the path of socialist revolution, the big bourgeoisie in alliance with the Junker landlords responded with a counterrevolution. The Left failed and, as Clara Zetkin pointed out as early as in 1923 (see Appendix), was punished with fascism. Our study, therefore, starts with this civil war, this prelude to the emergence of fascism in Germany.
Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany
As the first imperialist world war was drawing to a close, the monarchist rulers in Germany were completely discredited and alienated. Popular unrest and upheavals were growing. The year 1918 opened with a general strike involving more than one million workers, demanding peace, bread and the ouster of the Kaiser’s imperialist government. Workers in Berlin were getting organized in Soviet-like councils. Revolutionary ferment also spread throughout the army. It seemed the country was going the Russian way.
In the face of imminent defeat, Germany was eager for peace talks but as a precondition, the US insisted on a civilian government being installed in the defeated aggressor country. Under pressure from victors abroad and the disgruntled masses at home, the ruling dispensation headed by Chancellor Max Von Baden put in place a so-called democratic coalition government, headed by Prince Baden himself and including social democrat leaders like Scheidemann, in the first week of October 1918. The purpose obviously was to preempt revolution and satisfy the victors through a constitutional reform that left the economic system and political power structure intact.
The Spartacus League (SL) and the delegates of revolutionary councils in Berlin, who had been elected during the January 1918 strike, called for another general strike and an armed uprising to overthrow the government of betrayal. In January 1919 Berlin was in the grip of a general strike, with soldiers joining the armed workers, who were taking to the streets of Berlin. The turmoil continued. In November sailors spread the revolutionary ferment to major coastal cities as well as Munich, Frankfurt on Main, Hanover etc. The Kaiser abdicated on November 9 and on the same day, SL leader Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a Socialist Republic. As a counter tactic Scheidemann advanced the slogan of a “free German republic”. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils came up in Munich and other major towns and cities throughout the country (in Berlin they had been already formed). However, the SL lacked the strength to win a majority in the councils and transform them into bodies representing the real interests of the working class and the toiling masses. Gaining a majority in the councils, the opportunist leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the Independents (or ISDP, a centrist faction of social democrats) made the councils toe their line. The provisional government—the Council of People’s Commissars—which was elected on November 10 at a general assembly of the Berlin councils, included three representatives of the right-wing Social Democrats including F. Ebert, Scheidemann and three Independents; there was no one from the SL. The Council allowed the Kaiser’s officials to keep their posts and formed an alliance with the monarchist head of the army, P. von Hindenburg.
At the First All-German Congress of Workers’ Councils (December 16–21, 1918) the Social Democratic leaders succeeded in passing resolutions on elections to the bourgeois Constituent Assembly and on the transfer of legislative power to the government. The revolutionaries started an insurrection to seize power. The Ebert-Scheidemann government then switched to an open offensive against the revolutionary workers. It got the foremost leaders of the revolution, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, brutally murdered by members of the right-wing paramilitaries, the “Freikorps” on January 15, 1919.
Rosa Luxemburg’s Last Words
Rosa Luxemburg had opined, within the party, that an insurrection would be disastrous when the forces of the right were gathering strength. But when it was started, she joined her comrades; arguing that events were now in motion and that standing on the sidelines would be a worse mistake than waiting for the right moment. Days later, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were taken prisoner by the freikorps and summarily executed. Liebknecht’s body was dumped anonymously at the city morgue and Luxemburg’s was found months later in the Landwehr canal.
On the evening of her murder, almost certainly knowing that the uprising had failed and that she personally faced death, Rosa wrote:
“The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built...Order reigns in Berlin! You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!”
In the meantime, a Socialist Republic of Bavaria had also been proclaimed in Munich. Extremely ill-prepared, this one also was brutally crushed by the armed forces in early May 1919. Later in the year a new constitution adopted by the Constituent Assembly, which met in Weimar town, formalized the foundation of a parliamentary republic, popularly called the Weimar Republic. A half-baked bourgeois republic replaced the monarchy, with big Junker landlords left untouched. Ideologically influenced by opportunist politics, and organizationally divided, the working class was not in a position to lead the revolution to a socialist culmination. However, compared to the House of Hohenzollern’s 400-year rule over Prussia (and 30-year rule over Germany) the republic with all its shortcomings (e.g. the President having almost arbitrary powers of appointing and discharging a Chancellor, issuing decrees etc.) represented a relatively progressive institution in the sense that it allowed for more open and free development of class struggle. Exactly how that struggle would play itself out in the political arena – and which side would win -- would depend, of course, primarily on the political conduct of the parties representing the antagonistic classes.
From Class Compromise to Fascist Takeover
Every failed revolution evokes a two-pronged response from the ruling class that is threatened but not destroyed. One, brutal repression to try and finish off the revolutionary party; two, some kind of reforms aimed at preempting further attempts at revolution and at the same time expanding its social base among the masses. In Germany the repression was targeted against the SL and then the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) while a reform of the state was introduced in the shape of the Weimar Republic. The first and subsequent governments were formed by a coalition of the liberal bourgeois parties and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Clearly, these were governments of class compromise. To smother the smoldering embers of revolution, the SPD-dominated coalition government introduced what we now call social safety net for the working people. And the capitalists accepted it for the time being, as a policy of pragmatic adjustment in place of foolhardy confrontation. Explaining this position, a leading German industrialist candidly told his fellow capitalists in June 1919:
“Gentlemen, in Russia events took the wrong turn and, right from the start, industry found itself rejecting the revolution. If we – and this would have been feasible – had taken up a stance of non-cooperation, then I am sure that by today we would have the same conditions as prevail in Russia”.[1]
Lenin too pointed out that the big bourgeoisie learned from the Russian example and adopted an excellent strategy. For a small price of economic concessions, they as well as the Junker landlords thus saved themselves from the threat of revolution spreading from Russia. The SPD and the trade union leadership attached to it (the latter enjoying the support of the vast majority of workers) also did not try to intensify class struggle to resume the revolution.
Political compromises, as we know, are a temporary truce between two warring parties/sides, a period during which the battle goes on by subtler means, with each party trying to outmanoeuvre the other. One side wins, the other loses. In this case the social democrats, in continuation of their 1914 betrayal of supporting the Kaiser’s war policy, backtracked from their own land reform programme and, rather than using the government for extending the scope of class struggle, sought to consolidate class peace and thus hang on to office in the bourgeois parliamentary setup. Naturally they saw the revolutionary communists as major obstacles and sought to remove them by political – and, during the phase of direct confrontation between armed revolution and armed counterrevolution, by physical/conspiratorial means as well.
Alongside the social democratic prototype based on compromise with the big bourgeoisie, alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie and struggle with the revolutionary communists – a prototype that would be replicated all over the world in the decades to come – the revolutionary communists in the form of the nascent SL-KPD had their bout of ‘left-wing communism, an infantile disorder’. They correctly underscored the need for an uninterrupted transition from the democratic to the socialist revolution, but initially failed to make a sober assessment of the overall balance of class forces in the raging civil war, tried to move too fast, and suffered heavy losses, which further eroded the chances of revolution. However, following the installation of the republic, they supported the social democrats in office on every real move in defence of democracy while opposing the instances of capitulation. The failure of the two left parties to unite in struggle against fascism helped the reactionary big bourgeoisie gradually reclaim its dominance (e.g. through the repudiation, in the mid-1920s, of the eight-hour working day that was instituted soon after the foundation of the republic, and the ouster of the social democratic government in Prussia, led by Otto Braun, in 1932). With the National Socialists emerging as the strongest right-wing and ferociously anti-left, anti-labour party within and without the parliament, the big bourgeoisie and the Nazis came closer and closer together. And the absolute supremacy of the big bourgeoisie was finally restored under Hitler’s “Third Reich”, which replaced the Weimar Republic.
Germany in the 1920s
The economic crisis of the 1920s, which matured into the Great Depression by 1929 and led to large-scale economic disruption and intensified class struggle, sets a common backdrop to the emergence of fascist groups in countries like Italy, the US, France, Austria, Romania, Portugal, England and Spain[2], and in several of these the fascists grabbed power too. But it was Germany that had the misfortune of being home to the most savagely successful, genocidal fascist regime.
This was due to a unique constellation of exceptional socio-political developments and anextraordinary political leader doggedly pursuing his mission Conducive objective factors like unprecedented economic woes, disruptions in individual and social lives and the sense of wounded national pride, which followed defeat in the war and the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty, and which rendered all classes and strata (with the honorable exception of the industrial proletariat) highly vulnerable to fascist propaganda, are well-known; so we do not go into details of all these. Instead, we investigate the politics of fascism. We try to understand exactly how – with what strategic perspective, tactical maneuvers and modus operandi – Hitler navigated the stormy seas of post-war German polity to reach his goal so fast and with such deadly effect on the national and international planes.
How the Private Became a Politician
Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in the Upper Austrian border town Braunau am Inn, not very far from Munich, and ended his own life on 30 April 1945 in an underground bunker in Berlin when he learnt that his nemesis – the Russian Red Army – had already entered the city. His father, Alois Hitler, was a mid-level customs official. In his teens Adolf tried twice to get admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts, but in vain. However, he did manage to earn a living by painting watercolor scenes of Vienna, where he had to spend a few years in homeless shelters after frittering away a handsome inheritance left by his parents. In those days he was influenced by the prevalent currents of German racist nationalism and antisemitism. At the age of 25 he went off to war as a “private” (the lowest-ranking soldier) and was discharged, along with others, in March 1920, after the Versailles Treaty came into force.
At the time of the revolutionary uprisings and counter-revolutionary reprisals in 1918-1919, Hitler was living in Munich, the citadel of extreme right nationalist forces. He neither supported nor opposed the revolution. During the initial high tide he conveniently appeared to lean towards the Social Democrats but overall he just kept a low profile.[3] Subsequently, of course he always denounced it and its product, the Weimar Republic, while having a word of praise for those SPD leaders who “never intended to spark a revolution” such as Noske, Ebert, Scheidemann, and the Bavarian leader Auer.
Hitler joined active politics in September 1919 when he attended a meeting of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP) –- one of many ethnically chauvinist, nationalist groups that evolved after 1918 – in Munich. His speech was well-received, and very soon he was invited to join the party. He readily agreed because, although it was a small and unimpressive group in the making, the DAP offered him an opportunity to get ahead quickly and shape the party according to his own ideas. With Hitler as the party’s star speaker, DAP events began to attract larger gatherings. His strident ultra-nationalism and communication skills attracted the attention of his bosses and in a very unusual move, he was also appointed as an assistant to the educational officer in the Regiment he belonged to.
The Demagogue
The gift of the gab was Hitler’s prime weapon in building his political career; so why not take a closer look at it?[4]
Contrary to popular belief, Hitler did not speak extemporaneously: he diligently prepared for all his public appearances. He would fill several pages with catchwords and slogans to keep him focused during his two- to three-hour performances. Usually he arrived late to ratchet up the excitement and his speeches followed a set pattern.
Most of the times he would begin calmly, almost hesitantly. As the historian John Toland put it, Hitler spent the first ten minutes or so gauging the mood of his audience with the fine sense of an actor. Only when he was convinced of their approval did he begin to relax. He then started to punctuate his remarks with dramatic gestures — throwing his head back, extending his right arm and underlining particularly vivid sentences with his finger or hammering on the lectern with his fists. At the same time his tone and choice of words became more aggressive. His own excitement was infectious. By the end of his speeches, after a furious crescendo, the entire venue would be in a state of intoxicated fervour, and the orator himself, covered in sweat, would accept the congratulations of his entourage.
Many were the factors that contributed to Hitler’s power as a speaker, starting with his full-bodied and flexible voice—“his best weapon,” as it has been called—which he used like an instrument. He had mastered the “language of the post-war little guy,” peppering his speeches not only with the coarse phrases of a former military man, but also with irony and sarcasm. He was adept at using religious imagery and motifs and showed a great capacity to express what his audience thought and felt: he exploited their fears, prejudices and resentments, but also their hopes and desires. As Hitler’s first biographer, Konrad Heiden, wrote, Hitler was “someone seduced by himself,” someone who was so inseparable from his words “that a measure of authenticity flowed over the audience even when he was telling obvious lies.”
Hitler’s speeches typically began with a look back at the “wonderful, flourishing Germany before the war”. Again and again, he directed his audience’s attention to the “great heroic time of 1914,” when the German people, unified as seldom before, had been dragged into a war forced upon them by the Entente powers. This glorified vision of the past allowed Hitler to paint the present day in hues that were all the darker. His constant refrain was that the revolution of 1918–19 led to Germany’s downfall, casting it into slavery. Those primarily responsible were Jews and leftists whom he described as “revolutionary” or “November criminals.” “The ‘utterly fearless’ army was ‘stabbed from behind’ by ‘Jew-socialists’ bribed with Jewish money,” was how a USPD pamphlet cited a statement by Hitler as early as April 1920. Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the former heads of the Third Supreme Command, had launched the stab-in-the-back legend, which then became a constant component within the propaganda arsenal of right-wing nationalists.
Polemical attacks on the Treaty of Versailles occupied a central position in Hitler’s campaigns, playing upon widespread bitterness about what was perceived as a shameful and humiliating peace. The conditions of the treaty, Hitler repeatedly hammered into his listeners’ heads, condemned it to “serfdom”. He skillfully combined the acerbic condemnation of the Versailles Treaty with hateful attacks on the Weimar Republic and its leading representatives. By turns he excoriated Germany’s new democratic order as a “republic of scoundrels,” a “Berlin Jew government” and a “criminal republic.”
The Building Blocks of Nazism
From the beginning of his political career to the very end, Hitler’s world outlook and politics comprised three basic strands: (a) radical anti-Semitism[5] (b) aggressive anti-Bolshevism/communism/Marxism and (c) racial/national revivalism and chauvinism, complete with a clamour for conquest of “a living space in the East”. Such themes were nothing new in German right-wing politics at the time, but Hitler packaged and marketed them incomparably better than the others. The third component – shrill, supremacist nationalism – would always be there in his speeches and write-ups, but as a rule he would emphasise one particular strand for a particular occasion and audience. Here are a few examples.
In one of his early (1920) speeches, Hitler said:
Being unable to form a state, Jews lived as “nomads…parasites on the bodies of other peoples…as a race within other races and a state within other states.” Driven by their two most prominent racial characteristics, “Mammonism6 and materialism,” they had accumulated enormous wealth “without putting in the sweat and effort required of all other mortals.” With that, Hitler arrived at his favourite subject, international “interest and stock-market capital,” which dominated “practically the entire world…with sums of money growing beyond all measure and—what’s worst—with the effect of corrupting all honest work.” The National Socialists, Hitler claimed, had come forth to combat this destructive force by “awakening, augmenting and inciting the instinctual antipathy of our people for Jewry.” From here, from the global “stock-market and interest capital” holding Germany in its vice-like grip Hitler smoothly moved on to the nightmare of a “worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”
On 24 February 1928, the eighth anniversary of the announcement of the party programme, Hitler proclaimed: “If he [the Jew] behaves, he can stay—if not, out with him!” (Looks like Golwalkar took his infamous warning to Indian Muslims directly from here) But in the same breath he insisted that “We are the masters of our house” and issued an unmistakably murderous threat: “One cannot compete with parasites, one can only remove them.
In another speech in 1920 he said:
“Those who are on top in Russia are not the workers but, without exception, Hebrews.” Hitler spoke of a “Jewish dictatorship” and a “Moscow Jew government” sucking the life out of the Russian people and called on the NSDAP to become “a battering ram of German character” against the “dirty flood of Jewish Bolshevism.”
Now, on what grounds could anyone talk of a “Jewish Bolshevism” or a “Moscow Jewish government”? It is a fact that many Bolshevik leaders happened to be from a Jewish background, and so were many other communist leaders in other countries. And Hitler was not alone in using this fact to claim that Bolshevism was guided and controlled by Jews, thereby conveniently merging the two enemies. Just see how Winston Churchill pours venom on the Bolsheviks (box).
Regarding Marxism, Hitler believed that by destroying it he could eradicate class conflict and create a “genuine ethnic-popular community.” He was also constantly coming up with new phrases to describe the marriage of nationalism and socialism, the unification of “workers of the mind and workers of the fist.” National Socialism knew neither bourgeois nor proletarian, only “the German working for his people.”
At times he would combine the two objects of hatred: “The Jew is and remains the world’s enemy, and his greatest weapon, Marxism, is and remains a plague for humanity,” he wrote in February 1927 in the Völkischer Beobachter.
Appropriating Christianity
National Socialism depicted itself as a political religion. “What does Christianity mean for us today?” Goebbels wrote in his diary, “National Socialism is a religion.” This view corresponded to the party’s inflation of itself to a “community of faith” and its programme to an “ideological creed.” Like the biblical apostles, the task of the Führer’s disciples was to spread Nazi principles “like a gospel among our people.” This was one reason why Hitler staunchly refused to consider any amendment of the original twenty five-point NSDAP manifesto. He once told his close confidante Hanfstaengl, who once suggested some realistic modifications, “Absolutely not. It’s staying as it is. The New Testament, too, is full of contradictions, but that did nothing to hinder the spread of Christianity.” At the Nazi Party’s 1925 Christmas celebrations, Hitler drew a revealing parallel between early Christianity and the “movement.” Christ had also been initially mocked, and yet the Christian faith had become a massive global movement. “We want to achieve the same thing in the arena of politics,” the NSDP chairman declared. A year later he was explicitly casting himself as Jesus’s successor, who would complete his work. “National Socialism,” Hitler proclaimed, “is nothing other than compliance with Christ’s teachings.”
“…From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing…
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. …With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.”
- Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
Zionism versus Bolshevism
(Illustrated Sunday Herald,
8 February, 1920)
In his public speeches, especially in their final crescendos, Hitler often utilised religious vocabulary. He would conclude with a final “Amen!” or invoke his “faith in a new Holy German Empire” or call upon “Our Lord to give me the strength to continue my work in the face of all the demons.” He constantly warned his followers that there would be no shortage of sacrifices along the way. Here, too, he drew parallels with early Christianity: “We have a path of thorns to go down and are proud of it.” The “blood witnesses” who had lost their lives for the Nazi movement, Hitler promised, would enjoy the sort of reverence once reserved for the Christian martyrs.
The Fascist Manifesto
Together with Anton Drexler (a DAP leader from whom he acquired the idea of fusing nationalism and socialism, of freeing the working classes from the “false teachings” of Marxism and winning them over for the nationalist cause), Hitler produced a party programme that forcefully expressed ideas in currency among ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic circles at the time. Ulrich notes that at the top of the agenda was the demand for all ethnic Germans to be united within a greater Germany. This was followed by demands for the revocation of the Treaty of Versailles and the return of Germany’s colonies. Point 4 clearly expressed the party’s anti-Semitic orientation, reading “Only an ethnic comrade [Volksgenosse] can be a citizen. Only someone who is of German blood, irrespective of religion, can be an ethnic comrade. Thus no Jew can be an ethnic comrade.” This was followed by the demands that Jews in Germany be treated as foreigners under the law and that all further Jewish immigration be halted.
Also there were demands for “the eradication of work-free, effortless income” (this was obviously pointed against Jewish moneylenders and bankers) and the “confiscation of all wartime profits without exception”. Demands for nationalisation of large banks, for profit-sharing and for an expansion of the pension system were designed to appeal to the working classes. A promise to communalise large department stores was aimed at the middle classes, and the prospect of land reform at farmers. The programme also contained slogans like “communal welfare comes before selfishness” and “strengthening of central authority”, combined with a pledge to fight against “the corrupting parliamentary system”.
As a whole, the programme/manifesto left no doubt that the aim was to get rid of the democracy of the young Weimar Republic and create an authoritarian government for an ethnic community, which would no longer have any room for Jews. At the same time, it also had a dash of what we now call lemon socialism (nationalization in certain cases, for example)[7]. It was read out to a 2000-strong public event on 24 February 1920, to great applause of the majority and loud protests from opponents from the political Left, who were also in attendance in sizeable numbers.
It is testimony to Hitler’s political acumen that he added the qualifying phrase “National Socialist” (from which ‘Nazi’ is derived) to the lacklustre “German Workers Party”. Nationalism and Socialism were the two most powerful political trends of the time, and he tried to dupe and attract people of both persuasions. The party was thus renamed as the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (NSDAP) and this meeting came to be counted as the foundational act of the Nazi movement. As Hitler wrote at the end of the first volume of Mein Kampf (My Struggle), “A fire was sparked, from whose embers the sword would necessarily come which would restore freedom to the German Siegfried and life to the German nation…The hall gradually emptied. The movement was under way.”
For Hitler, socialism was of course only a façade. But there were some who took it more seriously – Joseph Goebbels and Gregor Strasser for example. “National and socialist!” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “What has priority and what comes second? There’s no doubt about the answer among us here in the west. First socialist redemption, and then national liberation will arrive like a powerful storm wind.” In 1925 they came up with ideas of a revision of the party programme along these lines. To this end they founded a “Working Association North-west”, which explicitly recognized Hitler as the leader. When they proposed the revision in a conference, they were confident that Hitler would agree with them. Actually the Führer rubbished all that vehemently, declaring the party programme sacrosanct. The Working Association North-west was finished. But before long Hitler befriended and won over both Goebbels and Strasser. It was the last time there would be an open debate about the party’s political orientation, although differences on tactics would surface again.
Notes:
1. Cited by Kurt Gossweiler, op cit. p 121.
2. n the case of Spain, we refer mainly to the Falange Espanola founded by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera in 1933 and a few other kindred groups which were subsequently merged together under the fascist dictatorship of General Franco (1939 – 1975).
3. This approach – concentrating all energy only on his own agenda and organization and refusing to unite with any other party or movement even at crucial junctures – would remain a permanent feature of his politics.
4. he following description is excerpted from Ullrich’s well-researched work.
5.Radical or not, anti-Semitism was a powerful trend in many parts of the world. To cite just one example, the racist pamphlet by American carmaker Henry Ford, “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” -- which had appeared in German translation in 1922 and became a huge hit -- is said to have been a major influence on Hitler.
6. Fixation on money and the drive to accumulate more and more of it.
7. The “anti-capitalist strain” -- hence (national) socialism -- obviously relates to usurious capital, or as Hitler put it, the practice of amassing wealth “without sweat and effort” and was actually targeted at the Jewish community who were dominant in this branch of business. Latent anti-Semitic prejudices had long been rife across Europe (recall The Merchant of Venice), so the conditions existed for many to succumb to Hitler’s scapegoating of the Jews in this context. This ‘anti-capitalist’ charade would be maintained in later years too (though never emphasised or acted upon, and kept completely hidden during close interactions with business magnates) so as to project a pro-worker, pro-poor image.
History, the English historian E.H. Carr observed, “is an unending dialogue between the past and the present.” Here is a short history of the meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler, retold from the present Indian perspective overshadowed by the marauding march of the Modi-Yogi-Bhagwat band. It is part of a continuing conversation in which we ask questions, reflect on the answers we get, and use these feedbacks for charting a new, different course of advance, where the saffron fascists are pulled down well before they reach their cherished goal of a totalitarian Hindu Rashtra. History for us is interactive between past and present, and proactive towards the future.
In this study we have used the terms Nazism and fascism interchangeably, where the former is a specific form of a broader category or genus called fascism. As Umberto Eco points out in his 1995 essay Ur- Fascism (Eternal Fascism), there was “only one Nazism”, whereas “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” The novelist and semiotician refuses to “define” fascism, but points out 15 broad features – such as “the cult of tradition”, “rejection of modernism”, “disagreement as treason”, “fascism is racist by definition” and so on – most of which, with some regional variations (e.g., caste supremacism as an additional attribute of Hindutva fascism in our country) are easily discernible in Italy, Germany and India.
Indeed, over the past hundred years since it arose in Italy and acquired a more complete shape in Germany, fascism has taken on many national/regional colours and contours in course of adapting itself to varying contexts in different times and countries. Through all such mutations, however, it has retained certain core features or characteristics that place it in a very special category among comparable and allied trends like various shades of right-wing populism, authoritarianism, military rule, etc. Among these features, we believe, the single most important is the instigation and mobilisation of racial/ communal/ supremacist/ national-chauvinist mass frenzy for sneaking into the corridors of power and then engineering or attempting a complete fascist takeover of the state, all along relying on a carefully calibrated combination of demagoguery and terror, and progressively enlisting the support of big capital. In this pamphlet we study some of these features in their quintessential form in the classic case of Hitler’s Germany, where fascism had reached its zenith, because we believe a deeper knowledge of the original would help us better understand the derivative that we are confronting here and now – the current Indian variant.
Was Hitler’s rocket-like ascent really irresistible? Why did the left and democratic forces fail so miserably to arrest the rise? And that in a country gifted with one of the most advanced working-class movements in the world and leaders like Marx, Engels and their followers such as August Bebel, Wilhelm and Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin? Can we learn a thing or two from that experience, the huge differences between the then German and present Indian scenarios notwithstanding?
Keeping in mind the specific political purpose of resisting and defeating fascism in our country, in this pamphlet we have, rather than trying to tell the whole story of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, chosen to focus the spotlight on the period of fascist ascendance, i.e., the years between 1920 (when Nazism as a political force spearheaded by Hitler was born) and 1933 (when Hitler became Chancellor, going on to liquidate parliamentary democracy and establish a totalitarian fascist dictatorship).
This pamphlet does not lay any claim to original research. The biographical storyline and related facts we have taken mainly from Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Ascent 1889 – 1939 (a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2016) and certain other books and articles, such as The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer (Simon & Schuster, 1960; and Economy and Politics in the Destruction of the Weimar Republic by Kurt Gossweiler; (the last one is an article taken from the collection Resistible Rise: A Fascism Reader edited by Margit Koves and Shaswati Mazumdar (LeftWord Books, New Delhi, 2005). We acknowledge our debt to these authors and publishers here at the beginning itself, because we do not wish to burden this activists’ handbook with detailed citations. We have also reproduced excerpts from an article on Fascism by Clara Zetkin (Appendix), who was not only a leading light of the communist women’s movement but also a major theoretician and activist of the struggle against fascism. Published in August 1923, it contains one of the earliest communist assessments of fascism and a basic guideline on how to combat it. For our political inferences and the overall presentation, the responsibility of course lies with the author alone.
The first edition of this booklet was published in March this year to coincide with the CPI(ML) ‘s Tenth Congress held in Mansa, Punjab (23-28 March, 2018). Here is a revised and enlarged edition with the following additions: a new chapter summing up the evolution of Nazism; short excerpts from Georgi Dimitrov in the Appendix (I); and an Epilogue where, responding to the desire expressed by some of our readers, we have sought to broaden and update our understanding of fascism with notes on Italian fascism of yesteryears and what has been called “functional fascism” in present-day America. We have also incorporated another Appendix (II), covering corporate-communal fascism in our country.
The struggle against fascism on the soil of India will be long-drawn and multifaceted, ranging from direct physical resistance through electoral battles to the war of ideas and narratives. As part of this movement, we shall soon be publishing booklets on a series of key issues around which the RSS-BJP is conspiring to manufacture a malicious common sense, to weave a web of vitriolic false consciousness. Hope our readers find this booklet useful in the ongoing anti-fascist resistance.
Liberation Publications
August 2018
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui[1]
Thus learn you how to see, and not just look,
And act instead of talking all day long;
The world was almost ruled by such a crook!
Though people overcame him, you’d be wrong
To pat your backs and think yourselves so clever –
The ooze that spawned him is as rich as ever!
- Bertolt Brecht (Translation - Jennifer Wise)
Note:
1. The satirical play, written in 1941, draws a parallel between the career of Hitler and the rise of a fictional Chicago gangster, Arturo Ui. The epilogue, spoken at the end of the play by the actor who plays Ui, urges on the audience to keep a close watch on what’s happening, to be active rather than talkative, and vigilant rather than being complacent, because the “ooze” – presumably the filthy pus seeping out of rotten, decaying capitalism – is still “rich” or potent enough to produce the progenies of the original demon.
The Congress of the Communist League held in London in November 1847 had commissioned Marx and Engels to write a ‘detailed theoretical and practical programme for the Party’. Accordingly Marx and Engels drafted the Communist Manifesto in January 1848, the first German edition of which came out just a few weeks before revolution broke out in France on 24 February, 1848.
In view of the massive growth of modern industry and the concomitant expansion and development of working class party organisations, and especially in the light of the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune, a quarter century after the publication of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels felt that the programme had become dated in some of its details. They said the programme outlined at the end of the second chapter would have been written quite differently. The critique of socialist literature was also incomplete in the sense that it did not cover the period beyond 1847. Most of the parties described in the Manifesto had also become extinct by then. And the sea change in political situation had also rendered much of the comments about the relations of communists with other opposition parties considerably outdated.
The Communist Manifesto has now completed 150 years. These 150 years witnessed major periods of crisis in global capitalism, the quest for control over the world market led to two world wars among bourgeois states, socialist revolutions became victorious leading to the rise of socialist states, yet in the last decade of the twentieth century it was capitalism which prevailed over socialism in the global contention between the two (socialism and capitalism).
A unipolar world, a new world economic order, the break-neck speed of globalisation, the all-out domination of multinational corporations, the scientific and technological revolution and the more recent information revolution reducing the whole world to a single village – such are the principal features of the present age. Rifts in the international solidarity of the working class, the rise of ethnic, feminist and environmentalist movements, the philosophy of post-modernism – all these are questioning the very relevance of Marxism and the communist movement.
When the communist movement across the world finds itself at the crossroads, Marxist intellectuals are once again returning to a renewed study of Marxist classics to find directions for an answer to today’s questions. Indeed, it has become imperative for every progressive individual to revisit the Communist Manifesto and study it afresh.
According to the Communist Manifesto, “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Further on, we find, “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production.”
And then “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. ... In one word, it creates a world after its own image. ... Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”
The informed reader can see in these lines a living picture of today’s globalisation.
The picture of internationalism of the working people drawn by Marx and Engels in contrast to this globalisation of capital clearly underlines the complex interrelationship between national and international circumstances as between classes and nations: “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. ...
“In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”
The Manifesto had clearly stated that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Even in its most liberal and broadest form of parliamentary democracy, the modern state can essentially be nothing else. The socialist state, in contrast, champions real democracy for the common people. In spite of this if the bourgeoisie has succeeded in projecting the defeat of socialism as the victory of democracy, we will surely have to deeply investigate the reason.
In the wake of the experience of the Paris Commune (1871) in which the proletariat had controlled political power for full two months, Marx had drawn the important conclusion that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (The Civil War in France).
Lenin, in his debate with Kautsky in his all-important work “The State and Revolution”, raises the crucial question as to whether the old state machinery will continue after revolution or be smashed. Citing the aforementioned inference drawn by Marx, Lenin answers this question categorically: the old state machinery will have to be smashed because the bourgeois state rests on the very basis of alienation of the people from state power.
According to Lenin, democracy in a capitalist society is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist ex-ploitation, the majority of the population is denied participation in public and political life.
In clear contrast to Kautsky who limits the political struggles of the proletariat to the goal of securing parliamentary majority and establishing parliamentary control over the state machinery, Lenin advocates a representative assembly of the proletariat which will be a working body, executive and legislative at the same time, where the electorate will enjoy the right to recall and representatives will have to work and take responsibility for implementing the laws they have legislated, will have to test their impact in real life and will have to be accountable directly to the electorate.
“[T]he mass of the population”, emphasised Lenin, “will rise to taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.” (The State and Revolution)
According to Lenin the Paris Commune was one such organisation and after the Russian revolution, the Soviets had also emerged as similar organisations. Regarding the state Lenin goes so far as to say that in the first phase of the communist society, the socialist state itself is a remnant of the bourgeois state: “The state withers away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and consequently, no class can be suppressed. But the state has not yet completely withered away, since there still remains the safeguarding of “bourgeois law”, which sanctifies actual inequality. For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.”
This is why “In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains “the narrow horizon of bourgeois law”. Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably pre-supposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.
“It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!” (The State and Revolution) Since the days of the Paris Commune to the Soviet and Chinese Revolutions, we have seen several experiments with proletarian state power. The Cultural Revolution in China witnessed vibrant debates on the nature and form of proletarian state power. The setbacks suffered by socialism in recent years have further intensified these debates.
While Social Democracy accepts parliamentary democracy as the ultimate limit of democracy, anarchism ends up negating democracy itself by its primitive negation of parliamentary democracy. The basic challenge facing Marxists today is to explore the broadest form of proletarian democracy beyond the limits of parliamentary democracy so that the defeat of world capitalism in the coming century is seen as the victory of not just socialism but also democracy.
Many changes could possibly be made in the Communist Manifesto in the light of the questions arising from the experiences of the last 150 years of the international communist movement, but as Marx and Engels wrote in the preface to the 1872 German edition, “the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter”. Indeed, nobody has this right today, especially because the general principles delineated in this document, remain by and large as true as they were 150 years ago. The practical implementation of these principles will however depend on the historical circumstances of a given country and time.
Note:
1. Comrade VM wrote this for a Hindi edition of the Communist Manifesto published by Samkaleen Prakashan, Patna, in November 1998.
“The development
of civilisation
and industry in general
has always shown itself
so active
in the destruction of forests
that everything
that has been done
for their conservation
and production
is completely
insignificant in comparison.”
Any attempt to capture the vast panorama of the eventful and brilliant life of the most outstanding public figure of our time in a few pages, can have but one purpose: encouraging the reader to go beyond the brief sketch and take up a comprehensive study of Marx’s major works in the historical context of his age.
Karl Marx had a life of many facets. But, as his best friend Friedrich Engels said, the great theorist was above all a “revolutionist”. Let us, then, proceed to study the first great model of combining scientific theory and revolutionary practice in the life and works of one whose “idea of happiness” was “to fight”, “idea of misery” was “submission” and who declared his “chief characteristic” to be “singleness of purpose”[1].
The Formative Years
Karl Heinrich Marx, the son of a well-to-do, progressive lawyer, was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of Trier in Prussia and studied in a local Gymnasium. His school-leaving essay on a young man’s choice of profession gives an idea of his frame of mind at the age of seventeen : “If he works only for himself he may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfectly, truly great man.” On the other hand, if a man chose the station in life which enabled him best to serve mankind, he would feel not the petty and limited joys of egotism, for his happiness would belong to millions; and no burdens will bow him down.[2] These lofty ideals of love of freedom and humanism continued to grow on the basis of Hegelian idealism during his university years at Bonn and later at Berlin, where he studied law, philosophy and history. In Berlin he was a prominent member of a group of “Young Hegelians” who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel’s philosophy. They were opposed to the right wing Hegelians who read Christian orthodoxy into Hegel’s philosophy and vindicated the existing political order as a whole. The controversy between these two groups, though theological and academic in appearance, had a definite political content. For, by insisting that religion was not divine revelation but a product of human spirit and by putting forward the principle of transforming reality through criticism, the young Hegelians were undermining one of the major pillars of the Prussian absolutism. And this was what made their philosophy the philosophy of the radical German bourgeoisie.
After becoming a doctor in philosophy in 1841, Marx moved to Bonn to become a professor. But the growing opposition by the absolutist regime, which had already fired senior radical professors like Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, made Marx give up the idea of an academic career. Meanwhile the appearance, in 1841, of “The Essence of Christianity” by Feuerbach drew Marx and other young Hegelians irresistibly to the militant materialist views of Feuerbach who was the first to overcome, within limits, the idealism of young Hegelians. While Marx was zealously deepening his study of philosophy and developing his own philosophical methods and system, a radical bourgeois group in Rhine province set up an opposition paper called “Rheinische Zeitung” in early 1842 and because of the broad philosophical affinity mentioned above, invited Marx and Bruno Bauer to be the chief correspondents. Both of them accepted the offer, and in October 1842 Marx moved from Bonn to Cologne to become the editor. His journalistic career – such as his articles on the conditions of peasants – got him into sharp struggles against the Prussian censorship rules and the state. The paper’s increasingly pronounced revolutionary-democratic tone led first to Marx’s resignation and then to final closure of the paper on March 31 1843. However, this short but significant first schooling in real-life struggles had a profound impact. It greatly widened Marx’s cognitive horizons and at the same time made him aware of his scanty knowledge of political economy, the primary role of which in society he now came to realise and which he therefore zealously set out to study; it also brought home to him the urgent necessity of a critical review of Hegel’s idealist conception of society and the state (the latter was considered by Hegel as the embodiment of universal reason, of the interest of the whole society), and the need to identify the real motive forces behind social progress.
While deeply immersed in intense creative efforts on the above lines and producing several manuscripts and note-books on philosophy and history, Marx married Jenny, a childhood friend from an aristocratic family who remained a dedicated comrade-in-arms to her last breath and a constant source of inspiration. After a few months he went to Paris in order to publish a radical journal abroad jointly with Arnold Ruge. The first double issue of this journal, “Deutsch Franjo- sische Jahrbucher” appeared in late February of 1844 — but that was its last, too. Difficulties in secretly distributing it in Germany, and political differernces with Ruge brought a premature death to the paper. However, Marx’s articles put forth for the first time certain key theses of a new revolutionary outlook: e.g., that the modern proletariat is historically destined to destroy the old world and create a new, and that an advanced theory is a powerful weapon in the people’s struggle for a revolutionary transformation of society. “Of course”, he explained, “the weapon of criticism is no substitute for criticism by weapons and material force must needs be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force as soon as it takes hold of [also translated as “grips”] the masses.”[3]
The paper also carried two articles by its London correspondent Frederick Engels, who first met Marx in Paris in late August, 1844. And thence began the illustrious friendship between the two great revolutionaries. Together (mainly through correspondence) they waged a vigorous struggle against the various schools of petty bourgeois socialism. And this continued even when Marx went to Cologne after he was banished from Paris in February 1845 at the repeated insistence by the Prussian authorities. His most notable works in the 1844-46 period included the brilliant ‘Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844”; several articles in the Paris journal “Vorwarts!”; the “Holy Family” (February 1845), which he wrote together with Engels and which dealt the final blow to Young Hegelians’ idealism and passivity; the “Theses on Feurbach” (eleven brief theses that Marx hastily jotted down in his notebook in April 1845, the concluding one being “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”); and the “German Ideology” (completed for the most part by April 1846 in collaboration with Engels). Through these works, Marx and Engels hammered out the theory and tactics of scientific socialism, or communism. The most important of these works — the “German Ideology” — never saw the light of the day during their lifetime for want of a publisher. However, as Marx would observe in 1859, “We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose — self-clarification.”[4] With profoundly clear convictions, Marx now set out on the next phase of his eventful life.
The First Proletarian Party And The First Marxist Programme
In the 1840s, Germany comprised of 38 independent states ruled by feudal absolutism, only formally aligned in a German confederation. The socio-economic and political stagnation gave rise to various opposition (bourgeois and petty-bourgeois, most of them with various utopian socialist doctrines) movements, particularly in the Rhine province of Prussia. Among them were the “League of the Just” — a secret organisation of German workers and artisans abroad, mainly in London and Paris — which believed in sectarian communism and conspiratorial tactics. This situation confronted Marx and Engels with two major tasks — first, to build a proletarian movement and proletarian organisation with socialist orientation based on the political and organisational independence of the working class; and on that basis, to leave a proletarian imprint on the general democratic movement.
To accomplish the first task, they started by setting up, in January 1846, the “Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee” (BCCC). It carried on correspondence on living theoretical and political questions with workers’ and other socialist leaders and organisations in Belgium and other countries. By June of that year Marx and Engels persuaded the London leaders of the League of the Just to set up a CCC there; another Committee was set up in Paris. All these committees were inter- national in their composition and content of work. They forged close links with the Chartist movement in England and helped sharpen the struggle of the proletarian wing against the petty bourgeois wing. Under the guidance of the BCCC, socialists and communists in many German industrial centres gained a more or less strong foothold in the local democratic movements and to some extent left behind their narrow sectarian mentality. Marx and Engels also had to fight against many other wrong but influential trends – such as the “artisan communism” of Weitling, the “true socialism” of Grun, Krieg and others, and Proudhonism[5] — in such a way as to win over their mass following. Through all these extensive activities, Marx and Engels made a deep impact on the European and American working class movements and socialist discourse, and the ground was prepared for making a breakthrough in Party building.
So in the London Congress of June 1847, the League of the Just was renamed the Communist League, which replaced the League’s politically erroneous motto “All men are brothers!” (the bourgeoisie and the workers are surely not brothers!) by the class-conscious battle cry of the proletariat: “Workers of All Countries, Unite!”. The League branches spread across various countries remained secret, but were surrounded by open Workers’ Educational Societies which in their turn organised libraries, choirs, and lecture-series for workers,[6]. The erstwhile CCCs in different countries were merged with the organisations of the League. Thus a new period of integration of communist propaganda and mass working class movement was ushered in, and this was facilitated by two journals brought out by Marx and Engels. The Second Congress of the Communist League met in London in November-December, 1847. Through heated debates, the new proletarian doctrine upheld by Marx and Engels won decisive victory, and the Congress decided to formulate that doctrine into a programmatic manifesto. Marx and Engels were the obvious choice for the task, and this was how the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” came to be written.
“With the clarity and brilliance of genius, this work outlines a new world conception, consistent materialism, which also embraces the realm of social life; dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development; the theory of the class struggle and of the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat –– the creator of a new, communist society.”
- Lenin on Communist Manifesto[7]
To accomplish the second task, i.e., to remold the general democratic movement in a proletarian spirit, Marx and Engels set up the “Brussels Democratic Association” (BDA) – with a bourgeois republican as chairman and Marx and a French socialist as vice-chairmen – in November 1847. Thanks to Marx’s brilliant efforts, the Association developed close contacts with the Chartist Party and gradually emerged as the coordinating and leading centre of almost all general democratic movements throughout Europe. At the same time, there was considerable two-line-struggle within and without the Association between the proletarian democrats on the one hand and the petty bourgeois democrats and bourgeois republicans (including the chairman) on the other.
In the meantime, bourgeois democratic revolution was brewing in many European countries including the German states. Marx displayed great organisational skill and tactical ingenuity in rapidly developing the activities of the Communist League, the various Workers’ Societies, and the BDA both in quantity and quality (e.g., under Marx’s initiative the BDA started arming the workers on the eve of the revolution of 1848), and in coordinating all these streams. Naturally he was banished from one country after another, and in April he and Engels arrived in their native land. They and other Communist League members set up numerous Workers’ Associations and Democratic Societies, successfully developed a broad-based united front organisation (the Democratic District Committee). The “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” drawn up by Marx and Engels formulated for the first time the proletariat’s minimum national programme in the democratic revolution and was thus complementary to the “Communist Manifesto”. In June 1848 Marx and Engels established their revolutionary daily “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, with the sub-title “Organ of Democracy”. As Engels subsequently pointed out, in the stage of democratic revolution their banner “could only be that of democracy, but that of a democracy which emphasised everywhere in every point its specific proletarian character,”[8] The paper supported the peasants’ seizure of landlords’ lands and directed its attacks not only against the avowedly reactionary forces, but also against the German big bourgeoisie, which put up a fake op- position. With Marx as its editor-in-chief the editorial board in fact took over the functions of the old Central Committee of the Communist League.
With the crushing defeat of the June uprising in Paris, counter-revolution began to gain the upper hand everywhere. Marx’s revolutionary activities, during this period, included : setting up of a broad-based, democratic “Safety Committee” in September 1848, organising a “People’s Committee”, with a still broader basis in November, taking care of arms collection, re-establishment of the disbanded Civil Guard, addressing numerous mass rallies, and so on. Marx provided outstanding strategic and tactical leadership on a carefully-prepared no-tax campaign in November 1848, a revolutionary utilisation of elections in February 1849 and, very notably, a people’s committee to supervise the elected deputies. At the same time, he continued to provide ideological and political guidance to revolutionary movements in countries like France, Italy and Hungary.
However, counterrevolution was reigning high. The “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” was closed down in May 1849, and Marx was repeatedly prosecuted in reactionary courts. Of these trials, the most important was the one at Cologne in February 1849. In the dock were Marx, Engels and the publisher of “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”; the charge: insult and libel on the Chief Public Prosecutor and the police. Though Marx and Engels had a defense counsel, they took upon themselves the task of beating their opponents with the latter’s own weapons. And they were highly successful. To the great admiration of even his opponents, and to cheers from the teeming public gallery, Marx gave a detailed legal analysis to prove the charges untenable in law and smoothly proceeded to uphold the freedom of the press and to spread the ideas of a people’s revolution. They had to be acquitted, but on the following day Marx and some others were arraigned in court. This time the charge was: incitement to revolt on the part of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats. In a long speech Marx gave a profound theoretical analysis of the factors behind the recent coup in Prussia and of its true nature. He argued in favour of the tactics followed by the said District Committee and repudiated the idea that a revolution had to confine itself to the framework of legality. Referring to the Rhenish District Committee’s appeal to the masses for the non-payment of taxes, he cited examples from history to show that this was a legitimate means of popular self-defence against a government that was violating the people’s interests. He added, “If the crown makes a counterrevolution, the people have the right to reply with a revolution.”
As Engels subsequently pointed out, Marx confronted the bourgeois jury as a communist, forcefully demonstrating that the bourgeoisie themselves should have done the things for which he was being tried. The jury was so much impressed that, while acquitting Marx, their foreman thanked him for his instructive explanations.
After the trials failed, the authorities banished him from one country after another with wife and children. Finally he settled down in London where he lived from August 1849 to the end of his life.
Summing Up the Experience and Theoretical Achievements
In London, Marx carried on organisational activities in the Communist League, the German Workers’ Educational Society etc. and founded the Journal “Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch Oknomische Revue”. Through all these he simultaneously summed up and propagated the lessons of the 1848-49 revolutions, most notably in his “The Class Struggle in France”, which was serialised in the Revue. He also took the most prominent part in setting up the Universal Society of Communist Revolutionaries which brought together the Communist League, the left-wing Chartists and Blanquist emigrants. Immediately after President Louis Bonaparte staged a coup d’état in Paris on December 2, 1851, he wrote, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”. This, together with “Class Struggle in France”, remains to this day outstanding sourcebooks of historical materialism and scientific socialism. In November 1852, counter-revolution forced the Communist League to close down. Marx, however, kept in close touch with the Chartist movement and the American working class movement, and wrote in various progressive bourgeois papers, notably the “New York Daily Tribune”. It was in the “Tribune” that his articles on India, such as “The British Rule in India” and “The Future Results of British Rule in India” were published. But he paid utmost attention to political economy. Of great importance was his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, parts of which were set out in Grundrisse published after his death and, in the words of Lenin, “revolutionised this science ... in his ‘Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859) and ‘Capital’ (Vol. I, 1867)”.[9]
Marx achieved all these at a time when he was extremely oppressed by reaction and penury. In his own words, he often had to go without “pants and shoes”, number of his children died of malnutrition, and he could not even afford a small coffin for one of his daughters. But for Engels’s constant and self-less financial help, perhaps it would have been impossible for Marx to keep body and soul together, let alone complete the “Capital”:
“... I was constantly hovering at the edge of the grave. Hence I had to make use of every moment when I was able to work to complete my book. To which I have sacrificed health, happiness, and family. ... I laugh at the so-called ‘practical’ men and their wisdom. Of course, if one wants to be a swine, one can turn one’s back on mankind’s torments and worry about one’s own skin.[10]
Even after publishing the first volume, he continued work on the same till his death, and Engels brought out volumes II and III after taking great pains in revising and completing the rough manuscripts left by Marx.
From IWA to the Paris Commune
While Marx was deeply immersed in theoretical and political endeavours, the revival of democratic movements in the late fifties and the early sixties prompted Marx to make himself busy once again with practical political activities. The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was founded in London on September 28, 1864 and soon Marx emerged as its best-known leader. He wrote its “Inaugural Address”, “Provisional Rules” and numerous resolutions, declarations, etc. “In uniting the labour movement of various countries”, said Lenin of Marx’s astounding work in the IWA, “striving to channel into joint activity the various forms of non-proletarian, pre-Marxist socialism (Mazzini, Proudhon, Bakunin, liberal trade-unionism in Britain, Lassallean vacillations to the right in Germany etc.) and in combating the theories of all these sects and schools, Marx hammered out a uniform tactic for the proletarian struggle of the working class in various countries.”[11] The work of the IWA spread across the developed capitalist countries, and the Paris Commune of 1871 marked the high point in its activism. On behalf of the IWA Marx kept in close touch with the Parisians. Issued in the name of the International, his “The Civil War in France” presented a profound revolutionary analysis of the Commune, which he regarded as the first historical form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Commune, with all its path-breaking achievements, lived only a little more than two months. After its fall, ideological struggle between the different sects within the IWA crossed all limits and the “naive conjunction of all factions”, as Engels put it[12], started falling apart. Both he and Marx took it in a sporting spirit and bravely looked forward to the future. Their final view on the International was that it had a glorious history, but “in its old form it has outlived its usefulness. ... I believe the next International – after Marx’s writings have exerted their influence for some years – will be directly communist and will candidly proclaim our principles.”[13]
Engels was quite right when he said, “Without the International Moore’s (Marx’s family nickname) life would have been a diamond ring without the diamond”. For further details on the IWA and the Paris Commune, interested readers may see the three-part article Creatively Apply the Lessons of the First International published in Liberation, October and November 2014 and January 2015 numbers.
A Proletarian Fighter to the Last Breath
After pre-Marxian petty-bourgeois socialists of all hues beat a retreat in the face of the theoretical and practical-political work done by Marx and Engels centering around the IWA, Marx once again delved deep into scientific research, primarily for completing “Capital”. But decades of extreme over-work — and that under the most oppressive penury most of the times — brought him to the verge of disablement. However, thanks to the loving care of his wife and comrades, notably Engels, and a few recuperation trips abroad, he managed to remain active. He maintained a very close relation with the socialist parties and groups in various countries, notably Germany. There, the urgent need of unity between the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (popularly known as the Eisenach Party) with which Marx and Engels were closely associated and the Laasallean General Association of German Workers was felt by everybody. Since Marx and Engels believed that condemnation of the retrograde Lassallean dogmas was a necessary condition for unification –– which was therefore a time-consuming affair — they advised leaders of the Eisenach Party not to be impetuous about organisational unifications, but to take real steps towards unity of action. This profound piece of advice, though adhered to initially, was gradually set aside by leaders like Liebknecht for petty tactical reasons, and in early 1875 a unification programme was drawn up by making major theoretical concessions and compromises on questions of principle. Both Marx and Engels instantly drew attention of the leaders of the Eisenach Party to the grave consequences of this blunder, but with little effect. Marx set out the main points of his criticism in what later came to be known as the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”.[14] A most important programme document of scientific communism, this critique was first published by Engels only in 1891, when the programme came up for review.
In the last few years, apart from providing ideological guidance to working class movement on a really universal scale, Marx was immersed in unprecedentedly extensive research work, the fruits of which went into volumes II and III of Capital (both of which remained unfinished; these were given a printable shape and published by Engels after the death of Marx) the “Chronological Notes” (on the history of a number of European, Asian and African countries, originally intended to cover the whole world), articles in journals of many countries and so on. The death of Jenny Marx on December 12, 1881, came as a mortal blow for her husband, and so did the death of their eldest daughter Jenny in January 1883. His health deteriorated irreparably.
And then came the terrible March 14, 1883, when Karl Marx passed away silently and peacefully alone in his room.
“Yesterday afternoon at 2.30 ... I arrived to find the house in tears. ... Our good old Lenchen, who had been looking after him better than any mother cares for her child, went upstairs and came down again. He was half asleep, she said, I might go in with her. When we entered the room he was lying there asleep, but never to wake again. His pulse and breathing had stopped. ...
Medical skill might have assured him a few more years of vegetative existence, the life of a helpless being, dying – to the triumph of the physician’s art – not suddenly, but inch by inch. Our Marx however would never have borne that. To live, with all the unfinished works before him, tantalized by the desire to complete them but unable to do so, would have been a thousand times more bitter to him than the gentle death that betook him. ...
Be that as it may. Mankind is shorter by a head, and that the greatest head of our time. The movement of the proletariat goes on, but gone is the central point to which Frenchmen, Russians, Americans, and Germans spontaneously turned at decisive moments to receive that clear indisputable counsel which only genius and consummate knowledge of the situation could give. ... The final victory remains certain, but the detours, the temporary and local mistakes – which are unavoidable in any case – will now occur much more often. Well, we must see it through; what else we here for? And we far from losing courage because of it.”
Engels to F A Sorge
15 March 1883 [15]
Speaking at the funeral ceremony at Highgate Cemetery, London, which was attended by representatives of many workers’ parties including veterans like Liebknecht, Engels impressively brought out the multi-dimensional genius of Karl Marx as a scientist and revolutionary fighter. Said he, “... Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders on him. All this he brushed aside as though it were cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered, and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers — from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America — and I make bold to say that though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy.
His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.”[16]
[This is a slightly modified version of an article published in the September 1983 Special Number of Liberation commemorating the anniversary of the death of Karl Marx.]
“... Against the collective power of
the propertied classes
the working-class cannot act,
as a class,
except by constituting itself into a
political party,
distinct from,
and opposed to,
all old parties formed by the
propertied classes.”
Notes:
1. Marx’s answers to a questionnaire circulated in 1865 in England and Germany; quoted in the compendium “Marx and Engels: On Literature and Art”.
2. “Karl Marx A Biography” (English Translation of the Russian edition, Moscow, 1968, written by P.N. Fedoseyev and others on behalf of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU Central Committee.)
3. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Karl Marx, Introduction.
4. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. I.)
5. Named after Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, French anarchist politician and author of “Philosophy of Poverty”. It was this work that Marx mercilessly criticised in his “Poverty of Philosophy” (1847).
6. Marx’s lectures in one of these societies provided the body of his well-known pamphlet “Wage Labour and Capital”.
7. Karl Marx by Lenin (Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol 21.)
8. Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. III.
9. Lenin in Karl Marx, ibid.
10. Letter to Sigfred Mayer, dated April 30, 1867; see Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence.
11. Karl Marx, ibid.
12. Letter to Friedrich Adolf Sorge, September 1874 (Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence.)
13. Ibid.
14. Gotha was the seat of the unification Congress held in May, 1875.
15. Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence.
16. Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx, Selected Works. Vol. III.
We are commemorating the bicentenary of Karl Marx’s birth. At a time when the Sangh brigade has unleashed a virulent assault on democracy and is trying to forcibly impose the Sangh’s ideology on the entire country and society, the Marx Bicentenary gives us a great opportunity to widely disseminate and discuss Marx’s revolutionary ideas and wage a powerful battle for democracy, liberty and equality.
The fascists know the power of Marx. All through the twentieth century whenever and wherever fascists raised their ugly heads in the world, the followers of Marx fought them tooth and nail and consigned them to the dustbins of history. Hitler, their role model from German history, was vanquished in the Second World War by the Red Army of the Soviet Union. It was not just a military victory, but above all it was a great ideological victory which inspired and empowered the forces of freedom, democracy and equality across the world. Today when we resist the fascists in power in India, we have a great friend, philosopher and guide in Marx.
Indeed, Marx was a great friend and well wisher of India in his own lifetime. The Sangh brigade thinks they can keep us away from Marx by just saying that he was a foreigner. True, he was a German and never visited India. But from the 1850s till he breathed his last in 1883, he was based in London, the capital of the British colonialists who were plundering and suppressing India. Sitting in London, Marx was unravelling the mystery of capital and encouraging the working classes of all countries to fight against the exploitation of capital. India did not yet have much of a modern working class, but anti-colonial stirrings have begun and Marx followed them keenly with great hope.
The British colonialists wanted to camouflage their colonial rule as a great mission of civilisation. They sought to project their expedition in India as a great exercise in development and empowerment. Marx systematically challenged this false narrative and exposed the true nature of the colonial rule in India. As early as in July 1853, two years before the great Santhal revolt and four years before the historic 1857 upsurge, Marx was dreaming of the end of British colonial rule, either through a proletarian revolution in Britain or through Indians growing powerful enough to throw off the yoke of colonialism. That in a way is the first political vision of India’s independence, nearly a century before the colonial occupation actually ended.
While exposing the British hypocrisy of waxing eloquent about democracy at home and presiding over brutal police states in the colonies, Marx was no admirer of the pre-British Indian system either. Not for him was the myth of self-sufficient village communities, he knew enough about caste and social slavery in India to describe the Indian social system as nothing short of Oriental despotism. Indian thinkers like Phule have also used strong words like ‘Gulamgiri’ or slavery to describe the internal social condition of colonial India. A true account of India’s freedom movement must give equal focus on both India’s quest for freedom from the colonial rulers and also for an end to what Marx called Oriental despotism or what Phule called slavery.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, apologists of capitalism all over the world had triumphantly declared that they had now buried Marx for good. But as the 21st century dawned and capitalism found itself caught in one of its worst ever crises, Marx was again back with a bang. Every time capitalism hits a new crisis, the managers of capitalism also turn to Marx to comprehend the crisis. The collapse of the Soviet Union was of course a major setback for the communist camp at the end of the 20th century, but it has freed Marx and Marxism from the straitjacket of the Soviet model and forced communists across the world to confront the post-Soviet world, and now we have an emerging post-Soviet generation of Marxists who are not weighed down by the Soviet collapse.
In his lifetime Marx was not exclusively identified with any single model. With his closest comrade-in-arms Friedrich Engels, he wrote the Communist Manifesto in February 1848 anticipating a wave of progressive revolutions in Europe that would be a step forward from the French Revolution of 1789 that had given the world the clarion call of liberty, equality and fraternity. But in real life, 1848 turned out to be a reverse turning point for Europe where bourgeois regimes consolidated themselves by restricting the scope for working class advances. It was not till 1871 Paris Commune that Europe could get a glimpse of a working class uprising, and even that uprising did not last for more than seventy days even as it contributed immensely to the concretising of the socialist vision. Marx’s mission of bringing together the working class movements of his time under the banner of the International Workingmen’s Association, recognised as the First International in world history, could not survive the setback and tactical debates that ensued in the wake of the Paris Commune. This shows us that the ideas of Marx never really became popular on the basis of so-called big models of applied success, rather they continued to spread defying setbacks and repression because they reflected the felt need and shared urgency for social change, for a society beyond the crisis and chaos and brutalities of capitalism.
Marx continues to resonate even after two hundred years of birth because he was a philosopher and champion of change. All through his life he remained true to his declaration: philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, but the point is to change it. And he stuck to the method he had enunciated even before he wrote the Communist Manifesto: ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of facing up to its own consequences and with-standing the repression unleashed by inimical regimes. He never bothered about creating a detailed blueprint or plan of a society based on equality and emancipation, the details were left to be worked out by future generations. What was important for Marx was to fight for change here and now, with whatever materials and conditions handed down by history. Change for him is the only constant in nature and social life, and this change is a continuous process. Continuous, but not linear; for life always passes through a zigzag course, and keeps negotiating ups and downs. So there is no perfect context or minimum threshold for change in Marx, Marxism inspires and empowers us to fight for change in any situation.
Marx laid bare the mystery of capital for us, capital that was created by the human society in the course of its development and which now tries to set the terms for everything that human beings do. We are taught to treat capital as a key factor or component of production alongside land or natural resources and human labour. But unlike natural resources or living labour, there is nothing natural about capital. Marx takes us to the process of formation or accumulation of capital, exposes the cruelty and violence, loot and plunder, slavery and dehumanisation that are integral to the process that Marx calls the primitive accumulation of capital and which we continue to witness in various ongoing forms of dispossession of the people across the world especially in countries and regions that lag behind in the race of capital-dictated development. In Marx’s memorable words, if money comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
We are schooled to believe that capital lies at the root of development, at the centre of modern human civilisation; that production and employment follow from capital. Marx tells us that if anything is central to capital, it is profit. This is the only motive for which capital exists and Marx approvingly quoted a trade union leader of his time to show how with increasing profit margin, capital exposes its true colours: A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certain will produce eagerness; 50 percent positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. The forms of capital have changed, its speed has now become electronic, it now truly considers the whole world its stage and brooks no border or barrier. The American inventor Thomas Alva Edison had famously said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Paraphrasing him today we can say the business of capital is one percent production and ninety-nine percent speculation. When subjected to production capital extracts surplus value from labour power, and away from the trouble of actual production it goes on creating bubbles through speculation that burst periodically plunging the increasingly globalised economy in ever deeper and wider crises.
Marx tells us that it is not money or machine that constitutes the essence of capital, the essence of capital lies in that social power whereby those who own capital need not work and those who are deprived of capital are compelled to sell their labour power, whether manual or intellectual, to eke out a living. This rule of capital is enforced by the state. But just as capital is a social construct so is the state. And it is possible to imagine and attain a society that will transcend capital and also the state where society will be an association of free producers or a community of freely associated individuals, an association where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. This was communism in Marx’s vision where each will contribute according to his or her capacity and get according to his or her needs.
Marx inspires us to imagine and fight for a society beyond capital and capitalism. To help us understand this, let us think of a quick analogy of an agrarian society where the economy is dominated by agricultural production. What do we need for agriculture? We need cultivable land, we need agricultural implements and inputs, we need techniques of farming and of course we need labour, whether put in by the peasant himself or by hired agricultural labourers. But do we at all need a landlord owning hundreds of acres of land? Today the answer is an obvious no when landlordism has been legally abolished and we know that the abolition of landlordism has actually contributed to the growth of agriculture. If a landlord has thus been rendered superfluous in the context of the agrarian economy, do we really need a capitalist, a private owner of capital, for a modern economy based on industrial production, wide-ranging services and specialised knowledge? The answer should again be NO.
We need factories and workplaces, we need machines and techniques, we need workers working in close coordination with each other, we need scientists and engineers and inspectors checking the quality of production and even various ways of organising and managing the work and the workers. What we do not need is an individual owning and inheriting a business empire which is actually a parasitical role that has come to dominate every necessary aspect and component of the production process and the entire economy. Match socialisation of labour with socialisation of appropriation and ownership and capitalism is shaken to its roots.
The journey from the dehumanising rule of capital to this reign of fullest human freedom is marked by small and big changes, by small steps and big leaps, reforms and revolutions. And this is the context in which Marx talks about class struggle, the key dynamic of his revolutionary theory and practice. Class struggle as such dates back to the emergence of class-divided society and class rule, and Marx claims no credit for discovering it, his historic contribution lies in linking the dynamic of class struggle to the destination of communism.
Obviously Marx is talking of class struggle not in the limited context of two antagonistic classes battling it out over some immediate and specific interest. That is often the first step of class struggle, and the worker usually takes and learns this first step quite instinctively as trade unions take shape amidst the constant guerrilla conflict between labour and capital. Marx is talking of class struggle as a weapon of social transformation. He acquaints us with the secret of class rule and through class struggle he seeks to challenge and overthrow the existing class rule in its entirety. Talking of class rule we usually talk about the two pillars – capital and the state. The concentration of capital in a few hands and hence the ever growing inequality in capitalist societies are facts that are widely recognised. The Occupy Wall Street movement articulated it as the battle of the excluded 99 percent against the power and privilege of the top one percent. In Britain the Corbyn campaign expressed it through the slogan ‘for the many, not the few’. When the state opens fire on unarmed people demanding closure of a polluting plant for the sake of breathable air and potable water, the character of the state as the organ of the rule of the dominant class becomes crystal clear.
But if we read Marx a bit carefully we find him drawing our attention to a third pillar – the domain of ideas. In every epoch, the ideas of the ruling classes are the ruling ideas, says Marx. In other words, the ruling classes constantly legitimise their rule in the realm of ideas. Chomsky calls it the manufacture of consent. To challenge and overthrow the rule of the dominant class, the battle therefore has to be waged on all fronts – against economic control, political control as well as ideological control. Many people who think Marx is inapplicable in India because of the domination of caste and religion in India actually miss this very crucial ideological dimension of class struggle.
What are the dominant ideas in India? We can easily see most of the dominant ideas in India are heavily tilted against change and social mobility. We are constantly told that everything is pre-ordained by fate, that you need not worry about what you get in life, for you are ordained to get the right thing in the right amount at the right moment. We are told that whatever we are getting now is because of our karma in previous births, and the rewards for good things we do now will accrue to us in our future births. We are encouraged to go on working without bothering about the result or reward. We are told that the common Hindu’s station in life is determined at his birth through his caste, that caste is a divinely ordained institution that must not be transgressed. Women are told in every possible way that they are inferior to men and that their job is to serve men all through their lives within the strict frontiers of community, caste and family, their silence and sacrifice are glorified while every attempt to seek their rights as free individuals are prohibited and punished. The Manusmriti is of course the cruellest possible codification of these regressive ideas, this and other texts of Brahminism constitute the ideological fountainhead of mi- sogyny, untouchability and social slavery in India.
Any Marxist theory and practice of class struggle in India therefore must entail a vigorous struggle against all the dominant and well entrenched ideas that justify the status quo and inhibit any kind of social change and mobility. Looked at this way there is really no Chinese wall between caste and class. No matter whether Marx had heard about Phule or vice versa, the fact that Phule wrote about social slavery in India in terms of both caste and gender way back in 1873 constitutes a major contribution to class struggle in the realm of ideology. It does not matter how much Ambedkar eventually agreed with Marx, his clarion call of annihilation of caste in 1936 articulated what must be recognised and grasped as a key thrust of class struggle in India. Indeed when Ambedkar tells us that caste is not about division of labour but division of labourers, he actually calls for unity and assertion of labourers as a class on an anti-caste basis. Annihilation of caste is one of the most essential and radical steps for class polarisation in India. Indeed, Communist Manifesto visualised the rise of the proletariat, the lowest stratum of the society, as ‘the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air’. Caste hierarchy and patriarchy are key markers of the ‘official society’ in India and the proletariat can only rise by delivering decisive blows to the entire edifice of this official society.
In Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had entrusted the working class with the task of winning the battle of democracy and declaring itself the nation. This is the key significance of the working class emerging as the leading or ruling class in a class-divided society. Today in India, we are faced with not just a routine kind of class rule of capital, what we are confronting is nothing short of a fascist regime that combines the most unabashed kind of crony capitalism and subservience to imperialism with aggressive majoritarianism and the worst forms of caste and gender violence and oppression. While the Constitution of India is being daily subverted and shelved, the rule of lynch mobs, often openly protected and patronised by the state and the ruling party, has emerged as the order of the day in place of the rule of law that is supposed to be the basic foundation of every bourgeois republic. The most regressive ideas and trends in Indian history, that remained largely marginalised during the anti-colonial struggle, seem to have staged a parliamentary coup, using electoral victories as a licence to reshape the state and regiment the society on most regressive lines. A holistic understanding of Marx is extremely important in foiling this fascist design by unleashing the broadest unity and boldest resistance of the Indian people.
“I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews!”
One of the key aspects of Nazism was the deterring and prohibition of inter-racial relationships between men and women. 
Goebbels had already brought about a thorough shake-up in German radio, now a good many newspapers were simply banned and others subjected to strict government monitoring and economic pressure. Some of the larger liberal newspapers were granted a measure of freedom, but even these were constrained by daily governmental press instructions and self-censorship.
The first major Nazi massacre was directed against its own people – the SA. And the reason was entirely political.
When the Nazi party consolidated its power with the Enabling Act, the SA found itself robbed of their most important raison d’être: terrorising and neutralising the Nazis’ political opponents. Indeed, the Brownshirts’ violent activism had become superfluous and politically counter-productive. So in early August 1933 the government rescinded the decree which had made the SA an auxiliary police force. The consequent disgruntlement among SA men was accompanied by disillusionment among sections of the population triggered by price hike and stagnant wages, corruption and nepotism, unrealistic expectations from the Messiah remaining unfulfilled, and so on. Hitler was still very popular, but not all his colleagues. A report compiled by the SPD in exile based on information from sources within Germany, recorded as typical the sentiments of a Munich resident: “Our Adolf is all right, but those around him are all complete scoundrels.”
The World’s One Hope
“ … before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.”
Rosa Luxemburg had opined, within the party, that an insurrection would be disastrous when the forces of the right were gathering strength. But when it was started, she joined her comrades; arguing that events were now in motion and that standing on the sidelines would be a worse mistake than waiting for the right moment. Days later, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were taken prisoner by the freikorps and summarily executed. Liebknecht’s body was dumped anonymously at the city morgue and Luxemburg’s was found months later in the Landwehr canal.
The gift of the gab was Hitler’s prime weapon in building his political career; so why not take a closer look at it?[4]
