Lessons from the colossal failure of the 1930s German Left
“…to the leading Nazis it suggested something more sinister: the Communists were preparing in secret for a nationwide uprising. The fears of civil war that had plagued German politics in late 1932 and early 1933 did not vanish overnight… The more they waited, the more nervous the Nazi leaders grew. Surely something must happen soon?” -Richard Evans from The Coming of the Third Reich
Political upheaval from despots in modern times has happened in locations ranging from Cambodia to China to Chile, but for some reason, we in the US most often want to compare the prospect of fascism here to Nazi Germany.
It’s understandable; we share with Germany a common western heritage and a similar middle-class industrial/economic base dominated by oligarchs. At the risk of being sprawling and academic, for my own knowledge I’ve wanted for some time to look at the events in 1930s Germany to see if there are lessons for us in the modern USA, and the question seems especially relevant in 2024.
For me the journey started in 1970 in 10th-grade Social Studies, where Mr. Cady announced one day that anyone who read William Shirer’s RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH for their book report would get an automatic “A” for the entire semester. It didn’t matter how good the report was, one merely had to read it (over 1,200 pages), write something, and you’d get an “A” because the book was so massive & crucial. It was an important book for Americans of the World War II generation, and my mom similarly told me that if I never read anything else while she was alive, this was the one book I needed to read.
Before I actually read RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH late in the 12th grade (Mr. Cady had left by then so the book report deal was off), I’d assumed that because Hitler came to power, the Nazi stormtroopers must have triumphed in the streets. But I soon learned that this wasn’t necessarily so. I was surprised to read in Shirer about pitched street battles between the Brownshirts and Germany’s Communists, the Red Front Fighters’ League. In a book published decades later, historian Richard Evans, in part one of his three-part history of the Third Reich titled THE COMING OF THE THIRD REICH, confirmed the intensity of the German Communists: “Of all their opponents, the Nazis feared and hated the Communists the most. In countless street-battles and meeting-hall clashes the Communists had shown that they could trade punch for punch and exchange shot for shot with their brownshirt counterparts.” (1)
But let us start nearer the beginning. Germany’s dominant party at the time of the Weimar Republic, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), traced its foundations to the 1870s Bismarck regime, during which it was outlawed because of its socialist proclivities. By 1890, although they were legal again, the SPD had come to see their own revolutionary Left as a detriment, and so became a semi-socialist party of skilled functionaries. By the end of World War I, although not having enough votes to be exclusive, they became the majority party of the Weimar Republic; as “social democrats” rather than true socialists, the SPD from that point came to embody Weimar, dropping their former Marxist orientation as they sidelined their own left wing, and opting to make gains for the workers by “reform” within the system by way of “peaceful class struggle.”
But there was little peace to be had in Germany. By 1930, after a decade of hyperinflation, unemployment, war reparations, and street violence, Germany’s problems were compounded and exacerbated further by the Great Depression. Hitler and the National Socialists gained appreciable seats in the government that year, but when it came to open conflict, the SPD, much like liberals in the US today, always made sure to take the side of civility. A tragic event that initiated the 1930s downfall occurred in 1932 when von Papen was illegally installed as Reich Commissioner of Prussia, Germany’s largest state and an SPD stronghold, in a largely bloodless coup. There was no resistance from the police, who were, allegedly, sworn to uphold the Republic. In predictable form, the Social Democrats felt that the violation of civility embodied in the coup was not as bad as violating their own cherished principle of civility; they “trusted that the constitutional process… would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic… extra-paramilitary and ‘unlawful’ actions were condemned by a leadership which trusted that constitutional processes and the return of reason and fair play would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic and its chief supporters,” observed a historian named Edinger. “The Social Democrats refused to take the Nazi program too seriously. It sounded utterly absurd and appeared unlikely to receive the support of a majority of the electorate.” “Avoidance of civil war,” said a historian named Winkler, was the party’s “supreme guiding principle” during the revolutions of 1918-1919 (in which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered) and remained so until the end. Winkler states that to cooperate with the Communists would have meant the SPD abandoning their coalitions with bourgeois parties, thus losing their hold on state power.
But true Leftists, even though cast off by the Social Democrats, still remained a legitimate force to be contended with on their own. In the 1930 elections, while the Nazis surprised everyone by electing 107 members to the Reichstag, the Communists also increased their representation from 54 to a respectable 77 seats. By 1932, membership in the Communist party (KPD) was 360,000, up from 117,000 in 1929, and by early 1933, they had 100 seats in the Reichstag; together by early 1933, the Communists and Social Democrats had a combined 221 seats in the Reichstag compared to the Nazis’ 196.
But the two parties would never cooperate. In an essay written from exile in Turkey in 1931 titled FOR A WORKERS’ UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM, Leon Trotsky foresaw the inevitability of fascist takeover; he implored the German Communists: “We are unshakably convinced that the victory over the fascists is possible – not after their coming to power, not after five, ten, or twenty years of their rule, but now… you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you.
Unfortunately, the German Communists’ strategy was not directed by Trotsky, or even by anyone in Germany, but emanated directly from Stalin in Moscow. The Kremlin saw Social Democracy as the greater threat; fascism, they said, was a logical consequence of end-stage capitalism, and therefore should be allowed to occur naturally; “After Hitler, Our Turn” became the call of the German Communist Party, whose stated belief was that furthering social democracy would only serve to delay the inevitability of capitalism’s downfall. The SPD were now labeled as “Social Fascists,” and “Social Fascism” became an enemy greater than Nazi fascism. The historian Winkler takes this insidiousness even further, proposing that for Stalin, at least a Rightist military dictatorship in Germany had the advantage of creating the alienation, or potentially the defeat, of Germany’s pro-western allies, who were the USSR’s sworn enemies.
The German KPD and their leader, Ernst Thälmann, took this Soviet directive seriously. (2) “The Communists, convinced by the very violence of the Nazis that the class struggle against ‘monopoly capitalism’ was nearing a climax and the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ just around the corner, fell victim to their illusions,” wrote Edinger. The Communist KPD held stubbornly to the belief that fascism was the logical consequence of end-stage capitalism, that capitalism via the Nazis would “soon collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.”
On the conservative end of the Left continuum, the Social Democrats remained steadfast believers in their tried & tested programme, clinging “to the organizational and tactical forms to which they attributed the party’s successes in the past,” including “respect for law and order.” Somewhat unbelievably, the SPD even had their own paramilitary wing, the Reichsbanner, who could have joined with the Communist Red Front Fighters in the streets, but usually ended up brawling with them instead; perhaps predictably, the Reichsbanner were mostly unarmed. (3)
After the substantial events of the aforementioned Prussian coup, which destabilized German government at large, on January 30, 1933, the aging Field Marshal Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor. With three Nazis (Goering, Frick, and Hitler) now holding cabinet positions, that night a parade of Brownshirts, SS, and Steel Helmets (the paramilitary wing of a Nazi-allied conservative party), estimated at some 61,000 men, marched for hours under torchlight in Berlin. Soon after, a February 4th decree made armed breaches of the peace illegal (except for those conducted by the Brownshirts); SPD members met with unionists on January 31th in Berlin to plan a nationwide general strike, but the SPD leadership backed down. Soon it became too late. Goering, now the Prussian Prime Minister, on February 22nd set up an auxiliary police force made up of SS and SA (Storm Troopers) that broke into and destroyed Communist and union offices, while local police either looked the other way or joined in; SPD newspapers came under bans in certain areas, while the SPD, in characteristic form, responded by attempting legal action; meanwhile, local police protections for the SPD were removed as well, and incidents of destruction and occasional murder proceeded apace throughout much of Germany.
And then came the burning of the Reichstag. In the days following the Reichstag fire, set by a supposed Communist, the Nazis warned of an “imminent German Bolshevik revolution” as some 4,000 Communists were arrested, many being dragged from their homes; by March 1933, the number of Communists under arrest was 10,000. Not immune from the destruction were Social Democrats, whose leaflets were burned, posters ripped down, and printing presses destroyed, and many of whom dragged from their homes. In the March 1933 elections, the last to be held before complete Nazi accession to power, the Nazis only gained a minority position of 44% in the Reichstag, but together with the Nationalists constituted a weak 52% majority. The fact that the Communists, Social Democrats, and Centrist parties had a combined 17.5 million votes to the Nazis’ 17 million “testified to the complete failure of the Nazis, even under conditions of a semi-dictatorship, to win over a majority of the electorate,” says the historian Evans. But the point was moot, because as long as Hitler and Goering held office, the legislature was irrelevant.
Much like the liberal critics of today, who take every blunder by Trump as a herald of his imminent downfall, the SPD, still in denial, predicted Hitler’s early demise. As late as March 18th an SPD party theorist predicted that Hitler would soon be abandoned by his supporters. Such views confirm the wisdom of Trotsky’s aphorism that “there is no greater crime in politics than that of hoping for stupidities on the part of a strong enemy.”
On March 6, the Nazis outlawed the Communist Party. On March 20, Himmler announced to the press that there would be “a concentration camp for political prisoners” opened at Dachau; the first of many, its wide publication in the press was meant to constitute a warning. (4) By the end of 1933, 130,000 Communist Party members had been arrested and an estimated 2,500 murdered. On June 23, 1933, Hitler also outlawed the German Social Democratic Party, and their members were similarly set upon, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.
After such a litany of horror, perhaps it’s time get back to the original stated question of this article: are there lessons from Germany’s 1930s failure for us today?
In the broad sense, similar to the German Social Democrats, there has been a general underestimation by US liberals about the ferocity of another Trump regime. While the mainstream finally has come to use words like “fascist” and “authoritarian” to describe Trumpism, they still fail to appreciate just how far this true authoritarianism will take us. For example, a special 2023 issue of Atlantic Magazine, assessing the likely effects of another Trump regime, employed a checklist approach about US institutions under Trump again – the military, NATO, journalism, and others – without seeming to consider the relevance of these institutions if all journalists are jailed or if the military becomes a domestic occupying force. A quote from historian Mark Bray bears repeating: the US media specifically (and mainstream liberal culture generally) “is not often attuned to politics outside of conventional elections” and “have no framework to interpret such a threat.… They are ill-equipped to contextualize this threat within the broader fascistic politics of Trump and his supporters.”
What about a more specific lesson? Can we learn from the failure of the German liberal Left (the SPD) and the Communist Left (the KPD) to unite in resistance against the threat of fascism? In other words, could we in the US become a more unified Left? I have to confess frustration with fellow Anarchists who insist on *not* voting this year, and the usual reason given is because both candidates will continue the US course of Zionism. This is undoubtedly true! But my response is that under one candidate you will at least be able to protest about US Zionism, while under the other candidate, you and I will likely end up dead or in prison. Of course, voting for many of us seems irrelevant anyway, because there are so few Leftists to vote, and many of us live in overwhelmingly red states anyway. Although cases have been made about spoiler candidates like Ralph Nader or Jill Stein ruining Democratic chances, in fact there is virtually no true American Left – Communist, Anarchist, or Socialist – whose votes number enough to matter in an election.
And when it comes to civil strife in the streets, it’s something that the far Right, and even the regular centrist Right, have been preparing for, for decades. You and I both know that they are well armed. We also all know that the liberal centrist Left, who make up such a large portion of the US, will always trust in the police to protect them when the shit finally comes down.
Notes
1. Statistics for 1931 bear out the ferocity of Communist street fighters, with the SA (Nazi stormtroopers) suffering the largest number of injuries and deaths – 4,699 compared to 2,924 casualties for the Communists and Reichsbanner (the unarmed paramilitary arm of the Social Democratic Party) combined. In looking at additional data, historian Daniel Siemens similarly concluded that between 1930 and 1932 Nazis were more often murdered in conflicts than their leftist and centrist paramilitary counterparts.
2. The Reichsbanner would be analogous to today’s U.S. Democratic party having their own paramilitary group like the Oath Keepers, which is an unlikely concept indeed. The Reichsbanner, which later became part of the Iron Front, considered both the far Right and far Left to be enemies of the Republic, and historians have said that the Red Front Fighters’ League and the Reichsbanner were often responsible for many of each others’ casualties.
3. Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann was imprisoned in 1933 and kept in solitary confinement at Buchenwald until he was ordered shot by Hitler in 1944.
4. In a recent column, historian Heather Cox Richardson rightly states that the first camps were for political prisoners, but neglects (perhaps deliberately) to mention that these political prisoners were Leftists.
Edinger, Lewis J. 1953. German Social Democracy and Hitler’s “National Revolution” of 1933: A Study in Democratic Leadership. World Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3 pp. 330-367.
Evans, Richard J. 2004. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin Press.
Shirer, William L. 1960. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon & Schuster.
Siemens, Daniel. 2017. Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts. Yale University Press.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm
Winkler, Heinrich A. 1990. Choosing the Lesser Evil: The German Social Democrats and the Fall of the Weimar Republic. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 25, No. 2/3, pp. 205-227.