-Caveat Lector- Message 5342 of 5601 | Previous | Next [ Up Thread ] Message Index Msg # From: Michael Pugliese <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri Aug 24, 2001 5:56 pm Subject: Causal Nexus? Toward a Real History of Anti-Fascism and Anti-Bolshevism EBSCO "hits" on anti-fascism. Result 8 of 18 [Go To Full Text] [Tips] Title: Causal Nexus? Toward a Real History of Anti-Fascism and Anti-Bolshevism(*). Subject(s): FASCISM; HITLER, Adolf; COMMUNISM; NATIONAL socialists Source: Telos, Winter99 Issue 114, p49, 18p Author(s): Koenen, Gerd Abstract: Focuses on the historical events of anti-fascism and anti-Bolshevism. Role of the Nazis or national socialists; Adolf Hitler as an anti-Bolshevism; End of the communism propaganda. AN: 1958636 ISSN: 0090-6514 Note: This title is held locally. Database: MasterFILE Select Print: Click here to mark for print. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- [Go To Citation] Select Language inglés/español anglais/français Englisch/Deutsch inglês/português inglese/italiano Best Part CAUSAL NEXUS? TOWARD A REAL HISTORY OF ANTI-FASCISM AND ANTI-BOLSHEVISM(*) The question of whether there was a "causal nexus" between Bolshevism in the Soviet Union and National Socialism in Germany is far older than the Historikerstreit. Ernst Nolte's controversial thesis implied that the formation of the Nazis as a party (NSDAP) and a movement, and their subsequent rise to power were hardly conceivable without the German bourgeoisie's basic fear of Bolshevism; the Nazis' exterminatory anti-Semitism was only a sort of response to, and the interpretive reversal of, the looming expectation of a Sovietized Germany. Thus, Bolshevik "class genocide" provided the historical model for Nazi "race genocide," the annihilation of European Jews. Nolte's thesis was only a mirror-image of the postwar mythology of communist anti-fascism, according to which Stalinist collectivization and the Great Terror of the 1930s were merely prophylactic precautionary measures or simple reactions to the "deadly threat" of a rising National Socialism and its plans in the East. Thus, the fact that the Soviet leadership put the entire country on a war footing and pursued industrialization and re-armament irrespective of human casualties appeared extremely prescient. Even in the West, many people were ready to see things that way. In particular, this attitude corresponded to the feelings of many Soviet citizens in light of the historical 1945 victory. The fascists and the German invasion were blamed for all their sufferings and depravations, even for the millions meaninglessly "repressed," who disappeared, or died in the prime of life. Revolution, civil war, collectivization, cleansing, and world war, melted into a single epoch of blood and iron. This does not alter the fact that such a view has nothing to do with 1930's realities. The rise of National Socialism was in no way seen negatively by Moscow, but rather as part of German revanchism against the Versailles Powers -- a revanchism that had become virulent during the world economic crisis, and on which certain hopes could be pinned. The secret relation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army was tense, but useful. In the course of the five-year plan, technical and economic collaboration between both countries intensified. In February 1931, a grand delegation of German business magnates from Krupp to Borsig, to Klockner and Siemens -- went to the USSR. The company heads returned impressed, and pressed the German government to secure the promised "Russian orders" with state guaranteed credits and securities. In 1932, almost half of Russian imports, above all technological commodities, came from Germany, exceeding imports from the US, whose companies, in the meantime, had become more committed to Russia. Moscow also attempted to court allies within the German-national and national-revolutionary intelligence communities. Thus, in January 1932, prominent figures such as Otto Hoetzsch, Klaus Mehnert, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, Adolf Grabowsky, Friedrich Lenz, and Ernst Niekisch could be recruited for an "Association for the Study of the Planned Economy in the USSR" (Arbplan), founded by party members Georg Lukacs, Arvid von Hamack, Karl A. Wittfogel and Paul Massing. In August 1932, an Arbplan delegation traveled to Soviet Russia. In a 1941 party report, Lukacs characterized the twenty-five participants as people from the Right, "with sometimes fascist ideas, who were, however, for various reasons, supporters of a pro-Soviet orientation of German politics." Even if this undertaking remained a mere episode, it sheds light on Soviet foreign policy toward Germany before 1933. In accordance with the resolutions of the VI. Comintern Congress (1928), the politics of the German Communist Party (KPD) were aimed primarily against so-called "social fascism," i.e., Social Democracy, as were those of the most significant communist parties outside of the Soviet Union. That was no mere misjudgment, but rather a matter of definition. According to the Comintern, "fascism" was identical with a militant "anti-Bolshevism" found not just in the propertied upper classes, but also in the "corrupt" petit-bourgeoisie and proletarian masses. To a certain extent, Social Democracy stood for pro-Western politics; it viewed the Soviet Union with extreme skepticism and was ready to defend the Weimer Republic against all attempts to overthrow it, from the Right as well as the Left. This is what revealed its "social-fascist" character. The KPD press, of course, designated all parties as "fascist." Besides the social fascists, there were also the clerical fascists (the center), the national fascists (German nationals) and, finally, the Nazis or the Hitler fascists. In 1930, when the NSDAP became the second-strongest party overnight, the KPD attempted to steal their thunder with a "Programmatic Explanation of the National and Social Emancipation of the German People." In this program, the Nazis were characterized as pseudo-radical demagogues, who were profiting from social-democratic "treason." The true champions of the German people's national interests were the communists, who, immediately after coming to power, would "rip up" the Treaty of Versailles, and would "consider annexation with the Soviet Union of those areas of Germany that expressed a wish for it." These areas were probably Austria, the Sudetenland, Danzig, the former West Prussia --the so-called corridor. A socialist Greater Germany participating in the Soviet Union's powerful industrialization project would not just overcome the economic crisis in a single stroke, but would also form an insurmountable block against Western imperialists and exploiters. Hidden in this idea was the autochthonous nationalism of the KPD cadres, who assumed that the center of an expanded "Union of Socialist Soviet Republics," as Lenin had foreseen it, would expand out from Moscow into red Berlin. When, in 1932, the Nazis became the strongest party, this was understood as the worsening of an "inescapable" crisis of capitalism that could only end in revolution. In any case, the KPD had also made significant gains. In the July elections, 5.3 million people voted for the Communists. In the November elections, 600,000 more voted for them. With a share of almost 17%, the KPD came within 3.5% of the SPD, and, in the important industrial districts, the Communists clearly surpassed the Social Democrats. In "red Berlin," they even received more votes than the SPD and the NSDAP combined, at a time when they had crippled the city's public transportation services with a "wild" strike, and, in a sensational turn, had allied themselves with "National Socialist trade organizations." The NSDAP was punished by the electorate with sharp voting losses, particularly in bourgeois quarters, and seemed to be on the decline. Could there have been any clearer proof that it was possible, with demonstrations of revolutionary character, to gain the support of the masses and drive the system into total disintegration? The possibility that another Hugenberg government or a Hitler government could come to power before this disintegration had to be considered. But the Communists did not fear such a development. On the contrary: if the disappointed masses turned away from the Nazi economic leadership, because they could neither break the Versailles Diktat nor solve the economic crisis and were unable to overcome the general impoverishment, armed uprising would be inevitable. The fact that, in early 1933, with almost 6 million supporters, 100,000 disciplined members, and a well-built conspiratorial apparatus, the KPD remained largely passive after Hitler took power can only be explained by this strategy of "revolutionary agitation," which was directly related to Soviet policy toward Germany. This, incidentally, already prefigured similarities with Stalin's catastrophic misjudgment between 1939 and 1941, when Hitler and the Nazis were accorded a central role in the destruction of the "old" capitalist-imperialist world system. In any case, Hitler's seizure of power did not upset the Soviet leadership. Even the shattering of the KPD under the pretext of the Reichstag fire and the instauration of the Nazi dictatorship did not lead to any serious strain on foreign relations. In May 1933, the Berlin "Treaty of Neutrality and Friendship," signed in 1926, which had lapsed in the meantime, was extended. The head of the German Weapons Bureau, Bockelberg, completed a fourteen-week tour of the Soviet Union, was literally overwhelmed with expressions of friendship, and, after his return, pleaded for expanded military collaboration. He was unsuccessful. Over ten years of cooperation gradually came to an end by mutual agreement. For the most part, it had fulfilled its purpose for both sides: to develop and test future armaments in a close exchange of experiences. Moscow allowed airplane prototypes, tank artillery, and models built in German testing stations in the Soviet Union to be returned to Germany in their entirety, and even provided the necessary workforce and means of transport. The good-byes usually took the form of warm assurances that "the old camaraderie should endure." On the whole, the Soviet Union had been ahead of Germany in the development and production of modern weapons systems for quite some time. When the Third Reich began its tank and airplane production in 1934, the Red Army had long been well-equipped with both sorts of weapons. The only one to speak of a Third Reich threat was the longdemoted former German expert and ex-Trotskyst Karl Radek. Instead, in January 1934, one of Stalin's closest confidants, Voroshilov, assured the German ambassador that "Two public words from the Chancellor would suffice to dispel the anti-Soviet tendencies of Mein Kampf." Just how little the Nazi takeover was seen as a caesura is shown by a discussion in the Comintern's executive committee in December 1933. The aforementioned definition of fascism was reiterated, according to which fascism is "the public, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialistic elements of finance capital." Fascism was thus only a gradual, not a qualitative change with respect to bourgeois democracy, and one that, in any case, was understood as a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (a veiled one, to be sure). An "open" dictatorship could have decided advantages, since "revolutionary development is simultaneously both hindered and accelerated by the fascist rage of the bourgeoisie." Moreover, "fascist demagogy.., can, against the will of the fascists themselves, make the liberation of the working masses from the illusions of parliamentary democracy and peaceful evolution easier for us." The most dangerous enemy of the revolutionary movement remained unchanged: "social fascism," i.e., the SPD, since it sought to convince the proletarian masses to return to bourgeois democracy. The degree of obscurantism reached in Comintern analyses of National Socialism can be inferred from a book that Ernst Hentri published in London, titled: Hitler over Europe? It was presented as the work of an anti-fascist German emigre. In fact, it was commissioned by a Soviet journalist. It was disseminated throughout Europe, and in the Soviet Union it became a sort of standard work up to the 1960s. The book represented the Ruhr-magnate Fritz Thyssen as the real brain behind a "brown International," and Hitler and Mussolini as merely following the orders of big business. The Nazis' anti-Semitism was a crude ploy. Not only nothing would happen to Jewish finance capitalists, but they themselves were among the main financiers of international capitalism. The turn to the so-called United Front politics during the VII. World Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in August 1935, and attended by delegates from 65 communist parties, was thus all the more surprising. The Soviet press had hardly mentioned the wave of anti-Semitic outbursts in Germany since the Nazis had taken power. No Soviet citizen had signed any of the numerous resolutions and petitions circulated at the time, in which progressive intellectuals of all countries stood up against the Third Reich's racial policies. Now it was left to Georgi Dimitrov, the new president of the Comintern and the main defendant in the "Reichstag trial" (who was proclaimed innocent due to lack of evidence and who then fled the country on Hitler's personal directive) to denounce "Hitler fascism" as a system of "bestial chauvinism" and "political banditry." The Nazi movement was only a "reactionary variation of fascism" that had become a "general tendency" throughout the world. In his presentation, Dimitrov castigated German fascism as the "primary instigator of a new imperialist war," but also as the "shock-troops of the international counter-revolution," and the instrument and ally of third powers. He did not mention the Nazis' Lebensraum plans in the same breath as the "Greater East-Asia" politics of Japan and Mussolini's fantasy of a new "Roman Empire." Hitler was presented as a would-be "German Messiah," who had managed to deceive the masses with his motto "Against Versailles!" and who was now attempting to offer his services to the Western powers as a guarantee and spearhead against Bolshevism. The new United Front strategy was to bring together the workers of all countries under the flag of nation, democracy, and civilization, and to fight against the worldwide tendency toward a "fascistization" and "war politics" of the bourgeoisie, and, from there, to fight for "Soviet Power." The establishment of an international United Front against fascist countries and against Nazi Germany was not mentioned. Instead, the strategy concerned a change in revolutionary tactics for taking power. With the Soviet Union's entry into the League of Nations -- instead of Nazi Germany, which had withdrawn -- as well as through contractual agreements with France and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union pursued a course of "collective security." Immediately after joining the League, however, the press attache Gnedin appeared in the foreign office to make sure that these contracts could not be interpreted as concrete obligations of mutual assistance; e.g., if the German army marched into the de-militarized Rheinland. Clearly, the Soviet leadership operated on the assumption that German revisionism was primarily aimed at Western powers, and that "German land-settlements in the East" would extend, at most, only to Poland or Czechoslovakia. In any case, as Walter Laqueur has remarked, in the Soviet Union of the 1930s there was "no single history of National Socialism... , nor any sort of other general work about the Third Reich's foreign and domestic policy, such as any of the hundreds that appeared in the rest of the world." No single Soviet study dealt specifically with the Nazis' "Lebensraum Plans." All the theses about the eternal German "push to the East," about German capitalism as a "latecomer" and about its "particular aggressiveness," which were later part of the fixed repertoire of postwar Soviet historiography, were not even mentioned in the 1930s literature. The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 seemed to confirm that common geo-strategic interests had not yet been exhausted, as compared with the half concessions and lukewarm guarantees that Western powers had offered one or the other power. This serious error in judgment on the Soviet side is understandable, since the theme of "Lebensraum in the East" had not actually played a significant role in the rise of the Nazis before 1933, nor in foreign policy thereafter. In 1925, when Hitler in his little read confessional book, Mein Kampf, proclaimed a "new German move" toward the East that would fall on and destroy the Soviet Union like a "colossus on clay feet," it sounded as futuristic as Vladimir Shirinovsky's "Leap to the South," after which victorious Russian soldiers would wash their boots in the Indian Ocean. Hitler's entire argument was based on the hypothesis that the Germanic racial core that had formed the state in the Russian empire had been fully corrupted by Jewish Bolshevism, and that "the giant in the East" was "ripe for collapse." This first opened the possibility of Germany shifting from the inherited "colonial and trade policies of the prewar period" to the "ground politics of the future." Only a state ruling over an "inherently protected" area, such as the USSR and the US would be able to be a world power in the future. As ideologically rigid as Hitler's objective may have seemed, it was also far-sighted. Anyone wanting to seriously restore Germany's status as a great power had to be clear about the fact that it could no longer be concerned with simple revanchism, but had to "reach for world power" in the full sense of the word. Such policies had to aim beyond the Wilhelmenian "place in the sun" and to deploy extreme measures. Winning Lebensraum in the East and establishing an Indogermanic continental Reich would only form the starting point for a future and final confrontation with Western capitalist powers. When all was said and done, the Jewish world enemy conjured up in Mein Kampfsat in Wall Street or in London, rather than in the salons of Paris or in the Kremlin. Moreover, the most immediate danger was "the increasing Negroization to which France was falling prey," because its stubborn claim to continental hegemony signified "a danger lying in wait for the continued existence of the white race in Europe, because of Jewish world-domination." As a result, the hierarchy and sequence of opponents in Hitler's construction was in no way fixed. The first thing needed to be done was to shake free from the "chains of Versailles." In all probability, this meant that France, with its "Eastem Satellites," above all Poland, stood high on the list of enemies to be eliminated. According to Hitler, such a program of German breakthrough to world-power status could be assured only through an alliance with England, and on the basis of a global agreement that would guarantee British mastery of the seas and give a future greater Germany free reign on the Eurasian continent. Hitler combined this with a pact with Mussolini's Italy, which in turn sought to establish a new "Roman Empire" around the Mediterranean. In the end, everything depended on this imagined construction of alliances. To be sure, in the political spectrum of the Weimar Republic, a foreign-policy strategy such as the one Hitler suggested was completely marginal, and even for the party itself it meant an abrupt change of perspective. Up to the November 1923 Munich Putsch, Hitler and his close comrades-in-arms -- Rosenberg, Scheuber-Richter, and Eckart -had been part of a volkisch-anti-Semitic Right, in which the idea of a total liberation of Germany as well as of Russia from the rule of Judaism, from the Jewish system of land ownership as well as Jewish Bolshevism had represented the ideal way to restore Germany's status. Only the continental bloc of a national Germany and a national Russia, as the white Russian emigres had promised, seemed to be able to oppose the superior strength of the Versailles Powers. With the consolidation of the Soviet regime, this opposition became more and more improbable. Therefore, in the circles of the German-national and national-revolutionary Right, one was also increasingly ready to contemplate an alliance with Bolshevik Russia. The unconditional way in which Soviet leaders had defended their land against Western intervention and had made it self-sufficient had awakened admiration in former Freikorps fighters and deported anti-Bolsheviks. Here, the ambiguous tendencies of a cultural "orientation to the East" became intermingled; this orientation formed the counterpart to a resentful rejection of the bourgeois, decadent, and materialistic West that had been shaped during WWI, and that had become nearly universal after the "Versailles Diktat." An overview of the entire spectrum of political and intellectual currents during the Weimar years shows that there was no mention of a universal anti-Bolshevism combined with Russophobia, anti-slavism and anti-Semitism. The left wing of the NSDAP around the Strasser brothers or the young Goebbels had a completely different position than the one held by Hitler in Mein Kampf At the beginning of 1926, in his brochure "The Second Revolution," Goebbels published a fictional letter to a fictional Russian revolutionary -- the Doestoevskian Ivan, who had already served as the counterpoint to the German hero in Goebbel's Michael- in which it says outright: "We look toward Russia, because it will be the first to take the path to socialism with us. Because Russia is the confederate given to us by nature against the West's devilish contamination and softness." Such a Russian-German alliance was urgent, "not because we love Bolshevism, because we love the Jewish supporters of Bolshevism, but rather because in the alliance with a truly national and socialist Russia we recognize the beginning of our own national and socialist self-assertion." For Goebbels, as for many on the national Right, through its supposed coming to terms with the Kulaks and with the elimination of the Trotskyists, the Soviet regime had long since acquired the characteristics of a Russian national Bolshevism and, in many respects, with its thorough politicization and militarization of social life, had acquired exemplary characteristics. When, after his release from prison, Hitler gave the leaders of the left party factions a dressing-down for their national Bolshevik tendencies, Goebbels noted in his diary, "It is as if someone has hit me. What sort of Hitler is this? A reactionary?... Our task, he says, is the destruction of Bolshevism. Bolshevism is a Jewish creation. We must crush Russia. One hundred eighty million people? In a word, I am stunned." As a matter of fact, the planned "crushing" of Soviet Russia was neither part of the NSDAP program nor did it play a role in daily party propaganda. It would also have harmed the strategy with which the Nazis catapulted themselves into the center of political events and finally into power. Confronted with the devastating effects of the developing economic crisis, a growing part of the population reduced all politics to the question of how to break the "chains of Versailles." >From the very beginning, one of Hitler's central ideas was the "primacy of domestic politics." Without a domestic national and moral renewal, there could be no power politics abroad. In the foreground was the postulate of liberating Germany from all forms of "foreign infiltration" in social and cultural life, from "party grumblers," "the Jewish press," "nigger music," and "salon Bolshevism." It was a puritanical reaction to the steadily growing appeal of Western lifestyles and to everything that in Nazi terminology fell under the rubric of the "morass of big-city pleasure culture" and that had made the Versailles Treaty into a "syphilitic peace." This association reflected the paradoxical fact that forced reparations were responsible for the significant cultural and economic integration of the Weimar Republic into the West. In this respect, the Nazis set themselves at the forefront of a lifeworld reaction that today would be regarded as "fundamentalist," were it not at the same time inconsistent. This inconsistency probably contributed to their success. One could see in the Nazis world and social image whatever one wanted. If the main attack was directed primarily against "Marxism," this had to do first of all with the NSDAP's claim to be the true voice of the German proletariat, and then with the appeal to bourgeois and petit-bourgeois fear. Social Democrats and Communists were lumped together in the concept of "Marxism"; they were differing radical forms of a corrosive "Jewish socialism," whose direct opposite was the "German" or "National Socialist" who felt responsible for the higher good of state and empire. The bitter battles with the Communists in the streets and in the auditoriums took into account the fact that, besides the NSDAP, the KPD was the only other political group that could not be counted as part of the democratic "party system." It was the SA's strategy, following the example of the Italian 'fasci," to attack the Communist Red Front fighters on their own terrain as much as possible. This was supposed to demonstrate a dictatorial will and, through its brutal thoughtlessness, satisfy bourgeois and petit-bourgeois needs for order. But it was also a battle for psychological and ideological supremacy, a smoldering civil war for the rule of streets and districts, and a paramilitary recruiting effort among the proletarian masses. The active and symbolic character of Nazi politics corresponded to their political vagueness a fact pointed out by Joachim Fest: "Remarkably, Hitler's speeches in the years of his mass popularity contained only a very narrow measure of concrete declaration of intent, and neglected his ideological fixed points, anti-Semitism and Lebensraum." With the establishment of Stalin's dictatorship and the transition to forced industrialization, the German public's view of the Soviet Union changed considerably. Dramatic reports about forced collectivization of the German colonial villages, along with a larger re-settlement campaign, did cause a stir in the press. Under Hugenberg's new leadership, the German national Volkspartei openly hoped for the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly in view of reports about resistance to collectivization in the Ukraine, which since WWI had appeared to many as a designated area of interest for Germany. Yet, even more representative were positions such as those of the volkisch journalist Graf Reventlov, who wrote in 1931 that, with Stalin's victory over Trotsky, one could no longer speak of a "Jewish Bolshevism," since Bolshevism had become a national-Russian affair; and that a successful five-year plan would be "an event of historical significance" requiring a change in Germany's position toward the Soviet Union. In January 1932, Hitler delivered a campaign speech before the Dusseldorf Rhein-Ruhr Club that was supposed to dispel the magnetes of industry's obvious reservations about his adventurous program and his vulgar mass-party, which in the meantime, with 800,000 members and 10 million votes, had assumed a key role. In a deft turn, Hitler first stressed that in economic life, as in the army, a natural authoritarian-hierarchical order dominated, while political democracy was already a sort of communism. From there, he turned to Bolshevism, which he said was "not just a gang that roamed the streets of Germany," and no mere "new method of production" (this last bit was in reference to the clear attraction of the five-year plan). Rather, Bolshevism was "a worldview that was soon to subjugate the entire Asian continent." It would "slowly shake the whole world and bring it to a collapse." If no one put a stop to it, Bolshevism would "expose the world to the sort of complete transformation that Christianity had once brought about." One day people would speak of Lenin with the same reverence with which today they speak of Jesus or Buddha. In short, it concerned a "gigantic tendency," which could no longer be wished away, and which would "inevitably destroy one of the presuppositions of our continuation as a white race," because Bolshevism was a rebellion of the social underclasses and colored people against the natural superiority of the European "white race." Hitler's basic anti-Bolshevism finally seemed to come to light here. The speaker was obviously concemed with stirring up the industrialists' fears about a communist seizure of power and with presenting his own party as the guarantor of a national counter-revolution. In this respect, Hitler's pronounced anti-Bolshevism was calculated, as it was later in his interactions with Western government leaders, particularly from Great Britain. The industrialists' fear was no doubt real. Yet, there was no reason to assume that Hitler shared their fears. Privately, he repeatedly derided the Communists' revolutionary potential, as had Goebbels, who, out of an old affinity, had followed his opponents' activities carefully, and who, by the beginning of 1932, already regarded them as harmless. What was interesting about Hitler's speech, however, was the radical re-evaluation of Bolshevik Russia as compared with the picture of Russia in Mein Kampf: there, the image of a land hollowed out by Judaism, by fate itself, and subject to Germany's colonizing grasp; here, the massive threat of a state representing a world-movement, whose founders could possibly go down in history as the creators of a new religion. Typically, the speech did not revolve around the straggle for Lebensraum, nor did it mention any "Jewish Bolshevism." With this crowd, Hitler could not succeed with manic anti-Semitism nor his fantastic plans for the East. Still, he stressed Germany's double predicament: the slave-like debt to the Western winners, and the slow, yet progressive undermining of Germany by Bolshevism. This made an impression. The national revolution he promised would ultimately destroy "Marxism," the unions and other organized interests, and would lead to the establishment of a new corporate order that, with all its similarities to the successful model of Italian fascism, would have the characteristics of an original German Volksgemeinschaft. For this, he received lively applause, though only a modest amount of donations. Contrary to the frequently made claim, "major industry" did not grant Hitler a mandate to seize power and prepare for war at this now-legendary meeting. To return to Ernst Nolte's theses, Hitler's anti-Bolshevism was not his political "basic instinct" from which everything else followed. One could probably detect an elementary fear about the rebellion of a social "subhuman class" along with an uprising of "colored peoples," whose secret manipulators and rulers were always and everywhere the "world Jews." As "international finance Jews," they sucked the people dry and manipulated the government, and as Marxist or Bolshevist Jews, the "Volksjude," incited the classes and preached the bastardization of the race. Essentially, this picture only demonized the symptoms of modem life. Hitler's panic-stricken fear of germs and bacteria, which drove him to wash his hands after every conversation, was only the intensified anxiety of a hypochondriac -- something he shared with many of his contemporaries. These were the expression of defensive reflexes intended to counteract economic and cultural globalization, the greater density of communications, and the increasingly closer net of social contacts and associations: in short the promiscuity of modem life. In this atmosphere, which, following the world economic crisis, assumed hysterical forms, the concept of Bolshevism became an everchanging collective term almost completely separated from its real object. Thus, a book by Hitler's mentor, Dietrich Eckart, that appeared after his death in 1924, was titled Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin. Dialogue between Hitler and Myself. The several thousand-year old, culture-subversive effect of Judaism was related to the concept of "Bolshevism," whose most important manifestation appeared to be the "Mosaic Christianity" founded on the Old Testament. At the same time, there were also lampoons of the "musical Bolshevism" of exponents of the New Music, of the "cultural Bolshevism" of the abstract painters and avantgardist theater directors, or of "sexual Bolshevism," which could mean anything from co-education, bobbed-hair, jazz, gun-toting women, to Hollywood. But it did not have to refer to Bolshevism as a political movement. With his instinct for all of the resentments of the time, Hitler adopted this "anti-Bolshevism" in various ways. But, in the end, all roads led to the looming figure of the "world-Jew," the "King of Kings" who sought the bastardization, degeneration and emasculation of the Aryan people, whether through money and the stock exchange, the press and democracy, liberalism, sexual promiscuity, sexually-transmitted disease, world wars, inflation, famine, the proliferation of big cities, Hottentot dances or "Marxism." Hitler knew how to separate this from Bolshevism and communism. Incidentally, the aforementioned speech in the Rhein-Ruhr Club proved that the changes in the Soviet Union brought about by the elimination of the Trotskyists and forced industrialization had not escaped Hitler's attention. He required this Stalinist Soviet Union neither as an "example" nor as a "nightmare vision"; rather, it was a factor one had to deal with, just as one was not allowed to lose sight of the KPD in domestic politics. But this implied no mere "anti-Bolshevik" defense. Rather, one could see in Hitler's politics an exact correspondence to Comintern strategy, which believed its own seizure of power would, through the parallel strengthening of the fascist situation (here reversed as the communist situation), "be hindered as well as accelerated." It was Leon Trotsky, the astute distant observer and imaginary leader of a "Fourth International," who diagnosed early on that the KPD's strategy of focusing its attack on the SPD's "social imperialism" virtually invited the Nazis to seize power -- not only because of the riff created in the workers movement and their defensive forces, but primarily because of the possibility of the Nazis offering their services as savior to bourgeois forces. Moreover, following the same method, once in power Hitler would offer his services to the capitalist Western powers as a "super-Wrangel" of the world bourgeoisie. With their consent, he would shake off the bonds of Versailles and launch an anti-Bolshevik crusade against the Soviet Union. Trotsky's analyses, formulated during his exile, were a strange mixture of shrewdness and obscurantism. He accurately anticipated one of the basic mechanisms of Hitler's rise and his successful politics of "emancipation" and rearmament of the Third Reich with the Western powers' acquiescence. On the other hand, Trotsky misunderstood and underestimated the original strengths, objectives, and motivations of the Nazimovement. Ernst Nolte saw Hitler at the time of his speech to the RheinRuhr club in this very role attributed to him by Trotsky: Hitler presented and understood himself "completely and unmistakably" as an "antiLenin" and as a "super-Wrangel of the world bourgeoisie." Nothing could be more off-target than such an interpretation of Hitler's ideology and politics before and after the seizure of power. The doubt about the KPD's real power that Hitler privately expressed before 1933 was largely confirmed by the almost resistance-less dissolution of the KPD apparatus. The Nazi leaders were waiting for an armed communist resistance that never took place. In this respect, the Reichstag fire appeared to them literally as a girl from heaven. The legend of the attempt at revolt disseminated by Moscow was so thin that the Leipzig trial of Dimitrov and the KPD faction headed by Torgler, who later put himself at the service of the Nazis, ended with a verdict of not guilty. Nonetheless, the legend had already served its purpose. The fairytale of an impending communist uprising was only necessary to push the "Enabling Act" through the newly-elected parliament with the votes of the bourgeois party. Afterwards, Hitler possessed the apparatus to establish his sole dictatorship and, as he grimly stated, to settle with the "reaction," i.e., to let loose his German-nationalist coalition partners. SA troops and later the Gestapo brutally abused and persecuted thousands of communists and other people opposing the government, beating many of them to death. But this was in line with the expected repression, according to the Italian model of a "fascist" state. On the other hand, Nazi authorities made no attempt to arrest all the members and functionaries of the dissolved KPD. Hitler assured the British correspondent Selfion that he had no need for a "St. Bartholomew's Eve." Many of those arrested were freed after a few weeks or months, including high-ranking party officers such as Herbert Wehner. Only in rare cases were communists permanently stripped of their rights, though they were still subject to intensive surveillance and harassment. Yet, those who wanted to collaborate were welcome. Goebbels and other leading Nazis frequently stated that a "decent communist" could be a much more useful national comrade than an opportunist fellow-traveler or a decadent bourgeois. Even more transparent than the domestic-policy function of pronounced anti-Bolshevism was its use for foreign policy. Kurt Ludecke, one of Hitler' s early confidants, wrote in 1938, during his American exile, that even before taking power Hitler had told him that there was only one way to get through the dangerous period of the break with the Versailles Treaty and rearmament: England and France had to be convinced that Germany was the last bulwark against a Bolshevik flood. This calculation went even more smoothly than Hitler could have anticipated. British politicians, in particular, were seriously disturbed about the Soviet armaments as well as the growth of communist-inspired movements in the colonies and in various European countries. The perspective of a communist seizure of power in Germany must have seemed like a nightmare to them: the connection of a Soviet Germany to the Stalinist Soviet Union would have turned international power relations upside down in a single stroke. Even in France, left-wing parties were on the march and, for a short time in 1936, were able to form a government under the name of the "People's Front," as they had done in Spain. From the British perspective, the entire continent seemed to be divided into fascist and communist countries, who fought out a full-blown proxy war in the Spanish Civil War. Since the USSR had already grown into a significant power that was further undermining the pillars of the British empire in Asia and the Middle East in various ways, conservative government officials in London considered it a more calculated risk to give Hitler free reign in his pursuit of aspirations for a Greater Germany in Central Europe and to allow a controlled rearmament, if in return he was ready, as he constantly claimed, not to pursue any additional goals. Yet, one wonders whether Hitler's 1935-1938 "anti-Comintern" approach, which apparently stood in the foreground of domestic as well as foreign policy, had not, independent of all tactical ulterior motives, expressed a fundamental ideological and political tendency of National Socialism, as compared with the later abrupt about-face to a course of collaboration and a loose war alliance with the Soviet Union, which followed purely opportunistic considerations. Certain elements of conviction and world-outlook can be clearly recognized in the "anti-Comintern" policies. Yet, they definitely played a secondary role. These years' anti-Bolshevik campaigns, which culminated in the 1936 Nuremberg Party Days, were dictated much more by clear practical imperatives. Since a domestic communist danger no longer existed, the anti-Soviet propaganda that began in 1935 had to fill the gap in order to sustain the scenario of a threat and to justify the harsh suppression of all opposition. The secret instructions of the propaganda ministry clearly expressed that the continual horrible news from the Soviet Union served to suppress criticism: economic circles, who complained about high taxes and regulations, had to be impressed by reports about the Stalinist terror and the immense efforts to arm the Red Army; complaints by the working population about scarce food supplies and meager wages were countered with references to the catastrophic situation of the Soviet workers. Beyond this, agitation against "Judeo-Bolshevism" was employed to combat a conservative orientation toward the East. Until 1936, a not insignificant part of German journalists held the opinion that the Soviet Union was becoming increasingly Russified and was essentially a genuine sort of National Socialism. Thus, up to the mid-1930s, Klaus Mehnert published admiring reports about the Soviet success in a series of major newspapers. The work of the "anti-Comintern" propagandists was to a great extent aimed at getting rid of these still widespread "Russophile" tendencies in journalism and science. Moreover, this noisy "anti-Comintern" propaganda was partially supposed to legitimate the progressive stripping away of the rights of Jewish citizens in Germany, and partially to distract people from this. Here domestic policy needs and foreign propaganda overlapped. Because of its anti-Semitic policies, the Third Reich was pressured to justify itself to Western trade partners and fascist Italy. The attempt to pursue an offensive anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevik policy with respect to their allies, to find not only understanding, but also sympathy, led only to modest results. Finally, and most important, the forced propaganda against the "Communist overthrow of the world" was supposed to conceal the creation of the Nazis' own system of alliances. The December 1936 "anti-Comintern" Pact with Japan, which Italy signed a year later, was not at all what it claimed to be. The signers did not even promise to support each other in the case of a Soviet attack. It was not hard for Western commentators to recognize that in fact it was a coalition of "young" powers, who intended to overthrow the status quo, and that the pact was therefore aimed just as much at Western powers as at the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership did not see it any differently. For them, the "anti-Comintern" pact was eminently useful for the construction of absurd domestic conspiracy-scenarios for the show trials and the bloody cleansings. Who or what really was the "anti-Comintern"? Walter Laqueur's short study based on the files of this organization has thrown light on yet another side in addition to those emphasized by the usual accounts. It was actually a sub-division of Goebbels' propaganda ministry. Its personnel basis was thin. But, after all, with the exception of Rosenberg, there was hardly anyone in the NSDAP who could have dealt effectively with Bolshevism. Its head, Adolf Ehrt, came from the press section of the Protestant church, his deputy, Eberhardt Taubert, was for years an obsequious assistant of Goebbels. Outwardly, the "anti-Comintern" acted independently of state and party -- a weak imitation of the formal independence of the Comintern. The propaganda writings that were produced in rapid succession were fairly weak, despite the tremendous amount of documentary materials available from the many returnees from Soviet Russia. At any rate, they were clever enough to leave aside the theme of "Jewish Bolshevism," depending on the author and addressee, while in other cases it was made the main theme. The circulation numbers were sometimes quite high, but only because the bulk of the books and brochures were distributed at no cost. Rosenberg's publications about the Russian and Jewish racial souls and their historical roots in the chaos of peoples in the Mediterranean and the Byzantine world, or the 1930s updating of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," had it even tougher. Goebbels and his people believed that these publications lacked what most interested the audience: namely what was really happening in Russia. The "anti-Comintern" was seen as the nucleus of an international organization that was supposed to have defied the real Comintern. Yet, all attempts in this direction remained unsuccessful. According to Laqueur, at best, "the anti-Comintern brought together a motley assortment of groups of discharged Austrian colonels, Polish priests, and Japanese counterspies." A "First Confidential International Anti-Communist Conference" in November of 1936, which paralleled the Nuremberg Party Days, was supposed to have prepared for a World Congress, but it had no results to speak of. Most telling was the fact that even the Nazi leadership attached only limited importance to the "anti-Comintern." The urgent anti-Comintern desire for a radio station that could compete with the foreign-language programs of Radio Moscow remained unfulfilled. That was no mere episode. It shows to what degree the whole "anti-Comintern" was a bogeyman. Already by winter 1938-1939, it had to stop most of its work. Hitler had given orders to end anti-Bolshevik propaganda, "so as not to weaken the effect of anti-Jewish propaganda." In August 1939, most of the personnel were fired. And on August 26, the press received instructions from Goebbels to refer once again to "Russia," instead of "the Soviet Union," in order to create a thoroughly "sympathetic, warm tone." (*) This article originally appeared as "Ein kausaler Nexus? Zur Realgeschichte des Antifaschismus und Antibolschevismus," in Gerd Koenen, Utopie der Sauberung. Was war der Kommunismus? (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 1998), pp. 191-214. Translated by Michael Richardson ~~~~~~~~ By Gerd Koenen ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Copyright of Telos is the property of Telos Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Source: Telos, Winter99 Issue 114, p49, 18p. Item Number: 1958636 Result 8 of 18 [Go To Full Text] [Tips] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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