How to stop fascism, p.19
How to Stop Fascism, page 19
Only a strategic rethink by the leaders of both parties early in the process could have stopped the Nazi breakthrough between 1930 and 1932. But it didn’t happen.
1932: THE GROUND-RUSH
As in the last twenty metres of a parachute jump, the ground now rushed up towards the German left at disorienting speed. On 14 April 1932, reeling from the size of the Nazi vote in the presidential election, the SPD persuaded Brüning to ban the Sturmabteilung. But it was his last throw of the dice. The right-wing parties were now determined to form a cabinet including Hitler, to suspend parliamentary government and to launch an army crackdown on the political chaos that the Nazis had played such a key role in fuelling.
On 2 June Hindenburg sacked Brüning and appointed the reactionary Catholic aristocrat Franz von Papen as chancellor. Papen’s first act was to dissolve parliament, triggering elections for 31 July. His second was to lift the ban on the SA. The third was to launch a military coup against the socialist regional government of Prussia, marching its elected ministers out of their offices at gunpoint.
In the July 1932 election campaign, the SPD leaders finally did what their members had been calling for: they staged hundreds of mass rallies; they used populist slogans; and the Reichsbanner attacked and sometimes beat the SA in street fights. But despite the pleading of activists and union leaders, the socialists still refused to demand a state-funded programme of public investment. Instead, it was the Nazis who made the public works programme their signature policy.
There was now pressure from below within both left parties for a united campaign against the Nazis. Activists in five cities staged joint demonstrations during the campaign. In Berlin, activists tried to register a joint anti-fascist list of candidates. But the bureaucracy prevailed: both the KPD and SPD issued formal instructions to cease collaboration, the latter admitting in private that the push for unity was ‘extraordinarily strong’.41
As the election results were declared on 31 July 1932, the price tag for two years of delusion and division was presented: 13.8 million people had voted Nazi. Hitler had eaten even further into the base of the mainstream parties and – to their dismay – both the socialists and the communists saw their periphery begin to flip towards the Nazis.
With 37 per cent of the vote, Hitler now had the biggest parliamentary group by far. The socialists had lost half a million votes to the KPD – paradoxically reinforcing confidence among its members that the ‘social fascism’ line was working. Meanwhile, the mainstream parties were finished: their remaining vote was now clustered in the Catholic provinces of southern Germany and in the Rhineland. Among the Protestant majority of the electorate it was now a straight battle between Marxism and Nazism.
Even at this late stage there was room for hope. Hitler could not form a majority government. And it was clear that, with votes for the two left parties staying largely solid, he was unlikely to make further gains. The Nazi Party’s finances were also shaky. So Hindenburg rebuffed Hitler’s demand to be made chancellor and Papen carried on until September, when a vote of no confidence – in which the KPD and the Nazis (again astonishingly to modern eyes) combined forces – triggered yet another election.
When the next elections were held, in November 1932, the Nazi vote slid back to 33 per cent – partly due to Hitler’s support for a group of SA men convicted of a gruesome murder. The KPD vote grew to 17 per cent, mainly through disillusioned SPD voters switching to the communists. Papen was sacked and the reactionary army general Kurt von Schleicher was given the job of stopping Hitler.
Schleicher’s brief term in office has become one of the most examined episodes in history. Since the onset of the crisis in 1929 he had been the main representative of the army in politics. He pushed continuously for a presidential dictatorship. But he didn’t want Hitler as chancellor.
To this end, given the job himself, he explored two solutions: to tame Hitler by bringing him into the cabinet; or to create a cross-party national government that would exclude Hitler, drawing in forces as diverse as dissident Nazis and socialist trade union leaders. But neither Hitler nor the forces required for an anti-Hitler dictatorship would take the bait, and so, on 28 January 1933, unable to govern effectively, Schleicher resigned.
On the morning of 30 January, the SPD leaders met in their parliamentary office in a panic. They resolved to tell Hindenburg they would support any regime that could stop Hitler. Characteristically, they were too late. The man they sent out to make the phone call was greeted by ‘wild running and shouting’ in the corridors. Hindenburg had already made Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany.
DOES ‘CLASS’ EXPLAIN THE NAZIS?
Three basic questions need to be answered: why did the business elite switch from opposing the Nazis to facilitating their seizure of power? Why did the middle class abandon respectable racist parties of the right to become fanatical followers of Nazism? And why didn’t the workers’ movement effectively resist?
Alfred Sohn-Rethel left a convincing answer to the first question. As a Marxist economist, hired unwittingly by a secretive business lobby group, he observed first-hand how two factions emerged within Germany’s corporate monopolies and cartels: those reliant on international finance and trade (such as the Siemens electrical group and banks handling US money); and firms focused on the domestic market, such as the Steel Trust, the coal industry and the savings banks.
Once the economic slump began, the globally focused firms backed Brüning; to maintain the flow of foreign investment into Germany they needed reparations payments to continue. In addition, Britain, France and the USA had the power to lock businesses like Siemens out of infrastructure projects in the developing world. Those on the other side – mainly the heavy industrial sector – had little option but to ride out the crisis.42
So long as both factions believed the downturn was a ‘normal’ economic crisis – and would sort itself out through falling wages and lower taxes – backing Brüning looked sensible. But when the slump turned into a banking crisis, in May 1931, it became clear that the programme of austerity and deflation was a dead end. The reparations system collapsed and the flow of investments across national borders ground to a halt.
Now both factions of German industry were in deep trouble. How could the home market – with wages collapsing and public investment slashed – replace the global economy, either as a source of capital or an outlet for goods? Logic pointed to a new solution: a state-driven investment model and rearmament, and the attempt to carve out new colonial markets in the Middle East, the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
This was the background to the formation of the Harzburg Front, at an ostentatious right-wing rally in the spa town of Harzburg in October 1931. The front brought together the right-wing populist DNVP, the Stahlhelm veterans’ group, numerous monarchists and top executives from the heavy-industrial sector of German business. Hitler gave a speech at the rally – but resisted the idea of the Nazis joining a unified ‘National Opposition’.
Nevertheless, Harzburg was the moment when a significant chunk of German big business came together to form a plan for economic self-sufficiency – summarized in the word ‘autarky’. They would break with the global system and rebuild the German economy around highly concentrated monopolies, relying on state support, a revived weapons industry and, ultimately, territorial expansion. But the obstacles were huge: namely, a mass workers’ movement, the Versailles peace treaty and the constitution of the Weimar Republic. ‘What united this conglomeration of desperadoes,’ wrote Sohn-Rethel in a manuscript smuggled out of Germany as he fled, ‘was the demand for a dictatorial government directed against the organised working class.’43
But that did not have to mean Hitler. Plan A was to put von Papen in power and suspend parliamentary government. That, however, needed an army ready to stage a full-scale military coup, suppressing both the left parties and the trade unions. But the army was too small to achieve this.
Hitler’s offer to the German industrial elite was never simply an alternative economic plan, it was an offer to destroy the labour movement and rid the country permanently of communists. If you imagine the Reichstag without a bloc of Nazi politicians, he once warned the industrialists, then you have to imagine those seats filled with communists. And as the KPD’s vote increased, and the SPD’s base radicalized in the second half of 1932, so did the attractiveness of Hitler’s offer.
The ace-in-the-hole that toppled Papen and put Schleicher in power was the report of a secret war game staged by the military general staff, which showed that the army could not defeat the KPD in open battle at the same time as defending Germany’s borders.44 Hitler was handed power because all other options had been tried; he had mass support; and he was ready to do what the army couldn’t – crush the working class.
It is an established fact that the social base of Nazism was the middle class. Certainly, it drew electoral support from all sections of society, but the solid backbone of its membership consisted of farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, civil servants, students and office workers.45 Why did such people, usually committed to order and respectability, become fanatical enthusiasts for racist terror?
As we will explore in Chapter 8, left and liberal theorists were at such a loss to explain this phenomenon that they worked on the assumption that these were atomized loners, terrified amid the rising chaos.
More recent research, drawing on Nazi membership files, has challenged the atomization thesis. It shows that the Nazis grew most rapidly in places where there was a strong culture of civic associations: choirs, bands, gymnastic clubs and organized hiking groups. Critical to each local breakthrough was the Nazis’ ability to colonize the social networks of influential people. If a Nazi recruit was a member of the local gym, dog-breeders’ association or carnival float group, they would then recruit people in every one of these locations. The more clubs they were in, the more effective they were at recruiting. This translated into a higher vote share, because the Nazis’ chosen campaigning method – face to face meetings and conversations – helped get out the vote.46
A micro-study of Nazi membership in Marburg, a university town, substantiates this: after 1930 the people who signed up to the NSDAP were ‘joiners’, not loners, and they joined in groups, from the same gymnastic, rifle or student clubs. ‘Much of Nazi mobilisation,’ writes historian Rudy Koshar, ‘depended on the independent social activity of these opinion makers, string pullers and culture brokers. Responding individually to their environment, and perhaps only marginally familiar with Nazi ideology, these were the unauthorised facilitators of German Nazism.’47
In short, people joined because their friends did, and because it made them feel better. The Nazis built their party as a rival ‘world-within-a-world’ to match that of the SPD. Once you were wearing the Nazi lapel badge, or the SA uniform, you could feel part of something bigger, something that German conservatives had dreamed of, but never achieved: a ‘folk community’ in which inequalities came second to national solidarity. At the same time, the Nazis exploited people’s rivalry and self-interest. As a Nazi takeover began to seem inevitable, many striving members of the middle class realized that they could achieve promotion and higher social status by joining up.
As we saw in Chapter 4, the deeper ideologies that Nazism drew on were already widespread among the middle class: life-philosophy, anti-rationalism, occultism and racial pseudoscience. The Nazis mobilized these prejudices around the myths of symbolic violence, national rebirth and conquest, to devastating effect.
Why didn’t the workers’ movement resist effectively? Why, instead, did they delude themselves with irrational theories, bureaucratic routines, false hopes and tactics that could never have stopped Hitler? How, on the morning of defeat, could an activist like Jan Petersen write: ‘I am dazed’?
For many historians this is a non-question because, at root, they don’t believe working-class people are capable of independent thought and action. Marxists usually reduce the answer to ‘bad leadership’. If only Stalin hadn’t imposed the social fascism line; if only the SPD left had been more vocal and pushed for a break with Brüning; if only they’d listened to Trotsky, whose analysis was spot-on but who only had 600 followers in Germany.48
It is an explanation that flies in the face of Marxism’s claim to be ‘materialist’ – that is, to trace social phenomena to their socio-economic roots. If ‘bad leaders’ are to blame for the defeat of the German labour movement, what created the bad leaders? And why did the working class so readily accept their advice? By implication, ‘good leaders’ could have defeated Hitler – but when they spoke out, why did people ignore them? Why did rank and file militants like Jan Petersen go along with all the purges and witch-hunts of people inside the KPD who raised objections?
The answer revolves around something the left rarely wants to consider: just as there can be a ‘mass psychology of fascism’, there can be a mass psychology of Marxism. Unfortunately, more than eighty years on from Hitler’s seizure of power, you can still see it exerting influence on today’s left.
As a writer working within the Marxist tradition I want to address the problem unflinchingly. Orthodox Marxism’s signal characteristic was its inability to grasp complexity. It reduced all conflicts to their economic essence; it assumed that individuals could only be the finger-puppets of economic forces; it reduced political strategy to ‘reform or revolution’ – ignoring completely the intermediate elements of control and culture, and thus belittling questions of iconography, narrative or grassroots decision-making.
Where it considered the possibility of failure, it framed it around Rosa Luxemburg’s famous concept of ‘socialism or barbarism’ – either we win or the world ends. For all wings of Marxism, history was seen as a machine producing progress, and the working class as the machine’s tool. These concepts prevented activists from grasping the new and complex social dynamics at play.
The working class as it actually existed was heavily stratified by skill, income and outlook. Far from disappearing as technology developed, this stratification had been designed into the industrial system on purpose by the early practitioners of management theory, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford. Stratification was achieved not just through the creation of new job functions such as team leader or foreman, but through organizational changes, like forcing workers to do quality control on each other’s output.49
The middle class was not dissolving or bifurcating as predicted; it was expanding and had coalesced around fascism. The often celebrated resistance to Nazism among the Catholic middle and upper classes should have signalled why: this was not primarily about economic interest, nor even status. It was the collapse of a passive belief system that opened the Protestant middle class to the active belief system, fascism. As their doctrines of honour, respectability, reward for hard work and national pride were shot to pieces by defeat in war, the overthrow of the Kaiser, hyperinflation and then the Wall Street Crash, they embraced a new, active ideology: irrationalism, occultism, racial pseudoscience, the mythology of violence.
As for a theory of the state, on both the communist and social-democratic sides it was primitive. Communists learned that the state was the ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie’, committed to maintaining a monopoly of force to prevent a workers’ revolution. Social-democrats believed the opposite: that with the foundation of the Weimar Republic they had, for the first time, created a state that was neutral, and could be used to implement socialism once they had a parliamentary majority. Every time the SPD came under attack – as with the coup against its ministers in Prussia – it told its supporters to wait for the next election. Even the KPD, despite its insurrectionary rhetoric and theory, made no serious preparations for an armed uprising in the case of a Nazi victory.
At the most fundamental level, both sides of the labour movement were mesmerized by the two-class theory of reality and the fatalistic optimism that it implied. Even as critical left-wingers warned of the possibility of a ‘middle-class revolution’, with a dynamic of its own, the ideas in left-wing workers’ heads told them it was impossible.
Class dynamics on their own cannot explain the rise of Nazism. But the over-emphasis of the left on class dynamics played its part in creating a culture of fatalism, which lasted way beyond Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.
‘FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE’
The Nazi consolidation of power took place in stages. On 30 January 1933 Hitler appointed a cabinet dominated by the traditional right, and set 5 March as the date for new elections. All over Germany the SA launched a police-backed terror campaign aimed primarily against the KPD. Where there was resistance, as in Little Wedding, the police carried out mass arrests; the SA turned their local HQs into torture chambers.
The KPD’s response was to call for a general strike, which – as Petersen reports – failed. The SPD, true to its history of legalism, refused to back the strike. Both parties concentrated instead on the election campaign; both were eliminated without a serious fight.
On 27 February the Reichstag Fire – allegedly started by a mentally ill Dutch communist – gave Hitler the excuse to suspend large parts of the constitution, ban the KPD’s newspapers and arrest around 4,000 of its members. In Little Wedding the SA toured the homes of communist workers handing out swastika flags and giving them a choice: fly the flag from your window or go on a hit list.
Backed by systematic voter intimidation, Hitler scored 17 million votes in the March 1933 election. Despite mounting repression, the SPD achieved 7 million votes and the KPD almost 5 million – its highest ever score – after which it was banned and all its MPs arrested. By the end of the year half its members would be in concentration camps and 2,500 had been murdered.50
