A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  This was the mistake the Communist parties made for almost six years under Stalin’s influence. They attracted people radicalised by the crisis. But then they led them into battles which, cut off from the wider layers of workers influenced by the trade union and social democratic organisations, they could not win. A battle-hardened minority of party members persisted and fought on despite the odds. But many, often a majority, of members dropped away, beaten into submission by hardship, hunger and victimisation at the hands of the employers. The figures for membership of the Communist parties show this. The membership of the Czechoslovakian party fell from 91,000 in 1928 to 35,000 in 1931, the French party from 52,000 to 36,000, the US party from 14,000 to 8,000, and the British party from 5,500 to 2,500. 175

  The party did grow in one country – Germany. The effects of the crisis were even graver there than in the US, since many of those who lost their jobs in the slump had lost their savings in the inflation only seven years before, while high interest rates hit the middle classes, small businessmen and farmers very heavily. Amid feelings of insuperable economic and social crisis right across society, party membership grew from 124,000 in 1928 to 206,000 in 1931, and the Communist vote grew from 3.2 million in 1928 to 4.6 million in 1930 and 5.9 million in November 1932.

  But a huge portion of the party membership were unemployed. Some 51 per cent of the Berlin members were jobless in 1930, as against 40 per cent working in factories, and only 17 per cent of the national party membership were in a position to undertake party activity in their workplaces in 1931. 176 What is more, the turnover of party membership was incredibly high, about 40 per cent in Berlin. 177 Meanwhile, although the Social Democrats lost votes, they still won 7.2 million in November 1932 and took 84 per cent of seats on factory committees, as against only 4 per cent for the Communists. 178

  By denouncing the Social Democrats as social fascists, the Communists cut themselves off from the mass of workers who, however confused, wanted to do something about the economic crisis and resist Hitler’s Nazis. The consequences of following Stalin’s instructions were to be not only damaging to the party, but disastrous for humanity.

  Hitler’s road to power

  Social democratic parties of the Labour type dominated the governments of Europe’s two biggest countries at the time of the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. In Britain Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald had formed a minority government dependent on Liberal support earlier in the year, while the German Social Democrat Müller headed a ‘grand coalition’ formed with the ‘moderate’ bourgeois parties the year before.

  Neither government had any idea of how to cope with the crisis which engulfed them by 1930. Increased unemployment meant increased expenditure on benefits. Reduced industrial production meant less tax revenue. Government budgets began to run into deficit. Financial instability hit both countries – US bankers demanded repayment of the ‘Dawes Plan’ loans which had boosted the German economy in the mid-1920s and financiers began to gamble against the international exchange rate of sterling. The heads of the national banks, Schacht in Germany (appointed five years before as a representative of the liberal wing of the ruling class) and Montagu Norman in Britain (a member of the Baring banking family), told their governments to reduce the cost of the insurance funds providing unemployment benefits. The governments fell apart under the pressure. In Germany the finance minister – the one-time ‘Austro-Marxist’ economist and former Independent Social Democrat Rudolf Hilferding – could not cope, and the government fell early in 1930. In Britain MacDonald and his chancellor Philip Snowden opted to abandon the Labour Party and join the Conservatives in a national government.

  The economic crisis was less severe in Britain than in Germany and the US. British industry still had privileged access to huge markets because of the empire. Prices fell more rapidly than wages and salaries, and the middle class prospered even while unemployed workers suffered in the old industrial areas of the north, Scotland and south Wales. The national government cut the dole and salaries in the public sector, provoking riots among the unemployed, a brief mutiny in the navy and a wave of anger among groups like schoolteachers. But it easily survived the crisis, thrashed a demoralised Labour Party in general elections in 1931 and 1935, and convinced the major section of British capitalism that there was a way out of the crisis. Those members of the ruling class who were prepared to endorse Oswald Mosley’s British variant of fascism in 1933 and 1934 (for instance the Rothermere family, whose Daily Mail infamously declared, ‘Hurrah For The Blackshirts’) had generally abandoned it by 1936.

  Things were very different in Germany. Unemployment rose to about 50 per cent higher than in Britain, and much of the middle class suffered extreme impoverishment. The crisis led to a surge in support for Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (or Nazi) Party. Its vote shot up from 810,000 to more than six million in 1930, and then doubled to 37.3 per cent of the total poll in July 1932. But the Nazis were not simply (or even mainly) an electoral party. At the core of their organisation were paramilitary street fighters – the SA or Stormtroopers – numbering 100,000 at the end of 1930 and 400,000 by mid-1932. These armed thugs were dedicated to battling against those they blamed for the social crisis – attacking supposedly ‘Jewish’ finance capital on the one hand and a supposedly ‘Jewish’, ‘Marxist’ working-class movement on the other. It was the existence of this armed force, prepared to battle for control of the streets and conquer all other social organisations, which distinguished Nazism and fascism from the established bourgeois parties.

  The first successful organisation of this kind was that created by Mussolini in Italy after 1920. Its members were bound together by an intense nationalist, rather than anti-Jewish, ideology (some leading fascists, such as the mayor of Rome in the mid-1920s, were Jewish, and anti-Semitism did not feature in fascist ideology until after the alliance with Hitler in the late 1930s). But in other respects Mussolini blazed the trail that Hitler was to follow.

  Hitler’s party had first come to prominence in the crisis year of 1923, with the French occupation of the Ruhr and the great inflation. It was at the centre of a circle of right-wing terror organisations, anti-Semitic groups and former Freikorps members who gathered in the Bavarian city of Munich. But an attempt to seize power in the city in November 1923 failed dismally, and the party went into decline as the crisis conditions disappeared. By 1927–28 Hitler’s party was a marginal force electorally, its membership only a few thousand and its leaders perpetually quarrelling. Then the outbreak of the world economic crisis gave it an enormous boost.

  Ever-greater numbers of people flocked to Hitler from the ‘moderate’ bourgeois parties, for these supported governments presiding over a crisis which was driving not just workers but many of their own middle-class supporters into poverty and bankruptcy. In the small town of Thalburg, for example, the Nazi vote leapt in three years from 123 to 4,200 at the expense of the other bourgeois parties. 179

  Like the Italian fascists, the Nazis were a party of the middle classes. A large proportion of their members before Hitler took power were self-employed (17.3 per cent), white-collar employees (20.6 per cent) or civil servants (6.5 per cent). All of these groups were represented in the Nazi Party at rates between 50 and 80 per cent higher than in the population as a whole – and all were regarded as much more socially privileged than would be the case today. There were workers who joined the Nazis, but at a rate about 50 per cent less than their proportion in the population as a whole. 180 The Nazis did pick up some working-class votes. But many of these were the votes of agricultural workers in areas like eastern Prussia, where attempts at unionisation immediately after the war had been broken and traditions of working-class politics hardly existed; the votes of workers in small towns, where the influence of the middle classes was greatest; or the votes of the unemployed, who were atomised and sometimes attracted by the benefits of Nazi, and especially Stormtrooper, membership. 181 This makes a nonsense of attempts to deny the middle-class c
haracter of Nazism – as Michael Mann does, for instance, when he claims that ‘studies show only a low correlation between Nazi voting and class’. 182

  But why were the middle classes attracted to the Nazis and not to the left? Partly this had to do with decades of anti-socialist indoctrination. The self-employed and white-collar workers had been brought up to believe that they were superior to manual workers and tried to cling on to what separated them from the mass of workers as the crisis deepened. Their bitterness against governments and financiers was matched by their fear of the mass of workers just below them. Yet this had not prevented many of them acquiescing in the idea that some sort of socialist change was inevitable in the revolutionary period of 1918–20.

  The other factor in the situation was the behaviour of the left itself. The German Social Democrats learned nothing from the experience of their Italian predecessors. Instead they repeated ad nauseam that ‘Germany is not Italy’. Kautsky insisted on this in 1927, claiming that in an advanced industrial country fascism could never repeat its Italian success of ‘dredging up … large numbers of lumpen elements ready to serve capitalist ends’. 183 Hilferding was still repeating the same message a matter of days before Hitler took office in January 1933. By sticking to the German constitution, he said, the Social Democrats had forced the Nazis onto the terrain of ‘legality’, which would defeat them – as shown by President Hindenburg’s refusal of Hitler’s request to form a government the previous summer. ‘After the Italian tragedy comes the German farce … It marks the downfall of fascism,’ he argued. 184

  The stress on constitutionalism led the Social Democratic leaders to follow a policy of ‘toleration’ towards the successive governments which presided over the worsening crisis after they themselves abandoned office in 1930. These governments, led first by Brüning, then von Papen and finally von Schleicher, ruled without majority parliamentary support, dependent on the power to govern by decree open to the president. Their measures led to successive attacks on the conditions of workers and the lower middle classes – one decree from Brüning imposed a 10 per cent cut in wages – but could not stop the deterioration of the economy and the hardship which accompanied it. Through their ‘toleration’ policy the Social Democrats were saying, in effect, that all they could offer was hardship and hunger. They left the field open to the Nazis to pick up the support of those who abandoned the old bourgeois parties.

  The Social Democrats seemed to go out of their way to make things easy for Hitler. They built a self-defence organisation of sorts, the Reichsbanner, made up of militants and members of socialist sports associations and youth organisations. It had the potential to mobilise hundreds of thousands. Yet they insisted it was for defensive purposes only, for use only if the Nazis broke the constitution – a moment which never came. They also controlled the Prussian state government and with it a large well-armed police force. They had used the police to shoot down Communist-led demonstrators on May Day in Berlin in 1929, killing 25, and they banned Nazi demonstrations throughout Prussia in 1930 and 1931. But their very constitutionalism led them to abandon this weapon as the Nazi menace reached a high point in the summer of 1932. In the presidential elections of that year they did not stand a candidate of their own but urged their supporters to vote for the aged Hindenburg – who then repaid them by agreeing with von Papen, who was secretly negotiating with Hitler, to issue a decree overthrowing the Social Democratic government in Prussia. The Social Democrats meekly obeyed, abandoning what they had claimed was the strongest bulwark against Nazism. The SA Stormtroopers were now free to parade openly, creating the impression of a dynamic all-powerful movement which might somehow get rid of the conditions which were making life so difficult and drive the opposition from the streets. There could hardly have been a greater contrast to the Social Democrats’ paralysis in the face of the worst slump people had ever known.

  No wonder there was bewilderment among Social Democrat activists. As the historian of the rise of Nazism in the town of Thalburg writes of the Social Democrats, by the beginning of 1933:

  many expected a Nazi takeover. They planned to fight, but it was no longer clear what they were fighting for. For the republic of General von Schleicher or von Papen? For democracy under rule by presidential decree? During the grey January of 1933 Thalburg’s SPD held no meetings, sponsored no speeches. What was there to say? 185

  The immobility of the Social Democrats left the field clear for the Nazis. But the Nazis could not have come to power merely on the back of their electoral support. Their highest vote in free elections was 37.1 per cent, and they actually lost two million votes between July and November 1932. Even with Hitler as chancellor and mass intimidation of the opposition they won only 43.9 per cent of the vote in March 1933. Late in 1932 Goebbels complained in his diary that the Nazis’ failure to take power was causing demoralisation in the ranks, with thousands leaving.

  What gave the Nazis power was the decision by key representatives of the German ruling class to hand it to them. There had long been sections of big business which gave money to the Nazis, seeing them as a useful counterweight to the left and the unions. The newspaper magnate Hugenburg had ‘relieved … Hitler’s … financial dilemmas in his early years’. 186 By 1931 Fritz Thyssen, a leading Ruhr industrialist, was ‘a keen Nazi supporter’, 187 and the former national bank chief Schacht was increasingly sympathetic. 188

  But until 1932 the main sections of German capitalism had supported two parties more or less under their direct control – the big industrialists backed the German People’s Party (successor of the pre-war National Liberal Party), and Hugenburg and the big landowners backed the German National Party. They distrusted the Nazi Party because many of the impoverished middle-class people in its ranks – and some of its leaders – not only attacked the ‘Marxist’ organisations of the workers but also called for a ‘national revolution’ directed against big business.

  As the world slump hit their profits the views of sections of capital began to change. Even the majority of industrialists, who did not finance Hitler and distrusted a movement that had grown up independently of them among the impoverished middle class, began to feel they could use the Nazis for their own ends. As one study concludes:

  The increasing severity of the depression convinced most of the leaders of the upper class that the Treaty of Versailles had to be eliminated, that reparations had to be cancelled, and that the power of labour had to be broken before the depression could be overcome … In the summer of 1931 leaders of big business adopted the characterisation of the Weimar Republic as a ‘system of dishonour’, and called for ‘national dictatorship’. 189

  Such views were shared by the Ruhr industrialists, the big landowners and the bulk of the officers corps in the armed forces. They were also close in many respects to the policy Hitler put forward. The proximity increased when Hitler purged Otto Strasser, the most outspoken proponent of the ‘national revolution’ approach, took part in a joint conference with the National Party, the People’s Party, industrialists and landowning groups at Harzburg in September 1931, and then ‘addressed captains of the Ruhr industry’ in January 1932. 190

  The industrialists were increasingly reassured that Hitler would not damage their interests, while some saw his Stormtroopers as a useful tool in smashing the workers’ movement. By the autumn of 1932 most industrialists believed the Nazis had to be in the government if it was to be powerful enough to pursue the policies they wanted and weaken working-class resistance. They were still divided on exactly how important the Nazi presence was to be. The majority wanted the key posts to be in the hands of politicians they trusted from the old bourgeois parties, like von Papen. Only a minority were pushing at that time for Hitler to be put in charge. Their attitude was that they needed Hitler as a guard dog to protect their property and, like any guard dog, he should be kept on a tight chain. But Hitler would not accept this, and the mood of big business began to shift as the government of military chief von Schle
icher proved incapable of meeting their requirements. Even if many elite industrialists were not keen on the jumped-up former corporal with his wild talk, they began to accept that he alone commanded the forces necessary to restore bourgeois stability. Von Papen himself held a meeting with Hitler at the home of a banker. He told the British ambassador a few days later, ‘It would be a disaster if the Hitler movement collapsed or was crushed for, after all, the Nazis were the last remaining bulwark against Communism’. 191

  The big landowners, the established business backers of Hitler like Schacht and Thyssen, and sections of the military high command were already pressuring the president, Hindenburg, to resolve the political crisis by appointing Hitler chancellor. Von Papen threw his weight and that of the heavy industrial interests which relied on him behind that pressure. There were still important sections of industry which had their doubts, but they put up no resistance to this solution, and once Hitler was in power they were quite willing to finance the election he called in order to boost his parliamentary fortunes (and overcome the crisis within the Nazi ranks). 192 Hitler would not have got anywhere had he not been able to organise a mass movement of the middle classes, to some extent in opposition to the immediate political preferences of major sections of German big business. But at the end of the day they regarded him coming to power as better than continued political instability – and certainly as much better than his collapse and a shift of German politics to the left.

  Hitler took office on 31 January 1930. Many Social Democratic supporters wanted to fight. Braunthal tells of:

  the most impressive demonstrations of the German workers’ will to resist. On the afternoon and evening of 30 January, spontaneous and violent mass demonstrations of workers took place in German cities. Delegations from the factories … from all parts of the country arrived on the same day in Berlin in expectation of battle orders. 193