Beaten But Not Defeated

by Merilyn Moos

  I am aware that the KPD established a variety of other defence organisations particularly after their disaffection with the RFB in 1929/30, but none relevant to Siegi, and none, besides the RFB, which survived till 1933 so they will not be considered. It was the RFB and its youth organisation, both of which did most of the fighting against the SA. Insofar as the RFB is analysed in histories of Germany up till 1933, there is a tendency to either reduce it to being no more than the military front of the KPD, or to present it as being essentially autonomous. Both positions, I suggest, are flawed, as both the interviews with the Berlin 3 testified and LaPorte reveals.

  The Red Front Fighters League (which was to become the Red Front Fighters Association) had been created in 1924, following a brawl at a Stahlhelm rally in Halle in May 1924. (The Stahlhelm was the oldest and very right wing paramilitary organisation in Germany.) The RFB’s first leader was Ernst Thalmann, the District secretary of the KPD (later to become the KPD’s main leader).64 Not much is written about the Red Front but LaPorte (2002), with his emphasis on the importance of activity at the grass-roots, gives a few significant details of its history pre-1929. The RFB, set up to rival the Right’s paramilitary organization and the SPD dominated Reichsbanner, was first involved in campaigning: marches, speeches and leafleting, usually, though not always on behalf of the KPD. It drew its recruits from the same layer as the Reichsbanner, mainly unemployed, mainly youth and often not KPD members (Thomas Grant, 2004: 43). Its original purpose included an important propaganda function-spreading an antimilitarist message, including in the army and other paramilitary formations, as did the Reichsbanner. By 1928, it had about 100,000 members. Following the First World War and given the background of other quasi-military organisations, the Red Front too adopted a uniform of green Russian blouse, hat, belt, breeches and boots. The RFB had an official paper: ‘Die Rote Front’ and, from 1928, an official song: Der Rote Wedding by Eric Weinert, with music by Eisler. According to a rare reference in the Bavarian archives, from 1928, the Red Front, in particular the subdivision, the Red Youth Front, increasingly carried out military exercises across Germany. The RFB went in for serious para-military physical training and training (illegally) in the use of fire arms (as I know from my parents), for use against the police, Stadhelm and the SA, and to protect the KPD members and supporters in public and factory settings (Rosenhaft, 1983:89). Crucially their training was supposed to equip them to take over in the event of a revolutionary situation.

  LaPorte (2002) suggests that the RFB in the mid 1920’s was often better at galvanising its audience than the KPD. The RFB’s emphasis on activity rather than discussion was a crucial counterbalance to the paralysis within the KPD, induced by factional feuding.65

  The RFB moreover attracted the young, and this was recognised with a specific youth organisation: Rote Jungfront (Young Red Front) for ages 16-21. (This is the organisation which Rude led locally.) Although not documented, my suspicion is that the RFB drew youth in far more than the KPD. According to LaPorte (2002:308)66, during the middle years of Weimar, only 12.3 per cent of Party members were between 18 to 25, of whom only two per cent had come through the Communist youth. New members of the KPD in around 1932 aged between 18–25 years of age amounted to 8.1% of total recruitment, a probable increase on earlier, but nevertheless revealing the difficulty the KPD was having in recruiting the young. Although Siegi was older than that, it is worth reminding ourselves that when he joined the RFB, he was probably a mere 24, an appropriate age for a youth leader, and younger than the average age of 30 in 1933 for KPD members (Merson, 1986: 19).67

  The RFB was the main organisation involved in the - very serious - fighting against the police on May 1 1929 and in the insurrectionary days that followed. The KPD was slow to endorse this violence, anxious that it could cause them to lose touch with their grass roots (Rosenhaft, 1983: 35). May 1st 1929 was a prelude to an intensification in the many street battles between the left and the Nazis when the SA attacked local KPD strongholds. (My mother told me they knew all was lost after the May events - though that may partly be hindsight speaking.)

  Crucially, the RFB was banned a few weeks later. From now till the Nazis took power, the RFB operated as an illegal and underground organisation. Berlin’s police superintendent gave as his excuse the likelihood of renewed fighting between the SA and the RFB. Nominally, the RFB then was replaced by the League of Struggle against Fascism, but, in reality this was the same organisation (Merson, 1986:16).

  The RFB’s members started to desert after 1929 (Rosenhaft, 1983: 90). The KPD dithered as to whether to let it die. It seems though, that by August, so many local groups already existed underground, with cover names (as indeed Siegi had), safe addresses and other ways of continuing illegally, that the CC agreed to it continuing and even endorsed their use of weapons (Rosenhaft, 1983: 105).

  But this period marks a reorientation in the RFB’s purpose, though the KPD twists and turns on what it thought its unruly offspring, the RFB’s main purpose was. If we go with my mother, Lotte, (whose opinion, even if disparaging, has tended to be accurate) its purpose changed from being offensive up till 1929, to defensive afterwards. Rosenhaft (1983: 88) also argues that after the May events, the RFBs main purpose was generally seen as ‘Proletarian self-defence’.

  The increasing attacks by the SA in ‘red’ working class districts, like Kreuzberg in August 1929, led Neumann, at this point still on the KPD CC and the editor of the Rote Fahne, to advocate a less centralised system where local - KPD and RFB - cells could take the initiative against the Nazis, ‘Hit the fascists wherever you meet them’ became Neumann’s motto (Grant, 2004: 43). This was enthusiastically supported by many rank and file RFB supporters. (Some of us will be aware of very similar debates going on now and in the 1970’s amongst the revolutionary left as to how to confront the NF/BNP/EDL). Rosenhaft (1983) confirms that after the tensions arising from the events of May 1 1929 between the RFB and the CC of the KPD, members of the RFB did not all tow the Party line. By the end of 1931, many of its members including and/or supported by some of the younger members of the KPD were in open revolt against the KPD leadership, and their opposition to individual and local terror.

  The issue of the use of violence exercised the KPD leadership, whose line vacillated considerably, sometimes almost monthly, in the period between 1929 and 1933, partly pivoted upon the importance they gave the NSDAP. It is not till 1930 and the September elections which gave the NSDAP eight times the number of deputies as in the 1928 election (though remarkably the CC declared afterwards that the NSDAP had passed its peak) that the Nazis came to be seen as a sufficient danger that the possibility was considered of a physical fight against them as part of the wider struggle against fascism (Rosenhaft, 1983: 26 71). The KPD in abstract distinguished their support for street demonstrations from a concept of insurrection, and they supported collective but not individualistic action (Rosenhaft, 1983: 39). They made a crucial - but, nevertheless, in real life, fuzzy - distinction between the RFB fermenting proletarian mass terror and mass action, but eschewing individualist - terrorist - action (Rosenhaft, 1983: 71-79). This tight rope act became even shakier after 1931, when on the one hand the threat of Nazism was being taken more seriously, and on the other, the KPD started to place greater emphasis on cooperation with some Social Democrats (Rosenhaft, 1983: 75).

  By 1931, LaPorte (2002: 338) argues that the Party leadership no longer sanctioned the policy of physically beating back the Nazis, instead favouring a general strike. Increasingly, the KPD were worried about the use of violence in case it increased the likelihood of their being made illegal (Rosenhaft, 1983: 60-85, passim). But the ambivalence is illustrated by Ulbricht in 1931, a district leader, supporting ‘blitz demos’, and the use of guerilla tactics by small groups of people, with even the possibility of carrying arms now up for consideration (Rosenhaft, 1983: 39-41).

  The seriousness of the CC’s anti-RFB line in 1931 is illustrated by their move against Hein
z Neumann, up till then a leading CC member (a position he had briefly shared with Thaelmann). Neumann’s support of aggressive tactics was increasingly opposed amongst the leadership, who compared it to the use of fascist violence and because of his ‘advocacy of individual terror and his adventurism’. Thaelmann also had a go at Neumann in November 1931 condemning illegal terror squads, though he accused the Nazis of initiating the use of guns and knives. Neumann was then removed from the CC but in part because he opposed the Cominterns/KPD’s downplaying of the struggle against the Nazis. The RFB came to be seen, disparagingly, as ‘Neumanites’ (Rosenhaft, 1983: 82,83).68 A resolution directed against Neumann by the CC in November 1931 prohibited the use of individual terrorism, a position adopted at least in part because of their fear of the KPD being banned.

  The RFB objected (Carr, 1982: 48).69 The KPD were afraid, the RFB protested, of illegality; the RFB were the protectors of working class areas against the Nazis. They refused to adhere to the CC’s ruling. We are not part of the Party, but semiautonomous, they insisted (Rosenhaft, 1983: 84). Some left (Rosenhaft, 1983: 84). In October and November, the KPD went so far as to attack the RFB in Berlin, though Rosenhaft (1983:85) does not give further detail. Both positions reveal how far the Red Front operated at a distance from the KPD.

  Partly in order to re-assure the SPD leadership and membership, in November 1931, the CC at its meeting with the Comintern in Moscow, took a strong position against individual violence. Taking out individual fascists would not destroy the fascist movement, they argued. Moreover, as already discussed, the CC, with some support from RFB members, had wanted to recruit SA sympathisers, even members, and nationalist unemployed workers over to the left, which is unlikely if the SA was being attacked (Grant, 2004: 43).

  There was also the connected contradiction, which the KPD CC never finally resolved, as to whether the purpose of the RFB was to be a mass or a cadre organisation and whether illegality made a limited membership preferable, especially given its quasi-military function (Rosenhaft, 1983: 100). Another tension was between its political and military purposes. Its original political functions-propaganda, campaigning and agitation amongst the ‘masses’ - were supposedly maintained after illegality. Yet it continued to supposedly also have a military responsibility: for the recruiting and training of cadres for a German Red Army (Rosenhaft, 1983: 101).

  From 1930 onwards, after the RFB was banned, the RFB was structured in a cadre formation along conspiratorial lines, too complex for it to be unravelled so many years later (Rosenhaft, 1983: 103/4). The operating unit, initially eight, was reduced to five, for the sake of security, cohesion and mobility. Those units were linked to other similar units. Each member had a clearly delineated function: the intelligence expert, an enemy’s expert, organisation, etc. We know such units existed in Berlin, indeed were formed into ‘Ordnerdiesnt’ (OD: Marshall-corps) (Rosenhaft, 1983: 114). I suspect my father learnt how to survive ‘underground’ in the RFB, skills which would have helped keep him alive when he went underground in 1933.

  The battles between the left in general and the Nazis were increasing from around the late 1920s and particularly in the working class districts, taverns and housing estates of Berlin. Though the SA at this point did not discriminate between the Social Democrats (SDP) and the KPD, KPD/RFB members and those aligned to them on the ground saw the Nazis as their target and became the principal street fighters, not the SPD. The NSDAP was the ‘main enemy’ in the neighborhoods which, following the onset of mass unemployment, increasingly came to replace the factory as the actual location of political conflict (Rosenhaft, 1983: 7ff, 18ff, 26). The fighting was increasingly brutal. From 1929 onwards, the SA and KPD members regularly disrupted each other’s meetings and ‘fought’ for control of the taverns, a key meeting place in Berlin working class community life (Rosenhaft, 1983 passim).

  I was to discover that the RFB was a key and very lived in organisation, at least in Berlin. (It was apparently not of such importance in Leipsig.) Elfriede, from Prenzlauerberg, and Rudi, from the red district of Wedding, both emphasised how the Red Front and the SA were involved in daily battles in the streets. Rudi talked about how people who even were SPD joined locally, though the cadre was KPD. (One assumes this was unofficial activity, not endorsed by the SPD itself.) Both emphasised that the Red Front was defensive: the SA would attack their meetings, their demonstrations and any group of lefties they could find. Rudi even said it was safer to travel alone, because you were less likely to get beaten up. He belonged to the Youth Red Front, which, for reasons of security, was divided into groups of 8 (Rudi was the leader of his group). Some of them were hotheads, he said, and he would tell them to stay calm, but, if they were attacked, they would defend themselves. Again, without giving a precise date, he talked about how they would send out scouts, sometimes on bikes, to see if the coast was clear; courting couples were also a favoured tactic. The Red Front, in other words, was key to the left’s every day safety and existence.

  Rudi’s testimony confirms Rosenhaft’s (1983:105/6) analysis that the KPD leadership did have some real cause for concern: some of the local youth groups and gangs who participated in RFB actions against the SA were attracted by the fight for their neighbourhoods, including the use of weapons, as much as the RFB’s politics, and some were rather too close to the criminal underworld.

  The RFB can clearly not be reduced to the KPD or seen simply as its military adjunct. Again, this became much clearer from the interviews. Rudi led his group of 8 and walked a tightrope, or so it seemed to me, between cooling down his hotheads and defending his comrades by whatever means necessary. My impression was that this had little to do with the line of the KPD and far more to do with the reality of the situation and expediency.

  Rosenhaft’s (1983) research on the KPD’s tactics in Berlin addresses the question of how the KPD did respond to the NSDAP on the streets and casts far more light on the role of the RFB than most historians, but she still does not give enough credence to its importance. Rosenhaft (1983:101) argument: ‘insofar as the RFB had an attraction after 1929, it lay precisely in the romance of conspiracy,’ is indicative of a serious under-estimation of the RFB’s significance. Instead, she emphasises the role of the KPD itself, arguing that, despite the party’s ideological limitations in interpreting the political situation, in practice its response was ‘tremendously vibrant and surprisingly responsive to the shifting needs of its actual and potential constituency’ (Rosenhaft, 1983). While Rosenhaft is, I suggest, here implicitly referring to the Red Front, nevertheless her comment reveals she is not sufficiently focused on either the changes in Party line or the interplay between Party line and members’ activities. LaPorte’s focus on the other hand allows him to highlight the role of the RFB and the degree to which local circumstances, as in Red Wedding, had created a level of autonomy between members committed activism against the SA, and the vacillating Party line.

  When the Berlin KPD did finally decide that the NSDAP was the ‘main enemy’, they did not, however, present this as a significant break with the policy of ‘social fascism’. Instead, the validity of the policy for rank-and-file activists is explained in terms of a response to the role of the SPD in the Prussian government. Party members’ everyday experience with the SA and the SPD-administered police and the welfare state made Communist propaganda concerning a united front extending from the Nazis to the SPD seem credible.

  Cross-membership

  The Nazis were not simply seen as class enemies. What emerged from my interviews was the – unexpected - importance of drawing people away from the SA (confirmed in LaPorte (2002). Weber (1982) also emphasises that the KPD saw the SPD as ‘communism’s main enemy’. ‘The ‘united front from below’ tactic was merely extended to the Nazis’ ‘misled’ supporters among the ‘working people’ and nationalistic propaganda was pumped into the German body politic…The KPD’s grass-roots organisations were instructed to win over Nazi support among the lower middle classes and
the peasantry: the threat of ‘Hitler-fascism’ was to be overcome by turning its social basis from brown to red…With party propaganda so strongly emphasizing winning over the Mittelstand from the Nazis, the need to recruit among Social Democratic workers was played down. The KPD’s local membership was instructed not to ‘overestimate’ the Nazi threat and to avoid making a false distinction between bourgeois democracy and fascism‘ (LaPorte, 2002, from D. W. Daycock, 1980).70

  The Berlin interviews cast a fascinating light on the issue of cross-membership. Elfrieda talked about Felix who was both part of their Communist aligned writers’ group and in the SA, and used to arrive at meetings wearing his uniform. (This had disastrous consequences for the comrades in 1935.) The KPD at least on a few occasions, invited SA speakers to their meetings.

  Rudi provided an eloquent explanation for this policy: the people who joined the SA were workers too, he said. They belonged to the same families, had gone to the same schools, lived in the same streets and were often good friends. This semi-official attempt to draw over workers may have helped legitimate what happened next. Rudi talked of counter-recruitment but noted that most of the traffic was one way, especially after 1933 (his dating) because some Communists were so harassed by the SA and so afraid, that they joined the SA. Hans at one point appeared to suggest that the KPD wanted to appease the SA. People were far more likely to go from the KPD to the SA, than the other way around. The CC’s attitude to confronting the NSDAP was erratic and led them at times to criticise the Red Front’s emphasis on confronting the Nazis.

  The joint picketing during the brief Berlin transport strike of November 1932 of both members from the KPD and the SA is an acute example of the KPD CC’s policy of drawing Nazis over to them. This strike had been called by the KPD and the ‘Red Unions’ and was not supported by the main stream unions. It is not clear whether the KPD at an official level endorsed the joint activity. Carr (1982:77) states that both Thaelmann and Ulbricht in their retrospective accounts failed to mention Nazi participation in the strike. For all that, what happened indicates how far at least some members of the KPD did not have an ideological objection to joint activity.