by Merilyn Moos
The Nazi’s accession to power marked the final and lethal product of the rift between the KPD and SDP. Though this book emphasises the role of the KPD and the Third Period, because its concern is with Siegi, the SPD were as culpable for the failure to co-operate as the KPD (and did a good deal less on the ground). The working class in the unions, cultural organisations, and localities was fatally split.
So, why did you continue to resist the Nazis, I remember asking my father, who was already old, mystified that he had chosen to take on an irresistible force and to risk his life doing so. ‘You never know,’ he had replied, and I remember, for a moment, he had looked as if he were a young man again.
Siegi does not go into hiding until the night of the Reichstag fire.106 There is an interlude of a month between Hitler becoming Chancellor and the Reichstag fire. He and Lotte, who had by then married (in preparation for flight, she told me - see Appendix), had talked about whether to flee. I told him, she informed me one day when doing the ironing, with clarity in her voice of which there was no misunderstanding that we knew all was lost before Hitler became Chancellor. ‘so I told him I was leaving for Paris with or without him.’ I do not doubt her. She wished to save his life, she said. But she did not appreciate, she also said, that the Nazis would stay in power. And her version also neglects Siegi’s commitments as a Party man. My father did not want to flee - ‘the working class have no hiding place’, he told me. (I still wonder whether he ever recovered from his ‘betrayal’.) For a frozen month, the two stayed put.
One month after Hitler assumed the Chancellorship and a few days before the March elections, on the night of the Reichstag fire, 27 February 1933 the man from the corner shop who sold Siegi and Lotte their milk, banged at the door of their flat and woke them up in the early hours of the morning. He wanted to warn them. (As told me, the man was not somebody they particularly knew, but one might question that.) Siegi, who I suspect, would have prepared, escaped just before the Gestapo came knocking. He went, my mother told me not long before her death, to a highly respectable cousin of her mother’s who lived near her parents, who - amazingly - agreed to hide her wayward nephew-in-law. Siegi hid there for two weeks, not able to go out. Lotte did not even dare contact him there for fear of leading the SA or Gestapo to him. She was not to see him again for a very long time.107
As Lotte told Richard and me, the Gestapo picked Lotte up in March, probably hoping she could (and would) give them a lead to her husband. She was taken to a detention centre, which she told us she thought was in the Brandenburg area of Berlin and which later became a camp, and there was questioned.108 She claims she knew nothing and from what she told me, she did not know what had happened to Siegi. But I have no doubt she would not have given anything away. The Gestapo, having failed to discover Siegi’s whereabouts, released Lotte soon afterwards.
The next few paragraphs will consider the period more generally immediately after January 30. The RBF bravely continued with their local fights with the SA in the streets and housing estates, though these were growing ever fiercer (Merson, 1986). Rudi’s testimony bore witness to the RFB’s members bravery during this period. Many of the RFB leadership were later picked up and murdered for their resistance to the SA prior to January 1933.
Although the KPD as a Party was not at first banned, the Gestapo arrested what they could find of their leadership and many of the KPD meetings in the pre-election period up to 5th March were banned. (The Gestapo were formally set up by Goering in April 1933 as the ‘secret’ wing of the police.) Within these limits and the daily harassment - and worse - by the SA in left areas, the KPD were able to campaign for the elections on the 5th March. Indeed Merson (1986) argues that the appearance of being able to maintain legal activities further blinded the KPC to the threat the Nazis posed and to the importance of building the underground.
It is now academically and politically accepted (even taken for granted) that the combination of the election of January 30, 1933 and the Reichstag fire four weeks later, marked the division between some sort of democratic-even if autocratically dominated-regime, and fascism. But read about the KPD at the time and you find this was not the case - listen to the accounts of the 3 Berliners and again, this watershed moment of history was not recognised at the time. Nor are they alone. This will be discussed further when considering why Siegi did recognise the disaster and its personal implications. But to quote Carr (1982): ‘It was only in retrospect that Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on January 30 1933 was seen as the decisive day in his ascent to power.’
Only three members of the Cabinet were Nazis (Carr, 1982), the rest nationalist. ‘The first reaction of Pravda was to hail Hindenburg, the representative of monopoly capital, as the most important man in the new government‘. Extraordinarily, even in January 1933, Pieck (later leader of E. Germany) was still declaring that the SPD was the enemy. And in February 1933, Manuilsky was still damning the Social Democrats. Nevertheless, at the beginning of February, at a secret Conference (posing as a meeting of a sports club), attended by about forty delegates and addressed by Thaelmann, the KPD did put out a call to Social Democratic workers for a common struggle against fascism, all too late and all ignored.109
The election results on March 5th, less than a week after the Reichstag fire, appeared to show that the KPD vote, given the level of repression, had held up remarkably well. Around 5 million people had maintained their allegiance and voted for the KPD, 12.3% of the total vote, compared to the roughly 30% in the previous November election. But beware using this vote as an indication that the Communists had not yet been defeated, as some still do - if ever there was an indictment of trusting in the power of the ballot box, the March elections surely must be it. The day after the election on 5th March, the KPD was declared illegal and, on the 9th March, its parliamentary mandates were cancelled (Merson, 1986).
Then began a reign of terror whose intent was to smash the KPD once and for all. The SA set out to exact their revenge for past blows, essentially unfettered by any police or legal apparatus, though certainly unofficially condoned (Merson,1986). Many Communists, particularly the activists, who were not arrested, went underground after February 1933, but many, especially the rank and file members, who hoped to disappear into the working class areas where their friends and comrades might hide them, were picked up: these areas were already infiltrated by police and Gestapo agents (Palmier, 2004). From February 28th onwards, for about the next two years, strict controls were imposed, with the primary purpose of arresting Communists and Communist sympathisers, though stopping Jews was also important (Palmier, 2004).
On the night of the Fire and the days that followed, 1500 Communists were arrested in Berlin alone and about 10,000 in Germany as a whole. Palmier (2004), although his focus is not on the KPD, suggests that the fire took the KPD leadership by surprise. Most of their functionaries, even if not the top leadership, were arrested. ‘The wave of arrested that followed the Reichstag fire decimated the hierarchy of the KPD cadres in a single night…Those functionaries who escaped often had no further precise orders.’(Palmier, 2004). We will never know how far Siegi acted independently when he went underground, how far he was under Party directions.
Among those seized, were a high proportion of middle ranking functionaries as well as some full time regional officers (Merson, 1986). The top leadership and some of the key regional figures escaped (except Thaelmann who was probably betrayed and was finally murdered.) In the few weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, the KPD’s top leadership finally started to live and work clandestinely (Merson, 1986).
Too late, on the 28th February, the KPD’s CC issued an appeal to the three main trade unions federations, i.e. not just the Red Federation, and to the SPD. It called for a united response of ’strikes, mass strikes, general strike’ (Merson, 1986). The SPD leadership ignored it, although there were some local attempts at coordination, such as at Leipzig and Stettin (Merson, 1986).
Between January 30th and the
Reichstag fire, it was still possible for anti-Nazis to exit Germany legally and without significant risk (Palmier, 2004). Indeed, a very few leading members of the KPD and significant literary figures did get out in this brief ‘window’ of one month. But not Siegi. He remained, whether because of political instructions or a deep reticence to leave his own country, we cannot know.
In the dark hours of the early morning of the 28th February, as my father went into hiding and saved his life, most comrades did not know about or did not appreciate the significance of the Fire. ‘Many were dragged from their beds or seized at their place of work before they had realised the full significance of the Fire or received any political guidance about it, and were taken into ‘protective custody‘ (Merson, 1986). Indeed, in my interview with Rudi in particular but also the other two Berliners, my impression was that the significance of the Reichstag fire as the final break with democracy - even though the Weimar Republic had become autocratic and repressive - is still not fully acknowledged.
Around 53,000 people altogether left Germany in 1933, including many German intellectuals and musicians, including Richard Tauber, Max Wertheimer, Cassirer, and Erich Fromm. Like Brecht and Weill, Einstein was out of the country and decided never to return. Later, Klemperer, Janacek, Freud, Bloch and Adorno all escaped. But there were also a wide mix of political anti-fascists, from Conservatives to Communists (though very few Social Democrats) (Palmier, 2006). 37,000 of those who left were defined as Jews: some who saw the writing on the wall and had the money to get out, and many who were actively anti-Nazi (Palmier, 2006). There was no ‘typical refugee’(Palmier, 2006).
Siegi was in one sense lucky - he was still relatively young at 29, was fit, had no children, no possessions and, as will be explored later, a generous and loving uncle. He had experienced illegal and clandestine work through the RFB. Moreover, he would have made contacts across Germany through his theatre work but also through the different networks of which he was a part. In comparison, most of the KPD were older than Siegi, many had families and homes, were less experienced in illegal work and, crucially, could not support themselves without paid work - going underground becomes far more difficult in such circumstances. It was clear from interviewing the Berliner 3 that none of them, or most of their friends, ever considered leaving Germany.
Given what we know from the various ‘official’ police documents dated 1937, the police/SA knew about Siegi’s involvement in the KPD, the Red Front and the Proletarian Freethinkers. He would not have stood a chance. My mother’s arrest bears testimony to that. From the same documents, we know that the ‘library’ of communist literature which my father had told me he had hidden under the floorboards of their flat was also found and seized. (That would have upset him enormously, had he known.) Indeed, the SA tore apart many homes in their search for illegal typewriters and duplicating machines, and hidden caches of anti-Nazi literature as well as reeking revenge on some of the working class areas which had stood up to them in the past (Merson, 1986).
I had been brought up to know that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi plot, a position which was - and still is - contentious. Then, in the early 1980s, my father drew my attention to a snippet in the Guardian newspaper. It has been established, it read, that the Reichstag fire was not started by Van der Lubbe, the man, loosely associated with the Communist Party who was accused by the Nazis of having started the fire. ‘You see,’ he told me, ‘it takes fifty years, but, in the end, the truth comes out.’ ‘I knew,’ he went on, ‘that the Fire provided them with the excuse for a surprise attack on the opposition,’ (though he meant the KPD). I’m left suspecting that Siegi - and almost certainly Lotte too - had anticipated that the Nazis would stage some such event and had been prepared.
There is a question which cannot be answered: why did Siegi decide to flee at all. As already mentioned, none of the Berlin 3 considered flight. Indeed, my impression was that they would have seen flight as betrayal, though it must be remembered that they failed to recognise that the Nazi’s coming to power and the Reichstag fire marked a fundamental break with the ‘democracy’ of the Weimar Republic. Siegi too saw himself as a fighter for the working class. Leaving the fight would have been close to desertion. We know that he was in a better position to leave than many, but this is not sufficient to explain why he did leave.
We already know (Merson, 1986) that it was only quite significant figures in the KPD who went underground the night of the Reichstag fire. As already suggested, it is possible that initially Siegi only ‘went underground’: that the initial decision was for Siegi to get out of Berlin where he was known but to lay low elsewhere in Germany, to await a fight-back or the Nazi’s collapse. Maybe it was only when all the other members of his Freethinkers cell were arrested, that Siegi realised that, if he wanted to survive, he had to leave Germany.
Or maybe the decision of the KPD from the start was for Siegi to leave Germany. It is possible that the KPD instructed him to leave or at least, had made it clear that he could be useful abroad. Sonnenberg (in private correspondence) emphasises the necessity for KPD members to be instructed to leave if they wished to stay with the Party: a subcommittee of the CC who took these decisions. Given Siegi had already been used in the negotiations over supplying Russian oil to India, had journalistic and organisational skills and could speak both some French and English, the CC sub-committee could well have seen him as a suitable candidate to help build an exile organisation or network. Hobsbawm (2002) testifies to the degree to which comrades in this period would accept the Party’s decision as unquestionable commands. The Party had the first claim in their lives. Whatever it ordered, would be obeyed.110 So maybe, the Party ordered Siegi abroad.
But maybe Siegi approached the KPD. We know that Lotte, whose political acumen should never be underestimated, had said she was going to Paris with or without him. This would have encouraged Siegi to leave. What we do know is that, in the UK, Siegi became the secretary of the KPD exile group with KPD approval. This suggests he was, whatever the exact reasons he left, acting ‘on line’ as late as 1934.
German police records reveal Siegi’s role in the RFB and KPD, that he was on the EC of the Proletarian Freethinkers and very active in the agit-prop movement. His application to come to the UK in 1933/34 (in the MI5 documents) reads: ‘Wanted by the Gestapo’. Siegi got out but I suspect that he never quite forgave himself for his survival when so many stayed and died.
Escape from Germany
It is not possible to disentangle family myth from the political imperatives my father was under. The story as told to me by my father was that he was wanted for his theatre work (a ‘smoke-screen’ he created as much for himself as for me, I suspect). He had had to walk across Germany because he could not catch a train or buses because he would most likely be caught that way. He told me that at least some of the railway officials had Nazi sympathies. This is confirmed by Palmier (2006) as he walked, he lived by grazing the fields - having been brought up on a farm, or so he implied, he knew how to survive on the land’s produce. He then planned to get out by swimming the Rhine near Basle, but when he discovered that there were Gestapo on the French side, turned and walked north to Saarland. There he caught the ‘right’ train, as the French and the Gestapo checked alternate trains.111 This was the family story, told moreover, often with some wrath against my mother’s sister, whose suggestion it had been, or so the story went, for him to swim the Rhine.
My father never mentioned that he first lay low for a couple of weeks after the fire or explained why he chose a route that took him across almost the breadth of Germany. But there is logic to his route. He had family and contacts around Bavaria and Baden Wurtenburg where he had spent the first twenty-four years of his life and had probably been some sort of activist there up till 1928, only five years earlier. Even if he was unlikely to have wanted to put his close family at risk, he may have chosen - or been sent - south by the Party because of his local knowledge of the area.112 But Siegi would have r
apidly realised that he was far from invisible - a Berlin intellectual, even if safely in a city such as Munich or Augsbug, rather than walking along countryside lanes and through small villages, neither sounds nor looks like a Bavarian bourgeois or farmer. When he also realised that there was no way out across the River, he headed back up to Saarland.
Siegi was not alone in heading south. Again, Palmier (1996) confirms that some of the people who went underground immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and again after the Reichstag fire, headed to Bavaria. They mistakenly hoped that Bavaria, so jealous of its independence, would stand up to the Nazis, which the State Government was promising to do. Indeed, Bavaria was the last ‘anti-Nazi’ stronghold in Germany, holding on to their own regional government until March 9th, when, without any resistance at all, they resigned. But it had given some of the exiles one month’s grace in the free air of Bavaria before the Nazis unleashed their terror (Palmier, 1996).113
After the fall of the Bavarian government, those who were underground there had to flee for their lives again, generally to Switzerland and Saarland114 (Palmier, 2006).
I once asked my father why he hadn’t headed to Switzerland, rather than the Saarland and France - the obvious place as he had relatives there, or so he had told me (although no living relatives have ever materialised!) The impression he gave me was that he - correctly - did not trust that he would not be handed back to Germany either by the Swiss border guards or the police. Indeed, the Swiss were to become notorious for turning back refugees from Germany.