by Merilyn Moos
Schärft die Hirne! Uebt die Lungen!
Müssen gut zu kämpfen [!] taugen,
Bis wir unser Ziel errungen!
(Aus der Roten Revue.)
96. Sportler rufen, Nicht geschwiegen by Siegfried Moos
Sportler rufen: Nicht geschwiegen!
Achtung, Achtung, nicht gewartet!
Sollt nicht mehr die Rücken biegen.
Jetzt heißt’s: Achtung! Los! Gestartet!
Stählt die Muskeln, schärft die Augen,
Schärft die Hirne, übt die Lungen,
Müssen gut zum Kämpfen taugen,
Bis wir unser Ziel errungen.
97. I gather that much of the KPD records were destroyed in Allied bombing. Some records may have been sent to the USSR and disappeared into the Moscow archives. But these records were not something many in the post-war German Communist Party would have wanted found after January/February 1933!
98. A ‘centrist’ organisation, the Independent Labour Party, always to the left of the Labour Party with a belief in combining parliamentary and extra-parliamentary methods to bring in socialism, was in a state of decline at this point having walked out of the Labour Party in protest against the policies of the 1929-31 MacDonald government.
99. During the first period of the League Against Imperialism, individuals such as Jawaharlal Nehru (later India’s first Prime minister), representing the Indian National Congress, whose participation Saklatvala opposed, Indonesian nationalist Mohammad Hatta, Mexican painter Diego Rivera, author Upton Sinclair, and Professor Albert Einstein (acting as Honorary President), were all active in the League (Peterson, 2009).
100. Pennybacker: From Scottsboro to Munich. Race and Political Culture in 1930’s Britain
101. Münzenberg, a hate figure on the right, was a pivotal figure and deserves to be better known on the left. Based in Berlin, a member of the Reichstag representing the KPD, he successfully established and raised millions in aid for the Soviet Union through the Worker’s International Relief (Red Aid).He became a leading figure in the Comintern. After 1933, he fled to France and broke with the KPD/Commintern over the Soviet/Hitler pact of 1939 (not easy for somebody whose life had been the Communist movement). His premature and mysterious death in 1940 is often suspected to have been the result of another Stalinist killing. (The Soviets certainly did not publicise him after his death.) The chances of he and Siegi knowing each other at least as comrades are great - both were activists in the Berlin KPD, and subsequently fled to and lived in Paris, and both dealt with India. Nevertheless my instinct is that Siegi did not approve of him - Münzenberg is described as having a nice taste in suits and enjoying the high life. I remember my father studying Derek Hatton, the Militant leader of Liverpool council in the 1970s, and declaring (correctly) that this man was not to be trusted because he was too keen on the cut of his suit.
102. It was banned by the British in the late 1920s, in fact, the British government banned the LAI from even meeting in London in 1929, and Münzenberg planned to convene the meeting in Cologne - except that many delegates were arrested before they ever got there. Indeed, according to Brinson and Dove (2014), there had been regular contact between the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and the Prussian Secret Police during the 1920s and into the 1930s including about the League against Imperialism. There had been shared discussions as to whether Communists, including Münzenberg, should be admitted to the UK.
103. Siegi may have met Nehru who visited his daughter in Oxford in 1938, where she was studying. Nehru, a man of the left, who was actively pro-Indian independence, and supported the Republicans in Spain without being pro-Communist might well have interested Siegi.
104. Dewar, The Quiet Revolutionary. Dewar continues, significantly, that after the Reichstag fire, the KPD in Berlin became inactive and demoralised, although s small nucleus did continue with underground work, usually at a terrible personal cost. Moreover, the KPD was so unprepared they regularly put their members at risk from arrest, as the interview with Elfrieda also testified.
105. Remmele, accused of ultra-leftism, was ousted from the Politburo on 25 April 1933, sent to the USSR, where like, so many German comrades, including Neumann, he was purged (Merson, 1986).
106. D .N. Pritt (in From Right to Left) calls the Reichstag fire ‘perhaps the most important [world] event between 1917 and 1939‘. Pritt was part of an unofficial investigation by a group of European lawyers to investigate the cause of the Reichstag Fire, which was held in England and inevitably had to overcome many legalistic hurdles. Pritt rejected the argument, still popularly held, that it was the Communists who had started the fire and instead pointed out that the group who immediately benefited from the fire were the Nazis in the elections five days later. The fire started at between 30 and 40 points in the tunnel under the Reichstag, which precludes it being one man - van Lubbe’s - work. Moreover, given the level of guards patrolling the Reichstag and that access to the tunnel was through Goering’s residence, Pritt is unambiguous in pointing the finger at the Nazis as the planners and culprits. The conclusions of this unofficial enquiry are not universally accepted, even on the left. (Münzenberg was also involved in this unofficial enquiry and this was the stated reason the UK refused him admittance.)
107. Jan Peterson’s Our Street (2009) is a unique ‘novel’ about these days in a street in Brandenburg in 1933, written at the time, and - with great difficulty - smuggled out of Germany. He too highlighted that the absence of a left presence on the night Hitler became Chancellor, apart from some heroic but futile leafleting outside a factory for a general strike. Peterson documents the savagery with which the SA and police attacked the left in the following months. On the night of the Reichstag fire, one comrade fled, others were arrested. The talk amongst the comrades was that they would overthrow Hitler soon. Peterson himself amazingly survived after escaping from Germany in 1934, to end up living in E Germany.
108. Maybe, the detention centre was at - what was in August 1933 to become - the Brandenburg-Görden concentration camp which housed - and murdered - political (and later T4) prisoners (including Lotte’s sister, Annamarie). Neither of my parents ever gave details.
109. By 1935, at the Brussels Conference, held in Moscow, two years after the Nazis had taken power, Pieck appears to have accepted that he had been wrong and called for ‘a united front of the deed’ to liberate the working class (Harald Marpe, Ian Birchall). The fascist demonstrations in Paris in early 1934 were fundamental in causing a change of Comintern line (personal letter from I. Birchall). However, as modern day defendants of the 3rd period line will remind us, the call for a united front was not new (I.Birchall). It may well be that by 1935, it was circumstances which had changed rather more than Pieck’s opinions.
110. If the Party ordered you to give up your lover or spouse, you did so. Hobsbawm gives the example of the KPD ordering Margaret Mynatt to go to England from Paris to help organise the German exiles. She obeyed, leaving behind the love of her life.
111. There are some question marks over my father’s version of events. Were the Gestapo on the French side of the River Rhine? And were the Gestapo allowed to check alternate trains running from Saarbrucken in the Saarland to Forbach in France? Theoretically this was not possible. Saarland was at the time under a League of Nations mandate, in practice under French military occupation. But on the rare occasions Siegi referred to this escape, his fear, all those years later, was palpable and I believe him over any official records which suggest the Gestapo were not allowed into Saarland.
112. Josef Wagner, who Siegi could well have known from his time in Bavaria, maintained an underground KPD network from Augsburg. He appears again in 1935 as a key leader in Paris for the Saar territory (Merson, 1986). A long standing member of the KPD, Wagner was a member of both the Bavarian Parliament and the Augsburg City Council. Arrested by the Gestapo in April 28th 1933, released, then later re-arrested, he was later to escape to the USSR, only to die of TB.
113
. Palmier, 1996, from The Spokesman Review, May 10, 1933, Google.com/newspapers
114. After the Treaty of Versailles, Saarland, which had been a part of Germany, was put under a French/British League of Nations mandate from 1920-35. Its coal fields were ceded to France. Both were a cause of great disaffection in Germany, and not just on the right. Siegi was one of many political refugees who sought refuge there after early 1933 and they campaigned strongly for the continuation of the mandate. But Saarland was to fall back under the control of the Reich in 1935, following a plebiscite there.
Its record under Nazism did not distinguish it favourably. Weber, in his study of German Communists refers to Paul Lorenz, who had represented the KPD in the regional government, who, thrown out of the KPD in 1934, supported the Nazis - a trajectory which may be illustrative.
115. Since 1921/22, the KPD, like all CPs, had been theoretically committed by the Comintern’s 21 Conditions to develop and maintain an illegal structure. Moreover, the events of 1918/19 and of 1923 will have left some sort of legacy about the need for underground work, though there is no definitive evidence on this.
116. In Berlin alone, 5000 members continued to carry on the struggle in illegal and often highly dangerous conditions (Merson, 1986). Even by 1936-1937, clandestine groups in Berlin were sufficiently numerous to be divided into seven districts. There were six local Siemens factories where there were illegal KPD cells and an elicit KPD paper ‘Lautsprechen’ which was distributed and discussed! (Merson, 1986). The heroism of many of its members in the years between March 1933 and 1936 is remarkable and, often, heart-breaking.
117. Münzenberg, whose adventures often appear to parallel Siegi’s but with the advantages of privilege, also fled on the night of the Reichstag fire, escaping as the police raided his flat early in the morning (as they did at Siegi’s). Münzenberg also aimed for the Saarland but, unlike Siegi, he had use of his own chauffeur-driven car. Nevertheless, he too had to be smuggled across the German/Saar border. There he made contact with French Communists who provided him with papers so that he could ‘legally’ enter France (McMeekin, 2003) He and Siegi will have probably come across each other in Saarbrucken. Münzenberg also then travelled onto Paris, where, with existing international contacts and reputation, he was welcomed, indeed granted a special residence visa, on condition he did not intervene in French politics. In fact, he set up a variety of front organisations (one, once again, with Einstein as its Honorary President).
Ellen Wilkinson, ex (and soon to be again) Labour MP, also arrived in Saarbrucken in June 1933, by when Siegi could well have arrived there, to help provide support for the political exiles on behalf of the UK Relief Committee (Pennybacker, 2009). Who is to know whether Siegi met her there, or even came away with the mistaken impression of a swell of left grass-roots support in the UK for the Communist refugees?
118. Lotte used to tell me how over the short period she worked there, from around April to her departure in around November, the woollen thread that was being woven on the frame started to break more frequently because it was poorer quality and how she had difficulty keeping up with the ‘girls’ whose experience meant they could knot the ends together quickly and keep the shuttle flying.
119. Caron, The Path to Vichy: Antisemitism in France in the 1930s.
120. After Siegi had left, there were increasing demands - often successful - for further restrictions of refugees and increasingly specifically of Jews. The second major theme of antisemitism in the 1930s, Caron (2005) argues, was the identification of Jews with the political left. Anti-foreign sentiment was transmogrified into an attack on all Jews, French as well as ‘foreign’. Antisemitism became almost respectable, even though laws were always framed as being against the foreigner, not the Jew.
121. McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg
122. Münzenberg, like Siegi later in the UK, seems to have remained fairly remote from the French Communist Party (PCF). But, unlike Siegi, McMeekin (2003) argues that Münzenberg retained an unambiguously ‘social fascist’ position towards the Social Democrats into spring 1934, much longer than the PCF.
123. Born Hans Steinicke, to a Berlin-Jewish bourgeois family, Hans adopted Reimann as a ‘pen-name’ when he started to write for the KPD newspaper in about 1925. In 1923, he had joined the Youth league, from 1923-27, he studied economics at Berlin university. In 1931, he was a member of the Central Committee and Editor in chief (Weber says AN editor) of Die Rote Fahne (writing a controversial article about the key role of the unemployed). According to Weber, he became an independent writer in 1930. In 1932, he allegedly belonged to the group that wanted to replace Stalin with Buckarin and led a resistance group made up of KPD and SPD dissidents.
124. Reiter: ‘Political exiles and Exile Politics in Britain in ‘Political exile and exile. Politics in Britain after 1933’
Part 2
In exile in Britain
Chapter 6
1934 - 1938 The first years of exile
Introduction
This second part of Siegi’s biography looks principally at how this man who had been a committed revolutionary slowly came to terms with living in a relative political backwater against a background of the ‘betrayal’ of his socialist value by the USSR. The period between the mid-1930s and the late 1950s were moreover not a propitious time for revolutionaries in the UK and were even harder, if you were a foreigner.125 This is an attempt to show how Siegi tried to adjust to this new reality.
As discussed, Siegi was one of a mere handful of political exiles to aim for and gain entry into the UK. Pennybacker (2009) estimates that altogether only about two hundred German Communists arrived in the UK altogether. Very few anti-Nazi émigrés thought of settling in the UK in 1933 (Palmier, 2006). Britain was suffering from high unemployment and it was difficult to get a permit to work. Moreover, immigration authorities could forbid refugees suspected of Communist sympathies, even though this was against the law. Palmier (2006) states that immigration authorities made every effort to keep out Communist activists. This helps to explain the very limited number of anti-fascists who successfully sought refuge in the UK between 1933 and 1938. Indeed, Palmier suggests that the UK was not generally seen as attractive by German anti-fascists in terms of somewhere to carry on the struggle. Most other European countries in 1933 would have seemed more culturally familiar. The few political activists who settled here in 1933 were more likely to be Liberals, Catholics, Conservatives and Social Democrats (Palmier, 2006).
The first refugees from Germany to the UK are often subsumed or overlooked because of their lesser number - and probably because they were less obvious ‘victims’. Most refugees arrived here after the 1938 pogrom/Kristallnacht. Although the Immigration authorities figures are unreliable, they suggest that, between March 1933 and October 1934, only 4000 refugees, almost all German, had arrived here (London, 2000). The exact numbers are not known: not everybody came straight from Germany so would not necessarily appear as a German refugee. Moreover, British immigration/the Home Office did not have a classification for political refugees or even, more generally, refugees: everybody who arrived here entered as one form or another of alien.
This initial influx were predominantly not political activists, but made up of an assortment of scientists and academics, the ‘literati’, mostly in theatre and cinema, and the representatives of the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’, including the more far-sighted industrialists, so largely drawn from a ‘respectable’ and potentially highly employable middle class, and many, though certainly not all, Jewish (Palmier, 2006). Even by 1937, there were only 4500 refugees in the UK (Palmier, 2006).
Examples of writers or journalists who came to the UK are: such as Rudolph Olden126, Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt127 and Alfred Kerr128. The most well-known and influential was the playwright and revolutionary leader, Ernst Toller, whose time in the UK is considered below. As opposed to Siegi’s more interventionist inclinations, most of these men largely
wanted to influence public opinion by getting the ear of influential public figures (Furness, 1995), but the British were generally not responsive to these foreign émigrés’ exhortations. These principled exiles were not just taking on the predominate attitude of appeasement, expressed clearly by sections of the British ruling class but also rooted in the anti-militaristic left, but also, like Siegi, running the real risk of deportation from the UK for engaging in ‘political activities’.
Indeed, MI5 were particularly suspicious of political refugees from Germany, an interest out off all proportion to their numbers, and a consequence of their historic concerns with German spies and Communist agitators (Brinson and Dove, 2014).129 There were even discussions between MI5 and the Prussian Secret Police about German Communists and whether German Communists should be admitted to the UK. Brinson and Dove argue that MI5 had received details of a list of German political refugees’ activities in the years up to 1933 (2014).
The political refugee, Communists but also Social Democrats or from a broader aligned or non-aligned left spectrum, who generally arrived in the UK in 1933 and 1934, were very different from the post 1938 pogrom Jewish refugees, even when the political refugees were themselves, in a Nazi, even if not always self-identifying, sense, Jewish. Unlike many Jewish refugees, the vast majority of the refugees who retained an alignment with the KPD (and its other European equivalents) intended to return to rebuild their countries of origin, preferably within a socialist framework, and indeed started to make plans while still in the UK. Siegi’s rupture with the KPD also meant he was unlikely to want to return, which makes his trajectory all the more unusual.
From 1938, the Government’s policy towards the refugees becomes increasingly restrictive, even more so than the earlier 1933-1937 period when Siegi and Lotte were struggling to remain on this island. Not just ‘Kristallnacht’ in Germany but the Austrian Anschluss and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (soon to be followed by the invasion of Poland) caused a considerable increase in the numbers wanting to flee for their lives and seek refuge in the UK, numbers moreover which now included many families, not all respectably middle class, who may have required far more public monies. The rate of expulsions from the UK also quickens from 1938 with terrible results for too many of those expelled (London, 2000).