The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  The verdict in the counter Trial, which found the Communists innocent and the Nazis guilty, was announced in Caxton Hall, London, on September 20th--the day before the real trial opened before the Supreme Court of Germany at Leipzig. Thus, thanks to Muenzenberg's genius, the Nazis were from the very beginning put on the defensive. The proceedings before the Supreme Court lasted for three months, most of which time was spent in frantic efforts to refute the accusations of the Brown Book and the findings of the Counter Trial. The Brown Book was actually referred to in the proceedings as the `sixth defendant'. It was a unique event in criminal history that a court--and a Supreme Court to boot--should concentrate its efforts on refuting accusations by a third, extraneous party. Hence the parade of Cabinet Ministers on the witness-stand; hence the fantastic request of the court to the Head of the Potsdam Police, to furnish an alibi for his movements at the time when the crime was committed; hence the incredible self­degradation of Prime Minister Goering: (`The Reichslag Fire Trial. The Second Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, based on material collected by the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, with an I:rtroductory Chapter specially written for the book by Georgi Dimitrov, a Foreword by D. N. Pritt, K.C., an Appendix on Murder in Hitler-Germany introduced by Lion Feuchtwanger, and 21 illustrations from original sources, London 1934.')

  `The "Brown Book" says that I looked on while the fire was being prepared, dressed, I believe, in a blue silken Roman toga. All that is missing is an allegation that, like Nero at the fire of Rome, I was playing the fiddle. ... The "Brown Book" is a work of incitement that I have destroyed wherever I find it.... It says that I am a senile idiot, that I have escaped from a lunatic asylum, and that niy skull has collapsed in several places.'

  After the acquittal of Dimitrov, Torgler, et al, Muenzenberg's victory was complete. It had far-reaching and lasting political effects. In the public mind, Dimitrov's acquittal became synonymous with the acquittal of Communism in general from the charge of conspiracy and violence. Communist terror was an invention of the Nazis to discredit their main opponents; in reality, the Communists were honest defenders of freedom and democracy, only more courageous and determined than others. To call Dimitrov a`Comintern agent' was to speak the language of the Nazis. Dimitrov became the symbol of that brave and respectable type of modern Liberal, the 'anti-Fascist'.

  Six months later the group of S.A. leaders to which the authors of the fire had in all likelihood belonged--Roehm, Heines, Schultz, etc.--were liquidated in Hitler's 30th of June purge. Thus the precise circumstances of the fire will probably never be established. Both Heines and Schultz had produced fairly convincing alibis, and in some other respects too the guesses of the Brown Book had been wide off the mark. But that did not diminish the effect. In totalitarian propaganda details do not matter.

  Even more remarkable was the Communists' achievement in effacing from public memory the fact that for years, in Germany and elsewhere, they had preached violence and armed rebellion. The evidence was there--on the front-page of every Communist paper. But as the Trial had established that they had not planned an armed rebellion on the day of the Fire of the Reichstag, the public regarded it as implicitly proved that they never had and never would at any date.

  The most fascinating example of how the world was fooled is the affair of the so-called `Sofia plot' which played an important part in the Reichstag trial. The Sofia plot was probably the ghastliest single act of terror in modern lustory. On April 14, 1925, the chief of the Bulgarian General Staff was shot dead in Sofia. During his funeral service two days later, the Cathedral of Sofia was blown up by a time-bomb hidden behind the altar. A hundred and fifty people were killed on the spot, and over five hundred seriously wounded. Among the dead were fourteen generals, the Chief of Police, the Mayor of Sofia, over fifty high government officials, thirty newspaper editors and journalists, and so on. The King and leading members of the Cabinet were among the wounded. The idea behind the plot had obviously been to exterminate the Government and leaders of the Bulgarian ruling class in one blow.

  The Government's retaliatory measures were even more terrible than the outrage itself. According to official figures, eighty-one trials were held involving 3,537 persons, of whom 300 were condemned to death. According to opposition reports, at least 5,000 were killed or disappeared. Some prisoners were burned alive in the great heating furnace of the Sofia Police headquarters. One of Dimitrov's brothers was killed in Sofia prison. Dimitrov himself, leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party, was condemned to death in absentia. He, and the Comintern, naturally denied any responsibility for the outrage and claimed that it was the work of police agents provocateurs.

  When Dimitrov was arrested seven years later on the charge of having set fire to the Reichstag, the Nazi Press accused him of having also blown up Sofia Cathedral. Dimitrov, and the Muenzenberg-Comintern machine shrewdly seized this opportunity to convince the world that, as the Communists were innocent of the Reichstag outrage, they were also innocent of the Cathedral outrage. In his famous concluding speech at the Reichstag trial, Dimitrov once more drove home this point:

  `My Lords, this is not the first time that such an outrage has been falsely attributed to Communists ... I would also remind you of the outrage in Sofia Cathedral. This incident was not organised by the Bulgarian Communist Party, but the Bulgarian Communist Party was persecuted on account of it. Under this false accusation two thousand Bulgarian Communists, workmen, peasants and intellectuals were murdered. That act of provocation, the blowing up of Sofia Cathedral, was actually organised by the Bulgarian police.'

  The truth of the matter only came out fifteen years later--through Dimitrov's own mouth. On December 19, 1948, at the 5th Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Dimitrov flatly stated that the Sofia cathedral had, after all, been blown up by the Communist Party, which at that time was suffering from a Left deviation:

  `The Party Executive inside the country, however, proved unable to cope with the ultra-Left deviation, to discontinue in time the policy of armed uprising and to proceed with the reorganisation of the Party's activity in accordance with the changed conditions. The Fascist government continued its terroristic course with even greater ferocity. Taking advantage of the desperate actions of the leaders of the Party's military organisation, culminating in the attempt at the Sofia Cathedral, it started a mass slaughter of active Communists. . . .'

  Funnily enough, both quotations appear in the same book: Georgi Dimitrov-Selected Speeches and Articles, published by the British Communist Party, with a preface by Harry Pollitt (Lawrence & Wishart London I95I). The first quotation, in which Dimitrov protests the Party's innocence, appears on page 23; the second, in which he admits its guilt, on pages 202-203. In the first quotation the blowing up of the Cathedral is called by the translator an `outrage', in the second an' attempt'; actually Dimitrov used in both cases the same word: 'Attentat'.

  After the acquittal, Torgler was taken into `protective custody', that is, to a concentration camp, whereas Dirnitrov and his two Bulgarian aides were, despite Goering's repeated threats, whisked off in a 'plane to Moscow. Two historians of the Comintern, Ruth Fischer and Franz Borkenaul have asserted that from the very beginning of the trial Dimitrov knew that a secret arrangement had been concluded between the G.P.U. and the Gestapo, according to which, whatever the outcome of the trial, he would reach Moscow in safety.

  Ruth Fischer's assertion is based on confidential information received by her at the time of the trial from Wilhelm Pieck, then a member of the German Central Committee, now President of the Soviet German Republic, and from Maria Reese, Deputy of the Reichstag and Torgler's girl friend. Ruth Fischer asserts that Pieck was worried at the time lest Torgler should learn of the arrangement and spill the beans during the trial out of resent­ment at having been excluded from the deal. Pieck, therefore, `was busy arranging for a refugee from underground Germany to arrive in London with the startling message that Torgler was a traitor to the anti-
Fascist cause.... Pieck's courier did go to London and deliver his message in a loud stage-whisper, but since Torgler never revealed the arrangement by which Dimitrov was saved, the charge against Torgler was allowed to peter out.'

  I myself have no first-hand information regarding the alleged deal. I remember, however, that Muenzenberg repeatedly and meaningfully warned us, his staff, `not to build up Torgler.' The implication was that Torgler might weaken or even turn his coat. But this suspicion need not necessarily have been related to the alleged Dimitrov deal.

  (Torgler himself survived the war in a German concentration camp and is now an official of the Social Democratic Party in a small German town. His case proves again that the secret of survival in such circumstances lies in colourlessness and self-effacement. Torgler somehow managed to remain inconspicuous even during his own trial.)

  If a secret understanding did exist, it was merely one more link in the chain of underground relations between the two totalitarian regimes which lasted from the Nazis' ascent to power until the Stalin-Hitler pact. But even if this were the case, Dimitrov was running the risk of infuriating the Nazis during the trial to such an extent that the deal would be called off. His personal courage remains wholly admirable. The pathetic role he played later on both as Secretary General of the Comintern and during the Stalin-Tito affair, merely proves that a Communist is apt to behave like a lion towards his enemies and like a mouse towards his superiors in the hierarchy.

  And so the homeric battle of blind-man's-buff between the two giants ended. It had taught me that in the field of propaganda the half-truth was a weapon superior to the truth, and that to be on the defensive is to be defeated. It taught me above all that in this field a democracy must always be at a disadvantage against a totalitarian opponent. My years with Muenzenberg have made me sceptical regarding the West's chances of waging `psychological warfare' against opponents like Hitler and Stalin. For to wage effective psychological war the West would have to abandon precisely those principles and values in the name of which it fights.

  XVIII. Red Eminence

  MY first meeting with Willy Muenzenberg made a strong impression on me. I became deeply attached to him--an attachment which lasted until he was assassinated in 1940. Willy was born in Thuringia of working-class parents; as a youngster he had been a worker in a shoe factory for six years. When I met him he was forty-four--a shortish, square, squat, heavy-boned man with powerfiil shoulders, who gave the impression that bumping against him would be like colliding with a steam-roller. His face had the forceful simplicity of a wood­cut, but there was a basic friendliness about it. His broad, cosy Thuringian dialect, and his simple, direct manner fiirther softened the powerful impact of his personaliry. He was a fiery, demagogical, and irresistible public speaker, and a born leader of men. Though without a trace of pompousness or arrogance, his person emanated such authority, that I have seen Socialist Cabinet Ministers, hard-boiled bankers, and Austrian dukes, behave like schoolboys in his presence. His only mannerism was to underline a point in conversation by a sudden flashing of his steel-grey eyes under raised eye­brows; and though this was usually followed by a smile, the effect on the interlocutor was rather like lightning. His collaborators were devoted to him, the girl comrades worshipped him, and his private secretary--tall, lean, lame-legged, self-effacing young Hans Schultz--was known to work sometimes until three or four o'clock in the morning to get the ideas that incesently spouted from Willy's fertile brain into shape. For Willy only dictated what he called `drafts' or `theses', which all ran something like this:

  `Write to Feuchtwanger. Tell lum articles received and so on. Ask him to do a pamphlet for us, ten thousand copics to be smuggled into Germany, upholding cultural heritage and so on, tradition of Goethe and so on, leave the rest to him, love and kisses. Next, Hans, you buy a book on metcorology, find out about highs and lows and so on, find out how the wind blows over the Rhine, how many quarto handbills you can hang on a toy balloon, in which area of Germany balloons released on the French side are likely to come down, and so on. Then, Hans, you contact a few wholesale manufacturers of toy balloons, tell them it's for export to Venezuela, ask them for estimates for ten thousand balloons. Next, Hans ...'

  In the Comintern hierarchy Willy occupied an exceptional position, and this for two reasons. First, he was not a politician but a propagandist, not a `theoretician' but an `activist'. He took no part in the battles between factions which, every two years or so, produced a devastating earthquake in the Communist universe. Hc did not manauvre for position, and the wrangles about the dialectically correct interpretation of the line left him cold and contcmptuous.

  Secondly, Willy was the head of a worldwide and powerful organisation, the 'International Workers' Aid' (IWA), known in Party slang as `the Muenzenberg Trust'. The IWA was run by Moscow as an autonomous body, and not subject to the control of the local Communist Parties. Willy thus enjoyed a greater measure of independence and freedom of action in the international field than any other Comintern leader. Undisturbed by the stifling control of the Party bureaucracy, the Muenzenberg Trust's newspapers, periodicals, film and stage productions were able to exploit imaginative methods of propaganda in striking contrast to the pedantic, sectarian language of the official Party Press. Willy's spectacular successes, his unorthodoxy and ill-disguised contempt for sycophancy and hairsplitting, earned him the heartfelt hostility of the Party bureaucracy. The German bosses in particular--Ulbricht, Neck, Eisler and co.,--who now rule the Eastern Zone of Germany, were permanently plotting his downfall. They finally Succeeded in 1937, during the Great Purge.

  Willy had founded his famous Trust in September 1921 in Berlin. In his youth, after the years in the shoe factory, he had emigrated to Switzerland where he had worked as an assistant in a pharmacy. During the first World War, while in Zurich, he had been drawn into the circle of Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks in exile. In 19I7, he was expelled from Switzerland, returned to Germany, joined the revolutionary Spartakus-Bund and, in 1919, became one of the founder members of the Spartacists' offspring, the Communist Party of Germany. His early efforts as a propagandist were directed at young boys and girls; in 1920 when the Communist Youth International was inaugurated in Moscow, Willy was elected its president. Never have so many and such pretty girls marched in political demonstrations as during Willy's presidency.

  A year later, when Russia was ravaged by the great famine that followed the Civil War, the Third Congress of the Comintern launched an appeal for help to the workers and friends of Socialism throughout the world. The appeal was followed by the founding of the IWA, with Muenzenberg at its head. It became at once an enormous success, though not exactly in the way that was originally intended. The original idea was famine-relief, and in the first two years some fifty shiploads of goods of all sorts, from drugs to trucks and sewing machines, were in fact collected and sent to Russia by the IWA. The quantity and the miscellaneous composition of these goods did not mean much to a starving country the size of Russia, but their indirect propaganda value was incalculable. Muenzenberg had hit on a new technique in mass propaganda, based on a simple observation: if a person gives money to a cause, he becomes emotionally involved in that cause. The greater the sacrifice, the stronger the bond; provided, of course, that the cause for which you are asked to make the sacrifice is brought to life in a vivid and imaginaive manner--and that was Willy's speciality. He did not, for instance, ask the workers for charitable alms; he asked them to donate one day's wages as an act of solidarity with the Russian people.' `Solidarity' instead of `charity' became the keyword of his campaign, and the key-slogan of the IWA. Contributors were given IWA stamps, badges, medals, pictures of life in the U.S.S.R., busts of Marx and Lenin--each donation was forged into a link. Willy had found the pattern which he was to repeat in founding the `World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism' and in his various Chinese, Spanish and other relief campaigns: charity as a vehicle for political action.

 
; The `International Workers' Aid', like its successor the `World Committee', soon branched into activities which had little or nothing to do with the original philanthropic purpose. The mobile canteens and soup-kitchens which the IWA had organised in famine-stricken Russia made their appearance during the following years in the working-class quarters of countries torn by social strife: in the Germany of the inflation years, in Japan during the 1925 strikes, in England during the 1926 General Strike. Out of the pamphlets issued in support of the relief campaign, grew the Trust's own publishing firms, its book clubs, and a multitude of magazines and newspapers. By 1926, Willy owned two daily papers in Germany with mass circulations, Berlin am Morgen and Welt am Abend; the Arbeitcr Illustrierte Zeitung, a weekly with a circulation of one nullion, the Communist counterpart of Life; and a series of other publications, including technical magazines for photographers, radio amateurs, etc., all with an indirect Communist slant. In Japan, to quote a remote country as an example, the Trust directly or indirectly controlled nineteen magazines and newspapers. It also financed Communist avant­garde plays which were in great vogue at the time. Finally the Trust was also the producer of some of the best films by Eisenstein and Pudovkin that came out of Russia (produced by Meshrnbpom-film, the Russian abbreviation for `International Workers' Aid').