A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (66 page)

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.
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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 Schleicher 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’.
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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 who 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).
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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:

Yet the SPD leaders decided Hitler had come to power ‘constitutionally’, and their followers should do nothing! Its daily paper
Vorwärts
boasted, ‘In the face of the government and its threats of a
coup d’état
, the Social Democrats and the Iron Front stand foursquare on the grounds of the constitution and legality’.
^193a
The party devoted its efforts to preventing ‘premature’ resistance to the new regime.

The desire for resistance from rank and file Social Democrats was a feeling the Communist Party could have tapped throughout the preceding three years. But its leaders had refused to demand that the Social Democratic leaders join a united front to stop the Nazis from 1929 all the way through to 1933, either out of stupidity or out of deference to Stalin. Individuals who began to have doubts about the policy were removed from positions of influence. The ultimate absurdity had come in the summer of 1931. The Nazis had organised a referendum to remove the Social Democratic government in Prussia, and the Communist leaders, on orders from Stalin, had declared this a ‘Red referendum’ and told their members to campaign for a ‘yes’ vote! It is difficult to imagine a gesture more calculated to stop rank and file Social Democrats looking to the Communists for a way to resist the Nazis.

This does not mean the Communists were any sort of allies of the Nazis, as is sometimes claimed. In places such as Berlin, Communist groups fought desperate street battles day after day to drive back the Nazis.
¹⁹⁴
But they did so cut off from a wider base of support.

Like the cowardice of the Social Democrats, the lunacy of the Communist leaders persisted even after Hitler took office. They did not learn from what had happened in Italy and believed the Nazis would act like any other bourgeois government in power. They insisted the Nazi dictatorship was fundamentally unstable and likely to be short-lived.
¹⁹⁵
Their slogan was, ‘After Hitler, us.’ In Moscow the party paper
Pravda
spoke of the ‘rousing success of the German Communist Party’, while Radek, a former Left Oppositionist now completely under Stalin’s thumb, wrote in
Izvestia
of a ‘defeat like the defeat on the Marne’ for the Nazis.
¹⁹⁶

In line with this perspective, Communist activists in Germany were told to keep on the offensive, with mass leafleting and petitioning directed against the new government. But Hitlerism differed from other bourgeois governments precisely because it had a mass of supporters prepared to crack down on any element of working class resistance, hunting out militants, ensuring employers sacked union activists, and joining the secret police to smash centres of opposition to the regime. Anyone who signed a petition was likely to be beaten up by the SA and picked up by the police.

Within a few days the paramilitary forces of the Nazis were being integrated into the state machine. The SA Stormtroopers and the police worked together to harass the working class parties. Then, on 27 February, the Nazis used a fire in the Reichstag as an excuse to ban the Communist Party, suppress its press and drag off 10,000 of its members to concentration camps.

The cowardly stupidity of the Social Democrat leaders persisted to the end. They believed the repression directed at the Communists would barely touch them, and they expelled members who talked about underground resistance. The trade union leaders even promised to cooperate with the Nazis in turning 1 May into a ‘day of national labour’. On 2 May the Nazis carted these leaders off to concentration camps as well.

Between the accession of Hitler and the outbreak of war in 1939 around 225,000 people were sentenced to prison for political offences, and it is estimated that ‘as many as a million Germans suffered, for a longer or shorter time, the tortures and indignities of the concentration camps’.
¹⁹⁷

Workers’ organisations were not the only ones to suffer. Having won the support of the parties of big business—the National Party and the People’s Party—for his onslaught on the Communists, the Social Democrats and the unions, Hitler turned on them, forcing them to dissolve and accept a Nazi one-party state. He used state terror to destroy the independence of all sorts of organisations, however respectable and middle class—lawyers’ groups, professional associations, even the boy scouts suffered. If any put up resistance the political police—the Gestapo—would cart off some of the more active members to the concentration camps. Fear silenced any overt disagreement with totalitarian policies.

Nazi rule remained, however, based upon a direct agreement with big business and the officer corps of the army. These were left relatively untouched by Nazi violence, free to make profits or expand their military capacity, while the Nazis were given control over the means of repression and the whole of political life. The alliance was sealed in blood a year later by the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when Hitler used his own bodyguard, the SS, to murder leaders of the SA Stormtroopers whose talk of a ‘second revolution’ worried the generals and industrialists. In return these allowed Hitler to take over the presidency and concentrate all political power in his hands.

The scale of the Nazi victory in Germany caused shockwaves across Europe. It had dismantled the world’s most powerful working class movement virtually overnight. It was a lesson that right wing forces elsewhere were quick to learn, and one which workers’ organisations had to try and digest, however unpalatable that was to leaders who had insisted on the inviolability of a constitutionalist approach or the imminence of a Communist victory.

Vienna 1934

The first concerted moves by the right to copy some of Hitler’s methods came in 1934 in Austria, France and Spain. Austria’s ruling class had tolerated the Social Democrats presiding over coalition governments in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of its empire in 1918-19, since there was continued revolutionary upheaval in neighbouring states, and vigorous workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Austria itself, which only the Social Democrats could hold back from bidding for power. As one Austrian Social Democrat later wrote, ‘The Austrian middle class parties were almost impotent, and the task of defending Austrian democracy fell to the Social Democrats’.
¹⁹⁸
Once the upheavals had died down the Social Democrats left the government and concentrated on using their control of the city council in Vienna to improve workers’ living conditions. Vienna was a bastion of the party, which had 600,000 members in a country with a total adult urban population of only three million, and won 42 percent of the poll in national elections.

But right wing Catholic politicians dominated the countryside and had a majority in parliament. Inspired by Mussolini’s success in Italy, by the late 1920s they had established a paramilitary force, the Heimwehr, which clashed increasingly with the defence force of the Social Democrats, the Republikanischer Schutzbund.

Hitler’s victory in Germany boosted the confidence of Austria’s fascists, even though it also split them in two—between those who wanted Austria to merge with Germany and those wanting a Catholic state allied with Italy. The leader of this second group, Dollfuss, took advantage of the situation in early March 1933 to dispense with parliament and rule by emergency decree.

Dollfuss took token action against the pro-German Nazis, but his main target was the workers’ movement:

The Austrian Social Democrats had boasted after 1919 that they were more left wing and more willing to fight the right than the German Social Democrats. They also boasted that because of this the Communists had barely been able to grow in Austria and the country’s working class movement was weakened by division like Germany’s. But their response to Dollfuss’s coup was to do nothing.

They were in a strong position. The strength of the working class had been shown only a few days earlier, when railway workers had won a clear victory in an all out strike. Instead, the Social Democrats hoped that Dollfuss would somehow form an anti-Nazi front with them. They told their members to be prepared for action, but not to do anything ‘premature’.

The situation dragged on like this for 11 months, with Dollfuss making piecemeal but systematic attacks and the Social Democrats continuing to tell their supporters to be patient. At a meeting of 1,000 factory delegates in Vienna a Social Democrat leader rejected calls for immediate action, saying, ‘So long as there is the slightest chance of averting the horror of civil war we are bound by honour and conscience to take it’.
²⁰⁰
As the Social Democrat Braunthal recalled:

Dollfuss was left a free hand to move decisively against the socialists at the moment of his own choosing. He did so on 12 February 1934, after his deputy had declared, ‘We are going to start cleaning up Austria. We shall make a complete job of it’.
²⁰²

Despite the defeat, the fact that the Austrian workers’ movement eventually fought back against fascism and did not simply surrender, as in Germany, proved an inspiration to anti-fascists in other countries. ‘Better Vienna than Berlin’ became a slogan around which a new left wing crystallised in many social democratic parties.

In Austria itself, Dollfuss’s followers hung on to power for four years with a regime sometimes described as ‘clerico-fascist’. Then, in 1938, Mussolini made a deal with Hitler, German troops took over the country to cheers from middle class crowds and there was full Nazification.

Events in Germany had demonstrated that the workers’ movement could not stop fascism unless it was prepared to fight in a united manner. Austria showed that unity alone was not enough—there had to be a preparedness to fight.

France and the Popular Front

Paris also seemed close to civil war in February 1934. Successive governments of the centre Radical Party had responded to the world economic crisis with deflationary policies which cut the pay of public sector employees and the incomes of the peasants, who still made up a majority of the population. At the same time a series of banking scandals had implicated leading figures in the governing party.

Popular bitterness led to a growing atmosphere of disorder, with protests by civil servants, demonstrations by small shopkeepers and small businessmen, and violent mass action by peasants. The far right, organised around various paramilitary ‘leagues’, was able to take advantage of this, parading through the streets and attracting growing middle class support for its combination of nationalism, ultra-Catholicism, denunciation of ‘corrupt’ financiers, and anti-Semitism.

By the beginning of 1934 the far right had hopes of emulating Hitler’s victory of a year before. On 6 February its organisations called a huge demonstration in Paris against the recently formed ‘left of centre’ government of the Radical Party’s Eduard Daladier. Their aim was to invade the Chamber of Deputies and force Daladier’s replacement by a right wing government, so opening the door to power for themselves.

A night of vicious fighting followed, as demonstrators and police shot at one another, with a total of 15 deaths and 1,435 wounded. Daladier resigned the next day, fearing he could no longer keep order, and a ‘right of centre’ Radical replaced him. The far right had shown it had the strength to ‘unmake’ a government by force, and France seemed set to follow the path of Italy and Germany.

The French left had previously seemed as incapable of responding as the left elsewhere. The Socialist Party (SFIO) tolerated the Radical Party in government, much as the German Social Democrats had tolerated Brüning. The Communists repeated the ‘third period’ nonsense that the Socialist Party were ‘social fascists’. On 3 February, as the right wing mobilisation became more violent, the Communist paper
L’Humanité
carried the headline ‘No Panic’, while on 5 February it declared that the choice between the fascists and the government was between ‘plague and cholera’.
²⁰⁴
When it called a protest on 9 February, which led to bitter fighting with the police and nine dead, it did so on its own and claimed the demonstration was against both the fascists and the ‘killers’ in Daladier’s fallen government.
²⁰⁵

The major union federation, the CGT, called for a general strike on 12 February, and the Socialist Party separately called for a demonstration. Only at the last minute did the Communist Party decide to demonstrate as well, but separately from the other organisations. It was far from certain what would happen when the demonstrations met. People feared they would end up fighting each other, as had happened in the past. Instead, as they drew close together, people began chanting the same anti-fascist slogans and melted into a single demonstration. According to one account, ‘This encounter triggered off a delirious enthusiasm, an explosion of shouts of joy. Applause, chants, cries of, “Unity! Unity!”’
²⁰⁶

The success of the general strike and the united demonstration halted the right’s advance. A formal agreement between the Communists and Socialists led to gains for both in elections at the expense of the Radicals. At the same time a merger between the CGT and a Communist-led breakaway led to some growth in union membership. Anti-fascist committees mushroomed across the country to challenge the right for control of the streets.

Then the Communist Party went even further in its policy shift. It called for a pact not just with the Socialists, but with the Radical Party as well, on the grounds that although it was a bourgeois party it stood for preserving the republic. When the ‘Popular Front’ of the Socialists, Communists and Radicals gained a clear majority in the elections of May 1936 it claimed this as definitive proof that its approach was correct. Certainly, the left did well electorally. For the first time the Socialists were the biggest party in the assembly, while Communist representation shot up from ten to 76. The Socialist leader Leon Blum was able to form a government containing 18 Socialists and 13 Radicals. The Communists were not in the government, but voted for it in the assembly.

However, the mood in the streets and workplaces was much more impressive than the Socialist-Radical government—after all, the two parties had held enough seats in parliament to have formed such a government at any point in the previous four years. A series of huge left wing demonstrations culminated in a 600,000-strong commemoration of the Paris Commune. The biggest wave of strikes France had ever known was beginning even before Blum’s government took office. What started as a scattering of short and isolated but victorious strikes in different parts of France—Le Havre, Toulouse, Courbevoie—suddenly turned into a powerful movement on 26 May, when workers in engineering factories in the Paris suburbs struck and occupied their plants. On 28 May the huge Renault plant at Billancourt in Paris struck and occupied, and by the end of the week 70,000 workers were involved. After a lull for the Whitsun bank holiday the occupations spread beyond engineering to all sorts of industries and to virtually every part of the country—chocolate factories, print works, building sites, locksmiths, even to department stores in Paris where there were no unions and workers had previously been afraid to talk to one another. In the Nord
département
alone 1,144 workplaces were occupied, involving 254,000 workers. The British ambassador compared the situation to Russia in 1917, with Blum in the position of Kerensky.
²⁰⁷

The employers, who had been willing to look favourably on the advance of the far right only two years before, were now desperate for Blum to settle the strikes even if it meant making enormous concessions to the workers. At a special meeting in the prime minister’s residence on 7 June they signed an agreement for the immediate establishment of labour contracts, substantial wage increases and the election of workers’ delegates in all factories employing more than ten workers. Three days later the government presented bills to parliament introducing two weeks paid holiday and limiting the working week to 40 hours. The bills passed in a record seven days. Even the Senate, elected on an undemocratic basis which gave the right built-in strength, did not dare oppose them.

Among many workers there was a feeling they wanted more than just wage increases, a shorter working week and holidays. They wanted somehow to change society in its entirety. The strikes continued until 11 June, when the Communist Party intervened with a speech by its leader, Maurice Thorez. He claimed that since ‘to seize power now is out of the question’, the only thing to do was to return to work. ‘It is necessary to know how to end a strike,’ he said.
²⁰⁸

The most militant strikers, who looked upon the Communists as the far left, reluctantly began to accept a return to work on the conditions offered. This gave them material gains—although inflation was soon to eat into their wage increases. But it left power in the hands of the old police, generals and top civil servants, who had shown their sympathy with the far right over the previous years. And it left control over industry and finance in the hands of capitalists who would try to grab back the concessions made in June the moment the balance of forces changed.

Thorez was right that conditions were not yet ripe for workers to take power, any more than they had been ripe in February or even July 1917. But they were such that the Communists could have put into effect the slogan they had ritually raised until only two years before—for the creation of soviets, structures of workers’ delegates which could oversee and challenge the power of the state and big business. However, Thorez did not even mention this, although the mood of workers would have ensured a favourable reception for such a call.