by CHRIS BAMBERY
1933: Warnings From History republishes an important contemporary analysis of how the powerful German working-class movement was defeated by Nazism, finds Chris Bambery
Whenever we discuss how Hitler came to power in January 1933, with all the horrors that entailed, there is one major question to be posed: how did the German working class allow this catastrophe to occur?
This little book, the main chunk of which is Peter and Irma Petroff’s 1934 article, published in exile in Britain, ‘The Secret of Hitler’s Victory’, goes a long way in just a few short pages to answer that question. It is an eyewitness account as they were living in Berlin until they had to flee following Hitler being appointed Chancellor. Their account is backed up by an accompanying article and letters of an Argentinian one-time Trotskyist, Hippolyte Etchebehere who was also in Berlin when Hitler took power (he would be killed early in the Spanish Civil War fighting in the militia of the Madrid POUM).
The editor of 1933, Paul Flewers, provides a useful introductive overview of events in Germany from the outbreak of World War One to Hitler’s appointment. Useful because Hitler was in so many ways the revenge inflicted on the German left for their failure to make a revolution in a period of revolutionary crisis from 1917 until 1923.
German workers’ organisations
The German working class was the strongest organised working class in the world. The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD) had some million members, the main trade-union federation was allied with the party, with five million members, and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Black, Red, Gold Banner of the Reich), named after the flag of the Weimar Republic, organised to defend parliamentary democracy, had over a million members.
The German Communist Party (KPD) increased its vote total by 1.3 million in the first election after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the onset of the Great Depression, and membership more than doubled to a quarter million between 1928 and 1932. The Roter Frontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front-Fighters, usually called the Red Front) had some 130,000 street fighters.
In the last, relatively free parliamentary election of November 1932, the SPD and KPD had 1.5 million votes more than Hitler and the Nazis. Yet the latter won, and the working class lost – lost with no show of resistance. The German left went quietly into the night of Nazism.
Counterfire for more