Chapter 13: Tango with the Devil
The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willy Munzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West
by Sean McMeekin
© 2003 by Sean McMeekin
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Chapter 13: Tango with the Devil
On 29 October 1929, a date that would soon live in infamy as “Black Tuesday,” a careening stock sell off that had begun the week before on the New York Stock Exchange turned into a rout, and panic descended on most of the world’s financial markets. An economic downturn had begun in Europe as early as 1928, drying up demand for U.S. exports and leaving few outlets for American goods when the Wall Street crash undermined domestic confidence the following autumn. The production crisis was exacerbated further by the doctrinal commitment of Western governments to the gold standard, which left central bank officials with little room to maneuver and kept credit tight. By winter 1929-30, a great deflationary spiral had ensued, in which contradictory fiscal policies pursued on both sides of the Atlantic reinforced one another, dampening demand still further. [1]
The political fallout from the Great Depression in central Europe was felt immediately. The German economy had slipped into recession even before the Wall Street crash, and the news from New York devastated the business climate even further. The Muller government, composed of an unwieldy coalition of Socialist, Catholic Center, and People’s Party ministers, was already drowning under the political burden of a burgeoning employment crisis, which threatened to bankrupt the national unemployment insurance fund. Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann of the People’s Party, who had negotiated the far-reaching Young Plan of 1929 refinancing the German reparation payments over the long term and including a pledge from the Allies to evacuate their troops from the Rhineland, died just weeks before the Wall Street crash, depriving the Cabinet of its most talented statesman. Stresemann’s death laid bare the impotence of the Muller Cabinet, which few expected to survive the difficult winter months.
If the Depression weakened the hand of political moderates in Germany, it inevitably did just the opposite for the extremists. The first beneficiaries were Hitler’s Nazis, who, along with the Communists, were the most vociferous supporters of the campaign against ratification of the Young Plan. [2] Nominally, the campaign was led by Alfred Hugenberg, the wealthy media magnate who headed a national committee promoting an anti-Young Plan plebiscite. Yet by bringing the Nazis into his coalition, Hugenberg famously made Hitler salonfahig, or socially respectable, for the first time, thereby helping ensure his own political eclipse. The opportunistic Hugenberg plebiscite, which demanded the abrogation of the Versailles treaty and made any minister who acquiesced in reparations payments guilty of treason, was resoundingly defeated in December 1929, but this did not slow the extremist momentum Hugenberg had foolishly ignited. Buoyed by the entrée Hugenberg’s embrace gave him into business circles, Hitler kicked Nazi fundraising into high gear and succeeded in winning regional elections for the first time, including the mayorship of Coburg. This success with the voters also led to a ministerial position in the Thuringian state government, into which the Nazis ominously entered in January 1930.
As in the Ruhr crisis of 1923, the Communists fed on the economic chaos no less shamelessly than did Hitler. Yet once again, the Communists fell far behind the Nazis in their recruitment efforts. In much the same way that the KPD’s confusing flirtation with fascism had alienated potential converts in 1923, Communist assaults on SPD and union leaders as “social fascists” now seriously damaged the party’s capacity to win over workers in the early days of the Depression. “To be a Communist,” Rote Fahne declared with typically savage bluster, one must be “a mortal enemy of social fascism.” [3] Such shrill attacks on an avowedly worker friendly, SPD led Muller government, struggling for its life against the forces of political reaction, were simply too much for most German workers. Astonishingly, as the Depression cast a pall over Germany and unemployment rolls soared into the millions over the winter of 1929-30, the Communists actually lost fifteen thousand members, just as the Nazi membership rolls were exploding. [4]
Declining KPD membership rolls were hardly reassuring, however, to members of the Muller government, who saw the Nazis’ inexorable expansion and the increasing stridency of Communist rhetoric as two sides of the same coin. Both parties, after all, drew on paramilitary forces for support, which at a moment’s notice could be mobilized in support of an antirepublican coup. (The SPD had its own paramilitary arm, the Reichsbanner, but this group was pledged to defend the Republic.) In truth, the Communists’ notorious M and N groups had declined significantly in strength since their heyday in the early 1920s; but if they were mobilized at the same time as Hitler’s storm troopers, the Germany army would have been stretched to the limit merely to reestablish public order, leaving the Polish border, among others, vulnerable to attack. Such was the reasoning behind the Defense of the Republic law that SPD Interior Minister Carl Severing introduced into the Reichstag on 13 March 1930 in one of the Muller government’s last desperate efforts to keep the forces of political extremism at bay. [5] Since the last Defense of the Republic Act had expired on 22 July 1929, Severing noted, assassination attempts on government officials had dangerously accelerated. Paramilitary attacks on the Socialist government of Prussia alone in 1929 had yielded fourteen police deaths and more than three hundred injuries. Though Severing clearly considered Hitler’s storm troopers public enemy number one, he took the Communists’ paramilitary Roter Frontkampferbund seriously as well, seeing in both forces a mortal threat not only to Germany’s republican form of government, but to “our entire public life.” [6]
In his (eminently plausible) depiction of both Communists and Nazis as mortal enemies of republican government, Severing provided rhetorical ammunition to the KPD’s “social fascism” argument. So often in the 1920s, laws aimed at curtailing political extremism had been applied unevenly, with the courts applying a double standard that punished the Left more severely than the Right. Whereas convicted Communist agitators often languished for years in prison, renegade right-wing generals such as Ludendorff were sometimes acquitted completely. Hitler himself got away with only a short prison sentence after gleefully confessing to attempting to overthrow the Weimar government at his February 1924 trial. And charges of politically motivated murders by Nazi storm troopers were sometimes dismissed by judges who, understandably, feared reprisals.
Thus when Severing introduced this law designed to defend the Weimar Republic against its extremist foes, it merely “proved” to Communists that the SPD was their greatest enemy. “Social fascists” like Severing, armed with parliamentary resolutions and the backing of the government, seemed more dangerous to the workers’ movement than the real fascists, even if the latter often murdered Communists in cold blood. After all, KPD foot soldiers could retaliate against such provocations by murdering Nazis – as they began to do when Nazi attacks grew more virulent later in 1930 – whereas Communist violence against Weimar government officials would now be crushed by the regular army.
In this way the debate over the law allowed Communists to flesh out the “social fascism” argument, introducing a real and present danger into a doctrine that had previously relied on hysterical claims about phantom SPD war plans against Soviet Russia. It is significant that the most vociferous parliamentary opposition to Severing’s draft law came not from the Nazis – who still had only the insignificant twelve seats they had won in 1928, as their swelling membership rolls had not yet translated into parliamentary strength – but from the much larger Communist delegation, whose raucous members smelled blood.
No one exploited this rhetorical moment more effectively than Munzenberg. Although he had never really warmed up to parliamentary life, seldom appearing in the Reichstag in his first five years as a deputy, Munzenberg was known to comrades and political rivals alike as a talented orator who could hold audiences spellbound. Several surviving pictures of Munzenberg delivering speeches in this era, taken by Nazi photographers assigned to cover Communist rallies, give a sense of the man’s demagogic firepower: Munzenberg all but glows with demonic energy, with the scorching intensity of his eyes giving sharp edge to his movie star good looks. Far more handsome than Hitler, Munzenberg nevertheless shared his contemporary’s bottomless capacity to feed off the energy of a crowd, to seem to lose himself in the passion of the moment, even while maintaining ruthless control over his ideological message (figures 4 and 5).
[x]
FIGURE 4. Münzenberg in the full flow of oratory addressing a Communist rally, circa winter 1931–32, photographed by a Nazi surveillance team. Source: Files of the Gesamtverband deutscher antikommunistischer Vereinigungen, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California.
[x]
FIGURE 5. Another Nazi surveillance photo taken at a rally, showing Münzenberg in calmly authoritative mode. Source: Files of the Gesamtverband deutscher antikommunistischer Vereinigungen, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California.
With an impeccable sense of timing, Munzenberg seized on Severing’s appearance in the Reichstag to give one of his greatest speeches. After reminding his fellow deputies that the first Defense of the Republic Act had been applied mostly against Communists, Munzenberg dismissed Severing’s claim that this law was aimed against the Nazis as “monstrous” cynicism. From Ebert and Noske to Muller and Severing, Munzenberg saw in Socialist ministers not representatives of the working class, but rather their “hangmen and prison wardens.” You “speak against the fascists,” he berated Severing, “and then [you] descend on the workers with tanks and machine guns and shoot them.”
Munzenberg, like most Communists, simply did not believe that the SPD-led “bourgeois” government really feared the Nazis. The Hitler Hugenberg accord during the anti-Young Plan plebiscitary campaign seemed proof that the Nazis, though claiming to be anticapitalist radicals, had in fact “long ago made their peace with the German bourgeoisie.” How could the Republic possibly fear a capitalist magnate like Hugenberg? And – since Munzenberg (again, like most Communists) mistakenly believed that Hugenberg now controlled Hitler behind the scenes like a marionette – it stood to reason that no Defense of the Republic Act would ever be applied against the Nazis, as “no one in the ruling classes of the Republic” could possibly gain from such repression. “For whom,” Münzenberg demanded, would the law work, and “against whom” was it intended? The answer could only be that Severing’s law defended the interests of “the Republic’s financial backers” against “the workers” and “the Communist Party.”
Having dismissed the Nazi threat as a red herring, Münzenberg proceeded to attack his true enemies—the “social fascists” who had designed the nefarious new law. Bringing back to life the ever-simmering old resentments of wartime, when Socialist leaders had transformed a party of Social Democrats into “Social Patriots” by supporting the war effort, Münzenberg traced the party’s further evolution during the Weimar years into a complacent organ of prosperous “pensioners and rentiers of the bourgeois Republic.” In its prewar glory days a militant workers’ movement, the SPD by the late 1920s represented only “well-installed bureaucrats and police chiefs,” whom the new law was obviously meant to protect against the true revolutionaries, the Communists.
Just as he had during his trial for treason after the Spartacist uprising in Stuttgart in 1919—and as Hitler had in his own treason trial in 1924— Münzenberg openly pled guilty to Severing’s charges of antirepublican agitation, and dared him to do something about it—safe in the knowledge, of course, that he enjoyed parliamentary immunity. “Jawohl,” he proclaimed, “we are a revolutionary party,” the first in German history that “had paid for its program with the blood of its martyrs.” “Jawohl,” he continued, “we are proud that the German worker is finally awakening” to fight back against oppression. We will resist any effort to suppress the KPD, he promised Severing, “with tooth and claw.” Citing a famous phrase uttered by one of the SPD’s founding fathers, Wilhelm Liebknecht, in his trial for lèse-majesté in Leipzig, Münzenberg vowed that the Communist rank and file would “oppose violence with violence.” When your laws defend a “capitalist dictatorship,” Münzenberg taunted Severing, again turning Liebknecht’s words against his own party, then “we consider it a positive duty ... to break [them].”
Spurred on by the SPD’s countertaunts that he was merely acting as Moscow’s tool (“Kronstadt 1921!” was the one most frequently heard), Münzenberg built up to an apocalyptic climax that left no doubt as to who would bear the wrath of his vengeance when the KPD took power. “You laughed at us then,” Münzenberg admonished the SPD’s almost elderly Reichstag delegation, reminding them of the ridicule that once greeted Lenin and his tiny Zimmerwald Left fraction during the war. But your “moment ... will come,” he promised his SPD enemies, just as “it came for tsardom and for German kaiserdom.” “Your ‘Defense of the Republic’ law,” Münzenberg assured Severing, “is a sign of weakness,” while for us, by contrast, it is “a spur to double our forces, to increase them tenfold.” There was no doubt in Münzenberg’s mind that the SPD was losing the war for the hearts of the working masses, who would soon all join the KPD’s ranks in struggling toward “the destruction of bourgeois class society and the realization of communism.” [7]
About one thing, at least, Münzenberg was right: the SPD-led government of Hermann Müller was too weak to defend the Weimar Republic. Over the Communists’ increasingly shrill objections, Severing’s Defense of the Republic Act did pass by a vote of 265 to 150 in the Reichstag the following week, but this symbolic triumph was not enough to save the government. Müller was, to be sure, handicapped by the stubbornness of his own party’s Reichstag delegation, which on 27 March 1930 rejected compromise legislation devised by Heinrich Brüning of the Center Party on the crucial issue of bailing out the unemployment insurance fund from bankruptcy. But Müller could have weathered even this crisis had President Hindenburg had faith in his capacity, as a Social Democrat, to uphold social order in the face of extremist threats like those issued by Münzenberg.
Knowing that Hindenburg had no intention of issuing a presidential decree on his behalf (which would have allowed him to circumvent Reichstag opposition on the unemployment insurance plan), Müller resigned. Brüning, the pragmatic Center Party moderate who had authored the compromise legislation, was now drafted by Hindenburg to replace him. Although Brüning himself had wanted to preserve the Müller coalition government, and now wished to establish his own parliamentary majority, in truth his claim to the chancellorship rested from the start with Hindenburg’s advisers, most of them (like Hindenburg) military men, who were more interested in stamping out Socialist influence on German politics than in securing parliamentary support for economic initiatives. For better and for worse, with the advent of “presidential” Cabinets such as Brüning’s, the army would now call the shots in Weimar politics.[8]
Under pressure from Hindenburg’s cadre of reactionary advisers, Brüning reluctantly ousted from the government every one of the seven Socialists who had served under Müller. For reasons still debated to this day, he also pursued a deflationary policy which, by rejecting economic stimulus or work creation measures in favor of strict adherence to international financial obligations, exacerbated the unemployment crisis further and put his government on a collision course with the SPD and the unions. [9] All of this put the Communists in an odd position, rhetorically speaking. With the SPD stripped of its power (outside of the state government of Prussia), were Socialists still “social fascists”? And of course, Munzenberg and other Communists had been cruelly taunting Muller, Severing et al. for months. Should the attacks now cease and the gloating begin? Or did the advent of a Cabinet openly hostile to Socialism herald a time for contrition and reconciliation with the SPD? Where, in short, was the enemy?
A flicker of recognition of what the Communists’ brutal assaults on Muller may have wrought can be found in the subtle shift in doctrine endorsed by the KPD Politburo the week following Muller’s fall. In the opaque phraseology of party speak, the new line, passed on 5 April 1930, was labeled “United Front from Below.” This basically meant that SPD rank and file members would no longer be overtly attacked as “social fascists,” and that their leaders, after being ousted from government, were now seen as mere “lackeys” of Germany’s bourgeois ruling classes. “Fascism” was now understood as a king of all embracing phenomenon in the German governing bureaucracy, in which “SPD lackeys” were not necessarily worse than Bruning’s coalition or the Nazis – who were no longer merely an opposition party, as they now held office in Thuringia. On the other hand, in the new doctrine Socialists were not seen as any better than the Nazis, either. [10]
One happy corollary of the new line was that Communist journalists were now free to criticize real fascists as well as imaginary ones. The threat posed by Hitler’s Nazis was formally addressed for the first time in a Politburo resolution dated 4 June 1930, which expressed concern over storm trooper terror tactics and authorized attacks in the party press labeling the NSDAP as “fascist.” [11] In his usual style, Munzenberg had already jumped out in front on this issue, launching his own press assaults on the Nazis as early as mid-May. Repeatedly during spring and summer 1930, Munzenberg ran inflammatory stories exposing Nazi brutality, leaving no epithet unused (one memorably alliterative headline compared SA storm troopers to the Ku Klux Klan). [12] The KPD’s discovery of real fascism clearly helped the party’s cause, reversing the membership declines of the preceding winter, although only about half of the losses were made up by August. [13]
The Communists’ flirtation with moral principle, however, was short-lived. With new Reichstag elections called by Bruning for September, the Nazis’ surging popularity alarmed Moscow enough that a new, more aggressive (and more cynical) doctrine was proclaimed for the KPD. On the positive side, the new line was less opaque than the last, summed up in the cardinal theme of “national liberation.” The idea was to claim Nazi issues for the Communist camp, stepping up attacks on the Young Plan and on the Versailles settlement more generally, which was now officially labeled a “thieves’ peace.” [14] Through a perverse logic of backhanded flattery, the Communists hoped to beat Hitler at his own game, must as they had aped his anti-Semitic arguments in their attacks on Jewish industrialists in the Ruhr controversy of 1923. And the early returns were promising: after railing opportunistically against reparations in the campaign’s final weeks, the KPD won 1.3 million more votes in the September 1930 elections than it had in 1928, increasing its Reichstag delegation to its greatest number yet, seventy seven deputies.
And yet, just as in 1923, Nazi gains were must greater. Hitler’s party increased its vote count by a factor of eight over the 1928 results, from 809,000 to 6.4 million, and its Reichstag delegation by a factor of ten, from twelve to 107. Nazis now outnumbered Communists in parliament for the first time, and by a substantial margin of thirty seats. The KPD “national liberation” campaign, pressed most enthusiastically in the Zentrale by Munzenberg’s friend Neumann, may even have helped the Nazis. By encroaching on the Nazis’ rhetorical turf, the Communists seemed to have played right into Hitler’s hands.
Oddly, though, the Communists didn’t see it that way. The Nazis, in spite of their electoral triumph, remained purely opposed to Bruning’s government – unlike the SPD, which saw Bruning as a lesser evil than the Nazis and agreed not to support a no confidence motion against him in the Reichstag. Thus the official Communist line labeled the Bruning cabinet a “fascist dictatorship” propped up by “social fascist henchmen.” [15] In this sense, Hitler’s gains in September were less important than the six hundred thousand votes lost by the moderate SPD to the uncompromising KPD. Such losses, in the blinkered “social fascist” worldview, left the putatively centrist but actually “fascist” Bruning regime weak and ripe for the plucking. The September elections, in this way, represented “Communism Advancing in Germany.” Munzenberg’s AIZ even put out a special issue celebrating “the electoral triumph of Red Berlin” in words and pictures. [16]
Munzenberg himself responded in much the same way in a postelection interview conducted by Hans Wesemann of the prestigious left wing cultural review Die Weltbuhne. On reading the transcript of this interview today, one is struck less by the predictable bombast about Communist gains in September than by the ideological confusion caused by the unexpected Nazi triumph. On the one hand, Munzenberg dismissed Hitler as a nonentity, calling him “little Adolf,” and spent most of the interview gloating about the erosion of the Socialist voter base. When he was asked to defend the “class against class” strategy, which had clearly weakened the SPD and possibly strengthened the Nazis, Munzenberg was unapologetic, blaming the socialists alone for disuniting the Left by opportunistically grasping at power. If the SPD were true to its “democratic and socialist” principles, Münzenberg unbelievably insisted, then it would form a government with Hitler (!) and make him “answerable” for his phony promises to the German workers. But the stodgy SPD bureaucrats would not do this, preferring instead to prop up the unpopular cabinet of Brüning, merely in order to protect the party’s precious ruling posts in the Prussian state government. Holding ministerial office was, in Münzenberg’s view, the Socialists’ true pride and joy. The SPD, he declared, would “hold onto Prussia, its sole power base, at any price.” Thus the SPD would continue to shy away from any decisive social struggle, leaving it to Communists alone to fight the true class war.
Somehow, though, Münzenberg seemed to recognize that the Nazis represented a serious threat on the political horizon, even if he was not sure quite how to meet it. In full obedience to the “class against class” line, he ruled out unequivocally any “tactical collaboration with the SPD bureaucracy” to counter the fascist threat. In part, this was because Münzenberg viewed the SPD as an enemy that the Nazis and Communists had in common. Both parties, after all, were trying to make inroads in independent German labor unions, which for the most part remained loyal to the SPD and hostile to both Red and “Brown” recruiters. Münzenberg was hardly going to “begrudge every lumpen proletarian who defected to [the Nazis] for Hitler’s free beer.” Then again, if Hitler’s Brownshirts ever took power, Münzenberg was certain they would drop their quasi-socialist rhetoric in an instant and launch their “national liberation struggle” by “thrashing the weakest segment of the [German] working classes with their truncheons.” Thus the Communists must carry out a “dual strategy,” seeking to “avert the fascist danger” even while “winning over the working masses of the SPD” to the KPD strategy of escalating the class war. [17]
At root, the contempt Münzenberg and other Communists felt for the SPD’s mostly elderly, comfortably well-paid leaders reflected a lack of respect for the Socialists’ will to fight for their beliefs—a will the Nazis obviously possessed in abundance. For this reason, there was a grudging mutual respect between the two extremist parties, neither of which hesitated to copy and learn from the other. Hitler himself admitted that, although he despised the Communists’ “boring social theory and materialist conception of history,” he had learned a great deal from their “methods,” from Lenin’s ruthless militarization of politics and demonization of political enemies to the disciplined organizational techniques and elaborate propaganda apparat of the Comintern. [18] Then there were the garishly red Nazi swastika banners and posters, which so shamelessly usurped the traditional color of the Left.
The Communists returned the compliment, both in 1923, when Radek and Rush Fischer experimented with fascist themes and Hermann Remmele tried recruiting Communists at Nazi rallies, and in 1929-30, when the KPD jumped on the anti-Young Plan, anti-Versailles bandwagon to try to rope in nationalist malcontents. It is significant that the strongest Nazi and Communist gains in the early Depression years were registered among the unemployed, who proved especially susceptible to the no holds barred scapegoating practiced by demagogues like Hitler and Munzenberg. At the time of the September 1930 Reichstag elections, as many as 40 percent of registered KPD members were on the dole. The Nazis, too, drew much of their electoral support from voters who had lost their jobs (although the extent of Hitler’s exploitation of the unemployment crisis has sometimes been exaggerated), and the unemployed made up a particularly large percentage of storm troopers, who were happy to join an organization that offered them work (of a sort – professional brawling, basically), and not infrequently, free food. Neither party, by contrast, made any kind of serious dent in the more numerous (though ever dwindling) ranks of organized and skilled labor, where electoral loyalty to the SPD was still fierce. [19]
It should not be surprising, then, that the Communists’ new covert “anti-fascist combat alliance” created in December 1930 to replace their now illegal paramilitary arm, not only mirrored the Nazi SA’s tactics but even recruited from its ranks. Among the Communist cadets Munzenberg addressed in a rousing speech at the combat alliance’s founding congress was a former Freikorps lieutenant, Richard Scheringer, who had done time at Gollnow prison for illegal political solicitation in the army. At Gollnow, Scheringer was converted to communism along with a number of his fellow inmates. Following Munzenberg’s speech, Scheringer rose up to declare his allegiance to the KPD and his readiness to take up arms against the Nazis. With Munzenberg’s help, Scheringer began publishing a Nazi opposition rag styled “The Mouth Piece of the Upright Soldiers of the German Revolution in the NSDAP.” It was not long before Scheringer began receiving letters from SA men disillusioned by Hitler’s apparent lack of revolutionary “sincerity.” Many of these disgruntled storm troopers followed Scheringer in joining the KPD. Not all would stay, however – in fact “side switching” between the two extremist parties’ paramilitary wings occurred with great frequency in the early 1930s, with some turncoats moving back and forth between the Communists’ combat alliance and the SA repeatedly. [20]
As such ideological defections by hardened street warriors suggest, the KPD’s hostility to Nazism in no way reflected a pacifist aversion to Hitler’s violent methods. The gulf between the two parties was not so much ethical in nature as eschatological. Certainly the two extremist parties reveled in publicizing atrocities committed by the other in the tactical struggle of the here and now, but for most of their leaders, it was the ends to which power would ultimately be put, not the means by which it was acquired, which really mattered. Munzenberg certainly believed this, which helps explain why, even as many of his Communist followers were being bludgeoned by Nazi thugs in the streets of Berlin, he agreed to tarry with the notorious Nazi renegade Otto Strasser in January 1931 at a friendly public debate on the theme of “National Unity or International Socialism?” [21]
Strasser’s famous break with Hitler the previous spring had been occasioned by his contempt for the Nazi fuhrer’s indifference to the “socialist” and “worker” parts of his party’s name. Unlike Hitler, Strasser actually believed in the ideal of a national socialism, in which the means of production – just as in Marxist socialism – would be turned over to the workers. In Strasser’s scenario these would, of course, all be patriotic German workers, who would still look out for the national interest. Strasser’s last illusions about the ultimate goals of Nazism were dispelled at an emotional meeting of the NSDAP leadership held in Berlin on 21 May 1930, when he learned that Hitler did not, in fact, intend to expropriate Germany’s industrialists, whose support Hitler would need to carry out his goals for military expansionism. Unwilling to abandon his socialist ideals, Strasser was expelled from the Nazi party, whereupon he tried to recruit followers into a splinter party of “revolutionary national socialists.” [22]
When Strasser and Munzenberg took the stage in Berlin’s Pharussalen on 6 January 1930 for what was advertised as a “Frank Discussion between Communists and National Socialists,” then, there was clearly common political ground to be exploited. The two men shared a passion for “socialist” ideology and for large-scale geopolitical theorizing, to the exclusion of the mundane tactical give and take of the everyday. Astonishingly, at a time when Nazi Brownshirts and Communist Redshirts were brawling in the streets and generally sowing terror wherever they went, neither man saw fit to bring up the issue of this political violence in the entire course of their exchange. Although both criticized Hitler severely, it was not out of distaste for his brutal anti-Semitism or for his goals – already published openly in Mein Kampf – of violent territorial conquest and extermination of his race enemies. Rather, their disagreements with Hitler – and with each other -- boiled down to the dialectical interpretation of current events. It was all a matter of historical eschatology, of the urgent need to predict the nature of the coming apocalypse and plan accordingly.
Significantly, Münzenberg opened his remarks by faulting Hitler for the cardinal sin of indifference to socialist doctrine. Citing Strasser’s own recollection of the words spoken at his fateful meeting with the NSDAP leadership the previous spring, Münzenberg provoked loud indignation among the Communists present in the auditorium by declaring that for Hitler, “socialism [was] only a word, which we [the Nazis] use to mislead and defraud the masses.” Since Hitler was not a serious socialist, he was not to be taken seriously. Münzenberg cruelly mocked the would-be Nazi dictator, to hearty laughs from the audience, as a clownish pretender to the Hohenzollern throne, who thought himself an “instrument of heaven,” even though all he really spoke for was the vulgar “gramophone.” “Hitler,” Münzenberg assured his rough-and-ready followers, “we can ignore. He has no worldview, has never had one, and he never will have one.”
Strasser, by contrast, actually did take socialism seriously—so Münzenberg saved his real rhetorical energy for him. By seeking to fuse nationalism with socialism, Strasser was in Münzenberg’s view “unconsciously and unwittingly” acting as the stooge of the industrial profiteers who had sent millions of German workers to death in the war, and who were now preparing “an international war against ... Soviet Russia to annihilate Bolshevism.” Hitler, on the other hand—according to Münzenberg—acted “willingly” as a capitalist tool and was for that reason less dangerous to working-class unity. “Herr Otto Strasser,” Münzenberg now counseled his adversary, to “stormy applause” from the Communist contingent in the hall, “your great political error” lies in the endorsement of “this nationalist heresy of the criminal capitalist classes” which “deceives” and “infatuates the German working masses.”
Against this assault, Strasser mustered a surprisingly game defense. English and German workers, Strasser pointed out, even when employed in similar industries, neither thought nor behaved alike. Besides, millions of workers remained completely untouched by the economic world system. There was, then, no global “proletariat,” whereas at least in Germany, one could point to a healthy population of workers with a similar cultural and political sensibility. Strasser further observed that in the world’s preeminent capitalist country, the United States, there was not a single “Marxist deputy” in either House of Congress. If “there be any among you,” Strasser challenged the Communists, “that dares [predict] that America will experience a socialist revolution at any time in the next thirty years, then I will bow down.” Tell me then, he taunted Münzenberg, how many of “America’s 120 million inhabitants belong to the Communist Party?”
In his reply to Strasser’s challenge, Münzenberg showed his hand as seldom before, openly confessing that he never expected the German workers to rise spontaneously en masse, à la Rosa Luxemburg. Rather, he was a Leninist to the core, who, though faithful to the Marxist worldview, had no illusions that the great masses of humanity would ever fully share it. Yes, he agreed, there were 120 million Americans, and only about 80,000 of them, he estimated, were Communists. But then there had been only about 100,000 Bolsheviks in Russia at the time of Red October of 1917—and that was in “a country of 150 million.” “Na ja, also!” Münzenberg’s Communist supporters now shouted at Strasser: now that’s an answer. You can’t argue with success.
Or can you? In his retort to Münzenberg’s apparent knockdown argument, Strasser offered a provocative interpretation of Bolshevism, in which Marxist ideology and political demographics were less important than personality and will. Lenin was in Strasser’s view the first “national socialist,” who, instead of “waiting until the international revolution had broken out,” had simply decided “to make the revolution himself”—in Russia. If Lenin had not thus given birth to “national socialism,” then “the tsar would still be sitting in the Kremlin.” From an ideological standpoint, Strasser argued, Trotsky was the true “Marxist,” with his focus on world revolution. But then Trotsky was a failure, whereas Lenin had achieved historical “greatness.” Lenin had decided, in Strasser’s formulation, that he “did not give a damn whether Marxist theory allows the model of socialism in one land or doesn’t allow it.” Strasser topped off this unorthodox tribute to the late Bolshevik leader with the crowd-pleasing send-off, “Long Live the Socialist Revolution!” [23]
Ultimately, no lasting cooperation grew out of Münzenberg’s flirtation with Strasser, but the episode set a disturbing precedent whose echoes would not soon dissipate. It was not merely that Münzenberg echoed the Nazis in his merciless attacks on the SPD, but that the entire world of politics seemed upside down as viewed by the Münzenberg trust, with words denuded of any logical meaning. Thus in a typical installment of Welt am Abend in March 1931, readers learned of an IAH meeting held to promote “the struggle against fascism”—a meeting at which the only “fascists” criticized were Socialist and union leaders. And one of the critics invited to give a speech attacking the “social fascist leaders of the SPD and the unions” was—“a Nazi party spokesman”! [24]
While dismissing the Nazis as cynical monarchist tools, Münzenberg spewed the bulk of his bile in the direction of the SPD. Münzenberg’s flagship FSR club, the All-German Society of Friends of Soviet Russia, even held a benefit concert in Berlin in March 1931 to raise money for—noble cause!—yet more publicity smearing Socialists for their supposed complicity in “Menshevik” sabotage in Moscow. [25]
As if this were not enough, Münzenberg next set out to discredit the last remaining “revolutionary” tradition to which the SPD adhered—May Day—by calling his own revolutionary counterdemonstration, an IAH-administered “Solidarity Day” march slated for 14 June 1931, at which no “open, brutal social fascist traitors” would be welcome. [26] The previous year, a similar IAH “Solidarity Day” march had attracted at least some interest among the non-Communist workers of Berlin, taking place as it did at the height of the short-lived spring 1930 thaw in KPD-SPD relations that had followed Müller’s fall. [27] But no such brotherly love would be extended to SPD “class traitors” this year. Among the twenty-four political parties, union cells, paramilitary groups, cultural committees, and the like Münzenberg invited to participate on 14 June, not a single SPD affiliate was to be found. [28]
As Münzenberg explained to his lieutenants at an IAH Executive meeting in Berlin on 19 May 1931, Germany’s independent unions, just like the SPD, were no longer merely “reformist” but had transformed themselves into openly “social fascist organizations.” [29] Or as he put the matter somewhat more colorfully in his formal Solidarity Day invitation to the workers of the world in Inprecorr, it was none other than Lenin himself who had taught the world during the war that “the international solidarity of the revolutionary proletariat is a fact in spite of the dirty scum of opportunism and social chauvinism.” [30]
Happily, none of the “dirty scum” from the Socialist parties dared show their faces at Münzenberg’s Solidarity Day—but then neither did anybody else. So incendiary were the attacks on “social fascism” in Münzenberg’s newspapers all through spring that the Prussian police—controlled as it was by the SPD—unsurprisingly laid down a comprehensive ban on street agitation of any kind on the planned Solidarity Day. Not even open-air concerts would be allowed in Berlin’s working-class districts on either 13 or 14 June, lest they be used as a pretext for IAH demonstrations. Humbled by his SPD enemies yet again, Münzenberg backed down, vowing to fight another day. [31]
He did not have to wait long for another chance to smite the hated Socialist class traitors. Since Hitler’s triumph at the polls in September 1930, the Nazis had been gearing up for a swipe at one of the last remaining props of Weimar democracy, the SPD-led government of Prussia. As in the anti–Young Plan campaign that had brought Hitler to national prominence, the political vehicle chosen for the assault was a cynically demagogic no-confidence plebiscite. Once more, Hitler’s key tactical ally was Hugenberg, and yet again his most vociferous rhetorical fellow travelers were Communists.
This was by no means an inevitable development. As late as 10 April, Rote Fahne was warning workers against joining forces with the “murderous strike-breaking bands of the Nazi [SA].” [32] But as the Communist assaults on the SPD grew fiercer over spring and early summer, the unthinkable became thinkable, and—after a nudge from Stalin—the KPD Zentrale chose on 22 July to throw in their lot with the Nazi plebiscite in order to weaken the Social Democrats. The SPD ministers of Prussia, Party Secretary Ernst Thälmann now declared, were to a man “deadly enemies of the working class,” and it was now the duty of all truly revolutionary workers to strip them of their power, even if they would have to team up with Hitler and Hugenberg to do it. [33]
The KPD Zentrale’s fateful decision came fairly late in the game, barely two weeks before the vote was scheduled for early August, but nevertheless the party press went all out to sell the “Red plebiscite,” as it was now styled. No one embraced the campaign more vigorously than Münzenberg, who used the plebiscite as a springboard to publish one of his most scathing assaults ever on his “social fascist” enemies in a special supplement to the 6 August 1931 Berlin am Morgen. Astonishingly, Münzenberg saved his most passionate scorn for his own fellow-traveling clients, many of whom had come out against the plebiscite. The none too subtle sub-headline of his article was “an answer to all manner of critics and know-it-alls,” whom he then dismissed in a boldface special section as “scribblers and intellectuals who fancy themselves radicals [but who] would support the social fascists Braun, Severing, Grzesinski and Co.” [34]
Most readers of Berlin am Morgen understood these words to be directed most vehemently at one former “Münzenberg man” in particular, the self-described revolutionary pacifist writer Kurt Hiller, who had just published an open letter in several Berlin newspapers accusing Münzenberg of behaving as if he “had Nazi agents in [his] central committee.” “If you personally, Willi Münzenberg,” Hiller had written his former hero, soon after the Münzenberg trust began promoting the “Red plebiscite” in late July, “swallow this decision without damage to your health, then . . . I admire your stomach.” [35]
Certainly Münzenberg’s stomach was stronger than Hiller’s. In the voluminous records of Münzenberg’s political correspondence in Moscow, I have found no expressions of soul-searching or undue concern for the precedent set by this stunning collaboration with Hitler. It may conceivably have helped Münzenberg’s conscience, however, that the “Red plebiscite” was resoundingly defeated, due in part to a poor Communist turnout, as many of the party’s rank and file refused, on principle, to vote for a Nazi-authored plebiscite. [36] Even Münzenberg’s wife and collaborator Babette Gross, who in her memoir elsewhere takes great pains to protect her husband’s reputation from any embarrassing stain of insufficiently antifascist tendencies (she avoids mentioning the Strasser meeting entirely, for example), is unable to muster up a shred of evidence to suggest that Münzenberg had second thoughts about pushing Hitler’s plebiscite. [37]
At the time, there seemed no reason to mourn the defeat of the plebiscite, which, after all, had been a setback for the Nazis as well. Besides, Münzenberg had weightier matters on his mind that summer, such as the imminent release of his anniversary tome glorifying the IAH’s first ten years, Solidarität. Münzenberg completed his introduction to this vanity volume in August, just days after the “Red plebiscite” was held. The book itself was ghosted by an NDV staffer who had been on the job since 1929, but Münzenberg was heavily involved in the editing of the proofs during spring and summer 1931. With his militant spirit unfazed by the plebiscite debacle, Münzenberg managed to slip in yet more attacks in Solidarität on the “social fascists of the Second International” who were, he claimed, struggling everywhere to exterminate revolutionary socialism and its most powerful exponent, the International Worker Relief. [38]
In addition to providing yet another venue for Münzenberg’s inexhaustible vitriol against SPD traitors and saboteurs, Solidarität was also meant to set the stage for the tenth anniversary conference of the IAH, slated for October 1931. By downplaying his controversial media “trust” and other business interests in favor of a wildly overblown emphasis on his earlier, mostly imaginary charity campaigns, Münzenberg aimed yet again to cleanse the IAH’s reputation. Not until page 493 of Solidarität was the once-ballyhooed Wirtschaftshilfe campaign of 1922–23 mentioned, and not until pages 509–21—the very last section of the book—did readers learn about Münzenberg’s one true passion, the M-Russ film studio. [39]
Rounding out the book’s dishonesty was its heavy emphasis on the recent, post-1929 militant “strike aid” initiative—which in fact as yet had barely gotten off the ground. [40] The “strike aid” label was also opportunistically backdated to apply to earlier IAH failures, such as the English miners strike fiasco of 1926. [41] Taken as a whole, Münzenberg’s Solidarität added up to an astonishingly dense farrago of lies.