Books.

| The KPD:-an untold story of resistance

COMMUNIST RESISTANCE IN NAZI
GERMANY. By Allan Merson, Lawrence
and Wishart, London. Paper $19.95 Avail-
able at People’s Co-op Bookstore.

“Riot squads ringed the house where Adolf
Hitler was born and police arrested eight
people yesterday for marking the 100th anni-
versary of his birth with Nazi slogans and
stiff-armed salutes.” — Associated Press
report April 21, 1989

The ugly incidents that erupted last week
in the town of Branau, Austria — Hitler’s
birthplace — raised once again the haunt-
ing questions about Nazi Germany that, for
many, remain unanswered: how did it
happen? How did the German Nazi Party
seize a country and mold its people into its
fascist design for world conquest? And what
happened to the Communist Party which

- before 1933 had been the largest outside the

Soviet Union?

The editors of the Soviet magazine Sput-

nik set off a furore last October when they
published a 1965 letter from journalist Ernst

Henry in which he suggested that one of the
| answers to those questions was the position
taken by the Communist International and
the resulting attitude of the German Com-
» munist Party (KPD). On orders from
" Stalin, Henry said, the KPD rejected any
n idea of unity with the Social Democrats,
%y, thus paving the way for the fascist takeover
* and Hitler’s consolidation of power.

| Henry’s letter was more a_personal
Sy memoir than it was an historical document

but it nevertheless prompted a ban on that
~ issue of Sputnik in the German Democratic

7 Republic and has been the subject of impas-

“sioned debate in the Soviet Union and
iS around the world. It may have been 44 years
® sirice the end of the war, but clearly Hitler’s
W Reich — and its supporters and opponents
aj — is still an issue of contemporary rele-
“y vance.

- Tronically, one the best works in English
1 on the role of the Communist resistance to
s Hitler (there is a wealth of material available
rin German) was originally published in
~

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1985 but received little attention here when
it first came out. But the renewed debate,
occasioned in part by the opening of the
Comintern’s archives, prompted British
publisher Lawrence and Wishart to bring it
out again. ~

That book, Communist Resistance in
Nazi Germany, by Allan Merson, is now
available and although the strong British
pound gives it a hefty price tag for the
paperback edition, it’s worth every nickel.
It’s both a fascinating read and a solid his-
torical document.

Merson, a former history lecturer at
Southampton University, notes in his intro-
duction that until recently, historians in the
west have paid little attention to the role of
the Communist Party’s opposition to the
Nazis, an omission that has helped to per-
petuate the notion that the KPD largely
ceased to exist after 1933. That view has
begun to change with some new works
which have appeared recently, but a bal-
anced view of the KPD’s role in the resist-
ance is only just beginning to come into
focus.

Merson’s work covers the period from
1933, when Hitler took over as chancellor,
to the final defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
It is a brief but obviously critical period in
German history and Merson uses the com-
pressed scope of the book to touch fre-
quently on what he calls the “human” side
of history — the activities of specific KPD
activists and committees.

The story that emerges is remarkable:
even though after the KPD suffered a mas-
sive wave of arrests in the wake of the
Reichstag fire — a provocation staged by
the Nazis — German Communists man-
aged to maintain the core of their organiza-
tion and structure, although it was to prove
a losing battle under conditions of heighten-
ing repression,

_ Key to the devastating losses was the
division of the powerful German working
class, a division created by two main fac-
tors, Merson says. One was the wait-and-see
attitude to Hitler adopted by the Social
Democratic Party and its unwillingness to
co-operate with the KPD in joint anti-
fascist activity. But the other factor was the
KPD’s “ultra-left” political strategy which
viewed the Social-Democrats as one of the
props of fascism and saw the Hitler regime
itself as only an acute phase of the crisis of
the capitalist regime in Germany whose
overthrow would be followed by proletar-
ian revolution.

Despite continuing losses and, as Merson
demonstrates, continuing isolation, that
Strategy was maintained until 1935 when,
under pressure from the Communist Inter-
national, a conference of the KPD held in
October adopted the new “united front”
position of anti-fascist unity.

But as Merson explains in some detail,
the KPD’s earlier doctrinaire opposition to
co-operation with Social-Democrats was
not a position imposed on German Com-
munists by Stalin, as Henry and others have
argued. That position had been stubbornly
maintained by the KPD’s leadership for
some time after the international movement
was changing.

Still, international developments were to
play a prominent role later in the resistance

May Day
Greetings &
Solidarity

Gramma Publications
2089 Commercial Drive
Vancouver, B.C. V5N 4B7
Phone: 254-7717 .

Rudolf
Goguel (I)
and Hugo
Paul, two
early KPD
underground
organizers
and pamphlet-
eers; the
clandestine
print shop
used by KPD
in Jena in
1943-44,

to Nazism — in 1939, for example, when
the Hitler-Stalin pact created confusion in
Communists’ ranks, and in the last years of
the war when it became apparent that the
future of Germany would be decided less by
the German people than by the U.S, Britain
and the Soviet Union.

Even before the KPD altered its dog-
matic political position, there had been
numerous instances of co-operation between
KPD activists and Social-Democrats, but
increasingly the extensive repressive appara-
tus of the Nazi state made work among
large groups of workers virtually impossi-
ble. As the months of fascist dictatorship
wore on, the KPD’s work moved farther
underground, with many leaders and acti-
vists going into exile in neighbouring coun-
tries to continue their work there.

But the resistance clearly continued at
another level. Merson details the activities
of several underground KPD committees
and leaders, who carried on what was often
heroic work, issuing clandestine leaflets and
meeting with other resistance workers,
often knowing that arrest was imminent.

And if many historians have disregarded _

the impact of those efforts on German
workers, Merson notes, the Gestapo knew
full well the effect it could — and occasion-
ally did — have.

Merson does not deal in detail with the
work in the concentration camps — a
major study in itself — but he does touch
on the role of KPD prisoners who, he says,
“often became synonymous with the camp

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administration at the prisoner level.” In
Buchenwald, a prisoners’ committee led by
KPD leader Walter Bartel launched a upris-
ing and took over the camp two days before
American troops liberated the area.

It is truly an incredible story — of hero-
ism, of resistance maintained even when
there is little hope of change. And Merson
makes it highly readable throughout,
backed up by solid footnoting and docu-
mentation for those who want to extend
their reading further.

It is also vital history that goes a long way
towards answering some of the troubling
questions raised in the current debate and
helping to create an understanding of the
anti-fascist heritage in the German Demo-
cratic Republic. As Merson notes in his
conclusion:

“The full story of the Communist Resist-
ance will never be known. But enough is
now know to make clear that it was no epic
of a few heroes and heroines (although there
was much heroism), but an unbroken, 12-
year struggle of many thousands of ordi-
nary working people, in which the Party not
only created a moral heritage (which even
its enemies have come to recognize) but
perseveringly grappled with past errors and
outdated conceptions and so acquired a
theoretical and political heritage which was
to make it possible to turn a catastrophe in
one generation into a great constructive
achievement in the next.”

— Sean Griffin’

Tr

Pacific Tribune, May 1, 1989 » 29