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From International Socialism (1st series), No.38/39, August/September 1969, pp.65-66.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
In 1932 the economic situation worsened. There were eight million unemployed. A third of the urban population depended on the dole. The real wages of those with jobs had fallen by a third since 1928. All sections of German society were discontented with the government. The Nazi vote seemed to be growing at an irresistible pace. Furthermore, willing industrialists seemed only too prepared to finance the fascists. The number of members of the SA had risen to 400,000.
Yet Hitler was far from having the majority of the German people behind him. Brüning persuaded the ageing reactionary Field Marshal Hindenburg to stand for re-election as president. Despite Hindenburg’s opposition to everything they purported to stand for the SPD and the free trade unions supported him as the ‘lesser evil’ against Hitler. The Nazis obtained their biggest vote yet – 36.8 per cent of the total – but were far behind Hindenburg’s 53 per cent (Thälmann got 10.2 per cent).
The Social Democrats continued to wait and hope. They continued to argue that the only sort of force they could employ was defensive force. They formed all the Social Democrat-influenced organizations, the free trade unions, the sports clubs, the Reichsbanner, into an ‘Iron Front’ to defend the republic – but not to fight the misery produced by capitalism in crisis under the republican Brüning. And the lynch pin in their defensive system continued to be the Prussian police force.
The Brüning government fell at the end of May, basically because the only positive supporters it had – the Reichswehr – turned against it. During the presidential elections of April information was discovered that the Nazis were preparing a coup. Worried by this, Brüning, who had let the stormtroopers behave very much as they liked previously, now banned the SA and the SS. But the most politically influential member of the General Staff, Schleicher took objection to this. He wanted to use control of the streets by the SA and SS for his own ends. He made it clear that the army was now against the government. When at the same time Brüning made one of his few positive proposals for dealing with the economic crisis – that the estates of bankrupt Junkers in East Prussia be bought up by the state and given to landless peasants -the agrarian interests close to Hindenburg turned against him as well. Brüning was replaced by an appointee of Schleicher, von Papen, who had virtually no parliamentary support and depended on Nazi votes, the ban on the SA and SS was lifted, and new elections were called.
The return of the SA to the streets led to street fighting everywhere. In Prussia alone there were 461 political riots between June 1st and July 20th. 82 people were killed and 400 seriously injured. At the height of this violence von Papen dismissed the Prussian Social-Democratic government. Such an action was completely unconstitutional. Furthermore it was carried out by a government with no pretence of a parliamentary majority. It was precisely the sort of eventuality the ‘Iron Front’ of the Social Democrats existed to fight. If they did not, their whole defensive strategy would have collapsed. The Social Democratic Minister of the Interior, Severing, and his police chief, Grzesinski, refused to resign.
‘In the city (Berlin), that was in the throws of a violent election campaign, these proclamations ... fell like a thunderbolt. Holding their breath people looked now to the Ministry of the Interior where Severing resided, now to the Wilhelmstrasse, where Papen resided. Everywhere discussions were to be heard on whether the Prussian police or the Reichswehr were superior in fighting ...’
‘In the large works, workers waited all night for the order for a general strike.’ [8]
The massed forces of the ‘Iron Front’ had been prepared over the years for precisely such a moment. Yet the Social Democratic leaders did nothing. Force had to be used to arrest Severing and his police chief: four soldiers took them from buildings that were full of armed police who would have obeyed any order. There was no resistance whatsoever. After only two hours in prison Severing and Grzesinski resigned. The ‘Social Democratic fortress’ had fallen without a shot being fired.
The Communists were prepared to fight. It was they that had been resisting the SA in the street battles. Thirty of their members had been among those killed. They did issue a leaflet calling for a general strike. But they could not organize one alone. They had very few members in the factories; the majority of their members were unemployed (in the Trades Council elections of March 1933 they only received 5 per cent of the votes, compared with 73 per cent for the Social Democrats and 12 per cent for the Nazis. [9] This perhaps would not have mattered at such a crucial juncture were it not for the inconsistency of the KPD. It was now calling upon workers to defend a government it had all along called ‘social fascist’ and, even worse, had worked alongside the Nazis to overthrow. No one took the belated call to action seriously.
In the elections that followed a week later the Nazis received their highest vote ever in a free election, nearly 14 million, twice that of the last election in 1930. The SPD lost 600,000 votes and the KPD gained the same number. The combined vote of the working-class parties was still only a few hundred thousand behind that of the Nazis. But the Prussian coup had made it clear that no combined resistance was likely.
The Communist leaders were still unable to see the danger before their very eyes. The Comintern executive at its September meeting still argued that the ‘main attack’ should be directed at the Social Democrats. [10] At the October Conference of the KPD, the call for a united front was referred to as a ‘demagogic United Front manoeuvre in which the left allies of the social fascists and the counter-revolutionary Trotskyist group are especially active.’ [11] Trotsky was called by Thälmann ‘an utterly bankrupt fascist and counter-revolutionary.’
The Only Road was written in the weeks after the July election of 1932. Here Trotsky analyses the overall forces at work in the German situation. On the one hand he is concerned to show that Hitler can still be checked by united working class action; on the other that the illusions of the social democrats, that the ‘lesser evil’ will prevent the greater one, and of the Communists, that their electoral gains at the expense of the SPD will somehow stop Hitler or ensure that they follow him, are false.
Once again we have not the space to reprint the whole work. The chapters we have omitted (4, 5 and 6) [1*], however, merely repeat many of the arguments given in What Next? This translation, by Max Shachtman and B.J. Field, first appeared in the US in 1933.
8. Peter and Irma Petroff, The Secret of Hitler’s Victory, London 1934
9. Braunthal, op. cit., p.288
10. Ibid., p.377
11. Ibid.
1*. The link is to the complete text.
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