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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 24, 29 April 1933, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Fascist Germany presents today a frightful picture of devastation of a once powerful revolutionary and working class movement. The Communist party has been destroyed, vanishing under heavy, well-aimed blows. The Stalinist policy delivered the party, and with it the working class, gagged and bound to the Fascist hordes.
The Socialist party is crippled apparently beyond recovery. Only its parliamentary skeleton is still attempting to maintain an humble, submissive existence. The trade unions are beginning to feel the Fascist lash. Many of their headquarters are sacked and now the preparations are in full swing to turn them into Fascist state organs. All Communist and even social Democratic delegates, are unceremoniously removed from the factory councils and replaced by Fascists, that is, where the councils are not dissolved altogether and new elections prohibited.
The savage howls of the roaming Fascist bandits who murder, pillage and destroy are pierced by the heart-rending groans from the torture chambers. The bestialities which actually take place are indescribable.
This is the crowning height of the many bitter experiences suffered by the German proletariat since the first serious act of treason performed by the social democratic chieftains on August 4, 1914. This first step was only the beginning of the later unbridled wrecking, the drowning in blood of the workers’ revolutionary struggles of 1918 to 1921, the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the perfidious collaboration in the restoration of capitalism after the working class defeat of 1923, until the completed preparation of the road for Fascism. But to this must be added the bitter experience of the Communist party, numerically the strongest outside of the Soviet Union, but Stalinized in every fibre of its bureaucratic apparatus, which has now experienced its August the Fourth. Though its leaders are now undergoing the most horrifying tortures nevertheless this must be said out loud.
The Nazis are advancing through streams of blood and tears. The horrible tales which come from the specially arranged Fascist torture chambers almost defy description. In their naked reality the actual events are much more hair-raising than the dribbling accounts would indicate which are smuggled out and find their way to expression outside of the German borders. I will attempt to relate a few examples culled from reports of eye-witnesses, for obvious reasons not giving names of the reporters, whose veracity, however, need not in the least be doubted. Our comrade relates:
“In the Nazi barracks they whip the Communists and break their fingers in order to get from them confessions and addresses.
“In the Nazi barracks in Hedemanstrasse there lay in one room about 150 Communists who had been tortured until they were half dead. They were all undressed and when they were naked had to run the gauntlet until they broke down.”
In Spandau, near Berlin, almost all Communists were arrested and taken into the barracks to be tortured. A woman comrade was taken from her bed at night, taken into the barracks to be horsewhipped and thrown into a cellar. When consciousness returned she noticed that she was not alone but was surrounded by others groaning or dying. Some are allowed to go out after they have been tortured: others never see daylight again.
The “Kassemats” in Spandau is an old antiquated prison to which most of the “bigger game” is being brought. There are incarcerated Thaelmann, Torgler, Pieck and Koenen, among many other Communists. But there are also such victims as Lehman Russbildt, the chairman of the “League for Peoples Rights”, whom the Fascists, symbolically it seems, put in chains, leaving him unable to move for days at the time. An eye-witness relates the beastly beatings that were administered to Thaelmann every night so that the once robust figure is now but a living corpse. A special confession was demanded from him in the form of a declaration all made ready for him to attach his signature. It was to prove among other things that the Communist party had organized terror groups to murder and to pillage, giving names of alleged commanders of these groups. It was to prove that the C.P. was supported by the Soviet government, alleging the manner in which funds were turned over.
The significance of the attempted direct connection of the Soviet government cannot be underestimated. It is but one out of many similar attempts, such as in the burning of the Reichstag building and others to stir up a popular hatred of the Soviet Union and pave the road for intervention. There are among the flamboyant declarations of Goering the one proposing to carve out a bigger piece of the Ukraine for Poland so that she may object less to the return of the Corridor to Fascist Germany. In general the Fascist press concerns itself very studiously at the present time with reports and estimates of the fighting capacity of the Red Army.
But the gruesome torture tales continue. Right along, corpses are found throughout the Reich and reported “killed by persons unknown.” Eye-witnesses also relate having seen victims in the Berlin prison of the police presidium brought there from the Fascist barracks with their eyes cut out or with their teeth smashed by rifle butts. They tell of the unfortunate prisoners being thrown on the floor, trampled upon and kicked in the abdomen. It is the Fascist storm troops who administer the tortures. This became too much even for some of the old hardened Schupos in the Berlin Moabit police station. About a dozen of them protested and were immediately disarmed.
A certain C.P. functionary, B. Ramer, who had once been a Fascist officer but remained loyal to the party had his legs so badly crushed in the prison tortures that it became necessary later to perform an amputation. Storm troops went to the home of Ruth Fischer; once a party leader, and not finding her home, smashed all they could lay their hands on and took her thirteen-year-old boy as a hostage.
It is not only the Communist victims who suffer barbaric mutilations but social democrats as well. Karl Bockel, the editor of the Chemnitzer Volksstimme, was beaten to a pulp and died in the street. However, the torture methods applied to the socialist member of the Reichstag Sollman, from Saarbruecken, are of the kind which put the notorious Spanish inquisition entirely in the shadow. A Fascist storm troop broke into his home, destroyed all furniture and beat him into insensibility. To bring him back to consciousness his socks were torn off and a lighted torch applied to his feet. As he writhed in pain one of the gang threw mustard into his eyes saying: “There is your black-red-and-gold dirty pig, your national mustard colors.” After that they forced his mouth open and urinated into it.
Finally his body was literally dragged along the streets in a parade headed by music and when the orgy was over, it was thrown into a coal cellar.
Some of the capitalist papers, fearing that the terror may bring too serious repercussions, at times endeavor to soothe the pains a bit by explaining this regular part of the Fascist system as merely some isolated excesses. That, however, is not at all the viewpoint in high Fascist circles. Goering made that perfectly clear in his speech at Essen, on March 10, where he said:
“I refuse to have the police appear in the role of protectors of Jewish department stores. It is about time to put a stop to every scoundrel calling for police protection. When you claim that here or there people have been captured and maltreated, one can only answer that: Where anyone planes, there the shavings fly.”
Yet there is some evidence of “efforts” to halt the “isolated excesses”. Recently a certain celebrated Berlin lady, a demimonde, threw her fashionable home open to a big blow out. The whole diplomatic corps was much in evidence. These gentlemen were brought there by their private chauffeurs and somehow a Nazi storm troop considered this a big occasion and in order to keep in trim, went to work battering some of the poor chauffeurs to pulp. That was obviously an “excess” and the papers promptly carried a warning from Fascist headquarters. After that the American ambassador, Sackett, could cable to his paper’s at home that law and order prevails in Germany.
The Fascists themselves were surprised at the ease and speed with which their brutal onslaughts succeeded in consolidating their position in power. That fact we need not doubt in the least. It is confirmed by events. The absence of resistance from the workers increased the tempo of the attacks to a speed which in itself became an ever greater provocation. This lack of resistance only caused the Fascists to be so much more merciless, not needing to fear anything in their way. An army in open retreat becomes an easier prey for the enemy whose ferocity increases with each step in pursuit. And in this case the tortures inflicted upon the working class are an integral part of the Fascist consolidation of power.
In this there is a serious lesson to be learned by the working class elsewhere who still cling to reformist illusions or depend upon capitalist democratic constitutions and remain unprepared while the reaction strengthens its forces. Every lesson of the German events should be hammered home, never to be forgotten. They must play an important role in guiding the preparations for the future. For it is a certainty that this consolidation of Fascist power in Germany inaugurates a new reactionary period, no one can say for how long, but we can clearly perceive its fateful implications. It will not at all be what the Stalinists conceived of their “third period” estimates. But by its sharpened contradictions it will nevertheless again become pregnant with new revolutionary possibilities.
The German proletariat was disarmed by the illusions which inevitably resulted from the perfidious policy of its social democratic leadership. They, who became the inheritors of the monarchy, allowed and themselves helped to prepare for the counter-revolution to conquer by stages. That is the lesson embodied in their rule from Noske through the bourgeois coalitions, the emergency decrees of Bruening, Papen and Schleicher to Hitler. The German proletariat was disarmed by the Stalinists sabotage of every correct measure of defense. In this lies the sad testimony to the serious weakness of a revolutionary party which rests upon the foundation of a false ideology and is paralyzed by bureaucratic incompetence. The German proletariat failed to receive the support from its international basis – the Soviet Union and the Comintern. And it must be said plainly that the guilt of the catastrophic defeat suffered is not only to be laid at the doors of those who were directly charged with the leadership of the German working class but must be traced to the highest seat of Stalinism in the Comintern and the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Its departure from the road of international revolutionary policy marks the most serious retreat for the world movement which is fraught with sinister implications for the future. One may rest assured that the Fascist enemy will endeavor to pursue its gains relentlessly. Its mission of destroying the German working class organizations is not finally completed so long the Soviet Union remains a bulwark.
With frightful accuracy the Left Opposition warnings of the course of events have come true. They were given correctly and in time because they rested upon the basis of a Marxian analysis. But they were not heeded. It is on this basis also that we have long ago sounded the alarm in regard to the course which will be pursued in the next stage. That is the one in which the Fascist spearhead, already pointing Eastward, will be concentrated upon the efforts to destroy the workers’ republic. But the Stalinist policy – the retreat from revolutionary internationalism – is also disarming the proletarian fatherland. Its defense can be secured only through the most Implacable struggle against Stalinism.
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