Rethinking Antifascism

History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present

Hugo García, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, Cristina Clímaco, Hugo García, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, Cristina Clímaco

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781785338182
  9781785331381
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785331398
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bringing together leading scholars from a range of nations, Rethinking Antifascism provides a fascinating exploration of one of the most vibrant sub-disciplines within recent historiography. Through case studies that exemplify the field's breadth and sophistication, it examines antifascism in two distinct realms: after surveying the movement's remarkable diversity across nations and political cultures up to 1945, the volume assesses its postwar political and ideological salience, from its incorporation into Soviet state doctrine to its radical questioning by historians and politicians. Avoiding both heroic narratives and reflexive revisionism, these contributions offer nuanced perspectives on a movement that helped to shape the postwar world.

PART ONE

HISTORICAL ANTIFASCISM, 1922–45

New Perspectives, New Research Topics

1


FREEDOM FOR THÄLMANN!

The Comintern and the Orchestration of the Campaign to Free Ernst Thälmann, 1933–39

Anson Rabinbach

In 1925, an astrologer named A.M. Grimm published the horoscope of Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann, born in Hamburg on 16 April 1886: ‘Thälmann’, he declared, ‘is an enthusiastic, energetic and stubborn pioneer of his cause with tough willpower and patience; a man that does not allow himself to be subverted’. His chances of success, Grimm predicted, ‘were better than those of Hitler’.¹ Astrology, obviously, is not an exact science. The head of the German Communist Party was famously murdered in Buchenwald on 18 August 1944, less than a year before the demise of Hitler and his Reich. A note scribbled by Himmler four days earlier records that Hitler personally ordered his death.² Before that, he spent eleven years in German prisons – Moabit, Hannover and Bautzen – though he was never in a concentration camp for any length of time. During his eleven-year ordeal, Thälmann’s ‘bald pate’ or his Hamburg sailor’s cap (Mütze) adorned banners and pamphlets from Brussels to Barcelona, from Montmartre to Montevideo. The sustained campaign to win his release mobilised the entire communisant left in the early 1930s and ultimately gave his name to the famous ‘Thälmann Battalion’ of German volunteers in Spain.

The Thälmann campaign was in many respects typical of the Comintern’s (Communist International) mobilisation of public opinion in the West during the early 1930s. It overlapped with the successful campaign, also organised by the Comintern’s propaganda expert Willi Münzenberg, to free the four Communist defendants accused of conspiracy to set fire to the Reichstag in February 1933 and, as in the Reichstag campaign, demonstrated the efficacy and degree of independence from obsolete Communist Party tactics developed by Münzenberg during his Paris exile. Moreover, the Thälmann campaign was characteristic of how Münzenberg’s style of ‘propaganda as a weapon’ virtually invented a popular antifascism that enlisted the participation of prominent West European politicians and intellectuals as well.³ Although the Comintern remained an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, Münzenberg’s political style – the production of mass spectacles and the orchestration of public opinion by manipulation of the press – was, at least for a time, beyond the grip of the Comintern’s Executive (ECCI).⁴

Encouraged by the unexpected acquittal of the four Reichstag fire defendants handed down by Leipzig Supreme Court president Wilhelm Bünger at 10 AM on 23 December 1933, Münzenberg planned a new offensive on behalf of the most important Communist prisoner in Germany. Ernst Thälmann, the fiery orator and leader of Europe’s largest Communist Party had been held in Berlin’s Moabit Prison just north of the Spree River since 3 March, when he was arrested in a garden plot on the outskirts of the city. Although the Münzenberg campaign hailed the Reichstag trial verdict as a resounding victory, the prospects for Thälmann were by no means rosy. Despite the acquittal, Dimitrov and his three Communist co-defendants were not freed, and rumours circulated that a treason trial for Thälmann was in the offing.⁵ After the verdict, Göring made no bones about claiming that Dimitrov still ‘deserved the gallows, if only for his criminal and seditious activities in Germany before the Reichstag fire’.⁶ Göring also boasted that the accused Communist Reichstag deputy Ernst Torgler ‘did not have it so bad in jail, and had long since broken with Communism’, while Thälmann still had not changed, because ‘he was too dumb and has no clue what Communism is’.⁷ In January the defence committee released its first post-trial statement under the heading ‘Acquitted, but not Released’, a warning that the defendants ‘are still threatened with murder’, as had been openly announced by Göring.⁸

In some respects, the two antifascist campaigns were twins. Both were orchestrated by Münzenberg, the Comintern’s ‘supraparty’ impresario. Both created a profusion of committees, declarations, petitions, conclaves of jurists, and a multitude of letter-writing and postcard actions. But in many respects they were opposites. Whereas the Reichstag fire campaign had high visibility, a courtroom drama, a courageous hero (Dimitrov), stock company villains (Göring), a perfect ‘fool’ (Marinus van der Lubbe) and a thrilling unexpected outcome, the Thälmann campaign revolved around a largely invisible, long-suffering figure who lacked any of the political or oratorical gifts of Dimitrov, apart from his stubborn tenacity. Unlike the Reichstag fire campaign, the absence of a public trial indicated that the acquittal in Leipzig had taught the Nazis a valuable lesson about jurisprudence, public opinion and the international press. Although the Reichstag fire was the occasion for the elimination of civil liberties and parliamentary rule by the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933, the trial remained within the Weimar system of jurisprudence, with some restrictions. Hearing of the acquittal, Goebbels was beside himself, writing in his diary: ‘This is what happens to a revolution when you put it in the hands of jurists. This court must disappear. Bring on a court for the protection of the German people’.⁹ In November 1935 he noted that Hitler had decided to delay judicial proceedings to ‘put an end to the publicity as soon as possible’.¹⁰ In conformity with Goebbel’s diatribe, Thälmann’s status was changed from a defendant awaiting trial to a prisoner indefinitely placed under ‘protective custody’.

Like the Reichstag fire campaign, the case of Thälmann served to alert the French – and beyond France, the international public – to the brutality, arbitrariness and injustice of the Nazi regime. If the Reichstag fire trial promoted unity among the opponents of Hitler throughout the world, the Thälmann case was divisive. For those outside the Communist orbit, Thälmann was regarded as a corrupt and servile lackey of Stalin. In 1928 he was implicated in a financial scandal, the ‘Wittorf affair’ – a cover up of embezzled KPD funds – and was reinstated as party chairman only by the direct intervention of Stalin.¹¹ During the early 1930s, he repeatedly quoted Stalin’s axiom that fascism and social democracy were ‘twin brothers’.¹² Above all, for the SPD and the non-Communist anti-Nazi left, Thälmann was anathema for his role in the April 1932 presidential run off election when he ran against Hitler and Hindenburg. The SPD supported Hindenburg in order to block Hitler, and saw Thälmann’s candidacy as the obstacle to a democratic–republican solution to the crisis of the Weimar Republic.

In March, just after his arrest, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) issued a proclamation calling upon all Communists to work for the imprisoned leader’s freedom.¹³ The Dimitrov campaign occupied the full energies of the Münzenberg organisation in the autumn and winter of 1933, and the Thälmann case was put on hold until the verdict. In November 1933, Münzenberg announced the creation of a committee for the liberation of Dimitrov, Thälmann, Popov, Tanev and all imprisoned antifascists – notable was the absence of Torgler, whose fate was obviously deemed insignificant – financed by his International Red Aid (IAH) and placed under the umbrella of his World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism in Paris.¹⁴ Once the three ‘Bulgarian’ defendants were repatriated to the Soviet Union on 27 February 1934, the campaign turned its energy to the jailed KPD leader, with the assumption that a Thälmann trial was in the offing and that a carefully prepared indictment would directly follow the Reichstag trial.

As Münzenberg wrote in a secret communiqué to the newly installed ‘foreign bureau’ of the exiled German KPD, reconstituted in Paris under the leadership of Franz Dahlem, Wilhelm Pieck and Wilhelm Florin in the summer of 1934: ‘To compensate for their defeat in the Reichstag trial the Hitler people are preparing a trial against Thälmann which is also meant to be a trial against the KPD … We too are forced to ratchet up our efforts against the Hitler–government’ and ‘will have to gain broad proletarian support for the campaign’.¹⁵ In other words, a public defence of Thälmann would have to appeal to a different audience than the Reichstag fire campaign. While intellectuals and sympathetic middle-class supporters of the left could be counted on to rally to Dimitrov and the others accused of conspiracy in the name of an obvious injustice, Thälmann’s role as KPD leader ‘naturally created certain difficulties’ when it came to their participation. Left unsaid was Thälmann’s reputation as a thick-headed and slavish Stalinist whose incessant assaults on the integrity of the Social Democrats were notorious.

Unlike the Reichstag fire campaign, the international efforts on behalf of Thälmann tended to be conducted by both the official Communist parties and by the supraparty Thälmann Committee. To be sure, Münzenberg had always been a loyal and disciplined Communist, a member of the KPD’s Central Committee, a member of its Reichstag fraction, and an unwavering defender of the party during its political gyrations during the Weimar era. At the same time, his successes in creating impressive international organisations and campaigns featuring high profile literary, scientific and political celebrities, required that he maintain a credible distance from Moscow, which of course made him all the more indispensable, and suspect.¹⁶ Münzenberg’s genius was to orchestrate events that went far beyond the narrow radius of the Comintern, creating temporary alliances and often producing spectacular results while at the same time clandestinely consulting with Moscow and arranging Soviet financial support for his vast enterprises.¹⁷

Before his exile in Paris, Münzenberg’s great triumph as the impresario ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Beyond Revisionism: Rethinking Antifascism in the Twenty-First Century
• Part I. Historical Antifascism, 1922–45: New Perspectives, New Research Topics
• Part II. Political Uses, Memory Wars and Revisionism from 1945 to the Present
• Index