Nazis and Class Politics

A Warning from History about Historians

Anti-Nazi ‘Swing Youth’

This is a review I wrote back in the last century of Serge BoIogna’s critique of revisionist attempts to rewrite the history of the Nazis, their opponents ,and their enablers.

Nazism and the Working Class 1933-93, by Serge Bologna (Common Sense, No. 16) is a 43-page survey of studies on the German working class and National Socialism. Bologna, an Italian “autonomist” Marxist historian, challenges what he sees as the new “crescendo” of claims by “historical revisionists” that “the working-class component was decisive within Nazism” and that “Hitler was a true social revo­lutionary of the twentieth century.”

The 1920s saw the growth of a mass “Fordist” working class in the West, especially in the USA. But in Germany, by 1933, the working class had been deliberately “atomised.” Nearly 50% of workers were employed in factories with fewer than ten employees and 16% were self-em­ployed. Over one million of the rest of them were “mo­bile” skilled workers who constantly changed jobs and moved between the engineering, construction and trans­port sectors. Revisionist historians tend to distort the picture by concentrating on large-scale unionized enterprises.

Productivity in Weimar Germany rose by over a quar­ter in the years 1925-29, but wages stagnated. During this period the socialist trade unions collaborated with employers in the “systematic and selective expulsion” from the fac­tories of militant workers. As a result, the Communist Party (KPD) became largely the party of the unemployed. With very little base in industry, the KPD turned to “mass propaganda,” whilst the Social Democrats (SPD) focused on building a power-base in the state bureaucracy: local government, public administration and social security.

Bologna argues - contrary to Trotsky’s analysis of fascism - that the problem wasn’t the Communist-Socialist division within one labour movement. Rather, “It was a question of two cultures,” one which saw the Weimar Republic as a gain for the workers and one which saw it as threatening their means of existence.

In the course of the Depression, the welfare system “progressively lost almost all its character as a social service and increasingly became a supplementary policing system over the weaker parts of society.” A study by Angelika Ebbinghaus shows that the “largely female staff” of the welfare bureaucracy in Hamburg “went over more or less without problems” from the Social Democratic welfare administration to the Nazi regime to “carry out functions of monitoring, surveil­lance and classifying.” And “In the meantime the Nazis were constructing a parallel structure of selecting out and marginalizing people on biological and racial grounds.”

In 1929 Erich Fromm and Hilde Weiss began a “workers enquiry,” so as to “identity any eventual inclinations towards authoritarianism.” The study, which was submitted to Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, showed alarming authoritarian and chauvinist attitudes in the male respondents of the SPD. Their findings scared Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt Institute into suppressing the findings for ten years. Horkheimer, it seems, didn’t want to “undermine the socialists” at a time when special police squads an­swerable to the SPD interior minister were firing on demonstrations of the unemployed.

The Nazis grew first in the south. To lead the long “Battle for Berlin” Hitler chose Joseph Goebbels, the original “Great Communicator.” In the first phase of his campaign in the “Red metropoles,” Goebbels relied on the Strasserite “left” wing of the Nazi SA Brownshirts to pursue “workerist” propaganda. Bologna writes, “Too often you find in history books the thesis that the Nazis and Communists went side by side against the institu­tions of Weimar” (for example, the Berlin transport strike of 1932, where they found themselves fighting the same enemy), “but you almost never hear of the physical clashes which took place between proletarians organized by the KPD and the Nazi gangs.”

Drawing on the work of Eve Rosenhaft, Bologna in­sists: “It was an armed resistance. The proletariat de­fended inch by inch the territory and communities which over decades of struggles had become its strong­holds.” By 1931 the KPD had a “paramilitary” anti-fas­cist organization of 100,000 with more than 7,000 mili­tants in Berlin.

The Nazis achieved their breakthrough in the “Red Belts” of Berlin by targeting the taverns, which had been the meeting places of the Left for a generation. The Nazis — now well-financed by the bourgeoisie — were able to turn their gangs into an army of mercenaries and seize the taverns for headquarters. The KPD’s tactic of restricting the use of violence to supporting “mass action” proved ineffective in the face of the Nazi offensive.

The focus of revisionist attacks has been Timothy Mason, who showed in his well-documented study of1975, that there were “moments of insubordination” by the working class after 1933: ex­tensive stoppages at autobahn construction sites in 1935 and an “identifiable cycle of strikes” in the factories and shipyards in the course of 1936-37, which were brutally suppressed with the arrest of 11,687 workers designated by the Nazis as “agitators.”

Two years after seizing power the Nazis felt confident enough to claim that they had solved unemployment with a mas­sive program of infrastructural public works. “The bourgeoisie put Hitler in power, the workers kept him there,” says Left revisionist historian, Gunther Mai. On the Right, revisionists argue that Nazism was “Keynesianism in practice,” with the implication being that Nazism was bad because it was state-interventionist and negated the “free market.”

The truth was that the economy the Nazis inherited from Weimar was left to stagnate, whilst the new regime gave massive state support a war economy of new industries, such as aeronautics. This new economy established “a new working-class elite” with no experience of the pre-Nazi period political organization and no memory of Rosa Luxemburg and the 1919 Ger­man Revolution. Whilst these more “modern” sectors were the most “integrated” with the regime, as “defence industries” they were also the most militarised — workers lived in constant fear of incarcera­tion for lateness or questioning an order. Even so, it is recorded that pacifist leaflets appeared in the Fokke-Wolf aeronautics factory when war broke out. As the 1939-45 war progressed, the composition of the work force in the war economy became “multina­tional...and 80 per cent of this work force was working under conditions of forced labor.”

It would have been good had Bologna further dis­cussed the role of the KPD, whose rank-and-file mem­bers, he rightly reminds us, fought with courage and de­termination. Yet to what extent did the dictates of Sta­lin’s Comintern weaken the KPD and its working-class base during the “Third Period” of 1929-33? What problems did the KPD have in relation to the anarchist Free Workers Union which, Bologna tells us, had at one time 400,000 members? How impor­tant were the intellectuals, and how did theory relate to practice?

The strengths of Bologna’s study are: firstly, its powerful challenge to the historical revisionism coming from the Leftist “historians of the personal and everyday” as well as from the Right; and, secondly, his well-timed warning that fascism doesn’t just grow out of fascist gangs and scheming capitalists. It also grows in the town hall, the clinic, the welfare office, the class­room, the union local and the social studies department.

(First Published in News and Letters June 1995.)