“Smash the Fascists…” German Communist Efforts to Counter the Nazis, 1930–31

Abstract

For most historians in the West, the German Communist Party (KPD) belongs among the gravediggers of the Weimar Republic. Other culprits certainly abounded; still, the Communists are held to have made a major contribution to the fall of Weimar by preaching violence, promoting civil disorder and economic disruption, and deliberately trying to weaken the republic's chief supporters, the Social Democrats (SPD). With such policies, Western scholars have charged, the Communists in effect collaborated with the Nazis and their allies on the right to bring about the destruction of Germany's first parliamentary democracy. Furthermore, with a leadership corps that had been “Bolshevized,” then “Stalinized,” and that took all its orders from Moscow, the KPD by the final years of Weimar was incapable of modifying its policies, even when their disastrous consequences were plain for all to see. As might be expected, East German historians present a very different picture, arguing that the KPD was the sole Weimar party to have defended working-class interests, resisted militarism and imperialism, and fought to prevent the establishment of fascist rule. Since the Weimar Republic, in the Marxist view, was a class state operating to oppress German working people, there was little about it worth fighting for. While conceding that workers suffered even more under the Nazi dictatorship, East German writers deny that the KPD carries any responsibility for Hitler's triumph. On the contrary, they contend, the Communists alone recognized what National Socialism represented and sought to devise the political tactics that would block a Nazi takeover.

Richard Scheringer, the KPD and the Politics of Class and Nation in Germany, 1922–1969

“…49 This strategic amendment to the idea of proletarian internationalism -representing nothing less than the adoption of all the main demands of the radical right by the KPD -was followed by the policy of 'Volksrevolution' ('People's Revolution'), a line for which Ernst Thälmann successfully argued at the eleventh plenum of the EKKI in Moscow in March 1931. 50 The concept of 'Volksrevolution' was an attempt to extend Communist influence to those groups with which the Nazis were enjoying the greatest electoral success and the Communists the least: rural voters, white-collar employees and civil servants. 51 It had the twofold aim of winning the middle class for communism while preventing further Nazi inroads into the working class, a KPD concern from the early 1920s.…”