Responding to listener queries about the evidence behind this common assertion regarding the KPD’s underestimation of the fascist threat.
Further reading:
Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919-1943: Documents, vol. 3: 1929-1943
International Press Correspondence
Communist International journal (1933)
Documents from the 13th Plenum of the ECCI
Some names from this episode:
Chen Duxiu, co-founder of the Communist Party of China
Hermann Remmele, leading KPD Reichstag member
Heinrich Brüning, German Chancellor from 1930-1932
Osip Piatnitsky, leading Comintern figure
Wilhelm Pieck, leader of KPD from 1934
Episode artwork:
Autonome Antifa (M) poster from 1991
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 131 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Last episode, we discussed, in a broad and brief way, some background on what the Comintern called the ‘Third Period’ in the development of the world revolutionary movement. And we followed that up by looking at a couple of telegrams that the Executive Committee of the Comintern (the ECCI for short) sent to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party regarding what the ECCI considered to be favorable developments for revolution in China. I was going to pick up where we left off with a discussion of Chen Duxiu and his opposition both to this line and to the Communist Party’s support for the Soviet Union in the war in Manchuria. But there has been a change of plan. I do think that we will get to Chen Duxiu next episode. But for now, because of listener response to last episode and because there is some controversy here, I want to go a little deeper with something that I brought up last episode.
Last episode, when I was characterizing the ‘Third Period’ broadly, I brought up what I consider some heroic aspects of the ‘Third Period,’ such as the organizing of the Share Croppers Union in Alabama by Communists in the United States. And I also brought up that this was a period when Communists made what in retrospect can be seen to have been some pretty big errors (at least in my opinion), such as the political line of seeing the Social Democrats rather than the Nazis as the main danger in the early 1930s in Germany. In that context, I briefly mentioned that the German Communists adopted the slogan “After Hitler, Us,” (or, alternately, “After Hitler, Our Turn”).
Since that episode came out, I have heard some people asking about this phrase. One listener indicated that he had been under the impression that the phrase had been made up by Trotskyists in order to bad mouth the Communist Party. Someone else said that they had heard the same thing, only that it was the Social Democrats and not the Trotskyists who made it up. I, of course, don’t like to think of myself as someone who unthinkingly absorbs anti-communist slander and then spits it back at people in this podcast (or in any other form), so I thought, let’s get to the bottom of this and examine the evidence.
And after all, this is, I think, a fairly relevant topic. I think that the experience of the German Communists, who might have done more to prevent the Nazis coming to power than they did because they were so focused on the Social Democrats as the main enemy, that experience sort of hangs like a dark cloud over any of us who are watching our own governments take frighteningly fascist turns. So, let’s examine the evidence here.
First off, I think there are two separate questions to answer. First, is the phrase “After Hitler, Our Turn” a fair characterization of the political line of the Communist Party of Germany (the KPD for short) in the early 1930s? And second, did the KPD actually use this slogan in any form (and if so, in what context did it use the slogan)?
Let’s start with the first question: Is the phrase “After Hitler, Our Turn” a fair characterization of the line of the KPD?
Let’s look at some evidence:
Here’s a speech given by Herman Remmele, at the time one of the top leaders of the KPD, to the German Reichstag on October 14, 1931. The citation is from the Comintern publication International Press Correspondence, and contains some asides to the speech which should be clear from the context:
“Herr Brüning has put it very plainly; once they (the Fascists) are in power, then the united front of the proletariat will be established and it will make a clean sweep of everything. (Violent applause from the Communists)… We are the victors of the coming day; and the question is no longer one of who shall vanquish whom. This question is already answered. (Applause from the Communists). The question now reads only, “At what moment shall we overthrow the bourgeoisie?”… We are not afraid of the Fascist gentlemen. They will shoot their bolt quicker than any other Government. (Right you are! from the Communists.)”
Herr Brüning here is the German chancellor, from the Centre Party, Germany’s Christian Democratic party. He was expressing the fear that a Nazi victory would lead quickly to the Nazis being overthrown by a proletarian revolution (which he did not think was a good idea, so this was part of an argument that he was making to other parts of the German ruling class that it wasn’t a very good idea to support the Nazis, because that would just lead to revolution).
So, on the one hand, Remmele is responding directly to someone else raising the specter of a Nazi government bringing about a Communist revolution. And if that were the only context for this speech, I would be open to the idea that we should dismiss it as evidence because it was just Remmele responding to someone else bringing the issue up.
However, it is worth noting that the KPD printed copies of Remmele’s speech and distributed them around the country with forms attached that people could fill out in order to apply to join the Party. So, independent of the immediate context of responding to Chancellor Brüning, the KPD independently circulated this statement around the country and solicited people to join the Party on the basis of the idea that should the Nazis come to power the KPD would then seize the initiative in the midst of economic chaos created by the Nazis and have a Communist revolution.
And this line continued all the way into 1934, so for over a year after the Nazis took power (Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, and the Reichstag fire, which the Nazis used as a pretext to unleash a massive wave of repression and terror, took place on February 27, 1933). Here are some examples of what was being said by the KPD and the Comintern after the Nazis took power:
On April 1, 1933, the ECCI issued a resolution on the situation in Germany which read in part:
“The calm that has succeeded the triumph of fascism is only a transitory phenomenon. Despite fascist terror, the revolutionary surge in Germany will rise; the revolutionary resistance of the masses to fascism is bound to grow. The establishment of the open fascist dictatorship, which is destroying all democratic illusions among the masses and liberating them from Social Democratic influence, is accelerating the rate of Germany’s advance towards the proletarian revolution.”
In an article in the May 15, 1933 issue of the journal Communist International, the following statement was made regarding the prospects for revolution in Germany: “Reaction which is triumphing to-day and enraged Fascism is only a short-lived phenomenon. The Fascists are only the temporary masters. Their victory is a shortlived one, and upon its heels will come the proletarian revolution.”
On October 10, 1933, the KPD politburo issued a statement which included the following:
“the past few months the Hitler government has already proved in practice that it is incapable of shaking off the Versailles yoke, just as it is incapable of effecting the ‘union with Austria…’ All the forces of the fascist dictatorship are already trembling in face of the uninterrupted growth of the forces of Communism, in face of their inevitable doom. In its impotency to alleviate the crisis, distress and unemployment, and to crush the C.P. of Germany, the fascist dictatorship, which is losing its head, is desperately seeking for ways and means in order to raise its prestige at home and abroad. But the growth of the Communist movement in Germany and the adventurist, foolhardy policy of the government itself are undermining the prestige of the Hitler government among the broad masses in Germany and abroad… The proletarian revolution against the fascist dictatorship in Germany is on the order of the day.”
All this wishful thinking about an imminent Communist revolution in Germany reached a kind of peak in December 1933 at the 13th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Many of the speeches given at this Plenum were printed in multiple languages and distributed worldwide during the Spring of 1934.
Osip Piatnitsky, one of the top Comintern leaders, remarked on how much easier it supposedly was for Communists to work under conditions of fascist repression:
“In spite of the incredible terror, it is easier to work among the German proletariat now, because the Social Democratic workers, and also members of the reformist unions, are in large numbers becoming disillusioned with the policy of Social Democracy… Thanks to the changed situation in Germany and to the heroic work of the KPD, the Communists no longer meet with the resistance in the working class that was formerly put up by the trade union bureaucrats and the SPD.”
And in a very long speech to the plenum which was reprinted as a 100 page pamphlet, Wilhelm Pieck, the new top leader of the KPD and future president of the German Democratic Republic, said:
“The present situation in Germany is characterised by the growth of the revolutionary mass movement under the leadership of the KPD… Its influence on the toiling masses is growing rapidly. It is organising mass struggles against Hitler’s dictatorship. A new revolutionary upsurge is growing… The prerequisites for the revolutionary crisis are increasing. Germany is marching towards the proletarian revolution.”
So, I think I’ll stop there with quoting the KPD and Comintern. There is a lot more that could be pulled out and cited, but I expect that you get the point.
Nowhere in these quotes does the phrase, “After Hitler, Our Turn” or “After Hitler, Us” appear. However, I would argue that the content of the political line expressed from 1931 all the way up into 1934 makes that phrase a pretty fair shorthand for what was in fact the political line of the KPD and Comintern, which was that any fascist government which came to power would collapse relatively quickly, mainly due to an inability to deal with the ongoing economic crisis which its own policies were only expected to exacerbate, and that the period of fascist rule would in fact create more favorable conditions for proletarian revolution than existed before the fascists came to power. This assessment is, in my opinion, clearly expressed in the documents produced during the year following the Nazi seizure of power (a period during which Communists were mercilessly hunted down and arrested or murdered), and in the Reichstag speech by Remmele. But you can decide for yourself if this is a fair way to characterize the KPD’s line or not.
Now, what about the actual use of the phrase “After Hitler, Our Turn” as either a mass slogan or a slogan used internally within the KPD?
Because the phrase does not appear in the documents that we looked at to answer our first question, I decided to look at as many sources on the period as was possible given the short time I’ve had to put this episode together. I managed to work through a good number of monographs, general histories, and memoirs, but given the timeframe I had to work with, I want to emphasize that my research was far from exhaustive.
In the academic histories, while I did encounter the phrase occasionally, whenever the phrase turned up, it lacked a citation. Historians using the term did not seem to feel the need to cite a source for it. This sort of lack of citation is pretty normal when something is commonly understood to be a fact. But of course, that is the problem we are investigating here, the idea that this phrase was widely used is commonly understood to be a fact, but there are people contending that this is a reflection of the impact of anti-communist propaganda which came later. Now, I would happily defer to any German history specialist who really took this on, but my initial impression of the academic literature and the lack of citations and direct quotes of this phrase being used leads me to think that it probably wasn’t used as commonly as is assumed.
The memoir literature, and literature by people who were politically active at the time, adds another dimension to this picture. I looked at several accounts from people who were active Communists or supporters of the KPD in the early 1930s who later became deeply alienated from the party, especially because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. These were all people who I would have expected to bring up the phrase “After Hitler, Us” as part of their criticism of the KPD during the 1930s if the use of the phrase was widespread. All these people had come to believe that the ‘social fascism’ line was deeply incorrect. Related to that line though, they also expressed that a widespread disbelief existed among both the Communists and the Social Democrats that the Nazis could come to power in any kind of way where they maintained power, much less that they would be able to carry out the extensive repression which they quickly brought to bear on both parties.
So what was interesting about my review of this literature (again, not exhaustive in any sense), was that the phrase “After Hitler, Us” did not appear, even though I would have expected it to, given the way in which the phrase later on became a common part of the repertoire of people criticizing the KPD’s line in the 1930s. In addition, the widespread expression of disbelief that the Nazis could actually become a hugely repressive force with staying power in government helps to provide context for the KPD’s line of dismissing the magnitude of the fascist threat. Clearly, in retrospect, this was a mistake. But it was a mistake that many people were apparently making at the time. It was definitely not clear to many people in 1932 in Germany that if the Nazis came to power, that they would be able to do everything that they ended up doing before the Soviet Union and some other countries defeated them in World War II.
The one big exception that I found was in a book by C. L. R. James, a Trinidadian who is best known as a darling of post-colonialist academia, but who was a very active Trotskyist at the time. James wrote in 1936 that the phrase was widely used as an internal slogan in the KPD in the early 1930s, and he would have been in a position to know. Despite the Trotskyists’ pariah status for the KPD, they were very close observers of the internal life of the KPD and other major Communist parties and they had ready sources of information in the slow stream of people who left the pro-Moscow parties and joined the Trotskyist movement. Now, James’s writings were highly polemical and I wouldn’t be surprised had he exaggerated the extent of the use of the “After Hitler, Us” slogan. But my own assessment of James’s intellectual integrity, even though during this period he was mainly producing political hack work, my own assessment of James’s intellectual integrity is such that I don’t think that he would lie outright. Maybe I’m being too generous, but that’s the impression that I have of him, after having read a lot of what he wrote during his long life.
So, to answer the question raised by listeners that we began this episode with, my own assessment is that the phrase “After Hitler, Our Turn” is a fair shorthand description of the KPD and Comintern’s policy in Germany in the early 1930s, roughly from 1931-1934. How much was the slogan actually used? My best guess is that it was in fact used some as an internal slogan, but was not used as a mass slogan, and that the extent to which it was used internally is open to some question.
Of course, you can decide for yourself how to weigh the evidence that I have presented here, and perhaps more importantly, you can make a decision for yourself about whether any of this is relevant to the situation that we are living through in the world today.
Alright, until next time, be well.