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By Root 1595 0

implausible, but, especially after 1930, the view that social democracy was therefore a greater danger than the rise of Hitler, indeed, that it could be described as ‘social fascism’, bordered on political insanity.1 Indeed, it went against the instincts, the common sense, as well as the socialist tradition of both socialist and communist workers (or schoolchildren), who knew perfectly well that they had more in common with one another than with Nazis. What is more, by the time I came to Berlin it was patent that the major political issue in Germany was how to stop Hitler’s rise to power. Indeed, even the ultra-sectarian Party line made an, albeit empty, concession to reality. On our lapels we wore not the hammer and sickle, but the ‘antifa’ badge – a call for common action against fascism, though of course only with the workers, not with their power-corrupted and class-betraying leaders. Both socialists and communists knew, if only from the Italian example, that their destruction was the chief aim of a fascist regime. Conservatives, or even elements in the centre, might consider fitting Hitler into a coalition government, which, underestimating him, they hoped they might control. Socialists and communists knew perfectly well that compromise and coexistence with National Socialism were impossible both for it and for them. Our way of minimizing the Nazi danger – and, like all others, we also underestimated it grossly – was different. We thought that, if they got into power, they would soon be overthrown by a radicalized working class under the leadership of the KPD, already an army of three to four hundred thousand. Had not the communist vote increased almost as fast as the Nazi vote since 1928? Was it not continuing to rise sharply in the last months of 1932, as the Nazi vote fell? But we had no doubt that before then the wolves of a fascist regime would be loosed against us. And so they were: the original concentration camps of the Third Reich were designed primarily to hold communists.

Excuses for the lunacies of the Comintern line may no doubt be found, even though there were socialists and dissident or silenced communists who opposed it. Seventy-odd years later, and with the historian’s professional hindsight, one is less sanguine about the possibility of stopping Hitler’s rise to power by means of a union of all antifascists than we came to be later in the 1930s. In any case, by 1932 a parliamentary majority of the centre-left was no longer possible even in the doubly improbable case that the communists had been willing to join it, and that the social democrats, let alone the Catholic Centre Party, had accepted them. The Weimar Republic went with Brüning. Hitler could indeed have been stopped by the President, the Reichswehr and the assorted authoritarian reactionaries and businessmen who took over then, and who certainly did not want what they got after 30 January 1933. Indeed, Hitler and the momentum of the rise of the swastika was stopped by them after the Nazis’ electoral triumph in the summer of 1932. There was nothing inevitable about the events which led to his appointment as Chancellor. But by this time there was nothing either social democrats or communists could have done about it.

Nevertheless, in retrospect the Comintern line made no sense. Were we in any sense critical of it? Almost certainly not. Radical, once-for-all change was what we wanted. Nazis and communists were parties of the young, if only because young men are far from repelled by the politics of action, loyalty and an extremism untained by the low, dishonest compromises of those who think of politics as the art of the possible. (National Socialism did not leave much public scope for women, and at this stage, alas, its passionate support for women’s rights did not attract more than a minority of exceptional women to an overwhelmingly male communist movement.) Indeed, the militant Young Communist Leagues were the Comintern’s chief catspaws in pushing the often reluctant adult leadership of the Parties into the extremes of the ‘class against