Fifty years ago. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany with the support of more than ten million workers. The horrors of the following twelve years will never be forgotten. Many thousands across the world still bear the mental scars from their time in the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Dachau and elsewhere, or lost friends or relatives in the holocaust. The first camp was opened on 22 March, 1933, for the incarceration of officials of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties. The West German government is this year mounting a campaign to remind people of the perils of Nazism, but they are presenting it as an aberration, a terrible slip which could have been avoided if only people had been a little more careful. This is not a fair representation of the facts. There were fascist regimes in the thirties in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, much of Latin America and elsewhere. If we are serious about wanting to avoid a repetition, we must be prepared to examine the way in which these governments evolved.
In Germany (as in Italy and elsewhere) the late nineteenth century had seen a vast increase in industrial productivity, but no corresponding modernisation of the political process. East of the Elbe, there still remained the old, aristocratic class of Junkers — Prussian imperial landowners — whose influence held back the advance of the more modern industrial capitalists based around the Rhine. In the second half of the nineteenth century the German population increased from thirty-five to sixty million. The rise of the social-democratic movement was met by the two-pronged approach of social welfare reform and Bismarck's repressive Anti-Socialist Laws. The First World War was pursued under the military dictatorship of Hindenburg and Ludendorffs Supreme Army Command, which was accepted by the five parties of the generally ineffectual Reichstag, or parliament. The failure of the Schlieffen plan in 1914 led to four years of persistent and devastating trench warfare. as German workers were slaughtered like cattle in the name of expanding German capitalist control of world markets.
By 1918, discontent with the war was rife. A million munitions workers went on strike. The old military regime collapsed against a background of destruction and decay. Demobilisation crises were turned into dole queues. A parliamentary constitution was drawn up at Weimar, but proved to be little more than an empty formality. Capitalism had reached one of its gravest crises yet in central Europe, and there was something of a political vacuum in Germany in the early twenties. Germany had long traditions of nationalism, racism and social darwinism among its shopkeepers, professionals and white-collar workers. There was also a class of relatively new industrial capitalists, in possession of huge, twentieth-century steel and coal combines, such as the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, formed in the 1920s. Krupp told his employees: “We want only loyal workers who are grateful from the bottom of their hearts for the bread which we let them earn” (G. Raphael. Krupp et Thyssen, 1925).
Long before the war, iron and steel workers owners had been giving large donations to the German Union to Fight Against Social Democracy. Thyssen said in a statement to the Journal des Débuts, 7 February 1924. "Democracy with us represents — nothing". There was, however, a conflict of interests within the capitalist class between heavy industry, represented for example by Stinnes and Thyssen. who opposed the terms of the Versailles Treaty which had been the basis of the Weimar Republic, and the lighter finished goods industry. or Fertigindustrie represented by Rathenau and the powerful AEG (General Electric Association). The latter sector was more inclined to try to mould a class “alliance" between workers and employers. through corporatism. They were more nationalist and protectionist.
It was in 1930, just when the expansion sponsored by the Dawes Flan was reaching its peak and there was a greater reliance than ever on selling German industrial products to foreign buyers, that the world crisis came and the bottom fell out of international markets. The Vienna Credit-Anstalt bank failed on 11 May 1931. Profits plummeted and the industrialists looked to the state to suppress wage levels by disregarding union contracts, and to grant subsidies, tax exemptions and orders. Politicians like Brüning and von Papen who. together with von Schleicher had tended to represent the chemical and electrical goods industries rather than iron or steel, took some steps in this direction. Brüning's decrees reduced wages and "social expenditures”. He believed that he could allow the Nazis into power and manipulate them in accordance with the interests he represented. The owners of heavy industry were looking with increasing interest at Hitler’s party. Hitler’s accession to power was discussed between him and von Papen on 4 January 1933 at the home of a Cologne banker, von Schröder, who had connections with Rhenish-Westphalian heavy industry (Benoist-Mechin. Histoire de Varmee allentande, V.ll, 1938).
Some historians have understandably viewed the fifteen years of the Weimar Republic as merely a formal interlude between the militarised empire and the Third Reich. In the first year after the end of the First World War workers spontaneously set up democractic councils across Germany. In the absence of a clearly pronounced, majority rejection of all forms of capitalism and support for socialism, however. this situation did not last long. If the working class was going to continue producing wealth for their employers to market profitably, rather than for free distribution and use. a government of authority had to evolve to administer the resulting process of the accumulation of capital for a minority and of poverty for the rest. It was not long before the new, "social democratic" government was using the old. imperial troops, reorganised as “Freikorps", to shoot down any who felt that the government was not "social" or not “democratic” enough. Licbknecht and Luxemburg were clubbed to death by cavalry officers, on their way to prison.
At Versailles, crushing peace terms were forced on Germany. Hitler was later to use the reparations, enforced disarmament. territorial annexations and "war guilt" clause to support the "stab-in-the-back" legend, according to which liberal German politicians engineered the military defeat of the First World War as the foundation of their fifteen-year republic. The new German government in 1919, on the other hand, were so anxious to reassert their patriotism that they borrowed the language of socialism and made a public declaration that the settlement would condemn German workers to “wage slavery in the hands of foreign capitalism". The war had given rise to a number of new parties, and the parliamentary coalitions of the twenties mirrored the general instability which marked German capitalism throughout this period. The new republican constitution was steadily opposed by the military and judicial establishments, the civil service and the universities. The power of majority consent was clear while it lasted, however, as is demonstrated by the failure of the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. Military leaders had taken over the government offices, but strikes in gas, electricity and transport services helped to defeat the coup and uphold the Weimar Constitution.
Hitler and the NSDAP appealed to those who felt desperate at their social impotence. Rather than solving the problem by taking power democratically into their own hands, they were giving themselves an identity by fitting into a rigid hierarchical state, in which labour and capital would "work together" with the dictatorship as paternalistic arbiter, and in which any frustration could be taken out violently on a scapegoat chosen and legitimised by the state. In the thirties, with the terrible contradiction between twentieth-century technology and the waste and destruction of the First World War, the Wall Street Crash and mass unemployment, the defence of property became more brutal than ever, with Stalinist Russia as an Eastern reflection of the fascism of Central Europe. Fascism was not an alternative to capitalism; it was a way of running it when other approaches seemed bankrupt. In 1925. Hitler stated that his party would fight "against the Jew as a person, and against Marxism as a cause” (F. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism, page 123). In the desperate search for a scapegoat for the problems produced by the profit system, Jews were accused of being both impoverished communists and wealthy capitalists.
When Hitler campaigned as a nationalist against the Young Plan of reparations payments, he was joined by Hugenberg and his powerful Scherl publishing house. Some Ruhr industrialists, such as Kirdorf and Thyssen, began to make large contributions to Nazi Party funds. On 28 September 1930 in the Sunday Express, Hitler declared that the "socialism" of the Nazis "has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not". Most of the Sturmabteilung private army of 300,000 were recruited from the young unemployed. The many young civil servants, office workers, farm labourers and others who flocked to the fascists in 1930 and 1931 out of fear of "godless communism" had little or no property to defend. They were suffering from generations of propaganda which teaches workers to defend our bosses' property and privilege, even though it is this very property and privilege which make us poor.
The regime which was set up in the thirties predictably based itself on the interests of the heavy industrial capitalists. The military was incorporated into the party. Finance capital was discriminated against for the sake of industrial capital. Marxism was attacked, so that the regime could claim to be neither “capitalist" (in the sense of favouring finance) nor "communist" (in the sense of favouring state capital). Both the finance and state sectors were labelled as “jewish” and incorporated into the universal scapegoat. State discipline was imposed in every sector of life. The Reichs Labour Front was used as an instrument for the control of labour. Unemployment reduced as the slump reached its bottom and armaments and other heavy industrial production was encouraged and picked up again. Real wages are said to have increased by 2.8 per cent a year on average from 1933 to 1939. but the working week was lengthened and the “national income*' was increasing at an annual average rate of 8.2 per cent (Fascism. ed. W. Laqueur. p. 425).
From looking at the specific social roots of Nazism in Germany, it becomes clear that this was a social phenomenon which, far from occurring by accident, was very firmly rooted in the conditions of the time. It is not a great step to realise that they are also in many ways the conditions of the time we are living in fifty years later. There are very many people who sincerely express horror at the vicious authoritarianism and anti-semitism of the Nazi regime, but are rather less ready to oppose the underlying social fabric from which it arose. Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat for unemployment and poverty. This was not a freak accident of history. Workers were being thrown on the dole when their bosses did not find them profitable enough.
The socialist reponse to this problem is that wealth production should be organised democratically for direct, free use rather than for sale at a profit. But such a solution threatens the property of the powerful minority, who use their control of the means of communication in an effort to convince workers that the socialist solution is either unworkable or undesirable. Having swallowed this message, what was left? With six million on the dole, almost any easy remedy for such a problem would get a hearing. What was the central motivating force of Hitler's propaganda, apart from anti-semitism? It was his nationalism. He claimed to be able to stand for the united, national interest of all Germans, to be able to bind labour and capital together, and end social strife, despite the fact that these two social forces are in constant conflict, in Russia as much as in Germany. The cornerstone of fascism was nationalism. And yet, which modern Labour MP does not advocate a certain degree of nationalism, such as import controls or coming out of the EEC, all in good moderation, of course?
The lesson we must learn from what happened fifty hears ago, if we are serious about being responsible for avoiding its repetition, is that no such movement lives in a vacuum. It was the classical problems of the capitalist trade cycle, of inflation, financial crisis, the anarchy of competition and falling market demand which led to the mass unemployment on which Hitler rode to power. In the more long-term perspective. all social events of the last two hundred years have taken place within the framework of world capitalism, with its class division and profit motive. As such, this form of society must be held responsible for every war, every suicide and every dictator it has generated.
Clifford Slapper
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