The Economy & Class Structure of German Fascism: Chapter 19
Counter-Revolution and Anti-Semitism
My descriptions and analyses of events in Germany and Europe running up to the Second World War have, up to this chapter, been based on my own personal and eye witness evidence, gathered from the unique experience which accrued from my position in the offices in and around the Bendlerstrasse. This accounts for the seemingly astonishing fact that my report contains hardly a word of the anti-semitism which represents the cardinal ideology of national socialism, of its ‘Führer’ and of practically every one of its organised followers. The explanation lies in the fact that the circle in which my employment placed me was entirely upper class, industrialist or agrarian and their high level salaried employees. In these circles the anti-semitic creed was an irrelevant side-line of Nazism which would have degraded anyone who took it seriously.
On the other hand no account of fascism is complete without dealing with this ideological aspect and without an account of the beginning of the fascist movement. For the descriptions which follows, I depend on three main sources, the two volumes of Konrad Heiden, ‘Der Fuehrer’, the exhaustive account of the development of anti-semitism during the twentieth century by Norman Cohn, and the excellent pamphlet on racism and the National Front in Britain today by David Edgar.1
We have already referred to the ‘Technische Nothilfe’ — the Technicians' Emergency Service — acting as strike-breakers in the early 1920s against the revolutionary workers as one of the formative elements of German fascism. They considered themselves as a social stratum aspiring to a position like that of an officer corps in the labour process of production. Comparable to these would-be fascists, but emerging still earlier, were such remnants of the defeated imperial army of Germany who refused to accept defeat. Konrad Heiden when writing about the November Revolution of 1918 says: ‘This was the downfall of the German ‘Kaiserreich’, the historic moment of the German Revolution. It was also the beginning of the officers’ counter-revolution. In a purely military sense the war was not completely lost as yet; as statements made by the Allied generals show. But the military leaders of Germany preferred to lose the war and even to overthrow their Emperor in order to save the army and beat down the revolution.’ (pp. 195/6)
One cannot give a more accurate description of the source of the Nazi movement. These counter-revolutionary officers were, in the main, young intellectuals in uniform who had originally been recruited into the army out of university or school and now, totally alienated from civilian society, refused to be demobilised and to accept the defeat. They formed themselves into fighting gangs under the name of ‘Free Corps’.2 These existed with barely concealed allied approval. In fact the Armistice of November 1918 contained in Article 12 a clause, little publicised, stipulating that German troops should remain ‘as long as the Allies considered it expedient in whatever Russian territory they occupied.’
The Free Corps at first took shape at the instigation of Captain Kurt von Schleicher (the same who later became a well-known General and even, for a while, Reichs Chancellor). As aide to Hindenburg at the time of the armistice he suggested that if only a small army of volunteers could be organised there would be practically no armed resistance and they would soon become ‘master of the country.’ In this assumption he was, of course, quite mistaken as events later showed. The Free Corps were widely known as “murderers’ armies,” and, as far as their ruthless and unscrupulous acts were concerned they invite comparison with the gangs of mercenaries fighting against African liberation in the ’50s and ’60s. Their most immediate motivation was the suppression of the revolutionary movements inside Germany and of the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets3 which were being set up in many industrial centres of the country. For instance, the Corps were used against the Spartakus rising in Berlin. I vividly remember the fierce fighting there myself. It was the bandits of the Free Corps who murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. They fought for the counter revolutionary Kapp-Putsch in Berlin in March 1920 and against the armed general strike arrayed against the Putsch in the Rhine and Ruhr, where the Free Corps and the regular army were heavily defeated by the workers.
Their main activity, however, was against the Bolsheviks in the former Russian Baltic Provinces where they became the spearhead of the wars of intervention against Russia from 1919 onwards. They fought for the possession of such towns as Riga and Reval. Again to quote Konrad Heiden: ‘Some of the soldiers of the German Free Corps were soldiers of fortune of a very peculiar sort. They expected to receive from the new Governments of Latvia and Estonia a reward of land on which they could settle as farmers. When they were not supported in this by the German Government they tore the German cockades from their caps and sewed on the eagle of the Tsars.’ (p. 196)
Meanwhile the Bolshevik Revolution had taken possession of Russia throughout 1917 and 1918 and forced the German army out of their country. Among the fleeing refugees was Alfred Rosenberg,4 a Baltic German who had lived in Reval and who escaped to Germany at the end of 1918 bringing with him his most precious treasure, the anti-semitic forgery ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’. With this he was to make himself the leading light of the Nazi movement. He went from Berlin to Munich where he joined Rudolf Hess, a young officer, and Dietrich Eckart, an elderly writer, who became the main oracle of Hitler. There they founded a secret club under the name of the ‘Thule Society’ whose members rooted their implicit faith in the Protocols.
The all-important figure of the counter-revolutionary movement in Munich with whom they associated was Ernst Röhm. Then an army captain and aide to Colonel von Epp, chief of the infantry troops stationed in Bavaria, he was the real founder and cornerstone of National Socialism. He was another who absolutely refused to recognise the German defeat, and concentrated all his resources upon the creation of a new and illegal army. He writes in his own memoirs of a gigantic arsenal of weaponry left behind by the fallen German Army which, in the Peace Treaty, Germany had promised to destroy. The Allies supervised the process of destruction by control commissions. But in Bavaria Röhm undertook the task for them, deceiving them, and creating secret weapon stores for his own special army which went by the deceptive name of a mere ‘Einwohnerwehr’ or citizens’ homeguard. He succeeded in surrounding the Allied officials with a dense net of counter-spies so that a German reporting a secret arsenal would fall into the hands of a German masquerading as an officer of the Entente who would stammer in broken German, listen to the man’s report and deliver the ‘traitor’ to eager assassins.
The main hostility of these militant counter-revolutionaries was directed against the democratic republican governments which had emerged from the November Revolution of 1918 and which, on the part of the central ‘Weimar Republic’ entailed the acceptance of the Versailles Treaty and the disarmament of Germany down to a professional army of 100,000 men. The reactionary organisations around Röhm and the Thule Society were the responsible instigators of a number of sensational political assassinations. Kurt Eisner, the Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Bavaria was murdered in the open street in March 1919 by a member of the Thule Society. This caused such an outcry that a communist Soviet Republic was proclaimed without any violence in Munich under the leadership of [Eugen] Leviné and the poet and dramatist Ernst Toller. It lasted only until May 2, 1919, when the town was conquered by regular troops aided by the Free Corps counter-revolutionaries who carried out a bloody white terror of such unparalleled ferocity that it is still remembered to the present day. Toller succeeded in escaping, hidden in the wardrobe of a painter friend of his who very nearly lost his own life at the hands of the persecuting soldiers. (The painter friend, incidentally, happened to be Karli Sohn-Rethel, my own uncle.)
The most prominent of the innumerable murder victims were Matthias Erzberger, Minister of Finance in the central Government, Walther Rathenau the Foreign Minister, and the Deputy Gareis who planned to attack the secret murderers in the Bavarian Parliament but who was shot as he entered his house the night before. This regime of right-wing terror was carried out under the connivance of the President of the Munich Police-force, who when told that beyond a doubt there were organisations of murderers at large, said with an icy glance: ‘Yes, but too few!’ The Bavarian Minister of Justice was Franz Guertner, a man of equal calibre. One of the senior members of the police was Wilhelm Frick who was later proved to have employed murderers in his service but in 1933 became Minister of the Interior in the Hitler Government. But at the head of all these conspiratorial activities was Ernst Röhm, the actual founder of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). At this time Adolf Hitler was in Röhm’s service as agent provocateur and a spy. His leadership of the party which Röhm founded gradually developed, thanks to his rhetorical talents. Röhm used his official position as Army Captain to organise entire Reichswehr companies to march through the streets of Munich, wearing civilian clothing, and parading as National Socialists. Thus arose the formation which later became the SA.
The essence of fascism is counter-revolution in late capitalism when the standards of bourgeois society are utterly discredited. The activities of fascism must be conspiratorial in kind to make feasible the committing of crime and murder essentially involved in counter-revolution. The ideology found to be best suited for this undertaking was to uphold the existence of a conspiracy for the domination and exploitation of the world by Jews. Thus fascism could hide its own conspiratorial activities under the cover of the bogus one. The old German socialist leader August Bebel called anti-Semitism ‘the socialism of the stupid’ (den Sozialismus der Dummen). Anybody stupid enough to believe that capitalist exploitation is an invention of the Jews has his mind well sealed to social understanding of any kind.
The myth is presented in the guise of a documentary truth under the title of ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ and not a few people still credit this piece of literature as genuine. But the great majority nowadays can be trusted to know that it is a forgery. At the end of the First World War when Alfred Rosenberg first produced the Protocols in Munich, he and his fellow conspirators of the Thule Society believed in them as in a holy writ. With ardent zeal they translated them and spread them to almost all parts of the world. When Hitler came to power this activity gained momentum through German Nazi organisations and sympathisers in foreign countries.
Jewish communities in Switzerland responded to the provocation by bringing an action against the leadership of Nazi organisations in their country and against certain individual Nazis. The charge was of publishing and distributing improper literature. The case was heard before the Court of Berne, partly in October 1934 and partly in May 1935, and was followed by an appeal case before the High Court. It became, in effect, an enquiry into the authenticity or spuriousness of the ‘Protocols’. It attracted world-wide attention and was covered by journalists from many countries.
The first thing the Berne Court was able to establish was the fact that the text of the ‘Protocols’ is unmistakeably a plagiarism of a book written by a French lawyer Maurice Joly and published anonymously in Brussels in 1864. It was written as pure fiction in the form of a satire against Napoleon III, Emperor of France. It bore the title ‘Dialogue in Hell between Macchiavelli and Montesquieu, or the Politics of Macchiavelli in the 19th century, by a contemporary.’ The ‘demon’ was supposed to represent Napoleon who would conquer the masses and dominate France. In the form of a pamphlet it was smuggled from Belgium to France, where it was banned and confiscated, and the author identified, arrested and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. Needless to say, Joly’s writing has nothing whatsoever to do with Jewry.
The pamphlet, however, was discovered thirty years later by the head of the foreign section of the Ochrana, the Tsar’s secret police, Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, then in Paris. Under his direction Joly’s text was re-styled and given the form of the Protocols. Two-fifths of the entire text of the Protocols comprising 160 passages are clearly based on passages of Joly. The words Joly put into the mouth of a demon satirising Napoleon the forger put into the mouth of a mysterious lecturer, the nameless Elder of Zion. With Joly, Macchiavelli, representing Napoleon III, describes an existing state of affairs. But the Protocols recast this to a form of prophecy for the future. Macchiavelli argues that a despot may find in democratic forms a useful cover for his tyranny, but the argument is reversed in the Protocols so that all democratic forms of government are shown as being simply masks for Jewish tyranny. Similarly, ideas of liberalism are presented as being invented and propagated by Jews only to disorganise and demoralise gentiles. Furthermore Joly wrote of the domination of France whilst the ‘Elders’ scheme to dominate the world.
Interwoven with the plagiarism of Joly’s text are two other pieces. The first is a novel called ‘Biarritz’ published in 1868 and written by a German, Hermann Gödsche who masquerades as Sir John Redcliffe the Younger. One of his chapters is set in the Jewish Cemetery of Prague where he describes as a horror story the meeting of twelve rabbis in a hair-raising scene. According to Konrad Heiden the rabbis are supposed to represent the twelve tribes of Israel and speak Chaldean. ‘They set up a cry of Satanic glee, for through accursed gold, through its mighty bankers, Judah has conquered the world, bought kings and princes of the Church; Judah is wallowing in vice and glory.’ This chapter, suitably modified, was reprinted as a separate pamphlet, and translated into foreign languages, notably Russian. ‘And now, lo and behold, we have an ‘authentic document’, proving the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy!’
Still, Gödsche’s literary outpourings could not hide its frankly fictional character, even with the pseudonym of an English aristocrat to deceive the reader. Konrad Heiden acknowledges the superior skill of the forgers in tarring Gödsche's childish figures with the ‘worldly wisdom, the contempt of humanity, the seductive power of Joly’s tyrant. Don’t just make them avaricious braggarts; make them subtle and crafty; make them speak the accursed satirical wisdom of Macchiavelli, but in deadly earnest; finally confound the fabulous nocturnal conspiracy with an international Jewish congress which actually did convene to discuss such sober matters as the problem of emigration. Then we have before us, in all its bloody romantic horror, the demon of Jewish world domination gathered in a congress and fixed in protocol’, (p. 15.)
Here we have the third major component of the forgery. An international congress indeed did take place in 1897 in Basel in Switzerland for the founding of the Jewish Zionist Movement with Theodor Herzl. The entire proceedings were held in public and the town was overflowing with journalists. But the speeches do not appear in the protocols; instead the text of Joly and of Gödsche is wrongly presented as the pronouncements of the Jewish Congress. Therefore, not only are the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ a forgery, but in fact not a single document of Jewish origin has gone into the making of it. The first anti-semites faced with this revelation tried to comfort themselves with the idea that Joly was himself a Jew. But then his baptismal record was found, exploding this last hope. Heiden adds: ‘since then, some anti-semites have declared merely that the ‘Protocols’ are ‘deeper wisdom’, beyond any possibility of documentary proof. Actually they do contain a deeper truth; but the demonstrable history of their origin’ — and one must add of their consequences — ‘shows that this truth involves not a Jewish but a fascist world conspiracy.’ (ibid. p.18.) And this fascist conspiracy was possible because a nation modelled itself on the behest of a madman, Hitler.
Why was the unfathomable catastrophe possible that this lunatic could make himself ruler over seventy million educated and civilised people; could smash the German working class movement; could unleash a World War; could succeed in landing Germany in a crushing defeat with the loss of millions of war victims; could exterminate with abominable cruelty six million peaceful, reasonable civilians who happened to be Jews collected from all corners of Europe? How could it come about that this lunatic with his demoniacal voice could lead the German nation into such a bath of blood and murder?
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote of the Protocols: ‘The Frankfurter Zeitung is forever moaning to the public that they are supposed to be based on a forgery; which is the surest proof that they are genuine.’ Also in Mein Kampf, referring to the presence of African soldiers of the French Army on German soil, he wrote: ‘It was and is the Jews who bring the negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought of their own of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization....to deprive the white race of the foundations for a sovereign existence through infection from lower humanity.’
It is not difficult to trace the connection between these insanities of Hitler with the avowed philosophy of the National Front.5 In their newspaper Spearhead of April 1971 is the following: ‘It may well be that the masters of the campaign for world government know very well the truth concerning the cause of racial differences. If so, it would certainly explain why internationalist elements of all types are at the forefront of all attempts to encourage people of different races to interbreed and produce half-caste offspring. The reason for this is obvious. If separate races can be eradicated by the process of miscegenation and the whole of humanity submerged into a single slant-eyed, khaki-coloured, lumpen, then racial differences will have disappeared — along with any sense of national identity — and a world government system will be much more easy to impose.’ And Spearhead of October 1964 openly proclaims: ‘If Britain were to become Jew-clean she would have no nigger neighbours to worry about.’ Their philosophy has not changed though it may be more tactfully expressed.
But who are the people who follow such leaders? I agree with David Edgar who writes: ‘Fascism is the mobilisation of a counter-revolutionary mass movement during a period of capitalist crisis...The participants in this mass movement tend to be drawn from those sectors of society — notably the lower-middle-class, unorganized workers, the peasantry and backward sections of the ruling class — which are facing a relative and progressive worsening of their economic and social position, but who nonetheless see no future in an alliance with the organised proletariat.’6
As in German Nazism, so in Britain today, I would describe these middle strata, who follow their leaders blindly, as strata lacking a social contour as a class. They are the most insecure and fluctuating elements who feel menaced from all sides — both from the capitalists and the working-class and their socialist leaders. Their scape-goat is the Jew or the nigger.
According to Marx these intermediate middle classes between capitalists and proletarians should long have gone out of existence. But, on the contrary, in the last half century they have grown as human debris produced by the decomposition of capitalism, resulting from the structural change in its base. Anti-semitism acts as a common ideological denominator which converts the debris into an active political force — that of fascism.
In this book I have tried to show how the Nazis in Germany saved the capitalist system by destroying the independent organisations of the working-class, their political parties and trade unions. They slashed the workers’ wages and laid the foundations of the Second World War. In one sense the Nazis fulfilled the needs of finance capital as the capitalists themselves could never have done. At the same time their brutalities almost destroyed the civilisation of a nation.
The contradictions of capitalism are greater than ever. Limited time-spans of prosperity may conceal the truth, but the cancer of fascism is in our midst. Can we learn from history?7
Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer. 2 vol. Victor Gollancz Ltd 1944.
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide. The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1970.
David Edgar, Racism, Fascism and the Politics of the National Front. Race and Class Pamphlet No 4.
likely a reference to the Freikorps, which literally translates to English as “free corps”. There is, however, a slight problem in assuming this interpretation. In many popular narratives of the counter-revolution which crushed the Sparticist Uprisings of 1918-19, the Freikorps are often described as a highly organized professional mercenary group, loyal to the Kaiser, that had been deployed in conflicts prior to the First World War. Other narratives do describe the Freikorps as rogue segments of the German military corps which turned to aimless marauding when it became clear that Germany would lose the war, which had long since lost the support of the German public by that point. This latter narrative is much less common nowadays than the former. Both narratives, however, have this in common: they identify the Freikorps as an early formation out of which Nazism would eventually emerge. The account given here by Sohn-Rethel, and works he draws from, contain elements of both narratives. — Bluebird
Workers councils are referred to as “soviets” in Russian, so the the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) really should’ve been called the Union of Council Socialist Republics (UCSR) in the English-speaking world. — Bluebird
Since Sohn-Rethel more or less explains Rosenberg’s role in the propagation of Nazi antisemitism and its results, we will only add that Rosenberg was one of the few Nazis to hang at Nuremberg in 1946. He stands as one of the few Nazis and/or Nazi supporters named in this book to face any punishment that was proportional to his crimes. — Bluebird
The National Front is a British fascist party founded in 1967. It still exists at the time of writing and is currently led by Tony Martin. — Bluebird
We would only like to add that this description perfectly conforms to the orthodox Marxist understanding of Bonapartism and its class character. We give an exhaustive description of Bonapartism in our article Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce! — Bluebird
Our decision to prepare a new edition of this book was motivated in large part by us asking ourselves the same question, and desperately hoping that society will find the answer. — Bluebird