Militant Anti-Fascism. M. Testa

      Struggle, violence and war were at the centre of Nazi ideology and for years the Nazi storm troopers, the SA, had been engaged in a campaign of politically motivated street fighting which left hundreds dead and thousands injured during the final years of the Weimar Republic.

      —Richard Bessel in Life in the Third Reich

On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Spartacist leaders of the Berlin uprising, were taken from police custody, assaulted and murdered by the proto-fascist Freikorps. Their bodies were dumped in the Landwehr Canal near where the Bauhaus Archive and the museum to German anti-Nazi resistance now stand. Luxemburg and Liebknecht had split away from the reformist socialists ( SPD), to lead the Spartakists and form the German Communist Party ( KPD). The socialist Ebert, leader of the government coalition, was seen as being too weak by independent socialists, communists, and worker’s and soldier’s councils who were agitating for a revolution. Violence between the left and the Freikorps escalated. The Freikorps were a reactionary street force that mobilised against the growing rebellion, ‘volunteer units raised by the old Army Command and paid by the Prussian War Ministry…[and] led by Imperial officers’.1 Freikorps members were ex-soldiers nostalgic for the camaraderie of the trenches and angry over the ‘stab in the back’ by the politicians who had signed the armistice in 1918; they were also unemployed adventurists seeking excitement and a sense of certainty and belonging; and, as with the Italian fascist squads, Freikorps members were also violent criminals. Like the Italian squads, the Freikorps’ lack of answerability was a cause of worry to watery-kneed conservatives. Political assassinations were to become a characteristic of this proto-fascist activity: Kurt Eisner, who had led the Munich uprising, was murdered in February 1919 by the Freikorps, as were the politicians Matthias Erzberger and Walter Rahtenhau, the ex-foreign minister. Nichols writes that ‘most victims of such violence were men of the left. [Defence minister] Noske’s forces freed Berlin from the fear of a Communist insurrection, but at the expense of working class unity’.2 The police turned a blind eye and the courts were lenient when the subjects of the Freikorps enthusiasms were militant leftists, and few Freikorps faced the consequences: ‘Attempted counter-revolution, political murder and libellous publications were often connived at in the courts because the judges thought the perpetrators more “patriotic”.’3

Via the legal system, political pressure was exerted against militant workers whilst the murderers of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and leading figures of the Freikorps got away with lighter sentences: ‘Yet thousands of workers who had been involved in the fights in the Ruhr and in Central Germany were sentenced to extremely long terms of imprisonment and hard labour’.4

      Berlin was not the only city to witness reactionary violence: on 7th April 1919, revolutionaries in Munich proclaimed a Soviet Republic and organized a Red Army as a defence measure. However, on the symbolic 1st of May, the defence minister Noske sent in troops who brutally suppressed the Soviets and imprisoned and executed many revolutionaries without trial. Berlin and Munich were only two of the cities where working-class militancy faced state-sanctioned violence.

In 1919, the Freikorps continued with their ‘punitive expeditions’ against left militants, and thousands were kills in street battles. In Munich on May Day, 1919, workers fought pitched battles with soldiers: ‘About 1,000 people were killed during the battle. Between 100 and 200 revolutionaries were murdered’.5 In the Ruhr, workers armed themselves against proto-fascist militias and ‘the Red Brigades drove the Free Corps and Reichswehr troops out of the district. A united front of all socialist parties and Free Trade Unions was formed’.6 The mix of unity, organized workers, and militancy was seen as key in successful anti-fascist struggle. The Freikorps engaged in scab action against working-class organizations, and in 1921, when Berlin workers went on strike, they acted in a predictable manner: ‘ultra-Right wing students, young engineers and former officers’ formed into strike-breaking Technical Emergency Squads that were maintained and ‘in later years [they were] often used to break the organized resistance of labour’.7

The association with gangster-like behaviour recurs throughout fascist history. Anderson states that the Freikorps were responsible for attacks on and murders of radical workers and ‘were comparable to organized gangsterism in America, except they were much more dangerous’. They made public calls for the executions of prominent radicals on posters reading, ‘Kill their leaders. Kill Liebknecht!’8

After Russia, Germany had the largest working class in the world, and Stephen J. Lee illustrates the left-wing power base in 1920 thusly: ‘Challenges came in 1920 from rail and miner’s strikes, mass demonstrations by the USPD [Independent Social Democrats] and uprisings in the Ruhr from a variety of groups ranging from workers’ self-defence units, USPD activists, syndicalists and communists.’9

The SPD unions were well institutionalised in the factories and they had the advantage over the communists: the KPD had 300,000 members but 80–90 percent of them were unemployed so they lacked the syndicalist potential of the socialists—although the reformist nature of the SPD meant that the syndicalist approach of politically motivated strikes would be used infrequently. The KPD’s forces were best mobilised on the streets. Both the communists and fascists realised there was a potential force otherwise unengaged in the ranks of the jobless, and they both vied for members from there, organizing propaganda that dealt specifically with unemployment issues: ‘the increasing competition between Nazis and Communists to woo those who were out of work led to severe clashes between both sets of activists in front of the unemployment offices’.10 The KPD identified anger and dissatisfaction amidst the ranks of the unemployed and saw that the young were the worst-affected of all. The KPD recruited at the offices where the unemployed attended twice weekly with considerable success: ‘A Red Help organization, special unemployment committees and the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition ( RGO) recruited large numbers’.11

      In 1920, left-wing militancy increased and there was fear of a communist