Militant Anti-Fascism. M. Testa
erupted between SA and RFB men which destroyed the carriage and led to confrontations throughout the night. The SA suffered a temporary ban.
Control of the Streets
In and around Leipzig…the clashes were at their most severe and took the heaviest toll of human life.
—C.W.W. Szejnmann in Nazism in Central Germany
Nazis faced violent opposition when trying to organize activities in ‘Red’ Leipzig, which ‘tended to turn into wild brawls between the SA and Marxist supporters and the Nazis had to leave again, highly frustrated’.28 Facing either well-organized or violent opposition in the workplaces, the Nazis looked to ‘the home front’ in their recruiting drives: ‘In places where they faced overwhelming resistance they often avoided outright confrontation. As parades or public meetings in the west of Leipzig only fuelled tough resistance from Marxist activists, they preferred to be active “beneath the surface”’.29 Fascists organized a surprise march through Plauen, which meant that the left-wing residents ‘could not demonstrate their skill in building street barricades and limited themselves to throwing beer bottles…[and] the usual shouting of “Red Front!” and “Down! Down! Down!”’30 Even as Hitler edged closer to power, working-class resistance remained strong with one organizer reporting,
The fight in our district is incredibly hard. Marxism defends it as its rightful domain. SA members who walk home alone are attacked; party members, as soon as they are known as such, are watched every step they make; their family members are hounded, even children suffer due to the terror of the red comrades; business people are boycotted…the pack does not even shrink from attacks in apartments.31
On the May Day demonstrations in Wedding in 1928, the SDP police chief demanded that KPD demonstrators disperse; this led to pitched battles and several days of rioting, leaving twenty-five people dead and 160 seriously injured. The RFB were banned. As with most proscribed militant organizations, they simply reformed under another name but also lost significant membership numbers. Following May Day 1928, the SA attempted to march through Wedding and were met with fury. The police stepped in at the last moment to prevent the leftists from attacking the interlopers. Merkl describes the repercussions thus:
There followed other clashes, such as a half-hour street battle involving 100 to 150 Red Fronters near their Sturmlokales Volksgarten and two trucks of SA returning from a campaign in small towns outside Berlin. Pavement stones, beer steins, fence poles, garden furniture, and flag poles served both sides until the Volksgarten was totally demolished, with beer gushing from the smashed counter.32
The Nazis attempted to march through Neukoln in a provocative gesture. The workers reacted with violence, leaving the fascists with serious injuries. Although they were initially repulsed, it was only the beginning of a Nazi incursion into ‘Red’ territory, and in 1928, the SA started setting up the first Sturmlokales, public bars or meeting places in the area. Communists responded by occupying Nazi meeting halls, which caused the predictable battles and also replicated the intrusion tactics of the Nazis: ‘Three times in one week, they tried to storm the Treptow Sturmlokale of the SA, the second time allegedly with 180 men of the elite Liebknecht Hundreds, and under police protection. The third time the RFB completely destroyed the SA hangout.’33
On May Day in 1929, the KPD staged an illegal demonstration, which was attacked by baton-wielding riot police. Hundreds of arrests and many beatings were reported as the police imposed quasi-martial law. Thirty people were killed. The KPD called a general strike for the following day and, in response to this, the RFB, the AJG youth wing, and the newspaper were banned. The KPD viewed this outrage as a ‘confrontation between Social Democrat police and Communist workers’.34 KPD resentment of the socialists was also guided by the rapidly changing and opportunistic foreign policy objectives of Stalin, which lay behind the increased use of the ‘social fascist’ insult, and that culminated in the disastrous ultra-left ‘third period’ strategy, where the KPD saw Social Democracy as no different from the Nazis.
By 1929, KPD leader Ernst Thaelmann and others had increased recruitment amongst the unemployed at the labour exchanges where thousands gathered every day, despite the reservation of the Moscow-dominated Communist International. The SPD was frequently disparaging about the KPD, referring to their ‘Bolshevism, the militarism of the loafers’, and pointing out the fact that 80–90 percent of the communists were unemployed and that the party was not as politically effective in the workplace as the SPD was.35 The KPD was increasingly competing with the Nazis who, being better funded, could offer temporary work for the unemployed. The KPD organized ‘proletarian shopping trips’, where unemployed workers would raid stores and take goods gratis. There was some discussion over how much was being taken and of what kind and if this was a political or a more dubious act: Walter Ulbricht, later leading figure of the DDR and Stalinist henchman in Spain, described these missions, quaintly, as ‘self-help’.
Initially, for the most part, the KPD was involved in defensive rather than offensive violence but soon realised that ‘pre-emptive strikes’ could be politically effective. Defection to the Nazis was not looked upon lightly, and KPD militants often identified transgressors for ‘special treatment’. The violence was not exclusively left/right but also factional. In Leipzig in 1930, a 1,500-strong meeting of the SAJ (Socialist Working Class Youth) was disrupted by two hundred KPD militants. The SPD was also losing members who defected to the KPD, the SAP (Socialist Workers Party) or the Nazis. Not only were the political organizations competing for members, but also ‘the KPD, NSDAP and the Reichsbanner were competing against each other regarding party publicity and propaganda activities. Fighting parades, red days, propaganda rallies…minor incidents often led to clashes’.36 Not all areas were as divided: in Auerbach ‘in contrast to most other places, Social Democrats and Communists often cooperated to secure a socialist majority in the town council or to fight the growing threat of the Nazis’.37
By 1930, both the KPD and Nazis realised that the violence could have a negative impact on electoral returns (although it certainly helped recruitment on the streets). The KPD leadership argued for the cessation of violence between political gangs in the street and was uneasy over socialist/communist alliances engaged in attacks on political opponents at the local level rather than consolidated mass action. The militants felt confident that they could beat the fascists; the youth wing sided with the militants as leadership figures started agitating for the closure of the fighting bodies. Dismantling the militias would leave individuals vulnerable to fascist violence in the streets, but the leadership wanted to rein in any autonomous activities that these non-partisan groups may be carrying out. The KPD eventually reorganized the fighting groups to consolidate militants under a different name but to operate in a similar capacity as before.
In the 1930 election, the KPD received 13.1 percent of the vote and the SPD 24.5 percent, so a potential anti-fascist vote was 37.6 percent in total, but the ideological schisms between the two left-wing parties were deep and savage.38 For some, the fragmentation amongst the left was a defining factor in their defeat: ‘Any realistic chance of winning a physical confrontation with Nazism was destroyed by the lack of a united front on the left, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Social Democrats stuck to legal means and tried to avoid any confrontation on the streets.’39
By 1931, the SA had 300,000 uniformed members ready to confront anti-fascist opponents on the streets. The Reichsbanner, representatives of the governing party, began to liaise with police in order to prevent a Nazi coup. In the long term, although there were many militants in the Reichsbanner, it was subject to political machinations out of its control and was neither properly trained nor properly armed. By 1931, the unions had also organized their muscle as the ‘ Hammerschaften, strong-fisted teams of workers in the major plants who would enforce a general strike against management resistance or Communist interference if necessary’.40
Protection of meetings and demonstrations was paramount and the use of firearms became an issue following the May Day violence. In 1931, a Comintern handbook recommended
knives, brass knuckles, oil-soaked rags, axes, bricks, boiling water to pour on the police-beasts raging in the streets of the workers’ quarters, simple hand-grenades made of dynamite, to emphasise only the most primitive of the infinite and ubiquitous possibilities of arming the proletariat.41