The German Communist

Resistance
1933-1945
T. Derbent

Foreign Languages Press

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First Edition

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Translated from La Résistance communiste allemande 1933-1945,

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To my mother,
an antifascist
To my father,
an antifascist
Each in their own way
T. D.
 Contents
Preface From German Communist Antifascism 1
to a Contemporary United Front
Devin Zane Shaw

Introduction A Resistance that Cannot be Found 18

Chapter 1 The KPD in the Face of the Rise of 24
Hitlerism
Chapter 2 In Exile, in Spain 36
Chapter 3 KPD Clandestine Organizations in Germany 48
Chapter 4 KPD in Occupied Countries 62
Chapter 5 The Special Networks, Espionage and 72
Sabotage
Chapter 6 The National Committee for a Free 78
Germany
Chapter 7 Up to the Camps 86
Chapter 8 Lessons of Resistance, Reasons for Denial 94

East German Bibliography 102

Appendix 1 Conversation between M. Abramowicz 104
and T. Derbent on The German Communist
Resistance
Appendix 2 Interview between J. Kmieciak and T. 110
Derbent on The German Communist
Resistance
Preface
 Preface

From German Communist Antifascism to

a Contemporary United Front
Devin Zane Shaw

Reconstructing a Communist Antifascist History

T. Derbent is a communist theorist of military strategy, whose
research and writing focus on the influence of Clausewitz’s theories on
revolutionary thought. His Categories of Revolutionary Military Policy (Ker-
splebedeb, 2006) already circulates within militant circles due to its con-
cise taxonomy of different types of revolutionary struggle. Soon two other
works will join that work and the present volume in English translation, to
be published by Foreign Languages Press: Clausewitz et la guerre populaire
(2004) and De Foucault aux Brigades rouges: misère du retournement de la
formule de Clausewitz (2018).
The German Communist Resistance 1933–1945 is to some degree an
outlier in Derbent’s work, if not a detour. It was first published in 2008
and then reprinted in 2012 with the addition of two interviews with the
author as appendices. In those interviews, he explains how he discovered
unpublished archival materials documenting widespread clandestine resis-
tance on the part of the German Communist Party (KPD), which is typ-
ically minimized or omitted from Western historiography. After failing
to persuade others to follow up on this line of research, Derbent finally
decided to take on the project himself, thus correcting a glaring historical
omission in Western historiography—including antifascist historiography,
no less—of the history of German communist resistance in Nazi Germany.
In broad outline, the received history of Nazi Germany holds that
Nazi repression of socialist and communist opposition was swift. The main
Communist Party leaders were arrested and detained in concentration
camps while many thousands of cadres went into exile to fight fascism
from abroad. A viable resistance only begins in the late 1930s, organized by
anti-Hitler factions of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy (the Kreisau Circle
or their “heirs,” the conspirators who carried out an assassination attempt
on Hitler on July 20, 1944) or among small networks of heroic dissidents
1
The German Communist Resistance

such as the White Rose group (whose best-known members are Hans and
Sophie Scholl). Communist resistance is not entirely omitted from this
received history, but it is said to re-enter near the end of the war and it is
grouped with socialist and Christian resistance. However, grouping these
forms of resistance together is, in Derbent’s terms, a “sham”: Christian and
socialist resistance was carried out by individuals or small networks; by
comparison,
only the communist resistance embraced all possible forms of
struggle (propaganda, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, espionage,
union struggle, etc.). It is the only one to have fought from the
first to the last day of the Third Reich, and to have extended
its action to the whole of Germany (even in the camps and in
the army). Finally, it is the only one to have really weakened
the Nazi war machine.
Furthermore, although antifascist historiography acknowledges
the role that the KPD played in numerous antifascist organizations, such
as Antifaschistische Aktion, the discussion typically ends where Derbent’s
account takes off, with the Nazi repression of the Communist Party in
1933. While clandestine work lacks the organizing capacity that open
resistance has available to it, that does not nullify its impacts. The reader
notes a certain amount of repetition as repression fails to stop resistance:
KPD organizations carry out clandestine action, they are dismantled by the
Gestapo, dozens if not hundreds of militants are rounded up and impris-
oned or executed, the organizations are reconstituted and return to action.
In the midst of this repression, communist resistance carried out propa-
ganda campaigns, supported strikes and sabotage of the war industry, and
organized resistance in the army and in concentration camps. Derbent also
catalogues communist involvement in exile, in the Spanish Civil War and
in other occupied countries.
Derbent’s short intervention is admittedly not exhaustive; it only
aims to give a representative picture of the scope and importance of com-
munist resistance. By focusing almost exclusively on the KPD, he shows
that the communist resistance followed in practice a remarkably consis-
tent clandestine policy of opposition to Nazism even as the Soviet Union’s
and Comintern’s political line shifts over time. Indeed, Derbent presents
2
 Preface

some evidence that the Soviet-aligned militants of the KPD continued to

carry out clandestine actions against the Nazis during the period of the
nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. I would con-
clude on this basis that when Derbent contends that German communist
resistance maintained a continuous opposition to Nazism, this continuity
was one of military policy rather than political policy, a continuity that is
perhaps legible only when we focus, as Derbent’s analysis frequently does,
on the former rather than the latter. There’s a relationship between the two
that Derbent could have developed further.1
In any case, the clandestine resistance he describes dwarfs that of the
individuals and groups typically celebrated in popular Western historiogra-
phy; and yet, today the reader will be surprised to discover the quantity of
munitions and planes rendered inoperable by communist sabotage. These
historical omissions are the result of a Western, anti-communist political
consensus, which continues to treat communism and fascism two sides of
the same totalitarian coin. And yet, today just as yesterday, supposedly lib-
eral and progressive but anticommunist blocs attempt to make peace with
far-right and fascistic political tendencies in order to shore up capitalist
hegemony.
***
Antifascist historiography, at least in the English-speaking world,
tends to date the emergence of modern militant antifascism around 1946
with the formation of the 43 Group in England.2 The 43 Group, which
was comprised mainly, but not exclusively, of Jewish veterans of World
War II, used physical confrontation to break up public meetings and rallies
of a variety of fascist groups. They used direct action to undermine fascist
organizing because the typical liberal mechanisms of social mediation—a
combination of the inculcation of liberal norms, the so-called marketplace
of ideas, and law enforcement—do not. Indeed, liberal norms and legisla-

1
In Categories of Revolutionary Military Policy, Derbent argues that European communist
parties failed to defeat Nazi invasion due to their organization as “primarily legal parties
supplemented by clandestine military structures” (5); on his account, they were more
effective when improvising practices of protracted people’s war. It would have been inter-
esting to see this argument integrated in the present volume.
2
See, for example, Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (New York: Melville
House, 2017), 39 ff.
3
The German Communist Resistance

tion tend to permit far-right or fascist organizing on the basis of freedom

of speech and association while police are sympathetic to far-right groups
for a variety of reasons, reasons we will return to below. In light of the fail-
ures of liberal mechanisms to halt fascist organizing, the 43 Group carried
out its actions as a form of “communal defense.”3 M. Testa summarizes this
period of antifascist struggle in terms which are contemporary enough:
“militant anti-fascists found themselves in a ‘three-cornered fight’ against
both fascists and the police… anti-fascists were statistically three times
more likely to be arrested than fascists. The police justified this by inter-
preting anti-fascist activity as aggressive and thus, wittingly or not, acted as
stewards for fascist meetings to ‘preserve the peace.’”4 While antisemitism,
and even fascist sympathies, among law enforcement certainly played a
part in police actions, “the police were never convinced that the Group
was apolitical and not secretly communist. Consequently, like their com-
munist allies, the anti-fascist ex-servicemen were seen as radical agitators
desperate to overturn the status quo.”5
If the modern history of militant antifascism typically takes the 43
Group as its point of departure, it is because the Group took on the three-
way fight against both system-oppositional far-right and fascist groups and
law enforcement (or more broadly, the repressive apparatus of bourgeois
class rule). This three-way fight would be familiar to antifascists out in the
streets of North America (and elsewhere) over the last five years, but the
volatile events of the last year during the pandemic show that the politi-
cal co-ordinates of struggle are both volatile and subject to rapid change.
In my view, Derbent offers us a window into a particularly important
moment—the struggle between the KPD and the German Social Demo-
cratic Party (SPD) during the rise of the Nazi Party—from a theoretically
fruitful angle.
There is a temptation when revisiting the failures of the KPD and
SPD as the Nazis ascended to political power to relitigate their ideological
debates in order to settle political scores. It may be impossible not to belie
3
This specific phrasing is from one of the Group’s pamphlets, quoted in Daniel Son-
abend, We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain
(London: Verso, 2019), 72.
4
M. Testa, Militant Anti-fascism: A Hundred Years of Resistance (Oakland: AK Press,
2015), 150.
5
Sonabend, We Fight Fascists, 119.
4
 Preface

one’s commitments when analyzing these failures. Derbent, for his part,
takes a critical approach to the KPD’s political line by contextualizing it
via social antagonism. He writes:
The communist leadership believed that the antifascist strug-
gle involved the elimination of social-democratic influence in
the proletariat, because this influence distanced the class from
a genuine antifascist and anti-capitalist struggle. This analysis
had two premises. The first—erroneous—was the widespread
idea at the time that the Nazi movement would not with-
stand the test of power, that it would crack both because of the
workers’ opposition and because of its internal contradictions.
But the second premise of the KPD’s analysis was correct: the
will to fight Hitlerism was totally lacking in social democracy.
The SPD’s legalism led it to fight the communists rather than
the Nazis.
On this basis, Derbent analyzes two related political lines held by
the KPD in the run up to the Nazis taking power in 1933: first, the “third
period” policy which held that socialists were “social fascists,” that is, social
democrats functioned as a moderate wing of fascism, allied with the bour-
geoisie against communism; and second, the two-front struggle of the
“united front at the base,” which consisted of fighting socialist leadership
and organizations while building alliances with SPD rank and file.
We will begin with the latter: as Derbent notes, the united front at the
base policy resulted in an ambivalent political position: “The KPD could
do or not do anything; it served ‘objectively’ either the Social Democrats
or the Nazis.” It led, infamously, to the KPD’s participation in a Nazi-in-
spired referendum against the social-democratic government in Prussia in
1931. Derbent hints at the internal struggles within the KPD when decid-
ing these policies, but does not underline the policies that resulted in the
failures of the united front at the base. Here, I find Nicos Poulantzas’s ver-
dict persuasive: the KPD relied on “electoral struggle as the favoured form
of ‘mass action.’”6 At the same time, he adduces evidence that the KPD

6
Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of
Fascism, Trans. Judith White (London: Verso, 1979), 184.
5
The German Communist Resistance

failed to set up united front organizations which could cement alliances

between communists and the rank and file of the social democrats.7
Part of the failure of the united front from the base policy can be
placed on the line that socialists were social fascists. Derbent departs from
the typical reception of this part of the third period line. Some critics rel-
egate the third period to the Stalinization of the Comintern, where “Mos-
cow politics often influenced continental anti-fascist strategy more than
Italian or German realities”—but this emphasizes external factors over
contradictions internal to these “German realities.”8 By contrast, Der-
bent argues that the social fascist line was validated by the fact that social
democrats repeatedly used the repressive state apparatus to quell commu-
nist organizing. The failure of the KPD and the SPD to align against the
Nazis was not merely ideological, but also driven by antagonism between
communist insurrectionism and the SPD, which presided at the helm of
the repressive state apparatus. The socialist adherence of legalism, which
brought repressive state power to bear on communist organizing also put
them at odds with cadre on the ground who sought a more militant line
for the Iron Front, the SPD’s antifascist fighting organization.9 Yet com-
munists failed to seize the opportunity. As Poulantzas writes:
As far as the line itself is concerned, the inclusive designation
of social democracy and the social-democratic trade unions as
social fascist and as the main enemy, bore heavy responsibil-
ity for the failure of the united front. This was not so much
because of the refusal of all contact between the leaderships,
and even between the secondary ranks; it was particularly
because of the policy toward the social-democratic masses, consid-
ered ‘lost’ as long as they were under the influence of social democ-
racy… Even apart from the fact that the KPD’s main activity
was still directed against social democracy, this activity was
conceived of as a struggle between ‘organizations,’ not as mass
struggle on a mass line.10

7
Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 182.
8
Bray, Antifa, 20.
9
Bray, Antifa, 23–24.
10
Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 182 (my emphasis).
6
 Preface

Though the KPD sought to form a united front with social-demo-

cratic workers in principle, they failed to translate this into practice. The
“social fascist” label, in my view, is a symbol of this failure to build a mass
struggle around a united front, and it lives on as an inflammatory epi-
thet, largely doing the same work today. Nonetheless, what I have tried
to excavate, via Derbent, is how, at the time, this misguided terminology
reflected—in a partial way—social realities on the ground. While socialists
and communists had a common enemy, organizationally they occupied
structurally different social positions: one commanded state power and the
other’s insurrectionary strategy was repeatedly quashed by the repressive
state apparatus. But the KPD also failed to focus on the struggle beyond
these organizational parameters. We must underline this kernel of truth
while dispensing with the husk, which belies how communists underesti-
mated the strength of emerging threat of fascism.

Toward a Contemporary United Front

It might seem that we are far from discussing the praxis of a con-
temporary united front. On the contrary. I have attempted to outline—
and have perhaps belabored—the various points of antagonism between
the SPD and the KPD in order to anticipate a series of ideological and
structural pressures that militant antifascists could face during the Biden
administration.
If we remove the historical labels and replace them with contempo-
rary terms, these pressures will become more obvious. Given that militant
antifascist groups today tend to organize around a united front policy,
the differences between socialists, anarchists or Marxists is not nearly as
profound as the split between militant antifascism and liberal antifascism.
• Militant antifascism upholds the diversity of tactics to combat
far-right and fascist organizing, organizes as a form of commu-
nity self-defense which (at least ideally) builds reciprocal rela-
tionships with marginalized and oppressed communities, while
recognizing the “revolutionary horizon” of antifascist struggle:
fascism cannot be permanently defeated until the conditions
which give rise to fascism are overthrown. (Depending on the

7
The German Communist Resistance

context, as we will see below, other conditions might be present,

such as settler colonialism).
• Liberal antifascism, in Mark Bray’s concise definition, entails “a
faith in the inherent power of the public sphere to filter out fas-
cist ideas, and in the institutions of government to forestall the
advancement of fascist politics.”11 Liberal antifascists appeal to
the democratic norms of these institutions, but also assume that
law enforcement will apply force to repress the fascism when it
constitutes a legitimate threat; they also often appeal to the con-
verse of this position: if law enforcement doesn’t intervene, then
no legitimate threat is present.
While militant antifascism is best known for the embrace of the
diversity of tactics, over the past several years many antifascists have worked
to create a broader social atmosphere of everyday antifascism. Fostering
everyday antifascism makes it possible to organize a broader movement
which would challenge far-right groups when they mobilized in various
cities across North America. Everyday antifascism could, under the right
conditions, bring larger crowds to counter-protests; it also provides polit-
ical education on how the seemingly small things, like seating far-right
groups at restaurants or providing lodging, enabled the far-right threat to
communities. With Trump in office there was no chance that antifascism
could be funneled back toward an affirmation of American civic partici-
pation.
A Biden administration poses different problems. In August 2017,
only a few weeks after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Biden
published an editorial in The Atlantic denouncing Trump’s equivocations
about the far right; he also referenced Charlottesville repeatedly during his
campaign. In and of themselves, these denunciations didn’t drive his elec-
toral messaging. But in light of the far-right raid on the Capitol,12 and the
popular outrage which also accompanied this action, Biden is positioned
to siphon parts of the broader atmosphere of everyday antifascism—which
previously made it possible to organize militant antifascist actions rela-
11
Bray, Antifa, 172.
In January 2021, supporters of US president Donald Trump broke into the US Capitol
12

building, resulting in several deaths and members of Congress fleeing the building.—Ed.
8
 Preface

tively openly—to fortify Democratic voting coalitions. This co-optation

of a weak sense of even liberal antifascist sentiment will drive the narra-
tive that fascism, encapsulated and isolated as so-called “Trumpism,” was
defeated with the victory and inauguration of the Biden administration,
when in fact the far-right was diverted from system-loyal tendencies align-
ing with Trump and the Republican Party back toward system-opposi-
tional forms of organization.
If this occurs, the Biden administration can work to legitimate
liberal currents of antifascism while delegitimating—while applying the
force of the repressive state apparatus toward—militant currents. If liberal
antifascism succeeds in pulling everyday antifascism back toward forms of
bourgeois forms of institutional cultural power, it will effectively empty
everyday antifascism of any concrete political and organizational content,
while setting the stage for state repression of militant antifascists.13 Any
extension of law enforcement powers that follow in the wake of far-right
actions related to the Capitol riot will redound against left-wing militants.
What liberals will portray as the intransigence of militant antifascists will
appear to them as an ideological victory, but it will be won with repressive
state violence, dismantling militant antifascist organizations and under-
mining community self-defense.
The foregoing scenario is far from a fait accompli. It can be fore-
stalled by renewed efforts at militant political education and organizing
around a united front policy. The defeat of the Trump administration has
untethered far-right organizing from its system-loyal pretensions, though
without necessarily undermining alliances forged by the mutual opposi-
tion of some far-right groups and police departments to the antipolice
uprising of 2020. I will conclude by proposing a series of theses concern-
ing a united front policy for militant antifascists in North America, though
I believe some points would also hold in other situations. I defend them
in more detail elsewhere.14 We will begin with defining two terms: fascism
and the far right.
13
As Matthew N. Lyons, notes, “repression…can even come in the name of antifascism, as
when the Roosevelt administration used the war against the Axis powers to justify strike-
breaking and the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans.” See Insurgent Supremacists:
The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire. Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2018), ix.
14
See Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (London:
Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020); “Between System-Loyal Vigilantism and
9
The German Communist Resistance

1. Fascism is a social movement involving a relatively autonomous and in-

surgent (potentially) mass base, driven by an authoritarian vision of collec-
tive rebirth, that challenges bourgeois institutional and cultural power, while
re-entrenching economic and social hierarchies.
This definition of fascism—adapted from the work of Matthew N.
Lyons and drawing from the discussion between Don Hamerquist and
J. Sakai in Confronting Fascism (2002)—is a marked departure from the
most common Marxist definition, which holds that fascism is “the open
terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most
imperialist elements of finance capital.”15 Whereas Dimitrov’s formula-
tion, as it is typically applied, treats fascists in the streets as instruments of
the most reactionary faction of capital, the definition I offer asserts that
fascist social movements are relatively autonomous formations that chal-
lenge bourgeois institutional and cultural power. This autonomy does not
preclude hegemonic formations between fascists and the bourgeoisie. As
Hamerquist argues, the Nazis’ seizure of power united factions of the rul-
ing-class interested in imposing fascism “from above” with non-socialist
factions (and I’m using the term “socialist” as loosely as possible here) of
the fascist movement and “nazi political structure had a clear and substan-
tial autonomy from the capitalist class and the strength to impose certain
positions on that class.”16
As to the class composition of fascism, Derbent comments that
“workers were the only social group whose percentage of Nazi party mem-
bers was lower than its percentage in the total population.”17 Closer to the
System-Oppositional Violence,” Three Way Fight (October 25, 2020) [http://threeway-
fight.blogspot.com/2020/10/between-system-loyal-vigilantism-and.html]
15
George Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive & Unity of the Working Class (Paris: FLP, 2020), 4.
16
Hamerquist, Don. [2002]. “Fascism and Anti-Fascism,” in Hamerquist et al. Con-
fronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement. 2nd edition. (Montreal:
Kersplebedeb, 2017), 41. Hamerquist argues, for example, that Fascist labor policy under
the Nazis extended beyond “the genocidal aspect of continuing primitive accumulation
that is part of ‘normal’ capitalist development…The German policy was the genocidal
obliteration of already developed sections of the European working classes and the delib-
erate disruption of the social reproduction of labor in those sectors—all in the interests of
a racialist demand for ‘living space’” (43).
17
Despite the repeated assertions by paternalistic liberals that fascism is a working class
movement, even liberal historians acknowledge that workers “were always proportionally
fewer than their share in the population.” See Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
(New York: Vintage, 2004), 50.
10
 Preface

present, an examination of 49 of 107 persons arrested for participation in

the Capitol riot indicates the generally petty bourgeois character of par-
ticipants.18 Both observations affirm that the class composition of the far
right and fascism is more complex than the most reactionary faction(s) of
the bourgeoisie. In North America, the far right draws from elements of
the white petty bourgeoisie who are seeking to protect their social status—
purchased, as W. E. B. Du Bois argues, through the wages of whiteness—
and/or their class position. Fascism is, in my view, relatively autonomous
because it is anti-bourgeois, but anti-capitalist only to the degree that it
seeks to reorganize capital accumulation on terms conducive to its base.
2. Fascist ideology and organizing develops within a broader far-right ecolog-
ical niche.
Lyons defines the far-right as inclusive of “political forces that (a)
regard human inequality as natural, inevitable, or desirable and (b) reject
the legitimacy of the established political system.”19 Lyons’ definition
focuses our attention on two key features of the far-right milieu, within
which fascists organize. First, far-right groups seek to re-entrench social
and economic inequalities, but the social hierarchies they advocate aren’t
necessarily drawn along racial lines. Lyons gives the example of the Chris-
tian far right, which advocates for a theocratic state that centers hetero-
sexual male dominance. In general, this movement has embraced Islam-
ophobia and “promotes policies that implicitly bolster racial oppression,”
but some groups have conducted outreach to conservative Christians of
color while others have formed alliances with white supremacist groups.20
Fascist movements emerge within a broader milieu of rightwing social
movements and these various groups sometimes establish alliances and
sometimes conflict. In fact, one purpose of antifascist counter-protesting
when these groups rally is to put pressure on their organizing; when these
rallies are disrupted or dispersed through antifascist action, far-right alli-

18
Lambert Strether, “The Class Composition of the Capitol Rioters (First Cut), Naked
Capitalism, January 18, 2021 [https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/01/the-class-
composition-of-the-capitol-rioters-first-cut.html]
19
Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, ii.
20
Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, 28.
11
The German Communist Resistance

ances often rapidly splinter as prominent figures and groups within the far
right trade accusations and recriminations.
Second, far-right groups reject the legitimacy of, as I would phrase
it, bourgeois-democratic institutions of political and cultural power.
Though mainstream conservativism has been pulled toward the far-right
in ideological terms, organizational differences between “oppositional and
system-loyal rightists is more significant than ideological differences about
race, religion, economics, or other factors.”21
3. Militant antifascism is involved in a three-way fight against insurgent far-
right movements and bourgeois democracy (or, in ideological terms, liberal-
ism).
More precisely, each “corner” of the three-way fight struggles against
the other two at the same time this struggle offers lines of adjacency against
a common enemy. The first and most fundamental lesson of the three-way
fight is that while both revolutionary movements and far-right movements
are insurgent forms of opposition against bourgeois democracy, “my ene-
my’s enemy is not my friend.” Given that far-right groups also aim to
recruit or ally with some revolutionary leftist groups, it is all the more
important to root out all forms of chauvinism within our practices and
organizations. Second, we must recognize the line of adjacency between
militant antifascism and the egalitarian aspirations of bourgeois democ-
racy. It is the shared appeal to egalitarianism which makes fostering a
broader sense of everyday antifascism possible. But it also means, as I will
argue in thesis six, that militants must uphold a revolutionary horizon to
keep the limitations of liberal antifascism in focus.
We will deal with the line of adjacency between the far right and
bourgeois democracy (or liberalism) in the next two theses. But before
moving on, we must examine the relationship between far-right groups
and law enforcement. The slogan that “cops and klan go hand-in-hand”
expresses two fundamental aspects of this relationship. First, it acknowl-
edges the systemic role of law enforcement: that is, law enforcement pro-
tects the systemic white supremacy of North American settler-colonial
states. Second, it also emphasizes not only common membership between

21
Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, ii.
12
 Preface

the two groups (when police, for example, are also members of the KKK),
but also the ideological bases, through which police and system-loyal
vigilante groups find common cause in opposition to leftist movements.
However, it would be incorrect to assume that there are no antagonisms
between law enforcement and far-right groups. In my view, it is more accu-
rate to differentiate between what I would call system-loyal vigilantism
and system-oppositional armed organization. On the terms established
by Lyons, all far-right groups are ideologically system-oppositional, but
not all of them are organized in system-oppositional forms. Over the last
few years, many framed their actions as system-loyal vigilantism, which I
would define as the use of violent tactics to harass, intimidate, or physi-
cally harm individuals or groups participating in transformative egalitarian
movements. While some levels of law enforcement tend to be permissive
or deferential toward system-loyal rightwing vigilantism, at least at the
federal level, law enforcement has moved to repress system-oppositional
groups organized around armed insurgency. In 2020 alone, police moved
to incapacitate numerous far-right armed accelerationist groups, including
members of The Base, Atomwaffen, and the more loosely-affiliated booga-
loo movement. We must not mistake law enforcement repression to signal
an unequivocal antagonism between police and the far right or any degree
of common cause between these targeted far-right groups and militant and
revolutionary leftist movements.
4. The particularity of the three-way fight is dependent on concrete social rela-
tions. Far-right and fascist groups draw on and respond differently to different
social contexts. For example, during the interwar period, fascist movements
drew from the imperialist aspirations of European nationalisms. In North
America, far-right movements emerge in relation to broader ideological and
material forms of settler-colonialism (which includes—meaning that capital
accumulation is imbricated in—elements of white supremacy, heteropatriar-
chy, ableism, and Indigenous dispossession).
In North America, the historical development of liberal political and
cultural institutions is inseparable from the development of settler-colo-
nialism. Nonetheless it would be undialectical to treat them uncritically
as the same thing. Instead, in my view, it is more precise to contend that
settler-state hegemony is formed by the mediation of bourgeois liberalism
13
The German Communist Resistance

and white supremacist settlerism. I would define white supremacist settler-

ism as an ideological framework which privileges both white entitlement
to land (possession or dominion) over the colonized’s right to sovereignty
and autonomy and entitlements encapsulated in what W. E. B. Du Bois
called the “public and psychological wage of whiteness.” Examining the
end of the Reconstruction period in the southern United States after the
Civil War, Du Bois argues that the potential for the formation of abolition
democracy, built on the solidarity between the black and white proletar-
iat, was defeated by the hegemonic reorganization of settler-state hege-
mony which ensured forms of deference and the institutionalization of
racial control as well as opening institutional access to education and social
mobility to poor whites, drawing them, even if only aspirationally, into the
petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy.22
Du Bois’ analysis remains the prototype—though it must be the-
oretically corrected by incorporating the role that the settlement of the
western frontier played in this dynamic—for conceptualizing settler-state
hegemony and the role that whiteness plays within it. The presidential
campaigns of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and then
the widespread antipolice uprising, offered two competing visions of reor-
ganizing American settler-state hegemony—one which attempted to pull
some system-oppositional far-right movements into system-loyalty and the
other which took on a form of superficial antifascism—but it also demon-
strated that a common interest in maintaining settler-state hegemony
against challenges from the revolutionary left and the liberation struggles
of oppressed peoples forms the basis of the line of adjacency between bour-
geois liberalism and white supremacist settlerism.
5. Far-right movements are system-loyal when they perceive that the entitle-
ments of white supremacy can be advanced within bourgeois or democratic
institutions and they become insurgent when they perceive that these entitle-
ments cannot.
In the first thesis, I stated that fascist groups appeal to an authoritar-
ian vision of collective rebirth. In North American settler-colonial societies,
22
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part
Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880.
Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 573–574.
14
 Preface

far-right and fascist groups demand the re-entrenchment of the social and
economic hierarchies which enabled white social and economic mobility;
they perceive that their social standing is in jeopardy and demand that
settler-state hegemony be tilted “back” toward their advantage. In sum, far
right movements assert supposed “rights” of white settlerism which super-
sede the formal guarantees and protections granted through the liberal
institutions of settler-state hegemony.
I would suggest that liberalism and white settlerism were histori-
cally able to coexist because the latter’s interests did not interfere with
the former’s. Fascism failed to emerge as a profound challenge to Amer-
ican political hegemony in the 1930s and 1940s because, as Sakai notes,
“white settler colonialism and fascism occupy the same ecological niche.
Having one, capitalist society didn’t yet need the other.”23 In the 1950s
to the 1970s, a variety of civil rights and liberation movements levelled a
profound challenge to settler-state hegemony. Liberalism accommodated
challenges from social justice movements by extending formal legal pro-
tections to marginalized groups and introducing new patterns of economic
redistribution (social welfare). This did not overturn the expectations and
entitlements of the wages of whiteness. As Cheryl Harris contends, “after
legalized segregation was overturned, whiteness as property evolved into
a more modern form through the law’s ratification of the settled expecta-
tions of relative white privilege as a legitimate and natural baseline.24” In
other words, white entitlements would be codified into law as long as they
could be framed in supposedly color blind terms—but these color-blind
terms would also contribute to the (incorrect) perception that systematic
white supremacy has been pushed to the margins of American society.
As recent events reveal, settler-state hegemony is not immune to cri-
sis. As Marx and Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto, the social posi-
tion of the petty bourgeoisie is always tenuous because “their diminutive
capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried
on.”25 While the white petty bourgeoisie has repeatedly been “bought off”

23
Sakai, “The Shock of Recognition,” in Confronting Fascism, 130.
24
Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993),
1714.
25
K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party & Principles of Communism,
(Paris: FLP, 2020), 41.
15
The German Communist Resistance

by social mobility or access to land (available due to Indigenous dispos-

session), even during the period of neoliberal policy, that does not mean
that settler-state hegemony will continue to reorganize future hegemonic
blocs successfully. The threat remains that an insurgent fascist movement,
organized around the rebirth of the settler-colonial project, will fill that
hegemonic vacuum.
6. A revolutionary horizon is a necessary component to antifascist organizing;
that is, there is no meaningful way in which fascism can be permanently de-
feated without overthrowing the conditions which give rise to it: capitalism
and white supremacy, and in North America, settler-colonialism.
Militant antifascism is organized in order to meet the imminent
threat of fascist organizing; it is an instantiation of community self-de-
fense. A united front is necessary in situations where the revolutionary left
is present but lacks a mass base, but it is always caught in a contradiction:
the major leftist ideological currents—socialism, anarchism, and commu-
nism—converge in a united front but diverge around the particulars of the
revolutionary horizon. While combatting fascism is the immediate task of
militant antifascism, antifascists must maintain a revolutionary horizon,
even if only in broad outline, in order to avoid being absorbed within the
ideological parameters of liberal antifascism. At the same time, militants
must also recognize that antifascist work cannot merely be absorbed into
revolutionary work; antifascism is community self-defense.
7. Militant antifascism must uphold the diversity of tactics.
From a practical perspective, militant antifascism is distinguished
from liberal antifascism by a willingness to use the diversity of tactics, up
to and including physical confrontation, to disrupt far-right organizing.
Effective militant organizing, though, must not transform the diversity
of tactics into merely physical confrontation.26 Antifascism seeks to raise
26
Indeed, Petronella Lee contends, in a point that applies both to the creation of a broader
antifascist culture and to the use of the diversity of tactics, that “we cannot focus almost
exclusively on physical activities and/or traditionally male-dominated spaces. It’s import-
ant to have spaces, roles, and activities that account for the variety of diversity of social
life—for example considering things like ability and age.” Nor should we perpetuate gen-
der stereotypes in organizing community self-defense. See Anti-Fascism against Machismo
(Hamilton: The Tower In Print, 2019), 36.
16
 Preface

the cost of fascist organizing and that is the most obvious reason that the
diversity of tactics plays an important role in organizing. As Robert F.
Williams observed in 1962, racists “are most vicious and violent when
they can practice violence with impunity.”27 Physical confrontation raises
the stakes of fascist attempts to harass and intimidate communities as they
organize. But it is important to emphasize that physical confrontation still
tends to come late in practice: antifascists conduct research and publicize
the fascist threat and dox fascists, we put pressure on supposedly com-
munity-accountable institutions to deplatform or no-platform far-right
groups, when fascists rally we meet them in the streets to disrupt their
actions. Militants uphold the importance of the diversity of tactics but
that doesn’t mean, against popular conceptions, that violence is necessary.
The critical question is always: which tactic can cause the greatest disrup-
tion to far-right movements at each stage of organizing?
Events of the last year especially have revealed the weaknesses of
liberal mechanisms to stem far-right organizing. For years, liberal antifas-
cists interpreted the lack of law enforcement pressure against the far-right
as a lack of urgent threat, and when the potential scope far-right violence
erupted into popular consciousness on January 6th, 2021, it was years too
late. The failure of far-right and fascist groups to undermine the transition
of government power was due not to police repression (in fact, there was a
distinct absence of police repression on that particular day), but primarily
to internal organizational weaknesses, which I would attribute in part to
pressure brought to bear on these groups over the last five years of antifas-
cist organizing.
When confronted with emerging far-right movements, and unlike
liberal antifascists, militant antifascists act sooner so that we don’t have to
take greater risks later. Antifascists must maintain a revolutionary horizon,
but at the same time remain focused on the immediate threat of fascist
organizing. A world where fascists can openly organize is worse than one
where they cannot.
Derbent’s book testifies to the contributions and sacrifices made by
German communist antifascists until a much more overwhelming military
response deposed fascism from political power. Though German fascism

27
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 4.
17
The German Communist Resistance

and Italian fascism were historically defeated in 1945, it will take a greater
effort to defeat fascism once and for all. Part of that work must be done
now by a united front of militant antifascists.

18
 Introduction
A Resistance that Cannot be
Found
 Introduction: A Resistance that Cannot be Found

According to Claude David, “until 1938, there was no organized

resistance in Germany.”1 This is also the opinion of Alain Desroches, who
attributes its birth in 1939 to aristocrats and the big bourgeoisie:
The first desire to oppose Hitler’s ideology and the Führer’s
policies… had originated on the eve of the Second World War
in a seigneurial estate in Kreisau…. The estate belonged to
Count Helmuth James von Moltke, founder of the “Kreisau
Circle,” which became the first nucleus of the opposition to
Nazism…. Among them were liberals and conservatives, aris-
tocrats and clergymen, landowners and industrialists, lawyers
and professors.2
As for the workers, according to David Schoenbaum:
They failed, in any effective sense, to produce resistance. Their
marginal protest in the years 1933–39 was economic, not
political, a matter of wages and hours and not, it seems, of
fundamental opposition.3
In his monumental study on the Third Reich, William Shirer devotes
more than one hundred pages to the anti-Hitler resistance: they are all
entirely devoted to the plotters of July 20, 1944 (heirs of the “Kreisau
Circle”) and to the Catholic “White Rose” of Hans and Sophie Scholl.
The communist resistance merits only a footnote.4 In the 800 pages that
Peter Hoffmann devoted to the German resistance against Hitler, only a
few dozen lines are devoted to the communist resistance.5 In the chapter
on resistance to Nazism in the book by Mau and Kreusnick,6 only the

1
Claude David: L’Allemagne de Hitler, Presses Universitaires de France, collection Que
sais-je ?, Paris, 1954, p. 103.
2
Alain Desroches: La Gestapo, Éditions De Vecchi, Paris, 1977, pp. 680, 683.
3
David Schoenbaum: Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-
1939, Garden City, NY Doubleday, 1966.
4
William L. Shirer: Le troisième Reich des origines à la chute, Éditions Stock, Paris, 1960,
tome 2, p. 416.
5
Peter Hoffmann: La résistance allemande contre Hitler, Éditions Balland, Paris, 1984,
pp. 22 and 45-46.
6
Hermann Mau and Helmut Kreusnick: Le national-socialisme: Allemagne 1933-1945,
Éditions Casterman, collection Années tournantes, Paris-Tournai, 1962, pp. 146-159.
19
The German Communist Resistance

plotters of July 20 and the Scholls are mentioned, without even a mention
of communist resistance. The same absence is present in Peter Rassow’s
summation7 and in Alfred Grosser’s study:
The 1940s and 1941 saw opposition at its lowest point….
After the defeat of Stalingrad, the atmosphere changed. From
then on, the resistance was to be composed of two very differ-
ent yet inextricably intertwined currents. One included those
who wanted to defeat Hitler in order to make Nazi barbarism
disappear. It was embodied in the admirable figures of the
students Hans and Sophie Scholl, executed in Munich in the
spring of 1943 after a sham trial…. The other tendency also
wanted to rid Germany of Hitler, but only because he was
leading it to disaster…. This tendency was to be particularly
popular among the senior officers of the army and in certain
leading circles.8
The non-existence of communist resistance seems to be so unanimously
accepted that, far from discussing it, François-Georges Dreyfus proposes
instead to explain it:
The first resistance to Nazism could have come from the social-
ist or communist left. Now, let us recall that as early as Febru-
ary 1933, the main leaders of the KPD were arrested and sent
to Dachau and Oranienburg… [and] about 15 to 20,000 left-
wing leaders went into exile abroad…. Their resistance was
thus carried out outside the Reich and their impact, reduced
from the outset, very quickly weakened…. [T]he grassroots
militants, with the exception of a few particularly courageous
ones, hid or rallied by joining the S.A. or the N.S.K.K.9 or the
Labor Front, not hesitating to militate there to make people

7
Peter Rassow: Histoire de l’Allemagne des origines à nos jours, Éditions Horvath, Lyon,
1963. Chapter on the antifascist resistance can be found in volume 2, pp. 254-263.
8
Alfred Grosser: 10 leçons sur le nazisme, Éditions Complexe, Bruxelles 1984, pp. 245-246.
9
The Storm Detachment (Sturmabteilung – S.A.) and the National Socialist Motor Corps
(Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps – N.S.K.K.) were both paramilitary wings of the
NSDAP.—Ed.
20
 Introduction: A Resistance that Cannot be Found

forget their past.10

This analysis is also that of Gerhard Ritter11 and Kurt Zentner.12
Henry Bogdan is one of the rare authors who acknowledges com-
munist activity—but he traces it back to the declaration of war against the
USSR in June 1941:
The second resistance [the first being that of exiled politicians
and intellectuals]—the real one—the one that was on the
ground and under the constant threat of incurring the wrath
of the regime, came from three different milieus: the churches,
the conservative movements and the army…. The communist
militants, for a long time passive and somewhat confused by
the German-Soviet pact, organized their resistance from the
summer of 1941 onwards with leafleting and sabotage.13
Allen Dulles proposes the same vision: “It was not until Russia was
invaded that the communist underground revived.”14
What is surprising in this beautiful unanimity (we do not consider
the nuances between these points of view as differences) is not that these
assertions are false: it is the extreme abundance of the evidence of their
falsehood. This effort did not require a lot of hard work on the part of the
author: it was enough for him to have access to East German historiog-
raphy and to cross-check the information with Western historiography.15
It will therefore be less a question of establishing than of “introducing” a
10
François-Georges Dreyfus: Le IIIe Reich, Le Livre de Poche, collection Référence, Paris,
1998, pp. 241-242. François-Georges Dreyfus reoffends in his Histoire des Allemagnes
(Éditions Armand Colin): after the burning of the Reichstag, “the left is dislocated and no
reaction occurs” (p. 371). He can therefore speak only of the resistance of the Churches
and the conspirators of July 20th…
11
Gerhard Ritter: Échec au dictateur – Histoire de la Résistance allemande, Librairie Plon,
Paris, 1956, pp. 14-15.
12
Kurt Zentner: La résistance allemande 1933-1945, Stock, collection Témoins de notre
Temps, Paris, 1968, which recognizes only the Red Orchestra, to which it devotes an
entire page, p. 167.
13
Henry Bogdan: Histoire de l’Allemagne de la Germanie à nos jours, Éditions Perrin,
collection Tempus, Paris, 2003, pp. 395 and 415.
14
Allen W. Dulles: Germany’s Underground, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1947.
15
This refers to francophone Western historiography; the main East German works con-
sulted are listed in the bibliography at the end of the book.
21
The German Communist Resistance

historical truth, and thus unmasking the falsifiers of history, as a tribute to

those they have murdered a second time.

22
 Chapter 1
The KPD in the Face of the Rise
of Hitlerism
 Chapter 1: The KPD in the Face of the Rise of Hitlerism

In the 1930s, the KPD and its mass organizations had organized up
to one million people and collected up to six million votes. By the 1920s,
it had developed an impressive political-military apparatus for proletarian
revolution under the leadership of the Militär-Apparat, which performed
the functions of staff, security and intelligence service. This secret orga-
nization was in close contact with the state security services of the Soviet
Union (the GPU, then the NKVD) and with the clandestine apparatus of
the Communist International (more precisely the Westeuropäisches Büro
der Komintern, or “West Büro,” led by Georges Dimitrov). The basis of
the communist political-military apparatus was a mass paramilitary orga-
nization: the League of Red Front Fighters (Roten Frontkämpferbund).
This organization (and its youth organization, the Roter Jungsturm),
which had more than 100,000 members, provided military training for
the militants, ensured the protection of demonstrations and picket lines,
forcibly prevented bailiffs from expropriating working-class families, and
disputed the streets with Nazi militiamen. Banned in 1929, the Roten
Frontkämpferbund acted under the cover of the Kampfbund gegen den
Fachismus (Kampfbund gegen den Fachismus), known as the “Antifa
League,” which organized 250,000 militants. Between 1928 and 1933,
the SA increased the number of Sturmlokalen in working-class neighbour-
hoods, which served as meeting places, propaganda centers and bistros.
The KPD decided on an offensive to eliminate these sites and launched the
shock groups of the “Antifa League” against them. From December 1930
to December 1931, this offensive resulted in 79 Nazi and 103 Communist
deaths. Of the latter, 51 were killed by the Nazis and almost all the others
by the police of the social-democratic government who, in the name of
maintaining law and order, flew to the rescue of the Nazi sites. The offen-
sive against the Sturmlokalen SA was halted to prevent the KPD from
being banned like the Roten Frontkämpferbund.16

16
Cf. Nicos Poulantzas: Fascisme et dictature: la troisième internationale face au fascisme,
Éditions François Maspero, collection Les textes à l’appui, Paris, 1970, pp. 201-203. This
concern to preserve the legal/electoral terrain was in line with the Komintern’s “legalis-
tic” line of the 1930s and was not subject to re-evaluation? . At the XIIIth Plenum of the
Komintern, in November-December 1933, Manouilsky again replied to foreign Com-
munists who criticized the KPD for its lack of resistance: “If the KPD had undertaken
armed struggle against Hitler, it would have fallen into provocation.”
25
The German Communist Resistance

Annual rally of Berlin militiamen of the Roten Front-

kämpferbund, the KPD’s paramilitary organization
(1926).

Communist militants arrested by the SA at the Colum-

bia-Haus in Berlin (March 1933).

26
 Chapter 1: The KPD in the Face of the Rise of Hitlerism

One reads endlessly that the KPD, through its excessive struggle
against the Social Democrats, paved the way for Hitler. The communist
leadership believed that the antifascist struggle involved the elimination of
social-democratic influence in the proletariat, because this influence dis-
tanced the class from a genuine antifascist and anti-capitalist struggle. This
analysis had two premises. The first—erroneous—was the widespread idea
at the time that the Nazi movement would not withstand the test of power,
that it would crack both because of the workers’ opposition and because
of its internal contradictions.17 But the second premise of the KPD’s anal-
ysis was correct: the will to fight Hitlerism was totally lacking in social
democracy. The SPD’s legalism led it to fight the communists rather than
the Nazis. It was a socialist police prefect, Zörgiebel, who on May 1, 1929
opened fire on the Communist procession in Berlin, killing 33 demon-
strators. It was the Prussian Socialist Interior Minister, Severing, who then
had the Rote Frontkämpferbund banned. The following year, the Socialists
allowed the adoption of the very repressive “Law For the Protection of
the Republic”: the communist mayors were no longer confirmed in office
and the police closed the KPD headquarters. The SPD voted for Article
48 (which would give full powers to Hitler) and was the main architect
of the re-election in 1932 of Marshal Hindenburg, who would choose
Hitler as chancellor a few months later. The same policy was followed
in the large ADGB trade union, where the social-democratic leadership
proceeded with massive exclusions of communists. On July 17, 1932, in
Altona, a working-class district of Hamburg, the machine-gunners of the
police force led by the Social Democrat Eggerstädt came to the rescue
of a Nazi parade threatened by Communist counter-demonstrators: 17
counter-demonstrators were killed. These facts gave particular weight to
Stalin’s 1924 analysis that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate
wing of fascism… These organisations do not negate, but supplement each
other.”18
17
These contradictions would indeed erupt. The SA, which spoke of a “second revolution”
(anti-capitalist), was purged in the summer of 1933 and, since these purges were not
enough, Hitler ordered the “Night of the Long Knives”: the SS massacred hundreds of
SA, starting with their leaders (Roehm, Gregor Strasser, Ernst, etc.).
18
In a September 1924 article entitled “On the International Situation,” Stalin challenged
social democracy as the “moderate wing of fascism” and launched the famous formula:
“Social democracy is the twin brother of fascism.” This analysis is generally presented as
27
The German Communist Resistance

In summary, the KPD leadership rejected the idea of fighting exclu-

sively against the Nazis, and considered the idea of a “top-down” alliance
between the KPD and the SPD to be a right-wing deviation. The KPD
line thus envisaged a two-front struggle, constantly revolving around a
central principle, that of the “united front at the base.” This principle con-
sisted of allying itself with the social-democratic workers in the factories
and neighborhoods while fighting against the social-democratic leadership
and organizations. It was a difficult exercise. The KPD could do or not do
anything; it served “objectively” either the Social Democrats or the Nazis.
The latter represented the blackest of reactions, but the SPD was infinitely
more powerful and above all it was in power: it was the manager of Ger-
man capitalism. Issues such as whether to participate in a (Nazi-inspired)
referendum against the SPD government of the Prussian state, which were
easy to decide after the event, were such complex and high-stakes problems
at the time that they gave rise to terrible conflicts at the head of the party.19
In January 1933, the Nazis came to power: the Communists reacted
in several large cities with strikes and savagely-repressed demonstrations.
In February, the police invaded the headquarters of the KPD, the “Karl-
Liebknecht-Haus,” and outlawed the party.
On the night of February 27-28 alone, after the burning of the
Reichstag, 10,000 Communists were arrested, including the main mem-
bers of the Central Committee and two-thirds of the middle cadres. A few
weeks later, there were 20,000. Sixty camps, thirty special quarters in state
prisons and sixty detention centers were opened to accommodate them. In
each neighborhood, in each locality, the little Nazi chiefs set up their pri-
vate prisons and torture centers in cellars or empty factories. The chaos and
abuses were such (500 to 600 people shot or tortured to death, families
upended, civil servants refused to participate in the parish priest’s work,

one of the pearls of Stalinism, yet it predates Lenin’s death (by a small margin). As early as
January 9, 1924, according to a motion of the Presidium of the Executive of the Komint-
ern: “The leaders of the Social Democracy are only a fraction of fascism that is hidden
under the mask of socialism” [in The Lessons of the Events in Germany]. This was developed
by Zinoviev in the part of his report to the Fifth Congress entitled “Social Democracy, a
Wing of Fascism.”
19
Cf. Pierre Broué: Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste 1919-1943, Librairie Arthèmes
Fayard, Paris, 1997, pp. 530-531. Ernst Thälmann and Heinz Neumann apparently came
to blows in the middle of the political bureau meeting! The exclusion of the Neumann
Group (late 1932) did not put an end to the “dances” of hesitation.
28
 Chapter 1: The KPD in the Face of the Rise of Hitlerism

themselves sequestered, beaten and humiliated, etc.), that they become

the stakes in the struggle for influence among the Nazis. In April, the SA
were ordered to hand over their prisoners to the SS, which was developing
a network of concentration camps throughout Germany on the Dachau
model. Terror was applied methodically and rationally. In June, the SS
introduced the practice, which was to become systematic, of hanging rebel
prisoners on the roll-call square in front of the camp population standing
at attention. The first victim was the communist worker, Emil Bargatzky.
In spite of the waves of arrests (Ernst Thälmann, KPD’s general sec-
retary, was arrested on March 3 in Berlin, in a clandestine party apart-
ment), the Communists continued to openly confront the SA, which had
the status of auxiliary police. The Gazette de Lausanne of March 2 wrote:
“Only the Communists resist… Obviously the struggle is not equal, they
have all the forces of the State against them. But, for lack of numbers, they
have ardor, fanaticism: they fought for the street.” In one month, accord-
ing to official statistics, there were 62 deaths in street battles, including 29
communists, 14 Nazis and 8 socialists.20 These figures are much lower than
the reality. One only has to read the pages that Richard Krebs (under the
pseudonym Jan Valtin) devoted to the street battles in Hamburg to realize
the incredible violence of the confrontations.21
As it became clearer every day that the KPD would have the
underbelly, the Party prepared for a long period of clandestinity. It was
at this point that many experienced as well as little-known activists were
instructed to pretend to join the Nazi party NSDAP in order to carry out
undermining and intelligence work.

20
Cf. Gilbert Badia: Histoire de l’Allemagne contemporaine – Tome 2: 1933-1962, Éditions
sociales, Paris, 1962, p. 14. Badia’s works are the only ones that reserve a decent place for
communist resistance.
21
Cf. Jan Valtin: Sans patrie ni frontières, Éditions Actes Sud, collection Babel, Arles,
1997, pp. 478 ff. This book must be read with caution; its author did belong to the
clandestine Komintern apparatus, with which he came into conflict when he received the
order to return to Hamburg to reconstitute the networks of the International Seamen and
Dockers’ International (ISH). Arrested, tortured, he denounced the comrades who were
housing him and became an agent of the Gestapo (without an order from the Komintern,
which is what he claimed to try to clear himself ). Having become a man to be shot by the
NKVD and the security service (“S-Apparat”) of the Komintern, Krebs fled to the United
States in 1937. A biography of Richard Krebs was published, Ernst Von Waldenfels: Der
Spion, der aus Deutschland kam: Das geheime Leben des Seemans Richard Krebs, Aufbau
Verlag, Berlin, 2002.
29
The German Communist Resistance

When the Nazis came to power, the SPD continued to validate the
KPD’s analysis, preferring conciliation to confrontation. The socialists
refused to participate in the anti-Hitler general strike in the aftermath of
the Reichstag coup. This was a critical decision, because the proletariat
believed that the general strike could defeat the Nazi coup de force, just as
it had defeated the Kapp putsch in March 1920.
Goebbels’ diary shows that the Nazis feared this general strike more
than anything else; the first meeting of Hitler’s cabinet was entirely devoted
to this eventuality. The SPD had been powerless to prevent the right-wing
deputies from granting Hitler the benefit of Article 48. The elected rep-
resentatives of the SPD and the KPD together would have reached the
required quorum, but the communist representatives were hunted down,
arrested and tortured (on the basis of police lists drawn up by the SPD pre-
fects) while the SPD representatives continued the parliamentary routine.
In order to avoid the Nazi criticism of being a “party from abroad,” the
SPD left the Socialist International and even approved the Nazi foreign
policy program in May 1933!22 While several Social Democratic leaders
went into camps or exile, many others collaborated or remained in the
Reich without further concern. Minister Severing, for example, withdrew
from business but remained in Germany, receiving his pension under the
new regime. This was also the case with Noske, the socialist leader who had
led the crushing of the Spartakists and the massacre of Rosa Luxemburg
and Karl Liebknecht. The Social Democratic leadership in Württemberg
decided to dissolve itself by calling on the SPD municipalities to “support
the new order and the national revolution.” When the Berlin section of
the Young Socialist Workers organized clandestine work and protected the
organization’s money from the Nazis, its leader demanded an end to “these
small illegal schemes.” In the Berlin-Brandenburg district, sections of the
SPD’s order service (the Reichsbanner, which had 160,000 militiamen)
received this circular:
We are left with three possibilities:
The use of the violent methods of the communists. But it is
22
The SPD parliamentary fraction was reduced to 60 seats (out of 129) at this vote.
Eighteen of the elected representatives were in prison, while the others were in exile or in
voluntary political retirement.
30
 Chapter 1: The KPD in the Face of the Rise of Hitlerism

KPD poster calling for a general strike against

Nazi power the day after the Reichstag was burned
down.

31
The German Communist Resistance

clear to every one of our comrades that these methods are

criminal and must be left aside;
Abstention;
The search for collaboration within the framework of practical
life.
For years we have carried in our hearts, faith in Germany and
in the future of Germany. That is why we will claim our place
in the new life of the German state and do for Germany what
it expects of us: our duty. The executive committee negoti-
ates with the competent authorities about the activity of our
association. The following points are fundamental: culture of
friendship; assistance to veterans; youth education; military
preparation; voluntary work service.
All the testimonies attest both to the communist resistance and to the
social-democratic debacle, from press articles (“the attitude of the com-
munists in front of bloody and implacable judges was so exemplary that
one had the impression that they alone had been given the mandate to
maintain the resistance”)23 to secret service reports:
First of all, let us note that no Communist Party leader bowed
to the national revolution.24 All of them are in prison, on the
run or in hiding. It is mainly Communists who have gone
to populate the concentration camps…. Others have gone
abroad…. The need for the leaders who have remained at their
posts to hide and work clandestinely reduces their action to
very little, and it is even doubtful that their work can be pro-
longed for long in the presence of searches by a police force
23
Cited by Gilbert Badia, Histoire de l’Allemagne contemporaine, (op. cit.) p. 59.
24
Only one of the 422 KPD leaders went over: Ernst Torgler had been Dimitrov’s co-de-
fendant in the famous Leipzig trial. He suffered a deep depression during the trial and
adopted an individual defense, refusing the Party’s instruction to accuse the Nazis of
burning down the Reichstag as “suicidal.” Expelled from the KPD in 1935, liberated
in 1936, he was a salesman until the war and accepted a post in a ministry during the
war. He ended his life in the FRG… as a member of the SPD. Cf. Gilbert Badia: Feu au
Reichstag – L’acte de naissance du régime nazi, Éditions sociales, collection Problèmes, Paris,
1983 pp. 245-248.
32
 Chapter 1: The KPD in the Face of the Rise of Hitlerism

Ernst Thälmann, general secretary of the KPD,

secretly photographed in Berlin-Moabit prison
(1933).

33
The German Communist Resistance

developed to the extreme…. If the communists, who, it must

be repeated, showed an indisputable nerve until last March,
are at this point, it is easy to imagine how far the socialists
have gone…. They have only known how to bow or flee like
Braun, Grzesinski, Breitscheid, Dittman, Crisprein, Noske,
Bergemann, unless they bring to the new regime a more or
less veiled adherence like Leipart, Grassman, Tarnow, Wels,
Stampfer, Hilferding.25
The social-democratic union leadership also gave in very quickly to
the Nazis: its president wrote to Hitler to inform him that the ADGB had
broken with the SPD. On March 20, the ADGB published a damning
manifesto:
The trade union organisations are the expression of an irrefut-
able social necessity, an indispensable part of the social order
itself… according to the natural order of things, they have
become more and more integrated into the state. The social
function of the trade unions must be fulfilled whatever the
nature of the regime of the state…. The trade union organiza-
tions do not claim to directly influence State policy. Their task
in this sense can only be to place at the disposal of the govern-
ment and parliament the knowledge and experience they have
acquired in this field.
On April 22, 1933, the ADGB announced that it was leaving the
International Federation of Trade Union. The ADGB undertook to unite
with the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO) to form a
single trade union and participated on Nazi commemoration of May 1st.
But these capitulations did not save it from the ban.
The NSDAP remained in a minority in the March 1933 elections,
but it enjoyed the support of the right-wing parties in parliament to grant
Hitler the full powers provided for in Article 48. Repression gradually
extended to trade unionists (the SA occupied the trade union building
on May 2, 1933 and arrests began the next day), the Social Democrats
25
Report of the Renseignements généraux of May 18, 1933 (J.C. 5. A. 4509) exhumed
by the historian Annie Lacroix-Riz.
34
 Chapter 1: The KPD in the Face of the Rise of Hitlerism

(the SPD disbanded on June 22, 1933), and Christians opposed to Nazi
warmongering and racism. By July 1933, tens of thousands of people had
been interned and there were 27,000 political prisoners in the concen-
tration camps. In November, 60,000 communist militants were arrested
and 2,000 murdered. Trials were held in a chain reaction: on May 23, two
communist activists were the first to be sentenced to death by the new
regime.
Nazi repression left activists who had been unable or unwilling to
leave Germany with a choice between three mindsets. Some, discouraged
by the terrible defeat of the communist movement, deprived of leader-
ship and intimidated by state terror, abandoned the struggle. Among them
were a handful of leaders, because not all of them were up to the dizzying
height of events. At the end of April 1933, for example, the Arbeiter Zei-
tung, an organ of the KPD in Saarland, the German region occupied by
France from 1919 to 1935, published this opinion:
The district [of the KPD] Baden-Palatinate asks us to publish
the following exclusion: the deputy to the Reichstag Benne-
dom-Kusel, who has been living in Saarland for several weeks
and who had received orders from the district to return to
Germany, did not respond to this invitation. He was expelled
from the German Communist Party for cowardice in the face
of the class enemy.
A small number of KPD members collaborated with the regime—
simple grassroots activists and most often new party members.26 But tens
of thousands of communists adopted a position of resistance. Often there
was a long way from this position to organized and effective clandestine
action. Party structures crumbled, cadres were imprisoned or exiled, sym-
pathizers were watched. But clandestine Party organizations were reconsti-
tuted very quickly, to be generally just as quickly dismantled… and rebuilt
again.

26
The KPD was emerging from a period of purges in 1932. Four or five percent of its
members had been in the party since its founding twelve years earlier and more than 40
percent had been in the party for less than a year.
35
 Chapter 2
In Exile, in Spain
 Chapter 2: In Exile, in Spain

If half of the KPD leaders had been arrested and imprisoned in Feb-
ruary-March 1933, several dozen leaders and several thousand militants
and middle-ranking cadres had been able to escape the round-ups and go
abroad. France took in the largest number of German political refugees
(30,000 in the summer of 1933). It was in France that the external leader-
ship of the Party settled in mid-May 1933, followed in 1936 by its recon-
stituted Political Bureau. Some worked there in semi-clandestinity, such
as Wilhelm Pieck, Wilhelm Florin or Franz Dahlem; others openly and
successfully organized antifascist propaganda for capitalist Europe, such
as former KPD deputies Paul Schwenk and Willy Münzenberg. The latter
was also secretary of the International Red Aid, the Komintern organiza-
tion that organized solidarity with political prisoners. Helping anti-Hitler
political refugees was the largest campaign of the International Red Aid
since the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. The most important campaigns were the
Leipzig trial against Dimitrov (accused of burning the Reichstag), the cam-
paign demanding the release of Thälmann, and the campaign denouncing
the death of Albert Funk. Albert Funk had succeeded in reconstituting the
KPD organization in Dortmund, which the Gestapo had dismantled at
the end of March by arresting nearly 300 communist militants in the city.
Funk was in turn arrested on April 16, 1933. He was tortured for ten days
without betraying anything and finally, fearing that he could not take any
more, took advantage of the executioners’ distractions to throw himself
out of an 18-metre high window. A few weeks later, the Ruhr area was
flooded with thousands of KPD leaflets with Funk’s photo, and his case
was highlighted in anti-Hitler campaigns abroad. The Thälmann Commit-
tee, founded in Paris in March 1934, published in its first year of activity
20,000 brochures, 10,000 sheets of the Thälmann’s Song, 30,000 badges,
32,000 postcards, three publications with a total print run of 150,000
copies, 260,000 leaflets, 15,600 posters, etc. The Thälmann Committee
also put out a number of other publications. In addition, it organized a
large number of meetings (gathering more than 100,000 people in 1935
alone!), released hundreds of balloons over Germany on which was written
Freiheit für Thälmann, sent delegations, organized a counter-court with
300 jurists, etc.27 The Nazis announced his trial publicly several times,
Cf. Gilbert Badia, Jean Baptiste Joly, Jean Philippe Mathieu, Jacques Omnes, Jean
27

Michel Palmier and Hélène Roussel: Les Bannis de Hitler – Accueil et lutte des exilés alle-
37
The German Communist Resistance

but their propaganda suffered a terrible fiasco at the Leipzig trial. In this
trial, which has remained a model of its kind, the accused had become
an accuser. In front of the international press, Dimitrov succeeded in dis-
mantling the Nazi machinations and unmasking Goering, who had come
to testify in court. Thälmann’s inflexible resistance left the Nazis fearing a
new Leipzig, and they abandoned their plan for a show trial.
Escape routes were set up, and the KPD organized large and effec-
tive underground operations in Belgium, France, Holland, Czechoslova-
kia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Luxembourg. These centers sent
delegates to reconstitute Party organizations and to provide these organi-
zations with the means of political work (leaflets, brochures and especially
in the form of Tarnschriften, i.e., publications with an innocuous or fake
cover). The Belgian center, for example, had one of the editions of the
KPD organ, the Rote Fahne, printed in Brussels and used the sea channels
between Antwerp and Germany to infiltrate delegates and material into
the Reich.28 This was a relentless and extremely costly activity for the cad-
res, because the repression did not weaken and hundreds of delegates fell
into Gestapo traps.
A few months after the big roundup, the Party had already managed
to break out dozens of imprisoned activists. Thus, on May 9, 1933, it
brought a file for sawing through bars and planks for crossing the barbed
wire into the cell of KPD deputy Hans Beimler, in the death-row block at
Dachau. Beimler was taken by an exfiltration line and went to France. The
communist escapees brought the first information about the Nazi camps
to the West very early on (for example, the testimony of Egon Erwin, pub-
lished in l’Humanité on March 23, 1933).
It was the KPD militants in exile who also constituted the first inter-
national antifascist unit in Spain: the Centuria (or column) “Thälmann.”
The German battalion “Edgar André” (of the 11th Brigade)29 was the first

mands en France 1933-1939, Études et Documentation Internationales, Presses Universi-

taires de Vincennes, Paris, 1984, p. 218.
28
Cf. José Gotovitch: Du rouge au tricolore – Résistance et Parti communiste, Éditions
Labor, Bruxelles, 1992, pp. 61 and 80.
29
Six months later in June 1937, this unit regrouped all the German inter-brigadists
(“Thälmann,” “André” and “Beimler” battalions). It was then commanded by Richard
Staimer (alias “Colonel Richard”), a KPD official who had led the woodworkers’ union
in Germany. After the war, Staimer held important posts in the GDR People’s Police.
38
 Chapter 2: In Exile, in Spain

“The World in Combat for Thälmann,” photomontage on the cover

of the Thälmann Committee brochure.

39
The German Communist Resistance

Two different KPD Tarn-

schriften, each with a dif-
ferent cover, were smuggled
into Germany. These were
textbooks on underground
work.

40
 Chapter 2: In Exile, in Spain

The first German volunteers of the “Thälmann” Centurion in the summer

of 1936.

A few months later: the “Thälmann” battalion, the shock unit of Repub-
lican Spain.
41
The German Communist Resistance

international unit to be committed to the front. In October 1936, this bat-

talion took the name of a KPD M-Apparate leader who had been impris-
oned and tortured since 1933. Within a few days, the battalion lost a third
of its men in Madrid, and two weeks later, on November 4, 1936, Edgar
André was beheaded in Berlin. The German “Thälmann” battalion, com-
manded by the communist writer Ludwig Renn,30 formed the solid core
of the 12th Brigade, which was engaged a few days later, first at the Cerro
de los Angeles, then in the university campus of Madrid. The political
commissioner of the Brigade was the communist writer Gustav Regler.31
There was also the escaped deputy Hans Beimler, who became both polit-
ical commissioner of the “Thälmann” battalion and general political com-
missioner for all the Germans fighting in Spain. He was killed in action in
Madrid in December 1936 and replaced by Franz Dahlem, another KPD
deputy. Wilhelm Zaisser, a leader of the M-Apparat who had studied at
the Moscow Military Academy, commanded the 13th Brigade under the
pseudonym “General Gómez.”32 A total of 5,000 Germans fought in the
International Brigades. Among them were 1,700 or 1,800 members of the
KPD, 1,000 members of the small leftist parties SAP and KPD(O), and
700 or 800 members of the SPD. 2,000 of them were killed.33
These figures, which only concern the International Brigades, do
not do justice to the commitment of the German communists to Spain.
They were numerous in the networks supplying arms to the Republic
and sabotaging weapons intended for the fascists in the security services
(the Spanish SIM and the Soviet NKVD). Agitators achieved remarkable
results in their work with the crews of the German merchant navy at the
risk (and sometimes at the cost) of their lives. The crews of six ships (the
30
Captain in active service in 1914-18, Ludwig Renn wrote a famous anti-militarist novel,
Krieg. Arrested in 1933 by the Nazis, he took advantage of his detention to perfect his
military knowledge, and on his liberation in 1936, he reached Spain via Switzerland. He
made the “Thälmann” Centurion, then the “Thälmann” Battalion, a model of efficiency.
Cf. Les écrivains et la guerre d’Espagne, Les dossiers H, Pantheon Press France, Paris, 1975,
pp. 24-25.
31
Gustav Regler was wounded in May 1937, at the Battle of Huesca, in the shell explo-
sion that killed the commander and doctor of the 12th Brigade (General Lukacs and Dr
Heilbrunn) and wounded Soviet General Batov. Regler was replaced by Heinrich Rau
who later became Deputy Prime Minister of the GDR.
32
Wilhelm Zaisser later became Minister of State Security of the GDR.
33
Hugh Thomas: La guerre d’Espagne – juillet 1936-mars 1939, édition définitive, Édi-
tions Robert Laffont, 1985, p. 754.
42
 Chapter 2: In Exile, in Spain

Brochure published in Paris in 1933 by Hans Beim-

ler, KPD deputy in Bavaria, following his escape from
Dachau.

43
The German Communist Resistance

Henrika, the Koenigstein, the Melilla, the Lasbek, the Poseidon and the Pre-
ussen) refused outright to transport arms shipments to Franco’s ports!34
The German communists were also active in the Corps of the partisans
of the People’s Army. This Corps infiltrated commandos behind fascist
lines for occasional sabotage and intelligence operations. Soviet adviser
Vaoupchassov, sent as an instructor to the partisans, spoke in his memoirs
of a commando unit composed exclusively of German communists, led by
a steelworker who had survived the Gestapo raids. In a single mission, at
the beginning of December 1937, this group, led by a local Spaniard, blew
up six trucks loaded with troops on the Huesca-Jaca road, killed many fas-
cists, and brought back prisoners and documents.35 In addition to all these
commitments, there was the political work carried out within the Reich on
the Spanish question; clandestine collections for Spain were organized as
early as 1936 in Bavaria, Silesia and the Rhineland. 1,500 Germans left the
Reich during the Spanish Civil War to fight fascism in Spain. The Gestapo
arrested and deported 3,000 Germans (communists and socialists) for hos-
tile demonstrations and sent the “Condor Legion” to Franco’s side.
In January 1937, a KPD shortwave broadcasting station was heard
throughout the Third Reich. It was designated by its wavelength: 29.8.
Its broadcasts denounced the degradation of the working class, corrup-
tion, warmongering, anti-Semitism and intervention in Spain, denounced
by name the Gestapo snitches, reported on the struggles and broadcast
the declarations of prestigious antifascists. This station acquired a level
of popularity that was reported by a Norwegian government newspaper
correspondent:
All over Germany—in workshops, stores, liquor stores and
large buildings—the mysterious figure of 29.8 is now being
talked about. This figure can be read on walls and fences. On
the walls of houses it is written in chalk, and people look at
each other when they find this curious decimal fraction. You

34
Cf. Georges Soria: Guerre et révolution en Espagne 1935-1939 – Tome 3: Le tournant,
Robert Laffont, Livre Club Diderot, Paris, 1976, p. 309.
35
Cf. Stanislav Vaoupchassov: Quarante ans dans les services secrets soviétiques, Éditions
du Progrès, Moscou, 1978, pp. 182-183 and 190-191. Vaoupchassov was one of those
NKVD officers specializing in guerrilla warfare; he had the rank of commander in the
Spanish Republican Army.
44
 Chapter 2: In Exile, in Spain

blink your eyes and you understand each other…. Although it

is the Communist Party’s position, it deliberately avoids every-
thing that comes out of narrow party politics. Thus the post
becomes the mouthpiece of the German opposition.
Thus, priests in Cologne shorthanded Heinrich Mann’s speech on
29.8 and distributed it to their parishioners. The content of a 29.8 pro-
gram about Thälmann was reproduced in the form of leaflets in Berlin fac-
tories. The Gestapo undertook an audit of listeners, identifying the owners
of radios capable of receiving shortwave, and the press announced several
arrests for listening to 29.8. The Nazis installed a powerful transmitter
in East Prussia to jam the broadcasts, but the radio started broadcasting
slightly below or above 29.8, and it was still possible to hear it. Eventually,
the Nazis had to install three more transmitters to jam the KPD’s clandes-
tine broadcasts. 36
The KPD’s organization abroad suffered a blow in September 1939.
Following the declaration of war, the French police intercepted all Ger-
man and Austrian citizens—18,000 people, the vast majority Jewish and
anti-fascist refugees. The main leaders of the KPD were locked up, includ-
ing Franz Dahlem, Paul Merker, Georg Stibi and Adolf Deter. The KPD
leadership was reconstituted again in 1939, this time in Moscow, by Wil-
helm Pieck37 and Walter Ulbricht38, but the party was still in the process of
reorganization when Hitler's Blitzkrieg struck Western Europe.

36
Cf. Le poste émetteur clandestin allemand 29,8 – Son combat – Son succès, Comité alle-
mand de liaison du poste émetteur de la Liberté 29,8. L. Vannier, Paris, 1938, p. 6.
According to Gilbert Merlio (Les résistances allemandes à Hitler, Éditions Talladier, Paris,
2006), the transmitter was installed in republican Spain.
37
Wilhelm Pieck first went into exile in Prague. He joined Walter Ulbricht in Paris in
1936. Pieck would become the first head of GDR state.
38
Walter Ulbricht was a KPD deputy in the Reichstag, he represented the party on the
Executive Committee of the Komintern. Secretary of the Central Committee, he went
into exile in Paris, then in Prague. He held important positions in the NKVD in Spain
during the Civil War. After the founding of the GDR on October 7, 1949, he became the
President’s representative in the Council of Ministers. In 1950, he became General Sec-
retary of the Party Central Committee and in 1953, First Secretary of the Central Com-
mittee. In 1960, he became Chairman of the National Defense Council and Chairman of
the Council of State; he was thus GDR Head of State after the death of Wilhelm Pieck.
45
The German Communist Resistance

Honor Guard of the People’s Army and International Brigades around the
remains of Hans Beimler (Madrid, December 1936).

46
 Chapter 3
KPD Clandestine Organizations
in Germany
 Chapter 3: KPD Clandestine Organizations in Germany

A police report from Wiesbaden in 1935 noted that “it is confirmed

that the Communist Party has a staff of collaborators endowed with
remarkable organizational and tactical abilities, who, despite the most
rigorous surveillance, have recreated illegal organizations in some regions
with some success.”
As early as March 1933, the Communist press reappeared clandes-
tinely in Germany and abroad: Das Ruhr-Echo, Die Hamburger Volkszei-
tung and Die Rote Fahne were printed in tens of thousands of copies, while
the Roter Jungsturm distributed 20,000 brochures in Saxony alone. When
Daniel Guérin visited the working-class districts of Hamburg and Altona
in May 1933, networks distributed the party press there, and one could
see, freshly painted on the walls and sidewalks, “Long live communism!,”
“Hitler should die!” and “Long live the revolution!”39
In 1934 the Gestapo noted in its reports that despite the arrests and
sentences imposed on the Communists, “there are still people who engage
in clandestine work,” and that “the KPD has an enormous apparatus of
remarkable permanent staff who succeed, in the provinces, in reconstitut-
ing the party apparatus.” In that year, 10,000 to 12,000 copies of the Rote
Fahne came out three times a month from an underground printing house
in Solingen. But rebuilding the Party was a long and costly process and
often, as we have said, a local or regional organization that had barely been
rebuilt was dismantled by the Gestapo with an upsurge of brutality and
efficiency. In October 1935, according to Wilhelm Pieck, out of the 422
leaders of January 1933: 219 were imprisoned, 24 were executed, 125 emi-
grated (including Pieck himself, who at that time headed the KPD center
in Prague), 41 left the Party, and 13 led the resistance within the Reich.40
In 1936, the Gestapo arrested 11,678 Communists, among them
Wilhelm Firl, who coordinated the Party’s activity inside the country.41 At
the same time, the police arrested 1,374 Socialists. The Gestapo archives
reveal that its agents seized 1,643,200 communist newspapers, leaflets and
brochures that year! And this is only the material seized. The quantity of

39
Cf. Daniel Guérin: Sur le fascisme I: La peste brune, François Maspero, Petite collection,
Paris, 1971, pp. 113-114.
40
Cf. Gilbert Badia: Ces Allemands qui ont défié Hitler, Éditions de l’Atelier, Paris, 2000,
p. 52.
41
Wilhelm Firl was executed in August 1937.
49
The German Communist Resistance

material produced was naturally even greater… The regime was particu-
larly sensitive to revelations about the corruption of Nazi leaders “who
make [—acknowledged a 1935 Berlin Gestapo report—] communist writ-
ings much more interesting to readers than the legal press.” In Dortmund,
for example, where August Stötzel and Wilhelm Sand had replaced Albert
Funk, the local KPD organization distributed two newspapers printed
abroad and smuggled into the Reich and two newspapers printed locally.
The Stötzel/Sand organization was dismantled in January 1934 (with more
than two hundred arrests). In 1935, the organization was reconstituted for
the third time and the communist underground press once again circu-
lated in the city.
To show that the whole of Germany was not behind Hitler, the
KPD planned a campaign of unrest and strikes for the 1936 Berlin Olym-
pics. The Gestapo was expecting this offensive, as a report found in its
archives indicates.
Since there is still a strong illegal KPD organization in Berlin,
the Communist Central Office will try to provide the various
subordinate organizations with suitable propaganda material
and effective slogans.42
The Gestapo therefore carried out roundups, particularly targeting
workers who had been members of KPD sports organizations. Despite
these preventive measures, the testimonies of foreign tourists and police
reports describe numerous incidents: Nazi flags torn and burned, com-
munist slogans chanted in the crowd or painted on the walls, distribu-
tion of leaflets, strikes in workplaces. Thus the communists put the large
automobile factory “Auto-Union” in Berlin on strike. Concerned about its
Olympic propaganda, the regime granted the strikers a wage increase, but
repression then fell on them.
From 1933 to 1939, one million Germans were apprehended and
275,000 sentenced to 600,000 total years in prison for anti-fascist activ-
ity; there were between 150,000 and 300,000 Germans permanently in
concentration camps—not counting those detained for racist reasons. In
1939, for example, there were 112,000 people in prison after a politi-
42
Cf. Jean-Marie Brohm: 1936 Jeux olympiques à Berlin, Éditions Complexe, Bruxelles,
1983, p. 99.
50
 Chapter 3: KPD Clandestine Organizations in Germany

Die Rote Fahne, organ of the KPD

Central Committee (No. 3 of the
year 1938).

Die junge Garde, organ of the Com-

munist Youth (January 1936 issue).

51
The German Communist Resistance

“Down with Hitler,” “Overthrow Hitler and his

famine regime,” “Against Hitler, for freedom and
peace,” slogans painted in various German cities
in 1941 (photos taken by the Gestapo).

52
 Chapter 3: KPD Clandestine Organizations in Germany

cal conviction, 27,000 “politicians” awaiting trial, and another 160,000

locked up without trial in the concentration camps. Repression became
more radical. The first official execution of a woman took place in 1938.
She was Liselotte Herrmann, a communist student from Stuttgart, mother
of two young children. At that time, official executions of communist mil-
itants totaled 95 and extrajudicial executions several thousand. Of course,
the concept of “extrajudicial” did not mean much for the Third Reich,
since the eminent Nazi jurist Theodor Maunz, (professor of public law in
Freiburg) had given this definition of the law: “The law is the plan formed
by the Führer and thus the expression of the order of life of the German
race. The plan formed by the Führer is the supreme law of law.”43
But the work of reconstruction did not cease, and in 1939 the KPD
counted 3,000 active and organized clandestine workers within the Reich,
supported by thousands of sympathizers and accomplices. The reports
found in the Gestapo archives bear witness to this:
Communist activity is carried out, as we have noted on sev-
eral occasions, in the companies…. The observations made
previously on communist activity in places where large masses
of workers are gathered (car sites and temporary Volkswagen
factories) are currently of interest to the Westwall sites44 and,
on the one hand, to the mines.
The Berlin KPD organization led by Willi Gall was dismantled by
the Gestapo in January 1940 (Willi Gall was executed on July 25, 1941).
It was rebuilt by Rudolf Hallemeyer, and in 1941 Die Rote Fahne, the party
organ, clandestinely reappeared in Berlin. This new organization was in
turn dismantled after two years of intense activity. Its leaders were executed
shortly after their arrest—Hallemeyer himself, but also Heinz Kapelle,
Erich Ziegler, Robert Uhrig, and other group and network leaders.45 A
43
This master of law that Dr. Maunz was, continued his brilliant career after the war in
the FRG: Professor of Public Law in Munich, member of the presidency of the Institute
for Politics and Public Law, and even, from 1957 to 1964, Minister of Culture of the
State of Bavaria.
44
The Westwall is the official name of the fortified line known in France as the “Siegfried
Line.”
45
A member of the Communist Youth, Heinz Kapelle contributed to the reconstitution
of the party organization after the Nazi takeover; he was arrested in 1934 and imprisoned
53
The German Communist Resistance

new organization was then reconstituted by Wilhelm Knochen and Alfred

Kowalke, which was dismantled in January 1943. In practice, the subver-
sive work never ceased.
In 1942, during the great anti-communist exhibition “Soviet Para-
dise” at the Lustgarden in Berlin, teams of poster painters46 under armed
protection covered the city walls with this answer: “Nazi Paradise: War—
Hunger—Lies—Gestapo. For how much longer?” Parallel to this initia-
tive, a group of young Jewish communist workers at Siemens led by Her-
bert Baum, exploded two incendiary devices in the exhibition pavilion,
which the Berlin fire department managed to save in extremis. This group
had existed as early as 1933 and had resisted two waves of arrests (in 1935
and 1938) before organizing a hundred resistance fighters in 1941. After
its dismantling, 22 members of this group were beheaded—the others died
in concentration camps. Also in Berlin, Wilhelm Beuttel, leader of the Red
Aid (Rote Hilfe), who returned to Germany in 1942, reconstituted this
organization to support the victims of repression. He was arrested by the
Gestapo in 1943 and executed in 1944.
In 1943-44, the Berlin KPD organization benefited from the excep-
tional militant qualities of Anton Saefkow. Saefkow was the former leader
of the KPD in Dresden and later in the Ruhr. He had been arrested in
1933 and severely tortured. After ten years in a concentration camp, he
escaped and resumed the underground struggle. In the summer of 1944,
the Saefkow organization in Berlin was running clandestine cells in thirty
companies, including the largest war factories: Osram, Telefunken, AEG,
Hasse und Wrede, Argus-Motoren, Siemens, etc. In the summer of 1944,
the Saefkow organization ran clandestine cells in Berlin. It was in con-

for two years. Upon his release, he re-formed a group of sixty young communists attached
to the Berlin Party organization. Robert Uhrig, for example, had been arrested for the
first time in 1934 for organizing the communist cell at the Osram factory. Released after
21 months of forced labor, he went to Prague, where he received the instructions and the
means (material, contacts) to re-form cells in several Berlin companies from the KPD
headquarters. He returned to Germany to carry out this task, and managed to create an
organization with about twenty company units. In February 1942, this network, which
had linked up with the Hallemeyer organization in 1941, was badly hit: 200 militants
were arrested, more than 50 of whom were beheaded, but certain sections of the network
remained intact and continued to work clandestinely.
46
Twenty according to Gilbert Badia (Ces Allemands qui ont défié Hitler, op. cit. p.106),
sixty according to Gilles Perrault (L’Orchestre rouge, op. cit. p. 296). They belonged to the
Harnack/Schulze-Boysen network, cf. infra.
54
 Chapter 3: KPD Clandestine Organizations in Germany

Leaflet of the KPD’s Saefkow organization (Berlin,

1944).

Anti-war leaflets.
55
The German Communist Resistance

tact with several circles of the social-democratic and bourgeois antifascist

opposition, but also with groups of war prisoners (especially Soviet) put
to work and with the clandestine organization of communist prisoners in
the Sachsenhausen camp. Qualified militants printed leaflets and posters,
provided liaison, stored weapons and ammunition, carried out counter-es-
pionage and sabotaged war production.
There were several clandestine KPD organizations in the Ruhr, nota-
bly the one led by Franz Zielasko. This miner from the Ruhr was para-
chuted into the Reich by the Soviet air force. On his return to his region,
he renewed his old contacts and rebuilt a KPD organization camouflaged
behind a Cycling Sports Union, which the Gestapo dismantled in 1943.
The Bielefeld organization was taken over by Otto Giesseman after his
liberation in January 1936 (he was arrested after the Reichstag fire). Partic-
ularly active in the important Dürkopp arms factories, it was dismantled
in 1942 (twelve executions). In 1941, the communist resistance in the
Ruhr was reorganized by Wilhelm Knöchel. A former member of the Cen-
tral Committee, he headed the KPD headquarters in Amsterdam before
returning to Germany with five cadres specialized in clandestine struggle.
He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 with 200 militants of his orga-
nization and executed in 1944 with about 50 of his comrades. In Mann-
heim, the organization led by Georg Lechleiter led an active resistance for
years until it was dismantled at the end of 1942: Georg Leichester and
thirty members of his organization were executed. It was also in 1942 that
the Gestapo dismantled the communist organization in Duisburg: about
a hundred militants were arrested and several were executed, among them
Luise Rieke, Willi Seng, Anton Stupp, Albert Kamradt, Friedrich Kam-
leiter, Ferdinand Jahny, Paul Wondzinski, etc.47 But despite the repression
in the Ruhr as in Berlin, the resistance never ceased.
Other organizations were active in Hamburg, Bavaria, Hannover,
Breslau (Wroclaw), Koenigsberg, Schleswig-Holstein, etc. By 1939, the
KPD was able to rebuild two large underground organizations in Thuringia.

47
Cf. Gerard Sandoz: Ces Allemands qui ont défié Hitler, 1933-1945, Éditions Pygmalion/
Gérard Watelet, Paris, 1980, p. 67. Sandoz devotes twenty pages (out of 250) to the
communist resistance.
56
 Chapter 3: KPD Clandestine Organizations in Germany

One was led by Theodor Neubauer,48 a former Communist member of

the Reichstag, and the other by Magnus Poser, a carpenter working for
Zeiss in Jena. In 1943, the two organizations united and expanded to
form a large organization that carried out its work along five main lines:
antifascist propaganda directed towards the German proletariat, sabotage
of war production, solidarity with the anti-fascists imprisoned in Buch-
enwald, organizational development in companies, and contacts with
deported foreign workers and prisoners of war. As a practical application
of this last alliance, an International Antifascist Committee was formed in
Leipzig, which united German workers with the deported Soviet workers.
The leader of the latter was Nikolai Rumiansev, a communist miner from
the Don basin, the KPD delegate was Max Haucke. This committee pre-
pared the liberation of the Soviet prisoners of war and their organization
into battle groups, as part of a general insurrection plan. Rumiantsev and
Haucke were arrested and executed in 1944.49
The clandestine communist organization of Hamburg, active in
thirty factories and shipyards, was led from 1941 to ’42 by Bernhard
Bästlein (a former KPD deputy), Oskar Reincke and Franz Jacob, who
had just been liberated from a concentration camp. Arrested again by the
Gestapo in 1943, they were able to take advantage of the destruction of
the prison by an Allied bombardment to escape. Arrested a third time in
1944, they were executed with about sixty members of their organization
after terrible torture.50
In Saxony, the clandestine organization was led by Georg Schumann,
an old fellow fighter of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. It was a
powerful organization that had clandestine groups in seventeen companies
and in several localities. The Schumann organization linked up with other
clandestine KPD organizations in Central Germany, such as the organiza-
48
Theodor Neubauer was arrested in 1944 and hanged on February 5, 1945 in the Bran-
denburg-Görden penitentiary. It was in this penitentiary that Erich Honnecker, who led
the Party and the GDR from 1971 to 1989, was detained for ten years, from 1935 until
his liberation by the Soviet army.
49
Cf. G. Rozanov: L’Agonie du Troisième Reich, Éditions du Progrès, collection Essais et
Documents, Moscou, s.d., pp. 16 and following. See also Badia: Histoire de l’Allemagne
contemporaine, (op. cit.), pp. 202 and following.
50
Confronted by the Gestapo with Jacob, one activist said, “His face was unrecognizable.
I identified him only by the shape of the skull and his hair.” Cf. Gilbert Badia: Ces Alle-
mands qui ont défié Hitler, (op. cit.), p. 135.
57
The German Communist Resistance

Die Wahrheit (addressed to the army,

issue of October 21, 1941).

Tribunal, organ of the Red Aid,

March 1936.

58
 Chapter 3: KPD Clandestine Organizations in Germany

tion led by Otto König, active in the Mansfeld mines and the giant Leu-
na-Werke and Buna-Werke factories.51
Several clandestine KPD organizations opened up to non-commu-
nists: the organization led by Robert Havemann and Georg Groscurth,
which helped prisoners, escapees and Jews by printing food cards, and
Werner Scharff’s organization, which also helped Jews.52
The KPD leadership in Moscow decided to regroup all these organi-
zations (which in 1944 had 10,000 active underground workers in about
100 cities) and to strengthen ties with non-communist antifascists. In the
spring of 1944, Saefkow organized a conference in Engelsdorf, which was
attended by delegates from all the clandestine antifascist groups in the
Leipzig region. The document developed at this conference was taken over
by the Central Committee of the KPD and became the Party’s program
text. It was widely distributed in the Reich, including as a leaflet, on May 1,
1944. It endorsed an already perceptible change of line, which advocated
an antifascist front for the construction of a German democratic republic,
rather than pursuing a “class against class” policy for the construction of a
German Soviet republic.
The impact of communist subversive labor on war production is
certain. Apart from direct sabotage (for example, the communist cell at the
Hasag-Werke factory replaced the explosive charge of the Panzerfaust anti-
tank rocket launchers with sand), the effect of leaflets calling for bad and
slow work to hasten the end of the war is difficult to measure. But the pro-
ductivity of the war factories was everywhere lower than the calculations
of the Nazi engineers. Calls for strikes were increasingly widely heeded.
The Nazi Minister of Justice acknowledged (in a newspaper intended for a
restricted circle of high-ranking civil servants) that in the first half of 1944
there had been 200,000 strikers (of all nationalities) in Germany! And this
in a climate of unheard-of terror: the Nazi police had arrested 177,000
men and women inside the Reich during the same six-month period. At
that time, an estimated 125,000 German workers were linked to the anti-
fascist resistance. As the Reich had to devote more and more resources
to its internal security, the 40,000 Gestapo agents in charge of the fight

51
Georg Schumann was arrested and executed on January 11, 1945.
52
Organization dismantled in 1944, Scharff was executed in Sachsenhausen in March 1945.
59
The German Communist Resistance

against the resistance were no longer sufficient: thirty new SS police battal-
ions were formed, as well as detachments of armed Nazi militants.
The KPD still suffered numerous blows in Germany, particularly in
Autumn 1944, when Saefkow was arrested along with other leaders and
300 militants. Saefkow was executed along with 71 members of his orga-
nization (three detainees had already died under torture, three others had
been gassed as Jews). The verdict of September 5, 1944, said in particular:
Saefkow, Jacob, Bästlein are old permanent communist offi-
cials, deeply animated by an unbounded hatred against our
Führer and our State, and they did not hide it during the hear-
ings. They are hardened and incorrigible. The punishments
they have already endured made no more impression on them
than their stay in the concentration camps. Especially in the
fifth year of the war, they were so successful in reconstituting
the German Communist Party and working for the disinte-
gration of the Wehrmacht that it resulted in the most serious
perils for the Reich.
About 100 members of the Saefkow organization escaped the blow
and went back to work. All over Germany, other organizations were recon-
stituted, such as in Rupperthal (Kapp organization), Gotha (Bush organi-
zation), Pomerania (Empacher/Krause organization), Thuringia, Central
Germany (Büchner organization), Dresden, Cologne, Dortmund and, of
course, Berlin (Fischer organization).

60
 Chapter 4
KPD in Occupied Countries
 Chapter 4: KPD in Occupied Countries

While the Social Democratic leaders Otto Bauer and Friedrich Adler
spoke of “historical necessity” in connection with the Third Reich’s annex-
ation of Austria, the KPD clearly denounced the Anschluss: “The Ger-
man working class, the German people repel Hitler’s monstrous act against
Austria with all their might. The workers and the German people want
nothing to do with this oppression of the Austrian people.”53 Moreover, at
its 14th Congress, held at Draveil near Juvisy on January 30 and February
1, 1939 (to bewilder the Gestapo, it was referred as the “Berne Congress”),
the KPD declared that “if war were to break out, the German antifascists
would side with the peoples under attack… and would do everything to
bring about the rapid defeat of fascism.”
That’s what they did. Everywhere, German communists united with
the resistance fighters of the occupied countries. In general, this engage-
ment was so diluted that it might appear anecdotal if it is noticed at all.
But examination reveals it to be omnipresent and systematic. The com-
munist parties in the occupied countries organized a “TA” (“German
Labor”) section to make propaganda to the occupation troops. The “TA”
was carried out by militants belonging to the KPD (and/or the Austrian
Communist Party, KPÖ) and the Communist Party of the country con-
cerned—often immigrants who knew the German language, often Jews
from Central Europe.
In Paris, the “TA” was started as early as July 1940 by two young
KPD members, Sally Grünvogel and Roman Rubinstein,54 who put up
posters on barracks walls and in places frequented by soldiers. Very quickly,
they assembled a solid group of clandestine KPD who came into contact
with the PCF. By 1941, the “TA” network of the KPD and KPÖ had
already succeeded in forming 27 committees of soldiers in the occupation
troops in France.
In Belgium, the KPD appointed Hermann Geisen, a party official
and former inter-brigadist, as head of the “TA.” From May 1941 onwards,
the German military police reports showed they were worried about the

53
Die Internationale, a magazine edited by the KPD Central Committee, No. 3/4, 1938,
p. 139.
54
Roman Rubinstein had spy experience, having carried out some clandestine missions
in Germany. At the end of the war, he commanded an entire battalion of partisans in the
Saône-et-Loire. After the war he became director of broadcasting programs in the GDR.
63
The German Communist Resistance

TA’s work to demoralize occupation soldiers.55 In Belgium, too, this activ-

ity relied on many sacrifices, including the lives of Wilhelm Katz, Siegfried
Feur and Werner Blank, who were caught distributing communist leaflets
to soldiers at the Antwerp Sports Palace on January 1, 1942. They were
tried and shot in Essen in 1943. Geisen was arrested at the end of 1941
and beheaded in Berlin on April 21, 1943. His successors were Max Stoye
(beheaded in Berlin in May 1943) and Otto Abel, who was wounded by a
revolver on August 15, 1943 while trying to escape from the SS “anti-Jew-
ish section.” The SS deported him to Auschwitz as a Jew, without having
learned anything about his activities in the “TA.” The other leaders of the
“TA” in Belgium were Frieda Gincburg, (who was arrested and murdered
in Ravensbrück), and the Austrian Gehrard Paul Herrenstadt.
This work gradually gained momentum: newspapers were created
(Soldat im Westen and Soldat am Mittelmeer) and German and Austrian
communists infiltrated the German administration under false French
identities. Young activists got to know German soldiers and tried to make
them understand the criminal nature of Hitler’s war. This work sometimes
had appreciable results, especially with Austrian or Volksdeutsche soldiers.
The Volksdeutsche were members of the German minorities in Poland,
the Czech Republic (Sudetenland), Hungary, Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Vojvo-
dina), etc., and they were mobilized as citizens of the greater German
Reich. A group of Polish Volksdeutsche of the Wehrmacht, who worked in
France with the “TA,” provided weapons and uniforms for the maquis,56
and deserted their barracks.57 The Austrians were targeted because many
of them felt unwillingly drawn into Hitler’s war.58 The “TA” sometimes
cleverly used legal channels. Thus, in 1944, antifascists were circulating a
copy of the October 1941 edition of the Nazi newspaper Brüsseler Zeitung
55
Cf. Jean-Léon Charles et Philippe Dasnoy: Les dossiers secrets de la police allemande
en Belgique – Tome 1: 1940-1942, Éditions Arts & Voyages, Lucien de Meyer éditeur,
collection Inédits, Bruxelles, 1972, pp. 124, 128, 144, 194 (copies of Die Wahrheit, edited
by the National Committee for a Free Germany, found in the Wehrmacht Commissar-
iat), 203, 207 (discussing the Rote Fahne).
56
In France, maquis was the name given to rural base areas for guerrilla resistance fighters,
known as maquisards.—Ed.
57
Cf. Jacques Ravine: La résistance organisée des juifs en France (1940-1944), Éditions
Julliard, Paris, 1973, pp. 198-199.
58
Cf. F. R. Reiter: Notre combat – Interviews de Résistants autrichiens en France, Le Temps
des Cerises, Pantin, 1998, pp. 109-111.
64
 Chapter 4: KPD in Occupied Countries

German and Slovak partisans during the great Slovak antifascist

uprising of 1944.

German and Greek partisans of the National Liberation Army of

Greece, August 1944.

65
The German Communist Resistance

with an article entitled Russia has lost the war and the war will be over in
1941 in the occupation units in Belgium. Putting this edition back into
circulation in 1944, one year after the Stalingrad disaster, had a definite
effect on morale. And when a Nazi tried to oppose the collective reading of
this article, he was asked if he believed that the Nazi newspaper was lying?
Many Germans, communist militants in exile, young soldiers or
workers of the Todt organization joined the maquis. They were most
numerous in the USSR (particularly in Belarus, but also in Crimea, Mol-
davia, Ukraine, etc.), in Slovakia (where, in 1944, 80,000 partisans fought
under the supervision of parachuted-in Soviet officers), in Greece (there
were German or Greek-German partisan units in the 2nd, 3rd and 11th divi-
sions of the guerrilla army founded by the Greek Communist Party, the
ELAS, the National Liberation Army of Greece) and in Yugoslavia (Ger-
man antifascists, deserters of the Wehrmacht or members of the German
national minority in Yugoslavia, formed the “Thälmann” detachment in
Tito’s Yugoslav People’s Liberation Army).59
But there were some everywhere: in Poland, Albania, Denmark,
Italy, and of course in France: in the Alps, Lozere, the Cevennes, Limousin,
etc. The best known of these maquisards is Léo Gerhard. This young Ger-
man antifascist was under the leadership of Werner Schwartze—a touring
worker who first worked in a clandestine KPD organization in Germany;
Schwartze was an inter-brigadist, who escaped from a French concentra-
tion camp and later became head of the “TA” in Toulouse. Schwartze sent
Gerhard to infiltrate the Toulouse Transportkommandantur under a false
French identity. Later, Gerhard was arrested in Castres for distributing
leaflets of the National Committee for a Free Germany to German sol-
diers. He was freed during a transfer to the military court by the attack on
his train by a maquis of Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP, communists). He
himself became an FTP maquis and participated in the hard fighting for
the liberation of Tulle.60 In France, the German maquisards fought either
59
Cf. Donlagic Ahmet, Zarko Atanackovic and Plenca Dusan: La Yougoslavie dans la Sec-
onde guerre mondiale, Interpress Medunarodna Stampa, Belgrade, 1967, p. 164.
60
Cf. Léo Gerhard: Un Allemand dans la Résistance – Un train pour Toulouse, Édition
Tirésias, Paris, 1997. Gerhard also participated in writing Maquis de Corrèze par cent
vingt témoins et combattants, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1971, pp. 397-398, 617. His story
is also evoked by Gilles Perrault (Taupes rouges contre SS, Éditions Messidor, Paris, 1986,
pp. 193-205), Florimond Bonte (Les Antifascistes allemands dans la Résistance française,
66
 Chapter 4: KPD in Occupied Countries

German and Austrian anti-fascists fighting in a unit of Soviet partisans

in 1944.

German and Austrian partisans of the 104th Company of the 5th FTP
Battalion, Cévennes 1944.

67
The German Communist Resistance

directly in the FTP units or in the FTP units that organized the fighters
of foreign origin by nationality: the FTP-MOI (Immigrant Labor). Some
maquis were even 100% German! This was the case of the FTP maquis
of Bonnecombe, which was commanded in April 1943 by former KPD
deputy Otto Kühne.61 The German partisans engaged the SS, who wanted
to attack villages in the departments of Gard and Lozère, in many battles
and thus saved their inhabitants from fierce punitive actions. Many died
in battle, and those that the German army managed to take alive were tor-
tured to death; their remains were found with their sexual parts mutilated,
their tongues torn out, and their feet and hands deeply burned. At the
end of August 1944, the French maquisards who took part in the victory
challenge in Nimes decided that the German partisans would march at
their head and carry the flag of victory. Even the Brussels Corps of the
Belgian Partisan Army (the guerrilla organization founded by the Com-
munist Party) had a German-Austrian company of about twenty fighters,
commanded by Otto Spitz.62
Some militants joined the urban guerrillas, and several of them, such
as Leo Kneler, Alfred Wosnik or “Richard Hugo,” achieved real feats there.
A communist militant in Berlin in the 1920s, Leo Kneler was forced into
exile for the first time in 1929. He returned to Germany in 1932, was
arrested by the Nazis, escaped to France, fought in Spain, was locked up in
a French concentration camp, escaped from there, and entered Germany
once again (under the identity of a volunteer foreign worker) to organize a
clandestine KPD group in the Ruhr. He escaped from the Gestapo when
his organization was dismantled and returned to France, where he joined
the FTP-MOI task force in Paris (the famous “Red Poster”).63 There he
commanded the “Stalingrad” detachment. It is Kneler who, protected by

Éditions sociales, Paris, 1969, pp. 233-263), and Gilbert Badia (Ces Allemands qui ont
défié Hitler, op. cit., p. 189-190).
61
Otto Kühne had been the secretary of the KPD parliamentary group in the Reichstag
and had fought in Spain. In France, at the time of the fighting for liberation, Kühne had
2,500 combatants under his command as lieutenant-colonel of the FTP-MOI. After the
war, he became governor of the Brandenburg region in the GDR.
62
Maxime Steinberg: L’Étoile et le fusil, livre trois: La traque des Juifs 1942-1944, volume II,
Vie Ouvrière, collection Condition humaine, Bruxelles, 1986, pp. 176 and 188 (note 87).
63
Cf. Stéphane Courtois, Denis Peschanski and Adam Rayski: Le sang de l’étranger – Les
immigrés de la M.O.I. dans la Résistance, Fayard, Paris, 1989, p. 265. Kneler escaped the
waves of arrests and spent the rest of his life in the GDR.
68
 Chapter 4: KPD in Occupied Countries

German and Austrian anti-fascists who fought in the Belgian Par-

tisan Army, Brussels 1944.

German partisans of the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Army on the

road from Semlin to Belgrade (February 1945).

69
The German Communist Resistance

the other fighters of the special team, on July 28, 1943, blew up the car
of Lieutenant Colonel Prince Moritz von Ratibor with a grenade, giving
birth to the legend of the execution of General von Schaumburg, military
governor of Gross Paris.64 Moritz von Ratibor escaped the special team,
but two months later, SS General Julius Ritter was shot in the middle of
Paris by the same team. Ritter was in charge of the deportation of French
workers to the Reich as part of the Service du Travail Obligatoire. The
Third Reich organized a state funeral for him. What Kneler did not know
was that the weapons of his group had been supplied to the Parisian FTPs
by a KPD cell active in the heart of the Kriegsmarine HQ in Paris. Chief
Petty Officer Hans Heisel and two sailors who had joined the clandestine
KPD in 1942 had stolen about twenty pistols from the changing rooms of
a pool reserved for German soldiers. These weapons were handed over to
their “TA” contact of the French resistance and ended up in the hands of
Kneler and his comrades.65
Another great German figure of urban guerrilla warfare in France
was Alfred Woznik who, disguised as an officer, placed the bomb that dev-
astated the mess hall of the Kommandantur in Nice. Later, disguised as a
German policeman, he broke into the Gestapo office in Aix, stunned the
platoon and left with the secret documents contained in the safe. “Richard
Hugo” was a former German inter-brigadist, member of the Mobile Corps
of the Belgian Partisan Army (a shock unit, directly dependent on the
national staff). On July 25, 1942, with about fifteen Resistance fighters, he
occupied the headquarters of the Association of Jews in Belgium and set
fire to the files to prevent deportations. “Richard Hugo” was a pseudonym.

64
Cf. Boris Holban: Testament – Après 45 ans de silence, le chef militaire des FTP-MOI
de Paris parle… Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1989. The legend of the execution can be found
in Bonte (Les Antifascistes allemands dans la Résistance française, op. cit., p. 319), and in
Manouchian (Les Éditeurs français réunis, Paris, 1974, pp. 109-110) by Mélinée Manou-
chian, who goes so far as to attribute this action to her husband. Let us recall that Boris
Holban’s book is by far the most complete and precise on the FTP-MOI, and does justice
to the various anti-communist myths relating to the “Red Poster” (the PCF allegedly
“sacrificed” the Parisian FTP-MOI, etc.).
65
Cf. Gilles Perrault: Taupes rouges contre SS, (op. cit.), pp. 77-78. These communist
sailors deserted without looking back during the Paris uprising and fought (along with a
hundred other German antifascists) for the liberation of the city.
70
 Chapter 4: KPD in Occupied Countries

He was shot shortly afterwards by Nazi police officers, and his true identity
could never be established. 66
From 1943 onwards, KPD militants in the West (and thus the
thousands of Germans who had joined the French resistance) organized
themselves within the framework of the National Committee for a Free
Germany, which developed, as will be seen below, its own political and
military structures.

66
Cf. Maxime Steinberg, L’Étoile et le fusil, livre deux: Les cent jours de la déportation des juifs
de Belgique, Vie Ouvrière, collection Condition humaine, Bruxelles, 1984, pp. 173-177.
71
 Chapter 5
The Special Networks, Espionage
and Sabotage
 Chapter 5: The Special Networks, Espionage and Sabotage

Even before 1933, the KPD had sent numerous seasoned militants
to the Red Army intelligence services (the GRU) and the Soviet security
services (the GPU, then the NKVD). The main mission of the latter was to
ensure the internal security of the USSR, but this mission involved exter-
nal operations such as the liquidation of anti-Soviet exile organizations
maintaining networks in the USSR, the infiltration of the secret services
of countries hostile to the USSR, etc. The services rendered to the antifas-
cist cause by the German communists linked to the Soviet secret services
were literally invaluable. Alongside well-known examples such as the Sorge
network and the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen network (the Berlin hub of the
organization called by Nazi counter-espionage “the Red Orchestra”), how
many examples have remained in the shadows, such as that of the brigade
of the NKVD Department of Special Missions or that of the Wollweber
organization?
Richard Sorge has been described as “the spy of the century” for hav-
ing set up the “Ramsay” network in Tokyo which, from September 1933 to
October 1941, informed the USSR precisely of Japan’s political intentions
and military potential. Sorge thus alerted the USSR that Japan would not
attack in 1941, which made it possible to send the divisions defending the
Soviet Far East against the German army. This network benefited from the
valuable collaboration of clandestine Japanese communist militants, but
also included other German communists. Sorge himself had been a mem-
ber of the KPD since its foundation in 1919. Specialized in agit-prop until
the first banning of the Party in 1922, he was then assigned to the liaison
and security apparatus.67 In 1924 he went to Moscow, where he adopted
Soviet nationality and joined the intelligence service of the Komintern
(for which he completed several missions in Scandinavia, Germany, Great
Britain), then the GRU. His first mission for the GRU was to organize
a network in Shanghai in 1929 with two other German communists. In
Tokyo, Sorge’s radio technician was Bruno Wendt, a KPD activist trained

67
He was the bodyguard of such important personalities as Pinatnisky, Manouilsky,
Kuusinen and Lozovosky, who had arrived illegally in Germany for the 1924 KPD Con-
gress, and ensured the security of the KPD’s archives and collections in Frankfurt. Cf.
S. Goliakov and V. Ponizovsky: Le vrai Sorge, Librairie Arthème Fayard, collection La
guerre secrète, Paris, 1967, p. 111, and Nicole Chatel and Alain Guérin: Camarade Sorge,
Julliard, Paris, p. 221.
73
The German Communist Resistance

by the GRU in Moscow,68 and Max Klausen, a communist sailor from

Hamburg who, like Sorge, but in a different network, had worked as an
intelligence officer for the GRU in Shanghai.69 Sorge also benefited from
the collaboration of Günther Stein, a German antifascist correspondent in
Tokyo for an English newspaper.
Arvid Harnack, a clandestine KPD activist who had worked for the
GRU since 1932, was a senior official in the Reich Ministry of Economics.
Harro Schulze-Boysen was an anti-fascist officer recruited by Harnack,
who worked at Luftwaffe headquarters.70 The Harnack/Schulze-Boysen
network numbered about 100 people. The network was so integrated into
the “All-Berlin” that it was able to provide the GRU with information of
the highest importance for many years: technical information on weapons,
schedules and plans of offensives, Hitler’s army’s order of battle, etc. One
of its members, Horst Heilmann, a communist youth activist who had
pretended to go over to the Nazis, even worked in the decryption service
of the Abwehr, the secret service of the German army. “This network cost
Germany the lives of 200,000 soldiers,” wrote the head of the Abwehr,
Admiral Canaris, while an SS report dated December 22, 1942, stated
that:
The danger of this group is proved by the fact that it had
agents in the Ministries of Air, Economics, Propaganda and
Foreign Affairs, the Supreme Command, the Naval Staff, the
University of Berlin, the Political-Racial Office, the Berlin
City Administration and the National Labor Defense Ser-
vice…. The arrested persons were ready to help, by all means

68
Cf. Gordon W. Prague: Le réseau Sorge, Éditions Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet, Paris,
1987 pp. 79 and 105.
69
Klausen became a communist after having been a trade union activist in the Seafarers’
and Dockers’ International. The only survivors of the “Ramsay” cadres at liberation, Max
Klausen and his wife (who had been a courier and had also been imprisoned) spent the
rest of their lives in the GDR, first under the name Christiansen (the GDR had asked
them to keep their involvement in the GRU secret) and then by taking their name back
when the East German authorities lifted the secrecy of their past. Cf. Chatel and Guérin:
Camarade Sorge, (op. cit.), pp. 65 ff. This work is much more documented on the itin-
erary of Klausen (whom the authors met in the GDR) than the works of Prague or
Goliakov-Ponizovsky.
70
The biographies of Harnack and Schulze-Boysen can be found in Gilles Perrault’s L’Or-
chestre rouge, Édition Fayard, Paris, 1967, pp. 224 ff.
74
 Chapter 5: The Special Networks, Espionage and Sabotage

at their disposal, the Soviet Union in its struggle against Ger-

many.71
The information from the network was so valuable to the GRU
that the Soviet air force dropped five German communists, who had been
trained as radio technicians to facilitate communications with Moscow,
into the middle of the Reich between October 1941 and July 1942.72 The
Gestapo arrested 126 members of the network. 49 were tortured, sen-
tenced to death and hung from butchers’ hooks (including Harnack,
Schulze-Boysen and Heilmann), 5 died under torture during interro-
gations (burns, arms and legs crushed in vises…), 2 committed suicide
(including John Sieg, a former editor of the Rote Fahne who wrote the net-
work’s bulletin The Home Front), and nearly 80 were sent to concentration
camps where 40 died.
Many German communists exiled in the USSR were part of the
NKVD’s Special Missions Department brigade, which brought together
20,000 elite fighters, men and women, Soviet and foreign. As a measure
of the degree of confidence in this international brigade, it was entrusted
with the defense of the Kremlin when Hitler’s armies arrived at the edge
of Moscow…73
Erich Wollweber was one of the sailors whose mutiny was the spark
of the German revolution of 1918. He was the military leader of the com-
munist uprising of May 1923 in Bochum, and then in charge of the “West
Büro” in the Komintern. He headed the clandestine apparatus of the Inter-
national Seamen’s and Dockers’ International (Internationale der Seeleute
und Hafenarbeiter or ISH), founded in 1930 in Hamburg by the Profin-
tern—the Red Trade Union International. Established in 22 countries and
71
Quoted in the interview between the Soviet journalist Lev Besimenskij and one of the
rare survivors of the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen network: Greta Kuckhoff, who spent the
rest of her life in the GDR. See L’URSS dans la seconde guerre mondiale, volume 3, Témoi-
gnages-Editions-Diffusions, Paris, 1967, p. 536.
72
In Belgium, the radio technician of the Trepper/Gourevitch network was also a veteran
KPD clandestine activist: Johan Wenzel. Arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, he pretended
to collaborate in a black propaganda program, but knew how to warn the GRU by means
of an agreed signal. Wenzel escaped and rejoined the network in the Netherlands. See
Leopold Trepper: Le grand jeu, Albin Michel, Paris, 1965, p. 174.
73
See Pavel and Anatoli Soudoplatov (with Jerrold and Leona Schecter): Missions spéciales,
Seuil, Paris, 1994, pp. 167 ff. Pavel Soudoplatov was head of the NKVD Department of
Special Missions. This brigade was disbanded in 1946.
75
The German Communist Resistance

19 colonies, the ISH was led by Albert Walter, who was arrested the night
the Reichstag was burned down and assassinated by the Nazis. The Woll-
weber organization carried out sabotage before and during the war, either
on goods transported by Axis ships or on the ships themselves. One of the
techniques used consisted of mixing a block of explosives, which had the
appearance of coal, with the fuel. On the open sea, it was thrown into the
boiler and exploded there, cutting the ship in two. The Wollweber organi-
zation sent many German, Italian, Japanese and Polish ships to the bottom
of the ocean in this way. It should be remembered that Poland in the 1930s
was a fascist dictatorship allied to Hitler (Hitler gave it his share of Czecho-
slovakia: the 1,700 km2 of the Teschen region). That is why in 1938 the
Bergen (Norway) group of the Wollweber organization sank, among oth-
ers, the Polish cargo ship Stefan Batory with its cargo of strategic materials
destined for Franco in the North Sea. During the trial of the Copenhagen
group in July 1941, the court accused Wollweber’s saboteurs of having
blown up 16 German, 3 Italian and 2 Japanese ships.74 The hundreds of
German soldiers drowned in the sinking of a troop transports sailing from
Denmark to Norway were allegedly the victims of Wollweber’s saboteurs.
The organization was mainly based in Germany, Scandinavia, Dunkirk, Le
Havre, Rotterdam and Antwerp. The Wollweber organization’s Antwerp
group sank the Italian freighter Boccacio in November 1937, and in June
1938 set fire to the Japanese freighter Kasji Maru, which was on its way
to Franco’s Spain. When the Nazis invaded Belgium, it was the files of the
Belgian police that allowed the Gestapo to arrest, torture and murder Ant-
werp dockers of the Wollweber organization. The Belgian police transmit-
ted its information to the Gestapo before the war within the framework
of Interpol (from 1938 to 1945, SS generals presided over Interpol).75 The
Commissioner General of the Belgian Judicial Police responsible for this
collaboration, Florent Louwage, was the Belgian delegate at the Interpol

74
Information on the Wollweber organization is rare and always present in books that are
subject to doubt. Cf. the very dubious Omnibus pour l'espionnage by Kurt Singer, Éditions
Marabout, Verviers, 1963, pp. 7-23.
75
First Otto Steinhäusl, then Reinhard Heinrich, “the Butcher of Prague,” until his exe-
cution by Czech resistance fighters, and finally Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was sentenced
to death at the Nuremberg court.
76
 Chapter 5: The Special Networks, Espionage and Sabotage

headquarters in Berlin during the war, and after the war… president of
Interpol.76
From 1933 onwards, it was often through the sailors, dockers and
boatmen of the Wollweber organization that the KPD ensured its links
with its organizations in Germany, and it was this organization that suc-
ceeded in the feat of removing all the archives of the Komintern from the
Reich. The organization also had a network of informers in Swedish ports
who communicated the movements of German ships coming to load iron
ore and precious SKF ball bearings by radio to the Soviet Navy. This sup-
ply was vital for the Reich, and was the privileged target of the Soviet sub-
marines for ambush offshore: more than thirty German transports were
thus sunk.77 Erich Wollweber was arrested in Sweden. His extradition was
immediately requested by the Nazis, but he declared that he had acquired
Soviet citizenship, which was confirmed by Alexandra Kollontai, ambas-
sador of the USSR in Stockholm. Wollweber was deported to the USSR a
few months later.78
These lines give only an imperfect idea of the role of German com-
munists in Soviet and Komintern secret organizations. The history of sev-
eral of these organizations remains to be written, as their members kept
their involvement secret and continued to operate after the victory over
Hitler within the framework of the Cold War. This was the case of the
Hamburg branch and the Czechoslovak branch of the Harnack/Schul-
ze-Boysen network, which escaped the Gestapo until the end and were
reactivated after the war by the GRU.79 This was also the case for whole
sections of the Wolleweber organization, and thus Kurt Wissel, a former
assistant to Wollweber, played an important role in the network formed by
William Fisher (alias Rudolf Abel) in the US. In 1949-1950, Wissel set up
a dormant network of dockers on the East coast of the US who could carry
out sabotage in the event of war against the USSR.
76
Cf. L’Allemagne nazie, la police belge et l’anticommunisme en Belgique (1936-1944) – un
aspect des relations belgo-allemandes, a study by Rudi Van Doorslaer and Etienne Verho-
even for the Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (1986).
77
Cf. Nikolaï Kouznetsov: La marine soviétique en guerre (1941/1945), Editions du Pro-
grès, Moscou, 1979, p. 162.
78
After the war, he was Minister of State Security of the GDR.
79
Thus Frantizcek Klecka, who was captured by American counter-espionage in Germany
in 1948.
77
 Chapter 6
The National Committee for a
Free Germany
 Chapter 6: The National Committee for a Free Germany

On June 10, 1941, a mobilized German communist, Rudolf Rich-

ter, joined the Soviet outposts and warned them of an imminent attack by
Hitler’s troops against the USSR. On the evening of June 21, soldier Alfred
Liskow swam across the Bug River and gave the Soviets new details: the
attack was the next day. During the night, NCO Wilhelm Shutz, deserted
his regiment in which the invasion order had just been read. Wounded
by German sentries, he was picked up by Soviet soldiers and, half uncon-
scious, he told them: “I am a communist; in an hour, it will be war; they
will attack you, be careful, comrades!” In the days that followed, several
mobilized Communists took advantage of the war against the Soviet Union
to desert and join the Red Army. Making this choice at a time when the
German army was going from victory to victory could only be made by
staunch communists.80
On the proposal of Dimitrov, who had become secretary general of
the Komintern, a statement made by 158 German prisoners was broad-
cast by radio Moscow and dropped in the form of a leaflet over the Hitler
lines. It was a new step towards the foundation in Krasnogorsk in July
1943 of the National Committee for a Free Germany (Nationalkomitee
Freies Deutschland). Its program was to fight for the end of the war (with
Germany renouncing all conquered territories), for the formation of a
democratic republic and for the judgment of the Hitlerians. When it was
founded, the Committee was led by 13 communist exiles (8 KPD cadres,
including Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht, and five intellectuals) and
25 anti-fascist Wehrmacht soldiers who had been captured by the Red
Army.
Delegates of the National Committee for a Free Germany gave lec-
tures in the prison camps, and as rallies led to further rallies, the Commit-
tee grew rapidly. From Stalingrad, the movement became massive, rallying
thousands of soldiers, hundreds of officers, 63 generals, and even the Field
Marshall von Paulus, who had surrendered at Stalingrad despite Hitler’s
order to fight to the last soldier.
The Committee engaged massively to precipitate the disintegration
of Hitler’s armies. By 1944, 1,500 delegates of the Committee who had
80
For example, the communist youth activist Heinz Kessler, who later became a general in
the GDR People’s Police. Cf. Marcel Veyrier: La Wehrmacht rouge – Moscou 1943-1945 –
“Allemagne libre” contre Allemagne nazie, Editions Julliard, Paris, 1970, pp. 9-10.
79
The German Communist Resistance

received general ideological training at the Krasnogorsk antifascist school,

were on the front. Using loudspeakers, they called on the soldiers to end
the war. Information about the unit to “work on” was collected in advance,
a delegate from the recruiting area was sent to the unit, and the delegate
addressed the soldiers in the regional dialect, etc. The results of this activity
were disappointing, with a few exceptions, such as the surrender on July
8, 1944 of the commander and many soldiers of the XIIth Corps dispersed
in the vicinity of Minsk. Sometimes members of the Committee (such as
Heinz Kessler, who later became Deputy Minister of Defense of the GDR)
even infiltrated German lines or parachuted behind them. One of them,
Hans Jahn, disguised as an officer, one day took command of a company
cut off from his regiment and led it to the Soviets.81 Hans Jahn was killed
shortly after this exploit. Action groups of up to 60 volunteers parachuted
far behind the lines to assist the partisans, such as Felix Scheffler’s Group
117, which contributed greatly to the surrender of a division of 12,000
men. Scheffler himself, disguised as a military policeman, regulated the
traffic in such a way that an entire convoy was ambushed by the parti-
sans…
Committee leaflets were dropped en masse over the German lines,
and radio broadcasts were made to Germany and the Wehrmacht. This
activity gave rise to some clandestine groups at the heart of the German
army (in a security battalion in Frankfurt-am-Oder, in the Panzer School
Division in Bergen-Belsen, and in several units stationed in Bavaria and
abroad). This led the Wehrmacht high command to create on May 30,
1944 a special counter-propaganda staff, and to assign to each division an
SS officer in charge of this work. A special order signed by Keitel, com-
mander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, indicated that the relatives of the pris-
oners of war would be held responsible for their defections and would pay
“with their property, freedom and life.” Beginning in December 1944,
all German soldiers were required to sign a circular that said: “The com-
mand has informed me that if I surrender to the Russians, my entire fam-
ily, father, mother, wife, children and grandchildren, will be shot.” The
Gestapo added the usual procedures of secret warfare: Nazi agents pre-
tended to be deserters in order to unmask the Committee’s action groups.

81
Cf. Marcel Veyrier, La Wehrmacht rouge (op. cit.), p. 131.
80
 Chapter 6: The National Committee for a Free Germany

Constituent Conference of the National Committee for a Free Ger-

many in Moscow, July 1943.

Walter Ulbricht and Erich Weinert, leaders of the KPD and the
National Committee for a Free Germany, call on the Wehrmacht
soldiers surrounded in Stalingrad to lay down their arms.

81
The German Communist Resistance

The courts-martial sentenced 24,500 German soldiers to be shot for

anti-fascist activity—and thousands more to be imprisoned.
The Free Germany Movement for the West (France, Belgium and
Luxembourg) was formed under the leadership of Otto Niebergall. Nie-
bergall was head of the KPD in Saarland from 1926 to 1935. He left
Saarbrücken where he had been elected when Saarland was annexed to
the Reich. From the French-Belgian border, he was in charge of the KPD’s
clandestine power station for the Saarland and the Pfalz, and from Forbach
he was in charge of the power station for the Rhineland. Arrested by the
Belgian police at the beginning of 1940, he escaped and took charge of
the KPD for France, Belgium and Luxembourg. He formed the Free Ger-
many Movement for the West, bringing together KPD militants, militants
assigned to the “TA,” anti-fascist soldiers, German socialist and Catholic
political émigrés and workers from the Todt organization. Responsible for
the Southern Zone was Heinz Pries, former political commissioner of the
“Hans Beimler” battalion in Spain, who had escaped from a French con-
centration camp and became head of the KPD in Lyon, and by Walter
Vesper, the former head of the “TA” of the FTP-MOI in the Southern
Zone.82 At the end of 1943, Harald Hauser, also an old KPD militant,
took responsibility over the Northern zone. Two weeklies were created in
France by the Committee which succeeded the publications produced by
the KPD within the framework of the “TA.” In the Southern zone the
Committee published 25 issues of Unser Vaterland, and in the Northern
zone, 63 issues (each with a circulation of 200,000 copies!) of Volk und
Vaterland.
Richard Gladewitz’s organization infiltrated the Wehrmacht and
engaged in sabotage and the detour of arms and money for the maquis.
The massive sending of foreign workers to Germany within the frame-
work of the STO allowed the Committee to send emissaries to the Reich
under the cover of false French identities. In addition to its newspapers,
the Committee clandestinely published 109 different leaflets, 5 brochures
and a large number of circulars in France.
The National Committee for a Free Germany formed fighting units
in 25 departments that fought in the FTP maquis or practiced urban guer-
82
After the war, Vesper became ambassador of the GDR in Hungary and then in Czecho-
slovakia.
82
Chapter 6: The National Committee for a Free Germany

Call of the National

Committee for a Free
Germany to sabotage the
raising of the Volkssturm
in East Prussia (mid-
March 1945).

The KPD’s motto against

Hitler’s plans for extreme
defenses. These leaflets
were passed out in Ber-
lin as the Soviet army
approached the city.

83
The German Communist Resistance

rilla warfare by attacking officers’ clubs, Gestapo and military police posts.
Max Lingner and Ernst Scholz, among others, distinguished themselves in
these battles.83 In Brive, 350 soldiers and officers, partisans of the National
Committee for a Free Germany, led by their colonel, joined the Resistance.
Several KPD maquisards continued the war in the ranks of Colonel Fabi-
en’s regiment and participated in the liberation of Alsace.
In Belgium, where the Committee edited Freies Deutschland and the
Freiheitbriefe an die Deutsche Wehrmacht, German antifascists participated
in the armed struggle in the ranks of the Belgian Army of Partisans (ABP,
communist) in Brussels, Walloon Brabant and Antwerp. Thus, in Ant-
werp, two German fighters from an ABP shock group were killed in a fight
with Gestapoists and others were captured and transferred to Germany
to be beheaded.84 More than 20 KPD militants died as a result of their
involvement in the Belgian Resistance.
As Allied troops entered Germany, several clandestine organizations
of the KPD and the National Committee for a Free Germany moved into
open combat—not without casualties. The Free Germany committee in
Cologne, which had been founded in 1943 on the initiative of commu-
nist militants, had a core of more than 200 members and set out to bring
together resistance fighters from all political and ideological backgrounds.
Leaflets inciting the German population to commit sabotage in order to
stop the Nazi war machine and encouraging soldiers to desert were distrib-
uted, and resistance fighters helped foreign forced laborers. In November
1944, the Cologne Gestapo arrested 1,800 members and sympathizers of
the group, murdered the main perpetrators, and thus succeeded in perma-
nently dismantling the group in the city.
On February 4, Walter Ulbricht called for a popular uprising against
Hitler on the Committee’s radio station. In the Kiel region, KPD shock
troops boldly attacked D.C.A. batteries and police stations. In Wroclaw
83
Cf. Alain Guérin, La Résistance 1930-1950, Tome 5: Le combat total, Livre Club Did-
erot, Paris, 1976, pp. 366-367. Lingner was a famous communist illustrator who drew
for L’Humanité during his exile in Paris. He fought in the maquis of the Gers and died
in 1949 after receiving the National Prize for Painting in the GDR. Scholz was a KPD
executive and former inter-brigadist. He fought in the maquis of Savoy and was the first
post-war ambassador of the GDR in France.
84
Cf. Henri Bernard, L’Autre Allemagne, la résistance allemande à Hitler 1933-1945, La
Renaissance du Livre, Bruxelles, 1976, pp. 290-291. Bernard claims to do justice to the
German communist resistance: he devotes half a dozen of the 300 pages of his book to it…
84
 Chapter 6: The National Committee for a Free Germany

(Breslau) a KPD militant, Hermann Hartmann, organized about 100 mil-

itants in groups of three.85 Hartmann’s organization began urban guerrilla
warfare (a grenade attack on a Nazi local), and the National Committee
for a Free Germany sent him a reinforcement of 80 fighters from Soviet
lines.
The enlistment of all those who had not been mobilized in the army
(teenagers, the elderly, the sick, the handicapped) into the ranks of the
Volkssturm, and the extreme defenses around the cities were, in many
places, if not prevented, at least weakened by the members and sympathiz-
ers of the Committee. In Leipzig, Jena, Cologne, Gotha, Chemnitz (Karl-
Marx-Stadt), Rostock, Stalsund, Grimmen, Greifswald, Borzow, Belzig,
Freiberg, etc., several local committees arose at the time of liberation and
established counterpowers. In Leipzig the local Free Germany committee
had 4,500 members. On the arrival of the American forces, it had under-
taken the first work of cleaning up the city and started denazification.
Upon its arrival, the American army refused the anti-fascist candidate for
mayor, appointed a conservative politician and banned the Committee.86

85
Hermann Hartmann was a communist tile worker. Arrested and tortured in 1933,
detained in Sachsenhausen, he was released in 1940 by the triumphant Nazi regime as a
reward for his brother who had shown himself to be a good soldier during the invasion of
Norway. Hartmann resumed his clandestine activity after his liberation. He survived the
Battle of Breslau and spent the rest of his life in the GDR.
86
Cf. Gilbert Badia: Ces Allemands qui ont défié Hitler, (op. cit.), p. 62.
85
 Chapter 7
Up to the Camps
 Chapter 7: Up to the Camps

In the concentration and extermination camps, the SS employed

a large number of prisoners as auxiliaries: chamber chiefs, barrack chiefs,
office workers, team leaders in the construction sites and workshops,
maintenance personnel, etc. Occupying one of these positions consider-
ably increased the chances of escaping the appalling mortality rate in the
camps (in 1941, 76% of Mauthausen’s inmates died of malnutrition and
ill-treatment). Different networks fought against them by means of direct
or indirect assassinations (denunciation to the SS, transfer to a particularly
murderous construction site, etc.). The SS initially entrusted these posts to
ordinary German prisoners, but their theft and trafficking disrupted the
order of the camps. KPD militants (identified as such or not) gradually
overwhelmed the administration of the camps. They managed, through a
centralized and rational use of the possibilities thus offered, to give the SS
the appearance of “good administration” while developing a vast network
of solidarity and struggle. Wherever the KPD was able to infiltrate the
camp apparatus, the condition of the deportees improved, while ordinary
German prisoners stole food from the prisoners and Polish and Ukrainian
chauvinist organizations competed with the SS in the persecution of Jews
and Russians.
Wrong about the apparent “good will” of German political prison-
ers, Himmler offered them freedom in October 1944 in exchange for an
engagement in General Dirlewanger’s SS Brigade. Dirlewanger found the
idea of “fighting the Soviets with communists” ridiculous, and experience
showed that he was right. Only 800 political prisoners agreed to join, and
the result was catastrophic. In whole sections, 400 of them deserted a few
months later, in the middle of the battle, putting the entire brigade in dan-
ger; a hundred of them managed to join the Red Army.87 The affair had a
precedent: earlier, prisoners who had finished their sentences (political and
common rights) were transferred to the Wehrmacht’s 999th disciplinary
Division and assigned to the occupation of Greece. The Communists
reconstituted the party organization there and plundered the division’s
stocks for the benefit of the communist maquis of the ELAS, the National
Liberation Army of Greece. Several deserted without looking back and
became partisans, like Gerhard Reinhardt, who was a captain in the ELAS.
Cf. Christian Ingrao: Les chasseurs noirs – La brigade Dirlewanger, Édition Perrin, Paris,
87

2006, pp. 57 and 113.

87
The German Communist Resistance

The German communists established a clandestine organization in

all camps. In Mauthausen, it was led by KPD deputy Franz Dahlem.88 In
Sachsenhausen in 1942, the Gestapoists attempted to strike the clandes-
tine organization “blindly”: all prisoners who were members of the KPD
and who held “civilian” positions were arrested, interrogated and sent to
particularly deadly building sites. But they revealed nothing under torture,
and the organization survived their loss. It was not until 1944 that the 200
snitches kept in the camp by the Gestapo enabled it to identify 160 mem-
bers of the organization. Some of them were so tortured that they were
carried on stretchers to the crematorium. On October 11, the 27 main
defendants (including 3 KPD deputies) were shot, but by this date the
organization had already been reorganized. In November 1944, the clan-
destine organization in Dora was affected: the SS arrested, tortured and
murdered many communist cadres. Friedrich Pröll, who actually belonged
to the leadership of the clandestine organization, was thrown into the dun-
geon. While waiting for torture; he got his last words out: “Don’t be afraid,
tomorrow I will be dead and the dead no longer speak,” and committed
suicide.89 Dora’s organization was reorganized by Albert Kuntz. Arrested
on March 6, 1933, he was sentenced to three years of forced labor but had
never left the concentration camps. He was assassinated in 1945, along
with Georg Thomas and Ludwig Szyczak, two other German Communists
who had refused to hang escaped Soviet soldiers and were recaptured.
The communist underground organization in Buchenwald was the
most developed and effective. By the spring of 1942, it had taken control
of almost all the “civilian” functions of the camp. It saved the lives of many
condemned to death. One of the procedures consisted of exchanging the
identity of the condemned prisoner with that of an ordinary prisoner who
had just died: the piece of skin tattooed with his number was removed
from the condemned prisoner and the number of the deceased prisoner

88
He had been political commissioner of the “Thälmann” Battalion and general political
commissioner for all Germans fighting in Spain. He was also interned by the French and
delivered by Vichy to the Gestapo. Dahlem survived the camp, becoming secretary (and
head of the cadres) of the Party and responsible for the armed formations of the GDR
(workers’ militia and people’s police) before the foundation of the National People’s Army
(NVA).
89
Cf. Hermann Langbein: La Résistance dans les camps de concentration nationaux-socialistes
1938-1945, Éditions Fayard, collection Les nouvelles études historiques, Paris, 1981, p. 151
88
 Chapter 7: Up to the Camps

was tattooed back on him. The clandestine organizations of Auschwitz

and Mauthausen also succeeded in making such substitutions. Another
procedure consisted in declaring the convict to be suffering from typhus
and assigning him to the quarantine premises where the SS did not dare
to enter. The Buchenwald organization succeeded in setting up the most
highly developed medical system in the concentration camp world, fully
equipped with equipment stolen from the SS; it ensured food solidarity for
the sick and the Soviet prisoners of war deprived of food; it preserved the
lives of party cadres. It set up an information service fed by a clandestine
radio station that broadcast 26 issues of an information sheet and pro-
vided political-theoretical training for the militants.90 It was at the origin
of the creation of an International Committee (ILK) by helping to set up a
clandestine organization by nationality (eleven national organizations were
eventually members of the ILK). It achieved remarkable success in sabo-
taging the war production of factories employing deported labor. In Dora
(which depended on Buchenwald and where the “V2” rockets were pro-
duced), 80 percent of the production was scrapped; at the Gustloff factory,
production fell from 55,000 rifles to a few thousand with the beginning
of concentration labor, and three quarters of the production was sent back
by the Wehrmacht as unusable. The plan was to produce 10,000 pistols
per month, but production remained “on trial” for two years, and in the
meantime an incredible amount of raw materials and energy was delib-
erately wasted.91 The clandestine organization set up a military branch,
the International Military Organization (IMO), with the prospect of an
armed insurgency. At the time of the insurgency, the IMO had 91 rifles
with 2,500 rounds of ammunition, a machine gun with 2,000 rounds of
ammunition, 20 handguns, 200 Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, knives,
shears, etc. In order to protect the secrecy of all this activity, it developed
espionage of the SS authorities to the highest degree and discreetly liqui-
dated many snitches.

90
Cf. Hermann Langbein: La résistance dans les camps de concentration nationaux-social-
istes (op. cit.), pp. 144-145. This activity occurred in all the camps: at Ravensbrück, they
collectively studied The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik); at
Sachsenhausen, it was notably Stalin’s work, Principles of Leninism, and so on.
91
Cf. Sur la résistance dans les KZs et les camps d’extermination du fascisme nazi, special
number (no. 62) of Gegen die Strömung, May 1993.
89
The German Communist Resistance

The clandestine organizations in the camps were in contact with the

Party. Organizations from neighboring towns sent political material, food
and sometimes weapons to the camps. In Dachau, former camp inmate,
Georg Scherer, headed a local KPD organization that prepared the armed
release of prisoners. In Saschenhausen, the escape of cadres was organized
for the benefit of the KPD organization in Berlin. This was the case of
the inter-brigadist Herbert Tschäpe, who escaped in April 1944, and Rudi
Wunderlich and Richard Schmeink, who escaped in June 1944. The prox-
imity of the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration complex to Berlin
offered numerous possibilities for connections with the clandestine KPD.
The 300 testimonies of French deportees collected by the Amicale d’Ora-
nienburg-Sachsenhausen evoke on numerous occasions the complicity of
Berlin workers with the deportees put to work in their factories.92 While
the simple act of sharing a snack led German civilians into concentration
camps, several of them passed on not only food but also the Commu-
nist underground press to the prisoners. In addition, they turned a blind
eye to the sabotage of German and foreign deportees, or even sabotaged
themselves. They were a minority, of course, but a sufficiently representa-
tive minority to have marked the memory of many French deportees, and
to have contributed to the failure of the production of the Heinkel 177
bomber. Out of the 120 planes built in 1943, none was usable…
The KPD organized several ceremonies in the camps to honor its
assassinated leaders. On two occasions, these ceremonies had tragic con-
sequences. On August 18, 1944, after eleven years of torture, the SS mur-
dered Ernst Thälmann in the basement of the Buchenwald crematori-
um.93 His prestige was such that they blamed his death on an American
bombing raid in the hope of provoking dissension between communists

92
Cf. Amicale d’Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, Sachso, Éditions Terre humaine, Paris,
1982.
93
In 1947, an American military tribunal sentenced SS non-commissioned officer Wolf-
gang Otto to 20 years of hard labor for having killed Ernst Thälmann and fifty other
detainees with his own hands, for having tortured many detainees, and for having been
part of the Komando 99 that murdered thousands of Soviet prisoners of war in Buch-
enwald with bullets to the head. Five years later, Wolfgang Otto was free and became a
teacher in a private school in the FRG. The 2nd chamber of the Cologne regional court
made any new proceedings against him impossible by denying the status of murder for
Thälmann’s execution: “the leader of the KPD being able to expect the end that was his,
ordered by reasons of the state.”
90
 Chapter 7: Up to the Camps

and pro-Western opponents. A secret ceremony of homage was organized

in Buchenwald itself. A snitch managed to catch it by surprise and the
Gestapo arrested several leaders of the organization, including KPD leader
Robert Siewert. All of them resisted terrible torture and the secrets of the
clandestine organization were preserved. Another informer denounced the
ceremony of homage to KPD deputy Lambert Horn, who died in Saschen-
hausen on June 2, 1939 (the communists of the camp had marched in
front of his body one after the other), and there too, the repression was
bloody.
In the last days of the camp, the Buchenwald organization succeeded
in preventing the departure of 21,000 prisoners on the “death marches”
and finally, on April 11, 1945, triggered an armed insurrection. By the
time the soldiers of the US Third Army arrived in Buchenwald, the 850
IMO fighters had already liberated the camp in a brief but violent fight
against the demoralized and rapidly disbanded SS. 150 SS guards had been
captured, 1,500 rifles, 180 Panzerfaust and 20 machine guns recovered.
The first Allied officer to enter Buchenwald testified:
We enter the camp: no trace of fighting; there is practically
no SS resistance…. Here and there, in the camp, we see some
men who have already lost the appearance of political deport-
ees. They carry grenades hanging from their belts, rifles, Pan-
zerfaust; they give the impression of wanting to constitute a
revolutionary force in the camp.94
An insurrection plan had also been drawn up at Mauthausen: the
clandestine organization had prepared its shock groups armed with a
machine pistol, twenty handguns, a few dozen grenades, Molotov cock-
tails, truncheons and knives. The escape of the SS guards rendered the plan
null and void. However, the combat groups of the clandestine organiza-
tion recovered other weapons and for a few days they fired against Hitler’s
troops retreating in the region.

94
Cf. David Rousset: Les jours de notre mort, Union Générale d’Édition, collection 10/18,
tome 3, Paris, 1974, p. 423. Testimony of Jean Baptiste Lefebvre, liaison officer at the
76th US Infantry Division.
91
The German Communist Resistance

The punishment of political prisoners in Buchenwald by SS exe-

cutioner Martin Sommer.

The Buchenwald insurgents (with American soldiers and SS pris-

oners) after the camp’s self-liberation.
92
 Chapter 8
Lessons of Resistance,
Reasons for Denial
 Chapter 8: Lessons of Resistance, Reasons for Denial

Show yourselves
Just for an instant, you
Unknown men; you can cover your face while we
Utter our thanks.95
The value of the alleged denazification of the FRG (Federal Republic
of Germany, or West Germany) can be measured by the fact that, after the
war, none of the judges had to account for a single one of the thousands
of death sentences for opponents they had pronounced between 1933
and 1945… Whereas any jurist who had collaborated in the elaboration
or application of the Third Reich legislation was excluded from the judi-
ciary in East Germany, by 1955, 1,310 lawyers from the Nazi “special
courts” had returned to service in the West German courts. These “special
courts” alone had handed down more than 50,000 death sentences. Set up
in March 1933, they were placed outside public jurisdiction in order to
“totally exterminate the opponents of the Third Reich.” This complacency
of the FRG went very far. For example, Dr. Erich Anger, former prosecu-
tor at the Leipzig “special court,” had been found guilty of multiple legal
assassinations and sentenced by an East German court in 1945. When he
was released from prison, he fled to the FRG and was appointed… pros-
ecutor in Essen.96 One can imagine how these magistrates judged their
former accomplices: they transformed the denazification of the FRG into
a masquerade. There were only 5,234 convictions of Nazi murderers in
the FRG, and these convictions were equivalent to an average of ten min-
utes in prison per person murdered. In 1965, the FRG passed an out-
right amnesty law. It was announced by Federal President Heinrich Lübke.
Heinrich Lübke was a former employee of the Gestapo in Stettin and the
former boss of the concentration labor in Peenemünde and Leau, a depen-
dency of Buchenwald.

95
Bertolt Brecht: excerpt from the “Praise of Illegal Activity,” from the play The Decision
(translation by John Willett).
96
Cf. Le Livre brun: Les criminels de guerre et nazis en Allemagne occidentale, published by
the National Council of the National Democratic Front of Germany and the Documen-
tation Center of the National Archives of the GDR, Zeit im Bild Verlag, Dresden, 1965.
This dossier contains hundreds of biographies of FRG leaders with particularly busy Nazi
pasts.
95
The German Communist Resistance

Reporters and historians as well as military personnel and jurists

benefited from this same treatment. All of them remained at their posts. It
is not surprising that West German historiography has tried hard to con-
ceal the communist resistance in order to nourish the thesis that “we were
all abused by Hitler/were victims of Hitler.”97 While several recent papers
describe this resistance facet by facet, region by region, the general tone is
one of denial. For example, the catalog of the exhibition organized by the
Bundestag in the Reichstag on the history of Germany devotes thirty lines
to the conspirators of July 20 and a single line to the resistance: “social
democratic and communist cells and clergymen.”98
Putting these three resistances on the same level is already a sham:
only the communist resistance embraced all possible forms of struggle
(propaganda, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, espionage, union struggle, etc.).
It is the only one to have fought from the first to the last day of the Third
Reich, and to have extended its action to the whole of Germany (even in
the camps and in the army). Finally, it is the only one to have really weak-
ened the Nazi war machine. Christians and socialists most often opposed
individually or within a small circle of close relatives. As for the famous
conspiracy of July 20, 1944, it was ambiguous to say the least. Behind the
handsome figure of Colonel von Stauffenberg, the conspirator who placed
the bomb against Hitler, who was a true anti-fascist patriot, there were sol-
diers, reactionary politicians and capitalists who until then had faithfully
followed Hitler, and who had sometimes directly contributed to putting
him in power. Half of the July 20 conspirators were closely associated with
the Nazi project, and what they ultimately blamed Hitler for was failure,
and leading Germany to defeat and a Soviet revolution. Their documents
explicitly mention this fear: “The time has come to carry out this project
[the coup] because the supreme moments are coming to an end. Oth-
erwise, we will have to face a second November 1918 revolution.” The
97
Detlev Peukert: Die KPD im Widerstand:Verfolgung und Untergrundarbeit an Rhein und
Ruhr 1933 bis 1945, Peter Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal, 1980; Bernd Kaufmann, Eckhard
Reisener, Dieter Schwips, Henri Walther: Der Nachrichtendienst der KPD 1919-1937,
Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1993; Nikolaus Brauns: Schafft Rote Hilfe ! Geschichte und Aktiv-
itäten der proletarischen Hilfsorganisation für politische Gefangene in Deutschland (1919-
1938), Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Bonn, 2003; and some others.
98
Interrogeons l’histoire de l’Allemagne – Les idées, les forces, les décisions de la fin du 18e siècle
à nos jours. Une exposition d’histoire dans l’édifice du Reichstag, à Berlin, 4th french edition,
Deutsche Bundestag, Referar Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, Bonn 1992, p. 362.
96
 Chapter 8: Lessons of Resistance, Reasons for Denial

emissaries of the conspirators promised the Westerners that they would

withdraw all their units from the West and send them to the Eastern front.
They had even planned to welcome American airborne divisions to Berlin
as soon as they had succeeded in their coup, so that the city would not be
taken by the Soviet Army. These proposals were made directly in Switzer-
land to Allen Dulles, head of the US secret service in Europe. In this way
the plotters hoped to achieve a separate peace with the Western capitalist
powers and thus save what could be saved from imperialist and militaristic
Germany. The writings of the head of the conspiracy, Carl Goerdeler, are
revealing. In 1943, he still claimed the 1914 borders (including Alsace,
Lorraine, Silesia, etc.) “increased by the integration of Austria and the
Sudetenland.” The anti-communist crusade was at the heart of the project:
I can predict that a Germany which, in addition to an honest
and competent military leadership, will have given itself [with
the coup] a suitable—let’s just say it—political leadership, will
see the end of the air war [i.e., the Anglo-American bombings]
within 48 hours. The efforts that will follow can be devoted
to the realization of a détente with the West, which will make
possible the concentration of all the warlike power of the Ger-
man people in the East.
Goerdeler considered that by allying itself with Japan, Germany
committed “a betrayal of the interests of the peoples of the white race.”99
The selfish motives of these “resistance fighters” cherished by Western his-
toriography were manifested one last time in the spirit with which the
majority of them denounced each other in the hope of saving their own
skins.
The obscuration of the German communist resistance is found in
the French-language bibliography: there has never been a paper in French
on the subject, except for a brochure once published… in the GDR. There
are only a handful of books in French focusing on particular aspects of
German antifascist resistance in France and Belgium, and a few books deal-
ing with German resistance “in general,” which reserve the corresponding

99
Cf. the appendices of Gerhard Ritter’s book: Échec au dictateur – Histoire de la Résistance
allemande (op. cit.) pp. 309, 324-325, and 327-328.
97
The German Communist Resistance

portion for communists.100 For the rest, one will find mention of com-
munist resistance only in books dealing with related subjects (Soviet espi-
onage, concentration camps, Jewish resistance, the Gestapo, the Spanish
War, etc.). Against this scarcity, one can contrast the incredible number of
books, articles, television programs and even films devoted to the plotters
of July 20, 1944, and to the small group of the “White Rose” composed,
it must be recalled, of a handful of students and their philosophy teacher.
Contemporary ideological stakes must be important if the resistance
of tens of thousands of communists to Hitlerism is to be concealed in this
way.
This issue is not mysterious: not a day goes by without an article
or a program attempting to substantiate the myth of the “twin brothers”
communism-fascism.101 Even perceived as a distant threat, communism
remains the Enemy for a bourgeoisie that yesterday put Hitler in power
to protect itself from “Bolshevism” and today stands as the champion of
anti-fascism. In order to arrange things this way in the social conscious-
ness, a vast undertaking of historical revisionism was necessary: to make
the bourgeoisie look like antifascists and the communists look like the
Nazis’ alter ego. The success of the ideological concept of “totalitarianism,”
forged for the occasion, gives the measure of this propaganda, as does the
success of anti-communist myths repeated ad nauseam.
100
The works of Gilbert Badia, as we have seen, are the only exception. Among the recent
works are Gilbert Merlio’s Les Résistance allemandes à Hitler (op. cit.), which devotes
twenty pages out of 453 to the communist resistance (pp. 49-69) and 25 pages to the
“White Rose” (pp. 214-238), and Barabar Koenh’s La résistance allemande contre Hitler
1933-1945, Presses Universitaires de France, collection Politique d’aujourd’hui, Paris,
2003, p. 59. Barbara Koehn’s absurd segmentation into sociological chapters (“the resis-
tance of the workers,” “the resistance of the youth,” etc.) allows her to dispense with the
KPD resistance in less than 10 pages (from page 50 to page 60) and as much for the
“White Rose” (from page 82 to page 92). In her 398-page book, Barbara Koehn concedes
two more pages to the Young Communists and six to the National Committee for a Free
Germany… She cheerfully peddles the most improbable gossip since it serves her militant
anticommunism (Münzenberg eliminated by the NVKD, John Scheer denounced to the
Gestapo by Ulbricht, Stalin ready for an armistice with Hitler in 1943, etc.). When it
stopped denouncing the misdeeds of Stalin and the “Soviet soldier” (sic), it was to ascribe
to the conspirators of July 20, the objective of “the re-establishment of the supremacy of
the law…”
101
To this we owe this pearl of François-Georges Dreyfus: “Resistance to Nazism was
limited, just as resistance to communism was weak in the GDR from 1953 to 1989, and
for practically the same reasons,” Le IIIe Reich (op. cit.), p. 241. Unsurprisingly, this book
is dedicated to François Furet…
98
 Chapter 8: Lessons of Resistance, Reasons for Denial

Take, for example, the myth of the “transition” from the KPD to
the NSDAP. The election results prior to Hitler’s seizure of power show
that, despite the Nazi attempts to mobilize the industrial proletariat, the
NSDAP’s progress was achieved by absorbing the electorate of the two lib-
eral parties representing the peasantry and the middle class, by mobilizing
the regular abstainers and the new voters—and not at the expense of the
KPD.102 The KPD even grew to the point of having a record 100 deputies
in the November 1932 elections.
The failure of the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization
(NSBO) testifies to the lack of Nazi presence in the German working
class; in the spring of 1933, elections to the work councils gave the Nazis
only 11.7 percent of the vote. Workers were the only social group whose
percentage of Nazi party members was lower than its percentage in the
total population. The NSBO was paralyzed by the privileged links between
the Nazi party leadership and German big capital: in April 1933, Rudolf
Hess had forbidden any NSBO demonstration against a private company,
industrial firm or bank without the authorization of the NSDAP.
The Confidential Guidelines for the Fulfillment of our Struggle in the
Decisive Year 1932 against Corporate Marxism insist that the NSBO is not
a trade union, that it does not give any financial support to the strikers. It
reads:
The noblest task of the National Socialists in the factories is
the struggle for our movement and for the annihilation of the
enemy. No matter in what form the enemy comes to us—
whether it is the KPD, the RGO [Communist Trade Union]
or the Social Democratic and Christian Semi-Marxist Trade
Unions that follow them—our struggle concerns all these for-
mations…. [E]very National Socialist is furthermore obliged
to establish the identity of every Marxist delegate in the com-
pany, regardless of its nuance, and to provide his or her exact
address. Whenever possible, he must try to obtain a photo-
graph of these people…. If the boss is a member of our party,
he has the right to be constantly informed…. It is also import-

Cf. Georges Goriely, 1933: Hitler prend le pouvoir, Éditions Complexe, Bruxelles,
102

1982, (and particularly the picture of the election results, p. 198).

99
The German Communist Resistance

ant to point out to our fellow bosses that, in the face of possi-
ble indispensable wage cuts, the National Socialist personnel
will show a completely different understanding of the eco-
nomic situation than personnel excited by Marxists.103
After the burning of the Reichstag, the regime satisfied all the
demands of the capitalists: any incitement to strike was punishable by
one month to three years in prison; employees were not allowed to change
employers, but the authorities could move them without taking into
account their wishes and without them keeping the wages of their previ-
ous jobs, the old collective agreements were replaced by wages fixed by the
company managers, etc. The NSBO’s role was to supervise the German
worker and, at no time, to represent his interests. Those who wanted to
do some semblance of union work were thrown into concentration camps
for “seeking to perpetuate the class struggle under the auspices of National
Socialism.” Goering instructed the police “to act energetically against those
members of the enterprise cells who have not yet understood the true char-
acter of the Third Reich.” It could not have been put better.104
The resistance of the German people to Hitlerism was less than
the KPD had hoped for. The hope for a general anti-Hitler insurrection
was very high among the Communists, especially when the defeat of the
Third Reich was evident. This hope was based on the bankruptcy of the
regime, the vertiginous degradation of the living conditions of the masses
(bombed cities, 60-hour minimum work week, famine), and the historical
precedent of 1918. The military dispositions of the KPD organizations
(even those operating in the concentration camps) were conceived in the
perspective of this popular uprising that never took place.
The fault certainly does not lie with the communist resistance, which
was vast, deep and heroic.
This resistance demonstrates that, whatever the scale and ferocity of
the repression, the experience of struggle and organization of the commu-

103
Cf. Kurt Gossweiler, Hitler, l’irrésistible ascension – Essais sur le fascisme, Éditions Aden,
Bruxelles, 2006, pp. 130-131. Kurt Gossweiler deserted the Werhmacht in March ‘43 to
join the Soviet ranks. At the end of the war, he began a scientific career in the GDR at the
Institute for German History.
104
Cf. Daniel Guérin: Sur le fascisme II: Fascisme et grand capital, François Maspero, Petite
collection, Paris, 1971, p. 182.
100
 Chapter 8: Lessons of Resistance, Reasons for Denial

nist movement gives revolutionaries the methods to get through the worst
ordeals—provided they show sufficient determination. “The worst enemy
of the Party is not the Gestapo, it is panic,” Erich Wollweber used to say.
The worst chains are those which the oppressor forges in the heads of the
oppressed. The anti-Nazi resistance of the KPD, carried out in inconceiv-
able difficulties and at the cost of unheard-of sacrifices, is not only a page
of glory but also a valuable experience for the communist movement. This
is more than enough to explain the wretched lies of official history written
about it.

101
East German
Bibliography
 East German Bibliography

All the iconography (and much of the documentation) in this book

comes from the following memorial books, all published in the German
Democratic Republic:
• Zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands—Ein Aus-
wahl von Materialen und Dokumenten aus den Jahren 1914-1946,
Herausgegeben von Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Institut beim Zen-
tralkomitee der SED, Dietz Verlag, Berlin (DDR), 1955.
• Zur Geschichte der deutschen antifaschistischen Widerstandsbewegung
1933 bis 1945, Ein Auswahl von Materialen, Berichten und Doku-
menten, Verlag des Ministeriums für Nationale Verteidigung, Ber-
lin (DDR), 1957.
• Schaul Dora (Zusammengestellt und bearbeitet von): Résistance—
Erinnerungen deutscher Antifaschisten, Herausgegegeben von Insti-
tut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED,
Dietz Verlag, Berlin (DDR), 1973.
• Pech Karlheinz: An der Seite der Résistance—Die Bewegung “Freies
Deutschland” für den Westen in Frankreich (1943-1945), Militärver-
lag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Berlin (DDR),
1974.
• Geschichte der Militärpolitik der KPD (1918-1945), Militärverlag
der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Berlin (DDR), 1987.

103
 Appendix 1
Conversation Between M.
Abramowicz and T. Derbent
on The German Communist
Resistance
 Appendix 1

This interview between Manuel Abramowicz and T. Derbent was pub-

lished in the Belgian monthly Le Journal du Mardi of June 2008 and on
RésistanceS, web-journal of the Belgian Observatory of the Extreme Right, on
February 7, 2009.
According to you, the communist resistance was the broadest, most powerful
and most effective German resistance against the Nazi dictatorship.
Without a doubt. The other resistances could at best only make
propaganda and hide outlaws, and this within small circles of close rel-
atives. The resistance organized by the Communist Party of Germany
(KPD) organized the sabotage of the war economy in a big way. Com-
munist dockworkers mined and sank dozens of ships! This resistance gave
anti-fascist propaganda an unprecedented scale; in 1936, for example, the
Gestapo, the political police of the Nazi regime, seized more than one and
a half million communist newspapers, leaflets and brochures. And that was
just the material seized. The material produced was even more important!
The KPD ensured the escape and exfiltration of wanted antifascists, its
militants fought by the thousands in the maquis of the occupied coun-
tries, its clandestine agents provided invaluable strategic information to
the Soviet intelligence services, its deportees organized and, in the case of
the Buchenwald concentration camp, succeeded in an armed uprising, etc.
The KPD was the only one to have been involved in the war.
Several books and academic seminars have examined the German anti-Nazi
resistance. Why did you focus your research on communist resistance, for which
you do not hide your admiration?
It was a kind of accident! It was while collecting material for another
subject—the influence of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clause-
witz on the leadership of the underground military apparatus of the
KPD—that I discovered a research center in Zurich that had unpublished
documents on this resistance. I was struck by the discrepancy between
the importance of this resistance and its absence, or even its negation, in
Western historiography. For example, countless books, articles and films
have been devoted to the handful of Catholic students who made up the
“White Rose,” but the tens of thousands of communists who resisted, most

105
The German Communist Resistance

often at the cost of an atrocious death, have been wiped off the shelves of
history. Yesterday they were sacrificed to the anti-communist propaganda
of the Cold War, today to the fetish thesis of the dominant ideology: “com-
munism = fascism.” In order to do so, French-speaking authors had only
to recycle the production of a West German university body composed, in
its immense majority, of the minions of the Nazi university.
German communist resistance would thus have been a taboo subject in West-
ern Europe. But you refer to East German sources. These could just as easily be
questioned, considered “ideologically marked.”
I have cross-checked these sources, as far as possible, with Western
historiography, and they have never proved to be dubious. The sources of
East German works do not pose a real problem. They are direct sources.
In the early 1960s, the USSR handed over to the GDR the bulk of the
archives seized by the Red Army during the capture of Berlin in 1945.
These archives are very rich: reports of the Gestapo, files of the Nazi emer-
gency courts….
What is sometimes problematic is the work that East German histo-
rians have done on the basis of these sources. They wanted to demonstrate
that the KPD continued to function as a clandestine party directly led
by its central committee. However, this is only partially true: many cells
were reconstituted without any link to the party apparatus, let alone to the
central committee in exile. And while the German communist resistance is
very diverse in its forms of action, it is remarkably coherent from a political
point of view. The Leninist-Stalinist functioning of the KPD meant that
the cells cut off from the party did not try to develop their own political
and strategic line, but worked to apply the party line. This induced a lack
of flexibility but allowed the communist movement to get through this
terrible ordeal while maintaining its coherence.
East German historians are also too discreet about the “line strug-
gles” that emerged in the Party. It is known that the militants sometimes
found the material and directives sent to the Reich by the KPD’s exiled
apparatus to be unsuitable, because they were based on the conviction
that the Nazi regime would soon collapse under the weight of popular dis-
content. This contradiction has been widely dealt with—and sometimes
exaggerated—by militant anti-Stalinists, be they historians, such as Pierre
106
 Appendix 1

Broué in his Histoire de l'Internationale Communiste, or novelists, such as

Arthur Koestler in his book Le Zéro et l’infini (Darkness at Noon). It is
less well known that the transition from the “class against class” line to
the “popular front” line was not made without reluctance, so great was
the resentment of the communist militants towards the social democrats
who had totally capitulated to the Hitlerite force. But these contradictions
should not be overestimated. The dominant note remains the remarkable
coherence of this resistance.
After the Nazis came to power in January 1933, the KPD sent party cadres to
infiltrate various state bodies. Was the “communist infiltration” real, or were
some of these “spies” ultimately defectors, adhering to Nazism out of conviction?
Did the KPD measure this risk?
There were two types of infiltration. The KPD was for a time
tempted by the “mass” infiltration of basic organs of the new regime to
subvert them. For example, since the unions were banned, it was a ques-
tion of joining and being active in the Labor Front, the unique profes-
sional organization set up by the Nazis, to carry out crypto-union work.
This so-called “Trojan Horse” tactic was justified from a doctrinal point of
view by referring to Lenin’s instructions on the use of tsarist unions. But
this tactic—which had not been adopted without discussion—failed due
to the repression and was quickly abandoned.
For the second type of infiltration, the one you mention, I have not
found any document relating to a “risk analysis” or dealing with pseudo
infiltrations that would have proved to be real. On the other hand, I did
find several examples of the remarkable work done by these false defectors.
For example, Horst Heilmann, who was able to infiltrate even the decryp-
tion service of the Nazi intelligence services and communicated crucial
information to the Soviet General Staff.
To finish with the question of defectors, it is known that of the 422
principal leaders of the KPD, only one gave up the struggle and accepted
a position in the new regime. This happened after his exclusion from the
KPD for, as the formula of the time was, “cowardice before the class enemy.”
This is to be compared with the very numerous adhesions of right-wing,
center and social-democratic politicians to Hitler’s “new order.” This also
shows who was really close to fascism and who was its irreducible enemy.
107
The German Communist Resistance

Do you have other study projects?

My real research topic is the influence of Clausewitz’s theories on
revolutionary strategies from Engels to Giap to Lenin. I’ve been working
on it again because it’s far from being exhausted. The Yugoslav commu-
nist leader Tito studied Clausewitz in Moscow in 1934. I am looking for
material that will allow me to examine the influence of this study on the
partisan war in Yugoslavia during the last World War.

108
 Appendix 2
Interview Between J. Kmieciak
and T. Derbent on The German
Communist Resistance
 Appendix 2

This interview between Jacques Kmieciak and T. Derbent was published

in No. 947 of the French northern weekly Liberté 62 on January 7, 2011.
How did the idea of writing on the subject come about? To make up for a his-
toriographical deficiency? To fight a voluntary obscuration? To produce a tool
for the ideological struggle?
I have been working for years on the influence of Clausewitz’s the-
ories on revolutionary thinkers and strategists such as Lenin and Giap.
While researching Clausewitz’s influence on the KPD paramilitary appa-
ratus in the 1920s and 1930s, I came across an archive in Switzerland that
contained documents on the clandestine struggle of the German commu-
nists. Dealing with the German anti-Nazi resistance was not one of my
projects (it rather distracted me from it) so I approached others with the
idea. Nobody gave me a concrete answer, so I set to work on it, motivated
by the desire to repair the oblivion—worse still, the denial—from which
this resistance suffers.
You rely on bibliographical sources that you synthesize. Have you consulted
archives or collected testimonies?
My work is not exhaustive, I just wanted to give a good idea of the
extent and value of this resistance. To do this, I just had to dig into the
archive collection I was telling you about. As it contained a lot of East
German research, in order to prevent [the allegation of ] “bad trials,” I only
retained the facts corroborated by Western historiography. For if Western
historiography denies the existence of a true German communist resis-
tance, this same historiography conceals, in the form of elemental dust
scattered over hundreds of books, all evidence to the contrary.
Talk about denial. In what way did Western historiography have (an) interest
in minimizing or obscuring communist resistance to Hitler?
Western historiography in general had no interest in the subject. It
did not do any research. It simply re-submitted the West German works,
which were very interested in the wrong sense of the word. The FRG was
never denazified. If the direct participants and promoters of the Holocaust
were judged, all the Nazi framing of German society remained in place.

111
The German Communist Resistance

The post-war West German university consisted of the minions of the Nazi
university, and for them denying or disqualifying resistance was a means
of justifying their complicity. It had to be implied that there was no other
choice. The communist resistance fighters were not the only ones under
attack. Willy Brandt, a member of a left-wing socialist party (the Sozialis-
tische Arbeiterpartei), had to flee the Third Reich and was granted political
asylum in Norway, then Norwegian nationality. It was under Norwegian
uniform that he returned to Berlin in 1945, where he regained German
nationality and began a career in social democracy that would lead him
to the Berlin City Hall, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and finally to the
Chancellery. Well, this return to Berlin under the Norwegian uniform was
often and harshly criticized. If a Willy Brandt could have been called a
“traitor to the German homeland” in the middle of the Cold War, you
can imagine how people talked about the communist resistance fighters…
Günther Weisenborn explains this very well, his book on the anti-Nazi
resistance, Der lautlose Aufstand (The Silent Rebellion), published in 1953,
appeared in an incredibly hostile environment.
You are quoting from Swiss archives. Can you tell me more? What are they?
Where do they come from?
It’s a lot of East German material saved from oblivion and from
being crushed by activists running a non-institutional documentation cen-
ter.
What was the state of historiography in the GDR on the subject?
Very precise, very meticulous. East German historiography cannot
be taken to be at fault on one fact. It is only problematic in its “reading,”
in its interpretation of the facts it describes, in the way it puts one fact
in the foreground and another in the background, etc. It thus has a clear
tendency to overestimate the organizational coherence of the communist
resistance, whereas in reality many party organizations were rebuilt clan-
destinely and functioned without any direct link to the Central Commit-
tee in exile.

112
 Appendix 2

Anti-communist repression survived the fall of Hitler. Can you say a few words
on the subject?
It starts early! In April-June 1945, all over Germany, popular anti-fas-
cist committees arose, sometimes obtaining the capitulation of the military
in their localities. There were at least 130 of them, mainly communists, but
also other democrats. They arrested the notorious Nazis, took care of the
supply, etc. In the East, they served as a base for the new municipalities,
while in the West, all political activity was quickly prohibited…. The KPD
was reconstituted and soon had 350,000 members in the western zone. In
the first elections, it had directly elected representatives and ministries in
several Länder!105 But it was confronted with an anti-communist offensive
of unprecedented strength, benefiting from circumstances such as the Ber-
lin blockade and the Marshall Plan. And the persecutions began: In 1948,
a campaign against the constitution of a separate state in West Germany
(which would collect one million signatures in the West) was banned.
In 1949, the KPD was already very weakened, but it remained influ-
ential in business and was successful in its mobilization against the rear-
mament of Germany. The government prohibited a petition calling for a
referendum on rearmament: 7,000 West German communists are arrested
in 1951 for having signed this petition. In 1951, a law criminalized a
large part of communist activities, and in 1956 the Federal Constitutional
Court declared the KPD “unconstitutional” and ordered its dissolution.
In 1968, the ban was lifted and the DKP was founded, but the FRG then
banned members of a party “hostile to the constitution” from becoming
civil servants: communists were directly targeted.
Let’s go back to your book. How was it received?
The book was very well received. A historian reproached me for not
having followed all the rules of the art, but without questioning what I
wrote. Well, then I’m not a historian and I don’t pretend to be one. If I
wrote this book, it is precisely because historians had not done their job by
doing it themselves. The only negative criticism was written by a French
academic who writes often for the Cahiers Léon Trotsky, Georges Ubbiali.

105
A Länder is a German State in the FRG.—Ed.
113
The German Communist Resistance

What were his criticisms about?

Again, not on the content of my book. Ubbiali doesn’t really account
for my work in his criticism: he seized an opportunity to pronounce the
classic indictment of Stalin. When I speak of the German Communists
who warned the Soviets of the imminent attack on the USSR, Ubbiali
reproaches me for not stressing that Stalin did not take these warnings into
account, just as he reproaches me for considering the German Commu-
nists who worked with the Soviet intelligence services as “resistant.”
During a meeting in a bookstore, the moderator reproached me
(amicably this time) for having announced by my title a “communist resis-
tance” when it was only a question of the resistance of the “Stalinist KPD.”
Was there communist resistance outside the KPD?
There certainly was. Much more tenuous, much less effective, but
real. The KPDO (the KPD/Opposition), which had split from the KPD
in 1928, after ‘33, had a leadership in exile and an internal leadership:
the Berlin Committee, which managed to maintain activity until 1937.
In 1936-37, the Gestapo completed the liquidation of the last opposition
communist, anarcho-syndicalist and Trotskyist groups.
How can this work of “rehabilitating” communist resistance in Germany serve
the labor movement today?
The workers’ movement is confronted with the dominant discourse
which asserts that the present system is the only possible one. The regime’s
intelligentsia must therefore disqualify other experiences, and to do so it
is struggling to impose as a received idea the equivalence “communism
= Nazism.” However, the book shows that the KPD is the only political
party to have resisted: all the other parties capitulated or integrated into
the Hitler regime. Another thing: since the Leninist type of organization
experienced many dysfunctions (starting with a lack of internal democ-
racy), some would like to make it an absolute counter-model. However,
the KPD’s experience shows that when faced with an enemy determined
to break up the workers’ movement, (that is, whenever the class struggle
reaches a certain level of development), this type of organization is the
only one that can withstand the shock.
114
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