Going Red

Posted by Bogumil

Reichswehr Lieutenant Richard Scheringer’s infamous 1931 conversion from National Socialism to the Communist Party of Germany

On 4 October, 1930, three young Reichswehr officers from the Fifth Artillery Regiment in Ulm were sentenced by the Federal Court in Leipzig to 18 months’ imprisonment for the crime of preparing to commit high treason. Radicalized by Germany’s ongoing domestic instability and international weakness, and motivated by a contempt for the ‘old order’ and for the older generation of Reichswehr officers, these three young men – Richard Scheringer, Hanns Ludin, and Hans Wendt – had been caught disseminating National Socialist propaganda within army garrisons and attempting to foment support for a prospective ‘national revolution’ among the officer corps, hoping in this way to foster a sense of nationalist-anticapitalist radicalism within the Reichswehr which would help prepare it for its role as a ‘people’s army’ in the event of a nationalist uprising. The ‘Ulm Reichswehr trial’ was a highly publicized event within Germany (Hitler famously gave testimony to the court, defending his party against accusations of treason), and the fate of the three young officers became a cause célèbre for nationalists in Germany, who regarded them as martyrs for the cause of the Fatherland. There was thus something of a sensation among the German public when, in early 1931, one of the Ulm officers publicly announced his decision to ‘convert’ to Communism: Richard Scheringer. During their incarceration in the Gollnow fortress-prison, Scheringer and Wendt had become friendly with the institution’s many Communist inmates, and through long political debates with his new comrades Scheringer in particular had increasingly come to doubt the substance and validity of National Socialist doctrine. Helped along in his conversion by the allure of the Communist Party of Germany’s (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) ‘programme for the national and social liberation of the German people,’ as well as by the poor impression left by the NSDAP leaders he had met since his imprisonment, Scheringer finally decided to renounce ‘fascism’ and to throw his lot in with the cause of Marxism-Leninism instead, and a declaration to this effect was read out in the Reichstag by KPD deputy Hans Kippenberger on 19 March, 1931. Scheringer’s jump to Communism was heralded as a great victory by KPD publications, as the forerunner of many more conversions to come, and the party was eager to make as much political capital from the event as it could. Scheringer was swiftly incorporated into the party’s ‘national and social’ propaganda strategy, with the young ex-officer set to work writing propaganda material from his cell in Gollnow, and his name was attached to a new journal explicitly directed at winning over disillusioned, socially-conscious nationalists and soldiers. Translated below are three pieces related to Scheringer and his decision to cross the barricades and ‘go red’: an extract from Kippenberger’s Reichstag speech, in which he reads out Scheringer’s declaration for the ‘red front’; an article from KPD daily Die Rote Fahne discussing the reaction to Scheringer’s decision and its significance for German Communism; and a Communist propaganda leaflet penned by Scheringer and addressed to rebellious members of the Berlin SA, an example of the type of material which the KPD hoped would help convince idealistic National Socialists and help create more Scheringers to swell the ranks of the “fighting proletariat.”

Scheringer Declares for German Communism
From the 1931 Verhandlungen des Reichstags, vol. 445.

Scheringer’s declaration announcing his ideological conversion to Marxism-Leninism was first made public to the German people by Communist Reichstag deputy Hans Kippenberger on 19 March 1931, read out towards the conclusion of a speech given during an otherwise unremarkable parliamentary debate on the issue of defense spending. Scheringer and Kippenberger had become acquainted only a month or so beforehand, meeting over a glass of schnapps in a smoke-filled Gollnow workers’ pub while Scheringer was out of prison on a weekend furlough. During their meeting Scheringer had stressed to Kippenberger that his decision to ‘go red’ was sincere and that he was especially committed to “warning the Volk about Hitler”, whom he had met and not been particularly impressed by. Kippenberger for his part had emphasized to Scheringer the anti-pacifist credentials of the KPD, assuring him of the party’s commitment to revolution and to building a powerful German Red Army. Scheringer was especially impressed by Kippenberger’s martial background (Kippenberger was a decorated WWI veteran and the leader of the KPD’s underground paramilitary apparatus), which helped reassure him of the correctness of his decision and of Kippenberger’s suitability for conveying that decision to the world. For the sake of brevity I have only translated an extract of Kippenberger’s speech, the end portion which deals specifically with the NSDAP and with Scheringer, the rest being concerned with the rather dull topic of Reichswehr funding issues. The translation has been made from the Reichstag stenographic transcripts for 1931. – Bogumil

Extract from KPD Deputy Hans Kippenberger’s Speech
to the German Reichstag of 19 March, 1931.

KIPPENBERGER (KPD): …But I would here like to point out another fact with reference to the relationship between the Reichswehr, the National Socialists, and, moreover, the Social-Democrats: that in the Reichstag faction of the National Socialist Party there are 25 deputies who, from 1918 to 1920, fought against the workers as members of the Freikorps. This means that there are 25 National Socialist members of the Reichstag who, according to the Reichstag Handbook, boast of having helped erect the Versailles System and of helping to set the Weimar Republic in the saddle through blood, terror, and murder

(“Very true!” from the Communists)

together with Noske and with Herr Groener.¹ If we review the list of 25 National Socialist murderers who are today drawing parliamentary allowances from the Republic, then we can extend their ranks directly to Social-Democracy –

(The President’s bell sounds)

VICE-PRESIDENT VON KARDOFF: Herr Deputy Kippenberger, I call you to order.²

KIPPENBERGER (KPD): – not only via a Winnig or a Grützner,³ who have also outwardly demonstrated their spiritual kinship through their open conversion to the NSDAP, but also in such a way that the 25 on this side here (to the right) include at the very least Herr Wels as the chairman of the party over on that side,⁴ who played exactly the same role and function. Continue reading →

Extending a Hand to West Germany’s ‘Little Nazis’

Posted by Bogumil

An open letter by members of the DDR’s National-Democratic Party of Germany to former officers, soldiers, and NSDAP members in West Germany

On 26 February, 1948, the Soviet Military Administration in occupied Germany issued “Order No. 35,” officially declaring an end to denazification proceedings within the Soviet zone of occupation. Less than a month later, preparatory work began under the supervision of the Soviet authorities for the establishment of a new, sanctioned political party, one which would organize Germany’s “nationally-minded” forces in support of pro-Soviet, ‘anti-fascist’ objectives: the National-Democratic Party of Germany (National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, NDPD). The NDPD was officially founded on 16 July 1948, and though its first chairman, Lothar Bolz, was a longtime communist, most of its founding committee and subsequent membership were made up of former Wehrmacht officers and professional soldiers, as well as ex-members of the NSDAP (‘little Nazis’, i.e. low- or mid-ranking Parteigenossen) and similar nationalist organizations. The programme eventually adopted for the party established its ideology as a form of ‘national-socialism’ shorn of the racial, militarist, and anti-Marxist qualities which had typified the worldview of the NSDAP. Instead of war, the NDPD extolled peace, and instead of elitism, it extolled democracy and anti-fascism; at the same time, nonetheless, it also openly encouraged nationalist sentiments among its membership, promoting a view of German history and culture in which certain battles and engagements of the past were venerated (the anti-Napoleonic ‘Wars of Liberation’, the 1848 revolution), and in which East Germans were encouraged to rally in patriotic defense of their “socialist Fatherland” and its Eastern Bloc “brother nations” and against the military, cultural, and financial power of the United States. The efforts of the NDPD were not just directed at winning over the “national bourgeoisie” within the Soviet zone of occupation; from the very beginning it was also hoped that the party would prove a useful vehicle of outreach to the “radical, right-wing” forces in West Germany, serving as an example of the enlightened, forgiving attitude of Soviet and German Communist authorities towards those formerly in the ‘fascist’ camp, while also providing a useful platform of communication by which pro-Soviet sympathies could be transferred to nationalists in the West. To that end, at the NDPD’s second party conference in Leipzig in June 1950, prominent members of the party were tasked with drafting an open letter to all former Wehrmacht officers, professional soldiers, and members of the NSDAP in West Germany, calling on them to unite with their brothers in the East, to clasp hands and to stand together for “collective peace” and against war and rearmament. Signed by 22 party-members (16 of whom held posts within the party), the open letter became a key propaganda tool for the NDPD in subsequent months, with members being tasked to disseminate the letter throughout both East and West and to encourage the discussion of its content. A translation of the open letter, made from the official published transcript of 1950 NDPD conference proceedings, is provided below; the statements and remarks by delegates immediately preceding and following the reading of the letter have been included to help provide additional context.

Proceedings from the 2nd Party Conference
of the National-Democratic Party of Germany
The Proclamation of the NDPD’s
“Open Letter to Former Soldiers, Officers, and Members of the NSDAP”
From the stenographic transcript of the NDPD’s Leipzig Conference of 15-17 June, 1950

GÜNTHER LUDWIG – BERLIN:¹

My dear party colleagues!

I have requested the floor once again in order to inform you of the following. You know that our party has campaigned and continues to campaign for equal rights for all Germans of goodwill ever since it was founded, that it makes no distinction with regards to former members of the NSDAP and former officers and professional soldiers, and that it is only natural that even today there are a fair number of all of these to be found among our delegates. As one such example, I am a former career soldier. I spoke to you as such yesterday. I was a colonel, and I also fought in Stalingrad and was a witness to the combat there, as you have heard. Under the impact of yesterday’s events, we – that is, a large number of former officers and former members of the NSDAP – met together and decided to send an open letter to West Germany. Permit me, then, to read to you this open letter:

OPEN LETTER
TO ALL FORMER MEMBERS OF THE NSDAP,
OFFICERS, AND PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS
IN WEST GERMANY

We Germans – regardless of what we are and what we were and wherever we may reside today, whether in the West or in the East of our homeland – are all driven by a deep concern: We see borders dividing our homeland, we recognize that even our capital Berlin is split into pieces. West Germany has become the object of the deliberations and conferences of foreign generals and bankers, which leads us to fear that a new war is being prepared.

We all know what war is. We know it all too well. Our wives and our children also experienced the last one; the bombing campaign was primarily directed against residential areas. In their ruins was the end.

We Germans, irrespective of where we live, long for a peaceful life; we worry over peace, we fear for the lives of our wives and children. We know that a new war will ruin forever the efforts of our Volk to attain a new prosperity. Continue reading →

Against National Bolshevism!

Posted by Bogumil

Soviet revolutionary Karl Radek’s 1919 critique of Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim’s National Bolshevist “address to the German proletariat”

In late October 1919, at the Communist Party of Germany’s (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) second national conference in Heidelberg, party chairman Paul Levi issued a public denunciation of the KPD’s ‘ultra-left’ faction, with a specific emphasis given to the ‘Hamburg Opposition’ organized around council-communists Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim. In response, Laufenberg, Wolffheim, and numerous other ‘ultra-leftists’ left the KPD, acknowledging that their ideological objections to party centralization and electoral participation made them no longer a welcome element with the Communist leadership. For Bolshevik revolutionary Karl Radek – Soviet Russia’s chief representative to the German communists and a central figure behind the KPD’s founding – the news of these developments must have come as something of a surprise. Although incarcerated in Berlin’s Moabit prison for his role in the Spartacist uprising, Radek was still heavily involved in party affairs, and he had even sent written advice to Levi prior to the conference strongly urging him to avoid splintering the party. The consequence of the ultra-left split was the formation of a sizeable council-communist opposition within Germany (in April they would form their own party, the KAPD), an opposition which Laufenberg and Wolffheim attempted from the beginning to win over to their own idiosyncratic interpretation of council-communism – a worldview dubbed “National Bolshevism” by their critics – with the publication of their November 1919 “address to the German proletariat.” Although the influence of the Hamburg radicals would gradually fizzle out over the next few years, at the time they were viewed as posing a credible threat to the proletarian movement. Their emphasis on conducting a “revolutionary people’s war” against the Western Powers was alarming to a Soviet government already bogged down in an Allied-backed civil war, and the independent line they advocated, while undeniably pro-Soviet, still bred concerns that Russia’s leadership of the international communist movement might someday be undermined in favor of Germany. In an attempt to counter these tendencies, Radek – as the movement’s German expert and ‘man on the ground’ there – produced the article which has been translated below, originally published in the 20 December, 1919 edition of KPD theoretical organ Die Internationale. Radek’s critical stance in this article is intriguing; he had known Laufenberg personally before the split and there are claims (disputed by some communists) that both Laufenberg and Wolffheim had met with Radek in prison prior to their departure from the KPD, with Radek expressing enthusiastic support for their ideas. Later, in 1923, Radek would himself become the chief architect of the short-lived “Schlageter line,” in which the KPD openly adopted National Bolshevist tactics and language in an attempt to win over nationalists incensed by the Entente’s occupation of the Ruhr. Whatever his true feelings, Radek’s arguments in this article are consistent with party discipline at the time and constitute a noteworthy early attempt by the Soviets to counter left-wing National Bolshevist ideas, an attempt which pre-dates Lenin’s own critique of National Bolshevism in his 1920 work Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

The Foreign Policy of German Communism and
Hamburg National Bolshevism
By Karl Radek
First published 20 December, 1919
in “Die Internationale”, vol.1, no.17/18¹

The Manifesto of the Hamburg ‘Opposition’

Already, during the negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles, a certain tendency to propagate union [Anschluß] with Soviet Russia on nationalist grounds was making itself felt within particular bourgeois circles in Germany. In order to be able to put up resistance against the Entente, one ought even be able to commit themselves to the Devil – the Bolshevists. But since one does not usually like to devote themselves to the Devil, various representatives of this ‘National Bolshevism’ endeavored to prove that this Beelzebub was not all that bad, that at any rate one could buttress a proletarian dictatorship in such a way that it would also be acceptable to respectable people. In the face of this trend, to the extent that it was not a diplomatic game played by failed politicians but an honest search for ways of saving not national privileges but German culture, the Communist Party had the duty not to content itself with pure negation. It had a duty to reach out to those honest elements who dared to renounce bourgeois privileges in order to save national culture, while at the same time telling them that communism is not an umbrella that can be opened up during the rain and then folded up again, nor a bath whose temperature can be arbitrarily raised or lowered. Intellectuals arrive at communism in different ways: through philosophy, religion, even through aesthetics. Concern for the nation can also form another route to communism. But communism itself is the goal of the working-class in their struggle for liberation, and it has its own laws of development and its own exigencies. If the working-class has no cause to cast off those people who come to it for various reasons from the bourgeois camp, then it has the duty not to subordinate itself to the prejudices and special purposes of those elements, but to compel those who come to it either to absorb the innermost substance of communism or to avoid joining the Party. In future the Communist Party can, under certain conditions, have practical points of political contact with National Bolshevism: for instance, in the future it can open the way for honest, nationally-minded officers in Germany to volunteer for honorable service in the German Red Army. But for National Bolshevists there is no place within the framework of the Bolshevik Party, nor can the Party obscure its proletarian, internationalist position in order to play National Bolshevist confidence tricks. All the less can it tolerate within its ranks a tendency which, under the mask of communist radicalism, transforms a communist foreign policy into a nationalist one. The so-called Hamburg Opposition² unexpectedly turned out to be the source of this trend. Its leaders, Wolffheim and Laufenberg,³ put out an address to the German working-class in which they advocate a nationalist foreign policy, both in terms of goals and methods. Continue reading →

Revolutionary People’s War or Counter-Revolutionary Civil War?

Posted by Bogumil

Against capitalism and the betrayal of Versailles: Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim’s National Bolshevist “address to the German proletariat” of November 1919

During the first years of its existence, the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) was more a disorganized coalition of diverse, conflicting tendencies than it was a coherently-organized, revolutionary vanguard party. The KPD’s initial political development had been hampered early on by a number of major obstacles (the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; the party’s ban following the failed January 1919 Spartacist uprising), and these difficulties only compounded the latent ideological conflicts within the party over issues like democratic participation, revolution, and the ‘correct’ attitude towards the Treaty of Versailles. One popular faction within the KPD during this period was its so-called ‘syndicalist’ camp: a collection of far-left, council-communist activists who were adamantly opposed to reformist labor activism and to electoral participation, favoring instead a continuation of armed putschism directed against the ‘bourgeois’ November Republic. These “wild elements” were considered destabilizing enough by the KPD leadership that they were forced out of the party at its second congress in Heidelberg in October 1919, an action which led to the founding of a rival council-communist organization in response: the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, KAPD). Two of the leading lights of the new KAPD’s prominent Hamburg branch were a pair of radical former Social-Democrats who had played a central role in Hamburg’s revolutionary council government in 1918: Dr. Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim. Laufenberg and Wolffheim had developed something of a following within the KPD as a result of their unique political vision, in which they argued not just for a proletarian council-state and for the end of capitalism, but for a working-class alliance with ‘productive’ members of the patriotic bourgeoisie and a comprehensive revolutionary war directed against the Western Powers and the Versailles Peace Treaty. This perspective (dubbed ‘National Bolshevism’ by their enemies within the communist movement) was most explicitly spelled out within a notorious essay which appeared on 3 November, 1919, in the wake of the Heidelberg Conference, titled: “Revolutionary People’s War or Counter-Revolutionary Civil War?” Laufenberg and Wolffheim hoped that this “address to the German proletariat” would help put their ideological stamp on the emerging council-communist movement, guiding it in a direction that was simultaneously revolutionary, national, and anti-capitalist; to that end their essay was republished in June 1920 and distributed on a wider scale in pamphlet form, from which copy the below translation has been made. Although the Hamburg branch of the KAPD was significantly shaped by their views, the Laufenberg-Wolffheim ideological line would ultimately prove too controversial for their comrades, and both men and their followers were forced to leave the KAPD following its second party conference in August 1920.

Revolutionary People’s War
or Counter-Revolutionary Civil War?
First Communist Address to the German Proletariat
A 1920 pamphlet by Hamburg communists
Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim

The present publication originally appeared as a supplement to the K.A.Z.¹ The debates over this address have led to a lively demand for the publication, which is completely out of print, and the publisher is meeting this need through the release of this new edition.

This address is undersigned: On behalf of the Hamburg branch of the Communist Party of Germany. In the wake of its publication, a lively discussion began in the Hamburg local group about the points of view expressed within the text, at the conclusion of which those persons who were determined to adhere to the specifically Spartacist policy, and who therefore rejected the content of the address, left the local group. Following this process of purification, the local group finally severed all relations with the Communist Party of Germany (Spartacus League).

The Authors
Hamburg, 1st June 1920.

The November uprising was an expression of popular outrage against the lost war. It was supported not only by the revolutionary sections of the working-class, but also by the army and by parts of the bourgeoisie. A proletarian policy would have immediately established ties and treaties with Soviet Russia; through the firm expansion of council rule, and through a wide-ranging socialization of the economy, it would have consolidated the forces of the country into a brazen hammer, ready to strike; it would have unleashed the full power of the revolution against the bourgeois democracies of the West by organizing a revolutionary resistance, by launching a Red Army, and by driving the social revolution across the occupied countries straight through to the borders of France and England. A proletarian policy would have made the Treaty of Versailles an impossibility from the outset. Although it is true that the proletariat aided the victory of the November Revolution, their policy was ultimately unsuccessful. Those tendencies triumphed which in essence pursued only one goal: peace at any cost via the accommodation of the German system of government to the wishes of Anglo-American high finance, in order to attain from the Entente, as far as was possible, an alleviation of the harsh peace terms which were in the offing. Continue reading →