Anti-Nazi Germans

Anti-Nazi Germans is a volume in two parts: first, Merilyn Moos’s ‘Enemies of the Nazi State from within the working class movement’, then Steve Cushion’s ‘German volunteers in the French Resistance’. Ian Birchall provides a Preface. The cover says ‘It is a commonly held myth that there was little resistance in Germany to the Nazis except for one or two well known examples’, which the book explains as being the difference between the White Rose movement and the Edelweiss Pirates. The political parties themselves, according to Moos, had put up little resistance and on the Nazi coming to power had been suppressed very quickly. Far more significant, and greater in numbers than has been realised, were anti-Nazi activities by KPD members, SPD members, trade unionists, Trotskyists, or simply people with a conscience.

George Orwell was one of few people who realised the significance of opposition in Germany, yet struggled to make clear the difficulties such opposition forces faced to people who seemed willfully blind. As late as the ‘Pacifism and the War’ controversy, published in Partisan Review in early autumn 1942 (that is, after three years of war), Orwell still had to spell out the issues:-

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist… Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading)

Throughout her work Merilyn Moos includes biographies of anti-Nazis. The experience of Caesar Horn is typical:

Horn was arrested in July 1944, and beheaded on 19 March 1945

or Edgar Andre:

Andre was beheaded on 4 November 1936

or Alexander Schwab:

He and most other members [of the Red Fighters Group] were executed in 1943

What Orwell and the Allies may not have known by the autumn of 1942 was the number of extra-judicial killings of opposition forces that were taking place, murders in the concentration camps in Germany itself. Moos gives biographies of Gustav Bruhn and Herbert Tschape, among others, who died in that way. Moos emphasises ‘the working class movement’ in her title because she claims that it was only after three years (1933-1936) of violent suppression of political and class enemies that the Nazis could begin their racial atrocities.

In his Preface Ian Birchall mentions George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘control of the present and future depends on control of the past’ and later says ‘Germany was in no way a united entity’. He is correct, but interesting as Anti-Nazi Germans may be it still only deals with part of the opposition. For instance, in Partisan Review, where the Pacifism controversy appeared, Orwell had earlier mentioned other forces. In his London Letter dated January 1 1942 he mentions the struggle between two groups of exiles:

The Austrian monarchists have fallen foul of the German left-wingers, whom they accuse of being pan-Germans in disguise

Some of the opposition, though Orwell does not mention them, were even worse: former friends of Hitler such as Ernst Hanfstangl, or the other half of the Nazi party, the surviving Strasserites. Otto Strasser, like the Duke of Windsor, went into exile on Bermuda. There is much to be written yet, about those who opposed Hitler, and the threat they were to pose later.

This is a large book of 307 pages. Only one error stands out: Len Crome is confused with his brother-in-law Jonny Huttner: it was Huttner who was a concentration camp prisoner, though he survived the war. Crome’s parents and sister were murdered in an aktion in Latvia after the Nazi invasion.

The struggle against Nazism was rarely one of Left against Right. The armies who fought against it, though, and the underground who resisted, were largely made up of working class men and women. It was a recognition of this that made George Orwell, when writing of home events, emphasise the workman’s cottage and the mass membership of the Home Guard. Anti-Nazi Germans will help readers understand why Orwell decided to fight on behalf of – as he put it – ‘My country, right or left‘.

Anti-Nazi Germans by Merilyn Moos and Steve Cushion (Community Languages in association with the Socialist History Society, ISBN-13: 9781916342309)