German Exile Politics: The Social Democratic Executive Committee in the Nazi Era

By Lewis J. Edinger

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520345911

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German Exile Politics

German Exile Politics

The Social Democratic Executive Committee in the Nazi Era

LEWIS J. EDINGER

Berkeley and Los Angeles:

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON, ENGLAND

COPYRIGHT, 1956

BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 56-8473

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To My Mother

Preface

The figure of the political exile is an ancient one. Driven from his home by personal convictions or physical compulsion, he is neither an ordinary emigrant nor necessarily a refugee. Exile may be selfimposed or forced upon an individual by a hostile government, it may be due to foreign conquest or domestic upheavals.¹ Whether a voluntary or involuntary exile, whether driven out by a native ruler or an alien invader, what distinguishes the exile from the ordinary refugee and voluntary emigrant is, above all, a state of mind.

Hunted revolutionary or banished monarch, dissident intellectual or fugitive politician, the exile does not seek a new life and a new home in a foreign land. He considers his residence abroad strictly temporary and will not and cannot assimilate to a new environment. His thoughts and actions remain orientated toward the land he continues to call his own as he waits impatiently for the day when altered conditions will permit him to return home. His emotional and intellectual roots remain firmly imbedded among his own people—frequently to a greater degree than before his departure. In this sense, he ceases to be an exile as soon as he resolves to break the bonds that tie him to his native land and endeavors to start life anew beyond its borders.

Flowing over the frontiers, now in drops, now in streams, in various humours of fear, petulance, rage and hope,² political exiles are usually tragic figures. The history of ancient Greece and Rome abounds with tales of hapless outcasts, condemned to wander restlessly among alien peoples. The fuorusciti of Renaissance Italy, the Jacobites, the émigrés of the French Revolution—long is the list of the famous and the infamous condemned to live the bitter life of the exile. Names like Marx, Bakunin, and Kossuth remind us of the many would-be reformers and frustrated revolutionaries of nineteenth-century Europe who were compelled to live out their days as unhappy exiles in foreign lands. Relatively few exiles have lived to return home in triumph. Frustration, failure, and ultimate oblivion has been the fate of most.

National struggles for self-determination and the rise and aggressive expansion of totalitarian dictatorships have given new significance to the role of the exiles in modern politics. Not only may they constitute the sole organized opposition to a totalitarian rule in their country, but it has been suggested by James Burnham and others that political exiles may constitute a succession elite for a nation denuded of native alternative leaders by totalitarian purges.

Political exiles are usually the defeated, the victims of a more or less drastic convulsion in their homeland or a foreign conquest. In this age of democratic dogma and nationalism exiles opposing a native ruler—no less than those fighting an alien conqueror—denounced as traitors and cowardly fugitives by the government in power, tend to assert vehemently their claim to speak and represent the true will of their people. The element of legitimism has always played an important role in exile movements. While in the past exiles might claim to represent their people by virtue of divine sanction, the modern exile usually considers himself a patriot fighting for the liberation of his country from those he considers its unlawful oppressors. He endeavors to identify his cause with the national interest, not only to gain support at home and abroad, but to give himself the psychological support to survive the constant political and socioeconomic pressures pushing him to abdicate his exile status. Whether organized into governments-in-exile, national liberation committees, or foreign representations of suppressed political parties, modern exiles tend to insist that they represent their people’s legitimate interests—as against the counterclaims of the government in power at home, quislings, and rival exile groups.

When I began work on the following investigation, I was struck by the lack of systematic studies of political exiles and exile movements. These recurrent phenomena appear to have been singularly neglected by students of political and social behavior. Most literature on these subjects is of a highly impressionistic

nature, often disguised as history. Exiles and former exiles have here and there sought to defend and chronicle their activities for the sake of posterity, but usually such works have been polemical tracts written by embittered men, full of recriminations and personal quarrels. They afford a valuable insight into exile life, but fall far short of objective analysis. Those fortunate few who returned home to resume positions of prominence in the political life of their country have tended to erase or obscure in their writings the more disagreeable aspects of their life in exile. With a few notable exceptions, biographical studies of the exile phase in the lives of prominent men have treated it as a relatively unimportant prelude, interlude, or postlude. As for that vast majority of unhappy exiles who never achieved prominence, history-as-written has assigned them to oblivion. Unassimilated strangers in the countries of their refuge, they were vilified, scorned, and eventually forgotten. They were the losers and failures who attracted the attention of few writers. If they did not survive as diabolical schemers in propaganda tracts dictated by their victorious opponents at home, they were not long remembered. Ending their days as tragic-comic characters, the ghosts of the past, their dreams and ideals went to their graves with them.

This neglect of the subject of political exiles is particularly noticeable in the writings of American and British social scientists. No doubt, this limited interest may in part be traced to the fact that the phenomenon is outside the modern political experience of the Anglo-Saxon countries. But even those scholars investigating political behavior in areas where political exiles have played a more prominent role in recent times—not only the European nations, but Latin America and Asia as well—have shown little interest in the subject. Admittedly, the complexities of factional disputes and ideological differences among political exiles, the all too frequent hopelessness of their cause, the petty bickering and personal vendettas tend to discourage objective investigation. It is not a pleasant subject, yet it would seem to be worthy of more scholarly consideration than it has received heretofore.

The following case study endeavors to describe the activities of a group of modern political exiles. It traces the attempt of the exiled remnants of the leadership of a once powerful and disciplined mass party to organize from abroad a revolutionary movement against a totalitarian dictatorship. A secondary objective is to make a contribution to the political history of modern Germany in general and that of the German Social Democratic party in particular. Recognizing the unique aspects of this particular case study, it is my hope that it may constitute a contribution to a more systematic investigation of the anatomy of exile movements and the sociopolitical behavior of modern exiles. Incidentally, it may also suggest further studies concerning the role of exiles as alternative and succession leaders in this age of totalitarian dictatorships.

The character of the Nazi dictatorship largely determined the character of the anti-Nazi exile movement. In accordance with our definition of political exile, the overwhelming number of refugees from the Third Reich did not fall into this category. The majority were non-Aryan refugees from anti-Semitic persecution seeking permanent settlement in other countries. No more than about onesixth of the so-called anti-Nazi emigration, at most 50,000 persons, were exiles, in the true sense of the word.

In terms of numbers as well as organized activities against the Third Reich the exiled remnants of the German labor movement constituted the most important element within this latter group. Former functionaries and journalists of the Social Democratic and Communist parties and their various splinter groups, they represented largely an elite of the labor movement of the Weimar Republic. In addition to parliamentary deputies and prominent leaders of the two major labor parties, the anti-Nazi exile movement included activists and lower functionaries of these as well as minor components of the left wing of the German political configuration prior to the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship. Most of them were involuntary refugees who crossed the frontiers in order to evade arrest and death at the hands of the vengeful Nazis. Even where exile was initially self-imposed, it sooner or later became involuntary. As Thomas Mann wrote in his famous letter to the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Bonn in December, 193 6, his had become an exile which it would be euphemistic to call voluntary since if I had remained in Germany or gone back there I should probably not be alive today.³ Apart from a few prominent writers and intellectuals, such as Mann and the theologian Paul Tillich, exiles not belonging to the left-wing groups played a very minor role in the anti-Nazi exile movement. That relatively small minority formerly affiliated with center and rightwing groups contributed little or nothing to the organized activities of the political exile movement. A few persons, such as Otto Strasser, took an active part, but there were no political organizations on the right and center to compare with those on the left.⁴

The political life of the anti-Nazi exile movement thus revolved primarily around the various left-wing groups. Among the most important of these was the exiled executive committee of the German Social Democratic party, the activities of which form the core around which the following study has been built.

To appreciate the importance which ideological considerations played in the activities of anti-Nazi exiles, it should be remembered that these have always occupied a far more significant role in German, and particularly left-wing German politics than in the United States. To attain some perspective among the welter of doctrinal and ideological arguments and to allow the forest to be distinguished from the trees, individual views, which sometimes differed in degree, have been grouped together as representative of some particular faction or school of thought. Also, inadequate or unreliable data have sometimes made it difficult, if not impossible, to be always as accurate and definitive as I would liked to have been. Thus, it proved impossible to ascertain the exact size of the various groups and the extent of their support both inside and outside Germany. Such claims as were made for propagandistic reasons proved to be quite untrustworthy, while the true figures—if known—were never made public.

As I have indicated in a bibliographical note at the end of this study, my source material has not been as adequate as I would have wished it to be. Many of the covert and overt publications of the exiles were lost or destroyed in the course of their repeated migrations. Other data, poorly preserved by their custodians, have not survived the ravages of time. To my knowledge, none of the leading participants in the German anti-Nazi exile movement has published an account of his experiences. An understandable desire to forgive and forget the disputes of the past has apparently silenced many survivors, particularly those who are today once again active in the German Social Democratic party.

Whenever and wherever I could secure the cooperation of former anti-Nazi exiles I sought to supplement information gathered from other sources through lengthy and repeated interviews. I made every effort to check against other sources the information I was given and to eliminate such as I believed unreliable. For their invaluable help, I am particularly indebted to Friedrich Stampfer, Paul Hertz, Paul Hagen, Erich Rinner, Marie Juchacz, Hans Hirschfeld, Gerhart H. Seger, Rudolf Katz, Rudolf Leeb, Otto Bauer, and Hilde Walter. I remember with special gratitude the assistance of three men who have since passed away: Emil Kirschmann, Wilhelm Sollmann, and Alexander Stein.

I am also indebted to Erich Matthias, whose excellent study Sozialdemokratie und Nation provided me with some data not previously available. This work, published as I was about to conclude my own investigation, uses a good deal of the same material, but for a different purpose. Matthias is primarily concerned with the evolution of German Socialist thought in exile, with particular reference to the concepts of state and nation. His is primarily an Ideengeschicbte in the tradition of the German historian Friedrich Meinecke, while I have sought to examine the sociopolitical aspects of the exile movement and to study its anatomy.

In conclusion I would like to thank all those who assisted me in the preparation of this study, particularly Joseph Buttinger, who permitted me the use of his excellent library; Boris Nikolaevski of the Labor Archives of the Rand School for the Social Sciences; Mr. Maurice Goldbloom of the American Association for a Democratic Germany, and Mrs. Agnes F. Peterson of the Hoover Library. For their careful reading of the manuscript in various stages of its development and for their trenchant criticism I am immensely indebted to Professors John H. Wuorinen and Henry L. Roberts of Columbia University, Professor Carl Landauer of the University of California, Dr. Edith Muir Link, and my editor, Maxwell E. Knight. Mere acknowledgment barely does justice to my wife’s yeoman service. I am also grateful for permission to make use of an article I wrote for the April, 1953, issue of World Politics and to quote several verses from Heinrich Heine’s, Germany, A Winter’s Tale.

(English version by Herman Salinger, copyright 1944 by A. A. Wyn, Inc. [formerly L. B. Fischer Publishing Corp.], New York, N.Y.)

L. J. E.

Montgomery, Alabama

November, 1955

Contents

Preface

Contents

Chapter 1 Prologue

Chapter 2 Organization

Chapter 3 Reorientation

Chapter 4 The Kyffhäuser

Chapter 5 The United-Front Episode

Chapter 6 Generals Without An Army

Chapter 7 Finale

Chapter 8 Epilogue

Chapter 9 Conclusion: Revolution by Remote Control

Appendix I

Appendix II

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Chapter 1

Prologue

In this historical hour we German Social Democrats solemnly pledge our allegiances to the principles of humanitarianism and justice, freedom, and socialism. No enabling law gives you the might to destroy ideas that are eternal. … We salute the persecuted and the oppressed, we salute our friends throughout the Reich. Their constancy and loyalty call forth admiration. The courage of their conviction, their unbroken confidence assure a brighter future.—Otto Wels in the German Reichstag, March 23, 1933.

The Legacy

On June 23, 1933, the government of Adolf Hitler outlawed the German Social Democratic party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), the S.P.D. With a single blow, willed the leader of the New Germany, its seventy-year existence was to come to an end. Hereafter it was to be remembered only as a loathsome cancer that had threatened to destroy the nation, but had been removed in the nick of time in the national revolution.

For four decades, until 1932, Germany’s largest party, and for fourteen years the principal advocate and defender of the democratic Weimar Republic, the S.P.D. had been the most powerful and prominent representative of evolutionary socialism in the world. Marxism, which in the first few years after the founding of the party in 1875 had been of relatively minor importance, became official doctrine as a result of Bismarck’s endeavors to suppress the growing movement betweeen 1878 and 1890. The determinist, eschatological doctrine of the class struggle provided the party leaders with the psychological cement to weld their supporters into a solid, militant opposition, deaf to the threats as well as the bribes of the Iron Chancellor. When in 1890 the S.P.D. emerged from semilegality as the largest German party, its leaders credited Marxism with the greatest share in their victory over Bismarck. Economic determinism, the class struggle, and the inevitable proletarian revolution became the central elements of the party programs before 1914, and the efforts of the leading Social Democratic theorists were directed toward reconciling Marxist theory with the tactics employed by the strategists in building the S.P.D. into a mass reform party. For more than two decades the Social Democrats sought to reconcile their social-revolutionary and internationalist professions with their drive for political power and reform in imperial Germany. The outbreak of the First World War seemed to resolve this dichotomy between theory and tactics as the S.P.D. split into a patriotic social reform faction, the Majority Social Democrats, and a minority of pacifists and Marxists, the Independent Social Democrats, who opposed the imperialist war. However, after the war the new cleavage in the German labor movement between totalitarian communism and democratic socialism led to the breakup of the Independents and the return of the so-called Centrist Marxists to the S.P.D. Once more, the party strove to reconcile the Marxism of its official theory with its reformist activities, a task which seemed entirely feasible to the postwar leadership of the S.P.D.

After the S.P.D. had emerged from its heroic age of suppression under Bismarck, a new type of functionary replaced the veterans of that period. The party no longer needed daring heroes, but capable officials, trustworthy treasurers, skilled parliamentarians, and clever journalists. Solid, dependable, and efficient negotiators, sensitive far more to the sentiments of the broad voting public than of the Marxist theorists, this new generation of leaders gradually moved from minor posts in party and trade unions into the Reichstag and the all-powerful executive committee. The party split in the First World War placed these men in complete control of the S.P.D., and the collapse of the imperial system in 1918 unexpectedly put them at the head of their defeated country. Their plans for a gradual reformation of the monarchy were shattered as power was thrust into their inexperienced hands. Uncertain regarding its own course of action, but determined to preserve order until a popularly elected assembly could express the will of the people, the Social Democratic leadership refused to sanction a proletarian revolution and crushed its radical advocates by force. When the elections of 1919 yielded the S.P.D. only 38 per cent of the popular vote, its leaders formed a coalition government with the nonSocialist parties. This Weimar Coalition drafted an ultrademocratic constitution and made peace at Versailles.

Though complete power had been theirs for only a few weeks, these Social Democratic leaders considered themselves the principal founding fathers and guardians of the new democratic state. This claim was accepted by its opponents who made the S.P.D. the principal target of their attacks. Throughout the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic, social democracy had to contend with the undying hostility of the Communists, who accused it of treason to the proletariat, as well as extreme nationalists, who charged that it had betrayed the fatherland. At the same time, repeated threats against the republican state led the Social Democratic leadership on numerous occasions to agree to political as well as economic actions by non-Socialist governments which were fundamentally distasteful to the leaders, yet seemed justifiable to them as the lesser evil in comparison with a dictatorship of the extreme right or left.

In foreign affairs, the S.P.D. leaders loyally supported a policy of peace and reconciliation with Germany’s former enemies and claimed as their own Stresemann’s policy of fulfilling the terms of Versailles in order to achieve their eventual revision. This Realpolitik came under increasingly severe attack, not only from Nazis and Communists, but from critics within the ranks of the S.P.D. itself. But the national leadership insisted to the end that such sacrifices as they agreed to make in the name of the S.P.D. were necessary to save the Weimar state.

The Social Democratic leaders maintained that the democratic Weimar Republic formed the essential basis for the Socialist reconstruction of German society. The trend toward increasing state control of social and economic life was welcomed by them as a development in the right direction. The same was said of a series of social-welfare measures, such as the Old Age Pension Act of 1923 and the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1927, which were passed under Social Democratic pressure or auspices on the national, state, and municipal level. As before the war, the party theorists sought to reconcile reformist practice with Marxist theory. The emergence of the German Communist party (K.P.D.), with its claim to a monopoly on Marxist ideology, as a rather successful rival for the support of the workers, compelled the S.P.D. to adhere to its Marxist heritage, though many Marxist revolutionary tenets no longer fitted the party’s changed role in the state. While the party leaders accepted and defended a state which was not Socialist, the party theorists supported this position by claiming that the democratic republic was the only possible framework for a peaceful class struggle at the polls which eventually would bring a proletarian majority to power in accordance with the laws of dialectical materialism.

Though the role of the party had changed drastically after the war, the seasoned trade-union secretaries and party functionaries who led it during the Weimar period retained the outlook and practices which they had come to esteem in prewar days. Accustomed to peaceful bargaining for political and economic advantages, they were convinced that Social Democrats owed their gains under the empire to realistic, but law-abiding tactics. The Weimar Constitution expressed their faith in liberal democracy and the innate rationality and goodness of man. The emasculated Marxism of Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Rudolf Hilferding seemed to the leaders of the Social Democratic party entirely reconcilable with liberal humanism. Firm believers in the perfectibility of man and unlimited progress, they credited the mature German with sufficient good sense and social consciousness to understand, once properly enlightened, that capitalism was not only economically inefficient, but morally repugnant and the source of insecurity and irrationality. Germany, as an advanced civilization, would show the evolutionary socialist way to universal peace and happiness. Within the framework of the democratic state the Social Democratic leaders expected to gather around disciplined and socially conscious workers a proletarian majority. The assumption of power by this proletariat would be a democratic process and would come in time in accordance with the laws of economic determinism. The peaceful class struggle was believed to be a matter of educating the electorate to support the Social Democratic party and extending economic and social democracy through the welfare state until a Social Democratic government could supervise the transition to the classless millennium.¹

The administrators and parliamentarians who led the S.P.D. considered collegial leadership by a little-known executive committee more democratic than the monocratic rule which August Bebel had exercised before the war. Mature, reasonable, and sober men were declared to be of greater value to the movement than charismatic leaders and spellbinders who appealed to the irrational man. Thus Hermann Müller, party chairman from 1919 to 1930 and twice German chancellor, was approvingly characterized by one of his close associates as a fanatical anti-illusionist.² The cause, not personalities, was thought to be of principal importance. The proportional-representation list system assured such leaders safe seats in the Reichstag where it was believed that experts in parliamentary maneuvering and social and economic legislation were needed more than brilliant orators.

However, the postwar generation of German voters failed to live up to the optimistic expectations of the Social Democratic leaders who had insisted in 1919 that the voting age be lowered from 25 to 20 years. A growing number of German youths rejected liberal humanism and democratic socialism as old-fashioned and incapable of curing what they conceived to be a sick society. From the early turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, through inflation and into the depression, a romantic and collectivist rejection of what they called the tyranny of materialism and the conflict of selfish interest parties ruled by machine bosses, led these young Germans to the extremist movements. Nazis and Communists wooed them with the image of a new, collectivist order, free of the misery, exploitation, and injustice which was attributed to the Weimar System. To the Social Democratic leaders, men in their fifties who had grown up in an entirely different intellectual and social climate, these sentiments appeared to be irrational and childish, and they did their best to discourage and disparage them. Preferring the backing of men and women who shared their own outlook on life, the Social Democratic leaders were not overly disturbed by their failure to find favor with the younger generation.³ Until 1930, the overwhelming majority of the latter did not express their views at the polls. That year, the postwar generation of German voters turned out in force to vote for the extremists and give Hitler his first great electoral victory.⁴

The economic and political crisis of the early ’thirties led certain elements in the S.P.D., most of them intellectual, to demand changes in its strategy and tactics. A left wing of radical Marxists wanted the party to wage a militant class struggle, possibly in league with the Communists, and bitterly denounced the party leaders for cooperating with the bourgeoisie.⁵ On the other hand, a number of young reformists rejected revolutionary Marxism as well as the democratic liberalism of the party leadership. They demanded that the party appeal to youth and to the truly national Socialist elements among the Nazis by capturing their imagination with a dynamic, democratic, patriotic, Socialist program of its own. They proposed to outdo Hitler in the realm of propaganda by substituting emotional appeals and manipulative techniques for the logical and rational approach of the party leaders. The leadership was declared to be superannuated and asked to yield to new forces that have not yet been worn out.⁶ The party leaders refused to make any concessions. They were contemptuous of the extremists’ propaganda techniques which they held might be of interest to psychiatrists, but not to politicians. The left wingers were thought to skirt dangerously close to the party’s bitterest enemies, the Communists. Suggestions that Social Democrats yield to the nationalist and irrational passions which gripped the distracted supporters of the Nazis only alarmed the older party leaders. The young reformists were told that they placed far too much importance on youth, emotions, and irrational appeals. Like the rest of the younger generation, they were considered rather erratic and unstable, all too eager to seize the helm and do away with ideas and tactics which had stood the test of time.⁷ In complete control of the powerful party organization, the leadership succeeded in denying to its critics the more important posts and silenced them by enforcing party discipline or expelling them. The principal party positions did not change hands throughout the Republican era. Younger men who aspired to them were told to follow in their elders’ footsteps, gradually working their way up the hierarchy by loyal service to the party and its leaders.⁸

The leaders of the S.P.D. attributed the Nazi and Communist electoral gains of the early ’thirties to mass unemployment and general misery caused by the economic crisis which had begun in 1930. Their hopes were fixed upon world economic recovery, the upturn of the business cycle in Germany, and therewith a return to political sanity and stability. The party leadership conceived its task, in the words of Otto Braun, as helping to steer the heavily listing ship of state between the Scylla of fascism and the Charybdis of bolshevism into the calm sea of economic reconstruction and political reform.⁹ Accordingly, the S.P.D. tolerated the reactionary Brüning government as the lesser evil and supported Field Marshal von Hindenburg in his contest for the presidency with Hitler in 1932. It was no love match for either partner, wrote Friedrich Stampfer, but a marriage of convenience.¹⁰ This temporizing "Real-politik'‘ was dealt a tremendous blow when, soon after his reelection, von Hindenburg dismissed Chancellor Brüning and replaced him with von Papen, who, in a bloodless coup, immediately seized control of the S.P.D. stronghold, Prussia. The state’s government, led by the Social Democrats Braun and Severing, yielded under protest and took its case into court. The S.P.D. leaders declared that they could not sanction overt resistance to the so-called Rape of Prussia since such action would lead to a blood bath among their followers and the annihilation of the last mainstay of German democracy, a million-member Social Democratic movement, supported by seven million voters. When later there were some signs of an approaching upturn in the business cycle and when, moreover, the election of November, 1932, brought a decline in Nazi strength, a majority of the S.P.D. leaders apparently gained new hope that reason was about to return to the political scene and assure the survival of the democratic system.¹¹

The Road into Exile

The appointment of Adolf Hitler to the German chancellorship on January 30, 1933, presented the leaders of social democracy with a grave challenge as the new Nationalist and National Socialist coalition ministry consisted of avowed enemies of the Weimar Republic and its defenders. Apparently they did not quite know what to expect next.¹² Rudolf Breitscheid, leader of the S.P.D. Reichstag delegation told a meeting of the party leaders that the Hitler government represented the last vain effort of monopoly capitalism to stave off the inevitable victory of democratic socialism. The reactionaries have played their last card by calling out their fascist mercenaries, he maintained.¹⁸ A manifesto drafted at the meeting appeared over the signature of the principal party leaders on the front pages of all Social Democratic papers throughout Germany the following morning. The enemies of the working class … have united in a cartel of reactionary big capitalist and agrarian interests to wage joint battle against the working class, it announced. We stand ready to use every means to ward off any attack upon the political and social rights of the people, guaranteed to them by the Constitution and by law. Any attempt by the government to pervert or violate the Constitution will be met by the utmost resistance of the working class and all liberty-loving people.¹⁴ The leaders of the General Confederation of Labor and the Reichsbanner, the Republican paramilitary organization, informed the S.P.D. leaders, If you call upon us we shall be ready. The working class, announced Franz Künstler, leader of the Berlin S.P.D., is ready to mount the barricades to defend its constitutional rights.¹⁵ However, Hermann Göring assured his cabinet colleagues that the Social Democrats would mount nothing more than the rostrum of the Reichstag.¹⁶

The majority of our supporters expected overt resistance, Paul Löbe was to recall, but the leaders were convinced that the blood bath which was certain to follow would be utterly futile.¹¹ Their efforts to receive assurances from the army leadership that it would resist a Hitler dictatorship by force of arms were unsuccessful.¹⁸ The party leaders feared that Hitler was only waiting for a legal pretext to use the power of the state to crush the S.P.D. He had been appointed legitimately and constitutionally by the chief of state as the leader of the largest party in the legislature; to rise against him on the first night would make the rebels the technical violators of the Constitution they wanted to defend.¹⁸ Not only did the S.P.D. leaders expect to be beaten in such a contest, but, as Stampfer wrote later, a yearning for bloody adventures was completely alien to them. The Social Democratic party had for decades believed in peaceful evolution, rational judgment, [and] non-violent compromise, and extraparliamentary action would have been a denial of its true nature.²⁰

The S.P.D. leadership announced that it would leave to the new government all responsibility for starting a conflict in which both sides would abandon the normal weapons of political action. It refused to be the first to discard constitutional and legal means. A Communist call for united proletarian action and a general strike against the government were promptly rejected. The party and trade-union leaders recalled that the Communists had sought many times to use a united front to take over the S.P.D. and the General Confederation of Labor and received the appeal with utter distrust, product of bitter experience of years of conflict between the two proletarian parties. They feared that either the Communists or the Nazis would assume control of the Social Democratic workers as soon as a general strike was declared. Undiminished Communist attacks upon the social fascist leaders did not help to dispel their suspicions. Utmost restraint despite Nazi provocations appeared essential. The leadership conceded that a general strike would be a legal weapon and a hundred times justified to defend the liberties of the people and the social and political rights of the working class, but maintained that tactical common sense advised keeping this weapon in reserve so that the decisive moment will not find the workers already exhausted. Both S.P.D. and trade-union leaders warned that a general strike at this moment would simply be firing the ammunition of the working class foolishly into the air, and asked their followers not to allow themselves to be misled into precipitate and, therefore, harmful, isolated actions. Coolness, resolution, discipline, and, above all, unity, were declared to be the watchwords of the hour.²¹ On February i the government announced that it would seek a legitimate majority in the Reichstag where it now controlled only 35 per cent of the seats. The chamber was dissolved and new elections ordered for March 5, the earliest possible date.

At the outset of the electoral campaign the Vorwärts, the leading Social Democratic daily, stressed that it did not expect Germany to become another Italy. The coalition government appeared to many to be but slightly more to the right than its immediate predecessors , those of Papen and Schleicher, which had been labeled fascist by the Communists and reactionary by the Social Democrats. The three-to-one preponderance of conservative Nationalists in the cabinet, their close connection with Hindenburg, incumbent of the powerful presidency, and with the kingpin in German politics, the army, the oaths which the ministers had taken to uphold the Weimar Constitution, and the contempt which army and president were believed to feel for the Nazis, all reassured the Social Democratic leaders. Internal friction within the government were thought to be working against Hitler. They were expecting a strong conservative reaction, not a national revolution.²² The reactionary capitalist Hugenberg was depicted in the Vorwärts as the real master of a shaky coalition. The campaign was described as a class struggle between the Social Democratic workers, and monopoly capitalism and reactionary feudalism. By a generous use of Marxist symbols and slogans a strong effort was made to encourage the faint of heart who feared a Nazi victory and to prevent the defection of the impatient to the Communists. On February 2 the Social Democratic election manifesto proclaimed:

Defend yourselves, defend your independence as citizens against your oppressors, against the Upper Ten, against the miserable minority of barons, against the capitalists; break their economic and political power! Fight with us for the expropriation of the landowner and the division of the land among the peasants and the agricultural laborers! Fight with us for the socialization of heavy industry, for the construction of a Socialist- planned economy.²³

This seditious manifesto brought a three-day suspension of the Social Democratic press in Prussia, the state which comprised three-fourths of the population. It was the opening gun of the Nazi campaign, which was to give Germany a taste of the sugar-coated terror which was later to become familiar to the entire world. In the face of tremendous government propaganda, supported by every means of modern mass appeal, the strength of the opposition was sapped by keeping it in a constant state of insecurity and alarm. The radio, monopolized by the government, the vast Hugenberg press-and-film combine, and the Nazi press, handbills, and speakers bombarded the public with reassuring promises of stability and security if the coalition got its majority. Simultaneously, the unofficial terrorism of the storm troopers sought to increase fear and insecurity and to intimate what might happen if Hitler did not win. The Marxist parties were its particular targets. Not a day passed without murderous attacks upon their supporters. Social Democratic rallies were broken up, printing plants and campaign headquarters wrecked in an effort to intimidate the S.P.D. and the voters.²⁴

Officially, the government professed ignorance of these acts and limited itself strictly to constitutional and lawful means to further its cause. Under a series of presidential decrees to maintain the public order and safety in accordance with the Constitution, it banned all criticism of its members by the press, prohibited or dissolved opposition rallies, raided the homes of anti-Nazis without warrant, and generally infringed upon constitutional liberties. On February 6 a decree for the restoration of normal conditions of government in Prussia stripped the legitimate government of that state, led by Social Democrats, of the few powers which the Supreme Court had left in its hands as a result of the court fight following Papen’s seizure of Prussia in July, 1932. The Social Democrats declared that Hitler had flagrantly violated the Constitution by arrogating for the national government powers reserved to the state. But an intricate legal question "did