Historian Timothy W Ryback (
Hitler’s First Victims)
presents a well-written and mainly narrative account of Hitler’s rise to power.
The book has generally been well received, although most of the praise for the
book has been somewhat shallow and wide of the mark. A deeper, more objective
account from the Marxist movement on the rise of Hitlerite Fascism is needed.
One example of this superficial tone is provided by arch-right-winger
Timothy Synder, who commented, “How does a flawed republic become something
entirely different? We know how the Nazi regime ended, but we think too little
about how it began. This admirable account shows us how fragile and avoidable those
beginnings were and helps us to reflect upon them”.
One undoubted strength of the book is that it destroys the
myth that Hitler came to power through democratic means. Ryback presents a detailed
examination of the 1932 events that led Hitler to power. Hitler came to power
despite the Nazi's vote declining and the party being in disarray and heavy
financial trouble. The party was running out of cash. Ryback writes, “In Berlin,
10,000 out of the city’s 16,000 stormtroopers mutinied over shortage of funds.
Three Hitler Youth leaders in Halle had their homes vandalised, not by Social
Democrats or Communists but by their members. A dispute over loyalty oaths in a
Munich café led to a melee with broken table legs.”
In the parliamentary elections of June 1932, Hitler’s party polled
13.5 million votes, over 37 per cent of the total. But in November of the same
year, its vote fell to 11.7 million, 33 per cent. Ryback believes this caused a
deep crisis for the Nazis. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels said of the election
debacle, “ Every update is another defeat. It’s a disaster.” The electoral
defeat led Gregor Strasser, a leading member of the Nazi party, to resign, citing
Hitler’s inability to enter into a coalition with other right-wing forces. Gottfried
Feder also resigned. Feder developed the reactionary theory of “Jewish finance
capitalism”.
Despite having the word National socialist in their title,
the Nazis were nothing of the sort. Ryback shows they needed a significant group
of businessmen and generals to give Hitler power. Most of Germany’s Prominent
elite businessmen, including General Kurt von Schleicher,
were involved in handing power to Hitler. Schleicher called Hitler a “modest,
orderly man who only wants what is best”.
The right-wing media owner Alfred Hugenberg
also sought to bring the Nazis to power. Hugenberg had a huge media empire. He
was also the head of a right-wing party. His Telegraph Union network published
1,600 newspapers. Once, Hugenberg stupidly remarked, “If Hitler sits in the
saddle, I will have the whip.”
Ryback’s book joins a growing genre that highlights the
relationship between the Nazis and big business. Nazi Billionaires by David De
Jong, The Unfathomable Ascent by Peter Ross Range, and Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, to name
just a few excellent books on the subject. Not all historians share this belief
in the connection between big business and Fascism. In his book German Big
Business and the Rise of Hitler, the American historian Henry Ashby Turner goes
to considerable lengths to demonstrate that finance from big business was not
decisive in the rise and growth of the Nazi Party.
Historian Daniel Goldhagen goes even further than Turner, writing,
“The Nazi German revolution was an unusual revolution in that, domestically, it
was being realised—the repression of the political left in the first few years
notwithstanding—without massive coercion and violence. By and large, it was a
peaceful revolution willingly acquiesced to by the German people. Domestically,
the Nazi German revolution was, on the whole, consensual.
Marxist writer David North replied, “Until I read those
words, I had been inclined to look upon Goldhagen as a rather sad and somewhat
pathetic figure, a young man whose study of the fate of European Jewry had left
him intellectually, if not emotionally, traumatised. But in this paragraph,
something very ugly emerges. Except for its treatment of the Jews, the Nazi
“revolution”—Goldhagen does not use the word “counterrevolution”—was a rather
benign affair. His reference to the “repression of the political left” is
inserted between hyphens, suggesting it was not too big a deal.
The claim that the Nazi conquest of power was “a peaceful
revolution willingly acquiesced to by the German people” is a despicable
falsification. What Goldhagen refers to as the “repression of the political
left” consisted, in fact, of the physical destruction of mass socialist parties
that represented the hopes and aspirations of millions of workers and the best
elements of the German intelligentsia for a just and decent world. German
socialism was not only a political movement: it was, for all its internal
contradictions, both the inspirer and expression of a flowering of human
intellect and culture. Its destruction required the barbaric methods in which
the Nazis excelled. The burning of books, the flight of scientists, artists and
writers from Germany, the establishment of the Dachau concentration camp and
the incarceration of thousands of left-wing political opponents, the
illegalisation of all political parties other than the National Socialists, the
liquidation of the trade unions—these were, in the first months of the Nazi
regime, the principal achievements of its “peaceful revolution.”
Although big business was mistaken in its belief that it
could control Hitler, it saw the Nazis as a potent force in which to smash the
workers movement. Other businessmen soon followed suit, such as steel
manufacturer Fritz Thyssen, who significantly funded the Nazis and encouraged
their rule.
These businessmen knew exactly what they were doing and what
Hitler would do. Hitler gave them the green light to carry out a long-standing
aim of wiping the worker's movement off the face of the earth and carrying out
the wholesale murder of its leaders and cadre. The culmination of this plan was
the industrialised state murder of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of
Roma people.
Like many other books on this subject, the central weakness
of Ryback’s book is his deliberate disinterest in examining objectively and
deeply the state of class relationships that preceded Hitler’s rise to power. Although
Fascist rule was an opportunity for big business, smashing the working class
was also an incredible gamble. As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote,
“The big bourgeoisie likes fascism as little as a man with aching molars likes
to have his teeth pulled.”
The betrayal by Stalinism And Social democracy made destroying
the worker's movement a certainty. Again, Ryback has an almost pathological
disinterest in examining the betrayal of the worker's movement by Social
democracy and Stalinism, which allowed Hitler to come to power without a shot
being fired. This betrayal is all the more galling since, as Ryback correctly
states, the Communist Party and the Social Democrats both had armed militia
that not only outnumbered the German army but had more than adequate access to
arms to smash the Fascists. From a political standpoint, the most pressing need
was to act on Leon Trotsky’s call for a united Front.
He wrote, “The trouble is that in the Central Committee of
the Communist Party there are many frightened opportunists. They have heard
that opportunism consists of a love for blocs, and that is why they are against
blocs. They do not understand the difference between, let us say, a
parliamentary agreement and an ever-so-modest agreement for struggle in a
strike or defence of workers’ printshops against fascist bands. Election
agreements and parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary
party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advantage of the Social
Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are
always useful to the revolutionary party. The Anglo-Russian Committee was an
impermissible bloc of two leaderships on one common political platform, vague,
deceptive, binding no one to any action. The maintenance of this bloc at the
time of the British General Strike, when the General Council assumed the role
of strikebreaker, signified, on the part of the Stalinists, a policy of
betrayal.
No common platform with the Social Democracy or with the
leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, or placards!
March separately, but strike together! Agree only on how to strike, whom to
strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be concluded even with the
devil himself, his grandmother, and Noske and Grezesinsky. On one condition, not to bind one’s hands. It
is necessary, without any delay, finally to elaborate a practical system of
measures – not with the aim of merely “exposing” the Social Democracy (before
the Communists), but with the aim of actual struggle against Fascism. The
question of factory defence organisations, of unhampered activity on the part
of the factory councils, the inviolability of the workers’ organisations and
institutions, the question of arsenals that may be seized by the fascists, the
question of measures in the case of an emergency, that is, of the coordination
of the actions of the Communist and the Social Democratic divisions in the
struggle, etc., etc., must be dealt with in this program.
A practical program of agreements with the Social Democratic
workers was proposed by us as far back as September 1930 (The Turn in the
Comintern and the German Situation), that is, a year and a quarter ago. What
has the leadership undertaken in this direction? Next to nothing. The Central
Committee of the Communist Party has taken up everything except its direct
task. How much valuable, irretrievable time has been lost! Not much time is
left. The program of action must be strictly practical, objective, to the
point, without any of those artificial “claims,” without any reservations, so
that every average Social Democratic worker can say to himself. What the
Communists propose is completely indispensable for the struggle against Fascism.
On this basis, we must pull the Social Democratic workers along with us by our
example and criticise their leaders who will inevitably serve as a check and a
brake. Only in this way is victory possible.”
Ryback’s response in the book to the call for a united front
exposes his class outlook and his hostility to a Marxist historical perspective.
He mentions Clara Zetkin's speech in which she calls for forming a united front.
Ryback rudely describes her 1932 speech as a “tedious polemic.” Other
historians have echoed Ryback’s hostility to a Marxist understanding of the
rise of Fascism over the last few decades.
As the Marxist writer Nick Beams reflects in his article Imperialism
and the Political Economy of the Holocaust, “ When I was a student in the
1960s, it was widely understood that the coming to power of fascist regimes was
a direct response by the capitalist class to the dangers posed by the mass
socialist workers’ movement, the most powerful of which had existed in Germany.
During the past 25 years, this understanding has come under sustained attack.
He continues: An article published at the end of 2005 by the
British historian Michael Burleigh in the right-wing Weekly Standard noted:
“When I started teaching the history of modern Germany 20 years ago, it was
still obligatory to devote considerable attention to Marxisant attempts to pin
the blame for Fascism on this or that element of big business. Much of the
literature was by scholars of a leftist disposition, while classes on Fascism
tended to attract a disproportionate number of students from the radical
fringes. Things have moved on since then; it is more common nowadays to discuss
Nazism as a species of a ‘racial state’, or even of being a surrogate
religion…”
In his book The Third Reich: A New History,
published in 2001, Burleigh claimed that the “school of wishful thinking about
the relationship between capitalism and fascism” had been comprehensively
demolished by Turner. According to Burleigh, Nazism was a kind of
“political religion”, and its rise to power and the crimes it committed could
not be connected to capitalism. But the question of the relationship between
the Nazi movement and big business is far from exhausted simply by the level of
funding. The Marxist movement has never maintained that behind the Nazi Party,
there was some kind of secret cabal of big business leaders pulling the
strings. That does not mean, however, that the conceptions and ideology of the
Nazi movement were unrelated to the deepest needs and interests of big
business.”
Ryback’s book is not without merit and should garner a wide
readership. However, like most new books on this subject, it is missing one
vital ingredient: an in-depth look at the huge betrayal of the worker's
movement by Stalinism and Social Democracy. The Marxist movement must carry out
this task. If the editors of Mehring Books are reading this article, then it is
down to you to correct the historical record with a new publication.
Notes
1.
On Hitler's Mein Kampf-The Poetics of National
Socialism-By Albrecht Koschorke
Translated by Erik Butler
2.
Why Are They Back- Christoph Vandreier- Mehring
Books-2019
3.
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of
Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
4.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans
and the Holocaust Paperback – Illustrated, 1 Feb. 1997
