Hermann Weber and Andreas Herbst. Deutsche Kommunisten: Biographisches Handbuch, 1918-1945. Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2004. 992 pp. Photos, appendices, bibliography, index. EUR 49.90 (cloth), ISBN 3-3200-2044-7.
Reviewed by: Gary Roth, Rutgers University at Newark.
Published by: H-German (September, 2005)
Stalinists as Victims
Deutsche Kommunisten is an exceptionally useful reference book with biographies of the leading personnel from the German Communist Party between its founding in 1918 and its reemergence in 1945 from the bowels of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. It is not a pretty story. Of the 1400 people whose lives are surveyed, 400 of them were murdered: 222 by the Nazis, 178 by the Stalinists. The German Communists had almost as good a chance of being killed by the people they served so faithfully as by those against whom they were willing to risk their lives. In the Soviet Union, family members often disappeared into the gulag or were handed back over to the Nazis under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The western powers also interned German Communists and returned them to the Nazis. Even after the Second World War, survivors in East Germany, especially if they held positions within the party or the government, were not allowed to speak publicly about the persecution they had suffered within the Soviet Union.
This one-volume work is a revised edition of Hermann Weber's two-volume Die Wandlung des Deutschen Kommunismus, originally published in 1969. The biographical section is greatly expanded (nearly 3 times the length) and now includes information collected since the opening of archives in the former East Germany and the Soviet Union. Each biography provides information on an individual's family background, work history, educational attainment, political affiliations, and positions held within the party. Wherever possible, individuals are traced into the post-WWII era. The individual biographies are thoroughly researched, and each one even includes a portrait photo. The book is also accompanied by a short but highly informative forty-page introduction that surveys the history of the party during the Weimar era and also provides a layer of demographic analysis. The appendices provide attendance lists for the periodic party conventions, a breakdown of regional leadership with dates of service, lists of the national and regional parliamentary representatives, and an extensive bibliography of archival, primary, and secondary sources.
The editors' focus on the leadership of the party makes perfect sense. To an obsessive degree, it was issues of leadership that characterized the party's self-identification and explain many of the changes in party doctrine and practice during the Weimar era. Even at the party's founding conference, issues of leadership were divisive in the fierce debates over whether the party should be organized on a centralized or decentralized basis. The centralists ultimately won the day, and one of their first actions was to drive out the party's own left wing with over half the membership. The ideological commitment to the Bolshevik model was already so intense that this was done even though it left the party weak, dysfunctional, and thoroughly marginalized during much of the critical year that followed. It was a party caught between the conservatism of social democracy and the syndicalism of the ultra-left, with no real identity or following of its own other than its identification with developments in the Soviet Union. Because of the success of the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin had become every leftist's hero, although a considerable portion of the German Communist Party began to reconsider its evaluation of the Bolshevik experience once the full ramifications of its regime became clearer. The party emerged from this self-imposed marginalization only when the growing disillusionment in the results of the German revolution swept over the working class. This first split in the party, between the centralists who inherited the mantle of the party, and the left, which formed the short-lived but much more radical KAPD (Communist Workers Party of Germany), foreshadowed the party's history during the next decade, during which there were repeated splits, and each time the losing side was expelled from the party. In ideological terms, it was always a live-or-die situation.
If the party's history during Weimar is difficult to follow, this is because it was at every turn determined by two sets of circumstances--those in Germany and those in the Soviet Union. It is impossible to understand the various phases through which the German party was transformed into a foreign policy outlet for the Bolshevik government without also following the internal power struggles within the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s and the various twists in Stalin's policies in the late 1920s and 1930s as he consolidated his dictatorship. Weber and co-editor Andreas Herbst focus in particular on the Stalinization of the party. The alternating policies that characterized the party produced enormous instability within the leadership. The party needed to remake itself repeatedly. Within the Politburo, the most important of the party's leadership groups, only two of the sixteen members from 1923-24 were still in office in 1929; of the 250 leading figures in the party in 1924, some 105 were either expelled or left within five years. Doctrinal and policy disputes within the party become a major focus of the party to the exclusion of much else. The splits and purges, nonetheless, created many opportunities for upward-mobility within the party. Some five thousand people in the late 1920s owed their livelihood to the party and to the Soviet Union's foreign policy establishment in Germany. This constituted almost twenty percent of the active party, estimated at some twenty to thirty thousand members.
The party remained the representative for considerable parts of the working class throughout the Weimar period, despite the turmoil amongst its leadership. The majority of the leadership came from the metal trades, as did roughly 25 percent of the German working class; such was the orientation of the country's industrial establishment. Intellectuals and members of the middle class came to play an increasingly important role in the leadership of the party, although in fact the influence of the university-educated was always substantial. Over a million people at one point or another belonged to the party during these years. Many factors contributed to the party's appeal: the ongoing economic chaos of the early 1920s and the seemingly permanent recession that ensued, the widespread disappointment in various coalition governments into which the Social Democrats entered, and the widespread unemployment which accompanied the onset of the new depression in 1929. By the time it was repressed by the Nazis, the Communist Party was the third largest political party within Germany.
Weber and Herbst refer to the party's policies in the 1930-33 period as "ultra-left." This is an odd choice of terminology. What they refer to is the willingness of the Communist Party to form coalitions with the Nazis and against the Social Democrats. In 1932 the Communist Party found common cause with both the Nazis and other right-wing groups to bring down the regional Social Democratic government in Prussia; that same year, the Communists and the Nazis cooperated in a transportation strike in Berlin, also directed against a Social Democratic government. "Ultra-left," in this usage, refers to the opportunistic coalition-building against anyone who wielded state power. In a later phase, anti-fascism would lead the Communists into a "popular front" with even bourgeois parties. In any case, this is a very different understanding of "ultra-left" than how it has been used to characterize groups to the left of the Communist Party in the early 1920s--the syndicalists of the FAUD, the left-communists of the KAPD and AAU, and others--when they defined the political landscape through their opposition to Social Democrats and fascists alike. These groups did not distinguish between lesser and greater evils, and made no distinction between democracy and fascism. For the Communist Party, however, the fixation on state power helps explain its frequent flip-flops in policy and the periodic preferences for the fascists. This also pre-conditioned the acceptance of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which was received without many objections.
The repression under the Nazis was at first a matter of degree, as Weber and Herbst point out. Between 1929-32, for instance, over 170 Communist Party members were shot by the police; in 1932 alone, there were some 1000 police actions against them. During the initial years of Nazi rule in 1933-34, however, some 60,000 Communists were arrested, with another 15,000 new or repeat arrests the following year. Of these, 2000 were murdered, with a total of some 20,000 executions of party members by the end of the war. For those who fled to the Soviet Union, fate was not much kinder. The editors of Deutsche Kommunisten estimate that two-thirds of those who fled were jailed. Overall, more members of the Politburo were killed by the Stalinists than by the Nazis (during the 1930s, they estimate, Stalin ordered the killing of over one million Communists).
Nonetheless, party members remained faithful throughout. Of the 821 people in leadership positions during Weimar and still alive at the end of World War II, about half joined the reconstituted party when it was formed in East Germany, and another 10 percent joined the party in West Germany. Few joined either centrist or conservative political parties (about 25 percent of the survivors withdrew from politics altogether; another 10 percent joined the Social Democrats).
A fuller account from one of the biographies in Deutsche Kommunisten shows how these many themes come to light. Hans Kiefert, for example, was trained as a carpenter. In 1920 as a fifteen-year old, he joined the Communist Party youth organization, in which he would hold a series of important positions over the next years. In the early 1930s, he held regional positions within the party itself. He was arrested within months of the Nazi takeover in 1933 and spent two years in preventative detention. Unlike many others, he was able to avoid further arrests. He was, however, drafted into the army in the middle of the war (in 1943), at the conclusion of which he spent eighteen months in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. Upon his return to Germany, he joined the reconstituted party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands or SED) in the eastern sector. From then until his death in 1966, he held a series of local and regional positions, primarily in Berlin, before rising into the ranks of the party's Central Committee.
There are 1400 such biographies in Deutsche Kommunisten, each as compelling as the last.
Citation: Gary Roth. "Review of Hermann Weber and Andreas Herbst, Deutsche Kommunisten: Biographisches Handbuch, 1918-1945," H-German, H-Net Reviews, September, 2005. URL: [url]http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=62991154543656[/url].
Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [mailto]hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu[/mailto].