in street battles.… The Communist hardcore reacted to this challenge by taking the counter-offensive with their slogan, ‘Beat the fascists wherever you meet them’.
The SA had grown to over 400,000 members: ‘many hundreds of thousands of SA and SS men every day have to mount on their lorries, protect meetings, undertake marches, sacrifice themselves night after night’.52 Complete control over the SA was something Hitler coveted, and splits amongst the Nazi hierarchy over their function intensified: Hitler, as supreme leader, ordered the SA to avoid street fighting and was keen to stay inside the law in order to avoid being discredited prior to securing political victory. No doubt wealthy sponsors would be getting nervous over continuous political brawling and murder. Given this restriction, the SA, organized as a violent political force, laid mainly idle and without the relief of exciting confrontation. In September 1930, the restless SA smashed their Berlin headquarters over grievances, including pay and political direction, which led Hitler to personally appease their desire for violent action. A few months later it happened again. When the government finally moved in 1931 and banned private armies, Hitler forced the SA to comply in accordance with his new ‘legal’ stance. This was not to last and the ban was lifted again in 1932, which ‘caused an immediate and alarming upsurge in violence. Murderous encounters took place, especially between Nazis and Communists. Deaths were frequent’.53 The record is appalling: the police reported 461 political riots in six weeks with over eighty people killed and many more seriously injured. In 1932, ‘pitched battles took place on Sunday 10 July in which eighteen people were killed. The next Sunday, the 17th, saw the worst riot of the summer, at Altona, near “Red” Hamburg, where the Nazis under police escort staged a march through the working class districts of the town and were met by a fusillade of shots from the roofs and the windows’.54 Nineteen people died and many were seriously wounded. Never being one to miss an opportunity to make propaganda, Goebbels staged large and public funerals of the Nazis killed by anti-fascist actions, using the usual mix of sacrifice and martyrdom to stir his followers’ patriotic blood.
The police operating against the fascists was a relative rarity as they were naturally more sympathetic to the authoritarian Nazis and viewed the left as their main threat, with one noting ‘that the KPD was prepared and determined to use violence right from the start in order to prevent the infiltration of fascists into working-class districts’.55 Not only that, but ‘large sections of the police sympathised with their cause, the Nazis wore down Marxist followers in a brutal battle for control of the streets by the end of 1931’.56
In 1932, despite the changing face of public support for fascism, anti-fascists retained their militancy: ‘Political opponents clashed more frequently too, particularly in strongholds of the KPD and SPD where Nazis faced stiff resistance. For instance, two Nazis were seriously wounded by activists of the Reichsbanner and KPD in Lossnitz, a Marxist bastion’.57 When Nazis tried to march through Red Altona in July 1932, the KPD fired on them, causing an armed police response. The KPD built barricades and the violence ended with eighteen dead, sixty-eight injured and 150 arrested. Later in July, a newspaper reported a clash between KPD and Nazis, which left ‘one of the SA men stabbed to death; another seriously injured’.58 The same paper reported SA men invading an SPD meeting, which turned into a mass brawl as the police completely lost control. In 1932, violence escalated and newspapers reported ‘daily, and even nightly clashes, brawls, assaults, and shootings amongst the huge private armies that has been assembled’.59 The KPD’s hatred of the Nazis was exacerbated by those supporters who had been part of the Freikorps and violently put down workers’ organizations. The KPD had been continually involved in savage and fatal brawls with these fascists for over a decade and ‘armed raids of Nazi formations on political meetings of opponents or on workers’ settlements had become an almost daily occurrence.’60
In Berlin in 1933, KPD and NSDAP continued the attacks on each other’s meeting places and pubs. Guns were increasingly used with attendant fatalities. This was now a coordinated policy of ‘mass terror’ rather than individual terror, ordered by the KPD leadership and responded to in kind by the Nazis. It was a deliberate and violent escalation in response to the failure of communist ‘mass action’ and strikes to make a significant political impact. Factory agitation increased, and workers mobilised and initiated a united front policy with the SPD, formerly ‘social fascists’.
As Hitler was aware, these outbreaks of violent disorder and the expression of more extreme sentiments were doing little to assure the bourgeoisie electorate of Nazi respectability or their suitability to govern. Incidents like that of five SA members kicking a communist miner to death in front of his mother were neither endearing nor placatory. The five were initially sentenced to death although this was later commuted to life imprisonment. Despite their bid for respectability and Hitler’s public entreaties, the Nazis were still openly provocative and sought to control their turf through violent means. In January 1933, they demonstrated outside Berlin’s communist headquarters with Goebbels saying, ‘We shall stake everything on one throw to win back the streets of Berlin.’61 Again, protected by armed police, several thousand fascists held a march through Berlin which culminated in a speech by Hitler. The communists had been banned from counter-demonstrating.
Of all the European street confrontations between anti-fascists and their opponents, the Germans counted the most fatalities and, apart from the state-sanctioned violence of Mussolini’s fascists, made places like the UK seem very modest in their affairs. Hundreds of deaths were recorded and large-scale street clashes were a regular occurrence. Between 1925 and 1933 there were hundreds of violent confrontations between left-wing militants, Nazis and the police, with most occurring in Berlin. By the end of 1933, Hitler became chancellor.
1933 & Beyond
After Hitler seized power in 1933, the police and SA began to seal off workers’ strongholds and carry out mass arrests and house searches for KPD members, weapons and propaganda. When KPD leader August Saihof’s house was searched, a gun and bullets, as well as KPD propaganda ‘of a highly treasonable nature and Bolshevist content’ were found.62 This meant immediate detention. It became increasingly difficult and dangerous for anti-fascists to operate. Once arrested, they could hardly expect tea and sympathy, and many died under torture, which was apparently only used selectively; ‘Under the circumstances, the sharpened interrogation may be applied only against Communists, Marxists, members of the Bible Research Sect, saboteurs, terrorists, members of the resistance movement, parachute agents, asocial persons, Polish or Soviet prisoners who refuse to work or idlers’.63 This list doesn’t leave many out.
By 1935, fourteen thousand communists were in confinement with many more to follow: there were few alternatives to arbitrary arrest apart from fleeing and going into hiding. By 1945, between 25,000 and 30,000 KPD members had either died in the camps or been murdered or executed. The paramilitary nature of the state was enforced by the SA, SS and the regular police. The violence and suppression meted out towards the radical left ( KPD, USPD) was soon focussed on moderate socialist organizations and their assets, such as property and printing presses, which were seized by the Nazis. Meetings were forbidden and the Reichsbanner was forced to disband. All political opposition was made illegal, co-operatives and clubs were outlawed, newspapers were banned, and mass repression began. The SA had been sitting on their truncheons for some time, having been bound by Hitler’s bid for legality, but now they could wreak havoc on opponents, real or imagined. The SA had set up improvised concentration camps and many anti-fascists were abducted, beaten and murdered with the usual fascist mix of sadism and criminality: ‘In Berlin’s Columbia cinema, in Stettin’s Vulkan docks, and in countless other places enemies were incarcerated and tortured in a microcosm of the hell that was to come’.64 This in addition to the setting up of ‘legal’ concentration camps and the activities of the Gestapo (which, according to Eatwell, was set up by leading Nazi Hermann Goering to monitor his rival’s activities). The Nazi strategy legitimised institutional violence and the mass arrests of left-wingers (which led to torture and incarceration in 1933) was overlooked by many voters as it was represented as a determined response to republicanism and the Red Menace.
Local fascists sought
