were severely compromised by arrests and informants. However unfortunate, a funeral could become the site of resistance and a show of solidarity for anti-fascists: 1,200 showed up in solidarity at the funeral of a prominent member of the SPD who had died after release from a concentration camp. Adam Schaeffer had been imprisoned for political reasons and died in Dachau after attacking an SS guard. He was allegedly shot, although rumours grew that he had been beaten to death, hence the closed casket. Eight hundred people turned up at the funeral, mainly SPD and KPD members and sympathisers. Minor acts of resistance and sabotage affected production: the Albert Baum Group had thirty-two members, many of them KPD, who campaigned over work conditions, spread propaganda, and created informal networks. They had even disguised themselves in stolen Gestapo uniforms in order to confiscate items from the Berlin homes of the rich. Together with other Jewish anti-fascists, they destroyed one of Goebbels’s propaganda exhibits. Baum and others were later arrested, and although Baum was tortured, he never revealed who his accomplices were. Although Mason concedes that many acts of resistance did take place’, he also asks why did it not take place on a larger scale. Workers often enough displayed their lack of enthusiasm for the mass demonstrations of the Third Reich, but they never translated a May Day assembly into a street battle.78 Local circumstances, degrees of solidarity, organization, and opportunism were factors in resistance, but there was also the mitigating factor of terror, the fear of what may happen based on threats, and the knowledge of what had happened to other dissenters and their families. This fear became a pre-emptive tool and enforced compliancy to a regime that gave few concessions to the working class. Demoralization, disorganization and dread became an effective triumvirate to suppress rebellion.
In her autobiography One Life Is Not Enough, Lore Wolf recounts her life as a member of the KPD resistance: ‘I have been called “the White Raven of the Communists”. As a resistance fighter and a refugee I—like many others—always stood with one foot in prison. Twenty times I was caught, nineteen times I got away.’79
After 1933:
Red Aid of Germany was the organization of the oppressed. It cared for the dependents of the politically persecuted and the prisoners, it carried out solidarity actions for the suffering working-class, it agitated, made propaganda and spread information by means of leaflets and illegal newspapers.80
They printed thousands of clandestine newspapers per month and ‘often a single copy went through half the factory—each of the readers contributing some money’.81 They could be caught any time with the papers or be informed on and, although only simple propaganda, they could be subjected to the same punishment as for any other anti-fascist activity: arrest, torture, murder or starvation in a camp. Producing the leaflets was difficult, and paper was bought in many different shops to avoid suspicion. Some were passed on more secretively. In Wolf’s words, ‘there was a tobacco shop near the main station where we could also store brochures and other materials. Close co-operators who bought their cigarettes there collected the texts in small packs and passed them on to trusted colleagues.’82
In 1934, the police called for ‘ruthless suppression of the intense Communist activity promoting propaganda’, the Gestapo warned that the Red Front Line Fighters were reorganizing, and Gestapo goon Reynard Heydrich demanded ‘particular attention to the efforts of Red Aid’.83 The group was ultimately betrayed, and Wolf fled to France and then to Switzerland where she was arrested and deported. Red Aid continued in exile, helping homeless anti-fascist exiles and distributing information. Wolf worked as a courier in Paris until the 1939 mass round-ups of German communists and anti-fascists. She was sent back to Germany to a concentration camp until the end of the war. Wolf’s story is an exemplary account of selfless anti-fascist activity. Despite all the hardships, she retained her sense of dignity and solidarity. It is only one story of many.
Edelweiss Pirates and Others
Now look at the youngsters growing up! They give in to every desire and craving, puffing away at English cigarettes, buy the first tasty titbit, dance, and throw away every activity that requires some effort.
—C.W.W. Szejnmann in Nazism in Central Germany
It is, perhaps, the youth who could often express dissent more effectively, away from illegal political organizations, and remain unknown to the authorities. The enforced tedium of the Hitler Youth with its uniforms, daft songs and marching about was obviously anathema to disenfranchised and more independently minded youths. The compulsory sublimation of sexual appetites—boys separate from girls—whilst fetishizing flags and lederhosen was understandably repellent to many. Smoking cigarettes, getting prematurely drunk, listening to contemporary music and sexual cavorting has always been the prerogative of youth, much more than callisthenics and accordions—as has a natural anti-authoritarianism. The worldview that the Hitler Youth was putting forward was likewise unappetising to many with its focus on war as a natural state, hailing to the leader, and the subordination of individuality. It was inevitable that some youths would rebel.
Reports of brawls with members of the Hitler Youth (especially the disciplinary patrols), of assaults on uniformed personnel, and of jeers and insults aimed at Nazi dignitaries are legion.
—Detley J.K. Peukert in Inside Nazi Germany
Throughout the 1930s, reports of gangs or ‘cliques’ proliferated. They were often comprised of runaways who were avoiding the Hitler Youth or compulsory work schemes: Berlin police patrols would ‘periodically round up whole lorry-loads of youth.… There is a section of youth that wants the romantic life. Bundles of trashy literature have been found in small caves. Apprentices too are disappearing from home much more frequently and are drifting in the hurly-burly of the big cities’.84 It was a common phenomenon and one that worried the fascist establishment who warned that ‘a serious risk of political, moral and criminal breakdown of youth must be said to exist.’85 The spontaneity and informality of these gangs made them difficult to monitor and, as time went on, they became increasingly widespread, militant, and violent.
Get out your cudgels and come into town
And smash the skulls of the bosses in brown.
—Pirate song
The Edelweiss Pirates, the Kittelbach Pirates and the Navajos were all informal gangs that indulged in the standard deviations of sex, drinking, dodging work and avoiding the tedious adult authoritarians. The Edelweiss Pirates started at the end of the 1930s, wore distinctive outfits and emblems, and spent time escaping to the relative freedom of the countryside to party at weekends. Other gangs soon grew to prominence and were tied to a particular area: ‘groups from the whole region met up, pitched their tents, sang, talked and together “clobbered” Hitler Youth patrols doing their rounds’.86 In 1941, one mining instructor reported, ‘They beat up the patrols, because there are so many of them. They never take no for an answer. They don’t go to work either, they are always down by the canal.’87 Compulsive work was viewed negatively by the Pirates and ‘something to be evaded as much as possible by “skiving off,” idling and causing trouble’.88 Work was war work, and the Nazis knew that absence directly affected production; the Pirates could exploit this.
According to Mason,
The few direct armed attacks mounted by German resistance fighters against the hated Gestapo were the achievement of scattered gangs of ‘Edelweiss pirates’: groups of young people, utterly cut off from the inherited organizations and values of the working class movement, who in the last years of the war spontaneously developed into violent anti-fascist assault troops.89
On their rural sojourns, the Pirate gangs could relax, away from the pressure of everyday life, ‘though always on the watch for Hitler Youth patrols, whom they either sought to avoid, or taunted and fell upon with relish’.90 Although not ideologically aligned, the natural anti-authoritarianism of the Pirates began to take on political meaning: everything the Pirates wanted—freedom
