Go into any well stocked bookstore or library and you are certain to find books about Nazis. Consider the subject of how these Nazis got into power in Germany, and you will see these books deal with it in varying degrees of competence. Indeed, the issue of how such terrible people could attain power, apparently with the approval or at least acquiescence of millions of Germans, is one of the topics that fascinates Western culture endlessly.
The reasons usually cited in popular public discourse for the rise of Nazism include such things as Germany’s history of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism, bitterness over defeat in WWI and over the terms of the treaty of Versailles, and despair and rage over the economic consequences of the great post-war inflation and the later Great Depression.
But of all the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power, there are some that are commonly overlooked. And the reason they are overlooked is that these reasons threaten our society’s conception of capitalist, so-called “democracy” as the unquestionable apex of what is fair, or at least, of what is possible in the world. These overlooked reasons are also neglected because they threaten to shine a positive light on the political Left: those people whom we are supposed to assume are at best well-intentioned idiots, or at worst Stalinist monsters–that is, when they are not ignored entirely, which they often are in discussions of how the Nazis gained power.
But let me be more specific about one of these reasons for Hitler’s success: essentially, the radical Right, even before the Nazi party had gained a large following, murdered hundreds of leaders of the Left and got away with it in every case. The relatively few political murders committed by the Left were punished by heavy sentences, including death.
In 1922 one Emil Julius Gumbel published a book called Vier Jahre politischer Mord (Four Years of Political Murder). In this book he analyzes the political assassinations committed by the Right and the Left since November 9, 1918, the beginning of the German Revolution. Keep in mind that at this time the Nazi party was nowhere near as large and powerful as it would become eventually. However, many of those right-wing people whose essential beliefs and attitudes were those of the Nazis, and who would eventually willingly join them, were already active and violent in other organizations such as the various Freikorps militias.
I can do no better at this point than present some very illuminating quotations from Gumbel himself.
Correspondingly, the right is inclined to hope that it could annihilate the left opposition, which is carried by hopes for a radically different economic order, by defeating its leaders. And the right has done it: all of the leaders of the left who openly opposed the war and whom the workers trusted–Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Eisner, [Gustav] Landauer, [Leo] Jogisches, et al–are dead.
The effectiveness of this technique is for the moment indisputable. The left no longer has any significant leaders, no more people toward whom the masses have the feeling: he has suffered so much for us, dared so much for us that we can trust him blindly. The working-class movement has thereby doubtlessly been set back by years. This success is all the greater since in no case has punishment occurred.
The unbelievable leniency of the court is also quite well known to the perpetrators. . . . Today the [right wing] perpetrator risks nothing at all. Powerful organizations with an extensive network of confidantes over the whole country provide him with shelter, protection, and material sustenance. “Right-minded” bureaucrats and police chiefs supply falsified papers for potentially necessary trips abroad. . . . The beneficiaries live magnificently and happily in the best hotels.
Here is a summary of some of the statistics Gumbel collected on these events:
Political Killings Committed
Political killings Political killings
. by the Left by the Right
Total number of murders 22 354
Number of convictions 38 24
Duration of incarceration per murder 15 years 4 months
Number of executions 10 0
Gumbel also states,
Virtually all of the relatively small number of assassinations of reactionaries have been atoned for through severe penalties; of the very numerous assassinations of men of the left, on the other hand, not one has been atoned. Credulousness, wrongly understood orders, or actual or purported insanity were always the bases of the defense to the extent that trials even took place. Most of the proceedings were quashed either by the prosecutor’s office or the criminal court.
Gumbel also discusses how newspapers could call for the murder of specific individuals and be punished only by small fines.
Gumbel also relates how his earlier work, Two Years of Political Murder, which analyzed the earlier years of these same incidents, was received by the establishment. He had thought that either this work would be believed by the judicial system, which would then punish the murderers, or that he would be accused of slander and be punished himself. But neither happened.
Although the brochure in no way went without notice, there has not been a single effort on the part of the authorities to dispute the correctness of my contentions. On the contrary, the highest responsible authority, the Reich minister of justice, expressly confirmed my contentions on more than one occasion. Nevertheless, not a single [right wing] murderer has been punished.
So people always ask, why is it everyone in Germany was apparantly a Nazi, or a least a person who did not care enough to oppose them? The answer, in part, is this: there were anti-fascists in Germany (especially in the working class) who were numerous, active, and brave, and their leaders were murdered with impunity when Hitler was still in his political infancy. This was one of the ways in which the capitalist structure of Germany (which had been shaken but not overthrown by revolution) paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power. To ignore this fact is to slander the better elements of German society by ignoring them, and even more significantly, to slander the Left and the realistic hope it has always offered.
Gumbel also adds sobering words on how much of the public was suckered into accepting this murderous situation:
Public opinion in general approves of this procedure. For clever propaganda has taught it that every enemy of militarism is a Spartacist, therefore an enemy of humanity, therefore open game.
Keep in mind that such propaganda was well underway when Hitler was no more than a gleam in Hindenburg’s eye.
Please keep in mind also that Gumbel’s work discusses only cases of premeditated, illegal killing of a well-known German by another German for domestic political motives, whereby the incident is characterized not as mass action but as an individual deed. Four Years of Political Murder is not about deaths due to armed battles in the streets. In these conflicts as well, however, killing by the Right far exceeded killing by the Left, and the violence of the Left was far more often used in self-defence than was the violence of the Right. In other words, the German revolution was far less violent than the counter-revolution. One could actually make a very strong case that the Left should have used a great deal more violence than it did.
Germany’s population in Gumbel’s time was approximately twice what Canada’s is now. Were we to transpose Gumbel’s work to a fictional scenario set in Canada at the present time, we would be faced with a situation where, in four years, left wingers killed 11 people and were heavily punished in each case, and wherein right wingers killed 177 prominent, left-wing Canadians without one individual doing any serious time for this.
For anyone with their eyes open, the implications for America are even more alarming. The tepid response of the Democrats to Donald Trump’s violent insurrection attempt sends the same message to the American Right what the German judiciary sent to the Nazis: do whatever you want; we will never get in your way.
Donald Trump must be prosecuted: yes, even if it means violence from his supporters. For if the threat of that violence succeeds, it will be followed by far greater violence, just as the violence in the four years after the German revolution, horrible as it was, was dwarfed by the violence that followed when it helped to put Hitler into power.