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With nearly six million votes in the 1932 general election, the German Communist Party was both a mass party and a workers'
party. It was the party of a working class which, since the end of the First World War, had been through difficult periods - of
poverty, unemployment and merciless struggles, of strikes, insurrections and demonstrations and of revolutions which had ended
up in death, imprisonment, political bans and periods of underground work.
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The German Communist Party encompassed a wealth of militancy steeled over the past years in these strikes and numerous bitter
struggles. It was also a wealth of political consciousness and culture and it was a fund of political and military
organisational skills.
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Most of the men and women of this communist generation had been in their late teens during World War I. Within a few years,
between 1914 and 1923, they had experienced both jail and underground activity. The banning and repression of communist
activities had been almost uninterrupted - during the War, after the failure of the 1919 insurrection in Berlin and in Bavaria,
and again after the revolutionary events of 1921 and 1923. They had been engaged in a permanent struggle against capitalism.
Having had to fight as much against the social-democratic watchdogs of imperialism as against the most outspoken reactionaries,
they had few illusions about either.
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Most of these young communists, whether from a working-class or a middle-class background, had climbed over barrack-walls in
1917-1918 to spread anti-war literature. They had been jailed for this, for refusing to be drafted into the army or as
deserters. Others had taken part in the soldiers' uprisings of 1918. Most of them, including the youngest, had taken part in or
even led strikes, among the sailors or in the huge ordnance factories in Berlin, particularly in March 1918, in order to
strengthen Trotsky's position in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations.
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From the earliest days, the Communist Party had had to set up an illegal military organisation to defend itself as well as to
prepare for an offensive - this was one of the twenty-one conditions required to join Lenin's Communist International. In this
process and amidst many difficulties, the Communist Party and the working-class movement had acquired some experience and skills
for the class war.
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There were many revolutionary militants among the German Communists. Trotsky knew their value and for that reason he was looking
for a way to reach them. Of course their qualities were not without problems. But because of their military activity within a
mass communist party, they could have become the intermediaries between him and the mass movement which Trotsky needed in order
to lead the future struggles or to build a revolutionary leadership capable of leading them.
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The working-class movement did not have the leaders it deserved. This was specially the case in Germany. The capitalists had
deprived the working class movement of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogisches by murdering them - political purges
were not Stalin's invention. The task had been completed by the methods used by the Stalinist International - each political
turn arbitrarily decided in Moscow, each error for which the International refused to admit responsibility, resulted in the
elimination of a complete leadership team.
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Somehow Stalin's policy boiled down to, 'to change the policy, change the leadership'. As a result neither the German Communist
Party nor any of the major European communist parties had ever been able to build a real autonomous leadership, that is a
leadership trained, skilled and steeled through the experiences of a whole period. Everytime the young bodies of the communist
parties got their fingers burnt by events, their brains were replaced by brand new ones which had learned nothing from past
mistakes.
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The quartermasters and functionaries operating from Moscow kept repeating 'left, right, left', never at the right time. Under
their guidance, an impressive stream of leaders had passed through the leadership of the German Communist Party - Levi, Brandler
with Thalheimer, Fisher with Maslow, Neumann with Thaelmann, then Thaelmann without Neumann, etc.. These Stalinist methods
resulted in a total lack of leadership. By the end what was left was simply a figurehead, a paralysed Thaelmann, in no position
to grasp the sudden changes in the situation and incapable of leading a revolutionary party in a period of crisis.
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By March 1933 Hitler had already been in power for a month. After the Reichstag arson, thousands of communist activists had had
their houses ransacked, their books thrown out of the window. Many had been jailed and thousands of others forced underground,
sleeping rough in the odd corridor. And yet, as late as in the last election allowed by Hitler, the Communist Party still polled
five million votes. It was a few hundred thousand less than before, but an enormous achievement in the circumstances.
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Unfortunately while the bolshevik traditions and the methods of class struggle were spreading to Germany, Stalinist
bureaucratism was settling in Russia, depriving the young German communist tree of its sap. It became more and more a caricature
- an apparatus made up of tens of thousands of activists who were committed in the extreme, so much prepared for anything that
many tended to turn to ultra-leftism or to adventurism.
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The length and breadth of Central Europe, the Communist International had won over and trained legions of such activists, the
vast majority of whom remain unknown. In Germany, after the banning of the party and the persecution of its membership in 1919,
in 1921 and again in 1923, the knowledge of how to rebuild the communist network through underground ant-like work had become as
commonplace among communist activists as was the skill of producing and distributing illegal litterature. Emigrating and finding
a way to resume political work was soon to become commonplace as well, just as it had been for the entire generation of
Bolsheviks.
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