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Chapter LXI
When the dust settled over several days of infighting within the Communist Party of Germany, it was evident that a clear winner had emerged.
Ultimately Adolf Hitler's ability to persuade certain former Thalmann allies that he represented the best hope of them achieving revolutionary ambitions, alongside ensuring the loyalty of a party militia and a party bureaucracy that he had helped build, allowed him to accomplish what Thalmann himself had hoped to achieve, to tighten his own control of the party by removing his only true rival. Many in the party's leading Zentrale body who had wavered between the two over the years now stood firmly behind Hitler, in the name of concilitation if nothing else.
The way in which the power struggle had played out was initially unremarked upon publicly within the international Communist movement although the members of the Communist International watched the events unfold with a great intrigue, as did Joseph Stalin. Having successfully solidified his own total control of the Soviet Union, Stalin had sought to do the same to Communist parties in other countries where the preferred candidates for "Stalinising" their respective parties would usually find favour and a greater leadership role. It is likely that Thalmann would have been Stalin's preferred candidate; the two enjoyed a good personal relationship with each man's talents despite their humble origins impressing the other. Hitler and Stalin had reportedly only met once, and briefly, but it is not completely unlikely that Stalin would have accepted Hitler's sole leadership of the KPD had the newly empowered General Secretary not unilaterally pulled the party out of the Comintern; a direct snub at Moscow in favour of a more exclusively German line that would eventually form the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Hitlerism, or "German Ideology" as it is more commonly known.
Stalin demanded Hitler come to Moscow to explain himself and when Hitler refused the Soviet leader instead unleashed a slew of denunciations which snowballed into rejections of Hitler and his party from most leading communist movements around the world that happened to be somehow affiliated with Moscow. Within Germany itself, many prominent members of the party split to join with Thalmann and his fellow outcasts. Whilst the Red Front militia stayed almost exclusively loyal to Hitler's KPD, the same could not be said for the party's many sister organisations; the Young Communist League largely went with Thalmann, as did the Women's League and the Red Pionners. As was expected, Hitler's attempts to woo the General Congress of Trade Unions, the ADGB, paid off with an expression of support from those who had previously been wary of the Moscow orientated KPD, and for the first time since he had stood on stage with Paul Levi a couple of weeks beforehand, members of the Social Demoratic Party began to openly praise Hitler's attempts at clemency, if often with guarded rhetoric. To Thalmann these signs of support for Hitler were to be expected, and he and his remaining supporters decided to try and muddle through.
Having benefitted from being part of a successful double act for so many years, and having helped to build the Communist Party of Germany, Thalmann's failure to seize control of the organisation would now lead to him attempting to supplant it. The Communist Party of Germany (Marxist Leninist) would prove to be Ernst Thalmann's last stand in German politics, as well as the Soviet Union's final attempt to gain a direct foothold in German politics.
The launch of the Communist Party of Germany (Marxist-Leninist) took place in Hamburg with much fanfare despite increasingly harsh crackdowns on major left-wing events, it has been suggested by some that the conservative and increasingly authoritarian government of Chancellor Heinrich Bruning was attempting to aid the popularity of Thalmann's new party in the hope of splitting the left-wing vote to the greatest extent. If this is true then Bruning must have believed he had succeeded, given the announcement of a federal election a mere two weeks after the birth of the KPD (ML), earmarked for August 1930.
In establishing the new party as a serious challenger in German politics, and with an election coming up to put that to the test, the KPD (ML) could rely on several large grants from Moscow, some of which have been estimated to have been in the hundreds of thousands of German Marks, although it is likely we will never know the full amount that was invested in the party's success. Stalin's commitment to Thalmann's new party was clear, and was arguably one that the Soviet Union could not afford in the late Summer of 1930 but not all of the members of the KPD (ML) were equally as invested in the party's success. This became readily apparent when, in the last week of July, the Party Treasurer John Wittorf disappeared having cleaned out the party's accounts.
Wittorf had been a close friend of Thalmann for over a decade and with his history of financial expertise and sound management Thalmann had lobbied for his friend to replace Willie Munzenberg as KPD treasurer, a move Hitler blocked whenever his erstwhile ally brought it up given the General Secretary's respect for Munzenberg as an operator and suspicion of Wittorf following rumours of embezzelment that he had never quite managed to evade. If Thalmann had been aware of any truth in these rumours he clearly hadn't taken them that seriously when he had appointed Wittorf to control the finances of the KPD (ML), with Hitler no longer in the way he could finally have his friend where he wanted him to be. It would spell the end of his political career. Wittorf, apparently unable to resist the large sums of money coming from Moscow, had taken out several large loans to handle the party's day to day expenditures, all the while siphoning of the liquid assets into an account he had recently established whilst on a "fraternal visit" to the headquarters of the KPdS, the Communist Party of Switzerland. Wittorf would quite literally surface in Cuba some years later, on a Havana beach, apparently having enjoyed himself too much the night before and fallen into some bad company. Whether the Mob had gotten tired of a man who was according to many a particularly loathsome patron of their Casino empire, or if the NKVD had in fact decided to invoice Wittorf at long last, has been the subject of some debate but at any rate the damage was done.
The so-called "Wittorf affair" would be the pivotal moment in the short, unhappy history of the KPD (ML) and would bring about the party's downfall. Unable to pay its debts and with Moscow having largely written off the party the campaigning season when it arrived was a farce of activists who were few in number and increasingly demoralised, trying to string together a campaign based on favours and what they could scrape out of their own pockets. Thalmann rose to the occasion, focusing his campaign almost solely on the city of Hamburg where he could count on his name alone bringing large crowds of admirers amongst the dockers and labourers but few others were willing to listen and many were simply unable to.
The election itself yielded predictable results for the breakaway in the face of a a surge in the vote both for Hitler's KPD and Crown Prince Wilhelm's Volkisch Bund, Thalmann being elected as the sole deputy for the party almost more mocking than the party having none at all as he was forced to sit and listen to the derision and mocking from the swelled ranks of his former comrades in the new Reichstag.
Thalmann would not have to endure the derision for long, the 1930 constitutional crsis meaning that the affairs of a single deputy for a micro-party no longer held much attention. In the resultant fracas his name and reputation would largely be lost to the ether of a new era of German politics. It was a rather depressing end to a figure who had once been a hero to both the German and international left, his many talents having been overshadowed by his willingness to follow the Moscow line on too many matters, and in his inability to Stalinise the party he hoped to solely lead into the revolution.
Thalmann left for the Soviet Union shortly after the events that followed, not to return to Germany until the latter stages of the Second World War.
~ Andrea Clark, “The Revolutionary Hammer”: A History of the RFB
---
The statue of Ernst Thalmann in the above picture can be found in Berlin, within the park that also bears his name.
Happy New Year everyone!
"A new period of revolutionary upsurge matures. In this situation, we need more than ever the internationalism, the revolutionary solidarity of the toiling masses of the world in alliance with the oppressed colonial peoples. We had to lead the struggle against Trotskyism several years. In this great struggle Leninism prevailed as the undisputed winner in the entire Communist International. Even more than before, the spirit of internationalism emerged from this hard struggle, the spirit of unconditional loyalty to the Communist International and the solid confidence in its leading party, the CPSU. This revolutionary spirit must guide all our thinking and actions, and must a,ways be maintained in us. Our victory will be for certain if we strengthen our revolutionary energy, if we firmly and unwaveringly believe in the revolutionary power of the proletariat and all the working people led by the Communist International, the only genuine International throughout the world."
~ Ernst Thalmann
~ Ernst Thalmann
When the dust settled over several days of infighting within the Communist Party of Germany, it was evident that a clear winner had emerged.
Ultimately Adolf Hitler's ability to persuade certain former Thalmann allies that he represented the best hope of them achieving revolutionary ambitions, alongside ensuring the loyalty of a party militia and a party bureaucracy that he had helped build, allowed him to accomplish what Thalmann himself had hoped to achieve, to tighten his own control of the party by removing his only true rival. Many in the party's leading Zentrale body who had wavered between the two over the years now stood firmly behind Hitler, in the name of concilitation if nothing else.
The way in which the power struggle had played out was initially unremarked upon publicly within the international Communist movement although the members of the Communist International watched the events unfold with a great intrigue, as did Joseph Stalin. Having successfully solidified his own total control of the Soviet Union, Stalin had sought to do the same to Communist parties in other countries where the preferred candidates for "Stalinising" their respective parties would usually find favour and a greater leadership role. It is likely that Thalmann would have been Stalin's preferred candidate; the two enjoyed a good personal relationship with each man's talents despite their humble origins impressing the other. Hitler and Stalin had reportedly only met once, and briefly, but it is not completely unlikely that Stalin would have accepted Hitler's sole leadership of the KPD had the newly empowered General Secretary not unilaterally pulled the party out of the Comintern; a direct snub at Moscow in favour of a more exclusively German line that would eventually form the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Hitlerism, or "German Ideology" as it is more commonly known.
Stalin demanded Hitler come to Moscow to explain himself and when Hitler refused the Soviet leader instead unleashed a slew of denunciations which snowballed into rejections of Hitler and his party from most leading communist movements around the world that happened to be somehow affiliated with Moscow. Within Germany itself, many prominent members of the party split to join with Thalmann and his fellow outcasts. Whilst the Red Front militia stayed almost exclusively loyal to Hitler's KPD, the same could not be said for the party's many sister organisations; the Young Communist League largely went with Thalmann, as did the Women's League and the Red Pionners. As was expected, Hitler's attempts to woo the General Congress of Trade Unions, the ADGB, paid off with an expression of support from those who had previously been wary of the Moscow orientated KPD, and for the first time since he had stood on stage with Paul Levi a couple of weeks beforehand, members of the Social Demoratic Party began to openly praise Hitler's attempts at clemency, if often with guarded rhetoric. To Thalmann these signs of support for Hitler were to be expected, and he and his remaining supporters decided to try and muddle through.
Having benefitted from being part of a successful double act for so many years, and having helped to build the Communist Party of Germany, Thalmann's failure to seize control of the organisation would now lead to him attempting to supplant it. The Communist Party of Germany (Marxist Leninist) would prove to be Ernst Thalmann's last stand in German politics, as well as the Soviet Union's final attempt to gain a direct foothold in German politics.
The launch of the Communist Party of Germany (Marxist-Leninist) took place in Hamburg with much fanfare despite increasingly harsh crackdowns on major left-wing events, it has been suggested by some that the conservative and increasingly authoritarian government of Chancellor Heinrich Bruning was attempting to aid the popularity of Thalmann's new party in the hope of splitting the left-wing vote to the greatest extent. If this is true then Bruning must have believed he had succeeded, given the announcement of a federal election a mere two weeks after the birth of the KPD (ML), earmarked for August 1930.
In establishing the new party as a serious challenger in German politics, and with an election coming up to put that to the test, the KPD (ML) could rely on several large grants from Moscow, some of which have been estimated to have been in the hundreds of thousands of German Marks, although it is likely we will never know the full amount that was invested in the party's success. Stalin's commitment to Thalmann's new party was clear, and was arguably one that the Soviet Union could not afford in the late Summer of 1930 but not all of the members of the KPD (ML) were equally as invested in the party's success. This became readily apparent when, in the last week of July, the Party Treasurer John Wittorf disappeared having cleaned out the party's accounts.
Wittorf had been a close friend of Thalmann for over a decade and with his history of financial expertise and sound management Thalmann had lobbied for his friend to replace Willie Munzenberg as KPD treasurer, a move Hitler blocked whenever his erstwhile ally brought it up given the General Secretary's respect for Munzenberg as an operator and suspicion of Wittorf following rumours of embezzelment that he had never quite managed to evade. If Thalmann had been aware of any truth in these rumours he clearly hadn't taken them that seriously when he had appointed Wittorf to control the finances of the KPD (ML), with Hitler no longer in the way he could finally have his friend where he wanted him to be. It would spell the end of his political career. Wittorf, apparently unable to resist the large sums of money coming from Moscow, had taken out several large loans to handle the party's day to day expenditures, all the while siphoning of the liquid assets into an account he had recently established whilst on a "fraternal visit" to the headquarters of the KPdS, the Communist Party of Switzerland. Wittorf would quite literally surface in Cuba some years later, on a Havana beach, apparently having enjoyed himself too much the night before and fallen into some bad company. Whether the Mob had gotten tired of a man who was according to many a particularly loathsome patron of their Casino empire, or if the NKVD had in fact decided to invoice Wittorf at long last, has been the subject of some debate but at any rate the damage was done.
The so-called "Wittorf affair" would be the pivotal moment in the short, unhappy history of the KPD (ML) and would bring about the party's downfall. Unable to pay its debts and with Moscow having largely written off the party the campaigning season when it arrived was a farce of activists who were few in number and increasingly demoralised, trying to string together a campaign based on favours and what they could scrape out of their own pockets. Thalmann rose to the occasion, focusing his campaign almost solely on the city of Hamburg where he could count on his name alone bringing large crowds of admirers amongst the dockers and labourers but few others were willing to listen and many were simply unable to.
The election itself yielded predictable results for the breakaway in the face of a a surge in the vote both for Hitler's KPD and Crown Prince Wilhelm's Volkisch Bund, Thalmann being elected as the sole deputy for the party almost more mocking than the party having none at all as he was forced to sit and listen to the derision and mocking from the swelled ranks of his former comrades in the new Reichstag.
Thalmann would not have to endure the derision for long, the 1930 constitutional crsis meaning that the affairs of a single deputy for a micro-party no longer held much attention. In the resultant fracas his name and reputation would largely be lost to the ether of a new era of German politics. It was a rather depressing end to a figure who had once been a hero to both the German and international left, his many talents having been overshadowed by his willingness to follow the Moscow line on too many matters, and in his inability to Stalinise the party he hoped to solely lead into the revolution.
Thalmann left for the Soviet Union shortly after the events that followed, not to return to Germany until the latter stages of the Second World War.
~ Andrea Clark, “The Revolutionary Hammer”: A History of the RFB
---
The statue of Ernst Thalmann in the above picture can be found in Berlin, within the park that also bears his name.
Happy New Year everyone!
- The Red
- Word Count: 1.6k