A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

As the show trials continued, there were mass arrests all over the country. Workers, clergymen,
civil servants, intellectuals, all were ‘interrogated’ in the prisons; one authority estimates that
between seven and eight million people were executed between 1934 and 1938. These included
enormous numbers of Party members - of the 140 members of the Central Committee who had
been elected in 1934, only fifteen were still at large in 1937.
In fact, Stalin had struck a greater blow against communism than all its enemies put together.
Marxism is basically a theory designed to explain the existence of evil in the world. Its explanation
is that evil is due to capitalist oppressors, and that once they have been removed, the oppressed will
heave a sigh of relief and live happily ever after. Soviet Russia was a living demonstration that evil
has very little to do with economic circumstances, and a great deal to do with human self-assertion.
In the rest of Europe, the lesson was slightly less obvious - at least in the years that followed the
Armistice. Long wars always leave behind them a longing for change. When the soldiers returned
to their homes and found scarcity and hardship, there was a tendency to look towards Russia, where
- according to the socialists - the world’s greatest experiment in social justice was taking place. The
communist parties of Europe suddenly increased their membership dramatically. In Germany and
Italy - where jobs were particularly scarce - it looked as if it could only be a matter of time before
the workers took over the means of production. In 1920, the Italian workers anticipated the
revolution by taking over six hundred factories. In Germany, Communist Party ‘cells’ spread over
every major city. Everywhere crowds of workers were on the march waving red banners, or
listening to socialist agitators outside the factories and docks. Benito Mussolini, a socialist who
liked to think of himself as ‘the Lenin of Italy’, was heavily defeated in elections in 1919, but the
riots and strikes of 1920 gave him his chance. His ‘combat groups’ - fascio di combattimento -
helped to break the strikes by attacking communists, whom they regarded as unpatriotic extremists.
The symbol of these groups was the fasces, an axe in the centre of a bundle of rods, an old Roman
symbol of power. In 1922, the ‘fascists’ marched on Rome, and encountered no resistance. The
king appointed Mussolini premier. Italian businessmen and bankers preferred a patriotic socialist to
a communist.
In Germany, a corporal named Adolf Hitler came back from the war, in which he had served with
distinction, and joined the German Workers’ Party in Munich. Communist revolutions had already
broken out all over Germany, with councils of workers and soldiers seizing power. By Christmas
1918, a revolutionary group called the Spartacists - after the man who had led the gladiators’ revolt
- had taken over Berlin. They had been formed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg two years
earlier; now the Alexanderplatz was full of workers - two hundred thousand of them - waving red
flags. The Free Corps, the German equivalent of Mussolini’s fascists, marched into Berlin and
crushed the revolution, killing Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In Munich, Kurt Eisner organised a
more successful revolution; the king fled, and Bavaria became a republic. Hitler, like Mussolini,
detested these communists with their talk of international revolution, and it did not escape his
attention that most of the communist leaders - including Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Eisner - were
Jewish. He had already acquired a hatred of Jews in the pre-war years, when he was a half-starved
art student in Vienna and Munich, and had observed how many Jews seemed to be in influential
positions.
16 October 1919 was a turning point in Hitler’s life - and in European history. At a meeting of the
German Workers’ Party in a cellar, Hitler made his first speech, and realised that he was a natural