ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

BRENNER : ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS
[28] stunned when their party, the DDP, suddenly jack-knifed and turned itself into
the moderately anti-Semitic Staatspartei. However, younger members of the CV
pushed aside the old leadership and were able to get the CV to use the departmentstore
money to subsidise the SDP’s anti-Nazi propaganda. After the DDP's betrayal,
the SPD picked up approximately 60 per cent of the Jewish vote. Only 8 per cent
went Communist, and they received no CV largess for the stated grounds that they
were militantly against God; the real concern was that they were equally militant
against the CV’s financial angles.
Each German Jewish association saw Hitler's ascent through its own special
mirror. The young CV functionaries saw that the SPD's working-class base stayed
loyal to it and that Jews continued to be integrated into the party at every level.
What they did not realise was that the SPD was incapable of defeating Hitler. Before
the First World War the SPD had been the largest socialist party in the world, the
pride of the Socialist International. But it was no more than reformist and throughout
the Weimar Republic it failed to establish the firm socialist base which would
have allowed the German working class to resist the Nazis. The onset of the
Depression found their own Hermann Muller as Chancellor. Soon their right-wing
coalition partners decided the workers would have to bear the weight of the crisis
and replaced him with Heinrich Bruning of the Catholic Zentrumspartei. The
'hunger chancellor, raised taxes on the lucky ones with jobs to pay ever-smaller
benefits to the increasing millions of unemployed. The SPD leaders knew this was
suicide but 'tolerated, Bruning, fearing he would bring Hitler into his coalition if
they turned away from him. Therefore they did not fight against the cuts in the
dole. Bruning had nothing to offer the desperate middle class and more of them put
on brown shirts. The SDP’s ranks, Jews and non-Jews alike, passively stood by and
watched as their party succumbed.
The Communist KPD also defeated itself. Lenin's Bolshevism had degenerated
into Stalin's 'Third Period' ultra-leftism, and Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartakusbund into
Ernst Thaelmann's Rote Front. To these sectarians everyone else was a Fascist. The
Sozialdemokraten were now 'Sozial Faschisten' and no unity was possible with them.
In 1930 the two working-class parties combined outpolled Hitler 37.6 per cent
to 18.3 per cent. He could have been stopped; it was their failure to unite on a
militant programme of joint physical defence against the brownshirts and in
defence against the government's onslaught against the standard of living of the
masses that let Hitler come to power. Since the Second World War Western scholars
have tended to
[29] see the KPD 'betraying' the SPD through Stalin's fanaticism. In the Stalinist
camp the roles are reversed; the SPD is blamed for leaning on a broken reed like
Bruning. But both parties must share the responsibility for the debacle.
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