Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

esisted them in many cases. The overwhelming majority also
distanced themselves from Soviet communism. However, the main
opposition to the National Socialist policy of conquest and extermination,
which compelled the western powers to form a coalition
with the Stalinist Soviet Union, temporarily eclipsed the differences
between the socialists and communists in many places.
Anti-totalitarianism in the post-war period
The innumerable sacrifices made by the communists and the peoples
of the Soviet Union in the battle against National Socialist Germany
undoubtedly established the communist reputation for a time
– despite the show trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact. But this only
masked the difference between communist dictatorship and
democracy. And it very soon became impossible to ignore the dark
side of the liberation of Eastern Europe by the Red Army, especially
where there were stirrings of national independence.
As far as the labour movement is concerned, there were hopes at
first in many places – in Germany and other European countries –
that the divisions in the labour movement between social democrats
and communists could be overcome once again. But this would
have required the communists to make a real effort to come to
terms with democracy, and those who followed the Moscow line
were not prepared to do so at the time.
German social democracy felt the effects of this at a very early
stage. In March 1946, social democrats in the Soviet occupation
zone were obliged by a combination of force, deception and intimidation,
and with absolutely no choice in the matter, to join with the
KPD to form the Socialist Unity Party, or SED. In this context and
in the years that followed, social democrats were persecuted in
their thousands. Of course, the new party formally brought the communists
and the social democrats together but before long – at latest
with the SED’s transformation into a new kind of party, based
on the principle of executive authority among other things – social
democrats who sought to retain their identity in the Unity Party were
excluded, arrested, deported, or forced to flee to the West.
The social democratic parties in Eastern Europe suffered a similar
fate, though it took different forms in some cases – as regards the
117 Bernd Faulenbach