How we can stop the fascists: part one – the resistible rise of Hitler

In the first of a two-part series on anti-fascist strategy, Chris Bambery examines the mistakes of the German left which helped the Nazis into power

In this two-part series, I want to examine the tradition in which Counterfire stands in regarding the strategy required to fight fascism.

That strategy rests on the need for mass mobilisation. Whenever we have defeated fascism – as in Barcelona in July 1936, Northern Italy in 1944-1945, Cable Street in East London in October 1936, or at the Battle of Lewisham in August 1977 – it involved mass mobilisation.

This first part looks at a negative example. The second will look at a successful one.

I write this the day after 350 uniformed and masked all-male Nazis blocked the ferry port at Dover. If (and it’s a massive ‘if’) we could have mobilised against them, backed as they were by the police, it would have required at least three times this number. I wouldn’t fancy our chances if 350 far left activists tried it.  They were obviously experienced street fighters.  We are not.

The idea that we have to physically confront the Nazis whenever they appear is one we should reject. Holding this as a matter of principle, with street fighting squads, was a strategy applied in Germany in 1930 with disastrous results.

The German left divided

Adolf Hitler would take power in January 1933 in a country containing the biggest social democratic party in the world and the biggest Communist Party outside Russia. Between them they could mobilise millions of workers against Nazism, but that never happened.

The leadership of the Social Democrat Party (SPD) argued that it must respect the constitution and obey the law. In November 1932, weeks away from Hitler coming to power, the SPD paper, Vorwärts, printed a special edition saying, “the Social Democracy stands firm on the grounds of the Constitution and legality.”

The German Communist Party (KPD), meanwhile, following the line from Moscow, not only refused to work with the SPD against the Nazis, but branded them ‘social fascists’, who were the main enemy rather than the Nazis.

From exile, Leon Trotsky urged that the key question of the day was to build a united front of the worker’s parties and trade unions against fascism.

Of, course the SPD leaders hated the idea of street confrontations and of working with the Communists, but their members grasped that Hitler represented an expediential threat. In a number of cities and towns, the SPD was unable to hold back its members, who mobilised in their thousands against Nazi rallies and marches.

The Communists were the smaller of the two parties with a weaker base in the trade unions – a majority of their members were unemployed. Setting out to oppose the Nazis on their own, they were incapable of organising successful strikes against Nazi violence or mobilising on a scale which would have swamped the Nazis.

In May 1930, the KPD daily newspaper raised the slogan, ‘Hit the fascists wherever you meet them’.

The party’s paramilitary wing, the Red Front Fighters (RFB) organised squads of street fighters, almost all young males. It was a disaster. The Nazis had their own squads, containing ex-soldiers who were better armed and all too often backed up by the police.

The stress simply on physical confrontation created political problems. Semi-military operations required conspiratorial means which ruled out mass mobilisation. A celebration of physical force created a macho culture and reports flooded in of bullying.

The historian of the KPD’s physical force strategy, Eva Rosenhaft, notes

‘all too often … because of a Nazi attack, for days, even in some cases for weeks, no revolutionary work was done except practising ‘civil war’ in miniature’.^[1]

Isolated, the Communist squads turned to individual terror, involving attacks on individual Nazi leaders and gun attacks by small groups on Nazi rallies and beer halls.

Rosenhaft writes:

“Viewed on the national scale, the trend towards individual terror appears as a reflex response to accumulating evidence of the futility of mass action … It was clear by the end of 1932 that the policy of mass self-defence was not being carried as intended … Political strikes were no easier to organise than economic ones … What Die Rote Fahne headlined as a ‘strike movement’ in Berlin after the Felsenech shootings [of KPD supporters] in January 1932 amounted to no more than a half hour protest strike on the part of 180 workers, the entire workforce of a manufacturing plant, and a series of protest meetings and resolutions in other factories … an Inprekor [the magazine of the Communist International] correspondent reported: ‘although there were nearly 100 political strikes in July this year, this fight [against the Nazis] took place largely on the streets. The factories and mines were only slightly involved’. In December the Political Secretary for Berlin, a specialist in strike tactics, was heard to admit that the KPD was in no position to carry out a general strike on its own. In the view of the leadership, individual terror was the easy way out: ‘it arose not from disappointment with methods tried and found wanting, but from despair of the possibility of success.’”^[2]

As this did not work, by 1932 there was widespread demoralisation in the Communist ranks.

Trotsky and the united front

In contrast, Trotsky upheld the idea of the united front as presented by Lenin and himself in 1920 and 1921.

In November 1931, Trotsky wrote that:

“On the scales of election statistics, a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Communist votes. But on the scale of revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives and their mother in laws. The great bulk of the fascists consists of human dust.”^[3]

Trotsky was not saying the KPD and the SPD should drop their deep political differences, but that they should agree to unite around the simple demand, ‘Stop the Nazis’. Trotsky advised “march separately but strike together.”

The KPD could not win such mass action on its own. It required the involvement of the majority of employed workers, organised by the SPD and its unions. Half the Berlin working class continued to follow the lead of the SPD leadership – the percentage was even higher outside the capital.

A way had to be found to get their support in the fight against the Nazis. This would involve confronting the line of ‘do nothing’ when faced with the Nazi menace. There was only one way to do this – to apply the tactic of the united front as worked out in the early years of the Communist International.

Again and again, the Communist Party should have been inviting the Social Democrat leaders to engage in united action against the fascists, together defending Social Democrat premises from Nazi attack then going on to defend Communist premises from the same attacks.

The Social Democratic leaders would try to avoid such united actions by any means at their disposal. But such was the Nazi threat to their organisation that they could not always say no without the risk of driving many of their members to united action with the Communists in any case. If the appeal was made to the Social Democratic leaders for united action, then united action would eventually result, whether with or without these leaders.

The German Communists refused to make that appeal. Instead of teaching workers to oppose reformism while at the same time fighting alongside reformist workers against the Nazis, the KPD committed a historic crime. The people who benefited most from this were the leaders of the SPD. They could always excuse their disastrous passivity by blaming the Communists for dividing the class. Such squadism reinforced the blind alley politics of the KPD. It substituted the action of a dedicated minority for that of the masses.

A tactical question

Rosenhaft, drawing on the success of the mass action in Braunschweig [Brunswick], writes:

“If we consider the incidents that the KPD itself held up as models of mass terror at a certain period, those in Braunschweig [Brunswick] and Nowawes in the autumn of 1931, it is clear that their principal basis was the ad hoc cooperation of sections of the working class – which usually meant the realisation of a local ‘united front’ between Social Democrats and the Communist Party … it is clear that the voluntaristic conviction of the KPD leadership, that if only all Communists did exactly as they were told the Party could transform the situation single handed, was a dangerous illusion.”^[4]

In January 1933 the Nazis took power without a fight. They would inflict awful revenge on the German working class, whether Communist or Social Democrats, and on humanity.

Today, we are in favour of physically confronting the Nazis but that is a tactical question. On the September 2025 Unite the Kingdom march we were outnumbered nine to one. A physical confrontation by us was simply out of the question.

When we do confront them, we of course want the numbers, but we also want that to reflect the unity there is against racism and fascism. That requires mobilising people of all ages and genders, as well as trade unionists and people from across the different ethnic communities and so on.

When we have done that (and I’ll talk about this in part two), it doesn’t just defeat the Nazis, it demoralises them. Being defeated by women in hijabs or a multi racial group of students is something they will be ashamed of. Good.

^[1] Eva Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933 (Cambridge Press, 1983), P108

https://files.libcom.org/files/eve-rosenhaft-beating-the-fascists-the-german-communists-and-political-violence-1929-1933-2008.compressed.pdf

^[2] Eva Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933 (Cambridge Press, 1983), P111-112 

https://files.libcom.org/files/eve-rosenhaft-beating-the-fascists-the-german-communists-and-political-violence-1929-1933-2008.compressed.pdf,  – my emphasis

^[3] Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (Pathfinder, 1987), P128

^[4] Eva Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933 (Cambridge Press, 1983), P209-210

https://files.libcom.org/files/eve-rosenhaft-beating-the-fascists-the-german-communists-and-political-violence-1929-1933-2008.compressed.pdf, P111-112 – my emphasis