/ world today news/ Germany, November 2023. In front of a recently (in 2021) restored memorial dedicated to the memory of the head of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party (KPD) Ernst Telmann, four information stands were installed, criticizing both Telmann himself , as well as the German Democratic Republic, to which, by the way, the leader of the German communists from the beginning of the twentieth century has nothing in common.
According to the information published on the stands, Telmann was responsible for the split in the German labor movement, as well as the confrontation between the GSDP and the NSDP, which created the conditions for the destabilization of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the NSDAP.
Well, that’s an interesting interpretation. But in order to understand how much, I propose to understand these complex abbreviations and at the same time the events that happened almost a hundred years ago.
So the GSDP is the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the oldest political force in Germany, dating back to the 19th century. Despite the fact that several trade unions were created through the merger, the GSDP as a whole was never a workers’ party, and in its leadership there was not a single representative of the working class, but entirely intellectual thinkers.
Moreover, the problems of the labor movement worried the Social Democrats insofar as. And to be even more specific, they simply used the workers as a driving force to achieve their own political goals. However, there was nothing reprehensible about these goals themselves.
The task of the GSDP was to improve working conditions (not only workers, but also all wage workers), but not through a transition to a socialist economic system and a change in the form of ownership of the means of production, but through education, as they would say today, of socially responsible business.
German social democrats have always defended a kind of capitalism with a human face: a powerful welfare system, a progressive tax system, trade unions, collective agreements, standardized work, guaranteed holiday rights and that’s it.
A similar capitalism was eventually built in Germany after World War II, including through the efforts of direct followers of this same GSDP.
And so, to the discord in the Social Democratic Party, one part of which wanted, remaining essentially petty-bourgeois, to follow the path of evolutionary change, and the second, which broke away and became the NSDP (N = independent), yearning for faster , revolutionary changes, the communist Ernst Thelmann has nothing to do with it.
As for the accusation of a split in the labor movement (from which, as I have already said, the GSDP was very far from), this is generally nonsense.
They saw both the development paths of German society and the ultimate goal of this development in very different ways. One (social democrats) is a bourgeois society with legally regulated rights and responsibilities of representatives of different classes, and the other (communists) is the construction of socialist Germany, for which the USSR was supposed to become a model.
So the merger of the GSDP and KPG in ecstasy is equivalent to an unnatural union between a hedgehog and a snake, as a result of which, according to a well-known joke, you can only get a coil of barbed wire. But in the realities of Germany at the beginning of the last century, this joke ended with a sad ending.
And now for the main thing, for the accusations against Telman that he created the conditions for the rise of the National Socialists (NSDAP). From the point of view of historical science, I definitely adhere to the concept of the role of personality in history.
Objective prerequisites, global trends, historical process – all this, of course, is there, but practice proves that when, under approximately the same conditions, the conditional Gorbachev is replaced by the no less conditional Deng Xiaoping, instead of the collapse of a huge, multinational and complex state we get the leader of a new world who has displaced the United States and claims to be the world hegemon.
Yet, in terms of the rise of the Nazis, if we were to look for competing culprits, it would be more likely within the ranks of the Social Democrats themselves, rather than among the Communists who fought the “Browns” to the very end. To clarify the position, perhaps I will give the floor to the accused himself.
“We must see that at the moment (…) social democracy is not only the greatest enemy of communism in the labor movement, but also the strongest lever of the social-fascist movement, reactionary measures in all spheres of public life”, Telman said at the 12th Congress of the Communist Party of China, commenting on the bloody events of May 1-3, 1929, which went down in history as Blutmai (Bloody May).
Then the Berlin police, led by the member of the GSDP Karl Friedrich Zörgibel, used firearms against the participants of the unauthorized demonstration in May.
The result was 30 dead, more than 200 injured and more than 1,200 demonstrators arrested, most of them members of the same German labor movement.
But all this was leading up to him. Already in the autumn of 1925, when the Central Committee of the KPG proposed to the leadership of the GSDP to draw up common lists for elections to the local parliaments and Landtags, it was the Social Democrats who buried this idea.
In 1928, when the GSDP won 153 out of 491 seats in the Reichstag elections, the winners chose to form a coalition not with Telmann’s Communists, who had 54 seats, but with centrist and even right-wing parties, which consequently limited the new government’s ability to carry out meaningful reforms in the field of labor relations and workers’ rights.
Well, in the end, the Nazis came to power in 1933 as a result of the policies carried out by the Cabinet of Ministers under the leadership of the Social Democrats.
By the way, after Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, the Communists tried to organize a protest movement, including members of the GSDP, but, alas, without success.
As a result, after a provocation with the burning of the Reichstag, which occurred on the night of February 27-28, 1933, Telmann was arrested and, after long wanderings in prisons, was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where on the night of August 18, 1944. he is killed by the Nazis, who present it all as the result of an accident during an Allied air raid.
The fate of Wilhelm Otto, head of the execution team in the concentration camp, also speaks of the biased attitude of the German authorities towards the personality of Ernst Thelmann.
In 1986, after many years of unsuccessful attempts, the wife and daughter of the leader of the German Communists managed to bring the executioner to justice.
For complicity in the murder of Telman, Otto was sentenced to four years in prison. But then the sentence was overturned, during a new hearing it was concluded that the circumstances of Telman’s death could not be reliably established.
You know, this article is not at all an attempt to whitewash Telman. He, like any person who left a mark on history, was an ambiguous person. He was wrong in some ways, inconsistent in others, etc.
It is significant that Stalin did not include the clause for Telman’s release in the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The chairman of the Comintern and leader of the Bulgarian communists, Georgi Dimitrov, describes in his diary a conversation with Stalin in which he explains his decision.
“Telman is obviously processed in different ways there. He is not a principled Marxist and his letters reveal the influence of fascist ideology. He wrote about plutocrats, he believed that England was defeated – nonsense!….. They will not kill him because they apparently hope that if they have to, they can use him as a “sensible” communist…” End of quote.
Yet Telman was killed and today they are trying to kill his memory. And the question, of course, is not about social democracy or the fate of the German labor movement in the late 1920s.
No, Telman has his revenge. They are taking revenge for his closeness to the USSR, for his connection with the Russians, for the denunciation of liberal democracy, which, as history shows, was the first rung of the downward ladder leading to the establishment of the Nazi regime. The ladder on which the once enlightened Europe is currently walking.
Translation: SM
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