July 1944
The Nazi press’s propaganda sees the hand of Providence everywhere. Each day they expect the miracle without which victory is now impossible. Even the attack Hitler survived, an attack made by circles of high-up officers and a section of the big bourgeoisie who have realised that Germany’s situation is desperate and want to replace the Hitlerite state with another bourgeois state. But the bureaucrats do not want to give up power so quickly; on the contrary, they want to hang on to the butter dish as long as possible. They are defending themselves with the most brutal of terror, Himmler having received carte blanche to exercise it freely; in the big cities of Germany and even in the occupied territories in the West there have been incidents and bloody clashes between the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht. The Hitlerite state is falling apart, which is why they are calling on German soldiers to hold out until the last.
Hitler’s fall means revolution in Germany. Only the inhuman terror of the Gestapo, SS and other gendarmes is keeping the German soldiers on the front. All German soldiers and workers have had more than enough of the war and want to go home, above all now that they know that victory is unthinkable. They only have one slogan in their heads:
Down with the war, for immediate peace!
Hitler can rely on the German army less and less. He has to send Waffen SS, parachutists and other shock troops all over the place to stave off collapse.
Signs of discontent in the German army are becoming more numerous and more visible. Everywhere we find fraternisation between German soldiers and French and Belgian workers. Many soldiers have joined the maquis. The courts-martial are in full flow.
Bloody fighting, retreats on all fronts
German troops are being forced back by the formidable strength of the Americans. But the British and American “liberators” do not want to race ahead, since this would cause the decomposition of the front in Normandy and even the end of the German occupation of France, that is to say, the German revolution, which the American capitalists do not want. These formidable battles are not only happening in France; in Italy too each day more and more significant areas have become battlefields. The Red Army is still progressing: it is in the heart of the Baltic States, it is marching on Warsaw and it has arrived on the borders of East Prussia.
Germany is in an absolutely desperate situation
Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and their lying propaganda put their only hopes of winning the war in some God-given miracle, Providence and secret new weapons. We have already heard such talk once before in the war, from Reynaud, President of the French Council, who said such things a few weeks before the French disaster of June 1940. Like Hitler and German capital today, he was relying on a miracle. But this is hopeless. No miracle is now able to save Hitler and his capitalist backers. Hitler has been pushed back onto his last lines of defence. The domestic situation worsens daily. The more critical Germany’s situation becomes, the more the capitalists and the bourgeoisie are divided and turn away from Hitler.
But who will come after Hitler?
After five years of endless, pointless killing, the soldiers on the front as well as German workers constantly threatened with being sent to the front, unable to voice their discontent and forced to work under constant bombardment, have had more than enough of this war which has taken from them everything they worked so hard to achieve. They can see that they have nothing to gain from this war. German soldiers, workers and peasants want to send the Hitlerite régime to hell, along with the inhuman Gestapo terror which forces them to shoot at the workers and peasants on the other side. Each man is wondering how he can save himself from this hellish war. The Nazi bureaucrats, Goebbels and his henchmen, know that German soldiers no longer want to go and fight abroad. So to get them to hold out for longer the lying propaganda warns of a new, even worse Versailles Treaty in the aftermath of the war in the event that Germany loses.
All the British and American propaganda comes to Goebbels’ aid with its unrelenting attacks on the German soldiers, with its plans for a military occupation of Germany of indeterminate length, under American military dictatorship (Eisenhower shall rule over occupied Europe) and even talking of a carve-up of Germany. None of this surprises us. It only proves that the British and American governments are no better than the Nazi clique, that they are doing as they please and that we must rid ourselves of the whole system of capitalist rule, whether that be in Germany or Britain, France or America. That can only be achieved by a victorious workers’ revolution in Germany, Europe and the world.
The nationalist policies of the ex-Communist Party aid the reactionary plans of the Americans
But the worst thing is that the British and American capitalists’ plans have found solid backing from the nationalist politics of the so-called Communist Party. In Moscow Stalin has created a “Committee for a Free Germany” composed of barons, counts and captured Hitlerite generals. These gentlemen’s goal is to replace Hitler’s vacillating régime with a national bourgeois government and so save German capitalism from proletarian revolution.
The ex-Communist Party and Stalinist degeneration have cast the Leninist programme of international class struggle and international revolution into the dust. Stalin has dissolved the Comintern, the international leadership of the world revolution, and in every country has introduced a nationalist and chauvinist policy attacking German soldiers. The ex-Communist Parties have replaced the policy of revolutionary fraternisation with fraternisation with their own exploiters, and have united with the reactionary de Gaulle. They would have the workers believe that Churchill and Roosevelt will liberate them. By not calling on the international proletariat to defend the workers’ state, instead allying with the capitalist Great Powers and not calling for international fraternisation between workers, Stalin strengthens Hitler’s hand, since German soldiers who everywhere meet with hatred and unable to find any solution are ultimately thrown into the arms of Hitler, who tells them that Germany must conquer Europe in order to survive.
Only the transformation of the imperialist war into proletarian revolution can bring peace
Neither Roosevelt-Churchill nor Hitler can bring peace or bring an end to the war. Their peace can only be directed against the international working class.
We must end this war: for immediate peace! Only the will of the exploited working masses can end it, again taking up the struggle against the capitalist rule which caused the war, which is responsible for it, which dragged it out and which will bring more wars if we let it.
Hitler and German capitalism can only be overthrown by the working class. The latter must take its destiny in its own hands and turn the imperialist war into a civil war.
The bourgeois parties have already proven their inability to save Germany from crisis, and all of them have oppressed the working class and thrown it into ever greater poverty. We must not allow the Hitlerite régime to be replaced by another bourgeois government, however “democratic” it might be, whose main tasks would be to save German capitalism and oppressing the workers and peasants to an even greater extent. For this struggle, hang on to your weapons.
You should hang on to the weapons they have given you to fight for the interests of the Hitlerite clique in order to turn the imperialist war into a war against capitalism, a civil war. The uprising of the German working class, which will create workers’ and soldiers’ soviets and organise fraternisation with the workers and peasants of Europe, will cast aside any fresh Versailles Treaty and all the rapacious plans of capitalism. The proletarian revolution will overthrow capitalism across Europe and establish in its place the Soviet Socialist United States of Europe.
Fraternise with the Russian, American and British soldiers.
Fraternise with the workers of the occupied countries. Do not break their strikes, which signify the struggle against capitalism. On the contrary, show them that you are also exploited workers and peasants, that you are for peace and against Hitler and the war.
Fraternise with the French and Russian prisoners and with the millions of foreign workers in Germany, who are forced to work far from home, far from their wives and children. Invite them back to yours, and try and forge mutual understanding. Together, take home to Germany the struggle for better living standards, against the war and for peace.
Create secret cells of three or four people! In these cells, discuss the situation in Germany. With secretly advertised slogans fight in your units for better living standards and for more leave, and in regard to all issues raised by soldiers. Discuss the illegal papers and circulate them clandestinely among the other soldiers. Explain the situation in Germany and Europe to your comrades.
Comrades, you who believe in your unity, organise yourselves in committees for revolutionary struggle. Wherever you can, help the local workers. Try to build links with them.
Do not think that you are isolated. The proletarian revolution is mounting in every country in Europe, and everywhere the working class is fighting hard, even on the underground, against its own exploiters and against police and fascist terror.
Keep up contacts! Do not go into struggle without your comrades’ agreement! When struggle breaks out, have the courage to build it as much as possible! Spread news of the struggle by all means to all countries!
Long live the Soviet Socialist Republic of Germany!
Long live the Soviet United States of Europe!
Long live the Soviet Socialist Republic of the World!
Follow Karl Liebknecht’s example
On 1 May 1916 Karl Liebknecht came to Berlin and gave a speech in Potsdamer Platz. He was arrested and put before a military tribunal. To explain his opposition to the imperialist war he wrote a series of texts, one of the most important of which we reproduce here:
“The German government is in its social composition and historical character an instrument for the oppression and exploitation of the working class; at home and abroad it serves the interests of junkerism, of capitalism, and of imperialism.
“The slogan “Down with the government!” is designed to brand this entire policy of the government as fatal for the mass of the population…
“This slogan also indicates that it is the duty of every representative of the interests of the proletariat to wage a most bitter struggle – the class struggle – against the government...
“The present war is neither a war to defend the nation’s territorial integrity nor a war to liberate oppressed peoples or assure the well-being of the masses.
“From the standpoint of the proletariat this war only signifies the most extreme concentration and extension of political suppression, of economic exploitation, and a blood bath of the workers in the interests of capitalism and absolutism.
“To all this the workers of all countries can give but one answer: to engage in a bitter struggle, the international class struggle, against the capitalist governments and the ruling classes of all countries for the abolition of all oppression and exploitation by establishing a socialist peace. In this class struggle the socialists, whose only fatherland is the International, fight for all that socialists fight for. The slogan “Down with the war” signifies that I wholeheartedly condemn the present war and declare myself an enemy of the current war because of its historic nature, because of its general social causes as well as the specific way in which it originated, because of the way it is being carried out and the goals for which it is being waged. That slogan signifies that it is the duty of every socialist and every representative of proletarian interests to participate in the international class struggle in order to end the war.”
