INTRODUCTION of EUROPEAN CIVIL WAR 1917-1945

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Introduction

Perspectives for the World War Era

Nothing seems more trivial and yet is less self-evident than the thesis that the most appropriate perspective in which to view Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, National Socialism and the Third Reich, is that of a European civil war.

It is common knowledge that immediately after seizing power in November 1917, the Bolshevik Party called on the proletarians and the oppressed all over the world to revolt against the capitalist system, which was responsible for the war. And it is not specialist knowledge that the newly founded Communist Party  of Germany saw itself at the beginning of 1919 in "the most violent civil war in world history." Again a few months later, the Third International even believed it could proclaim that May 1, 1919 must be the day of the proletarian revolution all throughout Europe. Thus, there had been a state since 1917, and an international party since 1919, calling everywhere for an "armed insurrection" and consequently for a world civil war everywhere, and since these were obviously not the fantasies of powerless sectarians, a fundamental new reality had in this manner entered into historical existence. If a strong group calls for civil war, then a civil war situation is in any case a given, even if bloody battles do not take place immediately or constantly. Stefan Possony described the epoch as the "century of turmoil"; Hanno Kesting reached far back into intellectual history treated the subject of "Philosophy of History and World Civil War"; Roman Schnur, in turn, traced the "overture" of the world civil war in the age of the French Revolution.

Such a comprehensive concept must, of course, raise concerns. The concept of civil war seems to include the fact that within a state two groups of citizens face each other, armed; be it insurgents fighting the government, be it that both parties have their own territory and there is a clear analogy to the war of states. The most appropriate example is the American Civil War of 1861-1865, which from the beginning consisted of warfare by organized armies. On the other hand, one speaks of the age of the English Civil War 1640-1660, although by no means did armed confrontations take place in every one of these years, and although the party that was victorious ultimately did not possess armed forces at the beginning of 1660. And even this insular civil war was not purely domestic, for which both the Puritans and the royalists found sympathy and support across the Channel. In the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, civil war and war between states were often hardly distinguishable: a state that writes the motto War on Palaces, Peace on Cottages is itself a civil war party, provided that enemy states also have numerous houses and not just a few palaces next to millions of cottages. Therefore, according to all presumptions, the narrowest concept of civil war is not the most appropriate.

But is it therefore justified to speak of a European Civil War of between 1917 and 1945? There was the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, and there was the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, there were attempts at revolution and uprisings in Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria and elsewhere. But the January uprising of 1919, the March action of 1921, the Reval coup at the end of 1924 were put down by the governments under attack with the help of the police and the military, and just as one should not underestimate the severity of the domestic struggles in France and England, even the most comprehensive concept of civil war does not allow one to perceive anything in these countries other than fierce party struggles, occasional riots, and isolated political strikes. A communist party existed here and there, i.e. a party oriented towards armed insurrection, but it had the government and such a large majority of the population against it that there was only one civil war party, which got caught up, as it were, in an overpowering net. This, while there is no doubt that one must speak of "Europe in Crisis", there can be no mention of a European Civil War if one looks at the individual countries of Europe equally, and above all, in terms of their mutual relations.

But even in a completely conventional and merely narrative history of Europe in the age of the world wars, it must be stated as a new and completely unexpected phenomenon that, first of all in Italy a party was formed; which, like the long-standing parties in close or distant association with the government, did not simply oppose the party of revolutionary socialism or communism, in order to leave it to its own further development after defending against the actual or at least projected grip on power; but which saw itself as a second and radically opposed party of the civil war. Therefore, the seizure of power by the fascist party in October 1922 meant; although not immediately, but as a logical consequence of its basic approach; the political annihilation of the communist party and ultimately even the annihilation of all other parties.

Nevertheless, it is by no means certain that one can even speak of an Italian civil war. The term would only be indisputable and legitimate if it had ultimately been the fascist party that had crushed a national uprising of the communists. However, such an uprising had not taken place, and the attempts to do so had been nipped in the bud by the government or the party system; therefore, it has often been claimed that the fascist party only came on the scene after the fact and should be considered as a kind of parasite which gave a superfluous kick to the already defeated revolution and then pushed its own breadwinner, the system, off the political table.

But this view was by no means universally considered to be correct, and in any case, since 1922, two parties had existed that were oriented towards the civil war and that gave ideological justification to this orientation. Both parties had taken possession of a state, and both had sympathizers and supporters in many countries. As a result, the situation in Europe was very different from what it had been before the World War I. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1920s, the opinion was widespread that these two ideological countries were marginalized states that lagged far behind the great central powers of Europe, behind England, France and Germany in terms of productivity and genuine dynamism, and whose international following consisted only of meaningless sects. Indeed, in France the Communist Party, which was formed in 1920 from the great majority of the Socialist Party, lost its supporters to an almost alarming degree, and only small groups like the Action Française sympathized with the Italian fascists. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was widely believed to have abandoned its revolutionary character and was in the process of building socialism in one country. Anyone who traveled in Europe in 1929 was nowhere confronted anywhere with civil war-like conditions, and only in Russia and Italy did he come across one-party regimes that had crushed all their opponents in a civil war-like manner, albeit in very different ways.

When the global economic crisis had left its mark on countries, however, the foreign visitor saw a different picture. At least in Germany, he had to ask himself whether the revolutionary situation of 1919-1920 had not been resurrected. Almost one-fifth of German voters seemed to identify with the Soviet Union, as the "Rote Fahne" [Red Flag, socialist newspaper]  had already done in a particularly pronounced form in 1920, when it recast a well-known line of poetry by Heinrich Lersch into the astonishing formulation: "Soviet Russia must live, even if we have to die.” More than one-third supported a party which, through the mouths of its leader, often expressed its admiration for Italian fascism and its Duce. The unrest on the streets of the cities was so great that there was constant talk of the impending or imminent civil war. The seizure of power by the NSDAP was a event in which the state power and a huge party overthrew their main enemy in a very civil war-like manner and forced all other opponents to surrender. Whether here, as in Italy, an already won victory was merely reproduced in an exorbitant manner, must be doubtful. In any case, from that moment on it became probable that Europe had finally entered a new epoch which, according to its most novel and henceforth most decisive manifestation, must be called the epoch of fascism and which was precisely for this reason the epoch of the European Civil War; a world civil war had not yet been able to develop, since the United States of America had experienced the brief and violent panic of the red scare and had refused diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union until 1933, but had not yet really entered the conflict. If this character is to become visible, then it is not enough just to make the subject fascism in its epoch, but it is necessary to keep an eye on its most elementary presupposition, namely Bolshevism or Soviet Communism. If the mutual enmity of these two state parties, which at least saw themselves as civil war parties, was serious and not merely a relic from the half-forgotten early days, long since repealed by peaceful reconstruction work, then it was bound to one day develop into a state war, which would at the same time bear the essential characteristics of an international civil war.

But only a very decisive and therefore controversial selection can focus this character into view. Anyone who writes a European history of the World War Era has to do with so many relations between states and internal conditions of individual states that the Soviet Union and Germany only become an eminent topic in 1941 and at most in 1939. Whoever follows the development of the fascist movements perceives what is specifically new and, to that extent, the peculiar character of the epoch, but cannot describe in a vivid way its most important precondition: the anti-Bolshevism of these movements. A history of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, is either predominantly preoccupied with internal developments, or it becomes a succession of revolutionary failures, to which a deeper and more positive meaning may be ascribed. The era can only appear as a European Civil War if the focus is on the two main antagonists: Bolshevism, which had been a state since 1917, and National Socialism, which became a state in 1933.

Certainly, it cannot be ruled out that this perspective is precisely misleading, and it is certainly no coincidence that it has never been chosen so far. Contemporary communist authors will object to the fact that here a short-lived and reactionary phenomenon seems to be placed on the same level as the secular world movement, which was temporarily deformed but never lost its progressive character. Liberals will wonder whether, in the context of this question, the democratic and liberal states or tendencies do not fade too much into the background. For the anti-communist it will be extremely uncomfortable to see the resistance of the Western world in the Cold War era and in the present seemingly in line with what he believes to be the utterly different anti-communism of the Third Reich. By no means only the survivors of the Final Solution and the citizens of Israel will have to ask themselves whether, from this perspective, the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists does not sink into a accidental concomitant.

All these questions can be clarified only by the presentation and therefore can be answered only after the presentation, which includes methodical discussions, but must quickly reach the descriptive description and the essential details. In doing so, National Socialism may claim priority of the cognitive interest.

Bolshevism was certainly a confusing and controversial phenomenon for contemporaries as early as 1917/18. That the workers’ movement would seize power in at least one country or another in Western or Central Europe after the First World War was likely for not only the supporters of socialism. But what did it mean that the event took place, of all places, backward Russia, whose population was overwhelmingly consisted of peasants? Did the socialist party, which seized power here against other socialist parties, ultimately degrade itself into an instrument of self-assertion for the Russian multi-ethnic state? Or did Russia become the mere material of the world-revolutionary will of Marxist intellectuals who, in their first exuberance overestimated the possibilities offered to them in Europe and in the world, but who steadfastly held to their goal, the revolutionary transformation of the whole earth into a human community without classes and without states? From the beginning there was no shortage of enemies who had previously been friends, and even resolute supporters found themselves in grave doubts early on.

Nevertheless, there is no phenomenon in modern world history that has been condemned from so many sides, for so long and so intensely as German National Socialism and the Third Reich; But there is also no regime that has been characterized in such contradictory ways and that has given the critics so much opportunity to attack one another indirectly by stating a close kinship between National Socialism and one of the powers or ways of thinking that just now seemed to belong to the unanimous front of opponents. It is controversial whether National Socialism was similar to capitalism or communism, whether it must be considered German or un-German, whether it turned out to be anti-modern or modernizing, whether it was revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, whether it suppressed or unleashed the tribe, whether it had clients or not, whether it created a monolithic system or a polycracy, whether its mass base was formed by the petty bourgeoisie or to a considerable extent also by the workers, whether it was supported by world-historical tendencies or whether it was a last revolt against the course of the History.

This fact is a basic fact for science and at the same time a challenge. A scientific approach first of all requires a distance to each of the interpretations that have been sufficiently elaborated up to now, and it must therefore strive above all to do justice to the inner complexity of the phenomenon that has been assessed in so many ways; in its view of complexity and contradictions, however, it must not lose sight of the unanimity that is also a fundamental fact. If it has to be willing to carry out those revisions that may result from the weighing of opposing views and the formation of new questions, it cannot simply reject the consensus that has been able to span so many contradictions. If it pursued apology, it would become a party itself. But for party opinions, often what takes the opposing opinion into consideration already counts as an apology. When American scholars such as Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles C. Tansill in the second half of the 1920s, questioned the hitherto undisputed thesis that the German Reich was solely responsible for war, they were accused of advocating for the enemy, but in reality they paved the way for a more comprehensive approach that integrated the opposing thesis of war propaganda on both sides into an overall picture, for the result of an equal distance from both starting points.

Perspective means looking through, and no kind of historiography is not possible with perspectives that take in more than the immediate object. Even the historian, who wants to describe the events on a remote island, cannot do without a concept of non-insularity, from which what is peculiar, island-like, in these events can be better understood. Much more frequent, however, are phenomena that have their reason for existence in relation to other phenomena. The Counter-Reformation presupposes the Reformation, and a history of the Counter-Reformation that is not, at least in glimpses, also a history of the Reformation is inconceivable. The perspectives by means of which National Socialism is related to a more original or superordinate reality are numerous, but manageable. The most important of them are by no means based on learned theories, but are based on the concrete experiences of many hundreds of thousands of people.

1.The oldest and most obvious perspective is to view National Socialist rule as a stage of German history. Almost all states in the world had fought in the First World War against the German Reich, and it was the almost universal conviction that this state in the center of Europe had ignited the world conflagration through its militarism and its expansionist drive. The National Socialist Party was seen early on, especially by the French, as the spearhead of German revisionism and revanchism, on which almost all Germans agreed. After Hitler came to power, the party was even more identical with Germany, and the most important lines of German history seemed to lead directly to it from Luther and probably even from Hermann the Cheruscan. The contrast to this National Socialist Germany was the rest of Europe, with its culture shaped by ancient and especially Roman tradition. This view seemed to find definitive confirmation with the outbreak of World War II, which, as in 1914, exposed the European powers, France and England, to the attack of concentrated German military power. This time France even suffered a heavy defeat, and once again the help of the whole world was required until the strongest of all military states was overthrown. Hitler and his party were just a new manifestation of that Pan-German striving for world domination, which before 1914 had already been combined with social Darwinist ideas of the relentless struggle of biological forces and which had become the real antithesis of the peace-loving and democratic tendencies in Europe. The only solution was to break up this concentration of power and integrate the re-educated Germans into an association of states in Europe or the world. The Germans were also able to accept this perspective; it made it easier for them to say farewell to the power, indeed to the nation state, although or because it was still, in its inversion, a Teutonocentric perspective.

2.This view, however, always presupposes an inner cohesion that modern society does not have. Modern society proves for the sociologist to be manifoldly structured or fragmented. If, however, German society is made up of entrepreneurs and workers, educated citizens and small traders, civil servants and the liberal professions, just like the French and English society is, then it is not the modifications that are decisive, but basic character is what counts. And then it turns out that the economic system in all European countries with the exception of the Soviet Union was the same, namely the capitalist one, that England and France were no less imperialist than Germany, that they were subject to the same shocks, that they looked for ways out in a similar way, and that movements and parties appeared everywhere that wanted to face the great crisis in a manner similar to that of the National Socialist Party in Germany. The sociological perspective is therefore an international one, and where it appeared in a Marxist form, its representatives were convinced that only an international measure could remedy the situation, namely the replacement of the anarchic and crisis-generating economic system of capitalism by a socialist planned economy, which should at least encompass Europe and if possible the world. However, only a part of the Marxists saw the Soviet planned economy as a model worthy of imitation, and the Social Democrats flatly denied it the quality of socialism. But they, too, perceived dangerous tendencies among the employers and especially the petty bourgeoisie, which amounted to a violent defense of the historically obsolete system and which, in the form of Italian fascism, had already seized power in a large state. National Socialism was thus to be seen as a manifestation of the international movement of fascism.

3.A theory that understands National Socialism as fascism should only be mentioned if this movement is not seen merely as an instrument in the hands of well-known forces, such as heavy industry or finance capital. It must therefore be understood as something new, arising from historically new circumstances or from the reaction against them: the collapse of the Central Powers, the Russian Revolution, the socialist wave in most European states during the years 1919 and 1920. But whether Marxists see the existential fears of the middle class or the petty bourgeoisie negatively, or whether non-Marxists refrain from passing judgment on a entire social classes, the antagonism of the fascist movement against communism and socialism is regarded by both as fundamental.

4. Early in the twenties, however, the view emerged that this opposition was a pseudo-contradiction, which would prove to be a match if the correct perspective was chosen. From the point of view of democracy, which has only just made such great progress in Europe and the world, the fascist and communist parties were seen as reactions that strive for a dictatorship and endangering, through their respective claims to exclusivity, that civilized coexistence of the various strata, parties and classes, which is the prerequisite and the consequence of the freedom of the individual and the real distinction of the modern type of society. The totalitarianism of the Russian Bolsheviks was spoken of with a negative connotation as early as 1918, and it was only necessary to add the opposite emphasis to the word often used by Mussolini in order to contrast the totalitarianism of the dictatorial regimes with the liberal and democratic states. The Hitler-Stalin Pact greatly encouraged the scientific elaboration of this opposition, and there is no doubt that it could be based on a powerful tradition of thought which, since the beginning of modern times, has rejected tyranny, dictatorship and despotism and set against them the doctrine of the separation of powers as a safeguard of freedom. After the interruption by the wartime coalition, the theory of totalitarianism became something like the official self-image of the West from the end of the 1940s, and at least in its popular versions it tended to equate the regimes of Hitler and Stalin, which were based on terror and oppression. However, their influence declined since the beginning of the 1960s, as the consolidation of the balance of power and further de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union brought about a phase of détente.

It was precisely because of this that self-criticism became possible again in the West, which in the decade of acute disputes seemed almost forgotten, and a younger generation linked new questions with old theses. Had not the leading classes in Germany cooperated with the National Socialists in a variety of ways and thereby incurred serious guilt? Didn’t the USA play a disastrous role in the Third World through its imperialism by supporting dictatorships in many places and opposing the emancipation efforts of ordinary people? Weren’t they even committing a genuine genocide through their intervention in Vietnam? And the younger generation in Israel also asked very critical questions: Hadn't the established circles of European Jewry contributed by their behavior to the fact that millions of victims could be led "like sheep to the slaughter"?

So the traditional self-image of the western world seemed to have been shaken in the most lasting way, and from the newly acquired perspective of a world without political and sexual repression, which was based particularly on the Freudo-Marxism of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse; National Socialists and bourgeois resistance fighters, American capitalists and Italian fascists, Stalinists and sometimes Leninists moved closely together as representatives of a repressive society. In the Federal Republic of Germany, this anarchist tendency was combined with a Teutonocentrism reduced to the indictment of the leading classes of now and then to form a kind of ruling legend, the champions of which rejected an identification with the state myth of German Democratic Republic, but were highly sensitive to any kind of anti-communism because this seemed to disturb the coexistence that had finally achieved. After all, research and questioning continued in the field of science, and it was possible, with reference to the ever increasing distance in time, to call for a historicization of National Socialism as well, to emphasize its revolutionary traits more strongly than had been customary until then, and even to ascribe to it a positive role in the modernization of German society. It also became more and more difficult to uphold the warnings of a resurgence of National Socialism or even to declare incessant public education enlightenment to be indispensable in order to make the repetition of the terrible events impossible. At the same time, profound changes in world politics stimulated the raising of new questions.

The development towards a permissive society, towards a highly complex and differentiated welfare state, has continued almost everywhere in the West, generating serious reactions. The abandonment of the allies in South Vietnam in 1975 and the fearful reluctance of the USA when large African states were conquered by Marxist liberation movements in the fight against Western liberation movements made the weakness of imperialism clear as never before, and the conservative wave that brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency only set itself the goal of preventing an impending global political imbalance. However, the Soviet Union was now defending a weak and dependent regime through a protracted war in Afghanistan; a communist regime that was in danger from within was asserting itself with great decisiveness and initial brutality through a seizure of power by the party military; to the astonishment of the world, a very peculiar, but in appearance almost classic revolution took place in Iran, which according to widespread notions had to be called progressive as the elimination of American influence and quite reactionary as the establishment of the rule of a high priest; and this revolutionary country was struck by a neighboring state with a war that was already in 1985 equaled World War II in duration, without the supposedly all-powerful United Nations Security Council and world public opinion showing anything other than helplessness. Rather, this public weeping came more into play when Israel waged a blitzkrieg against Lebanon, or more precisely, against its enemy's strong base in Lebanon, and when the world press not infrequently spoke about "genocide," and occasionally even of a resemblance between Zionists and National Socialists. In the meantime, the reunified Vietnam had conquered Cambodia and was in turn the subject of a punitive expedition by the People’s Republic of China. In the Federal Republic of Germany the social-liberal coalition dissolved a little later, but the postulated "turning point" made itself felt mainly in the fact that a new party which was extremely critical of technology and showed not only formal similarities with National Socialism, which it nevertheless opposed in the most abrupt way on the main points, emerged and became influential. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, a new wave of reforms got under way, which already in 1987 meant more than the periodic thaw and which in any case gave room for criticism of Stalin and certain features of its own past in a remarkable way.

The world situation has therefore not only changed so much in 1989/1991 that the assumption of an essential similarity of conditions, which alone can justify the fear of the repetition of certain events, no longer has any basis. The assumption that one day the new Hitler would lure large masses into dangerous ways in Germany and even set a new version of Auschwitz in motion was always unfounded and today now only foolish.

If, therefore, the fear of repetition is groundless and popular educational concerns are superfluous, then it should finally be allowed to take the step of making the National Socialist past an issue in its central point, and this central point is neither in criminal tendencies nor in anti-Semitic obsessions. The most essential thing about National Socialism is its relationship to Marxism and especially to communism in the form that it had gained through the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. This is not a new insight, but its meaning is obscured by two assumptions that are all too common. The communists themselves put forward the thesis that National Socialism only meant a futile and therefore criminal reluctance against the will of history, namely against the socialist revolution; the liberal opponents of the communists, on the other hand, are largely of the opinion that Hitler and his people used the unfounded fear of communism to gain power as a bogeyman and a specter, and precisely in this way established a regime that was all too similar to that of Stalin.

The present book is based on the assumption that the fear and hate-filled relationship with communism was indeed the moving center of Hitler's feelings and of Hitler’s ideology, that he articulated only in a particularly intense way what many German and non-German contemporaries felt, and that all these feelings and fears were not only understandable, but also largely understandable and even, up to a certain point, justified. At a time in which the communist parties of several countries are or have been interested in participating in government and where they are all, at least in Europe, trying to work together with non-terrorist left-wing forces in a very civil way, it takes a mental effort if one is to remember that “the same” communist parties between 1919 and 1935 were everywhere the parties of the "armed insurrection,” that Lenin thought that "the bourgeoisie" was "embittered to the point of madness" all over the world, that it was perceived Europe was still trembling with fear as late as 1930, and that the Deputy War Commissioner Frunze wrote in 1924: “To all by the very fact of our existence we undermine their (the old, bourgeois world) foundations, we destroy their stability and thereby instill in their representatives the feeling of bitter hatred, senseless fear and inveterate hostility against everything Soviet.” The astonishing thing is, in truth, that by far no means all the citizens and petty bourgeoisie of Europe and America were filled with this feeling of fear and hatred, and that on the contrary, the great social experiment in Russia was met with sympathetic interest from many quarters. But if Lenin's and Frunze's statements were not true in this generality, nothing would be more foolish than the assumption that only Hitler and a small group of people around him were plagued by imaginary nightmares. Anyone who believes that Hitler was primarily a pan-German, who only used the specter of communism to disguise his intentions to conquer, should read the book by Otto Richard Tannenberg, published in 1911, “Greater Germany. The work of the 20th century "with his naive and cocky optimism and then read “Mein Kampf,” and he should ask himself what makes the profound difference, since the pan-German goals are so largely the same.

Since it was already unmistakably evident at the end of the 1980s that the expectations cherished by Lenin and Frunze were not fulfilled, it cannot and must not be ruled out from the outset that the anti-communist passion of the National Socialists was genuine and that it was not opposed to the development which history actually took. The decisive question then is why a predictable reaction, justified in essence by the later course of history, has assumed such an excessive character that it led not only to the greatest war in world history, but also to singular mass crimes. This question can be answered in a anticipatory and abbreviated way, that overshooting is the basic character of every ideology and that it is unavoidable even and precisely when overshooting that an ideology gives rise to a counter-ideology. The fact that this counter-ideology came to victory in a large state, although the most momentous overshooting, namely the anti-Semitic interpretation of the anti-communist experience, was only plausible and moving for a small part of the nation, can only be made understandable if Hitler was able to convincingly combine other, simpler and far more popular motifs with that basic ideological motif, for example the motif of the revision of Versailles or the motif of the unification of all Germans. But such theses can only be suggestive and anticipatory; they cannot replace the full account.

The present book aims to focus on the relationship between Communists and National Socialists and furthermore on the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich as the most important of all relationships for Germany, for the Soviet Union and for the whole world. In doing so, it remains on the basis of the phenomenological theory of fascism insofar as it starts from the essential hostility between Communists and National Socialists and does not consider equation to be justified at any point in time. But it nevertheless does not leave the framework of totalitarianism, because it is oriented to the concept and reality of the liberal system, which, with its safeguarding of the economic and intellectual freedom of movement of individuals, is not determined by the rule of an ideology and is nevertheless the origin of both the communist and the communist system of the National Socialist ideology. But because the approach of the fascism theory is preserved, one of the two ideologies is assigned priority, and the theory of totalitarianism thus acquires a historical-genetic dimension that it has previously lacked. Part of the historical movement, however, that the original and the reactive ideology do not remain mere complexes of ideas, that they are already rooted as such in real relationships, that they take the form of movements and, ultimately, of regimes, that they are in a relationship of interaction and change as a result. Thus, when the history of ideology is being written here, it is far from being a mere history of ideas. It is also a history of the interrelationships between two great states, but it belongs no less to the genre of comparative historiography.

It can only rely on predecessors to a small extent. The studies on the theory of totalitarianism, especially the classical works by Hannah Arendt and Friedrich/Brzezinski, are comparative in political terms, but not actually historical, and historiography has so far only made one of the two phenomena its subject, but not their internal and external relationship. Detailed studies of the struggles between Communists and National Socialists during the Weimar period are few in number. It was only in the area of ​​international relations, and insofar as the German-Soviet war, which of course found numerous representations as a whole and in individual aspects, that topics such as "Germany and the Soviet Union" or "Stalin and Hitler" were often dealt with. These questions are, however, too limited to be able to even tend to bring into view that whole which, in my opinion, can be better understood by emphasizing the question of National Socialism and Communism in the form of the Soviet Union and the Third International than by describing the diverse events in world history in modern times or even just in the 20th century.

This is not to suggest that the literature does not contain numerous important and thought-provoking statements about the reciprocal relationship. In scholarly studies of National Socialism, Hitler's takeover of power is often referred to as an apparent or spurious revolution, and this is usually explicitly or implicitly linked to the opinion that, in contrast, the Bolsheviks' seizure of power was a genuine revolution based on the example of the French Revolution. Not infrequently, however, comparisons are expressly rejected on the grounds that the circumstances were all too different. Apparently the opinion is very widespread that references to the Soviet Union or Stalinism could lead to an apology or impair the incomparability of the National Socialist crimes. Far more frequently and with greater impartiality, such references are made in literature that are devoted to Bolshevism or the Soviet Union. Louis Fischer, himself a former communist and close connoisseur of Soviet conditions, writes that Stalin's purges had only one rival in history, namely Hitler's gas chambers; the recently emigrated Soviet historians Michail Heller and Alexander Nekrich describe Stalin's system as "the most anti-human system" that ever existed on earth, for Milovan Djilas there was never a "more brutal and cynical despot than Stalin" and Nikolaj Tolstoy; brings up the most important implication when he says that Hitler was almost law-abiding when compared to Stalin. Leonard Schapiro, on the other hand, suggests a comparison between Lenin and Hitler when he suggests that obsession with power was the only lasting element in Lenin's thought, and that this resulted in his will to never compromise. Adam Ulam, on the other hand, restricts his testimony to a relatively short period of time when he claims that Stalin's regime in 1936/1939 was undoubtedly the most tyrannical in the world. But the Bolshevik leaders themselves, through early statements, made such comparisons, so to speak, in the mouths of those who came after them, for example Trotsky, who wrote in 1924 that the revolution was proceeding with the “methods of cruelest surgery," or Stalin, who stated without any emotion, that the landowners, kulaks, capitalists and traders had been "eliminated" in the Soviet Union. Some of the harshest utterances in particular come from former communists and therefore arose from revisionary reflection and not from a bourgeois anti-communism that was given from the beginning. For Leopold Trepper, the former "Big Boss" of the "Red Orchestra", in retrospect, Stalinism and fascism are equally "monsters", and in the estate of Hans Jaeger, who wrote articles for Inprekorr in 1932, the following sentence can be found: “Marxism is indirectly to blame for the six million dead Jews. It preached hatred first, it first demonstrated the extermination of a class. "

But other former communists evidently took no morally justified offense at Stalin's extermination measures even after 1945, because they considered them to be historically unavoidable and justified: Stalin was, despite his inhumanity, was a great revolutionary leader, wrote Isaac Deutscher, while Hitler was only a sterile counterrevolutionary. Among the non-communist authors, Walter Laqueur also makes a moral difference, when he speaks out against a comparison of the National Socialist death camps with Stalin forced labor camps. Adam Ulam, on the other hand, sees the difference above all in the greater wisdom of Stalin, who always pursued an extremely cautious foreign policy. Quite a few of the fellow travelers and authors, however, allow Stalin in particular to abolish the original distinction between communism and fascism: Walter Krivitsky, Vladimir Antonov-Ovsejenko and Franz Borkenau said that through Stalin, Bolshevism had assumed the form of its enemy, namely fascism .

I believe that these very different statements are not absolutely irreconcilable and that even those that were already negative for Lenin do not arise simply from ignorance, incomprehension or mere hostility. In the following I start from the simple basic premise that the revolution of the Bolsheviks in 1917 created a completely new type of situation in world history, because for the first time in modern history an ideological party seized power in a large state and credibly demonstrated its intention to unleash civil wars throughout the world, which would bring about the fulfillment of the hopes of the early labor movement and the fulfillment of the predictions of Marxism. Nothing was more evident to the Bolsheviks themselves than that such a monstrous undertaking would have to arouse extremely fierce opposition, especially since practice had shown that after the violent seizure of power the party fought, with the greatest determination, even exterminated, its numerous opponents both on the front of the civil war and in the rear through an unprecedented class war.

The most peculiar and earliest successful resistance movement was the Fascist Party of Italy, headed by the former leader of the revolutionary wing of the country's Socialist Party, Benito Mussolini. This made it clear that the opposition was sharper and that there had to be far more inner kinship than in the case of the bourgeois parties, which trusted that they could meet the first and second challenges according to the usual rules of the parliamentary system. Mussolini was a role model for Hitler from the very beginning, and his party too, felt from the outset that it was an answer to the communist challenge, no matter how much it did not go into mere reaction and had historical roots of its own, such as the pan-German doctrine. But from an early stage this response also had the characteristics of a copy, as was already evident in the merely modified adoption of the red flag. With the assumption of power, this symbolic aspect became more prominent, and as early as 1933, enemies and friends were using the word Cheka to denote the method of combating opponents. Yet Hitler was undoubtedly convinced that he had found an answer to the communist challenge that was better and more permanent than that of the western democracies. But even in the so-called Röhm affair there was no longer an answer and not even a correspondence, but an over-correspondence. During the war, Bolshevism became a more and more unmistakable model for Hitler in important areas, and in the area of ​​extermination measures it achieved an over-equivalence.

In the following, the history of the interrelationships between the two movements or regimes is described with the help of these terms: Challenge and Response, Origin and Copy, Correspondence and Over-correspondence. In the first and suggestive summary it can be said: For National Socialism, Bolshevism was both a horror and and a role model. The civil war that both waged against each other, however, differed most strikingly from ordinary civil wars.

A vision of horror is different from a nightmare. A nightmare can be unreal and a mere idea; a horror-sight, however, has a solid foundation in reality, although from the outset it includes that tendency to exaggerate, which is also the main characteristic of all ideologies. Only if it were proven that the early anti-Bolshevik literature, which found its way into the last village in pamphlets and newspaper articles, was in itself nothing but interest-driven propaganda and an appreciable content of reality, would we be able to speak of nightmares and scare fantasies. It will be shown that the opposite was the case. Anyone who had the feeling at the time that the Bolshevik Revolution had stepped into a new world-historical dimension, the dimension of the social annihilation of large numbers of people and, of course, that of a different kind of industrial revolution, was not wrong. Anyone who was of the opinion that all of this was happening in a semi-Asiatic country and that it could not have any noticeable effects in the context of European civilization was not necessarily right. That social annihilation was finally followed by biological and transcendental annihilation, that the copy exceeded the model in intensity in some areas, can hardly be adequately described in terms of ordinary life such as crime. Whether one can use the term "tragedy" as George Kennan suggested is questionable for other reasons. But it is definitely wrong if, even in this age between 1917 and 1945, one sees only interests at work everywhere. Interest-psychology, first developed by French aristocrats of the 18th century and then by English utilitarianism, is of great use wherever there is calculation, measurement and weighting. But the human being is essentially not a calculating being: he is fears for his existence, he fears the future, he feels hatred of his enemies, he is ready to sacrifice his life when a great cause is at stake. Where powerful emotions of this kind are decisive for larger groups of people, one should speak of basic emotions. One such basic emotion was the indignation of numerous workers and unemployed at the injustices and inequalities of the capitalist system; but a basic emotion was also the passionate anger of numerous French against the Boches, who had stolen two of its most beautiful provinces from the fatherland in 1871. In everyday life, politics may be a matter of calculating interests and balancing interests; but as soon as something unusual and threatening occurs, emotions are far more important than interests for many people, even if these emotions are only in rare cases directly opposed to the presented or imaginable interests: indignation, anger, grief, hatred, contempt, fear, but also enthusiasm, hope, belief in a great task.

Such basic emotions moved the masses of Russian soldiers in 1917, who feared that they would have to sacrifice their lives senselessly in a war that had already been lost; such basic emotions also determined officers, freikorps fighters and members of the bourgeoisie in Italy and Germany, who knew very well their kind had been treated in Russia. The active cores of the communist and fascist parties were still filled with basic emotions in later times, even though a vast number of opportunists, interested parties and also common criminals had attached themselves to them. In the following, the a history of two most important parties of two world movements is will be written as a history of the basic emotions and their ideological formations, one of which was more original and therefore primarily a horror for the other, but which nevertheless became more and more a horror and a role model each other. The National Socialist takeover of power on January 30, 1933 is therefore only a preliminary starting point, and as much space is devoted to the history of the Soviet Union as to the story of the struggle between Communists and National Socialists in the Weimar Republic and the history of National Socialist Germany.

If communism and National Socialism are primarily understood as ideologies and, above all, if their leaders are understood as ideologists, then Hitler is no more properly seen as a German politician than Lenin is seen as a Russian statesman. That doesn't mean that one was not also a German politician and the other also a Russian statesman. But the question always is first and foremost about the overshooting, about the newness, about the hiatus, which constitute what is actually ideological, from which the most important actions emerge. Ideologies can be very different, but each one is characterized by this excess and by a core of what is justified and timely, which perhaps can only be brought to existence through ideological excess, but which can also be ruined by it. In Theodor Herzl's “Zionist Diary” one can follow the development of a concept that later became effective in world-history, but what exorbitant hopes and unreal ideas it is clothed in! And yet Herzl would probably have thrown in the towel very quickly if he had only thought pragmatically and rationally. Only a new situation can enable those who are born later to distinguish between the real core and the unreal exaggeration; contemporaries, on the other hand, seize or reject the whole thing with all passion, and only in these struggles can it gradually become clear what is core and what is overshoot. Hitler did not see himself as a successor to Stresemann or Papen, but as an anti-Lenin, and in this view he agreed with Trotsky, who called him the "super-Wrangel of the world bourgeoisie."

For Trotsky, of course, Lenin was completely right, and Hitler was completely wrong; but whoever does not share the conviction of the absolute truth of an ideology will certainly have to be of the opinion that Hitler could not be wrong in every respect, but that in his views and actions there are also cores in which something came to light that was timely and, at least for numerous people, insightful and moving. When he postulated the amalgamation of all Germans into one state, he basically demanded nothing other than what Mazzini had successfully demanded for all Italians, and he was just as moving along the lines of nation-state thinking as most of his contemporaries. The fact that this unification as such had to arouse much stronger resistance than the unification of all Italians was due to the special circumstances of the situation of the Germans in Europe and Hitler was not responsible for it. The fact that the greater German unification was not an end in itself, but a step towards a greater goal, and that he gave a very specific and universal interpretation of the resistance he encountered in the process, was actually ideological and formed a new dimension.

The task of the historian, and especially the historian of ideology, is to follow these connections. He has to accept that he is criticized by those who want to be confronted with absolute evil in the retrospect and who believe that they are in the service of absolute good. In the painting he has to paint, only shades of gray of various kinds have a place; he is as well denied the use of white as that of black. Only through the depiction itself, and not through predetermined creeds and assurances, can he convince his readers that his shades of gray have gradations. He is well aware that there is no fundamental difference between historical thinking and ideologies inasmuch as both have to abstract and generalize and do not take into account the richness of the multifaceted reality. Because man is a thinking being, he must develop ideologies and thus be unjust. According to the theologians, only God is just, because he creates individual things by thinking them and therefore does not need to distort them with concepts. But historical thinking, out of a new time situation, can weigh up different ideologies against one another in their content and pursue them in their effectiveness, and it should be guided by the determination not to yield to to the will to realize ends, which is the basic will of every ideology. It must indeed make a selection already through its questioning, but within the scope of this selection it must not have a higher goal than to produce a picture of the object that is as comprehensive and truthful as possible. It was not Hitler who was first called the enemy of humanity, the embodiment of evil, the destroyer of civilization, but the historian knows and must therefore also say that all these expressions were used by serious observers on Bolshevism when hardly anyone knew anything about Hitler; Hitler was not the first to publicly declare from a position of power that he and his party could not live on a planet with a group people numbering in millions, and that they must therefore be exterminated. These statements are true; whoever knows and hides them acts unscientifically and immorally, because he wants to allow only individual groups of countless victims to be valid. Moreover, he acts inconsistently in declaring people so unequal that he rules out the possibility that he and his kind might have been just as guilty in the same situation as those whom he accuses. It goes without saying that differences are not denied, for difference is the essence of reality. But historical thinking must oppose the tendency of ideological and emotional thinking to solidify the differences, to ignore the connections and to exclude the "other side," the opposing side, from consideration.

The intentional impartiality of historical thought cannot be God-like and therefore error-free. It is not exempt from the danger of merely taking sides in particularly covert or subtle ways. But in a juridical picture it is nothing else than the demand that regular court proceedings take the place of the summary courts and show trials, i.e. court proceedings in which exonerating witnesses are also seriously heard and the judges are not just formally different from the prosecutors. The individual verdicts will still be very different, but unlike those of the drumhead courts, they will have intermediate stages between the death penalty and acquittal. Nevertheless, they are not free of errors and therefore do not preclude revision.

Historical thinking, too, must be ready to revise itself, provided that good reasons are put forward and not merely indignant outcries that refuse to admit that everything must be made understandable if possible, but that not everything that can be understood is understandable and that not everything that is understandable is justified . But it cannot be willing to ever renounce its own existence, and only then does an immediate and concrete partisanship result. If Hitler had won, in German-ruled Europe and probably also in large parts of the rest of the world, historiography would persist for centuries in praising the Führer‘s deeds. Dehitlerization would not be possible by all human standards. Perhaps people—apart from the victims who would not be talked about—would be happier because they would be relieved of the need to compare and to weigh and measure; many of the late-born anti-fascists of today would certainly be staunch and esteemed supporters of the regime. Only for historical thinking and revising there would be no place, and therefore historical thinkers would be counted as counter-types in this system and would have no right to exist. But not even this knowledge must cause them to join the ranks of their fighting contemporaries at a later date.