Working resistance – from the beginning of resistant

The actions of those anti -fascists and Hitler opponents who had been able to save themselves in time before accessing the Gestapo and now did everything possible to enable others to escape abroad, especially of the workers’ parties, to enable other Germans threatened by political and racist persecution, and they wrote through different opposition groups, for example Transportation worker Federation, to spread to the “German Reich”. At the beginning of the war, the attack of Germany on Poland on September 1, 1939, these contacts broke largely, even if the KPD in exile tried several times to illegally guide instructors for the resistance groups. In fact, such contacts via the Netherlands (into the Ruhr area) and Denmark (to Hamburg and Berlin) were still possible for a while. However, the Nazi gegers in the “Reich” were mostly on themselves. They now primarily related to the Allied radio broadcasters, on the basis of which they now increasingly created pilots themselves.

With regard to the almost complete insulation and the daily threat to be disarmed and arrested, it is impressive how many resistance groups there were in all parts of fascist Germany, especially in the industrial regions, from the environment of workers’ organizations. One of the most important was the Bästlein-Jacob-Abhagen group, which first focused in Hamburg and later also in and from Berlin its networks.

The most famous group, in which bourgeois circles, artists and scientists could also be integrated in addition to former members of the workers’ parties, was the Schulze-Boysen-Harnack organization, also called “Red Chapel” in the Nazi. She did anti -fascist educational work and even contacted the Soviet message existing in Berlin until 1941 in order to pass on military policy information obtained in ministries and authorities. Therefore, in the German historiography, it was a Soviet espionage organization for a long time, with which its anti -fascist resistance – according to the fascist attribution – was denounced as a “treason” in the sense of a foreign power.

The group’s resistance to the Jewish young communists Herbert and Marianne Baum, who not only did educational work, but also rescue resistance. The most spectacular action, the arson attack on the Goebbel’s “Das Soviet Paradise” in the Berlin Lustgarten, paid them majority with their lives.

In the Saxon and Thuringian industrial areas, the Neubauer-Poser group, in which former members of the workers’ parties banned in 1933, also tried to unveil the German population of the German population, but in the sense of an anti-fascist folk front and the concept of the “national committee free” formed in the Soviet Union and in other exile Antifascist-democratic Germany after the fall of Hitler also developed his own visions. And it was not just organized forces that showed resistance. There were many examples among workers, in particular, where practical forms of international solidarity were practiced by contacts with forced laborers and prisoners of war.

Working resistance was present from start to finish.

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It is not the place here to name all regional and national groups, but with full justification you can find that the workers’ resistance not only fought against the fascist danger and fascism in power from the start, but was also present in the war throughout until the liberation.

This self -sacrificing struggle had bloody consequences. Of the approximately 300,000 members of the KPD and their mass organizations at the end of 1932, around 150,000 were arrested for a more or less long time during the Nazi era. The KPD has thus clearly had to provide the greatest victims in anti -fascist resistance. A large part of their officials, members of the ZK or the district and regional cables, were not only detained, but murdered. The insidious murder of her former chairman Ernst Thälmann in the Buchenwald concentration camp on August 18, 1944 was a clear indication that the Nazi regime tried to pull his political opponents into the grave.

It is noteworthy that the workers’ resistance in Germany was a matter of men and women. In view of the fact that only about ten percent of the KPD members were women in 1933, it is striking that around ten percent of the accused were female even in political criminal proceedings before Nazi courts. By arresting men as well as their recruitment as soldiers, women played a variety of tasks in the various resistance groups and forms of resistance.

Social Democrats and trade unionists continued to try to maintain contacts abroad in the war phase. The supporters living in the “German Empire” did not want to endanger through offensive actions. Also, the leadership in the Prague and then in exile in London did not expect that inner German resistance could overthrow the Nazi regime. At the latest with the failure of the conspirator’s assassination led by Claus Graf von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944, it was assumed that this could only succeed from the outside by the allies.

Nevertheless, numerous SPD officials and former mandate holders were arrested by the Nazis at the end of August 1944 as part of the “Aktion Gitter”. Arrested from around 5000, many of which were kidnapped to the Buchenwald, Dachau, Neuengamme and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. The trade unionist and former Hessian Interior Minister Wilhelm Leuschner, who arrested in mid-August 1944 as a involved in the »Kreisauer Kreis«, was sentenced to death by the People’s Court and was executed on September 29, 1944 in the Berlin-Plötzensee penalty prison.

Not only the famous “oath of Buchenwald” of April 19, 1945 with the slogans “Announcement of Nazism with its roots” and “Creation of a new world of peace and freedom”, also in other camps and detention centers as well as in illegal circles, comparable ideas of a new, democratic, anti -fascist Germany and world order were designed. Like the workers’ resistance noted in the Federal Republic, they are still a political legacy that should be kept alive. Just now.