What do we really owe Balfour?

On its 90th anniversary CHARLIE POTTINS
questioned the reverence among Jews for the Balfour Declaration
and critically examines its roots and context.



BALFOUR

2nd November 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:
'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or he rights and political status enjoved bv Jews in am other country.' I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely
Arthur Balfour


There's a moshav, a farming settlement, in northern Israel called Balfouria, and a Balfour Street in Tel Aviv. The Zionist Federation's headquarters in London is Balfour House. I knew a fellow whose parents had given him the forenames 'Theodor Balfour', after Theodor Herzl the founder of political Zionism and the right honourable James Arthur Balfour.

Yet this Balfour, as Prime Minister, introducing the 1905 Aliens Act in the wake of Russian pogroms, had spoken of 'the undoubted evils that had fallen upon the country from an immigration which was largely Jewish'. At that time the world Zionist congress accused him of 'open antisemitism'.

In 1917, asked to intercede with the Czarist regime for the removal of civic disabilities on Jews, Balfour refused, reportedly opining that: 'Wherever one went in Eastern Europe one found that by some way or another the Jew got on, and when to this was added the fact that he belonged to a different race and that he professed a religion which to the people around him was an object of inherited hatred, and that moreover, he was ... numbered by millions, one could perhaps understand the desire to keep him down...'

AN OLD TRADITION

Like others of his class, Balfour actually admired those supposed characteristics of Jews which set them apart. His Declaration was not just a ploy to send them elsewhere, but stood in a Christian tradition much older than the Zionist movement, which saw a happy coincidence between divine prophecy and material ambitions in the Middle East.

Already in the 17th century, when Cromwell readmitted the Jews to England the idea of restoring us to Palestine was discussed, seen as boosting prospects for the Second Coming and perhaps more immediately those of the English Levant Company. Fortunately Cromwell's first priority was bringing trade from the Netherlands to London, and the Jews of Amsterdam saw greater promise in the New World than in an ancient 'Promised Land'. Hence Menasseh Ben Israel explained to the Puritan parliament that we must be dispersed all over the world before Messianic prophecy could be fulfilled.

At the beginning of the 19th century Napoleon tried appealing to the Jews of Asia during his Syrian campaign, promising to restore a Jewish Kingdom. Then Palmerston, seeing French claims to protect the Maronite Christians, and the Czar asserting his interest in the Orthodox Christians, sought to trump them by instructing Britain's consul in Jerusalem to pay attention to the Jews. But in his wishful thinking that Jews would rally to serve British interests, Britain's Prime Minister wildly exaggerated Jewish cohesiveness and strength, as well as fervour for Palestine. He wasn't the last.

It was not until the First World War that Britain, no longer interested in shoring up the Ottoman Empire, but intent on dismembering it, was able to enlist the Zionist movement and to offer the prize of Palestine.

EUROPEAN ORIGINS

The heart of Zionism then was among the Jews of eastern Europe, specifically the Russian Empire with its pogroms and Blood Libel, where young Jews grew up between tradition, emigration and revolution. But its head was in the West, encountering disappointment with the liberal emancipation and assimilation of which others still dreamt. In Paris, the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl had covered the Dreyfus trial. 'I achieved a freer attitude towards antisemitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon,' he wrote. 'Above all, I recognised the emptiness and futility of trying to "combat" antisemitism.'

The following year, 1896 he produced Der Judenstaat, proposing a Jewish state, and in 1897 presided over the first Zionist Congress, in Basle. He predicted - not altogether inaccurately as it happened - that in 50 years people would realise he had founded the Jewish State. That same year 1897 saw the founding in Vilna of a very different body, the Jewish Workers' Bund. Bundists believed Jewish workers must fight for their rights where they lived, not by seeking some Promised Land, but as part of the wider struggle for freedom, and a socialist future for all. What's more, they acted on this.

One of the most horrific anti-Jewish pogroms took place in Kishinev, in April 1903, encouraged by the Czarist authorities. The following month Herzl, with a mixture of naivety and cynicism, set out for St.Petersburg to meet the Czar's ministers Witte and Von Plehve. He offered to woo young Jews away from the socialists and help remove Russia's Jews, if the Russian government helped with Zionist aims for Palestine. Nothing came of this, for the Russian ministers had no influence on the Turkish Sultan. and Herzl could not control young Russian lews. At Gomel, that August, the Bundists were joined by groups like Poale Zion in organising resistance against a further pogrom.

In London, the previous year. Herzl had appeared before the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, telling them: 'The Jews of Eastern Europe cannot stay where they are - where are they to go? If you find they are not wanted here, then some place must be found to which they can migrate...' The Zionist leader reassured establishment British Jews that his Zionism was not meant for them, but for their poor brethren fleeing eastern Europe, whose arrival in greater numbers would only generate antisemitism and undermine those established here. Lord Rothschild, who had been worried about what impression this foreign adventurer might make on Her Majesty's Commissioners, was eventually won over.

Another ally won, strange considering his racial prejudice about Jews, but befitting Herzl's admiration for Cecil Rhodes, was the imperialist Joseph Chamberlain. They shared the idea that Europe's unwanted poor and 'problem' people could be made useful settlers overseas. Herzl and Chamberlain travelled together to El Arish, to look at whether Jewish settlement at this gateway to Palestine might help guard Britain's imperial lifeline through Suez. Nothing came of this, still less of a subsequent British offer of land in East Africa, a non-starter with Russian Jewry. Herzl died in 1904. But the seeds of a relationship had been started.

A TANGLED WEB

On 16th August, 1914, shadowed but not intercepted by the Royal Navy, the German warships Goeben and Breslau arrived at Constantinople, where they were renamed and hoisted Turkish flags, and the crew were issued with fezzes. Before long they were shelling Russian Black Sea ports and Turkey was able to close the Dardannelles - Russia's only access to warm seas.

Worried as it had been by Germany's influence in Turkey, the drive east, and Berlin-Baghdad railway, the British government - or at least sections of it - may have secretly welcomed Turkey's entry into the war, and hoped to gain from it. But Allied forces, trying to force the Straits open suffered bloody defeat in an almost year-long struggle at Gallipoli. The British Empire's invasions of Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Palestine, assisted by Jewish spies and the Arab revolt, were no walkover.

The diplomacy was more complex. In November 1915 the British diplomat Mark Sykes and the Frenchman Francois Georges-Picot sat down to plan how the Ottoman Empire would be carved up after the war. This Sykes-Picot agreement, extended to bring in Italian and Russian ambitions, contradicted promises which Sir Henry McMahon had made to Sherif Feisal Husseini of Mecca, of an Arab kingdom in return for assisting Britain against the Turks. The Sykes-Picot agreement was secret, only published by the Bolsheviks after the October 1917 Revolution, when they seized documents held in the Russian Foreign Ministry.

British forces used Feisal's army to stifle an Arab government that emerged in Damascus, then ordered Feisal out so Syria could be handed over to the French, as per the Sykes-Picot agreement. But the British government wanted to keep its allies well away from Egypt, and the canal. Haifa was to be a British naval base, and the rest of Palestine to go into international trusteeship, to be decided.

Sykes, though originally prejudiced against 'international Jews', had already discussed with Herbert, later Viscount, Samuel and Rabbi Moses Gaster how British interests might be advanced by promoting Zionist aims.

With the world Zionist leadership left in Berlin, Chaim Weizmann, his work as a chemist valued by Britain's Ministry of Munitions, emerged as chief Zionist negotiator with British ministers. He was assisted by the Manchester Zionists, Harry Sacher, Israel Sieff, Simon Marks, Albert Hyamson and Co. They brought introductions to Liberal and Labour leaders, the Manchester Guardian and New Statesman, and Lloyd George, who replaced Asquith as Prime Minister in 1916. They set up a British Palestine Committee with Jewish and non-Jewish members.

Zionism had more powerful backers in the cabal of British imperialists advising Lloyd George, including Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian), Lord Cromer, Leopold Amery, and Lord Milner, who had worked with Cecil Rhodes, and with Zionists, in South Africa, and drafted the final version of the Declaration issued by Balfour.

WHAT INTERESTS?

The war government was interested in using Zionism not just to cloak its claims in Palestine, but to win support for its aims from Jews, whose influence it exaggerated in Europe, Russia and America, just as it exaggerated Zionist influence among Jews. 'We might hope to use it in such a way as to bring over to our side the Jewish forces in America, the East and elsewhere, which are now largely, if not preponderantly, hostile to us,' explained a Foreign Office memorandum to the British ambassadors in Paris and Petrograd, dated 9th March 1916.

The election of the anti-war Socialist Morris Hillquit in New York, and Russia's slide toward its October Revolution (which British newspapers blamed on Jews) only accelerated the moves. The Foreign Office's Department of Information had set up a Jewish section in 1916, headed by Weizmann's co-worker Albert Hyamson. The War Office let Zionists communicate via its links to supporters in the United States.

When America's former ambassador in Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, set off on a mission ostensibly to assist Jews in Palestine - but actually to investigate reports that Turkish leaders wanted a separate peace -Weizmann was sent to Gibraltar to intercept him, and persuade him not to proceed.

In his book, Trial and Error, Weizmann tries to belittle Morganthau, suggesting the experienced diplomat was just trying to give himself importance by chasing an illusion. But whatever the real chances of peace, Chaim Weizmann and his British backers wanted to make sure it didn't happen before they had taken Palestine.

One member of the British government stood against the Balfour Declaration - the only Jewish member, Edwin Montague, who asked what authority he could have as HM Secretary for India, responsible for dealing with nationalists and Muslims, when HM Government proposed to declare his 'national home' was in Palestine. The rider added to the declaration, about Jewish rights and status elsewhere, owed something to his opposition, but not his alone.

Both the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Deputies had expressed opposition. On 17th June 1917 Lord Rothschild wrote to Weizmann rejoicing: 'We have beaten them!', and arranging an interview with Balfour to tell him 'the majority of Jews are in favour of Zionism'. But the vote on the Board had only been 56-51.

If Zionism represents Jewish 'self-determination', as we are told by Zionists and those who listen to them, it is strange that it aroused such doubts among Jews and depended so much upon its perceived usefulness to an imperialist power.

As for what the Balfour Declaration called the 'existing non-Jewish inhabitants' - that is the 90% who were Arabs and were to become today's Palestinian nation, Balfour himself observed that the fine words about 'self-determination' used by US President Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations would not apply to Syria, still less to Palestine: 'For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country... The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder importance than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion, that is right.'

Thus, even before the 'war to end wars' had ended, the scene was set in Palestine for almost a century of conflict, for which we still have to find a just end.


I am grateful to my friend Ted Crawford, of the journal Revolutionary History, for uncovering the document below, a statement originally published in the socialist paper The Call

'Jewish Social Democrats and Zionism'
a statement in The Call, 27th June 1918,

We have received the following statement from the Jewish Social-Democratic Organisation (BSP):
Since the publication of the War aims of the Labour Party, statements have appeared from time to time in the Socialist and Labour Press on Zionism and the Jewish question which display a total ignorance of the facts of the situation and call for their elucidation.

1. The so-called Jewish Socialist Labour Party 'Poale Zion' have no right to speak on behalf of organised Jewish labour, either in this country or any other. Here in England they represent no one but themselves. They are a body as small in numbers as they are in influence on the Jewish labouring population. They have never been authorised by the Jewish Trade Unions to speak on their behalf, and, if anything, these Unions are indifferent or even hostile to Zionism.

2. The same thing applies to America, where the organised Jewish Labour and Socialist movement (which is very powerful numerically, financially and in the influence it exerts upon labour conditions) has repudiated Zionism as a solution of the Jewish question.

3. But after all it was in Russia, and in the old Russia of the Czar, that there mainly was a Jewish question, and there, even before the revolution, the organised Jewish Labour and Socialist movement 'the Bund' has repudiated Zionism root and branch. Indeed, the Zionist movement was always a petty bourgeois movement, a movement among the small middle classes.

4. It will be seen therefore that the organised Jewish Socialist and Labour movement is everywhere opposed to Zionism - and for a simple reason. It is because Zionism cannot solve the Jewish question, if the question be viewed from a working-class standpoint. The emancipation of the working class can only be effected by the workers themselves, and in the country where they work and have their being. Now, what the Jewish workers require is to be placed on a par of equality of citizenship and rights in the widest sense in the countries where they happen to reside, and where they do so in large masses, such as Russia, Romania, America, and elsewhere. They demand not only political and civic rights, but also the right, if they so desire, to use their own language in the schools, in courts of law and other legislative and administrative institutions. To attain these objects Zionism is not necessary and is indeed harmful, inasmuch as if this movement were to obtain success among the Jewish masses it would tend to turn the attention of the workers from their economic and political struggles for the emancipation of their class into the paths of a petty and narrow nationalism and chauvinism.

5. Moreover, the experience of Belgium, Serbia, Greece and Ireland has shown how precarious is the existence and independence of the small states and nationalities, even where, as in the first three instances they were presumed to be sovereign. This experience is not such as would encourage the Jewish workers to try and establish a state of their own were this even feasible, which it is not. And it is not feasible because Palestine is not large enough to maintain the thirteen million Jews, and it is quite chimerical to imagine that these millions of Jews would or could break with the ties which bind them to the countries where they have lived and worked for generations and generations in order to emigrate to a country where they would find a civilisation and a climate which would be altogether uncongenial to their habits and the mode of living to which they have been used all their life. The Zionist movement is all the more impossible and ludicrous in Russia where the Jews, in common with all the rest of the nations resident therein, have at last found their emancipation from their common yoke of Czarism, and where the Jewish workers are eager to help in the building up of that great Republic.

6. Finally, on the grounds of the first principles of democracy, the Socialist movement must oppose the formation of a Jewish State in Palestine. In Palestine the Jews form an insignificant proportion of the population which mainly is Arabian, and which would bitterly and rightfully resent and fight against the robbery of their land. Let Palestine be free to determine its own fate and let it have its independence by all means, but it would be then an Arabian and not a Jewish State. The Socialist movement will support, of course, the freedom of colonisation in and immigration into Palestine for the Jews, but this it supports not only for the Jews but for all nationalities, and not only in Palestine but in all countries.

( The article on Balfour was originally published under the title 'Sale of the Century', together with the Jewish Social Democrats' perceptive 1918 statement, in JEWISH SOCIALIST, Winter 2007).

Class of '39

Charlie Pottins looks at British support for Hitler before the Second World War. (originally published in 1989 for the 50th anniversary of the war's outbreak.)

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor meet the Fuhrer


One still hears the argument every so often, "We made the mistake of underestimating Hitler. We must not be deceived again." Margaret Thatcher, evoking Churchillian daydreams, admonishes peace-seekers sternly, blaming them for pre-war appeasement and encouraging aggression.

Wiseacres, claiming superior knowledge by virtue merely of having lived longer, attempt to silence the young by conjuring-up the cliche of Neville Chamberlain back from Munich, promising "Peace in our Time". "We must not be fooled again," they say with a superior smile. But whoever "We" are (and it apparently includes the prime minister, armed service chiefs, captains of industry, intelligence chiefs and the person on the bar stool addressing you, all with an assumed common interest and shared knowledge) rest assured, "We" are the goodies, ever the innocent and injured party. Our political leaders may be fools occasionally, misled by the wily foreigner, but never (except possibly when putting up taxes) knaves or the villains of the piece.

The picture of Chamberlain being duped by Hitler, due to his sincere quest for peace in our time, is a myth. If the British government was duped, it was because it wanted to be. How it systematically duped the British public, with the help of the Tory media, is another matter.) In February 1938, Chamberlain
rejected a US approach for one from Mussolini, got rid of Eden, and effectively connived at the Nazi Anschluss in Austria the following month.

By May (six months before the Munich agreement) British Foreign Office officials were talking of how the Czechs must concede territory to the Reich. Nazi emissaries, including the Sudetan fuhrer, Konrad Heinrein, were warmly received in London while the Czechs and their republic were roundly abused in ruling circles.
On 3 March 1939, dissident German officers tipped off British intelligence that invasion of Czechoslovakia was imminent. Chamberlain encouraged Sir Samuel Hoare to make a speech on 10 March anticipating a "Golden Age of peace and prosperity, the end of the armaments race, and future co-operation between nations".

The Nazi tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia five days later.

A wisecrack that went around Prague at the time of the Russian invasion in 1968, when the Kremlin claimed it was forestalling "fascist aggression", was that the Soviet army had arrived a little late. The same could be said of the British Tories' new-found concern, 30 years after Munich, for Czech sovereignty and freedom. "...Czechoslovakia, a tumour in the heart of Europe ruled by the Communist Benes, which required a surgical operation to prevent it poisoning the lifestream of Eurooe," wrote Professor A P Laurie of the pro-Nazi organisation, the Link, in its Anglo-German Review, December 1938.

Headed by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, a former Director of Naval Intelligence, the Link was just part of a chain of groups and prominent individuals in Britain who wanted an alliance between this country and Hitler. Its council included Lord Redesdale, father of Unity Mitford and father-in-law of Sir Oswald Mosley. Just before the war it was joined by the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest landowners in England and friend of the Duke of Windsor.

The Pro-Nazi Lobby

Sir Barry Domville was involved with Mosley, the fanatically antisemitic Tory MP Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, and others in a series of conspiratorial secret meetings from 1939 to 1940 which were brought to a close by their internment. Some writers believe that a pro-Nazi coup was being hatched and go so far as to link Rudolf Hess's flight to Britain with this, as well as the Duke of Windsor's possible role as a figurehead. (It is said the reason Anthony Blunt enjoyed protection in later years was his inside knowledge gained from wartime work in MIS, and his willingness to recover embarrassing documents for the royal family.)

The Windsors and the Mosleys remained on friendly social terms in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. Sir Barry Domville had his memoirs, blaming a Jewish freemason for his being pensioned off from Naval Intelligence, published by the Britons Publishing Society. (They also published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and had among their post-war directors Sir Archibald Maule Ramsay.) In 1967, Domville was a founder and honorary president of the National Front.

The discussions which Admiral Domville, Lord Lymington, Lord Tavistock (later Duke of Bedford) and Mosley had between March and the end of May 1940, concerning a negotiated peace with Germany, had parallels at a more official level as Holland, Belgium and Norway fell. On 29 May, in Cabinet, Lord Halifax proposed suing for peace. Lord Buccleuth, a friend of the Duke of Windsor, had been urging peace
with Hitler, as had the Duke of Westminster. Sir Samuel Hoare at the Foreign Office was reputed to be in favour. Indeed, his permanent secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, remarked, perhaps unfairly: "He'll be the Quisling of England when Germany conquers us..." (He was made ambassador to Franco instead.)

The pre-war pro-Nazi lobby in Britain was not confined to a few convinced fascists or antisemitic eccentrics. Nor was it a matter of "peace at any price", as the Nazis conquered Europe. Even before Hitler attained power in Germany he had powerful backers abroad, such as Sir Henri Deterding of Royal Dutch Shell. Some researchers probing the prehistory of the Nazi Party, among the right-wing Freikorps and the antisemitic, aristocratic Thule Society, say evidence points to some British "godfathers" being around when Nazism was still in its cradle. Then, it was a matter of combating Bolshevism in Germany. Later, the Nazi reich was seen as both good for business, through rearmament and crushing trade unions, and an ally in the war against communism.

"Liberal ideas and public freedom of thought and speech are to some extent luxuries...," merchant banker Ernest Tennant told an audience at Ashridge Conservative College, explaining the Nazis' rise to power. Germany had endured economic chaos, a grim struggle for survival, and the threat of communism, he said. "When accusing the Nazis of wanton brutality, it must be remembered that the alternative — a Commu­nist revolution — might have been worse." Tennant led a British trade delegation to Germany in 1934 and was pleased to see how impressed members were. "It was decided on returning to London to form and finance the start of the Anglo-German Fellowship." Richard Griffiths, in Fellow Travellers of the Right, suggests the real source of the idea may have been Ribbentrop.


An earlier Anglo-German Association, aiming to promote friendship between the two peoples and including such people as Wells and Galsworthy, had been dissolved when Hitler came to power. There was little doubt of the mutual approval which existed between the Fellowship and the Nazis. Among speakers who were guests of the Anglo-German Fellowship were Ribbentrop (on several occasions), General Tholens of the German Labour Service, Hitler Youth leaders, and Freiherr von Hadeln, SS Adjutant to Himmler.
Ribbentrop was nicknamed the "Londonderry Herr" by some wags, being a frequent guest of the Marquess of Londonderry at his seat in County Down. The Marquess, Minister of Air from 1931 to 1935, was invited to Goering's summer residence along with Mussolini after the 1937 German army manoeuvres.


He had already met Hitler the year before and was keen for him to succeed, although he mildly cautioned Ribbentrop on taking antisemitism too far: "As I told you, I have no great affection for the Jews. It is possible to trace their participation in most of these international disturbances which have createdso much havoc in different countries, but on the other hand one can find many Jews strongly ranged on the other side."

Influence in High Places

In 1936, the secretary of the Anglo-German Fellow­ship told a reporter: "It isn't numbers that matter. We want 'Names', otherwise how can we have any influence with the government or the Foreign Office." If "names" were what was needed, the Fellowship must have gained plenty of influence! Along with Sir Barry Domville, Professor Laurie and Lord Redesdale (who turn up again in the Link), the Anglo-German Fellowship had about 2 7 Conservative MPs as members and at least 30 members of the House of Lords, such as the Marquess of Londonderry, Viscount Esher, the Earl of Glasgow and the Duke of Wellington.


Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Moore, one of three Tory MPs on the Fellowship council, had written an interesting article in the Daily Mail on 25 April 1934, entitled: The Blackshirts have what the Conservatives Need.

"What is there in a black shirt which gives apparent dignity and intelligence to its wearer?" he said, describing a fascist rally at the Albert Hall. "All seemingly filled with the same emotions, pride of race, love of country, loyalty, hope... As I listened ;o the vibrant tones of Sir Oswald Mosley ... I got my answer. There was little if any of the policy which could not be accepted by the most loyal followers of our present Conservative leaders... Why,therefore the Blackshirts? The answer lies in the one word - Action!"

Having satisfied himself that the Moslev movement was "largely derived from the Conservative Party" and shared the same "instincts" — "loyalty to the throne and love of country". Sir Thomas urged an alliance between his own party and "this new and virile ofshoot". In another article that year, entitled Give Hitler a Chance he told readers, "I am satisfied that Herr Hither is absolutely honest and sincere."

An interesting feature of the Anglo-German Fellow­ship, noted in Simon Haxey's classic work Tory MP, 1939. but left unexamined in more recent books, was its corporate membership (as perhaps befitted suppor­ters of the corporate state!). Companies which had corporate membership of this pro-Nazi propaganda body, indicating that their Board of Directors approved, included Guinness, Mahon & Co, Lazard Bros, and J Henry Shroder in City banking; Firth-Vickers in the steel industry; and, among other firms, Dunlop, McDougalls, and the giant Unilever corpora­tion.

Individual members of the Anglo-German Fellow­ship included 21 bank directors, including the Gover­nor of the Bank of Scotland, Lord Lothian; and Deputy-Governor, Sir Donald Cameron. Three direc­tors of the Bank of England were members; one of them, F C Tiarks, on the Anglo-German Fellowship Council. Lord McGowan, chairman of ICI and director of Midland Bank; Andrew Agnew, managing director of Shell; and Sir Leonard Lyle, president of Tate and Lyle; are a few more names on the Anglo-German Fellowship's list.


Material Support

It is well known that British industry was shipping strategic materials to Germany right up to the out­break of war. A third of Britain's 50,000-ton stock of rubber was on its way in mid-August 1939. What is perhaps not so well known is that the British govern­ment and the Bank of England facilitated credit and exchange for the Nazi war build-up. Montague Norman at the bank also saw to it that Czechoslovakia's gold was handed over to the Nazis.

While, according to its secretary, the Fellowship was a club for Tory peers and "distinguished repre­sentatives of Big Business", the Link, set up by Admiral Domville, formed local branches for local bigwigs: city aldermen, country squires, magistrates, vicars, councillors (some of them Labour) and retired military and naval officers who were probably attracted by the Admiral. It grew in the outer London suburbs, the Midlands, southern services towns and Ulster.

There were garden parties and socials, as well as propaganda. Ilford branch had a "Bierabend" in March 1939, at which local MP Geoffrey Hutchinson praised the work of the Link. Croydon branch had sent Alderman Mrs Bessie Roberts and her daughter to the 1938 Nuremberg rally: "an unforgettable experience," she enthused. "Herr Hitler himself is very keen on the movement," Admiral Domville assured reporters (The Observer, 28 November 1937).

The president of the Anglo-German Fellowship, and also chairman of the Anti-Socialist Union, was former Tory MP and Transport Minister Lord Mount-Temple. "If another war comes, " he told the Fellow­ship's annual dinner in 1936, "well, I must not say what I was going to sav — I hope the partners will be changed." He met Hitler that year. At a reception for the German ambassador on 19 October 1938, propos­ing the toast, Mount-Temple said, "Never, since the Anglo-German Fellowship started have we met under fairer auspices."

After Kristallnacht
On 19 November, following the Kristallnacht pogroms and Nazi anti-Jewish decrees, the London Evening Standard reported Lord Mount-Temple's resignation from the chairmanship of the Fellowship "as a protest against the treatment of the Jews by the German government." Perhaps it had taken a while for him to notice. Mount-Temple's first wife, the mother of Lady Mountbatten, had been of Jewish descent, the Evening Standard pointed out. If he had been a German subject "this non-Aryan connection would be enough to make him ineligible for chairmanship of the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft in Berlin". Although resigning his post, Mount-Temple did not quit the Fellowship.

Only 20 of the Anglo-German Fellowship's 900 members decided to leave after Kristallnacht. As for the Link, although its Anglo-German Review received a few letters protesting the antisemitic outrages in Germany, membership continued to grow: from 2,600 in September 1938 to 3,500 by the end of the year, and more than 4,300 by June 1939. The Link's Central London branch, launched at the beginning of 1939, soon had 400 members. In June 1939, Captain Ramsay addressed them on "Secret Forces Working for War". It's a fair guess that he was not talking about Krupp or IG Farben. Ramsay, Tory MP for Peebles, was a devotee of the Protocols. In August 1939, the subject was "The Hidden Hand in European Affairs", with their vice-chairman, Richard Finlay, describing "the influence exerted by the Jews in Europe as an evil one," the Anglo-German Review reported.

People may have joined the Link for a variety of reasons, from naive views on peace to social climbing, and not all were hardline Nazis. However, it is clear that Nazi antisemitism was embraced with enthusiasm by most of the rest. When we picture, ranged behind these respectable suburbanites, the powerful barons of the Anglo-German Fellowship, and in front of them the lumpen organised by Mosley, it is not difficult to imagine that had the Nazis ever occupied this country they would have enjoyed the same collaboration from the same social forces as they found elsewhere in Europe.

Without in any way justifying the Communist Party's contortions — before, during and after the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — one can under­stand left-wing hostility and distrust of the motives behind rearmament.

As it happened, the conflict between Axis ambitions and British interests overcame the tendency of right-wing rulers to ally. It was Labour, which had opposed the betrayal of Czecho­slovakia, whose backing during the May 1940 crisis enabled Churchill to take over government. The man who had used artillery against a few anarchists and sent in troops against the miners, who had told Mussolini in 1927: "Had I been an Italian, I would have been with you from the start", became the defender of democracy.

"The use of recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action at the present," Churchill said on another occasion. Today, when a decayed British imperialism attempts to restore its youthful vigour via Thatcherism, the danger to peace may be not from the appeasement of some foreign power, but the belli­gerence of our own bomb-happy Tories. It is essential to tear down myths about the past and counter those engaged in recreating facades of virtue for our rulers in order to find the way again for our future.

Some recommended reading:

Fellow Travellers of the Right by Richard Griffiths
(Constable)

Tory MP by Simon Haxey (Gollancz 1939). Look out
for it in second-hand bookshops or on older
friends' shelves.

Wallis by Charles Higham (Sidgwick and Jackson).
American biographer's blockbuster expose of the
Duchess of Windsor.

Peace for Our Time by Robert Rothschild (Brasseys)

Fascism in Britain by Richard Thurlow (Basil Blackwell 1987)

(Original article published in Jewish Socialist, Summer 1989)

1929-1933 Four Fateful Years (2): Red or Brown?

"WORK, BREAD, FREEDOM -SOCIALISM"
Communist presidential candidate
Ernst Thaelmann.


Below:

"Millions stand behind me" -Hitler. As depicted by anti-Nazi artist John Heartfield

The Communists in Germany had good reason to oppose Social Democracy. Each time the Party commemorated the 1918-19 revolution it reminded
its people how the Social Democrat minister Noske had restored 'order' with the help of the military Free Corps, who murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

For young workers now joining, the bitterness was underlined by experience of Social Democrat union officials collaborating with bosses to lower pay and conditions, and 'fingering' Reds to be first for the sack. The Communist Party was becoming the party of the unemployed and the young. By 1932 less than one in 10 of the members in the north­west coast region, including Hamburg, had a job. Instead of the factory strongholds of communist textbooks, the party was being built in the neighbourhoods, with rent strikes, and in fights with the fascists on the streets.

On the propaganda side, the Communist Party could contrast the grim, demoralising daily experience of capitalist depression with glowing reports of Soviet progress implementing its Five Year Plan. The underside of Stalinist repression spoke less loudly to those impressed with Russia's absence of unemployment. But, adhering to Stalin's supposedly revolutionary 'Third Period' vision which characterised Social Democracy and Fascism as 'twins', and insisted potential allies were but 'left social fascists', the German Communists were unable to establish a United Front against fascism, or win the trust of Social Democrat workers. Party members who questioned the line were denounced as 'imperialist agents', expelled, and subjected to violence.


Whether or not Stalin secretly saw advantages in a Nazi victory, hoping it would disrupt the West, as some alleged, his policies objectively contributed to it. Having declared that fascism was already installed under the 1931-32 Bruning government, the Communist Party was ill-prepared to confront the real thing when Hitler became chancellor the following year.

Some Nazis had openly rejoiced that the worse things got for Germany, and the greater the fear of Bolshevism, the better it would be for their Party. They, too, appealed to the unemployed, and to some of the working class, but more especially to those in the civil service and middle class who, slipping down the ladder, became angry with the rich and powerful, but still resented the organised workers, to whom they considered themselves superior.

The Nazis offered a theory which might have been rejected as crankish and out of place in a booming modern society but reappeared in a more attractive light now nothing seemed to make much sense. It was not something abstract like 'the system', but an outside foe conspiring to do down good Germans. The banker bleeding you for interest was the rich Jew, so was the chain-store owner. Meanwhile his brother the red Jew was agitating the workers, helping to put you out of business, by bringing them out on strike. To the shopkeeper, and to the student hoping to enter a profession, the Nazis could promise that good Aryans/Christians should not have to compete with Jews. For the lumpen criminal element there was also the prospect of sanctioned plunder and violence.


Although they called themselves the National Socialist German Workers Party, and some took the mixture seriously, Hitler and his crew knew which side their bread was buttered. In the autumn of 1928, Hitler decided he needed a new headquarters. Rudolf Hess approached a coal owner he knew, Emil Kirdorf, who said his own business was on hard times, but arranged a meeting with Fritz Thyssen, the steel magnate, who agreed a loan. With this the Nazis acquired a luxurious mansion, which became the Brown House. It was a bit different to the drab halls in which out-of-work Brownshirts might hang around, seeing if they could manage a beer to accompany their cheap meal, while awaiting news of a street fight to make their day.
'A grand staircase led to the second floor where the offices of Hitler and his staff were located. The interior of these rooms were decorated with dark wood panelling and rich red leather armchairs. Everything had the air of richness which comes only from expensive materials, said a visitor.' (Wlio Financed Hitler. The secret funding of Hitler's rise to power, 1919-1933, by James Pool, 1999).

Nazi 'anti-capitalism' was not just there to delude the less well-off or vent the intellectuals' spleen, but nor were they waging a class struggle to ovethrow the system. National Socialism aimed at a disciplined capitalism, where each knew their place, marching in step to make Germany the world power that racism said it ought to be. As political power appeared nearer, Hitler took steps to prove he was worthy of patronage.

In the autumn of 1931, Otto Dietrich, a former business editor with links to heavy industry and Rhineland mining interests was appointed chief of the Nazi Party press office. Hitler went on tour with Dietrich in a big black Mercedes, meeting wealthy potential supporters and business leaders. On 27th January 1932, Hitler addressed 650 members of the Industry Club in Dusseldorf's Park Hotel. The meeting had been arranged with the help of Fritz Thyssen, and Alfried Krupp sent a representative, who reported back very favourably. The Nazi leader had not lectured them on the evils of capitalism, nor even wasted their time with invective against the Jews. His themes were hard work, private property, and the danger of Bolshevism.

Becoming 'respectable' in the eyes of business did not bring any diminution of Nazi violence on the streets. It probably assured pro-Nazi police officers that they could let the Nazi stormtroopers do as they please. A Social Democrat councillor who had been hounded and attacked tried to defend himself in his home. The police arrested the councillor for possessing a revolver. In Altona, a working class district of Hamburg where the Communists were strong, something like the battle of Cable Street ensued, except it ended with police opening fire, killing 18 people and wounding hundreds, so the Nazis could proceed with their march.

In December 1930, the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht had been invited by one of the bank's board members to join him for dinner at the home of Herman Goering, Hitler's number two, in a pleasant Berlin suburb There followed a further invitation to Schacht and his wife, on 5th January 1931. Fritz Thyssen and Dr Goebbels were also present. After dinner the special guest arrived, in uniform: Adolf Hitler. Dr Schacht subsequently lobbied for Hitler to be found a place in government. Asked by an American journalist whether he could run Germany's economy under the Nazis, Schacht said that he could. In the end it was Hitler's government that found a place for Dr Schacht.

Schacht was important not just for his financial expertise but for his connections. He had met Montague Norman, governor of the Bank of England, during 1924 talks, and they became good friends. In October 1931, Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg came to Britain to meet Norman, and also met with Geoffrey Dawson editor of The Times, Lord Hailsham, and Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, who had been enthusiastic over Nazi gains in the elections the previous year: 'If we examine this transfer of political influence in Germany to the National Socialists we shall find that it has many advantages for the rest of Europe. It sets up an additional rampart against Bolshevism.'


When Hitler stood in the 1932 presidential election, the money showed. He was piloted around Germany in a hired plane, speaking at 48 meetings, and for anywhere he did not reach, the Nazis recorded speeches-- and broadcast them through loudspeakers, even radio. For new and younger voters particularly, the appeal was that Germany needed a young man of action. Hitler still came second to Hindenburg, but the following year the Field Marshall would appoint him Chancellor.


On 25th February 1933, as German) faced new Reichstag elections, Goering called top industrialists to a meeting at the Presidential Palace. After Goering and Schacht greeted them, Gustav Krupp pledged his support for Hitler. Goering left the room. 'All right gentlemen. Now to the cash register!', chirped Schacht. Very soon 3 million marks were pledged for Hitler.


Shacht came over for talks with Montague Norman in May and June 1934. Shortly afterwards he became Nazi Minister of Economics. The following year, leading British companies like Unilever, Dunlop, Shell and ICI came together with City banks in the Anglo-German Fellowship. The Bank of England's helpfulness continued in 1939 when the Czech gold reserve, which had been placed in London for safe keeping, was obligingly handed over, through the Bank for International Settlements, to the Nazis who had invaded Czechoslovakia.


The Nazis had long enjoyed support from others besides German capitalists. Sir Henri Deterding of Shell had seen his oil interests in the Caucasus taken over by the Soviets, and thought the Nazis might help him get his own back. Henry Ford, whom Hitler admired for union-busting and antisemitism, was decorated with the Order of the German Eagle in 1937, as had been Thomas Watson of IBM. Hitler believed that the spread of international companies and competition between them could be harnessed for use by an organised German capitalism. The Reich needed raw materials, more particularly war materials, like oil and rubber. IG Farben, which had agreements with Standard Oil and ICI, became especially important, once it had rid itself of Jews; this was the company to set up a Buna (synthetic rubber) plant at a Polish village called Oswiecim.


But all that lay ahead. When the Nazis took power, their opponents had little fight left. The Social Democrats, despite all the beatings and thuggery they had suffered at Nazi hands, had remained law-abiding, telling themselves that Germany was not Italy and could not really go fascist. They took pride in not being 'provoked'. The Communists, too, were quiet, reassuring themselves that the Nazis could not last. 'After Hitler it will be our turn'.

Some demoralised Red Front fighters went over to the stormtroops, whether hoping to subvert them or conceding to the winning side. On May Day 1933 the trade unions accepted that they should march behind the stormtroopers playing the Horst Wessel song. The following day, as planned, the Nazis took over every union hall or office in Germany, beating up trade unionists and sending leading members off to Dachau. Social Democrats continued sitting in parliament, even voting for government measures, till they and the Communists and other left-wingers were taking their turns on lorries and trains heading for the camps.

There was nothing automatic about the sequence of events between 1929 and 1933. Just because the big money swung behind Hitler, this did not guarantee that he would win, though it must have helped. But, hopefully, looking at some of the underlying connections should dissuade us from complacency and help us towards seeing what is necessary to say 'Never again'.


JEWISH SOCIALIST Autumn 2009

Some books that I found helpful:

The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany
by Richard J.Evans

Who financed Hitler : the secret funding of Hitler's rise to power, 1919-1933
by James Pool, Suzanne Pool

Hitler's Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht
by John Weitz

Germany 1931-1932
by Leon Trotsky

also worth reading if you can get hold of them:

Der Fuhrer
by Konrad Heiden

Our Street
by Jan Petersen

(Article originally published in Jewish Socialist Autumn 2009)

1929-1933 Four Fateful Years (1) Hunger and Anger

WORLD news, and anxious crowds wait on Wall Street. and below: NAZI propaganda says 'Break the Dawes chains'. But Germany had depended on Dawes Plan US loans. After 1929 it was replaced by Young Plan which required repayment in gold.


Eighty years ago the Roaring '20s, the decade of booming capitalism, mass-produced automobiles and confidence in lasting prosperity, came to a sudden end. On 24th October 1929, shares on Wall Street took a tumble, and the following week the fall continued. Real estate had already peaked and started to decline in prices some years before, but anyone in America with cash to spare had been able to buy shares, and borrow money to buy more. Before the Crash, the Dow Jones Index had reached an all-time height, and American loans and investment had shored up Europe too. Now America's crash marked the beginning of the worldwide slump.

For Germany, it was a rude awakening to catastrophe. Huge American loans and investment had helped the country out of the crazy 1923 inflation, easing the burden of war reparations, assisting industry to rebuild and compete, and the Social Democrats to plan welfare reforms. The middle class, which had faced ruin, now had money to spend on cafe life, cars, cabaret and concerts, and borrowed more money to buy shares, inflating their value. Companies like Mercedes Benz borrowed to produce more consumer goods. It was the age of modernism and the Bauhaus. Not everyone had jobs, or money, but for those who did, these were the Golden Years. The head of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, grumbled about 'loans for luxury' in 1927, but few politicians wanted to hear his tidings of gloom.

On Black Tuesday, 29th October 1929, 16.4 million shares were sold on Wall Street and $10 million were wiped off the value of US companies. Between September 1929 and July 1932 the New York Times Index fell from 452 points to 58 points. In the same three years, British industrial production fell by 11%, In Germany it fell 40%.

Like the proverbial man who asks for his umbrella back when it starts raining, the US creditors began recalling their loans. Then the United States raised its tariffs by 50%, while Britain delivered a double blow, raising imperial tariff barriers and taking the pound off the Gold Standard, which meant devaluation and cheaper exports.

In April 1931, Germany and Austria agreed a customs union, which should have provided a bigger market for German industry, keeping out Czech goods. France, which had insisted most firmly on full reparations, even occupying the Ruhr from 1923-24, declared any union a breach of the Versailles peace, and withdrew loans from Austria. The Rothschild-founded Credit Anstalt in Vienna, the biggest bank in Central and Eastern Europe, having taken over a smaller bank and its debts, collapsed in May 1931, and German banks began to follow.

By the winter of 1930-31 there were 5 million unemployed in Germany. By the following year, one in three Germans was unemployed, and the proportions in the Ruhr and Silesia were higher. The number of unemployed in Berlin rose from 153,000 to 600,000. In Hamburg the numbers rose from 32,000 to 155,000. Many workers only held on to their jobs by accepting short-time working and pay cuts.
Unemployment benefit had only been meant to provide relief during short spells out of work. Now the local authorities which had responsibility for it were caught out between rising joblessness and falling tax revenues. Those which had taken short-term American loans were bankrupted. Unemployment benefit was cut or ran out.

In the harsh winter of 1931 -32, millions of tons of unsold coal, lay piled around the pitheads of the Ruhr, while millions of Germans could not afford to heat their homes. It was a similar picture elsewhere in the capitalist world, with ill-fed, ill-shod and ragged people shuffling past idle factories and mills. But Germany was worst hit. A working-class housewife told how she and her husband tried to survive on bread and potatoes, with nothing at all at the end of the week, when they hoped for a bit of sausage. People took work on church- and charity-run schemes, labouring for subsistence. Men and women alike turned to begging, prostitution and crime.

It was not only the industrial workers who were suffering this crisis. Many professionals and public servants, who might have regarded themselves as middle class, had their career hopes dashed as banks and firms closed, and government projects were cancelled. Small shopkeepers, already losing out to the chain stores with their special offers, were left with customers who needed 'tick' and then could not pay up. Businesses went bankrupt.

The political posters of this time, from whatever party, show heroic, powerful, well-muscled figures, stepping out confidently to claim their future. These were the very opposite of the weakness and humiliation felt by hungry individuals. On each party's poster the big strong giant triumphs over enemies. A Nazi poster has him smashing 'the world-enemy, international high finance', whereas a cloth-capped Communist giant declares 'Out with this system!' - the system being represented by top-hatted capitalists seated around a huge table. On the Social Democrat poster the muscular giant elbows aside Nazis and Communists.

In elections for the Reichstag in May 1928 the Social Democrats won 29% of the votes cast, while the Communists won 10.6%. The Nazis gained only 2.6%, having retreated from some of their 'socialist' rhetoric in a turn to the countryside, and to reassure some of the business interests from whom Hitler was beginning to obtain funds. Though the Nazi vote fell by 100, 000 nationally, they still took 12 seats. The effect of the 1929 slump as reflected in the September 1930 election was that the Social Democrats were down to 24.5%, the Communists had 13.1%, but the Nazi vote rose to 18.3%.

The Man Who Was Friday (3) Triumph and Tragedy

HIS OLD FRIENDS. Lenin and Krupskaya. Lenin's widow protested when secret police tried to frame Piatnitsky. But she was unable to save him from the Great Purge.

Abroad again, Piatnitsky went to Liepzig, where the German Social Democrats' presses printed the Russians' literature. Once again it was his job to organise the smuggling. In 1912 he helped organise the Bolsheviks' conference in Prague. Lenin and Krupskaya visited him in Liepzig. The following summer he was invited to stay with them near Zakopane, and went hiking with Lenin in the Tatra mountains. The friends had their disagreements. Lenin ribbed Piatnitsky over his respect for the German Social Democrats, Piatnitsky warned Lenin not to trust Malinowski (who was later proven to be a police agent).


In 1914, having trained as an electrical engineer, Piatnitsky returned to Russia and took a job with the Siemens company in Moscow. They sent him to work in Samara, on a tramway project. The socialists there, Menshevik and Bolshevik, had a recreational society as a cover for political lectures. But once again the authorities were on Piatnitsky's trail, armed with a photograph which he guessed an informer called Zhitomirsky had supplied. Osip was arrested and sent to a fortress prison, and then away to a remote valley in Siberia.

He was out in the wilds on March 1917 when he heard that Czar Nicholas II had been overthrown. Somehow he reached Moscow, reported for party duty, and found work with the railway union. A few years after the revolution, party members were asked to write up their stories. Piatnitsky's account was published in 1925 and translated into German and French before it was published in English by Martin Lawrence as Memoirs of a Bolshevik, and in the United States bv International Publishers (1933).

The Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow enthused in a preface: 'These Memoirs should serve as an excellent material for training our younger generation of workers who are joining the Communist Party. In this respect Comrade Piatnitsky's book might serve as a sort of textbook, and an excellent text book at that, which would help our comrades abroad, who are carrying on their revolutionary work in capitalist countries, to learn the methods of organising underground work and help them to become model Bolshevik party members.'


With its tales of true adventure, and the author's frankness and humour, Memoirs of a Bolshevik is also an enjoyable read. Yet for three quarters of a century it has been kept out of print. The Bund crops up repeatedly in the book, and not just in Osip's native Lithuania where it was particularly strong. Another thing that strikes the reader is how, despite differences and polemics, factions could work together against the autocratic regime, whether planning prison breaks, smuggling papers, or fighting off attacks.

On the eve of the First World War, Piatnitsky found that Zhitomirsky, whom he suspected was a police agent, had been investigated by a three-person committee, comprising one Bolshevik, one Menshevik and one Bundist. Such procedure might sound like common sense, but those of us who have experienced the 57 varieties of the British Left will know that sense is rarely common, and co-operation less so.

What is remarkable about Piatnitsky's book is its timing and its provenance. In the late 1920s, along with brutal forced collectivisation in the Soviet Union, came a period when revolutionary willpower could supposedly conquer everything -environmental, economic, or political. Soviet railway engineers who warned of limits on how much freight their system could carry were condemned as saboteurs. The 1929 crash was seen as the final crisis of capitalism. Failure to carry out revolution was the result of bad leadership. Any element of truth in this was distorted by Stalin, to imply not theoretical critique, but denunciations of left-wing opponents, even potential allies, as the worst-possible enemy.

'Fascism is the military organisation of the bourgeoisie, which leans upon Social Democracy...,' proclaimed Stalin, but'Social Democracy, objectively speaking is the moderate wing of Fascism!' If anyone thought this crude, over the top, or even contradictory, they knew better than to risk voicing their doubts and being branded a 'Trotskyist'. Social democrats and the unions they still led were dubbed 'social fascist', and left-wingers like the British Independent Labour Party (1LP), were 'left social fascists', a more insidious variety.

In Britain, the Communist Party had been growing since the 1926 General Strike and Ramsay Macdonald's abandonment of Labour. It had limited success with breakaway 'red' unions, and repelled valuable friends by its attack on the Left. In Poland, Communist Party members attacked the Bund and its institutions, as 'social fascist', thereby antagonising the very workers with whom they needed to unite in the fight against fascism.

In Germany, the Communist Party was bigger. Its hostility to the Social Democrats, seen as betraying the November 1918 revolution, was understandable. But in the face of Hitler's rise to power, it was suicidal. The Depression made workers who were still in the factories cling tightly to their jobs and their Social Democratic unions, while the Communists were outside competing with the Nazis for support from the unemployed.

At elections in May 1928 the Social Democrats gained 29% of the vote and the Communist Party 10.6%. The Nazis that year had a mere 2.6%. Two years and a slump later, the Social Democrat vote in September 1930 was down to 24.5%, while the Communists got 13.1%. But the Nazi vote had risen alarmingly to 18.3%. Had the two workers' parties combined their strengths, they could have gained wider support and blocked the Nazis on the streets as well as in the polling booths. The gap between them became the gateway through which Hitler marched, to destroy both.

All this time Osip Piatnitsky, promoted into the secretariat of the Communist International, had loyally transmitted the line to the German party and others. As treasurer, and head of the inner OMS, with a trusted person in each party, he could see they complied.

In 1928 he authored a paper snappily entitled 'The Bolshevisation of the Communist Parties of the Capitalist Countries by Eradication of the Social Democratic Tradition'. It was meant to turn them into efficient disciplined revolutionary organisations with militant workplace cells, modelled on an idealised Bolshevik Party, which Piatnitsky's memoirs show, never existed. In reality. 'Bolshevisation1 was about moulding the Comintern and its parties into tools of the Russian state. Stalin came to despise them as ineffective tools, to be disposed of when he could.


Even after Hitler took power in 1933, Piatnitsky's pamphlet 'The Current Situation in Germany', assured readers that the fascists would not last, that workers were resisting, and the Communist Party growing. Had the Nazis attacked social democracy too? They just wanted to give their own supporters good jobs. Of course the Party line had been right.

When workers experiencing the difference between fascism and democracy said there should he a united front, the Communist Party had offered one 'from below'. If the Social Democrat workers did not accept, that was because the leaders in whom they still had illusions held them back. Piatnitsky did admit mistakes. The party should lave made more of the national burden which workers bore. If they just repeated that Social Democrats were 'social fascists'", the Social Democrat workers felt affronted and concluded the Communist Party was not serious about unity.


This came close to what Trotsky had said, but Piatnitsky would not admit that Trotsky had been right. In his Memoirs, recalling Trotsky's past opposition to Lenin, he branded him a 'Liquidator'. As Comintern treasurer he could withold funding from the Canadian CP whose leaders didn't take up the fight against 'Trotskyism'. His criticism of the German party leaders did not acknowledge that they had faithfully followed the Moscow line.


All the same, Piatnitsky remained too honest to be trusted in his Comintern job. There was worse to ccme. As the Soviet leadership lurched towards 'popular front' diplomacy, with its beautifully democratic 1936 constitution, it also launched the purges and show trials in which lifelong communists 'confessed' to being in league with Hitler, the British or whoever, in plots to assassinate Stalin and destroy the Soviet Union.


Piatnitsky was no oppositionist, but he refused to accept the stories of ever widening conspiracies. He knew some of the accused, and had mentioned them in his Memoirs. At a party plenum he accused the NKVD secret police of fabricating evidence and using illegal methods to obtain confessions. Lazar Kaganovich and other Politburo members surrounded him afterwards, begging him to retract, but Piatnitsky replied that he had expressed his opinion and would not withdraw it.


Yezhov, the chief of the NKVD, alleged that Piatnitsky had been a provocateur in the pay of the Czarist secret police. But Piatnitsky was not arrested. He challenged Yezhov to confront him with evidence. Meanwhile the Gestapo and Russian White Guard officers abroad surreptitiously fed the Soviet authorities with material to be used against Piatnitsky. Piatnitsky underwent 220 hours of harsh interrogation but refused to confess anything, instead writing a letter to the Politburo protesting his innocence and loyalty as a communist.


At a night meeting in the Kremlin in May 1938, on Stalin's initiative, they produced a 'witness' from jail to testify that Piatnitsky had been plotting. 'He's lying! He is a fascist, he is a scoundrel!' exclaimed Lenin's widow Krupskaya. 'You know Piatnitsky well, he is after all the most honest man. Lenin loved and respected him very much.'


On 19th June 1938, Piatnitsky was accused of introuducing Trotskyist formulations' into Marxist literature - not quite putting glass in the butter -and of infiltrating Trotskyists into the Comintern. But without his confession to these dastardly crimes the authorities were frustrated in their plans to follow up their trials and purges of Bolsheviks and Red Army commanders with a Comintern trial. This did not stop them locking up many foreign militants like the Invergordon naval mutineer Len Wincott, or executing others, including British Communist Rose Cohen. But British CP leader Harry Politt, who made discreet inquiries in Moscow in 1938 about Rose Cohen's fate, may have been spared in the wake of it because Osip Piatnitsky, being tortured at the time, refused to 'confess'. Piatnitsky was finally executed on 30th October 1939. Yezhov, who had himself been purged in March that year was executed a few months later.


Piatnitsky was among those officially rehabilitated following Khrushev's 'secret speech' to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1956. But Memoirs of a Bolshevik has still not been republished.

I don't know why.

The Man Who Was Friday (2) Berlin, London, Odessa and Home

MARX Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green. In 1902-3, it housed the presses which printed ISKRA. Lenin had an office on the premises. Osip Tarshis, alias Piatnitsky, despatched the revolutionary paper to Russia.

City lights, a new name, and a new trade

Young Osip, from Wilkomir in Lithuania, had escaped a Russian prison, and now he arrived in Germany. In Berlin, the small-town boy was dazzled by the traffic and the bright lights. He rode on trams and gazed in shop windows. At a meeting place, he 'saw the well-dressed gentlemen sitting around small tables drinking their beer, and thought it was a bourgeois gathering, for I had never seen such workers in Russia. It proved to be a Party meeting.'

He was impressed by the German unions, the party bookstores and printing presses. In Berlin he acqired a new name. Perhaps it was the day he arrived. The lady of the house, not wanting visitors to know who was staying, called him Mikhail Davidovich Freitag. The Russian for Friday is Piatnitsa. Somehow it stuck, so comrade Tarshis became better known in the movement as Osip Aaronovich Piatnitsky.

Piatnitsky also came to London, where the Social Democratic Labour Party of Russia was to reconvene its Second Congress. He stayed with Martov, Vera Zasulich and others, and had meals with Lenin and Krupskaya. The winter fogs and grime of the city depressed him. He was surprised to meet people from the old country who had turned from socialism to 'individualist anarchism'. Osip put this down to their exile from home and exclusion from British society and its labour movement.

Iskra was being printed on the presses of the Social Democratic Federation in Clerkenwell. It was Piatnitsky's job to find ways of despatching the paper back to those waiting back home. The Bund's network delivered the first issues of Lenin's Iskra into Russia (later in 1905 the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg were surprised to receive a consignment of Bund publications. A German worker dispatching the parcels had just assumed the more the merrier, and sent whatever he had).


In Tilsit, Piatnitsky found a group of Lithuanians sending large quantities of religious literature home; this was banned by the Czarist regime because it was in the Lithuanian language. Religious dissenters and Marxists were able to collaborate in adversity, so Marxist pamphlets were smuggled in the same crates as devotional works.

The revolutionaries used suitcases with false bottoms, and devised garments - waistcoats for men and bodices or skirts for women - into which newspapers were sewn. People swore in the Summer heat, but were all right in winter. Some even regretted parting with their garments, asserts Piatnitsky, the ladies' tailor, proudly: 'The women got used to them - they made them look impressive, dignified, with good round figures.'

The 1903 congress saw the Bund's delegates walk out when its status was not recognised as 'representative of the Jewish proletariat'. It ended with the split between the 'Bolshevik' and Menshevik' factions over what constituted party membership. Lenin lost control of Iskra. Piatnitsky was bewildered when the older theoretician Plekhanov turned against Lenin, and was upset to part with comrades he had admired; but he chose to go with the Bolsheviks.

The Battles in Odessa

In 1905 theoretical debate was jostled aside by real revolution. Arriving in Odessa that summer, Piatnitsky found party organisation was built from the top, on the principle of co-option. There were committees of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the Bund, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Dashnaks (an Armenian party), each working separately. But at the end of August someone began moves for a joint meeting. "I think it was the Bund ... organisationally they stood closer to the Mensheviks, but on many tactical questions of the period the Odessa Bund sided with us."

Not content with having massacred demonstrators on the Odessa steps, the Czarist regime wanted its revenge for the strikes, the Potemkin battleship mutiny, and the revolutionary ferment in Odessa. In October, along with the Czar's manifesto promising reform and national unity, came armed gangs harassing people in Odessa, and an organised pogrom against the Jews. There was a meeting in the university to organise resistance and defence. 'Besides us, the Mensheviks, the Bund group and the Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), resentatives of the Dashnaks, the Poale Zion and Serpovists attended the meetings of the committee' (Serpovists were members of the Chaim Zhitlovsky's Jewish Socialist Labour Party, and close to the SRs). Piatnitsky was worried that not enough non-Jewish workers showed up.

The Black Hundred pogromists, officers leading peasants, lumpen and criminals alongside plain-clothes police, were backed by Cossacks and well-armed troops. The workers' defence squads were heavily outgunned. On 19th October a detachment of railway workers routed a right-wing gang in the Dalmitsy district, but had to retreat, with heavy losses, when the army intervened. In some places people broke into gun shops for weapons to defend themselves. The battleship Potemkin and its revolutionary sailors had left Odessa, but a detachment of naval cadets fought bravely against the reactionaries, Piatnitsky records.

Still, after three days - the usual time alotted for pogroms by the Czarist authorities -some 800 Jews had been killed in Odessa, hundreds were injured or raped, and thousands were burned out of their homes.

The strikes resumed on a bigger scale in December. Under pressure from the rank and file for unity, an Odessa soviet was formed with elected delegates, like that in St Petersburg. The executive met in tearooms run by the Bund and other organisations, but had to keep on the move. In January 1906, Piatnitsky and others were arrested. Released after a hunger strike, but still depressed over the pogrom, and feeling that the movement in Odessa was ebbing, he accepted a call from Moscow to come and help the party press.

On his way, he made a diversion to his home town to visit family and friends. Wilkomir, awakened by the great events elsewhere, was not yet touched by the tide of repression. There were public meetings in the park. The Bund had a children's section - the Little Bund. There was a branch of the Social Democratic Labour Party with Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and Jewish members.

In Moscow, the workers still seemed to be in fighting mood. The party was working with students and producing a paper for soldiers. At holiday times, Moscow workers returning to their villages took political literature for the peasants. Piatnitsky organised printing, obtained paper and arranged distribution. But when police raided the printing works and people's flats he realised they had full details of who they were looking for, including his real name, which he had almost forgotten himself.

Leaving Moscow to shake off spies before going abroad, Osip returned to Wilkomir in May 1908. His home town was now an occupied country. Mounted police were dragging in Lithuanian peasants for interrogation. Even the Bund was lying low. He had been home 10 days when he was arrested. His mother arrived and he feared she would blurt out his name, but she kept quiet as he was taken away.

The prison was crowded with Lithuanians, Poles and Jews. Police officers boasted about flogging and torturing peasants, and showed him a blood-stained cell. Piatnitsky, using another pseudonym, 'Pokenansky', was anxious that they should not find out who he really was or where he had been, and trace his contacts. They hauled him in front of some old Lithuanians and asked if this fellow was really Pokenansky. The old men swore he was, they would recognise him anywhere, he looked just like his father who had gone to America. Osip had never met them before in his life, but their testimony saved him.

The Man Who Was Friday: 1) The Tailor's Apprentice

He was born on January 1882, in Wilkomir, a small town in the Pale of Settlement. His father and two elder brothers were carpenters, but young Osip Aaronovich Tarshis was apprenticed in a tailor's shop to learn ladies' dressmaking. At 14, he listened to the workers talking about socialists who had been deported back to their home town.

He wrote: 'From casual talk 1 learned that these socialists used to meet the local intellectuals and workers, teach the latter how to read and write, give them books to read, etc. Also they often talked in my shop about secret meetings that were held in the capitals of the different provinces - in Vilna, Kovno and Warsaw - and about arrests which were made there.'

More exciting, when his brothers came home at the end of the year, young Osip found out they were involved. By the end of 1897 Osip had a job in Kovno, where he lodged with his brothers. He sat in on the carpenters' illicit meetings, held in members' homes, and liable to be raided by the police at any time.

Soon Osip had a new job, besides his paid work in the tailoring shop. He was to carry political literature between Kovno and Vilna. This illegal traffic was to become his speciality. Meantime, trade unionism was growing. The garment workers went on strike for a reduction of hours - to a 12-hour day. But the employers had got young Osip's measure, and he was blacklisted in the Kovno area.

Leaving for Vilna, at the end of 1898, he entrusted the Rabochnaya Znaya (Workers Banner) printing press, which he had looked after, to a trusted comrade, a member of the Jewish Worker's Bund. A few years later when Osip returned to Kovno on a mission for Iskra (The Spark) the Bund asked his help in organising workers at a firm that shipped timber to Germany on the River Nieman.

The day he left for Vilna, Osip glimpsed the wider world of struggle. Weeping parents were at the station seeing off soldiers, sent to crush the Boxer Rebellion in China. Why should we fight the Chinese people, with whom we have no quarrel, Osip mused, when the same army is used to suppress us here?

Even the Czar's army had its uses, however. In Vilna, where Osip was recruited to the Iskra group, he discovered it had an Iskra Military Organisation, headed by an army doctor, which sent revolutionary literature through the army's own mail to contacts across the Czar's sprawling empire.

There were unions in several trades in Vilna, but none recruited workers regardless of nationality, according to Osip, nor did they have a central body. However the Bund brought workers together for May Day and other events, often held out in the woods. Osip and friends went to a celebration of Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. The girls stayed in a one-room cabin, while the lads slept out on the porch. Next morning they found someone had stolen their clothes and shoes. They had to signal frantically to passers-by, who scoured the neighbourhood for cast-offs, so they could get home.

It wasn't always funny. A friend from Osip's home town, not a party member, Solomon Rogut, caught carrying illegal literature, was beaten unconscious and left for dead. The Bund in Wilkomir produced a pamphlet about Rogut. But Osip felt responsible for having involved his friend.

Workers found rough and ready ways to deal with scabs and informers, and battle the authorities. They had set up unofficial 'labour exchanges' where they could drop in, drink tea, hear news of any work, and discuss affairs of state. Hearing that three women had been arrested for distributing leaflets, workers from Osip's 'exchange' stormed the police station. After cutting its telephone wires, they fought sabre-wielding police to reach the top floor and free the women held there. Many of these workers were injured or arrested later, but all were proud of what they had done.

Osip himself was taken off a Kovno train and questioned by police in March 1902. They knew about his links with the Iskra group. He was held in Vilna for a week, then sent to Kiev. There was student unrest there, and the jail filled up with students. Moved to the political wing, Osip was able to do some reading, and had tutors. He acknowledges that a compositor, Joseph Blumenfeld, with whom he later had differences, helped him. He also mentions Nicolai Bauman, a Bolshevik whose murder by Black Hundreds in Moscow aroused huge anger there in 1905.

Future Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov was with Osip in the Kiev prisoners' escape committee. They practised human pyramids to the height of the wall, and celebrated birthdays to get the guards accustomed to drinking with them. They smuggled in sleeping powders for the guards and, through Osip's contacts, they obtained false passports and papers for themselves. They assembled a grapple and ladder, and tied sheets into a rope.

Getting over the wall one August night, Osip went from town to town posing as a student. At Zhitomir he was sheltered in the Bund's secret committee room. For a time he returned to his old trade, taking digs with a fellow worker. But the authorities were after him, and someone from the prison saw him at the market. A friend had his papers. They met in the woods and, accompanied by two Bundist women, went to Kamenets Podolsk. From there, wading across rivers, they crossed into Austria at night. Then it was on to Berlin, where Osip began the next stage of his career.