This is an excellent book published in 1968 [unsure if book is from 1986 or 1968--18] by a German journalist concerned with why Germany never had its often- prophesied proletarian revolution.
Haffner explains why the right, the Social Democrats and even the Spartacists (communists) wrote attempted proletarian revolution out of the history books.
The military and the Kaiser of Germany had nothing but disdain for the uprising of the masses of Germany at the end of World War I. It was only so much chaos and rioting to them.
Social Democratic leaders who came to rule civilian Germany shared the traditional ruling class's contempt for the attempts at governance by the soldiers, sailors and workers of Germany, but added the element of betrayal. Haffner shows in no uncertain terms how the Social Democrats paved the way for Hitler and saw to the assassination of communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Finally, Haffner unintentionally detailed how Luxemburg and Liebknecht lagged behind the times. Despite a sympathetic after word by Richard Bruch, the overall impression of the book is that the Spartacists were too little too late. Nothing could be more indicative than that the party only formed after the initial events of the revolution.
It appears that Liebknecht in particular was in touch with the anti-militarist movement and even symbolized it, but he did not lead it, nor did his party.
The only hesitation that a Leninist could have with the book is Haffner's own tendency to see the period in terms of personalities, some more stupid than others. The book is excellent political history, but the underlying political economy of the period is left in the dark. On wishes there were a counterpart to Haffner's book on the political economy of Germany.
Overall Failure of a Revolution should be required reading on Germany because it teaches many political lessons chronicling a heroic but naive uprising against militarism and counterrevolution.
In the 1930s, it seemed that no one could stop Hitler. He marched into political power and through Eastern Europe. But Hitler did face some resistance from within the German people. To believe otherwise is undialectical while believing such resistance to be the majority of Germans is non-materialist. Peter Hoffman provides historical details of some of the bourgeois resistance.
Like an Amerikan politician today named Patrick Buchanan, Hitler campaigned to power initially by opposing empire. First he sought to unify the German people. Then he bumped up against England and France, which were trying to hold onto their colonies. Since Germany had no colonies, Germany had some possibility of going the communist route of sympathizing with the colonial peoples under English and French domination. Instead, the majority of German people chose to go the Nazi route, seeking to supplant France and England in international domination. This is not surprising; Lenin had already observed that a majority of Germany was petty-bourgeois and we know from history that a majority had rejected Communism before Hitler ever came on the scene. Germany had reached the decadent phase of capitalism.
Even if we count people who wanted a smaller empire than Hitler did, the German resistance was small. What Lenin called the "labor aristocracy" limited Germany's possibilities for anti-imperialism. Although Hoffman must not have liked admitting it, "declaring the revolution completed, Hitler held a plebiscite in November 1933, in which 96.3 percent of all eligible voters cast ballots, and 95 percent of those who voted approved of the government's internal and external policies."(p. 25) This was a feat by Hitler far exceeding any claim by the so-called democratic parties in Germany before or since. Hoffman says the result was fraud, but he cites no resistance to the voter fraud. Nor does he deny that the German parliament passed Hitler's "enabling" act -- which set up concentration camps and other repressions -- by a wide margin of 444 to 175 (counting 81 Communists not allowed to vote.)(p. 24) Hoffman also does not deny that in January 1935, the people of the Saar region contested by France voted overwhelming to join Germany, concentration camps, executions of communists and pogroms against Jews not notwithstanding. The people there could have kept a semi-autonomous status with democracy in name but opted for joining Hitler instead.(p. 33)
Normal elections have not produced such a turn-out or support. The plebiscite proves that the people were sick and tired of the opportunism of professional politicians lying and jockeying for power. In plebiscites, there are not two persynalities waging a battle for persynal gain. There is one persynality asking people thumbs up or down on an issue of substance.
More importantly the overwhelming success of Hitler destroys a number of stupid pseudo-theories of politics. One platitude is that Nazism is only an extremist philosophy and in fact joins up with communism in the extreme of "totalitarianism." However, if Nazism is "extremism," instead of the normal functioning of decadent imperialism in a desperate situation, how did the plebiscite gain such support? It must also be pointed out that communism had been crushed to insignificance at that point. By simple mathematics we must either acknowledge that the non-Nazis in Hitler's Germany were the extremists, or else the word "extremist" loses its meaning.
We Maoists can see that the support of the German people for the plebiscite cannot be written off as mass psychosis or extremism. Rather it is the latent possibility of any imperialist country in crisis. There is a mass base for reaction -- the labor aristocracy. When that mass base faces destruction, it does not opt for proletarian revolution as its first option. That is why Lenin was correct to speak of entire countries as parasites. It is also why the Nazis scapegoated the Jews for parasitism. The Nazis sought to divert the proletarian internationalist attack by blaming only a section of imperialist country whites for parasitism. Understanding Hitler's tactical focus on Jews, Roma, gays and other minorities helps us to understand the tactics of social-chauvinists today as well. Those who claim Socialism or Communism while attempting to isolate a section of the labor aristocracy as the sole imperialist-nation parasites are only prolonging the life of imperialism by muddying the definition of the proletariat.
Hoffman himself admits that "on the whole, at all times from 1933 to 1945 the majority of German voters, indeed of the entire population, supported the government, albeit with varying degrees of willingness."(p. 51) MIM will not marginalize such a fact. We hold the opinions of the German majority to be principal in discussing the internal politics of Germany. However distasteful these opinions may be, we must deal with the will of this alarming majority as the motive force of German history at that time.
Still, despite the situation of the majority of Germans, it would be undialectical to ignore minority resistance. There is always some and MIM-North Amerika seeks to organize that resistance, no matter how small or how much the labor aristocracy and labor bureaucracy sneer. We seek to avoid being co-opted the way Hitler co-opted the Social Democrats and Center Party of Germany. We can do so only by holding to the truth about the labor aristocracy.
In passing, Hoffman says the Marxist interpretation of the rise of fascism in Germany is wrong: 1) Hitler did not gain big business support on his way to power. 2) The resistance was real ethical resistance and not just upper class people trying to save their skins during a losing war effort.
Hoffman admits that the very meeting to arrange appointment of Hitler to the cabinet occurred in a banker's house,(p. 12) but he does not deal with the works of Marxist historians in any detailed way. The whole book seems rather thin to be even mentioning such subjects.
Hoffman is interested in the question of what counts as real resistance to Hitler and not just some officers and other elites trying to save their skins for the time when the Germans would lose World War II and see the Allies occupy Germany. Unfortunately, most of the resistance he uncovered was of the sort that sought a superior strategy for a German empire's interests. Most of the resistance was not an outright rejection of imperialist country nationalism, but a disagreement over strategy.
One of the lessons of the book concerning the exciting but failed military conspiracies to overthrow Hitler is that capitalist realpolitik is inherently militarist. Even most bourgeois historians have admitted that World War I was a product of secret treaties and strategic blocs and rivalry over colonies.
Yet according to Hoffman, throughout World War II, there were German officers making contact with the English and French seeking aid to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis. Before the invasion of Poland, England apparently blew a chance to stoke up German resistance when Chamberlain came up with the 1938 policy of appeasement which boosted Hitler's popularity internally in Germany.(p. 88) In particular, the German resistance wanted assurances of a hard stance against Hitler by England and France and of good peace terms after the coup, especially because their conspiracy would have more support if they could obtain favorable peace terms that guaranteed Germany its 1939 or 1938 borders.
Although he quotes Churchill on why it was dangerous for one of the Allies to appear to be selling out by negotiating with the German resistance,(p. 98) Hoffman does little to explain political realities of why those outside Germany did not trust the German resistance. The main organizers of resistance were enemies of the Allies equivalent to Hitler, albeit with their own agendas; and it was not always easy to distinguish a resistance conspirator from a Nazi.
A number of bourgeois authors have said that Stalin bungled by not taking every German conspirator's warnings at face-value regarding time and place of attack. Yet, Stalin ignored many such warnings before the attack came -- not just the one warning that this or that ignorant or lying scholar mentions in his/her critique of Stalin. Stalin proved to be right over 95% of the time. Hoffman leaves readers naive about the ability of intelligence officers to tell whether or not a German is really a conspirator or a loyal Nazi misleading the enemy. He also downplays the larger historical forces at work that made it impossible for England and France to accept less than domination of Germany, given their desire to retain their colonies.
We learn that there were numerous bungled assassination attempts against Hitler. The British rejected one chance in 1939 as too risky to diplomacy.(p. 108) However, the most determined and successful attempt which blew off a bomb and injured Hitler only occurred in 1944, after the victory of Stalingrad and when it seemed Germany's loss was inevitable. Hoffman acknowledges the value of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in spurring resistance in Germany.(p. 109)
In understanding theory and the existing literature of the subject, Hoffman does not seem more than a lightweight in this book. Nonetheless, we thank him for some historical details on this subject.
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This is a remarkable book on Eugenio Pacelli, who was Pope Pius XII from 1939 to 1958. Written by a Catholic scholar originally intending to defend Pacelli, the book presents a Catholic insider view of Pacelli.
The pope is the top authority in the Catholic religion and by tradition he has resided in Rome, Italy. Currently the place where he resides is called the Vatican, a place that other countries treat as a tiny country into itself. Cornwell has examined Vatican documents regarding Pacelli at a time when the Catholic Church is considering naming him a saint, in a process called beatification. Vatican documents generally stay secret for 75 years; (p. 372) although the Vatican claims to have released a complete collection in regard to World War II.
Cornwell concludes that Pacelli was "no monster," (p. viii) but he was "Hitler's pope," an easy pawn to handle.(p. 297) From the details presented by Cornwell, MIM separately concludes that Pope Pius XII must be counted amongst the most evil men of the twentieth century -- above and beyond his role perpetuating religion as a diversion from scientific and ideological clarity about this world and a deliberate division of the humyn race based on a figment of the imagination known as "God."
Yugoslavia and the Croats
Cornwell's material with the most contemporary flavor concerns the bloodletting in ex-Yugoslavia. In recent MIM Notes issues regarding Kosovo (e.g. MN 186), MIM has explained how the Russians have historical ties to the Serbs, including a similar alphabet.
In the case of enemies of the Serbs, it was Catholic Croat fascists who declared an independent Croatia and initiated massacres of Serbs in the wake of Hitler's invasion of eastern Europe. Cornwell fully admits the Catholic role and points out that the Pope condoned the massacres of non- Catholics in the wake of Hitler's victories: "Even by comparison with the recent bloodshed in Yugoslavia at the time of this writing, Pavelic's onslaught against the Orthodox Serbs remains one of the most appalling civilian massacres known to history."(p. 249)
In fact, the Croats had managed a rare feat -- to be included by Hitler in his idea of the Aryan race as Aryans.(p. 248) The Serbs along with most peoples in the world were slated for extermination by Hitler -- a fact increasingly lost in capitalist propaganda seeking to whitewash racism and equate Hitler's Nazism and communism as "totalitarianism." Hitler only regarded the Jews as his most fit internationalist enemy and the most convenient scapegoat for German unity purposes. There were only 2 million Orthodox Christian Serbs, and the Croats led by Catholic priests(p. 254) managed to kill 487,000 between 1941 and 1945 in addition to 27,000 Gypsies and 30,000 out of 45,000 Jews. (p. 253) What today's relativists lose sight of is that Stalin used violence to address capitalist violence, but he never targeted entire peoples to be systematically eliminated. The capitalist media whitewash of fascism omits this fact when it villifies fascism's vanquisher.
The reason Pope Pius XII condoned the massacres by the Ustashe is that it made it easier to spread Catholicism in the region. "Mass conversions" of Orthodox Christian Serbs and massacres of those same Serbs became difficult to separate, because the reasons for the two were the same. For this reason, Pacelli held joyous greetings for Croatian police and young Catholic fascists in Rome.(p. 260)
While it is well-known that the Jews suffered a holocaust, what the people do not realize is that the Vatican had its own genocidal fascism to account for all by itself -- without tailing behind Hitler or Mussolini. The Serbs and Gypsies were just two more peoples that faced genocide by fascists. As it turns out, Pacelli also had a role in fanning the historical hatreds in the Balkans that led to the genocide of World War II.
World War I
Of all the evil ruling class figures during the 20th century, Pacelli's claim to infamy comes largely from the fact of having an important role to play for so long. Before he became pope, he was the number two persyn in the Catholic hierarchy, the Secretary of State. As a diplomat, in World War I, Pacelli was involved in the most vexing European ethnic conflicts, most of which remain unresolved today, thanks to Pacelli's type of politics.
As it turns out, Pacelli was there for the beginning of World War I in 1914. Four days before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that started World War I, Pacelli maneuvered a diplomatic deal with Serbia that embarrassed Austria-Hungary.(p. 48) Pacelli had cut a deal with the Serbs to protect Catholicism and allow the Pope more absolute authority over Catholics in Serbia. His so-called "Serbian Concordat" was another straw piled on the camel's proverbial back.
As the war went on, Pacelli also learned to fake his anti-militarism. None other than the German kaiser told him he should show concern for the troops in World War I, because it often seemed to them that only socialists and communists were concerned about their well-being.(p. 68)
Mussolini
While Pacelli's greatest evil came from working with Hitler, both Hitler and Pacelli took their cues from Mussolini first. Mussolini came to power as a fascist in Italy before Hitler and he also signed a treaty with the Pope before Hitler. While Pacelli was the senior diplomat in the Vatican, Pope Pius XI called Mussolini "'a man sent by Providence.'"(p. 114) Rather than upbraid Pope Pius XI, Pacelli named himself in the same line. We find it reprehensible that so many Christians today live in denial regarding Christianity's role in propping up Hitler and Mussolini. The Vatican's endorsement of Mussolini is especially damning. The Vatican went so far as to dissolve a Catholic party and urge voters to support Mussolini and his party.(p. 116)
As the one to break the ice in Europe, Mussolini bears much of the responsibility for the fascist infection of all of Europe after World War I. The Vatican in turn bears responsibility for Mussolini.
Hitler
Most communist analysis of the rise to power of Hitler focuses on the social-democrats and their influence in the communist ranks. The original reason for this focus is that it used to be obvious that the Catholics and other Christians were ready fodder for Hitler; in contrast, the split in the working-class was much more interesting. It was often thought that a united German working-class under proletarian leadership could change world history decisively.
Now with capitalist media-induced amnesia, the youth grow up thinking that Hitler was simply a "statist." Hence, the trouble that Cornwell goes to to prove that Catholics and not socialists supported Hitler is important. Catholic Father Paul Collins pointed out that the version of papal authority accepted was more strict than anything put forward by communists or fascists.(p. 39)
From the point of view of Marxist scientists, it is obvious that Christianity dulls the scientific sensibility of the masses, because it teaches them poor logic -- "to argue from authority." No matter how well respected the authority, a statement is not true because an authority says so. Any argument along the lines that "God says so" is in fact "argument from authority" and should not be applied to anything in the real world, lest an elementary mistake in logic be made. This is not the same thing as saying that people may not submit to authorities as anarchists are likely to say. There may be good reasons to follow authority. Logic only says that the truth is independent of its speaker.
Aside from the countless German Christian leaders who named Hitler as Christ reincarnated, Christianity prepared the masses for fascism by teaching "argument from authority" in place of logic. Religious efforts to water down scientific education also contribute to making the masses ready for fascist leaders appealing to their emotions -- especially anti- Semitism in the case of Catholics.
Cornwell adds that Hitler was the perfect counterpart to Pacelli, because Pacelli opposed democracy and needed an authoritarian leader to negotiate with. Hitler was willing to impose a nation-wide deal that others had a hard time negotiating with various local authorities and political constituencies.
Pacelli had failed to obtain from Germans what he wanted for Catholic schools. Hitler granted Catholic schools and recognition of papal authority over all Catholic clergy in exchange for removing the Catholics from politics. In practice, this meant that Hitler succeeded in paralyzing possible Catholic opposition to himself. Every time the masses or lower levels of the Church rose against Hitler, Pacelli was there to urge reconciliation with Hitler until well into World War II.
As in the case of starting World War I, and helping Mussolini in power, Pacelli was right there when Hitler needed a pivotal push to power. It is a great irony of history and previously unknown to this reviewer that Pope Pius XII made right-wing German Chancellor (1930-1932) Heinrich Bruning look like a radical leftist. Catholic Bruning urged Pacelli not to make deals with Hitler. Bruning's Catholic Center Party was one of the last possible sources of opposition to Hitler.
Instead of opposing Hitler, the Catholic Center Party followed Pacelli's advice and facilitated Hitler's rise to power. Crucially, it voted for Hitler's so-called "Enablement Bill."(p. 135) Already by the time of March 1933, Hitler had succeeded in banning the communists and their elected representatives. The social-democrats voted against Hitler's power-grab, but the Catholic Center Party voted for it and dissolved itself. It would be hard to think of a more timely yet evil single act in the 20th century. Bruning rightly called the "Enablement Bill" "'the most monstrous resolution ever demanded of a parliament.'"(p. 135) Unfortunately, Pacelli had his way, not Bruning! Only 14 out of 76 Catholic delegates had the courage to oppose Pacelli and side with Bruning, so the entire Catholic bloc voted for Hitler.
Four days after becoming pope in 1939, Pacelli issued a positive statement to Hitler asking for reconciliation again. He also arranged for an ostentatious birthday for Hitler's 50th on April 20th, 1939.(p. 209)
Seven months later in 1939, a right-wing plot involving the Pope arose in Germany to kill Hitler. (p. 235) Thus far, historians have treated this plot as legitimate and not a concoction of German Nazi counter- insurgency. Eventually it's leaders did die in the attempt. It is one of the few proofs that Pacelli was not completely a Hitlerite himself, merely a Nazi collaborator. In the plot to kill Hitler, it was the role of Pacelli to approach England and France to ask for good peace terms in exchange for the rebels' killing of Hitler.
While Pacelli was thus willing to see Hitler assassinated in the late 1930s or early 1940s, his own agenda still overlapped with much of the Nazi agenda. He preferred Franco fascism to Hitler fascism. Franco in Spain was also ardently authoritarian and anti-communist, but Franco believed his work was on behalf of the Pope, while Hitler was more likely to encourage others to think he was the messiah himself. Pacelli hoped for a Franco style fascism all across Europe. Pacelli opposed both majority rule by bourgeois rules and communism.
The Jews
The single issue most scandalous to John Cornwell is how traditional Catholic anti-Semitism played right into Hitler's program of genocide against the Jews, what Cornwell calls "the greatest crime in human history."(p. 293) Pacelli's admirers include Jews who credit him with saving 860,000 Jewish lives during the war, (p. 378) but Cornwell shows how numerous stories regarding the pope's role in resisting Hitler's genocide were simply false, an attempt to protect Pacelli's image. It is Cornwell's efforts in the historical archives on this question that set much of history straight.
The pope's negative role decreased as the war went on, but even at the very end when German troops occupying Rome were afraid of Italian revolt, partly because Mussolini had been sent packing, Pacelli did not manage to speak out against the murder of over 1000 Roman Jews by a few determined SS troops. Thanks to Stalin's leadership success of the Soviet Red Army, the situation was so weak for the Nazis that Hitler had to concede that he did not have the power to kidnap even the defenseless pope in a city occupied by Nazi troops in late 1943. (p. 315)
Meanwhile the Nazi diplomats to the Vatican secretly turned against their government and begged the pope to stop the massacre of Jews just by speaking out against the demoralized and potentially heavily outnumbered SS. (pp. 302, 304) So it was that even sectors of the Nazi ruling class were beginning to look good compared with Pacelli. Hence, even with Allied troops advancing and the Italian people carrying out armed resistance and near the boiling point against a losing Nazi army, Pacelli still did not take a correct stance, and one reason was his ardent anti- communism and fear of an Italian Revolution.
Rather, during most of World War II once England and France declared war on Germany, Pacelli could be found agitating for "universal city" status for Rome -- by which he meant freedom from Allied bombardment by airplane. As the leader of the world's half a billion Catholics, Pacelli was a provincialist putting his locale first while taking weak stances on the fascist atrocities inside Rome and around the world. Also under Pacelli's rule, the death of Hitler found the Cardinal Archbishop of Berlin in mourning and ordering all priests "'to hold a solemn Requiem in memory of the Fuhrer and all those members of the Wehrmacht [German military--MC5] who have fallen in the struggle for our German Fatherland, along with the sincerest prayers for Volk and Fatherland and for the future of the Catholic Church in Germany.'"(p. 317)
Black troops
While Pacelli had little to say about specific war atrocities when he had the chance regarding the Jews, Gypsies and Serbs, he did speak out twice against the use of Black troops as occupation forces. According to Pacelli, Black troops are more likely to rape European wimmin than other troops.
Hence, we see that Pacelli was willing to get into minute ethnic details when it suited him. He specifically asked the U$A not to allow any Blacks to occupy Rome.(p. 95)
Conclusion
John Cornwell provides a good example of how to write an historical account without resorting to airy ideological principles. He provides examples of where Catholic resistance (to eugenics (p. 153), to euthanasia (p. 198) or German atrocities in Italy) made a big difference and proved that Hitler was not unstoppable. He also demonstrated from other periods of history what was possible, what the masses should have expected the pope to be able to do on behalf of justice -- since much of the argument concerning Pacelli is with regard to just how much power he had to bring to bear in various situations.
Hitler's Pope is a well-organized book with a clear sense of moral logic and direction that is increasingly lacking in the contemporary academic world. It answers many of the questions that we communists would also want answered about Pope Pius XII. Perhaps more than any reactionary leader this century, Pope Pius XII was at the right place at the right time doing the wrong thing.
Any history book coming out in 1998 on the subject of Stalingrad is probably helpful to progressives and communists. For this reason we rushed to review this book in time for the winter 1998 holiday season when people purchase most of their books for the year. Unfortunately, we could not fit it into earlier editions of MIM Notes due to the imperialist attacks on Iraq and other pressing news. This action-packed book is an appropriate holiday gift for the warmonger in the imperialist country family.
At this time in the imperialist countries, the youth are victims of a trend in academia and teaching which says there is no truth and everything is relative. By simply treating the subject of Stalingrad with the documents becoming available today, Beevor has struck a blow against the predominant nonsense in academia today. Together the Axis powers and Russians lost approximately one million troops dead in the battles of Stalingrad.(pp. 394, 398) Unlike post-modernists, MIM has no difficulty saying that the fact that Stalingrad was the largest battle in history makes this book and its subject more important than the subjects and books generally spewed out by post-modernism. Feminists in particular should take note that battles fought predominantly by men must still be accorded their full weight in history by feminists or feminists will forever be sidelined from power by their unwillingness to tackle military history.
There are three main strengths of this book compared with what is already available on the subject. 1) Evidence on the existence of varied anti- and non-Nazi views in the German army. 2) Detailed descriptions of the role of Russian traitors fighting alongside the Germans. 3) An inside view amounting to a psycho-thriller drama on the German army elite and why it did not surrender sooner.
Most of the book is a blow-by-blow account of the battle and this will make it concrete and readable to many.
Stalin blamed again
As is the fashion with Western writers today, Beevor blames Stalin for not believing the information he had about the beginning of the Nazi invasion. Yet, more than any other writer we credit Beevor for undercutting his own argument.
While others simply say Stalin was napping or paralyzed by the Nazi invasion in 1941, Beevor says that there was "repressed hysteria" in the Kremlin. He also says that there had been over 80 warnings of imminent invasion in the past eight months. (p. 3) Hence, Beevor understood it was a matter of not believing the various reports of attacks. Furthermore, Beevor does say Stalin did seriously consider that they were being invaded the afternoon it happened and Molotov took appropriate radio action almost immediately. (pp. 5, 10) Others write as if there were a huge vacuum until Stalin spoke publicly two weeks later.
Beevor was correct that Stalin was suspicious about the information he received. MIM believes that Stalin was right to be suspicious, cautious and thorough in his checking and re-checking of facts. The alternative would be to accidentally start a war along a front of thousands of miles. There had been many times when war almost started prematurely between Germany and the Soviet Union. The number of warnings that Stalin had to ignore mentioned by Beevor is even higher than the number mentioned by Molotov in his memoirs.
Although other than Beevor few Western writers evidence knowing it in their writings seeking to demonize Stalin, Stalin had industries shipped east of the Ural Mountains during the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939-1941, in preparation for the German advance. Nonetheless, Beevor chides the German soldiers and historians who widely complained that the Soviets "lured" them deep into Soviet territory. The Germans believe this caused their defeat, because of overstretched supply lines and widely dispersed troops.(p. 73) Lazy Western scholars believe they know better than the German survivors and blame Stalin for giving up almost all the territory of the European Soviet Union. At first the West thought the Soviet Union would collapse even more quickly than France and then it blamed Stalin for not defeating Hitler from the first stroke.
MIM has shown in the "Stalin Issue" of MT that the racism of Western writers like Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher was to blame for similar reasoning. For the West, it was unbelievable that Stalin would give up the European fraction of the Soviet Union as a field of battle and retreat to its edge bordering Asia. There was nothing real in the military science of their criticisms of Stalin.
A related point is that Beevor criticizes Stalin for not taking up motorized warfare for the Soviet Union in order to take back large pieces of European Russia. He fails to understand that Stalin criticized mobilized warfare in the 1920s and 1930s correctly, because German industry outpaced Soviet industry at that time.
Any strategy relying on something the Germans were better at was bound to lose. Beevor knows this (but he does not make the connection) because he himself notes that once the Soviets relocated east of the Urals, they did have a fourfold industrial advantage over the Germans in the key tank categories, but not until 1942.(p. 223) Beevor lightly dismisses this question of when to oppose motorized warfare as Stalin's "ideology," (p. 221) but Beevor also admits, as many Western writers do, that Stalin was more flexible in his thinking than Hitler: Stalin was willing to take advice.
In fact, Stalin comes out quite passive in Beevor's book, with credit going to Zhukov. It's another strategy of the imperialist mouthpieces to minimize the credit due to Stalin for beating the Nazis. In actual fact, Stalin was right in the 1920s when he said that the Soviet Union could not fight Germany in a motorized war and he was right in 1942 when he organized just such a motorized campaign.
Various German resistances
The oppressor always makes his system out to be invincible and beneficial. During slavery in the United $tates half of the clergy supported slavery as beneficial and godly. Yet, no matter how much of a juggernaut something seems to be there is always a resistance and a birth of new things.
Already at Christmas in 1941, German troops were criticizing the invasion of the Soviet Union. Some wrote anti-war slogans right on the headquarters building of the Sixth Army, Hitler's prized army. "'We want to return to Germany'" and "'We didn't want this war!'" were some.(p. 47) This was despite the fact that the Axis forces had advanced through all of Europe without any difficulty and had only had to withdraw from territory once, for the first time in November, 1941.
It was always known that German communists helped the Soviet Union and had small circles here and there and it has also been known that the German officers and intelligence included those who wanted to be rid of Hitler. Based on what is known today, Beevor focuses on what the German military officers really thought of what they were doing. We will not comment further on German officers, but the Soviet victory in Stalingrad did give rise to a German student movement, the "White Rose." Students and professors suffered beheadings for their agitation against the war in this movement.(p. 403)
The student movement of the "White Rose" is still what we need today --an anti-militarist movement in the imperialist countries. The arguments within the Nazi military were mostly about how to better defeat and oppress the Soviets.
Purges necessary
On the first page of the book in the preface, Beevor points out that the Soviet Union executed 13,500 of its own people in the Stalingrad battle. These were people who ran to desert to the enemy or spread defeatism in the ranks. To his credit, Beevor also admits that over 50,000 Soviet people fought alongside the Nazis in Stalingrad in front-line divisions.(p. xiv) Most Western writers are unwilling to connect these two facts and confront the moral argument about them head on. MIM says that obviously 50,000 that should have been executed before the war got away.
Most Western writers on the subject have taken to bashing Stalin with facts like the first without mentioning facts like the second. In this way, Beevor's book is above average, because the blow-by-blow detail does not omit the crucial fact of anti-Soviet treason. Indeed, Beevor takes care to tell us about life of the Soviet people called "Hiwis" who fought with the Germans and how they were often well-treated by the German Nazis; even though, overall, Hitler was too racist to let Russians help win the war. German intelligence asked to use Russian reactionaries or lose the war as early as 1941, but Hitler refused. To get around Hitler and because Hitler could tolerate the Cossack people racially, Russians and Ukrainians were renamed "Cossacks," so that they could fight alongside the German army.(p. 185)
In wartime, no one wants a vacillator covering his or her back. This vacillation in a minority of the Soviet peoples cannot be ignored. It was made all the worse by the collapse of Liberal Western states too pusillanimous to put up a good fight against Hitler. France was a major imperialist power in Germany's league as a military power, supposedly stronger than the Soviet Union, but it turned out to be a cake-walk for Hitler, a four-week non-existent battle. A single platoon in Stalingrad known as "Pavlov's" killed more Germans than all the French killed Germans in the defense of Paris.(p. 198)That is not to mention the smaller imperialist powers like Belgium that Hitler waltzed over.
The imperialists also failed to give the Republicans in Spain material aid to fight the Nazis and the Republicans lost. Hence, as Beevor correctly pointed out, Hitler took all of continental Europe and suffered no defeats until deep inside the Soviet Union. Beevor points this out, but is unable to draw the firm ethical conclusion that the bankruptcy of the West made Hitler seem invincible, contributed to panic in the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded and thereby caused the executions by the "Stalinists." It is inexcusable and obscene to this day for Western scholars to write about Stalingrad without acknowledging the West's own blame for the Soviet purges. Had Hitler been stood up to in Czechoslavakia, Spain or France, the 13,500 executed in Stalingrad would not have been.
What happened was that almost a million Italians, Finns and Romanians joined the three million Germans in the invasion and despite being joined by even more Ukrainian, Russian, Tartar, Cossack and other traitors, the Soviet Union still won. Beevor is so kind as to point out that only Japanese intelligence did not underestimate the Soviet Union.(pp. 13,24) The West did not want or know how to fight the Nazis, but Westerners complained about Stalin then and continue to complain even more today.
Long after the fascists had been surrounded at Stalingrad with no hope of victory, even the Russian traitors continued to fight to the death. Almost half of the 297th Infantry Division was 780 Russians. The best anti-tank fighters opposing the Red Army were Tartars, a people of the Soviet Union.(p. 353) When Stalin and Beria said that there was a fifth column in Russia just like the rest of Europe and said purges and special measures against panic-mongering were necessary, they were right. Even many Russians never heard about these people, because Stalin and Beria did not want to spread panicky ideas, but they existed. Now that we know the facts in 1998 about the Soviet peoples who joined up with Hitler it is even more obscene that the Western scribblers attack Stalin's purges and executions. Had the Liberal West succeeded in stopping Hitler, it would have had a right to complain. Since it didn't, it should shut up in the name of decency.
Harsh prison camps necessary
Many people ask us communists how we can complain about U.$. imperialism when Stalin did not allow complaints in his day, no "free speech." While it is true that not all of us speaking against imperialism are in prison for it, the percentage of Black people in prison is the same as the percentage of Soviet people in prison under Stalin in war. While Stalin had to lock up Nazi-supporters after the war, the U.$. imperialists have no excuse.
The context of imprisonment is important, not just the war either. Today, production is more modern in the imperialist countries. If the United $tates imprisons people and does not take good care of them, there is no excuse. There is no war except the undeclared war against oppressed nationalities and there is plenty of food and fuel.
MIM does not support letting prisoners die today in the imperialist countries -- through infectious disease, guard murders and instigation of gang-fighting. If we could overthrow imperialism, deathly prisons would not be necessary anywhere in the world, because there is enough food and fuel for the whole world if it were distributed without regard to profit. In World War II though, the situation was different. Panic-mongering had concrete effects. Many troops lost their lives when their units became disorganized and panicked. People spreading such ideas had to be executed. The worst of all panic-mongers was Trotsky who predicted to the world that Stalin would be defeated by the Nazis. We at MIM wish Trotsky had been assassinated before 1940, back in 1938 when Germany moved on Czechoslavakia or even earlier when Japanese imperialism seized Manchuria. More innocent lives would have been saved without this master panic-mongerer and splitter.
Once fascist prisoners had been seized in battle, with what motorized vehicles could they be shipped to the rear? Fuel and vehicles were in short supply and needed at the front. With what food would they be fed? Soviet soldiers and other innocents were starving, especially in Leningrad and Stalingrad. Giving food to fascist prisoners only took food away from innocent people. Finally, these captured fascists and their collaborators could not just be released, because they would return to fight with the fascists and kill more innocent Soviet people. They had to be guarded, but the more people to guard, the more guards there had to be. However, guards with guns were needed at the front.
For all these reasons, early treatment of Axis prisoners of war was justifiably horrible. Hitler had rejected an offer from Stalin that both sides go by the Hague convention for treatment of prisoners.(p. 60) Executed on the spot, starved to death, left to bleed to death and worked to death -- these were the usual results for Axis prisoners. A portion did survive, especially almost all the top officers who the Soviets wanted to keep for historical reasons. However, when the rednecks tell us communists that we should not complain about the prisons here, they are way off the mark. There is no shortage of food, fuel or unemployed people to guard prisoners. There is no just war going on either. There is no excuse for treating people within U.$. borders in any way like Stalin treated prisoners. Molotov said as much just before he died recently. Things are different now in terms of production and war.
Dialectics and military tactics
We credit Beevor for talking about the small Soviet military advantages that added up over the course of the war. Of course there was patriotism and fighting on one's own soil, especially at night and at times when the German air force did not fly. In the first winter, the Germans came without any winter clothes and the second winter also favored the defenders.
Furthermore, Soviet industry was already superior in one sense. According to Beevor, the T34 tank was superior to any tank the Germans had. Many German anti-tank guns and tanks could not pierce the armor of the T34, especially at anything but point-blank range.
Beevor's most dialectical observation in the whole book is that the German air force pounded Stalingrad into unpassable streets strewn with everything, but it was exactly that fact that made it impossible to take over.(p. 149) Up to that point, the Germans had made the maximum use of their motorized vehicles, especially tanks. Now with house-to-house fighting, artillery and the air force were much less useful and the rubble made it difficult for motorized vehicles to just stomp on everything in town. In every crevice, underneath every piece of junk a Russian would be waiting for the Germans and fighting became more like that of trenches in World War I.
Thus, Germany's overwhelming air superiority in the early stages of the battle of Stalingrad turned into a liability. Just as everything seemed bleak for the Soviet Union, the playing field was "leveled" so to speak, which was in effect an advantage for the defenders. The dialectics of reality were on the side of progress.
Western bias
On the book jacket, Gitta Sereny credits Beevor's "own humanity" as a reason to buy the book. To MIM, we prefer Western "humanism" to relativism, but in truth many will read this book unable to derive any of its meaning because of the general failure of teaching in the imperialist countries.
Beevor himself correctly concludes that it was not just the SS involved in executions of Jews and communists. It was the army itself. He holds the officers responsible for carrying out orders to exterminate various nationalities. Moreover, he even acknowledges that since over 3 million Soviet peoples died in German camps under brutal conditions, it was not going to be possible to restrain the revenge of the Soviet Army against German soldiers at all times. For these conclusions, Beevor is already superior to what is sweeping academia today.
Nonetheless, Beevor clearly wishes Stalin ran a more Liberal war. He claims Stalin and Beria were too harsh in their assessments of what patriotism was necessary.(e.g., p. 385) On the other hand, Beevor also presents the evidence that there were massive panics and treason committed on the Russian side.
Those with a firm sense of weighing the benefits and losses of leniency during the war will be able to engage the book, but the many youth with no political notions or sense of how to weigh the issues will come to relativist conclusions from reading this book. The reason is that the authors present evidence but do not offer firm moral conclusions on the difficult questions, beyond the obvious that the war was a terrible thing in a terrible time. To succeed 50 years after the battle, a book like this should at the very least organize the pros and cons of the difficult ethical decisions made so that the questions are not dodged completely.
MIM finds nothing humynist about dodging the tough ideological or ethical questions of World War II. People living in that time had to make decisions, either right or wrong, involving life and death. Dodging those questions makes it more likely that they will have to be faced again as history ends up repeating itself.
This book is a dialogue with the petty-bourgeoisie of the old pro-Soviet communist parties. Much journalistic information can be gained with a view to the petty-bourgeois struggles in the Cold War that were aimed at aiding the new bourgeoisie in the USSR.
Remnick notices a lot that could vindicate the revisionists of the Soviet Union. First, the Yeltsin regime and some others replacing the USSR (p. 4) he admits are more "authoritarian" and use much more force than the recent patsy revisionist regimes. Having tanks fire at the Parliament in 1991 was revealing for most of Russia on Yeltsin. It is also clear that Yeltsin roughs up political opponents in the streets. (p. 191) He admitted he would not honor a "communist" election victory; (p. 338) and he banned the social-democrats calling themselves communist from the airwaves during the campaign. (p. 336) Secondly, Remnick notices things in the conditions of the common person, including that life expectancy for men fell to 59 in 1993 from 65 in 1987 under revisionism. (p. 46) Thirdly, when it comes to writers, the perennial complaint was that they were suppressed. Today they are starving, because there is no money for writers. (p. 222) Hence, there is no intellectual life anymore just the mad-dash for profit in a free market system. One writer admits to wishing for Brezhnev suppression back, because then there was intellectual life. (p. 227) The whole book is about the bourgeois democrats and the wistful petty- bourgeoisie like this writer who wish for the old state-capitalist system back.
When it comes to the coup of 1991 that supposedly was a hard-line Marxist- Leninist coup, it turns out the coup had many more people in the streets supporting it than the Yeltsin regime had supporting it. Furthermore, contrary to images, the coup plotters were the ones unwilling to use extensive violence and it was only the military that finally bailed out Yeltsin. Backing MIM's line on the pull of the gender- aristocracy is an interesting tidbit Remnick found. Who is running Cosmopolitan magazine in Russia? A degenerated Maoist turned capitalist is. (p. 162) We see thus the pull of the patriarchy's privileges and its widespread support amongst the gender- aristocracy that makes it difficult to attack the patriarchy. We communists have not paid enough attention to this issue and have lost many to the patriarchy's snares.
Remnick helps us to understand the combination of mafia and monopoly capital that is Russia today. "If it were to be ranked by the Global Fortune 500, Gazprom would be second in profits, behind only Royal Dutch Shell. Gazprom is responsible for 5 percent of the entire Russian economy and is the country biggest taxpayer, pouring $4 billion annually into the state. In fact, Gazprom does not pay nearly the amount of taxes it should." (p. 178) Of course, it has bought-off key government officials.
The war to suppress the Chechen ethnicity is also covered in depth. Here is a gem: "'During the Cold War, you Americans used to go wild over one or two political prisoners,' one man said. 'But when an entire city is wiped out there is hardly a word from you! Would President Clinton have come to Moscow for the V-E Day parade if Sakharov were alive and in prison?'" (p. 284) Such comments abound in the book. There is no lack of reason for cynicism about Russia. People are seeing through the many cheap political stunts of U.$. imperialism in its Cold War.
Remnick is aware of the grist for those with "something of the social democratic orientation." (p. 296) He understands and mentions Zyuganov who ran for president and got 40 percent of the vote. Zyuganov sought the coalition with the fascists and came up with the traditional Nazi garbage about finance capital being Jewish. (p. 315) Fortunately, Remnick informs us that the more hard-line communists distance themselves from anti-Semitism, and not just Molotov's circles either. (p. 325)
Also, Remnick interviewed another person whose parents were killed by Stalin but who considered himself a staunch communist not unfriendly to Stalin.(p. 327)
The petty-bourgeoisie does not understand the essentials of class politics and is distracted by the mountain of lies it has to dig itself out from under. To avoid a simply cynical type of politics easily manipulated by fascists and bizarre nationalists, the Russians must return to an understanding of the proletariat, Lenin and Stalin. Most of what passes and has passed for communist politics is not.