From Jewish Capital to the Jewish-Fascist Legion in Jerusalem: The

Development of Antizionism in the German Communist Party (KPD) in the

Weimar Republic, 1925-1933 - Olaf Kistenmacher
Traditionally, anti-Zionism on the radical left has been perceived as a reaction to the Six-Day War in 1967
and, more generally, it has been seen as a post-Shoah phenomenon. Historians and activists who are
concerned about left antisemitism and who search for its roots, have drawn the following picture: The Six-
Day War had revived older anti-Jewish stereotypes that had been repressed after the Shoah. Socialists and
communists uttered antisemitic statements before 1933, although race hatred, national incitement, anti-
Semitism was officially prohibited, as the Second Congress of the Third International had made clear again in
summer 1920. (1) The Shoah, however, made it necessary to enforce this prohibition without exception, and
because the earlier form of antisemitism was repressed it resurfaced as anti-Zionism. (2) In the Socialist states
this occurred as early as the years following World War II, when thousands of Jews or people of Jewish
descent were persecuted as Zionists, spies, traitors of their countries, and enemies of socialism. (3)
According to this approach, anti-Zionism after 1945 reappeared in the form the Frankfurt School called
secondary antisemitism. (4)
In this paper I challenge this common view and show instead that the German Communist Party
(Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) in the Weimar Republic already held a biased antizionist
position which had the same patterns, that became characteristic of the new antisemitic anti-Zionism. (5)
For the Weimar KPD, Zionism was already a form of fascism which was to be fought against in the same
manner as National Socialism. The Central Committee of the KPD declared in its only official paper on the
so-called Jewish Question, Communism and the Jewish Question(Kommunismus und Judenfrage, 1932),
that we are fighting Zionism as [sic] we are fighting National Socialism. (6) I will demonstrate how the KPD
was able to equate Zionism with National Socialism in their ideology. First, I will argue that the anti-Zionism
of the 1920s was based upon the concepts of the nation and nationalism and, second, on the stereotypes of
Jews that existed in the communist movement in the Weimar Republic. (7) Given a new understanding of the
roots of anti-Zionism, the appearance of anti-Zionism in the 20th century requires a re-evaluation: It can not
only be seen as a form of secondary antisemitism, but also should be perceived as a consequence and
moulding of the older, traditional, pre-Shoah, or primary antisemitism. (8)
In the Stalinist trials of the late 1940s and 1950s, the police, secret services and District Attorneys in the
Socialist states used the term Zionists to designate people accused of working for an imperialist
conspiracy against state socialism and of working for US imperialism. To be a Zionist did not mean that
these people wanted to move to Israel. As the historian Thomas Haury argued in his study about the trial
against Paul Merker and his so-called Zionist conspiracy circle in the early German Democratic Republic,
The term Zionism now worked rather as the central metaphor in the Marxist-Leninist worldview and was connected
with the claim of a world conspiracy of anational Wall Street capitalists, with the antagonism of producing people
versus finance hyenas and parasites and with the threat of putrefying sabotage [Zersetzungsarbeit] by hidden inner-
state fiends. (9)
Most of the so-designated Zionists were of Jewish descent, and therefore the term Zionist was used to
refer to Jewish people without using the term Jews. (10)
Anti-imperialism and Anti-Zionism in the Mid-1920s
The daily newspaper of the KPD, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), mentioned Zionism for the very first time in a
headline on 25 July 1925. (11) The headline stated Zionism the Chained Dog of British Imperialism (12)
and revealed a specific form of hatred against Zionism that differed from the positions against Zionism
formulated by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin or Karl Kautsky. In 1916, Kautsky wrote Are Jews a Race? (Rasse und
Judentum) in order to criticise the racist antisemitism and racism in human sciences. In spite of this aim, his
critique itself seemed, as the historian Enzo Traverso has argued, in some pages drawn from a manual of
social Darwinism because Kautsky called the commercial specialization of Jews a distinct hereditary
trait. (13)
On the other hand, Kautsky was obviously still shocked by the pogroms in the beginning of the twentieth
century in Eastern Europe. As Jack Jacobs puts it in On Socialists and the Jewish Question after Marx,
Kautsky remained an opponent of the Zionist movement, but he was an opponent who was sympathetic to
Jewrys plight. (14) In this context, although Kautsky rejected the idea of a Jewish national state, he did not
advocate hatred of Zionism.
The Rote Fahne, conversely, mentioned the anti-Jewish pogroms in the beginning of the twentieth century,
but did not regard them as a reason for Zionism:
Zionism, behind the mask of a charitable movement that saves the poor Jews who were threatened by pogroms and so
forth and that gives them a home [Heimsttte], is in reality an instrument of British imperialism. (15)
Such hatred requires an explanation. One might argue that the KPD must have been against a Jewish national
movement, because communists were in general against nationalism. However, this was not entirely the case
for the Second International and even less for the Third International under Stalin. To be an internationalist
party meant for the German communists that they viewed class struggles as a global problem, and therefore,
the Rote Fahne and other party papers like the theoretical organ Die Internationale (The International)
regularly reported on conflicts in China, India, and Turkey. To be internationalist, however, did not mean that
the communist parties of the Third International were willing to overcome the concepts of nationality and
abandon the idea of national territories. The Second International had already confirmed the national right to
self-determination in 1893 (16), and it was only Rosa Luxemburg who criticized the national question as an
irrelevant problem for socialists.
When we speak of the right of nations to self-determination, we are using the concept of the nation as a
homogeneous social and political entity. But actually, such a concept of the nation is one of those categories of
bourgeois ideology which Marxist theory submitted to a radical re-vision, showing how that misty veil, like the concepts of
the freedom of citizens, equality before the law, etc., conceals in every case a definite historical content. Social
Democracy is the class party of the proletariat. Its historical task is to express the class interests of the proletariat and
also the revolutionary interests of the development of capitalist society toward realizing socialism. Thus, Social
Democracy is called upon to realize not the right of nations to self-determination but only the right of the working class,
which is exploited and oppressed, of the proletariat, to self-determination. (17)
The KPD not only endorsed national freedom movements and the idea of the 'national independence' of
colonial countries, but also in 1923 saw even Germany as a 'colony' to be liberated from international
'imperialism'. (18) In the 1920s, the Marxist slogan 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' was amended by the
Third International to 'Proletarians of all countries and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!' (19) According
to the KPD, the colonized people did not only struggle in equal measure as the workers in Germany did, but
also, according to the reports in the Rote Fahne, colonized people and the working class suffered the same
fate
Let me step back for a moment. It cannot be assumed that the German communists should have necessarily
hated Zionism. On the contrary, it would have been reasonable for communists to be more discriminating
about Zionism. Not only insofar as Zionism was a reaction to the increasing threat of antisemitism, but also
inasmuch as World War I had completely destroyed the hope that nationalism, national chauvinism and
racism would be overcome soon. According to Martin W. Klokes study on Israel and the German left, the
Weimar Social Democrats changed their attitude towards Zionism because of the experience of WW I and
became more sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish state. (20) The KPDs official answer to what it called the
Jewish Question was that the Jews had to assimilate to the German community. The Central Committee
wrote: The KPD confirmed any assimilation The KPD did not come to terms with the whole problem
in the Weimar Republic, and this is evident if you consider the argument the KPD gave for the assimilation:
In Germany, where the Jewish working masses are already in their overwhelming majority assimilated, it is
counterrevolutionary to try to split them up ideologically and organizationally from the masses of the German proletariat,
and it will be disadvantageous to the greatest extent to the Jewish workers themselves. (21)
The KPD contradicted its own argument. Either the Jewish workers were already assimilated, and there
would therefore be no reason to call them Jewish anymore, or they were not assimilated and remained
Jewish. This was more than a theoretical problem in the Soviet Union, where to be a Jew was a national
identity. On Soviet passports, Jewish people were listed in the column for nationality as Jews. The German
communists had two options: They could either see Jews as a national minority with the rights of a national
minority, or they could oppose to the policy of the Soviet Union and perceive Jews just as a religion. The
KPD decided in favour for the second solution, but the party did not stop speaking of Jews in terms a group
of strangers, or a nation of its own, or of a specific social group.
There would have been another important reason to sympathize more with the Zionist movement especially
for communists. Not only was the socialist form of life on the kibbutzim potentially fascinating for communists
(22), it was the Jews in Palestine who founded a Communist party, and not the Arabs who were living under
the British Mandate. (23) TheRote Fahne hardly mentioned the Communist Party of Palestine.
More generally, according to Tom Segevs One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British
Mandate, the Jewish labour movement took control of Jewish public life and monopolize[d] the formulation
of its values and symbols in the British Mandate Palestine. (24) Even if the Jewish labour movement saw
itself as more connected to the European Social Democratic parties (25), this was not a reason for the KPD
to criticize it. Instead, the KPD failed to mention the socialist attitude of important parts of the Zionist
movement and did not differentiate much between streams in Zionism.
Of course, the strongest objection against Zionist settlement in Palestine was that an Arab community already
existed there before the Zionist movement emerged. In this view the Austrian communist Otto Heller, who in
1932 published the bookThe Downfall of Judaism: The Jewish Question/Its Critique/Its Solution by
Socialism (Der Untergang des Judentums. Die Judenfrage/Ihre Kritik/Ihre Lsung durch den Sozialismus),
called a Jewish state a utopia because the Zionist idea ignored the Arab fellah. (26) The Central
Committee of the KPD expressed a similar argument more radically by arguing that Zionism converted the
people into a volkish community [Volksgemeinschaft] with the Jewish exploiters and into instruments in
the struggle against the Arab colonial liberation movement. (27)
It is disconcerting that the KPDs Central Committee could only imagine a state in Palestine
being either Jewish or Arab. Why could Arabs and Jews not live together? The German communists could
have argued that Jews and Arabs could live together in Palestine as they did in the centuries before. They
could also have considered that the European Jewish settlers would import technical knowledge and
economic power to the Middle East. This could have been an important point for Jewish settlement
especially in the eyes of communists. Even Arab politicians shared this perspective in the 1920s. (28)
The point of the foregoing considerations is not to argue that the KPD should have supported Zionism, but
rather that it must have taken considerable effort to develop such a simple position as this form of anti-
Zionism. I want to stress that the KPD had to ignore many aspects of the early conflicts in the Middle East in
order to maintain a biased/hateful anti-Zionism. In fact, there were deeper reasons for this anti-Zionism: the
first reason was that the communists did not criticize the idea that nations were given as quasi-natural entities
and that specific territories belonged to them. Indeed, this concept of nations formed the basis for the anti-
imperialism of the German Communist Party. In Marxism and the National Question (or The National
Question and Social Democracy), first published in 1913, Stalin formulated the basis for any discussion
about nations and nationalism:
We have now exhausted the characteristic features of a nation. A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of
people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a
common culture. (29)
Accordingly, Stalin did not consider the Jews to be a real nation. This was different from the Soviet Unions
policy in the 1920s, when under Stalin a Jewish national district was founded in 1928 in the Eastern-
Asian Birobidzhan. (30) In hisMarxism and the National Question, however, the Jews in the Soviet Union
could not be part of the national program,
'No, it is not for such paper nations that Social-Democracy draws up its national programme. It can reckon only with
real nations, which act and move, and therefore insist on being reckoned with. ' (31)
Since the early 1920s, the Rote Fahne reported emphatically on the national liberation struggles in
colonized countries and territories. Indeed, it was not the aim of communism to overcome nations. On the
contrary, the Russian Communist Party created new partly autonomous countries or district countries for
national minorities inside the Soviet Union.
The second reason for anti-Zionism in the German Communist Party was presence of the antisemitic
stereotypes about Jews in the party. Throughout the Weimar republic, the Rote Fahne identified Jews
with capital and capitalists. Consequently, a Jewish movement like Zionism was identified with imperialism,
because Lenin and Luxemburg had made clear that imperialism was the current transformation of world
capitalism. (32) For communists the crucial question was how the political and socio-economic character of a
national movement or a national entity was to be evaluated. Of course, the communist parties were fighting
against War and Imperialism. This, however, did not mean that the KPD rejected wars or military activities
in general. Rather, the German Communist Party objected to wars waged by capitalist and imperialist
countries. On the contrary, the KPD affirmed and supported military activities if they set out to help a
colonized nation or colonized people liberate themselves.
A month after calling Zionism the Chained Dog of Imperialism the Rote Fahne expressed communist
solidarity with the anti-colonial liberation struggle with a headline on the front page: Red Front against
Imperialism! (33) The KPD welcomed the wars or battles of so-called oppressed nations. These battles
were considered to be anti-imperialist activities. On the contrary, the Zionist movement was never
described as a liberation movement [befreiungsbewegung]. The German term Befreiungsbewegung was
not clear at that time and means both to fight against an imperialistic or colonial oppression and to fight for
national self-determination. The KPD re-affirmed its position in 1930 with its second program, the Program
of the KPD for the National and Social Liberation of the German People (Programm zur nationalen und
sozialen Befreiung des deutschen Volkes, 1930) in which the KPD did not differentiate between national
and social liberation but brought them together. (34)
As mentioned above, the KPD called Zionism imperialistic from the very first article in the Rote Fahne on
the subject. This meant that Zionism was also considered as capitalist and globally powerful. Consequently,
the KPD not only criticized and rejected the program of the Zionist movement, but also denied Jews any right
to exist as a nation. According to the Rote Fahne, Jews were air people at the border zone of the social
organism, unable to build their own national economy and thus their own national community.
Zionism developed as an ideology of the desperate petty bourgeoisie. As air people [Luftmenschen] at the border area
of the social organism, they did not come to the socialist movement to which the Jewish workers were connected, but were
looking for preservation from economic and political persecution in a utopia, the Palestinian Jewish state. (35)
It was a central feature of modern antisemitism to believe that Jews did not belong to the national economy,
to the social organism, and that they lived as parasites in other communities. In addition, it is noteworthy
that the KPD reproduced this position without using the volkish vocabulary. However, the KPD made one
important exception: although the party denied the Jews in Palestine their ability to build a state of their own,
the KPD did not deny the Jews to build up an economy of their own in Birobidzhan. By this, according to the
Soviet policy, the Jews in Birobidzhan would become real workers and peasants and therefore real
human beings. (35) What did it mean that the Jews were denied the ability to work, to be productive and
to build up their own national economy? In the Stalinist trials against Zionists, it meant that Jews were
denied to be human beings. (37)
It is noteworthy that already in the 1920s the Rote Fahne often did not speak of the Zionism as a political
movement formed by human beings, but rather in terms of power, forces, or elements. In August 1929,
the Rote Fahne called the Zionist Jews agents in a headline: Against British Imperialism and Its Zionist
Agents in Palestine! Manifesto of the League against Imperialism. (38) A few days earlier, the Rote
Fahne referred to the Zionists as an anonymous form of terror. In a bold-type subtitle it said that an
anonymous Jewish-fascist terror was fighting against the Arab workers: Demonstration of Arab workers
against the Jewish-fascist terror in favour of the right to found trade unions and the eight hour working day.
(39)
Since the end of the 1920s, the KPD equated Zionism increasingly with fascism. At that time, the KPD also
denounced all other parties as fascist parties the Social Democrats were called Social fascists
[Sozialfaschisten], and the National Socialists were called National fascists [Nationalfaschisten]. To speak
of Zionism as a form of fascism, however, marked an important difference. The characterization worked on
a different level, that is, on the level of foreign policy. By designating Zionism as fascism, the KPD not only
denigrated a segment of a society or a specific political party or movement, but also rather designated an
entire ethnic group, a nation that came into being at that time. Because Zionism appeared as the Jewish
national movement, the KPD used the terms Jewish and Zionist as synonyms. The Communist Party of
Palestine occasionally distinguished between Jews and Zionists arguing, So the British policy had to try hard:
[] to force the Jewish [sic] population again into the discipline of the Zionist [sic] organizations (40), but
the German Communist Party always used the terms Zionist and Jewish interchangeable.
The anti-colonial liberation movement of the Arabs against the Agents of Imperialism in Palestine
In order to maintain such an unnuanced antizionist position, the KPD was forced to ignore a specific group of
people as well as important aspects of the conflicts in Palestine. First, the KPD had to ignore the Jewish
communities that had existed in Palestine since the nineteenth century or longer. Second, the KPD had to
overlook class conflicts inside the Arab communities. Third, the KPD had to overlook the nationalism of the
Arabs. (41) In 1927, the Rote Fahne wrote under the headline The anti-colonial liberation not a
nationalistic, but a social demand:
for the weak and only poorly organized peoples the stranger is only the exploiter! If a people that is kicked like that
tried to liberate itself from the European parasites, it is not nationalistic fanaticism, but a social act. (42)
One might expect the KPD to have criticized the nationalization of the conflict. Instead of fanning the
nationalist flames, the KPD could have argued in favour of Jews and Arabs living together in Palestine. The
KPD however, pressed the conflict in Palestine into the scheme of class struggle, attributing the two ethnic
groups each a specific role in this class struggle: The Zionists or the Jews, together with the British
Mandatory government, were the personifications of capitalism and imperialism, and the Arabs were the
oppressed people, the workers, and their struggle was therefore considered to be anti-imperialist. The
following reports about the conflict in Palestine followed this line of argumentation:
- The Causes of the Struggles in Palestine (43);
- Northern Palestine in Hands of the Revolting Arabs / New Bloody Struggles in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and
at the Borderline of Transjordan / Manifestations of Fraternization with the Rebels in Syria and Egypt (44);
- Macdonalds Massacre in Palestine / Martial Law in Haifa Ships Bombing against Rebels Labour
Government Promises to Support the Zionist to Oppress the Arabs (45);
- Against the British Imperialism and Its Zionist Agents in Palestine! Manifesto of the League against
Imperialism (46);
- The Arabs Are on the Advance / Arab Forces from Syria Cross the Border Palestine-Demonstration in
Baghdad Macdonalds Troops Keep on Murdering (47);
- Battles in Northern Palestine (48);
- In Solidarity with the Arab Rebellion! Manifestation of the Anti-Imperialism League (49),
- The Liberation Struggle of Palestine, By Albert Norden (50).
The Jews were not only identified with imperialism and seen merely as interlopers, but rather they were
seen as parasites, air people who were just exploiting the Middle East. As the older Jewish communities in
Hebron or Safed did not conform to this picture, they, too, had to be ignored.
Moreover, the KPD had to ignore the conflicts inside the Arab communities between the fellah and the
effendis. TheRote Fahne sometimes remarked the inner-Arab class conflicts, but they were mentioned only
in the articles while the headlines simultaneously drew another picture. For example, it was mentioned in an
article that the development of the Arab revolt stood until now under the big influence of the Effendi, the
big landowners, but this did not lead the KPD to see it as a bourgeois political movement. It was no reason
for the KPD to deny the revolutionary character of what the communists called the Arab rebellion. In 1925
the Rote Fahne reported that the Arab Effendi were responsible for the Jewish settlement, because the
Effendi had sold their landed property.
The rich Arab aristocracy, the Effendi, step on stage together with the European bourgeoisie and willingly sell their
landed property to the Jewish capitalists. They do not care in the least about the fate of the impoverished Arab peasants
who leased the soil for decades. (51)
However, by 1929, the editorial team of the Rote Fahne seemed to have totally forgotten that it had been the
Effendi who sold the land of Palestine. In its reports, it was just the Zionists who, as representative of the
British Empire, brought economic and political slavery to the Arabs.
The common rebellion of the Arabs against the Zionists is actually a rebellion against the economic and political slavery
to which British Imperialism put them. ... Thanks to the anti-imperialistic character of their struggle, the Palestinian
Arabs were supported ethically and materially by the Arabs of Egypt, Syria, and Transjordan, and the masses of Indias
people who stand in the revolutionary struggle for liberation from the yoke of British Imperialism. (52)
At the same time, the Rote Fahne tried at the same time to create solidarity with the colonized people by
arguing that the German workers and the colonized slaves were suffering the same fate. The Rote
Fahne called Germany a colony in the year of crisis, 1923, the Rote Fahne when they published the
headline: International Haggling over the Colony Germany. (53) If Zionists meant capitalists, and if the
Arabs played the role of the working class in the communist view, then the Zionists were also enemies of the
German working class. This parallel was expressed by the headline in 1929:
Enemies of the Worker are Leaders of Zionism! (54)
The Pogrom in Palestine 1929 and the Reaction of the KPD
The anti-Zionism of the KPD reached its climax at the end of August 1929 when Arabs rioted against the
Jews for more than two weeks. Jews and Arabs were engaged in more than one bloody conflict in Palestine
in the 1920s, but the outbreak in 1929 was the most brutal one. The riot was directed against the older
Jewish communities and against the new Jewish settlers. 133 Jews were murdered (and 116 Arabs were
killed by the military or Police). (55)
Many historians have demonstrated how the Arab national movement in the 1920s took the antisemitic
stereotypes and forms of thought existing in Western Europe and in Russia. The Mufti of Jerusalem Amn al-
Husain played an important role by connecting the idea of a Palestinian nation with antisemitic images. (56)
The Rote Fahne mentioned neither Arab nationalism nor the existence of antisemitism in the Middle East.
Compared with that, it is shocking how the front page on 28 August 1929 was composed. The first headline
reads: Fascists Murdering in Berlin and, besides a long commentary, the second headline was: The
Rebellion of the Arabs Grows! The second article showed a photograph of a soldier with the accompanying
text:
Stahlhelm yob? No, a member of the Jewish-fascist legion in Jerusalem (57)
It was not explained who was shown in the photograph and which part of the Zionist movement has intended
by Jewish-fascist legion. Readers of the Rote Fahne who knew more about the situation in Palestine could
have concluded that the picture showed a member of the Jewish legion of Wladimir Jabotinsky. (58) It would
not have made sense for the Rote Fahne writers/editorial staff, however, to differentiate between different
fractions of the Zionist movement, because the KPD wanted to demonize Zionism as a whole.
Demonizing Zionism in general allows the KPD to praise the Arabs attacks on the Jewish population:
It is especially characteristic of the development of this movement that the attacks of the Arabs are not restricted to the
Jewish population [jdische Bevlkerung], but start to be directed against the main enemy, British imperialism. The
struggles in Palestine are answered by Zionists in many countries with nationalistic demonstrations It is typical that the
strongest response can be found in America, where Jewish finance magnates, the sponsors of the Zionist movement who
at the same time have invested many billions of dollars in Palestine, demand that the government intervene most
strenuously against the Arab rebels. Their pressure caused the US government to demand through its ambassador in
London, General Dawes, that the Labour Government takes energetic measures in Palestine against the Arabs (!).The
development of the Arab resistance movement, which remains largely under the influence of the Effendi (big landowners),
has gained momentum, as the last reports show, and, as the raids of government buildings and police stations as well as
against British troops make evident, is accordingly directed against the orchestrators of Zionism in Palestine, the
British imperialists The revolt contains the possibility of sparking a generalized Arab rebellion against the British
imperialist oppressor. The attacks that Arab natives carry out against the Zionist bourgeoisie and Zionist fascism in
Palestine are at the same time attacks against England.The Jewish proletariat of Palestine must fight shoulder to
shoulder with the Arab workers against their common class enemy, British imperialism and the Jewish bourgeoisie that
is bound up with it in life and death. (59)
The Rote Fahne did not even acknowledge that antisemitism could have caused the riots, though according
to its own report the Arab mob attacked the Jewish population. A J. B. (Jerusalem) on the other hand
described the antisemitic violence strongly in his or her report for the International Press Correspondence
(Imprecorr):
Because the masses of Mohammedan peasants who are standing under the dark-clerical, feudal, and bourgeois
leadership are attacking, scorching and murdering, first of all the unarmed poor Jewish settlements, Jewish synagogues,
and schools and created a terrible carnage amongst them. In the Talmud school in Hebron, 60 Jewish students
including children were killed and mangled. In the colony Moza, a Jewish family including the women and the children
were slaughtered. (60)
It is strange, therefore, that the Rote Fahne mentioned the Jewish proletariat in Palestine even though the
Communist Party of Palestine was again excluded from the report. The KPD was not able to give a plausible
answer about whether a Jewish proletariat had the right to live in Palestine or how the attacks on the Jewish
population could be justified if they were also directed against the Jewish proletariat. No answer would have
been possible that would have fit into the line of argumentation about the conflicts in the Middle East.
It is noteworthy that the KPD perceived British imperialism as the main enemy, not the Zionists or the Jews.
So British imperialism was explained as a manifestation of capitalism, as Lenin and Luxemburg had described
the transformation of capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the contrary, the Rote
Fahne gave another explanation for U.S. imperialism.
As quoted above, the Rote Fahne accounted for U.S. imperialism with the power, and the pressure of the
Jewish finance magnates. In other words, U.S. imperialism was explained by the power of a hidden
conspiracy.
The main line of argumentation was the antagonism of the Arab natives against the Zionist bourgeoisie and
the Zionist fascism. By refering to the Arabs as the natives the Rote Fahne made clear that for the KPD
the land belonged to the Arabs, not to the Zionists who were described as strangers, exploiters, and
parasites with no rights to settle and to live in Palestine. (61) To encourage the hostility of German workers
against the Zionists, the Rote Fahne printed the photo caption that made more sense together with the other
headline on the front page: Fascists were murdering workers, and Zionism was Jewish-fascist. There
should be no difference between Zionism and the fascists of the Stahlhelm-Freikorp. Zionism should be
seen as the mortal enemy to communists as the National Socialist movement was at the end of the 1920s.
I have not found additional articles about the Middle East in the Rote Fahne after 1930, a fact I can not
explain yet. It is, however, evident that the KPD did not change its attitude towards Zionism in the last three
years of Weimar republic. As excerpted at the beginning of this paper, the Central Committee of the KPD
declared, in its only official paper on the Jewish Question, that the communists should fight against Zionism
just as they fought against National Socialism. (62) Of course, such a declaration did not have the same
effects against Zionism as against National Socialism, because there was no Zionist movement in the
Weimar Republic as powerful and threatening as the Nazi movement.
Of course, there is a considerable difference between the anti-Zionism of the 1920s and the anti-Zionism after
1945. Thousands of people were persecuted and murdered after 1945 in the name of this latter anti-Zionism.
(63) Moreover, if you compare the statements of the KPD with statements by Leftists in the 1970s, there is a
considerable difference between the anti-Zionism of the 1920s and the anti-Zionism after the Six-Day War,
because after 1945 the Radical left engaged in this anti-Zionism though (or because?) they knew about the
Shoah. I do not want to identify anti-Zionism before 1933 with anti-Zionism after the Shoah.
My argument is that the trajectory was already present in the 1920s. It did not need to be invented after 1945
in order to identify Zionism with imperialism and capitalism, and the socialist and communist left after 1945
were not the first to advocate the hatred of Zionism. This has already been done in the 1920s. It is also
important that the conversion of anti-imperialism into anti-Zionism marked a considerable shift in the
worldview of the left: Throughout the Weimar Republic, the KPD drew a fetishistic picture of capitalism, as if
the German working class possessed its working power as a quasi-natural property that could create
values independent of the historical circumstances.
This picture was laden with a strange nationalistic and xenophobic meaning, that the capitalists were
portrayed as anationalist strangers who robbed the values produced by the working class. Therefore, the
German working class became, in the eyes of communists, the real German people, compared to whom the
capitalists were regarded as traitors to the fatherland [Vaterlandsverrter] and strangers. With the anti-
imperialistic turn, then, the KPD did not merely nationalize the German working class. Rather, the KPD
classified what it saw as oppressed peoples, nations or ethnic groups, so that they were understood as a
collective to play a role in a worldwide class struggle. In the case of the Middle East, it was the Jews who
were the capitalists and therefore anational, non-productive parasites, while the Rote Fahnepresented the
Arabs as the working class, productive, and the real nation.
The German communists should have criticized such a worldview, because it ignored the conflicts inside a
society and considered the Arab communities as volkish communities. Instead, such a volkish way of
perceiving the Arab community in Palestine became the basic feature of antizionist anti-imperialism. In doing
so, the KPD turned its back on any powerful critique of conflicts between classes inside the so-called
oppressed peoples, and, ironically, it was through the internationalism of the German Communist Party
that it became nationalistic and antisemitic.
Again, I would like to emphasize that if Leftists identify Zionism with imperialism today, they do so with
knowledge of WW II and the Shoah. Therefore, antisemitic anti-Zionism today is also rooted by secondary
antisemitism. However, the identification of Zionism with National Socialism was not a new antisemitic anti-
Zionism in the early 1980s. (64) It was easy to identify Zionism with National Socialism after 1945,
however, because communists had already in the 1920s identified Jews with exploitation, conspiracy,
power, with capitalism, with imperialism and fascism. It did not require the Six-Day War to see the state of
the Jews this way. The judgement on Israel had already been passed twenty years before Israel was
founded and ten years before the Shoah.
Olaf Kistenmacher is working on a PhD titled 'Labour fetish and "Jewish Capital. Antisemitic Forms of
Thought in the German Communist Party (KPD) in Weimar Republic, 1918-1933 (Arbeitsfetisch und
"Judenkapital". Antisemitische Denkformen in der KPD der Weimarer Republik, 1918-1933)'. The German
version of the paper above is published online on the website of the Rote Ruhr-Uni Bochum or of
the Hamburger Studienbibliothek.
(*) This paper is based on my last contribution to Engage journal # 2, titled From Judas to Jewish
Capital, Kistenmacher 2006.
I thank Fred David Copley, New York City, for translating the quotations.
Notes:
(1) Der Zweite Kongre der Kommunistischen Internationale. Protokoll der Verhandlungen vom 19.
Juli in Petrograd und vom 23. Juli bis 7. August 1920 in Moskau, cited in: Keler 1993, p. 41.
(2) Examples for this approach are Holz 2001, p. 431-82; Mertens 1995, Poliakov 1992, Rabinovici,
Doron/Speck/Sznaider 2004, Volkov 2000, Wei 2005, Wistrich 1990.
(3) Poliakov 1992, Wistrich 1985. Weitere Literatur zum Anti-Zionismus nach 1945?
(4) http://www.antisemitismus.net/deutschland/ulmer.htm#(3)>Rensmann 1998, 231-335, Ulmer 2002.
For the history of the concept secondary antisemitism see also Adorno 1964. The Frankfurt School
founded the concept to distinguish between antisemitism before 1933 and antisemitism after the Shoah. The
post-Shoah antisemitism differed from the older forms, because the old stereotypes f. e. Jews are rich,
powerful, and rule the world in a hidden conspiracy are transformed and connected with a denial or an
explanation of the Shoah. A typical secondary antisemitism argument is that the Jews provoked the Shoah,
because the Shoah became an imprtant reason after 1945 to found the state Israel.
(5) According to Robert Wistrich, it is precisely the equation of Zionism with Nazism which is the most
characteristic mode of the new antisemitic anti-Zionism in the early 1980s (Wistrich 1990, p. 215).
(6) Central Committee (Zentralkommitee, ZK) of the KPD 1932, p. 284-5.
(7) See also Kessler 2005, Wein 2003.
(8) Anti-Zionism of socialists and communists before 1948 has been hardly approached yet. It is, however,
worth to analyze the anti-Zionism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and to give an explanation for the following
facts: The arrests were in two major waves: 1000 Zionist leaders were arrested in September, 1920, while
anther 3000 were arrested in September, 1924. The trials were held secretly, many among the arrested
sentenced to hard labor and long jail terms. (Hen-Tov 1974, p. 40, note 9) Such persecutions have to be
interpreted in the context of Lenins conflict with the Bundists, the national minorities policy in the mid-1920s,
and antisemitic stereotypes.
Even the anti-Zionism of the National Socialists is hardly approached yet. Alex Gruber writes in a short article
that analyzes Alfred Rosenbergs Der staatsfeindliche Zionismus (Zionism, Hostile to the States) from
1922, that Rosenberg argued not only in a racist form against the Jew, but also against Zionism in an anti-
imperialist way, pointing out the Arab protests against the violent Judaification of Palestine (Gruber 2004, p.
23). Rosenberg was later the one of the chief ideologues of the Nazis and ran the Rosenberg Office, which
was named after him.
(9) Haury 2002, p. 429.
(10) Poliakov 1992, p. 57-8. The Frankfurt School found the term Crypto-Antisemitism to denote
antisemitic statements that refer to Jews without using the terms Jew, or Jewish, and Theodor W. Adorno
uses the term in the context of secondary antisemitism.
(11) The Rote Fahne mentioned the existence of a Zionist movement two times before 1925. In 1921,
Moses Hess was designated as a pioneer [Vorkmpfer] of socialism and Zionism in a review titled The
Rabbi of Communists [Der Kommunisten-Rabbi] (RF 382, 9 August 1921). A year later the Rote
Fahne reported about a Jewish university in Jerusalem (RF 256, 3. June 1922; see also Krmer 2003, p.
212-3). This little report is remarkable, because at this time the Rote Fahne did not consist of more than two
pages. That it was published without any explanation could be an indication that some members of the editor
team were interested in a so-called cultural Zionism (Kloke 1990, p. 32).
(12) RF, 25 July 1925.
(13) Traverso 1994, p. 84-5. Kautsky wrote in Are the Jews a Race? (Rasse und Judentum, 1916) that,
the Jews are the only race [sic] on earth that has constituted a purely urban population for approximately two
thousand years: we now have an almost perfect explanation of Jewish traits. The uniformity of the artificial
environment imparted to the Jews everywhere a uniform mental type, in spite of all the variations in their
natural environment, and all the differences in the inherited race elements. If this uniform type should be
accepted as a race type, the descendant of the homo alpinus might be designated as the homo urbanus.
(Kautsky 1914)
(14) Jacobs 1992, p. 23-4. Bernsteins comments, Kautsky claimed, can be so construed as to imply that I
denied Zionism any justification. This is in no way correct (Jacobs 1992, p. 23; compare Kautsky
1902).
(15) RF 168, 25 July 1925.
(16) Lenin 1914.
(17) Luxemburg 1908.
(18) Germany, the Newest Colony of England [Deutschland, England neueste Kolonie], RF 544, 28
November 1921, also The Colony of Poincar and Stinnes [Die Kolonie Poincars und Stinnes'], RF 34, 9
April 1924. See Carr 1969, p. 161-72, 182-97.
(19) Proletarier aller Lnder und unterdrckte Vlker der Welt, vereinigt euch! Von G. Sinowjew, RF
153, 8 July 1925.
(20) Kloke 1990, p. 24.
(21) ZK of the KPD 1932, p. 285.
(22) Compare Segev 2005, p. 249-69.
(23) Flores 1980, Hen-Tov 1974, Laqueur 1956, p. 73-103.
(24) Segev 2005, p. 125.
(25) Compare Segev, p. 209. It was precisely the strong socialist character that the Zionist settlement in
Palestine assumed during this period, closely identified with the Western Social Democratic Labor
Movement, that was the deadly enemy of the Comintern throughout the world Out of the foregoing
considerations, the Comintern launched its extensive propaganda campaign against Zionism under the
following banner: Fight against imprialism and against the Zionist and Social Democratic agents of
Imperialism. (Hen-Tov 1974, p. 81)
(26) Heller 1932, p. 96. Otto Hellers fate is typical for communists of Jewish descent. Born in 1897 in
Vienna, he was member of the German-Austrian Social Democratic Party, but in 1921 he joined the
Communist Party. Since 1926 he worked as a journalist in Berlin. Heller was murdered in March 1945 in the
concentration camp Ebensee in Austria.
(27) ZK 1932, p. 284-85 .
(28) Kntzel 2003, p. 15. You find English papers by Matthias Kntzel here.
(29) Stalin 1913.http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm#s1.
(30) Heller 1933, p. 186; Weinberg 1998. The Birodidzhan project ended violently in 1937/38, when most
of the Jews in Birobidzhan were deported and murdered in the so-called Great Purge. Arno Lustiger argued
in Rotbuch: Stalin und die Juden, that although Jews were happily settling in Birobidzhan, the project was
from the beginning meant as a strategy against Jewish nationalism. Lustiger 2002, p. 85.
(31) Stalin 1913.
(32) Lenin 1914, Luxemburg 1913.
(33) RF 175, 2 August 1925.
(34) Programm zur nationalen und sozialen Befreiung des deutschen Volkes, RF 197, 24 August 1930;
Berthold 1956. The German concept Befreiungsbewegung was not clear and therefor was perfectly suited
for the KPD to fail to differentiate between the people, the working class, and the proletariat. If German
communists spoke about liberation [befreiung] it was not clear if they meant the struggle against imperialistic
or colonial oppression or struggle for national self-determination. In 1923, the KPD went so far to certify the
German bourgeoisie playing an objective revolutionary role in spite of itself against the French occupation
in the Ruhr struggle (Thalheimer 1923, p. 107-10; Carr 1969, p. 167-8).
(35) A. N.: Die Ursachen der Kmpfe in Palstina, RF 164, 28 August 1929.
(36) The people were real peasents. If they would not have spoken Jewish, you would not have guessed to
be with Jews. Especially the grandmother made the impression of a polid farmers wife. Heller 1932, p. 293;
Weinberg 1998.
(37) Haury 2002, p. 94; Holz 2001, p. 456.
(38) RF 167, 31 August 1929.
(39) RF 164, 28 August 1929.
(40) Imprecorr 116 (1928), line 2279, reprinted in: Dokumente 1997, p. 20.
(41) To add a fourth point, the Arabs did not only attack Jews, but Jewish communists. In 1923, the
Imprecorr reported that the native population attacked a demonstration of Jewish Communists. On the 1st
of May 1921 the Communists organized a demonstration that was attacked by members of the yellow trade
unions. The native population whose pogromic flames were fanned for a long time by British and French
provocateurs and their own nationalists and who did not understand the point of the
demonstration/manifestation attacked the demonstrators and, then, moved to a general pogrom against the
Jews. (Awigdur: Die Arbeiterbewegung in Palstina, Inprekorr 29 (1923), S. 216-217, reprinted in:
Dokumente 1997: 4; compare Segev 2005, p. 176-7)
(42) RF 92, 20 April 1927.
(43) Die Ursachen der Kmpfe in Palstina, RF 164, 28 August 1929.
(44) Nordpalstina in den Hnden der aufstndischen Araber / Neue blutige Kmpfe in Jerusalem, Jaffa,
Haifa und an der Grenze Transjordaniens Verbrderungsdemonstrationen mit den Aufstndischen in Syrien
und Aegypten, RF 165, 29 August 1929.
(45) Macdonalds Gemetzel in Palstina / Standrecht in Haifa Schiffsbombardement gegen Aufstndische
Labourregierung verspricht Frderung der Zionisten zur Unterdrckung der Araber, RF 166, 30 August
1929.
(46) Gegen den britischen Imperialismus und seine zionistischen Agenten in Palstina! Manifest der Liga
gegen Imperialismus, RF 167, 31 August 1929.
(47) Die Araber im Vormarsch / Arabische Streitkrfte aus Syrien berschreiten die Grenze Palstina-
Demonstrationen in Bagdad Macdonalds Truppen morden weiter] (RF 168, 1 September 1929.
(48) Kmpfe in Nordpalstina, RF 169, 3 September 1929.
(49) Solidarisch mit dem Araberaufstand! / Kundgebung der Anti-Imperialistischen Liga, RF 170, 4
September 1929.
(50) Palstinas Befreiungskampf, Von Albert Norden, RF 172, 6. September 1929.
(51) RF 168, 25 July 1925.
(52) RF 167, 31 August 1929.
(53) Der internationale Schacher um die Kolonie Deutschland, RF 9, 26 February 1923. See also The
Colony of Poincar and Stinnes [Die Kolonie Poincars und Stinnes], RF 34, 9 April 1924.
The picture of the German people exploited by international haggling was affirmed again by the second
program of the KPD, the Programm zur nationalen und sozialen Befreiung des deutschen Volkes
(Program of the KPD for the National and Social Liberation of the German People). Programm zur
nationalen und sozialen Befreiung des deutschen Volkes, RF 197, 24 August 1930; Berthold 1956.
(54) Arbeiterfeinde sind Fhrer des Zionismus!, RF 165, 29 August 1929.
(55) Hyamson 1976, p. 121, see Segev 2005, 314-27.
(56) Hen-Tov 1974, Kiefer 2002, Kntzel 2003.
(57) Stahlhelmlmmel? Nein, ein Mitglied der jdisch-faschistischen Legion in Jerusalem, RF 164, 28
August 1929.
(58) Compare RF 165, 29 August 1929. Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky founded the Jewish Legion, but
according to Segev, it no longer existed in the beginning of the 1920s (Segev, p. 181). In 1925, Jabotinsky
founded the Revisionist Party and demanded a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River (Krmer 2003,
p. 182, 226).
(59) Der Araberaufstand wchst!, RF 164, 28 August 1929.
(60) J. B.: Das Blutbad im Heiligen Lande [The Bloodbath in the Holy Land], in: Imprekorr 86 (1929):
2092-93, in: Dokumente 1997, p. 30.
(61) The fact that the KPD spoke of Arabs as natives leads to the problem of racism within the communist
party. This, however, is beyond the aim of this paper. Of course, the KPD would not have used the term for
the German working class, though it was not called into question that Germany belonged to the Germans.
(62) ZK 1932, p. 284-85.
(63) The anti-Zionism in the Soviet Union was already in the 1920s violent. Thousands of Zionists were
arrested or deported to the Gulag. See above, note 8.
(64) Wistrich 1990, p. 215.
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