The Autobiography of Rudolf Höss: Bureaucracy, Counter‑Revolution, and the Making of a Functionary of Extermination

August 20, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Primo Levi and the Problem of Reading Höss

Few documents in history evoke such intense horror as Rudolf Höss’s memoir, written in a Kraków prison cell just weeks before his execution in April 1947. It isn’t literary or a moral confession. Instead, it is the self-portrait of a man responsible for leading the murder of over a million people, who, facing the gallows, recounts his actions with a detached, procedural tone akin to a factory manager reviewing production data.

Primo Levi, who wrote the introduction for the English edition, immediately recognised that the book’s importance lies precisely in its repulsiveness. He emphasised that the memoir is “filled with evil,” lacking literary value, and that reading it is a challenging experience. However, he also believed it was essential — not because of its moral emptiness but because of it. Höss’s memoir documents extermination from within the machinery of genocide, compelling the reader to face fascist violence directly, without the filtering effects of remorse, reflection, or human warmth.

Levi’s insight was twofold. First, he saw that Höss’s flat, bureaucratic tone isn’t a flaw but central to the document’s core. It reflects how a man who viewed mass murder as a technical and logistical problem approached his work—focused on innovation, efficiency, and discipline. Second, Levi realised that the memoir’s power comes from its absence of human emotion. It functions as a negative instruction manual, offering a stark look at how industrialised killing is portrayed by its perpetrator.

Levi’s firsthand experience in Auschwitz provided him with a unique perspective. He viewed the system from the perspective of a prisoner doomed to a slow death through forced labour, starvation, and dehumanisation. In contrast, Höss saw it from a top-down position, as the mastermind behind its daily operations. Levi’s introduction juxtaposes these contrasting viewpoints. He dismisses Höss’s attempt at introspection or portraying tragedy; he rejects calling it a confession. Instead, Levi presents it as a manifestation of bureaucratic evil, serving as a crucial insight into how genocide can occur within a modern capitalist framework.

This framing also pre-empts—and subtly critiques—future claims to generalise Höss’s behaviour through the concept of the “banality of evil.” Levi argues that Höss was not ordinary or banal. He was a particular type of official moulded by a specific historical crisis. His memoir doesn’t showcase universal human weakness but highlights the social forces that influenced the SS members: counter-revolutionary violence, racial ideology, bureaucratic rationality, and German capitalism’s fall into fascism.

Expanding Levi’s insight involves understanding the memoir’s paradox: a text lacking moral content yet requiring moral consideration. It compels readers to view the extermination process as its perpetrators envisioned it — not as metaphysical evil, but as a technical operation integrated into the administrative routines of a modern state. Levi’s introduction, in its full historical context, functions not just as a preface but as a methodological guide: warning against sentimentality, rejecting psychological mythmaking, and emphasising that the memoir’s significance lies in its cold, bureaucratic precision. This perspective should shape how the entire document is interpreted.

The Making of a Functionary: Biography as Social Pathway

When faced with such a text, the temptation is to see Höss either as an inexplicable monster or as an ordinary bureaucrat whose evil was merely “banal.” However, both views overlook the core historical question. The focus should not be on what Höss was “like,” but rather on how a particular social context led to the emergence of a specific type of killer.

Höss’s personal account, when compared with the documentary record, provides the foundation for that explanation, although he never states it explicitly. Born in 1900 into a strict Catholic, nationalist middle-class family, he volunteered for the German army at sixteen and served in the Middle East during World War I. His experiences with defeat and revolution radicalised him against the revolutionary forces. In 1920, he joined the Freikorps, paramilitary groups composed of demobilised officers that the Weimar government and German bourgeoisie used to suppress workers’ uprisings in the Baltic, Ruhr, and central Germany.

This environment was pivotal, combining anti-Bolshevism, racial antisemitism, and the veneration of a betrayed generation into a unified worldview. In 1922, Höss first met Hitler. In 1923, on Bormann’s orders, he took part in the killing of a man suspected of informing the French occupying forces. He spent five years in prison.

This is not just incidental biography; it illustrates how the counter-revolutionary violence from 1918–23 directly fed into the machinery of the Third Reich. Höss joined the SS in 1934, worked at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, and in May 1940 became the inaugural commandant of Auschwitz. There, he expanded and managed the largest extermination centre in the German system, introducing widespread use of Zyklon-B and continuously seeking greater efficiency in the killing process. A 1944 SS report praised him as a “true pioneer” in the field.

Höss was not a sadist in the vulgar sense. His memoir depicts him—and quite plausibly—as a diligent administrator who discovered his calling in organising death. This makes the document particularly important historically, as it details how the brutal violence of the Freikorps was rationalised, bureaucratized, and turned into an industrial process amid the collapse of German capitalism into fascism. Leon Trotsky, in 1933, described fascism as the process by which “capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism” that a healthy social development would have eliminated. Höss’s memoir, whether intentionally or not, serves as a case study of this physiological process.

The Industrialisation of Mass Murder

Höss’s memoir is striking for its cold tone. He writes as a manager, not a fanatic. The descriptions of transports, gas chamber construction, crematoria, Zyklon-B use, and the administrative “improvements’ after his 1943 promotion are detailed and precise. Historians confirm his technical and administrative claims are generally accurate, which makes the true horror lie in the understated tone rather than exaggeration.

This excerpt illustrates the bureaucratic ideology of the SS embodied in Höss. His claim to be a simple tool—merely following orders, seeking only a peaceful farming life—reflects not a psychological abnormality but the core self-image of the SS: viewing themselves as functionaries who see their agency as absorbed into the state machinery. The memoir serves as more than just an account of genocide; it reveals how fascism saw itself. The industrial scale of murder necessitated a cadre trained in counter-revolutionary violence, a bureaucratic system capable of rationalising such violence, a state dedicated to racial extermination, and a social crisis that merged all three into one overarching project. Höss’s memoir thus functions as the administrative voice of this entire undertaking.

The Memoir as Ideological Artefact

The Commandant of Auschwitz is most vulnerable, and its limitations need clear acknowledgement in Höss’s narrative of his motives and accountability. He controversially portrays himself as a soldier compelled back into action against his own judgment, deflecting blame upward to Himmler and Hitler, and depicting himself as a tool rather than a decision-maker. His time as a prisoner with other senior officials at Nuremberg in 1946 provided ample chances to perfect this rhetorical approach.

This is the same evasion that later commentary on Nazism, from Hannah Arendt’s formula of the “banality of evil” onward, has too often converted into a general theory rather than treating as a self‑serving defence to be tested against the facts. It is not banality, still less some universal human capacity for evil, that explains Höss. It is the concrete conjuncture of German imperialism’s crisis after 1918, the defeated revolution, the deliberate cultivation of counter‑revolutionary paramilitarism by the German state and capital, and the specific social layers—demobilised officers, déclassé nationalists, functionaries seeking order and advancement—from which the SS drew its cadre.

Against the “Banality of Evil”: Why Hannah Arendt Misread Fascism

Few ideas have strayed further from their original context and contributed more to obscuring the true history of fascism than Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” First presented in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), the phrase has become a moral shorthand, suggesting that genocide results from ordinary individuals following orders—bureaucrats committing horrific crimes not driven by ideology but by thoughtlessness, conformity, or career ambitions. This comforting notion has gained widespread acceptance, which is precisely why it is problematic.

Arendt’s core empirical claim—that Eichmann was merely a superficial clerk lacking ideological insight—has been thoroughly discredited. The historical evidence demonstrates Eichmann’s dedication to Nazism, his racial extremist beliefs, and his active role in developing the Final Solution. Posthumously discovered writings show he enthusiastically supported exterminationist antisemitism and viewed himself as part of a revolutionary effort to reshape Europe racially. Arendt mistook Eichmann’s courtroom antics for genuine psychological insight, wrongly equating a legal tactic for self-preservation with his true mental state.

However, the fundamental issue is theoretical. Arendt extended Eichmann’s self-portrayal into a broad theory of modern evil. In doing so, she reduced the particularities of fascism to an abstract moral concept. The “banality of evil” idea regards genocide as stemming from ordinary human flaws rather than the specific social dynamics that created the Nazi hierarchy: the German capitalism crisis post-1918, the defeat of the workers’ movement, the rise of counter-revolutionary paramilitaries, and the bureaucratic logic of a state committed to racial extermination. It shifts blame from historical forces to psychological ones, and from class conflict to individual morality.

This is why the phrase has gained widespread popularity in liberal discourse. It enables the Holocaust to be remembered while avoiding critique of the political and economic structures that enabled it. It shifts the focus from fascism as a collapse of social order to a lesson about individual morality. By universalizing responsibility, it also conceals the actual agents and institutions responsible for genocide.

Rudolf Höss’s memoir, ‘Commandant of Auschwitz,’ serves as a clear counterexample to Arendt’s thesis. Höss was not ordinary or banal; he was a product of a specific historical crisis. As a Freikorps veteran, a racial ideologue, and a bureaucratic innovator of mass murder, he found his calling in extermination. His life exemplifies the social pathway where the violence of 1918–23 was rationalised, professionalised, and turned into an industrial process. Labelling him as “banal” misrepresents both the man and the system that shaped him.

Arendt’s framework serves an ideological role by depoliticizing fascism. It promotes sentimental interpretations of genocide and hinders the necessary historical analysis to prevent future occurrences. Not only is this approach insufficient, but it also hampers political understanding. To truly grasp fascism, one must reject the banality thesis and engage directly with the concrete social forces behind the extermination apparatus. Anything less amounts to evasion. A memoir that leaves out this analysis does not disprove it; it only highlights the need to supplement the account from outside the text.

Why the Document Must Still Be Read

None of this reduces the book’s importance as a primary source. Its royalties were appropriately donated to a fund for Auschwitz survivors. Its unflinching account of the camp’s physical operation remains crucial for anyone wanting to understand not just the idea of “evil,” but the actual system that enabled an advanced capitalist state to organize industrial mass murder. The relevance today is clear. The political manipulation of Holocaust memory—whether by trivializing fascism in popular culture, depoliticizing genocide in liberal discourse, or using historical suffering to justify current militarism—necessitates critical reading. Höss’s memoir serves as a warning about the social conditions that could produce such a figure again: conditions rooted not in human nature itself, but in the recurring crises of the capitalist system.

Bibliography and sources

Höss, Rudolf. Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon, introduction by Primo Levi. London: Phoenix Press, 1959 (repr. various editions).
Höss, Rudolf. Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. Edited by Steven Paskuly, translated by Andrew Pollinger. Da Capo Press, 1996 (unexpurgated translation).
Postscript Books, publisher’s description and Primo Levi excerpt, Commandant of Auschwitz — https://www.psbooks.co.uk/commandant-of-auschwitz-age-of-dictators-1920-1945
WorldCat entry and Primo Levi introduction excerpt — https://search.worldcat.org/title/Commandant-of-Auschwitz-:-the-autobiography-of-Rudolf-Hoess/oclc/43377307
Amazon.com, publisher’s note on composition and royalties — https://www.amazon.com/Commandant-Auschwitz-Autobiography-Rudolf-Hoess/dp/1842120247
Testimony of Rudolf Höss before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg — https://famous-trials.com/nuremberg/1932-hoesstestimony
Yad Vashem, extract from written evidence of Rudolf Höss — https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/evidence-of-rudolf-hoss-on-auschwitz.html
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, “Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess on the Gallows” — https://www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/auschwitz-commandant-rudolf-hoess-on-the-gallows,461.html
Laurier, Joanne. “The Zone of Interest: Making the commandant of Auschwitz into ‘one of us.'” World Socialist Web Site, 1 March 2024 — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/02/wzbs-m02.html
North, David. Essay on Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century — https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
Trotsky, Leon. “What Is National Socialism?” (1933), in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.

Podcast Episode: The Nuremberg Women: Liberal Mythmaking and the Erasure of Fascism’s Class Roots

July 29, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: Fascism as moral aberration, justice as emotional spectacle, and eight women whose humanity supposedly unlocked Nuremberg's true meaning — freerein61 has thoughts, and they are not gentle.

Mara: This episode follows a single extended argument: a review of Natalie Livingstone's The Nuremberg Women, and what it exposes about how liberal historiography handles fascism, class, and the politics of the postwar trials.

Pip: Let's start with the book, the review that praised it, and why both together tell a story that the post argues is more comfortable than it is honest.

The Nuremberg Women: Liberal Mythmaking and Fascism's Class Roots

Mara: The post opens with Natalie Livingstone's own framing of her book — eight women at Nuremberg, a "fresh" and "humanising" account that, she claims, made the proceedings "more democratic" and contributed to the perception that "justice was served." That self-description is where the critique begins.

Pip: And the critique lands hard. The post's core charge is that centering personal stories at Nuremberg is not just incomplete — it is ideologically functional. The comfort is the point.

Mara: Katja Hoyer's review in the TLS is the immediate target. The post describes it as "a refined form of liberal historiography — graceful and compassionate, yet ultimately evasive," one that replaces structural analysis with narrative empathy and turns "structural violence into emotional spectacle."

Pip: Graceful and evasive is a devastating combination. You feel like you've understood something and you've been carefully steered away from it.

Mara: The post is precise about what Hoyer omits: the trials as geopolitical performance, the selective prosecution that left German capitalism's economic foundations intact, the reintegration of former Nazis into the Cold War state. None of that appears in Hoyer's account.

Pip: Instead, Nazi defendants become psychological monsters, the women become moral witnesses, and Nuremberg becomes a cathartic encounter with evil. Tidy. Reassuring. Structurally useless.

Mara: The post extends that charge directly to Livingstone. Her focus on figures like Erika Mann observing Göring and Streicher as "gaunt," "broken," or "like wild beasts in a zoo" is described as "trivia presented as historical insight." The condition of Nazi leaders in 1945, the post argues, tells us nothing about the class forces that brought them to power.

Pip: The industrialists — Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben — largely avoided serious punishment. That absence is the argument's spine.

Mara: On Laura Knight, the British war artist, the post makes a sharp point: her paintings are presented by Livingstone as capturing the proceedings' humanity, but "art at Nuremberg did not uncover deeper truths; it helped construct the trial's image as civilised, rational, and humane." Livingstone accepts that image without criticism.

Mara: The post also takes on Livingstone's treatment of Ursula von Kardoff as a symbol of the new Germany — and rejects it. The German bourgeoisie was not remade after 1945; it was preserved and realigned westward. Casting its postwar representatives as enlightened democrats, the post argues, aids rehabilitation rather than reckoning.

Pip: And on gender, the post is equally direct. Livingstone treats women as moral anchors by nature. The post calls that liberal-essentialist — gender as a social relation, not a moral category, and the gendered labour at Nuremberg served the trial's ideological presentation without overcoming its political limits.

Mara: The closing judgment is unsparing: "Empathy cannot replace analysis. It is not enough to sympathise with the women of Nuremberg; we must examine the conditions that shaped their labour, the political forces that defined their roles, and the ideological purposes their presence served."

Pip: The women of Nuremberg as workers, agents, and participants in a politically constrained legal proceeding — that's the recovery the post is after, and it's a genuinely different frame than the one either Livingstone or Hoyer offers.

Mara: The throughline is consistent: liberal historiography describes the emotional aftermath of structural violence but cannot explain its foundations.

Pip: Which means the next question is always the one it won't ask — what produced this, and who was protected when it ended.

Podcast Episode: Katja Hoyer’s Narrative: Nazi Files, Family Secrets, and the Liberal Falsificati

June 28, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: A Trumpet of Sedition asks a question most history coverage sidesteps entirely: when we talk about fascism, are we actually talking about fascism, or have we quietly swapped it out for something more comfortable?

Mara: freerein61 has a piece this week that takes that question seriously, working through how liberal memory culture handles the history of Nazism — and what it systematically leaves out. Let's start with the argument about Katja Hoyer, Daniel Goldhagen, and what the Marxist tradition says both of them get wrong.

Katja Hoyer, Goldhagen, and the Class Question

Pip: The setup here is a Financial Times article by Katja Hoyer on newly digitised Nazi Party membership records. The surface reading is: here is an opportunity for Germans to confront difficult family histories. The argument in this post is that the surface reading is the problem.

Mara: The post frames it precisely. A Marxist critic quoted in the piece puts it this way: "reduces the greatest crimes in human history to a matter of individual family shame and personal conscience, while leaving untouched the class forces that made fascism possible and that are re-emerging today."

Pip: So the archive becomes a mirror rather than a document. The question shifts from what structural forces enabled fascism to whether your grandfather was a good person — and that shift is not innocent, it is doing ideological work.

Mara: The post draws a direct comparison to Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, and the pairing is pointed. Goldhagen nationalises guilt — fascism as a German cultural pathology. Hoyer privatises it — fascism as a family secret. The post argues both moves share the same blind spot: class conflict disappears entirely from the explanation.

Pip: Goldhagen says Germans killed because they wanted to. Hoyer says look inward at your grandfather. Neither asks who funded Hitler or why the organisations representing millions of German workers collapsed without a fight in 1933.

Mara: That collapse is where the post spends real time. The SPD clung to bourgeois legality. The KPD, following Stalin's line, called the SPD social fascists and wrecked any prospect of a united front. Trade union leaders marched workers into Nazi May Day celebrations on May 1, 1933 — one day before SA and SS units raided their offices and seized their assets. The post quotes directly: "These organisations… capitulated passively to Hitler."

Pip: That sequence — the deliberate political disarming of the only force capable of stopping fascism — is exactly what neither Hoyer's genealogical introspection nor Goldhagen's national-character thesis can accommodate, because admitting it would mean asking class questions about 1933 and about today.

Mara: The post brings in Trotsky's definition as the counter-framework: "Fascism is a particular method of rallying and organising the petty bourgeoisie to serve finance capital." That reframes the whole problem — fascism as a product of capitalist crisis and political betrayal, not psychology or culture.

Pip: And the post closes by connecting this to the present. Germany is rearming. Historical revisionism is climbing. The individualised-guilt framework is politically useful precisely because, as the post puts it, one can feel personal shame about a grandfather while supporting the deployment of German troops — the class question is never posed.

Mara: Which is why the post argues the digitised Nazi files matter most not as a therapeutic resource but as a historical archive of fascism's class nature — and why the working class needs a framework that can actually explain what happened, rather than one that stops at the family tree.

Pip: The throughline is that how we explain fascism determines what we think can stop it. Psychology and genealogy leave the structural causes intact.

Mara: That's the stakes the post keeps returning to. The next time this territory comes up, it will be worth watching which questions get asked and which get quietly set aside.

Katja Hoyer’s Narrative: Nazi Files, Family Secrets, and the Liberal Falsification of History

June 28, 2026June 28, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The ideological function of genealogical introspection

Katja Hoyer’s recent article in the Financial Times on the digitised Nazi Party membership records appears as a compassionate call to confront difficult family histories. However, it is actually a strategic move aimed at shaping public awareness of history. This approach shifts the atrocities of fascism into a personal narrative of genealogy, shame, and individual reflection, while deliberately overlooking the broader class struggles, political betrayals, and capitalist factors that facilitated fascism.

As one Marxist critic recently noted, this genre “reduces the greatest crimes in human history to a matter of individual family shame and personal conscience, while leaving untouched the class forces that made fascism possible and that are re-emerging today.”¹ The digitised Nazi files become not a historical archive but a therapeutic mirror. This is not an innocent mistake. It is an ideological operation.

The displacement of history by family mythology

Hoyer’s approach relies on a straightforward but powerful shift: instead of asking, “What class forces enabled fascism?” the subject is prompted to ask, “Was my grandfather a Nazi?” This transforms the historical disaster into a personal story. Political issues become psychological concerns, and social problems are viewed through a personal lens.

This example illustrates modern attitudes toward remembering German history. As the WSWS highlighted during the controversy over the Wehrmacht exhibition, even important documentation of Nazi atrocities tends to be presented without linking it to the broader class struggles in Germany and Europe, as if there was no opposition to the Nazis’ rise and their military ambitions. Hoyer’s article exemplifies this issue on a smaller scale, creating a story in which the grandfather becomes the central figure of history, the family serves as a space for reflection, and the working class is entirely overlooked. This approach does not depict true history but promotes a liberal myth.

The erasure of the working class and its betrayal

Any thorough analysis of fascism must start with the betrayal of the German working class by the SPD, KPD, and trade unions in 1933. These groups represented millions of workers. Their surrender enabled Hitler’s rise to power. The SPD clung to bourgeois legality as the state fell apart. The KPD, following Stalin, called the SPD “social fascists,” undermining a united front. The trade unions encouraged workers to take part in Nazi May Day celebrations.

Hoyer’s narrative cannot admit this, as it would mean confronting the ongoing class interests that connect the capitalist systems of 1933, 1945, and today. Instead, she shifts focus to family history, asking whether ‘my grandfather was good or bad,’ rather than examining what political forces weakened the working class and facilitated fascism. This amounts to a form of historical falsification.

Goldhagen in miniature: national character disguised as family psychology

At first glance, Katja Hoyer and Daniel Goldhagen seem to embody different facets of modern German memory culture. However, they may actually reflect two sides of the same ideological spectrum. Goldhagen’s tone is polemical, broad, and accusatory, while Hoyer adopts a therapeutic, intimate, and psychologically nuanced approach. Goldhagen criticises the German nation as a whole, whereas Hoyer focuses on examining the German family. Goldhagen discusses “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” whereas Hoyer explores “family myths” and the process of “reckoning.”

However, despite these stylistic variations, they serve a common ideological purpose: to depoliticise fascism, eliminate class conflict, and reframe the atrocities of the Third Reich as issues of psychology, culture, and personal identity. Both authors function within the same liberal perspective that downplays “the greatest crimes in human history to a matter of individual family shame and personal conscience. Goldhagen nationalises guilt. Hoyer privatises guilt. Both protect capitalism.

Goldhagen: National character as historical explanation

Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) argued that the Holocaust was the product of a uniquely German, centuries‑old “eliminationist anti‑Semitism.” The book was a publishing sensation precisely because it offered a morally satisfying yet historically bankrupt explanation: Germans killed Jews because they wanted to.

Goldhagen’s thesis has three key flaws: it deletes class relations by ignoring the bourgeoisie, the working class, and capitalism; it reduces the Holocaust to a cultural issue; and it dismisses political struggle, especially neglecting figures like Marx, Engels, Bebel, and Liebknecht, thus turning history into nationalist rhetoric. Moreover, it overlooks the betrayal of the working class, as Goldhagen cannot explain the surrender of the SPD, KPD, and trade unions in 1933, or why the working class— the only group capable of resisting fascism—was politically disarmed. His thesis is a dead end because it views fascism as a moral failing rather than a class-based phenomenon.

Hoyer: The privatisation of guilt

Katja Hoyer’s “family secrets” narrative mirrors Goldhagen’s approach on a smaller scale. While Goldhagen criticises the entire nation, Hoyer focuses on the household. Goldhagen discusses “German culture,” whereas Hoyer examines “family mythology.” Goldhagen universalises guilt, but Hoyer personalises it. The core argument is similar: fascism is explained through psychology rather than politics, history is viewed through identity instead of class, and the working class is completely omitted. The question becomes ‘was my grandfather a good or bad person?’ rather than ‘what class forces and political betrayals made fascism possible?” Hoyer’s narrative is more than just incomplete; it is essential on ideological grounds. It guarantees that the digitised Nazi Party files serve for therapeutic self-reflection rather than for historical study.

The shared erasure of the working class

Both Hoyer and Goldhagen consistently overlook a critical historical fact: fascism’s rise was facilitated by the betrayal of their own base by German working-class organisations. As the state disintegrated, the SPD maintained bourgeois legality, while the KPD, following Stalin’s directives, sabotaged the unity front. The Trade union leaders collaborated with the Nazi propaganda event on May 1, 1933. This orchestrated spectacle was intended to lull German trade unions into complacency just a day before their complete suppression on May 2, 1933, when SA, SS, and NSBO units raided union offices, detained leaders, and seized assets. All these organisations… passively capitulated to Hitler.”

Goldhagen cannot acknowledge this because it would weaken his claim about national pathology. Likewise, Hoyer cannot accept it as it would contradict her narrative of personal self-reflection. Consequently, both authors depict a version of history that omits class struggle, suggesting fascism emerges from cultural, identity, or family factors rather than from the crisis of capitalism.

Trotsky’s method: The Marxist demolition of both narratives

Leon Trotsky’s critique of fascism reveals flaws in Hoyer’s and Goldhagen’s perspectives. Trotsky argued that fascism is not merely a cultural issue but a tool used by a class: “Fascism is a particular method of rallying and organising the petty bourgeoisie to serve finance capital.”

This single sentence challenges the entire ideological foundation of Hoyer and Goldhagen. Trotsky’s perspective shows that Fascism stems from the capitalist crisis, not from national character. It is propelled by the political betrayal of workers rather than family myths. Additionally, Fascism is fundamentally a class issue, not a psychological one. Goldhagen’s argument falters because it ignores why the bourgeoisie supported Hitler. Similarly, Hoyer’s argument is incomplete because it overlooks why the working class was disarmed. Trotsky reestablishes the comprehensive social relations that both authors overlook.

The political function of Hoyer and Goldhagen

The ideological significance of both writers becomes evident when viewed in the context of modern German politics. Germany is rearming, the Bundeswehr is active internationally, and historical revisionism is on the rise. The political leaders openly discuss “normalising” Germany’s military strength. In this environment, Hoyer and Goldhagen serve crucial ideological functions: They shift fascism from a class-based issue to a psychological one, promote guilt without fostering political awareness, hide the role of German capitalism in funding Hitler, and prevent the working class from developing revolutionary insights. “One can feel personal shame about one’s grandfather while supporting the deployment of German troops. The class question is never posed.” Both writers use their political role to prevent past crimes from endangering current interests.

The political utility of individualised guilt

The German elite prefers to shift historical accountability onto individual and psychological levels. As the WSWS observed in their review of the 2011 “Hitler and the Germans” exhibition, the official narrative usually attributes blame to the German populace while hiding the role of German capitalism in the rise of Hitler.”

Hoyer’s article aligns well with this pattern. It prompts Germans to feel shame about their grandparents while ignoring the banks that funded Hitler, the companies that benefited from slave labour, and the state institutions that remained unchanged after 1945. This is why the “family secrets” genre is so politically effective: it fosters guilt without involving politics, memory without addressing class, and reckoning without calling for revolution.

The Marxist view contrasts with Hoyer’s liberal-psychological explanation, which holds that fascism emerges from capitalism in crisis. Its rise is due to the working class’s betrayal. Fascism’s crimes are best understood by examining its class roots, not genealogy or psychology. The digitised Nazi files are useful primarily for revealing fascism’s class nature.

The working class needs to reject the entire ideology of individual guilt. Fascism’s crimes were not caused by flawed personalities or national traits but stemmed from a social system—capitalism—driven into barbarism by crises and betrayal. The only force that can stop another descent into disaster is an organised, conscious working class, equipped with a revolutionary socialist agenda.

Notes

Family Secrets and the Class Question: A Marxist Response to the “Nazi Grandfather” Phenomenon, p. 1.
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 3.
WSWS, “The Goldhagen Debate,” 1996.
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), 247.
WSWS, “Hitler and the Germans Exhibition,” 2011.

Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer is published by Allen Lane (£30).

May 21, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“The pauperisation of the petty bourgeoisie, barely concealed by their ties and socks of artificial silk, eroded all official creeds and, above all, the doctrine of democratic parliamentarism… In the highly fevered atmosphere brought about by war, defeat, reparations, inflation, occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie rose against all the old parties that had cheated it.”

Leon Trotsky- What is National Socialism? (1933)

“The class struggle is a law of social development. For ages, that struggle has been between the poor and the rich, the exploited and the exploiters.”

Jack London: The Iron Heel

“The ‘ordinary German’ who populates Daniel Goldhagen’s book is a vacuous generalisation from which all internal social antagonisms and conflicts have been extracted.”

David North

“They can only maintain their position while they honestly believe that civilisation depends on themselves alone…”

Jack London On Oligarchy

To understand Katja Hoyer’s contributions to recent historiography, we need to consider the broader academic landscape in which they fit. The ‘Ordinary Germans’ historiography is central to her latest book’s introduction. Since the postwar era, this field has been shaped by ongoing tensions between Marxist class analysis and various idealist, culturalist, and nationalist perspectives. The question of ‘ordinary Germans’ extends beyond mere academic debate; it is key to understanding fascism and influences the working class’s readiness or inability to oppose it. Since the 1990s, discussions about ‘ordinary Germans’ have been dominated by three main positions, none of which fully align with a Marxist view. Hoyer’s work synthesises and, in some respects, integrates elements from all three.

The primary perspective linked to Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 bestseller, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, is that the Holocaust was carried out by “ordinary Germans” driven by deeply rooted, centuries-old “eliminationist antisemitism” unique to German culture. Goldhagen argued this belief was so ingrained that it could be activated without coercion or specific circumstances; Germans killed Jews simply because they were Germans. David North’s 1997 critique, The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”, points out a key methodological flaw: the idea of “ordinary Germans” is an overly broad, abstract category with no internal differentiation, which makes it scientifically meaningless.

As North observes, questioning whether “ordinary Germans” refers to a factory worker, shopkeeper, lumpenproletarian, Junker landowner, or industrialist reveals that this category ignores class differences within German society, unintentionally reinforcing the Nazi myth of a unified Volk in a distorted way. Goldhagen’s notion of ewige Deutsche (eternal Germans) as enemies of Jews parallels the Nazi ewige Jude (eternal Jew) as enemies of Germans. Both are racial-nationalist abstractions that erase nuanced history and social class distinctions.

Furthermore, as North emphasises, the Goldhagen thesis relies on making the German socialist movement essentially invisible. In a 622-page book about Germans and the Holocaust, there’s not a single mention of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, or the Social Democratic Party, which by 1912 was the largest party in the Reichstag, drawing most of its support from the German working class. This omission is intentional; it’s structurally necessary because recognising a large socialist workers’ movement with millions of Germans directly contradicts the idea that all Germans shared a uniform antisemitic worldview.

The second perspective is offered by Götz Aly’s ‘Hitler’s Beneficiaries’ (2005), which suggests that ordinary Germans mainly supported Hitler for economic reasons they gained from the confiscation of Jewish property, a Nazi welfare system funded through expropriation and war spoils. While this outlook is somewhat more materialist than Goldhagen’s, it remains problematic: it portrays the working class as passive recipients of stolen wealth, dismisses acts of resistance, and continues to use the broad category of “Germans” as beneficiaries, oversimplifying the significant class differences in who benefited from the Nazi economy.

The third major perspective most pertinent to Hoyer is the Volksgemeinschaft historiography. Since around the 2000s, this view has been dominant in German academic history and is linked with scholars like Michael Wildt, Frank Bajohr, and the broader ‘Nazi society’ social history movement. This approach examines how the Nazi idea of the national community was actively built, enacted, and accepted by significant segments of German society, rather than merely being imposed from above. It highlights the roles of participation, consent, social pleasures of belonging, and the integration of the Mittelstand (middle classes) and parts of the working class into a racially defined national identity.

Hoyer and the Volksgemeinschaft Turn

Hoyer’s ‘Weimar intentionally challenges the so-called “Weimar syndrome’ the common tendency to interpret the republic solely as a precursor to Nazism. She aims to analyse the republic on its own terms and emphasise the daily lives of ordinary people who did not anticipate the impending catastrophe. She highlights Weimar’s cultural vitality, genuine social reforms, the expansion of women’s rights and sexual freedoms, and the democratic activism of the working class through unions and political parties. A crucial point underlying this is that vulgar retrospective determinism, which views fascism as the inevitable outcome of all developments in Weimar, is indeed poor history. However, Hoyer’s correction veers too far in the opposite direction, a mistake tied directly to the Volksgemeinschaft historiography.

The core issue goes beyond mere emphasis and highlights what is fundamentally missing. When Hoyer and other Volksgemeinschaft historians analyse the daily lives of “ordinary people” during the Weimar Republic or Nazism, they often blur the distinctions among class, the nation, and the people. The German working class, which nearly achieved socialist power during the November Revolution of 1918, consistently supported the SPD and KPD throughout Weimar and maintained underground resistance networks in Berlin, Hamburg, and the Ruhr well after Hitler’s ascent to power.

These workers are frequently portrayed as simply part of the indistinct mass of “Germans” experiencing the republic, depression, and Nazi rise in largely uniform ways. Hoyer’s historiographical approach, though it varies in details from Goldhagen’s, reaches a similar conclusion through a different method: it minimises “the relationship between capitalism and fascism” and depicts “all workers, the petty bourgeoisie, industrialists, and bankers as ‘the Germans.'”

The evidence opposing the dominant narrative is strong but often overlooked in this historiography. Hans-Rainer Sandvoss’s detailed archival research into Berlin workers’ resistance to the Nazi regime, utilising Gestapo files that only became accessible after 1989, revealed that the working class in Berlin and other labour hubs largely remained resistant to Nazi propaganda for several years following Hitler’s rise to power.

A Gestapo report from March 1936 noted that in Berlin one could go days without hearing the Führer salute, except from officials, uniformed personnel, or provincial visitors. The Nazi party regularly encountered challenges in industrial areas such as mining regions, Hamburg’s docks, and factory zones. This is not romanticisation but a reflection of the historical record. Yet, this resistance vanishes completely in a historiography that depicts all Germans as uniformly “ordinary.”

Why does this historiography remain so influential? Its foundation lies in the political and intellectual climate established after the fall of the Soviet Union and the so-called “triumph of capitalism.” Since the 1990s, numerous historians have justified abandoning honest and objective analysis by pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and East Germany, as well as the apparent victory of capitalism. In doing so, they have replaced genuine scientific methods with subjective, postmodern ideologies.

Abandoning class as the primary analytical focus is a politically motivated choice, not a neutral one. As David North notes in his critique of Goldhagen, during the postwar period, framing fascism’s class aspects through psychological, cultural, or national-identity lenses was linked to the Cold War objective of undermining Marxism. This also served to hide that fascism was essentially the capitalist ruling class’s response to revolutionary threats from the organised working class. Goldhagen attributes this entirely to German national psychology, while Volksgemeinschaft historians approach it more subtly by highlighting consent, participation, and everyday social integration. This indicates that “the Germans” collectively created fascism, instead of acknowledging that a particular class imposed it on a divided society—one in which millions were coerced, terrorised, and ultimately wiped out.

Focusing on Hoyer, there’s an additional point to consider. Her earlier book, Beyond the Wall (2023), depicts the GDR as a society with significant social achievements and broad support. This mirrors the strategy used for Stalinism: emphasising the daily lives of “ordinary people” to soften, contextualise, and ultimately justify a regime largely defined by bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class. In both Weimar/Nazi Germany and East Germany, highlighting “ordinary experience” aims to diminish political and class divisions and foster sociological empathy.

Leon Trotsky examined Weimar Germany and German fascism not from the standpoint of current social historians, but through his own contemporaneous writings, which remain unmatched in their analytical insight. He saw fascism not as stemming from German national character or broad social trends, but as a tactic used by the capitalist elite to unite the impoverished petty bourgeoisie—including shopkeepers, artisans, clerks, and disillusioned farmers—against the organised working class, especially when bourgeois democracy proved unable to resolve the social crisis.

This perspective is elaborated in his 1933 book, ‘What is National Socialism?’. He describes how the impoverishment of the petty bourgeoisie, barely hidden by their artificial silk ties and socks, undermined all official beliefs, especially democratic parliamentary doctrine. Amid the tense environment created by war, defeat, reparations, inflation, the Ruhr occupation, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie turned against all the old parties that had deceived them.

This analysis focused not on the cultural attitudes of “ordinary Germans” but on the class struggles within a society facing a severe capitalist crisis. Central to the discussion was the question of revolutionary leadership: whether the organised working class would seize power or whether the petty bourgeoisie, with no viable working-class alternative, would be pushed into the arms of a movement supported and financed by large capital interests. The outcome depended on the betrayals by the SPD and the Comintern, rather than on any intrinsic psychological traits of a uniform “German people.”

This framework is consistently rejected by “ordinary Germans’ historiography, from Goldhagen to Götz Aly, the Volksgemeinschaft school, and Katja Hoyer. This rejection is deliberate, as it precisely identifies the actual determinants of the outcome: class struggle, the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the counterrevolutionary roles of Social Democracy and Stalinism. These lessons remain highly relevant today, with the rise of the AfD in Germany and the pseudo-left channelling working-class opposition into bourgeois safe havens. Rediscovering these truths requires not a softer or more empathetic history.

Katja Hoyer is a historian of German and British background, author of “Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire” (2021) and, more recently, “Weimar Germany: Democracy on the Brink” (2024). She also wrote “Beyond the Wall” (2023), an alternative perspective on the GDR. Her Weimar book seeks to portray the republic not just as a precursor to Nazi disaster, a “Weimar syndrome” she explicitly aims to go beyond, but as a lively, authentic democratic experiment with notable achievements in culture, social policy, and politics. From a Marxist standpoint, there are serious methodological and political problems with this kind of liberal rehabilitation project.

Like many liberal histories, Hoyer emphasises Weimar’s lively cultural scene—covering the Bauhaus, Expressionism, Brecht, Grosz, cabaret, and sexual liberalism. Although these are important and genuine, highlighting them as the city’s main achievement shifts focus away from the crucial relationship between culture and politics. The innovative cultural output of Weimar arose from a revolutionary crisis in a drastically changed world. Many key figures, including Brecht, understood that this culture was closely linked to the revolutionary struggle. To focus too much on aesthetics risks neglecting Weimar’s political significance.

The Weimar Republic emerged from the German Revolution of November 1918 but was quickly thwarted by Social Democracy. Led by Ebert and Noske, the SPD violently suppressed the revolutionary movement, killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and kept the capitalist institutions and the Junker military hierarchy unchanged. Any explanation of Weimar that ignores this foundational betrayal—the counterrevolutionary actions of Social Democracy—fails to truly account for subsequent events.

The so-called cultural boom of Weimar’s Goldene Zwanziger era was funded through repeated betrayals of the working class. Under pressure from the Comintern, the KPD called off a planned insurrection at a critical moment—an action that led to a catastrophic failure, enabling German capitalism to stabilise temporarily. These “golden” Weimar years were merely a brief, circumstantial pause rather than a genuine democratic achievement.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not mainly caused by weak democracy or mass irrationality. Instead, it resulted directly from the Stalinist “social fascism” theory, which falsely labelled the SPD as equivalent to the Nazis and prevented a united working-class front against Hitler. This was compounded by the SPD’s own policies of supporting Hindenburg and collaborating with emergency measures under Brüning and von Papen. Trotsky’s writings from that era, such as What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat and The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany are essential resources, offering profound analysis that forecasted the catastrophe. Nevertheless, there was still time to avert it.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) stepped in not to lead the revolution, but to suppress and then drown it in blood. Led by Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske, the SPD allied with the old imperial military officers to crush the revolutionary movement. They organised the Freikorps, early fascist-style paramilitary groups, to eliminate the revolution’s key leaders. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), were pursued and killed in January 1919 under the orders of the SPD government. The traditional Junker military aristocracy, judiciary, civil service, major banks, and industrialists — all reactionary forces — remained untouched behind a newly formed democratic facade. This was the original sin. As the Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany) states plainly: “In 1918, the SPD had strangled the proletarian revolution to save the bourgeois order. The result was the Weimar Republic, in which the old forces of reaction continued to live behind a democratic facade.”

The republic experienced continual crises during its short fourteen-year span. In 1923, it faced two major setbacks: the French occupation of the Ruhr and a severe hyperinflation that destroyed the savings of the middle and working classes, causing widespread despair. That year, the KPD, guided by the Comintern, planned a revolutionary uprising but cancelled it at the last moment, which Trotsky later called “a classic demonstration of how it is possible to miss a perfectly exceptional revolutionary situation of world-historic importance.” German capitalism temporarily stabilised thanks to American loans under the Dawes Plan, and the mid-1920s are often seen as the “golden years” of Weimar—brilliant in culture, fragile politically, and economically reliant on foreign capital.

Then came 1929. The Wall Street Crash cut off American credit, the German economy collapsed, and unemployment exploded to over six million, roughly a third of the workforce. The social crisis was catastrophic. The middle classes — small shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, white-collar employees — who had already been ruined by inflation and were now devastated by the depression, were thrown into a desperate search for a way out. Into this vacuum stepped Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), offering an intoxicating brew of nationalist demagogy, antisemitism, and violent scapegoating aimed at the most desperate and disoriented petty-bourgeois layers.

As the crisis deepened, the SPD’s response was to retreat, capitulate, and appeal to the very institutions of the bourgeois state to save it. In 1930, when President Hindenburg appointed the Catholic conservative Heinrich Brüning as chancellor and began governing by emergency decree, bypassing parliament altogether, the SPD tolerated this, refusing to bring down the government. It feared revolution from below more than dictatorship from above. In 1932, the SPD supported the re-election of the arch-reactionary field marshal Paul von Hindenburg as president. This man would eventually appoint Hitler as the supposed “lesser evil” against the Nazis. When von Papen illegally deposed the SPD-led government of Prussia in a July 1932 coup, the SPD lodged a complaint with the Supreme Court rather than mobilising its millions of members to fight back. As the SGP historical document summarises, drawing directly on Trotsky’s analysis, the SPD’s attitude was that the fate of Germany depended “not on the fighting strength of the German proletariat… but on whether the pure spirit of the Weimar Constitution… shall be installed in the presidential palace.”

Even more grotesque was the behaviour of the trade unions. The ADGB (the main trade union federation) actually dissociated itself from the SPD three and a half months before Hitler seized power, hoping to demonstrate its “reliability” to the new order. They marched under the swastika on May 1, 1933. The Nazis rewarded this servility on May 2 by storming union offices, arresting and murdering union leaders, and dissolving the ADGB entirely.

The Communist Party of Germany was founded in direct response to the SPD’s betrayal. It had millions of members and supporters, its own armed Red Front defence organisations, and a working class willing to fight. But under Stalin’s domination of the Communist International, the KPD pursued a line of suicidal ultra-leftism, the theory of “social fascism.” This theory held that Social Democracy and fascism were not opposites but “twins” — that the SPD was itself “social fascist,” and that the main enemy was not Hitler but the SPD. On this basis, the KPD refused any united action with SPD workers against the Nazis. It even made common cause with the Nazis on occasion, supporting a Nazi-initiated referendum in 1931 to bring down the SPD-led Prussian state government. All the while, it consoled its demoralised members with the slogan: “Nach Hitler, kommen wir” “After Hitler, it’s our turn” the grotesque fantasy that Hitler’s regime would quickly collapse and the Communist revolution would follow.

The Weimar Republic and the pseudo-lefts: Then and Now

To understand the pseudo-left’s stance towards the Weimar Republic, we first need to identify what truly led to its downfall. The Weimar Republic didn’t perish due to internal contradictions or the overwhelming rise of fascism. Instead, it was dismantled by the organised workers’ movement, specifically by its leadership. This is the key lesson that the pseudo-left today tries hard to conceal.

The SPD, representing the German working class, showed its true colours with its betrayal in November 1918. Instead of leading the revolutionary effort—which aimed to seize state power and expropriate capital—it chose to defend the existing bourgeois order. The party was responsible for the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, suppressed workers’ councils, and upheld the Junker officer caste and state structure that, fifteen years later, helped facilitate Hitler’s rise. As noted, “the Social Democratic Party… sided with the bourgeois order in 1914 and became the main supporter of the bourgeois state in the Weimar Republic.” In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the SPD backed Brüning’s emergency decrees, which gradually dismantled democratic rights and undermined the working class, thereby paving the way for Hitler rather than resisting him.

The devastating role of Stalinism followed. The KPD, controlled by Stalin through the Comintern, dismissed Trotsky’s urgent plea for a united front of Communist and Social Democratic workers against the Nazis. Instead, it adopted the destructive “social fascism” thesis, claiming that the SPD was equivalent to fascism and that there was no real difference between bourgeois democracy and fascist dictatorship. This was not just a tactical error but a politically damaging disorientation that froze the German working class, separated Communist workers from Social Democratic workers, and at times even led the KPD to collaborate with the Nazis against the SPD, such as in the 1931 Prussian referendum. Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 occurred without organised resistance from the German working class, despite the SPD and KPD each having millions of members and their own armed units. This catastrophe proved Trotsky’s view that the Communist International was no longer a revolutionary force and that the Fourth International needed to be established.

The Frankfurt School

This reveals the connection to the modern pseudo-left. The Frankfurt School—comprising Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin—originated directly from the confusion following Germany’s defeat. Notably, “Horkheimer and Adorno do not mention [the role of Social Democracy and Stalinism] once and avoid discussing Stalinism in all their other works.” This silence was intentional. The Frankfurt School crafted a comprehensive theoretical framework—covering Critical Theory, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and the theory of the “authoritarian personality”—which attributed fascism to mass psychology, the irrationality of the masses, and the failures of the “Enlightenment,” largely ignoring the political betrayals by the SPD and the Comintern.

Why is this important? By framing the crisis of revolutionary leadership as the main explanation, the Frankfurt School adopted a different political stance: moving away from building a revolutionary Marxist party rooted in the working class, and instead emphasising cultural criticism, identity politics, and pressure on bourgeois institutions. This shift lies at the heart of the modern pseudo-left, as David North details in ‘The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism, and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left.’ The Frankfurt School’s move away from viewing the working class as the revolutionary agent—to focusing on the “critical intellectual” and later prioritising racial, gender, and cultural issues—set the stage for all that now claims to be ‘left,’ but fails to challenge capitalism.

The Contemporary Pseudo-Left

The contrast between the 1930s and today is more than superficial; it’s structural. With the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) now Germany’s second-largest party, pseudo-left groups like Marx 21, the SAV, and RIO are, in a modified form, repeating the political crimes that facilitated Hitler’s rise. Marx 21, influenced by Tony Cliff’s International Socialist Tendency, cynically invokes Trotsky’s “revolver-poison” analogy to justify demanding that the bourgeois state ban the AfD, directly contradicting Trotsky’s actual stance. Trotsky opposed the SPD’s reliance on the Weimar state and police to fight fascism, understanding that the state was not neutral but filled with reactionary elements. History confirmed this: it was Hindenburg, the Reichswehr, big business, and the judiciary—all institutions the SPD appealed to for protection—that implemented Hitler’s appointment. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (the Office for the Protection of the Constitution) was, until recently, led by fascist Hans-Georg Maassen, who secretly met with AfD representatives. Calling on this agency to defend democracy from fascism is the twenty-first-century equivalent of the SPD crying “Help! Intervene!” to the Weimar state.

The SAV, descended from the British Militant Tendency, tends to praise the trade union bureaucracy as a defender against the right and envisions a Left Party–SPD–Green coalition as a “democratic alternative” to the AfD. Yet, as Germany’s ruling coalition, the SPD and Greens have carried out the AfD’s refugee deportation policies, approved the largest war budget since WWII, and frequently collaborated with the AfD to normalise its presence in parliament. At the same time, trade unions have agreed to austerity measures with the government and corporations. The SAV’s approach isn’t aimed at “pushing them left” but at aligning working-class frustration with the very forces responsible for it.

RIO, associated with the Morenoite Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International, claims to support a “united front” and “anti-capitalism from below.” In reality, it partners with the SPD, Greens, trade unions, and Fridays for Future. This strategy conflicts with Trotsky’s original concept of the united front, which was meant to awaken workers from Social Democratic stagnation and rally them around a revolutionary program. Conversely, RIO’s “front” seems designed to align workers with bourgeois parties, often employing radical rhetoric.

What unites these trends, both historically and socially, is their class origin. The Frankfurt School consisted of segments of the bourgeois intelligentsia that had forsaken the working class. Currently, the pseudo-left champions privileged middle-class groups—such as academics, NGO workers, and trade union bureaucrats—who benefit from the current system enough to be wary of a genuine socialist revolution. Their emphasis on identity politics, state intervention, and parliamentary tactics reflects their social standing. Just as the KPD’s “social fascism” idea was driven more by the needs of Moscow’s bureaucracy than the interests of German workers, today’s pseudo-left ideology mirrors the interests of a social class with a very different relationship to capital than that of the working class.

Why Does a Marxist historiography Matter Today

The fall of the Weimar Republic was not due to democracy being fragile, mass irrationality, or fascism being an inevitable historical force. Instead, it collapsed because the organised workers’ movement was led by parties — one reformist, one Stalinist — that, for their own class-based reasons, refused to unite the working class in a revolutionary fight against capitalism. The key takeaway is not “defend liberal democracy” or “vote for the lesser evil,” but that capitalism’s crises lead to fascism.

Only revolutionary working-class mobilisation under genuine Marxist leadership can prevent this. This is the core task of the Fourth International — both then and now. In short, Hoyer’s attempt to portray Weimar as a democratic success is ultimately a liberal ideological exercise. It aims to extract lessons about defending “liberal democracy” against modern populism, rather than the true historical lesson that, without a revolutionary Marxist party leading the working class to power, capitalism’s crises breed fascism. Trotsky’s lesson remains highly relevant today.

The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class by Donny Gluckstein Haymarket Books 26 July 2012

April 20, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“Fascism is the political punishment meted out to the working class for the squandering of opportunities to overthrow the capitalist system”

Leon Trotsky

“If, against all expectations, Germany finds itself in a difficult situation, then she can be sure that the Soviet people will come to Germany’s aid and will not allow Germany to be strangled. The Soviet Union wants to see a strong Germany, and we will not allow Germany to be thrown to the ground.”

Joseph Stalin[1]

“All these things are still apparent today. You Americans can see for yourselves how impossible it is to feed the German people from the German soil itself. From the viewpoint of a historian’s perspective, one could say that Hitler would never have arisen if the Allies had not treated Germany so poorly. Justice Jackson said so himself. Today, things are more impossible than ever. The East has been taken away from Germany – in other words, hunger created Hitler, and paradoxically, Hitler created still greater hunger.”

Hans Frank[2]

“Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, but it may also be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis. Still, there is much evidence that Germany’s anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler’s early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide.”

Howard Zinn[3]

It is a little surprising that a book of this significance has been so little reviewed. In fact, I would go as far as to say it has been completely ignored by the capitalist media. This is not surprising given that it purports to be a Marxist analysis of the rise of fascism in Germany and examines the struggles of the working class.

Gluckstein’s The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class is well-written and researched. It addresses a vital question for those interested in what social forces produced Nazism, and how the global working class should respond. This is not merely an academic debate. The answers determine whether workers adopt an independent socialist strategy or are diverted into alliances that preserve capitalism and open the road to mass fascism and barbarism. Gluckstein’s book is a significant attempt to understand the rise of fascism from the standpoint of the materialist conception of history. The reader needs to locate fascism in the development of capitalist class relations, not as an aberrant moral failing or solely a product of culture.

Gluckstein is not an economic historian, but his book does show that structural economic crisis and the disintegration of ruling-class authority created the conditions for the rise of the fascists. Marxist analysis explains Nazism as a political instrument forged out of definite class needs and crisis tendencies within German and world capitalism. Adam Tooze’s economic study, The Wages of Destruction, demonstrates how the Nazi project was shaped by the drive of German capital to overcome its relative decline and secure raw materials, markets and strategic position—in short, the connection of militarism, imperialism and genocide to economic aims.

In the introduction to his book, which is well worth reading, Tooze puts forward his basic thesis: “The originality of National Socialism was that rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilise the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its own imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East, it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States…. The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalised as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today.”[4] As Tooze points out, the German ruling class, fragmented and terrified by mass working-class struggles, turned to the far right as a means of defending property, reimposing discipline and preparing for future imperialist war aims.

Gluckstein’s work tends to emphasise aspects of this history; however, not being a classical Marxist is a handicap. A Marxist critique would dig deeper. It needs to be explained how capitalist reorganisation, imperial rivalries and the political sclerosis of working-class leadership created the objective basis for Nazism—and why only a revolutionary alternative rooted in working-class independence could have prevented it.

The political defeat of the German working class was not a result of workers’ “backwardness” alone but of the collapse and betrayal of their organisations: Social Democracy’s subordination to bourgeois parliamentary politics and Stalinism’s bureaucratic compromises and purges left workers without revolutionary leadership. The trade-union bureaucracy and social-democratic leaderships, by integrating into the state apparatus and policing class discipline, blocked independent mass action. As Trotsky warned, the bureaucratized unions tend to “grow together” with state power and capital—creating a political vacuum that fascist movements exploit.

Nazism fused older anti-Jewish prejudices with virulent anti-Bolshevism to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie and small sections of the working class against organised labour and socialism. It should be noted that the genocidal culmination—the Holocaust—cannot be divorced from the imperial-colonial aims of the Nazi regime and its need to smash the labour movement and seize “Lebensraum” in the East (Imperialism and the political economy of the Holocaust). Ideology mattered—but ideology itself was shaped and harnessed to class strategy.

Donny Gluckstein comes from a political milieu associated with the Lambertist tradition; historically, this current has tended toward nationalist and economistic deviations from the Trotskyist method. The Lambertist milieu and the POID‑derived formations trace their politics to Pierre Lambert’s line. Historically, Lambertism emerged as a response to the crisis of the post‑war left: a stress on trade‑union work, factory embedding, and the construction of broad “workers’ parties.” But as documented in the history of the French PCI/OCI, Lambert’s priorities—rooted in unions and seeking broad alliances—produced persistent tendencies toward centrism, accommodation to union bureaucracies, and political compromises that diluted a Leninist program.[5]

Many on the pseudo left tend to treat Nazism primarily as a quasi-irrational cultural or psychological phenomenon, divorced from capitalist interests. These risks mystify its social roots and underestimating the conscious role played by industrialists, financiers and the military bureaucracy in bringing Hitler to power.

Gluckstein’s book came under sustained attack primarily from his fellow pseudo-lefts, and two are worth mentioning. Tom Cord’s article in Fighting Talk, issue 23, addresses fascism as a political phenomenon that the left must confront. His piece raises useful questions about the social roots of far‑right movements and the failures of centrist parties. However, Cord’s article, aside from being a right-wing attack on Gluckstein, suffers from theoretical limits that require correction. The starting point of a genuinely revolutionary analysis must be the materialist method: ideas and movements are rooted in social relations and the class interests that those relations express. Any assessment of Nazism that abstracts from the objective interests and political role of German capitalism will be incomplete and in danger of demagogy, which is precisely the tone and content of Ford’s review of Gluckstein’s book.[6] I am unable to find any reply by Gluckstein regarding Cord’s attack on his book.

The “debate” between German Marxist Horst Haenisch and Donny Gluckstein was a far more substantial matter than Cord’s somewhat simplistic riposte. The debate took place through a series of written exchanges in the journal International Socialism between 2018 and 2019. The debate over whether the Holocaust is a particular specificity to Nazism or a universal manifestation of broader modern imperialism) was at the heart of this discussion. The answer to this conundrum can be found in the realm of dialectics. Particular forms emerge out of universal tendencies: the Holocaust must be understood as both an extreme, historically specific manifestation and as rooted in broader processes. On the universal level, capitalist imperialism, racial ideologies developed in colonialism, and the social crises of a decaying capitalism create conditions in which genocidal solutions become thinkable and implementable. The reader should note that the racialist ideology of the Nazis was the most extreme expression of a wider European and global tradition of colonial, racial pseudo-science and political violence.

Who are the actors?

Donny Gluckstein is a historian associated with the British SWP milieu whose work addresses fascism, class struggle and working‑class resistance. His writings often emphasise political and cultural factors alongside social causes. The British SWP evolved from the revolutionary left and developed into a large extra‑parliamentary organisation; over decades, critics on the Marxist left have charged it with political adaptation to trade‑union and extra‑parliamentary alliances, opportunist united‑front practices, and failures to break decisively with reformist perspectives.

Horst Haenisch is a contemporary German author and scholar associated with German Marxist historiography. He is best known for his 2017 book “Fascism and the Holocaust: Attempt at an Explanation”.

Haenisch’s critique — insofar as it targeted excessive intellectualism, opportunism or sectarianism — has a legitimate core if you believe that Haenisch insists the party must be in organic relation to workers’ struggles. But when such critiques abandon dialectical analysis or slide into petty‑bourgeois rejection of theory, they become politically harmful. The famous debate between Trotsky and James Burnham is relevant to this situation. Trotsky warned that anti‑dialectical tendencies among intellectuals often lead them to inconsistent politics, saying, “The ‘petty-bourgeois opposition’ is fleeing from the hard reality of the world struggle into the ivory tower of abstract ‘reason’. James Burnham’s famous rejection of dialectics in the 1939 debate became a vehicle for abandoning working‑class analysis and led to opportunist conclusions. Burnham ended his days as a right-wing mouthpiece for capitalism.

To summarise Haenisch’s position, he believed the Holocaust was a unique event that was not simply the fault of the ruling class. He claims it is the only Nazi project that falls into the category of the “primacy of politics” over economics.

According to Google’s artificial intelligence, he uses the concept of Bonapartism to describe the Nazi state’s relative autonomy, suggesting the Nazi party acted like a “Praetorian Guard” that could pursue its own racist fantasies independently of immediate capitalist needs. He distinguishes Nazi antisemitism from general racism, characterising it as a deadly “antisemitism of reason” driven by middle-class competition for professional positions.

Readers should ask themselves the relevant methodological question: do arguments rest on a concrete, historically grounded analysis of class relations and state form — a materialist-dialectical determination — or on impressions, eclecticism or petty‑bourgeois moralising that detach ideas from class reality? When theory becomes a matter of rhetorical flourishes or pragmatism, it ceases to serve proletarian politics and becomes a barrier to building working‑class independence.

Intentionalism versus structuralism

The debate between Gluckstein and Haenisch, to put it simplistically, was over two contending historiographical schools of thought which currently dominate historiography regarding the rise of fascism and the Holocaust.

The intentionalist school emphasises decisions and individuals—most prominently Hitler and top Nazi leaders—as the causal centre. Structuralist/functionalist accounts emphasise impersonal social structures, administrative routines and systemic pressures that produced genocidal outcomes without requiring a single master plan. To put it simply, one is relatively close to a Marxist historiography, the other is not.

Do agency and leadership matter: Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler and the Nazi leadership were decisive agents who gave ideological content, legitimacy and directives that escalated persecution to extermination. This move towards extermination appeared at The Wannsee Conference (Berlin, January 20, 1942). It was a high‑level administrative meeting of senior Nazi officials that consolidated and coordinated the implementation of the regime’s policy of mass murder of Jews—what came to be called the “Final Solution.” Far from a sudden, isolated act of criminality, Wannsee formalised a process already rooted in the racist, expansionist and economic policies of the Nazi state that flowed from the contradictions of imperialist capitalism and Germany’s drive for living space in the East.

Structural conditions enabled and shaped those decisions: the bureaucratic-capitalist state, the logic of war and colonisation, the collaboration of local administrations, and the preexisting racism of European imperialism created the technical and social capacity to carry out mass murder.

As Nick Beams argues, if one considers the question very narrowly, as we have noted, then it is easy to show that the mass murder of the Jews ran counter to the immediate economic and military interests of German imperialism. But that is the problem—the narrow perspective through which the issue is viewed. If we widen the horizon, then the underlying interests come into view. The Holocaust arose out of the war against the Soviet Union and the plans of German imperialism for the domination of Europe. The German capital had handed over the reins of power to the Nazis to carry out these tasks. To be sure, as occurred before the war, some of their actions conflicted with the immediate short-term interests of German business—although there is no record of opposition from within the German ruling elites to the mass murder of the Jews—but there was a direct coincidence between the drive of the Nazis for Lebensraum in the East and the interests and needs of German imperialism.[7]

Thus, the explanation is neither “Hitler did it alone” nor “structural forces made individuals irrelevant.” Rather, structural pressures channel and constrain agency; individuals choose within those constraints, and those choices can be decisive. The dialectical relationship between structure and agency is central.

To finish one question the reader should ask is whether this is just a historical debate or whether it helps us understand contemporary politics. Reducing the Holocaust to a metaphysical “evil” or to merely psychological explanations dissolves political responsibility and obscures the social origins of mass barbarism. Conversely, purely structural reductionism that denies conscious decision-making can excuse perpetrators as mere cogs. Both tendencies are politically dangerous and historically inadequate.

Understanding the Holocaust as an outcome of capitalist crisis, imperial rivalry and the betrayal and destruction of workers’ movements reveals the crucial lesson emphasised by Trotsky: the absence of an independent, politically conscious revolutionary leadership permits the rise of barbaric counterrevolutions. Stalinism’s betrayal and the defeats of the workers’ movement in the interwar period were decisive in opening the road to Nazism.

As the global economy careens into a new period of crisis, far-right and explicitly fascist parties are gaining ground across Europe. The urgency of preventing a resurgence of fascism in the twenty-first century makes it more necessary than ever to understand the political and social context of the Nazis’ ascent to power in Germany.

I don’t usually end a review with an advert, but readers of this article would be advised to read two books. The first being Why Are They Back?: Historical falsification, political conspiracy and the return of fascism in Germany by Christoph Vandreier and secondly, Where is America Going -David North

Notes

German Marxism and the Holocaust-(Summer 2018) www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/gluckstein/2018/xx/holocaust.html

Imperialism and the political economy of the Holocaust-Nick Beams-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/holo-m12.html

[1] Statement in September 1939, as quoted in “Stalin’s pact with Hitler” in WWII Behind Closed Doors at PBS http://www.pbs.org/behindcloseddoors/episode-1/ep1_stalins_pact.html Contemporary witnesses/

[2]To Leon Goldensohn, March 16, 1946, from “The Nuremberg Interviews” by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately – History – 2004

[3] Howard Zinn on War (2000), Ch. 21: Just and Unjust War

[4] Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Allen Lane: 2006, 832 pages,

[5] French revisionist Pierre Lambert dies aged 87- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/01/lamb-j21.html

[6] libcom.org/article/class-analysis-afa-review-nazis-capitalism-and-working-class-donny-gluckstein

[7] Marxism and the Holocaust-

Nick Beams

Selling Hitler by Robert Harris. New York: Pantheon Books. First American edition, 1986, 402 pp., $18.95, ISBN 0-394-5533-5.

March 15, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Robert Harris’s Selling Hitler is a well-written and scrupulously researched examination of the “Hitler diaries” forgery. It is a journalistic and fictionalised account of the 1980s forgery case. It raises important questions about ideology, politics, culture and the circulation of false narratives about fascism.

In his review of the book, H. Keith Thompson makes the following point: “The quantities of Third-Reich-related forgeries in circulation can generally be divided into two categories. First, there are the forgeries made by the World War II Allies, and by various international pressure groups, for propaganda purposes, such as the masses of faked material introduced by the Allies at their various postwar “trials” of defeated Axis adherents, e.g., the Russian “evidence” concerning the Katyn Massacre. Most forgeries in the second category (documents, uniforms, medals, weapons and other memorabilia) are merely attempts to make money.”[1]

The Hitler Diaries scandal was perhaps the most stupid blunder by a media outlet. In 1983, the German magazine Stern paid 9 million Deutsche Marks for the “discovery,” only for forensic tests on the ink and paper to reveal they contained chemicals not available during WWII. The so-called handwriting experts brought in to validate the diaries were nothing of the sort. As Harris relates, “Hilton’s report, couched in five pages of professional gobbledy-gook, was conclusive. But, based as it was on the assumption that all the documents he had been given for comparison were authentic, it was also completely wrong…they were all forged by Kujau.”

The book details how the small-time forger, Konrad Kujau, managed to create and sell over 50 fake diaries to a gullible German journalist, Gerd Heidemann, of the magazine Stern. The story reached global headlines in April 1983 when Stern offered to sell the diaries for a substantial sum (around $4 million at the time), and major publications, including The Sunday Times and Newsweek, became embroiled in authenticating and publishing excerpts.

The scam successfully fooled many reputable historians and media executives, who were blinded by the prospect of fame, money, and a historical scoop that could alter perceptions of the Third Reich. The hoax was exposed just a week later when forensic tests proved the diaries were crude forgeries, written on modern paper and with ink that glowed under ultraviolet light.

Harris, while having a journalistic flair and his book reads like a novel, has only a limited understanding of the class interests involved in the story. How did cultural authority, market pressures and political currents combine to produce credence for a lie?. The forgery should be placed in the wider history of political myth-making about Nazism, the post-war rehabilitation of German militarism, and the role of intellectuals in legitimising reactionary narratives.

Enter Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003), who was described as the historian who caused the most trouble. Roper was an Englishman who had built a career on his book, The Last Days of Hitler, but who was in fact a specialist in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Harris notes: “He was not a German scholar. He was not fluent in the language and had admitted as much in a review of Mein Kampf published a decade earlier: “I do not read German,” he confessed, “with great ease or pleasure.” Written in an archaic script, impenetrable to most Germans, the diaries might as well have been composed of Egyptian hieroglyphics for all the sense Trevor-Roper could make of them. He had to rely on the Stern men for translation. The conversation was entirely in English”.

Hugh Trevor‑Roper was one of the most prominent English historians of the mid-20th century. He rose to public prominence through scholarly work on early modern Britain and Nazi Germany, serving as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and as a public intellectual whose judgments carried great weight in the bourgeois media and academic establishment. His career—most famously marked by the episode of the forged “Hitler Diaries” in 1983—illustrates key lessons about the social basis of historical authority, the limits of individualist scholarship under capitalism, and the political stakes of historiography.

Trevor‑Roper’s name became synonymous with the controversy when he initially authenticated material presented as Hitler’s diaries, a judgment later shown to be wrong when forensic evidence proved the texts to be modern forgeries. That mistake was not merely a personal lapse, for it reflected the institutional pressures and prestige relations in which a bourgeois historian operates. The eagerness of major newspapers and magazines to publish sensational claims, and the weight accorded to a single eminent expert’s word, produced a social environment in which haste could substitute for collective, methodical verification.

The unchecked authority given to persons like Trevor‑Roper often rests as much on social position and institutional prestige as on methodical, collective inquiry. The careers of such figures illustrate how bourgeois historiography can serve ideological functions, to legitimate national myths, to placate ruling‑class anxieties, or to manage memories of criminal regimes in ways compatible with present political needs.

Trevor‑Roper’s mistake thus demonstrates a dialectical relation: individual fallibility and institutional tendencies interpenetrate. The scandal exposed contradictions—authority versus truth, spectacle versus method—that are inherent in bourgeois cultural life.

Trevor Roper’s scholarship indeed made significant historiographical contributions; his errors do not nullify all of his work. But a historical materialist appraisal must treat individual scholars as social products: their interpretations reflect the material and institutional contexts in which they live and work. The proper response to episodes like the Hitler Diaries is not merely to censure but to insist on strengthening collective, methodical historical practice grounded in material evidence and social analysis.

In sum, the Hugh Trevor-Roper affair is a cautionary tale: under capitalism, historiography is vulnerable to commodification, to authority concentrated among social elites, and to ideological manipulation. The remedy is not reliance on isolated historians but the development of democratic, scientifically disciplined historical practice.

[1] Selling Hitler-A Review By H. Keith Thompson ∙ December 1, 1986-codoh.com/library/document/selling-hitler/

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone (Penguin). £12.99

January 29, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone is a useful if limited account of how and why the Nazi’s perpetrated the murder of six million jews. Reading Stone’s book while a genocide takes place in Gaza and Trump’s fascist government carries out state-sponsored murders is a brutal reminder that fascism is on the rise again and did not end with the Nazi’s Holocaust.

Stone is the director of the Royal Holloway’s Holocaust Research Institute in London. He is the author of over 20 books, including Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and The Liberation of the Camps. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023), Concentration Camps: A Short History (2017), and Histories of the Holocaust (2010).

Stone’s book has a subtitle called ‘The Unfinished History,’ which probably alludes to the number of books on or about the Holocaust, which is approaching 40,000. But as the Marxist writer David North says:

“Here we encounter a terrible problem: For all that has been said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure event. A vast amount of empirical data about the Holocaust has indeed been collected. We possess detailed information about how the Nazis organised and executed their “Final Solution,” the murder of six million European Jews. And yet the issues that are central to an understanding of the Holocaust—its historical origins, political causes and, finally, its place in the history of the twentieth century—have, with very few exceptions, been dealt with poorly. This is, really, an intolerable state of affairs. The one basic question raised by the Holocaust, “Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most difficult to obtain an answer.”[1]

It must be said that Stone gives a good go at answering North’s question. Stone’s book provides a “brisk, compelling and scholarly” account that seeks to supplement the vast historiography already in place. Stone argues against the historiography that the Holocaust was exclusively a German project, highlighting the extensive collaboration and independent murders from other European nations like Romania and France.

While accepting the idea that the Holocaust was an “industrial genocide” taking place at the main concentration camps, Stone supplements this analysis with other shocking facts that millions were killed elsewhere and by different methods, too. The “Holocaust by bullets” was responsible for 1.5 million Jewish deaths between late 1941 and the spring of 1942. In late 1944, as the Russian army advanced westwards towards Germany, the Nazis evacuated the camps. They forced the 750,000 or so surviving Jewish inmates onto “death marches”, sometimes over vast distances in the winter. This claimed another 250,000 victims, often shot by SS guards when they collapsed and could no longer walk.

Ideology

Stone’s examination of Nazi ideology is to be welcomed. He argues that for too long, Nazi ideology has been downplayed. Stone is critical of the post-war tendency to deny any political coherence to the Nazis’ ideas. He believes that Nazi ideology represented a radicalisation of ruling class ideas of nationalism, imperialism and race.

He says that the Nazis didn’t have a developed programme for genocide worked out in advance. But he says we need to take seriously their ideological motivation, which always harboured a genocidal potential capable of being unleashed under certain circumstances.

While Stone does not accept the right-wing theory that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it defies a rational explanation, he pays little attention to the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. In other words, Stone tends to downplay Marxist historians’ attempt to use historical science and political theory to understand the Holocaust.

Although Stone uses a large number of historians to examine Nazi ideology, he mostly ignores any Marxist-based historiography. A simple reading of the writings of Leon Trotsky or Abraham Leon, to name just two Marxists, would give a historian a far deeper insight into the rise of fascism and of Nazi Ideology.[2]

Stone’s use of Ernst Bloch is problematic to say the least. Bloch was not a classical Marxist. Bloch (1885–1977) occupies a complex position in Marxist thought. He is best known for his attempt to retrieve utopian hope as an element of Marxist theory—most famously in The Principle of Hope—insisting that human longing and anticipatory consciousness matter for politics. From the standpoint of classical Marxism and the continuity of the Fourth International, Bloch’s contribution must be assessed dialectically: what in his work advances the materialist understanding of history, and what tendencies lead away from the independent revolutionary politics of the working class?

Bloch insisted that utopian impulses—aspirations, anticipations, images of a better world—are not mere illusions but social phenomena rooted in objective contradictions. He sought to recuperate the emotional and imaginative dimensions of social life that orthodox economic or “vulgar” readings of Marxism can marginalise. This emphasis corresponds to Marxism’s insistence that human consciousness is shaped by social being; yet classical Marxism places primary explanatory weight on the development of the productive forces and class relations as the motive forces of history. Bloch’s insistence on hope supplements but must not displace the materialist analysis of how objective conditions—production, class struggle, political institutions—generate revolutionary possibilities. To say that Bloch was “unusually” the only Marxist to take fascism seriously is not only wrong but is a political lie.

Another writer missing from Stone’s work is Konrad Heiden.[3] Heiden’s biography of Hitler is worth reading. Heiden’s insight into Hitler’s anti-Semitism is worth an extensive examination.

According to Heiden, “Hitler hated the whole great sphere of human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in this process of production. All his life, the workers were for him a picture of horror, a dismal, gruesome mass … everything which he later said from the speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies.

Heiden explains Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from his encounters with the labour movement. It was among the workers that Hitler first came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that many Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light dawned on him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. … The labour movement did not repel him because Jews led it[4]The Jews repelled him because they led the labour movement. Heiden concluded, “It was not Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism. ”Stone has profited intellectually from a careful study of Heiden’s biography of Hitler.

Given that Stone has conducted extensive historiographical work, he has written 20 books on or about the Holocaust; his conclusions on how to fight modern-day genocide and the rise of fascism are troubling, to say the least. He writes, “The fact is that Holocaust education goes out of the window if people feel their life chances are narrowing; nothing in the end can stop people from supporting these dark forces in times of crisis.”

This is extraordinarily fatalistic. The goal is not merely to “know” the Holocaust as an isolated tragedy, but to understand its roots in class, imperialism and political defeat—and to transform that understanding into organised political action to build the international socialist movement that can prevent future barbarism. From a Marxist standpoint, Stone’s empirical and historiographical contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Marxism begins with the materialist method: social phenomena, including ideologies and mass crimes, are rooted in concrete material relations—class structures, property relations, state formation and the competitive dynamics of imperialism. The destruction of mass working-class political organisations left the proletariat unable to interpose itself as an independent social force; this political vacuum was decisive.

[1] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[2]wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Struggle_Against_Fascism_in_Germany

[3]wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Heiden

[4] Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944)

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959

December 27, 2025January 11, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

(This article is dedicated to the memory of Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler 1956–2025: Trotskyist and fighter for the working class)

Emil: Are your people well off?

Professor: I don’t really know. Nobody ever talks about money.

Emil: Then I expect you have plenty.

Dialogue from Emil and the Detectives

“It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie, with its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the power of the state to lie in the hands of a feudal bureaucratic class as late as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to take power into its own hands only when the material foundations of German culture began to fall to pieces.”

Leon Trotsky: Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art

The story of Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives illuminates Germany in the 1920s, before German culture began to fall to Pieces under the death blow of Fascism. Published in 1929 and in English in 1931, Kästner would have been politically aware enough to know that the book and himself were living on borrowed time. While the Nazis burned his books, he, however, did not suffer the same fate despite being interviewed by the Gestapo twice.

There are many reasons why adults return to their childhood books. For some, it is a comfort read or just the pure joy of reading. Emil and the Detectives was one of my first reads as a child. Not sure why I was drawn to it, why I chose a foreign author rather than a British one, we will never know. I borrowed it from my school library because it wasn’t on the school reading curriculum. I want to say that I was aware of its political overtones, but I was drawn to it by chance, as I was not yet politically conscious of the world around me, which would arrive when I reached sixteen. Nevertheless, the book will always evoke fond childhood memories.

Perhaps because children and adults, for that matter, face a return to the darkness that fell on Europe with the rise of fascism, that Emil and the Detectives still resonates today. It makes sense that a group of kids from 1929 would represent society’s underdogs, at risk from the forces of fascism, not only in Germany but in America, too.

The text from the 1931 translation by Margaret Goldsmith gives a flavour of the children’s class consciousness in Kastner’s book: “I don’t understand that at all,” little Tuesday declared. “How can I steal what already belongs to me? What’s mine is mine, even if it’s in a stranger’s pocket! ”These things are difficult to understand,” the professor expounded. “Morally, you might be in the right. But the law will find you guilty all the same. Even some grown-ups don’t really understand these things, but they are a fact. Or this dialogue

Emil: Are your people well off? Professor: I don’t really know. Nobody ever talks about money. Emil: Then I expect you have plenty. ”[1]

As Uma Krishnaswami correctly writes, “Emil and the Detectives positions itself squarely on the side of ordinary people and against oppression meted out by the powerful. When a suspicious-looking man, Herr Grundeis, steals the money Emil Tischbein’s mother gave him, young Emil doesn’t go to the police. Instead, he dashes off to find the thief. In the process, the boy sleuth gathers a motley band of friends, including the unforgettable Pony Hütchen and, of course, the endearing Little Tuesday, without whose faithful vigilance the plan could not unfold. Naturally, the kids are victorious in the end.”[2]

Why read Kästner Now

Emil’s story raises perennial questions: how childhood experience is shaped by class, how working-class solidarity takes root in everyday life, and how the state and the market shape civic trust. Studying such literature trains workers and students to read cultural texts as expressions of material conditions.

So Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1929) is best read not simply as a children’s adventure but as a social document of the late Weimar Republic: a work that reflects class contrasts, urban life, and the moral questions facing youth in a capitalist society. Again, for workers and students, Kästner offers an accessible entry point into how literature can both reflect social conditions and contribute to political education. For a political framing of Kästner’s broader milieu and politics.[3]

Erich Kästner’s stories, poems and satires—written amid the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic—are rich in social observation: they identify petty‑bourgeois anxieties, the erosion of democratic habits, the everyday humiliations of children and workers, and the moral cowardice of elites. Reading Kästner in the workplace helps workers develop a literary sensibility while equipping them to connect cultural forms to concrete political tasks: building class consciousness, exposing bourgeois ideology, and preparing collective struggle.

One of Kastner’s most crucial works is Fabian or Going to the Dogs. As Bernd Reinhardt perceptively writes, “ Fabian has certain autobiographical traits and who more than once in his literary work blames ‘stupidity’ for social ills, referring to dumb Nazis, stupid Germans, and so on. The voiceover that features from time to time in the film quotes a passage from the novel where the fights between Nazis and Communists are compared to dancehall brawls. Like many other intellectuals, Kästner underestimated the danger of the Nazi movement. After the war, he admitted that they should have been fought earlier, because “threatening dictatorships can only be fought before they have taken power.”[4]

About the Author

Erich Kästner (1899–1974), a pacifist and satirist whose works were famously burned by the Nazis, though Emil and the Detectives was initially spared due to its popularity.

[1] Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959

[2] Why You Should Read (or Reread) Emil and the Detectives-www.umakrishnaswami.com/blog/why-you-should-read-or-reread-emil-and-the-detectives

[3] See the WSWS discussion of Kästner’s Fabian work and its relation to the Weimar social crisis, on Fabian and the dangers of the 1930s.

[4] German Film Award in Silver for Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/13/fabi-n13.html

The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History-By Laurence Rees Public Affairs, 2025

June 29, 2025 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

We meet ordinary Germans who fell in line with a regime that promised them peace and prosperity. Interviewed decades after the destruction of the Third Reich, some still looked back wistfully to the days before the war. “You saw the unemployed disappearing from the streets,” recalled Erna Krantz from Bavaria. “There was order and discipline … It was, I thought, a better time”.

Laurence Rees

The fury of Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests behind the motives. Who can analyse the motives and the interests behind the enormities of Auschwitz? We are confronted here by a vast and ominous mystery of the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify humanity.

Isaac Deutscher-

The most appropriate, indeed the only relevant, general proper name for the Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust is “Germans.” They were Germans acting in the name of Germany and its highly popular leader, Adolf Hitler.

Daniel Goldhagen

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

The Nazi Mind by the writer, historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees has been described as a “groundbreaking narrative history” of the motivations and mentalities behind the Nazis and their supporters. As will be seen in this critical review it is essentially a rehash of his previous histography that not only downplays the social and economic and political forces at play in the Nazis rise to power but compliments Daniel Goldhagen’s theoretical premise that “Ordinary Germans” were to blame for the rise of German fascism and the subsequent murder of six million jews.[1]

Rees uses previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system to try and gain insight in to the psychological and social composition of the Nazis.

But as this perspective document elaborates “ Nazism was an expression of the most reactionary and brutal tendencies of German capitalism. That is the key to understanding it. Hitler’s rise from a Viennese homeless shelter and the trenches of World War I to becoming a megalomaniacal dictator cannot be explained by the social composition and psychology of his supporters. He owed his power to the ruling elite, which placed him at the head of the state. The millions that Thyssen, Krupp, Flick and other industrial magnates donated to the NSDAP, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by Hindenburg, the symbolic figurehead of the army, and finally the agreement of all the bourgeois parties to the Enabling Act are eloquent testimony to the fact that the vast majority of the ruling elite had placed themselves behind Hitler when all other mechanisms to suppress the working class had failed.

The members of the National Socialist movement originated, at least up to its seizure of power, almost exclusively from the middle classes. It recruited from among artisans, peddlers, the civil employees and peasants, whom the war, inflation and crisis had robbed of any faith in democratic parliamentarianism and who longed for order and an iron fist. At the head of the movement were officers and NCOs from the old army, who could not reconcile themselves to Germany’s defeat in World War I. However, the programme of the National Socialist movement was anything but petty bourgeois. It translated the basic needs of German imperialism into the language of mythology and racial theory. The dream of a “thousand-year Reich” and the hunger for “Lebensraum (living space) in the East” expressed the expansionist urge of German capital, whose dynamic productive forces were constricted by Europe’s closely meshed system of states. Racial hatred provided consolation for the German petty bourgeois in the face of his absolute powerlessness and prepared him for a war of extermination.”[2]

Program and perspective

One of the most notable aspects of Laurence Rees’s entire body of work, and that can be said of most historians writing on this subject, is the cursory attention given to issues of program and perspective. In all his books virtually nothing is said about the actual policies pursued by the Social Democrats and the Stalinists, from the German Communist party which demoralized and split the working class, and cleared the way for the Nazi victory. This disinterest dates back to when Rees wrote to me in 2008, saying “I’m afraid I simply didn’t have space to include a discussion of these issues- fascinating as they are – in the Behind Closed Doors book. I decided to begin the story in 1939 and therefore felt it wouldn’t be helpful to refer back to this history. I’m sure others would have written the book differently, but for better or worse, that’s what I thought was the right way forward. Equally, I’m afraid I can’t go into my views on Trotsky here, as I would need several thousand words to represent my thoughts on that intriguing time properly. I believe my friend, Professor Robert Service, is currently writing a comprehensive biography of Trotsky, so it will be exciting to see his thoughts on the subject.[3]

As I said to Laurence Rees at the time, Robert Service was a regrettable choice of historian to assist him with Trotsky. In 2010, Robert Service wrote a biography of Leon Trotsky.[4] The Marxist writer David North called the biography “character assassination”, writing that Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history, but rather an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.”[5]

While there are some things to like about Rees’s new book unfortunately it is a reflection of the current historical consensus that ordinary Germans played a crucial part in the rise of Nazis and bear indirect responsibility for the murder of six million jews in the Holocaust. Rees not only believes that “ordinary Germans” were to blame but “such horrors occurred not because the Nazis were Germans, but because they were human beings”.

Rees’s belief that all humans, given the chance, can be murdering fascist monsters echoes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, who believed that forces of human evil lurk deep in man’s soul or psyche. They can easily gain ascendancy, as they inevitably must, over the restraining moral influences of civilisation.

As North says, “Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which argued that barbarism is the natural condition of humanity. Release a group of ordinary school boys from the usual restraints of civilisation, and they will, within a few weeks, revert to a state of homicidal savagery. This misanthropic work flowed from the conclusions drawn by Golding from the experiences of the Second World War. “Anyone who moved through those years,” he later wrote, “without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” The popularity of Lord of the Flies reflected the bewilderment and despair provoked by the horrors of World War II. This mood was strengthened by the political relations that arose in the aftermath of the war. It became more challenging to engage in a discussion of the nature of the Third Reich after 1945 than it had been before that time. In the reactionary political environment of the Cold War, it was no longer considered appropriate, especially in the United States, to dwell too seriously on the relation between fascism and modern capitalism.[6]

There is little new about this “new history”. Daniel Goldhagen’s book[7] set the benchmark for this so-called theory. Although a substantial number of historians condemned his book,[8] It still went on to poison the minds of a younger generation, which swallowed hook, line, and sinker his right-wing historiography.

Brandi Lopez, one of those younger historians, wrote in a 2016 essay: “The term ‘ordinary men’ was used throughout several of my sources.” It was about the people that became the leaders of the Nazi party, Hitler’s right hand men as well as the people that became soldiers following his orders blindly and in the end becoming willing executioners. These individuals began as ordinary men, farmers, fathers, and everyday people. In Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.” Goldhagen’s basic thesis is that most German people became willing executioners in the Holocaust. He states, “eliminationist’ hostility toward the Jewish people was so deeply ingrained in Germany”, that’s how the people were willing to do whatever it took to rid the country of them.

In Laurence Rees’s “Auschwitz: A New History”, he mentions Hoss and his story. His family was a simple farming family, and for them to sell their goods, they had to go through a Jewish man. His father and mother ingrained in him that the Jewish man was scamming them out of money, and the reason his family struggled was because of this. Most of the people that were in the sample size said they resembled more of “real Nazis” than an “Ordinary German”. This article explores the theories of the perpetrators, the evidence, and ultimately, the sample size itself. Some graphs display a visual representation of the number of men who identified with a specific occupational rank, such as elite occupations, lower-middle-class workers, etc. [9]

The best refutation of Goldhagen’s “ordinary Germans” is by the Marxist David North, who wrote: The methodological flaw of Professor Goldhagen’s book is indicated in its title: Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Let us stop right there: What is meant by “ordinary Germans?” For those of you who would like a textbook example of an “abstract identity,” this is it. This is a category that is so broad, it is capable of including virtually everyone, except, presumably, Germans of Jewish parentage. What, after all, makes any particular German an “ordinary” one? Is it a hefty girth and a fondness for knockwurst and sauerbraten? Is it blond hair, blue eyes and a penchant for sunbathing in the nude? Is it a talent for abstruse philosophizing and a passion for 300-pound Wagnerian sopranos? A concept built upon such foolish and arbitrary stereotypes cannot be of any scientific value in the cognition of objective reality. But if we should attempt to include in our definition more serious sociological characteristics, the worthlessness of the concept of “ordinariness” becomes immediately apparent. In 1933, German society possessed a complex class structure. Was the “ordinary German” at the time of Hitler’s accession to power a factory worker, a ruined shopkeeper, a demoralized member of the lumpenproletariat, a heavily indebted peasant, an East Prussian land-owning Junker or an industrial magnate?

If all these elements of diverse social strata are to be lumped together as “ordinary Germans,” it simply means that the concept of “ordinariness” does not reflect the internal antagonisms and conflicts of German society as it existed in 1933. What Goldhagen, therefore, offers his readers is not a scientific examination of German society as it really was constituted in 1933, but rather—and it is unpleasant to say this—an idealized portrait of a homogeneous society that uncritically substantiates the Nazi myth of a unified German Volk, defined by race and blood.[10]

Another problem with Rees’s book is his take on the Holocaust; for Rees, the political, social and economic reasons for this terrible event are not important. What is essential for Rees is the psychological reasons behind the Nazis genocide of the Jews. Rees joins a long list of writers and historians for whom the Holocaust is unfathomable and should not even be attempted to be understood.

If a Marxist like Isaac Deutscher- can write “The fury of Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests behind the motives. Who can analyse the motives and the interests behind the enormities of Auschwitz? We are confronted here by a vast and ominous mystery of the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify humanity. “What chance do the rest of us have?.

North answers, “ The situation is rationalised too often with the argument that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it simply defies a rational explanation. If, as Adorno said, it was no longer possible to write poetry after Auschwitz, it was presumably also no longer possible to place much confidence in the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. Historical science and political theory were seen as powerless in the face of such unfathomable evil.[11]

As I mentioned earlier, there are some aspects to appreciate, but overall, Rees’s work perpetuates a very right-wing historiography. As Leon Trotsky once said, “Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners

[2] National Socialism and the Holocaust-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-ger/09.htmlthe theory

[3] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/

[4] Trotsky A Biography-Robert Service-Pan 2010

[5] In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/11/serv-n11.html

[6] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[7] Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Paperback – 1 Feb. 1997 by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

[8] Historians criticise Goldhagen’s book-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1997/11/gold-n17.html

[9] Lopez, Brandi J., “German People and the Holocaust” (2016). Capstone Projects and Master’s Theses. 12. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/caps_thes_all/12

[10] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[11] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html