Читать книгу Militant Anti-Fascism - M. Testa - Страница 10

In 1918, far right nationalism was hardly a new concept in Austria: in the 1880s Georg Ritter von Schönerer, a fervent nationalist who Hitler mentioned in Mein Kampf, was agitating for the unification of the German-speaking peoples. He was both anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic and referred to his compatriots as ‘racial comrades.’ In 1885, Schönerer backed the ‘Linz Programme’, which pledged to ‘eliminate Jewish influence from all spheres of public life’ and later, in 1887, urged that the ‘unproductive and obnoxious behaviour of many Russian Jews’ fleeing the pogroms be confined to the ghettos. Along with his anti-Semitic ultra-nationalism, Schönerer also appeared to sympathise with the worker and middle-class fears of ‘big capitalism’ and urged the nationalization of the Viennese railway as well as a limit on working hours. The socialist Karl Kautsky warned about these groups whose ‘appearance is oppositional and democratic thus appealing to the workers instincts’ as well as their anti-Semitism.1

It seems that wherever this strain of ultra-nationalism appears it is inevitably followed with violent reinforcement. In 1888, after the erroneous reporting of the emperor’s death, Schönerer and a gang of heavies barged into a newspaper’s offices demanding the supplication of the journalists, with unforeseen results: The journalists called in some printers for support and ‘a free fight developed in which the anti-Semites used beer glasses and walking sticks, but after some minutes were put to flight by the printers. Schönerer was put on trial for public violence and forcible entry’.2 It is tempting to view this incident as the first successful militant anti-fascist action.

Previously, in 1887, Schönerer took his followers to the streets to protest a bill that institutionalised the Czech language, thus equating the Teutonic with the Slav. There were violent confrontations between Schönerer’s supporters and the police, and in Graz, one student protester died. When parliament accepted the bill, further violence erupted in the chamber and demonstrations and riots broke out in several cities. By 1913, Schönerer’s political career had passed, but his anti-big business, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic nationalism preceded Hitler’s by several decades, as did the use—albeit more spontaneously in Austria—of political violence to push forward their programme.

In 1918, Austria was no more exempt from the fear of ‘Red Revolution’ than any other country in Europe. Following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the rise of traditional nationalism, anti-clericalism (i.e., Rome) and anti-Semitism, there was also resentment over the Social Democrats’ ‘Red Vienna’ and their political reforms. Following the uprising in Munich in 1919, Bavarian defence units were set up, which forwarded large amounts of weapons to the Austrian Heimwehr, ‘the paramilitary force of the extreme right’,3 to bolster protection from the possible spread of malign Viennese and Hungarian Bolshevism which could link up with the north and Berlin in particular. This was all fuelled by the fear of ‘Asiatic hordes in the form of Bolshevism under Jewish leadership, against German culture’.4

The Heimwehr

The Heimwehr were the Austrian version of the German Freikorps, anti-communist authoritarians who lacked the organizational rigidity of their German counterparts, and in 1920 they announced a ‘shooting festival’ in the Tyrol, which the Viennese Social Democrats (SD) opposed. A strike was called and the SD and armed workers prevented support from Bavarian units crossing the border. The rally still took place with speakers issuing dire warnings to Vienna. Thus the Heimwehr, a German-funded and heavily armed militia also supported by sympathetic industrialists, grew relatively unopposed under a Social Democratic government and were vocal over armed resistance should the ‘Red Revolution’ occur. Which it didn’t. The SD and Independents kept a curb on the growth of the communists, who remained small.

Elements of the Heimwehr were becoming even more provocative, and they not only advocated a coup but also organized ‘terror groups’ that were to be used as strike-breakers. Clearly things threatened to escalate and catch the socialists unprepared. In Styria in 1922, socialists confiscated the weapons of the Heimwehr, which they retaliated by arresting the SD leaders. In protest, three thousand steel workers came out on strike and confronted ‘a large-scale mobilization of the Styrian Heimwehren’ operating in a strike-breaking capacity for one of the first (but by no means last) times.5 In 1923, the Viennese SD ordered the formation of a Republican Defence Corps ( RDC), which drew on socialists and workers and led to the inevitable clashes. In October, a Heimwehr squad attacked a socialist in Klagenfurt. A forty-strong group of RDC arrived to confront them but the Heimwehr had gone, only to return the following day to conduct intimidating house searches of workers. The RDC arrived again in greater numbers and the Heimwehr swiftly exited. Humiliated, the local Heimwehr then demanded the arrests of the leading RDC involved and threatened retribution against a workers’ demonstration, to no avail. Shortly after, the Heimwehr took over an inn and began firing at police, who subsequently disbanded them.

Despite its funding and materiel, the regional Heimwehr were too disputatious and remained a potentially powerful but disunited force. As the threat of ‘Red Revolution’ receded, they became less active—although in 1926 at a rally of right-wing paramilitaries, one speaker described the SD as ‘the representative of the most radical socialism of a Marxist colour outside Soviet Russia’, proving that paranoia and bluster were just as prevalent as anti-working-class activity. The speaker was convinced that the socialists could only be stopped by armed resistance or, echoing Hitler, ‘national revolution’. Clearly some of the Heimwehr leadership harboured grander ambitions despite their declining influence. The right-wing Frontkampferbund had also begun to organize in some socialist strongholds; these socialists responded by mobilising the previously dormant RDC.6

In 1927, Styrian unions called a general strike and, aware of the right-wing militias’ strike-breaking history, called in the RDC to protect the workers. Superior numbers of Heimwehr surrounded the area to cut off food supplies and force the strikers to back down. The Heimwehr was being used as a political paramilitary force, but so was the RDC. The RDC was only strong in certain areas, most notably Vienna and other centres of industry, and although it was up against the far right Heimwehr, it was answerable to the SD and sent in against rioting Viennese workers. At one point in 1928, nineteen thousand Heimwehr marched, and the SD mobilised the RDC and its socialist supporters, although violent conflict was ultimately avoided. By 1929, the Heimwehr had started holding provocative demonstrations in socialist-dominated areas in a show of strength. In 1929, ten thousand right-wing paramilitaries marched in Vienna. Not only was the Heimwehr involved in physical strike-breaking, but they also organized ‘independent’ trade unions to undermine the working-class movement with the backing of certain employers. This reduced the ability of the general strike to be an effective political weapon. The Heimwehr were being manipulated by political and industrial figures in a virulently anti-socialist direction.

The Rise of Austrian Fascism

The main pre-conditions for Austrian fascism were the resentment of the Social Democrats’ ‘Red Vienna’, a popular desire for Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Germany), a tendency for authoritarian government, and a predominant and institutionalised anti-Semitism. The two fascist parties vying for electoral respectability were the Heimwehr and the National Socialists. The Heimwehr had benefited and grown when the ‘conflict between the right and the Socialists first peaked in 1927, enabling the Heimwehr to gain recruits as an alternative to the party systems’.7 They were indirectly funded by Mussolini who, in his later ‘anti-German phase of 1934–35’,8 wanted to curb German influence by curtailing the Anschluss. The Austrian Nazis were backed by Hitler but initially lacked a powerbase because voting loyalties were fairly intractable in many communities; the workers tended towards socialism, and voters in the rural areas tended towards the Christian Social Party. The Nazis agitated strongly for the Anschluss, in addition to propagating their usual anti-Semitism in order to gain favour. The Nazis attempted a putsch in 1934, which failed and led to their temporary suppression.

Jewish Resistance in Austria

Austrian working-class resistance was weakened due to their smaller infrastructures and organizations and a lack of militant leadership, whereas the Jewish militant resistance was small if not determined. After the 1925 anti-Semitic riots, newspapers wrote that ‘the violence was the work of “Jewish and Communist provocateurs” who tried to provoke the crowds’.9 Anti-Semitic right-wing students attacked Jewish and socialist meetings. The fact that socialist student groups, as well as the Social Democrats, all featured prominent Jewish figures meant that the two were unified, which fomented hostility from the right and anxiety amongst bourgeois and orthodox Jews: ‘The more Jews there are among the leaders of Social Democracy, the stronger the desire will become to square accounts through a show of anti-Semitism’.10

The League of Jewish Front Soldiers was the biggest organization; it was created in 1932 in reaction to Nazi electoral successes to ‘protect the honour and respect of the Jews living in Austria’.11 The League was a militant organization and followed from the earlier City Guard, Self-Defence Force and Protection Corps, and the later Jewish Armed Sporting and Defence Association, and the Jewish Protection League. In the face of anti-Semitic organizations like the Heimwehr, which was also made up of ex-soldiers, the non-partisan League had around eight thousand members in the main cities as well as its own newspaper and ‘young people would not only acquire military discipline but would also learn not to tolerate the insults of anti-Semites’.12 The Jewish Protection League offered physical opposition against Nazi aggression, responded to anti-Jewish propaganda and organized large demonstrations. They also linked up with non-Jewish veterans and the worldwide Jewish Front Fighters who held a meeting in Vienna in 1936, which the League stewarded and, unsurprisingly, the Nazis chose not to attack. Their entreaties to the more orthodox Jewish organization to form a united front did not succeed and internal differences created factional problems.

The Schutzbund

The strength of the Schutzbund lay…in its political convictions and its relationship to the labour movement.

—Martin Kitchen in The Coming of Austrian Fascism

Political street violence was prevalent and the parties organized militias to defend against provocation: ‘The Socialists (like their counterparts elsewhere in central and southern Europe) had long had [militia]’.13 This was the Schutzbund, whose militancy was quelled by the Social Democrat Party ( SPD) leadership, which ‘abhorred violence and were a truly humanitarian party’. In 1927, ‘workers launched a spontaneous demonstration to protest the acquittal of Heimwehr members who had been accused of murdering a member of the Schutzbundler and a child’, when the Schattendorf jury returned a not-guilty verdict. The SPD leadership considered using the Schutzbund against strikers, although militants within the Bund were amongst the demonstrators. The Palace of Justice, the police station and a newspaper office were all burnt down. The police opened fire on the strikers and unarmed Schutzbundlers and were subsequently viewed in some quarters as being anti-worker. Fighting with the police led to ninety-four deaths. The Schutzbund ended up policing its own militants, and although accused by the right of agitating for a civil war, they clearly were not. The Schutzbund and the SPD leadership were not nearly militant enough and the Bund’s job was to protect the Republic from left and right extremists alike.14

However, despite the overt caution by the Schutzbund, violence between them and the Heimwehr did occur. In 1929, ‘a fight that resulted in four deaths and some sixty injured, was taken by the Schutzbund leadership as triumphant proof that, even when outnumbered the Social Democrats were more than a match for the Heimwehr and that any attempt to launch a “March on Vienna” was bound to fail’.15 The Schutzbund at times seemed immobilised by weak leadership and a lack of militancy, despite pressure from hostile forces and at one point being ‘more concerned about the workers’ Olympics than…the possibility of a fascist coup’.16 The police raided the Schutzbund on government orders, hoping to find stockpiled weapons that would assist them in a civil war, but it came to nothing.

In Simmering in October 1932, the Schutzbund fought the Nazis when the latter attacked their centre, leaving two fascists and one policeman dead. When the authoritarian leader, Engelbert Dolfuss closed parliament in March 1933, the Schutzbund leadership prevaricated; units waited to be mobilised against the move but eventually stood down. Dolfuss subsequently banned the Schutzbund. As with many organizations made illegal, the more active members rebuilt, forming the Young Front for anti-Nazi activity. Despite this, many militants left, angered at the leadership’s failure to mobilise in March. As they watched the erosion of social democracy, the ex-Bunders were still subject to police harassment.

The Socialist leadership kept the Schutzbund on a short leash, opting for a general strike rather than full-on street warfare. This was to prove mostly ineffective and they ‘tried to ignore their Leftists’ insistent demand for militant activity’.17 The leadership also acted weakly when the chancellor, Dolfuss, attacked workers’ organizations and printing presses. Mussolini urged for the final destruction of the socialists, so the diminutive Dolfuss unleashed the ‘police and military forces to crush what had been the best-organized and most solidly entrenched Socialist party in Europe’18 in 1934, which saw the workers take ‘up arms to resist months of unlawful, arbitrary measures aimed at crushing the labor movement’.19 After four days of street violence and shooting in the industrial cities, two hundred people had been killed, ten prominent activists had been hanged, hundreds had been jailed and thousands lost their jobs.

In February 1934, Austria erupted into violence when heavily armed members of the Schutzbund ended up in a shootout with cops in a Linz hotel. The situation escalated as news reached Vienna. Viennese workers immediately went on strike in support, and the Schutzbund occupied strategic positions in a long-delayed confrontation with reactionary forces. Workers occupied a major bakery and kept it running as a cooperative, with a machine gun on the roof to scare off the Heimwehr. The Schutzbund barricaded the workers’ area and took control of the trams—though, crucially, not the entire railway network, which was used to transport more troops into the city, as the government grabbed the opportunity to violently suppress the organized working class. Government forces also fired artillery into the Karl- Marx-Hof workers’ housing complex; Dolfuss considered using poison gas, but it was rejected for fear of ‘a most unfortunate international incident’. The fighting continued from early on the 12th February until nearly midnight on the 15th. Repercussions were harsh, with the bakery workers receiving long sentences and other militants arrested and jailed. Many workers died.

The SPD had been a considerable organization, but once they were banned following the February uprising, their property was seized and redistributed and their leaders and prominent members were subjected to repression and ‘any leaders of the party or the Schutzbund, any prominent agitators or radicals, journalists or lawyers who defended leftists should be sent to concentration camps’.20 In Austria, as elsewhere, funerals turned into sites of resistance, and every flower placed on the grave of the executed radical Georg Weissel became a symbol of silent dissent. In the aftermath, the exiled socialists finally realised that ‘fascist violence could only be met by violence’21 and that what had been needed was ‘an anti-fascist front among widely different political groupings which could not simply be denounced as agents of fascism’,22 and ‘in the face of fascism an offensive not a defensive strategy was needed’.23 Keeping the RDC and Schutzbund on short orders, plus the lack of militant leadership seizing the initiative, had led to disaster.

Later that year, Austrian Nazis assassinated Dolfuss, which led to more violence, which was eventually suppressed by the Austrian army. When the Nazis marched into Austria, they were met with an enthusiasm that transformed into mass outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence, with ‘young toughs heaving paving blocks into the windows of Jewish shops’.24 This was not just a few local fascists: ‘The Nazi brawlers—tens of thousands of them—fanned out into Jewish neighbourhoods, looting shops and beating hapless passers-by.’25 As with much anti-Semitic violence, it had as much to do with jealousy and theft as intolerance. As the National Assembly voted for the Anschluss, gangs of storm troopers and vigilantes emerged to settle accounts with Hitler’s opponents, both real and imagined, including Jews, communists and socialists. Leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler arrived with forty thousand police in tow, and the Gestapo techniques of rounding up and arresting political opponents proceeded to channel at least twenty thousand into concentration camps to ­uncertain fates.

Resistance

Anti-fascist resistance became less prominent and the workers movement had been weakened, badly affected by mass unemployment (a third of the population was jobless) and the rise in the cost of living. Following the February uprising, left-wing activists had gone ‘underground’ and the far right absorbed some of the socialists’ votes. By the summer of 1938, shortages were affecting morale and Vienna saw much ‘lawlessness accompanied by violence, perpetrated by marauding Nazi malcontents’ in Jewish areas.26 Also, Austrian Nazis were being usurped by their more efficient German counterparts. Although active resistance was slight, workers still dissented: the communist underground paper Rote Fahne reported that workers had gone on strike for better wages and that there was unrest throughout industry. In Vienna in 1939, dissatisfaction was widespread and anti-German sentiment was expressed as the communist underground spread further, distributing propaganda and encouraging sabotage.27 The Nazis responded with more surveillance and arrests and ordered the police to arrest ‘all persons of Marxist persuasion—Communists, Revolutionary Socialists and so forth—who might be suspected of undermining the leadership of the National Socialist state’.28 The communists still maintained cells in industry and propaganda activities whilst ‘socialist railwaymen solicited contributions, set up safe houses, and established links with like-minded groups in Bavaria’.29 It was not without risk, and 250 Salzburg railway workers were arrested by the Gestapo alone.

Schlurfs: Youth Against Fascism

The most prominent resistance came from the youth with ‘a growing number of scuffles between teenage gangs of Schlurfs and the Hitler Youth.… [The Schlurfs were] composed largely of working-class boys’.30 Their numbers were increased by other disenfranchised young people, ‘apprentices, armament workers…“some misfits” and cripples’.31 They modelled loud suits, quiffs and arrogance, listening and dancing to jazz in bars with girls, or Schlurf Kittens, and ‘they directed their hostility against the Hitler Youth, whose formations they ridiculed for compulsory drills, senseless discipline, and mindless conformity’.32 Himmler ordered a clampdown, and the police attacked the Schlurfs in their bars and forcibly cut their hair. This did not deter their ‘anti-social’ activities and ‘over the course of the years clashes between Schlurfs and Hitler Youth escalated sharply. There were rumbles in Wienar-Atzgerdorf, muggings in the Prater, and stone throwing attacks on various Hitler Youth neighbourhood quarters.’33 They also smashed up a Hitler Youth dormitory and, despite the punitive measures against sexual liaisons, a Nazi reported that one women entertained several wayward youths at home where ‘they make noise and howl, play the gramophone, dance or play music until two in the morning.… Mrs G [was] sitting stark naked on the toilet with the door wide open!’34 In these small ways did people resist.

War fatigue, shortages, low wages and general dissatisfaction continued throughout the early 1940s. Anti-German sentiment was expressed at football matches in ‘a series of soccer riots that culminated in a wild melee.… Young toughs stoned and pummelled Gauleiter Schirach’s limousine, shattering its windows and slashing its tires,’35 which was comparatively mild hooliganism given later UK standards. Over two thousand per month were arrested for a variety of offences, including ‘insubordination, disruptive behaviour, or refusal to work’.36 There was ‘an upsurge of Communist violence in Salzburg and in railway yards in Styria and Carthinia’,37 and by 1943, ‘there were “daily executions of ten to fifteen anti-Nazis” in Josefstadt’.38 By 1944, communists, socialists, and moderate conservatives joined with O5, the resistance movement who, by the time the war was over, could claim 100,000 members. For others, an era of collective amnesia began.

The violence in Austria was not as prominent as in Germany; during the entire conflict between the left and the fascists, the attempted socialist uprising in 1934 and the subsequent failed Nazi coup, 567 people died—significantly less than in Germany. The far-right militia operated in an anti-working-class capacity, something that was repeated many times in many countries, and anti-fascists were moved towards militancy through provocation by the Heimwehr. The relatively small communist party, the moderation of the SD, the inherent conservatism of the Austrian people and the acceptance of an authoritarian government did not create the climate for militant anti-fascism. After the Anschluss, communists and more radical workers maintained propaganda work and communication with the outside world, in particular the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The Gestapo arrested many workers, who met uncertain though no-doubt horrific fates. That the Schlurfs dissented and physically attacked the Hitler Youth is reassuring. As the war progressed, ordinary Austrians, having faced hardship, shortages and external pressures, saw through the Nazi programme—but this in no way explains the barbarity of certain right-wing Austrians and their violent anti-Semitism.

Endnotes:

1 F.L. Carsten, Fascist Movements in Austria (London: Sage, 1977), 12–16.

2 Ibid., 20.

3 Martin Kitchen, The Coming of Austrian Fascism (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 3.

4 Carsten, Fascist Movements in Austria, 47.

5 Ibid., 66.

6 Ibid., 107.

7 Payne, A History of Fascism, 246.

8 Philip Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2003), 16.

9 Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 113.

10 Ibid., 266.

11 Ibid., 248.

12 Ibid.

13 Payne, A History of Fascism, 248.

14 Larry Ceplair, Under the Shadow of War: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Marxists, 1918–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 68.

15 Kitchen, The Coming of Austrian Fascism, 128.

16 Ibid., 133.

17 Ceplair, Under the Shadow of War, 68.

18 Ibid.

19 Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era 1938–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 15.

20 Kitchen, The Coming of Austrian Fascism, 247.

21 Ibid., 257.

22 Ibid., 258.

23 Ibid., 261.

24 Bukey, Hitler’s Austria, 27.

25 Ibid., 28.

26 Ibid., 56.

27 Ibid., 84.

28 Ibid., 87.

29 Ibid., 90.

30 Ibid., 195

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 199.

33 Ibid., 196.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., 189.

36 Ibid., 205.

37 Ibid., 170.

38 Ibid., 188.