Margaret Dewar Archive | ETOL Main Page
The Quiet Revolutionary
ON 5 MARCH 1934 the last democratic elections were held for the Reichstag. The Nazis emerged as the largest single party, with more than the combined vote of the Social Democrats and the Communists, but not yet an overall majority. They received 17,265,000 votes (43.9 per cent) to the Social Democrats’ 7,176,505 (18.3 percent) and the Communists’ 4,425,161 (10.9 per cent). The smaller parties made up the rest. (Germany has always had proportional representation).
Hitler wanted more. He wanted unrestricted power. Communists were banned from the Reichstag and on 25 March a reduced and obedient assembly passed an Enabling Bill giving him unrestricted sovereign power. In April and May a number of far-reaching laws were passed. The Social Democratic and Communist parties were outlawed and thousands of known activists imprisoned or sent to newly created concentration camps. All other political parties, except the Nazis themselves, were banned.
A list of banned books was drawn up which included all Marxist and left-wing publications. These were banned from public libraries and bookshops and confiscated during house searches. They were then publicly burnt in the street. A secret police was created, the Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo, separate and independent from the regular police. One of their duties was the supervision of the press. The death sentence was introduced and draconian anti-Jewish laws were passed. Jews were dismissed from government service and universities. They were banned from the professions. Jewish shops had to display a special notice. A year later marriages between Jews and ‘Aryans’ were banned, and the Jews lost virtually all their civil rights. Then their property was confiscated, they were confined to ghettos, and finally sent to the extermination camps.
Hitler also turned against the Protestant Church. A new Evangelical Church was created, with a new creed: ‘God has made me a German. God wishes that I should fight for my German-ness.’ The Protestant Church protested, while the Catholics founded an association to co-operate with the new Reich. Within the Left Opposition there was some debate about whether to support the churches’ struggle, or ignore it.
In May 1933 Hitler announced that labour conscription was to be introduced. The old trade unions were abolished, their most prominent leaders arrested. A new organisation, Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’) was created for workers and office employees, organising joint outings on Sundays for the enjoyment of everybody and the development of strength – for the week’s labour ahead, presumably. Other regulations were introduced. At work everyone had to prove Aryan parentage, right back to grandparents on both sides. The official form of greeting became the outstretched arm and the words Heil Hitler.
Life for ordinary citizens, even those not involved in any anti-Nazi activities, became distinctly unpleasant. In the street marching Stormtroopers had to be hailed with an outstretched arm. Most people tried to avoid this, disappearing into nearby shops or waiting in doorways. I had studiously avoided any such confrontation until one day I was caught totally unawares. As a means of relaxation and to keep up my eurhythmic training, I had joined a keep-fit class. One night we were lined up in a row for some exercise or other when in came the owner of the school – in full Stormtroop regalia and bearing a high-ranking badge. I was thunderstruck. I had no idea that he was a military Nazi. And not only that. He marched into the hall with outstretched arm and a loud Heil Hitler. What was I to do? How could I salute a Nazi? Yet how could I not raise my arm and draw attention to myself, when I was already involved in illegal work together with a group of friends? Unwillingness to conform was debating within me with caution. Then I too began to raise my arm, hesitatingly, unwillingly. And suddenly, without being conscious of it, I found my hand not outstretched, but adjusting my hair! Nobody seemed to have noticed it and nobody remarked on it, but I felt a little ashamed at this compromise. And I still do not know what I really should have done.
In June 1934 Hitler had Röhm, the chief of staff of the stormtroopers, assassinated along with his lieutenants. They had advocated the incorporation of the stormtroopers into the army, which was still powerful and independent and the only force that could now resist Hitler. In August a plebiscite confirmed Hitler as Führer und Reichskanzler, leader and state chancellor. He now had a completely free hand.
We were spared all that Hitler clap-trap at the DEROP and greatly appreciated it. We carried on as before until, one day in May 1933, there was a raid. The premises suddenly swarmed with stormtroopers. It was totally unexpected. The Russians were quite stunned and for the moment helpless. The Nazis declared the firm closed. Fourteen German employees, obviously known as members of the DEROP branch of the German Communist Party, were arrested. The rest of us were fired, on the spot. I was lucky. When I had started work there the secretary of the DEROP Communist Party branch thought that I was a member of my local party branch (I had in fact left it by then) and no one approached me or collected any contributions from me. That proved to be my luck.
I was not arrested, but I was without a job. I spoke to the firm’s Russian chairman, who promised to help. A few weeks later there was an opening for me with the Soviet Trade Delegation, not in Paris as I had hoped, but in Copenhagen. Well, that was better than nothing. I hated the idea of having to look for a job with a German firm, where I would have to Heil Hitler every day, and take part in meetings and other activities. And the chances of my getting a job after some years with the International Workers Relief and the DEROP were somewhat slim anyway. So I was glad to accept the offer and glad to leave Germany – though it saddened me greatly to have to part with Olya, and to leave Walter and my other friends and comrades. But none of us expected the Nazis to last very long.
I applied for an exit visa with mixed feelings. The visa was granted, but I delayed my departure for a week or two, planning to spend the long Whitsun weekend with Olya and Walter. On the Saturday before Whit Sunday there was a fierce ringing of the doorbell at about six in the morning: Police! The two men asked a few questions, had a look around Olya’s room and mine, without any thorough search, and then, in the small room, discovered Walter. He lived with us illegally, had never registered with our local police station, as required in Germany whether you moved to another town or just to another furnished room or flat around the comer. Then they asked for my passport. I could collect it in a few days’ time, they said. They took Walter with them. He returned after a few hours, now properly registered with us. But when I went to collect my passport, I was told it was being withheld on orders from a higher authority. Instead I was given an identity card, for internal use only. That was a blow. It meant I could not leave for Copenhagen. I was now marooned in Germany, and unemployed.
So I decided to apply for a job with the Soviet Trade Delegation in Berlin – and was accepted. This was rather surprising, as according to a new agreement between the Soviet and German authorities no more Germans were to be employed by the Russians in addition to their existing staff. I attributed the exception in my case to my knowledge of Russian. It didn’t occur to me until years later that the move may have been deliberate, a chess move by the Nazi authorities, intended to checkmate me at some opportune moment in the future.
The Trade Delegation occupied a huge building, and the atmosphere was very impersonal, quite different from that at the DEROP. I remember very little about it. I sat opposite a young woman whose husband was in a concentration camp or prison, with no prospect of being released in the foreseeable future. Her treasure and joy was her son, a plump little toddler, who, to her despair, suddenly contracted polio and was partly paralysed. But she bore her misfortunes bravely and never complained. I am still reminded of her when using a little rosewood bowl, carved and polished by her father, who made things like that as a hobby. I equally well remember another colleague, sparkling with youth and happiness, telling us about motorbike holidays with her newly-wed husband, both of them ardent Communists.
Trade relations between Germany and Russia gradually became more and more restricted and the Russians cut down their staff. They moved to smaller premises in the west end of Berlin, a very pleasant mansion surrounded by a garden. It was now much more intimate and personal. I worked in the finance section, the head of which was a Comrade Stepanov, who was rather too high up to deal with us on an everyday basis. Our immediate boss was a Comrade Guriev, but both were quite pleasant to work with, especially Guriev.
There were three or four German employees in that section, all, including myself, working in the same room. One of them was a youngish woman whose husband was a refugee in Czechoslovakia. She used to meet him from time to time just across the border and collect illegal Communist literature to bring back to Germany. So there must have still been some activity going on within the Communist Party. There was another, more middle-aged, cheerful woman who kept telling us that she had cured her short-sightedness by refusing to wear glasses when young. Best of all I remember a portly, humorous, rather authoritarian, middle-aged Berliner – a Berlin cockney. In his official capacity he was the chief bookkeeper. Unofficially he was obviously also the secretary of the illegal branch of the Communist Party at the Trade Delegation. I say obviously, because from time to time I could not help overhearing their not too conspiratorial arrangements for some meeting and noticed the collection of money. They seem to have taken it for granted that I was one of them, but they never approached me. In a broad sense, I was one of them. But there was no question of my approaching them, now that I no longer considered myself a member of the party. So I sometimes felt slightly awkward towards my German colleagues.
Like everybody else, I appreciated the advantages of working for the Russians in Berlin. The pay was good, but it was the atmosphere itself, without all that Heil Hitler business, that I appreciated most. Relations between the Russian and German workers at the delegation were still fairly relaxed: we used the same canteen, often shared a table and were allowed to buy a variety of things at their duty-free shop on the premises. In fact, since there were now fewer Germans working there and we were probably all vetted, the atmosphere was one of friendliness and mutual trust. Up to a point. It did not go as far as allowing personal contact with the German employees outside work.
As business was gradually getting more slack, I sometimes offered my services to the department in the room next to ours. There I was asked to do some typing for a young engineer. Dark-haired, with blue eyes, shy, with very little knowledge of German, he seemed to feel at ease with me. His typing requirements became more frequent and we would exchange a few words. I would have liked to find out more from him about life in the Soviet Union, over a cup of coffee outside the office, but he just sat there, blushing if our fingers accidentally touched when handling the pages of his report, and hinting sadly that they were not supposed to mix with non-Russians. It did not surprise me, but I felt a little sad for him and for the other Russians working abroad. Though for some, exceptions were possible, as I found out later.
Olya was working at the hospital, subjected to the same rules and regulations as everybody else working in a German establishment, including the daily Heil Hitler rigmarole. She had to prove her Aryan origin by submitting her own birth certificate, and those of our parents and grandparents. That was complicated, and everything had to be applied for in Riga, now the capital of independent Latvia.
The authorities took their time. In the end she was so fed up that she yielded to Arnold’s wooing and married him in the autumn of 1933, as soon as he had qualified as a doctor and taken a job just outside Berlin. She was fond of him, but whether she would have married him without the pressure of life in Nazi Germany, I do not know. He was a very reliable person, a meticulous, better than average, caring doctor, and a devoted husband and father – but a man who was rarely able to show his feelings. He was very sociable, slightly philistine and law-abiding; in other words an average, decent citizen.
Politically, he considered himself a supporter of the right-wing Deutsch-Nationale Partei, the German National Party, and for some time after Hitler came to power he still on occasion displayed the party’s black, white and red flag. A year or two after marrying Olya, he became assistant to a Jewish doctor in my area. Shortly afterwards the doctor died of old age, before the Nazis had the chance to deprive him of his livelihood or send him to an extermination camp. Under the anti-Jewish laws, Arnold was entitled to take over the practice and the large flat attached to it for no more than nominal compensation to the widow. Arnold was decent enough to pay her the market price, though it took him some time to pay it off.
While Olya and I were still together, and Walter and I engaged in underground work, she never once objected, though it endangered her too. I remember one night I returned home just as two policemen were carrying out a search of our flat. Walter was not in and Olya was sitting in my room, as pale as a sheet. Neither of us thought of asking them for a search warrant. We were too scared and too used to such things. I had already cleared out any incriminating literature, so the police were not likely to find anything of importance. The really ‘hot’ stuff was dumped in the loft and we just hoped nobody would search up there. They looked through all my books and took quite a few with them: socialist literature of a general kind and some Russian books, including poetry. Then they left without any further demands or any indication what it was all about. What a relief!
Later the Nazis issued an order to clear lofts of unnecessary or inflammable stuff, ostensibly to reduce the danger of fire spreading. It was obvious to everybody that this was a preparation for war and air raids. Now each block of flats and each entrance had to have a warden, usually a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser, appointed by the authorities, who had to check whether the lofts were cleared and in general had to keep an eye on the flats and their tenants. Walter and I surreptitiously carried all our stuff into the cellar. And all was well again.
I had finally decided to join the Left Opposition in the spring of 1933, and for the following two and a half years Walter and I, and a group of old friends and comrades, were active in clandestine work. It was hazardous right from the beginning, but we did it because we felt it to be necessary. The moving spirit behind the budding group in Berlin was Walter, alias Jan Bur – this was his cover name, the name by which he became known throughout the movement in Germany and abroad.
As Jan Bur, Walter met, organised and plotted with former members of the International Workers’ Relief and Communist Party, who were sympathetic. Small sub-groups of four or five people were set up on a strictly conspiratorial basis. I never knew how many members there were in Berlin or how many groups in Germany. The principle was simply that the less you knew, the less you could betray. Every member had a cover name (mine was Arma) and only one person in each group knew the name of the leader of another group and how to make contact. This reduced the danger but also made it more difficult to re-establish lost contacts. The German groups eventually adopted the name Internationale Kommunisten Deutschland (IKD), the International Communists of Germany.
Jan Bur made contact with the International Secretariat of the Left Opposition in Paris, for guidance and, sometimes, arguments. A supply of literature was organised, brought in by couriers over the Swiss and Czechoslovak borders. This included the German language papers Permanente Revolution, published by the Auslands Kommitee (the Committee Abroad). This was later replaced by Unser Wort (Our Word), which was published in Paris and included articles by Trotsky, which he wrote especially for the German groups, translations from the Russian Byuleten Oppositsii, and articles by Jan Bur and other leading members. Inprekor also arrived this way, I seem to remember. There were pamphlets, such as Trotsky’s own Germany – the Key to the International Situation, and occasionally a book or two. Another publication – probably produced by anti-Nazi liberals – was a weekly paper which contained nothing but quotations from the official press, speeches, reports and government orders. The selection and arrangement was so revealing and obviously subversive. It was soon banned.
Occasionally subversive books reached us from abroad. During Christmas 1934 Jan Bur attended a conference in Switzerland to discuss the situation in Germany. He brought back a thin, paperback book with a Nazi title. It began with a few pages of Nazi tripe, then, suddenly, without warning, it continued as a treatise on religion, sex and politics by Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychiatrist and one-time Communist. He argued that working-class women in particular, exploited and subjugated, finding no satisfaction in their sexual life with an overworked husband, turned to religion, to the organised church, especially the Catholic Church, seeking oblivion and a certain elation and ecstasy in the teaching of Christ and the colourful and intoxicating celebration of the mass. This deflected them from rebellion and active participation in political struggle.
This approach struck a chord with me, remembering how, in my early youth, I had for a while been attracted to the Greek Orthodox Church – the bowing and endless crossing oneself, the kneeling and bowing down right to the floor, the incense and the chanting of the choirs. ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,’ wrote Marx. Reich’s book threw a completely new light on the pull of religion and the church on ignorant, worn-out people.
Our activity consisted mainly in passing on information and directives to the members of the other Berlin sub-groups, which often meant stencilling and duplicating material. I often cut the stencils myself, but cannot now remember in detail what they dealt with. And I do not think that we ever had a duplicating machine in our flat, so they must have been duplicated somewhere else. Members who had contact with people who showed interest in our ideas did their best to pass on relevant material and engage them in discussion. I think we also duplicated short anti-Nazi leaflets, which were left around when and where possible.
But such activities were rather restricted and fraught with danger. In certain circumstances even carrying a briefcase or a bag in the underground or bus might arouse suspicion, particularly if you looked anxious. We had to learn to look unconcerned. When we arranged to meet another member in the street to pass on information or literature, we had to be there to the minute. Any loitering could again rouse suspicion. Sometimes a member would already be under observation, and then the Gestapo could easily make another catch. If we felt there was danger in the air, we tried to give the comrade a sign not to stop or approach – if such a sign was ignored or misunderstood, the outcome could be fatal. More than one comrade was caught in this way. Even calling on an active friend could carry a risk if, by chance, the Gestapo was carrying out a search. It needed a degree of ingenuity on both sides to extricate oneself from such a situation. There was just no question of open political work, such as distributing leaflets or having discussions at factory gates.
We also continued our discussions of wider issues: on Germany, particularly Trotsky’s analysis; on the theory of permanent revolution; on the nature of the Soviet state (we rejected the view that it was still a workers’ state, albeit a degenerated one, and thought it could no longer be reformed from above, but would require a revolution from below); and on the question of a new, or fourth, International (I think most of us thought such a move premature). We also tried to follow events outside Germany. For example we welcomed the armed uprising of the Austrian workers in Vienna against the authoritarian Dolfuss government in February 1934. The rising was smashed after four days. The government that followed facilitated the occupation of Austria by German troops in 1938 and the eventual absorption of Austria into Nazi Germany.
By the mid-1930s the German Communist Party, especially the young Communists, had rallied, but its leaders were very careless about their members’ safety. One young Communist, who was wanted by the Gestapo, had escaped to Prague – only to be sent back to Germany by the Communist Party as an illegal courier. In no time he was caught and imprisoned. Apparently he died in prison or one of the camps during the war.
An interesting sideline to this story is that he and his young wife had worked out a complicated code, based on a book obtainable in prison, so that they could communicate if he was arrested. The Gestapo broke the code, and questioned the wife about the Communist Party resistance movement in Germany – but in a way that made it easy for her not to give anything away. Then, when one of the Gestapo officials was left alone in the room with her, he suggested – indirectly – that she should consider emigrating with her four-year-old child. She took this advice and soon afterwards left Germany. The official could hardly have been a Nazi. He interviewed her only once. All other interviews were conducted by other officials, in ways more expected from Nazis.
Our group had a different method for clandestine correspondence. We wrote or typed an ordinary, perfectly harmless letter and between the lines wrote the message we wanted to transmit using invisible ink. The recipient would decipher the message by holding the page over a lighted candle. The heat brought the writing out. It seems unlikely that the Gestapo never discovered this way of communicating, but we never heard of an arrest as a result of it. Of course this didn’t work for prisoners. They had no candles.
Frequent visitors to our flat since the spring of 1933 included Liesel Friedrich and her husband Walter. They had both been members of my party branch. He lost his job in that spring, but Liesel still worked somewhere. They were clearly hard up, but never mentioned it. I remember Jan Bur remarking one day, after Walter had categorically refused to share a meal with us, that that was the surest sign that things were not well.
Walter Friedrich became our first casualty. He was arrested and after days of questioning at the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin was sent to the Brandenburg prison. We were all very depressed by this, and laid low for a while, but then carried on as usual. After six months he was released, and we discovered how near we had been to being arrested too. He had been questioned for hours on end, for days and nights – the Gestapo wanted to know where the typewriter was on which the stencils for the Trotskyist leaflets and information sheets were cut. It was a matter of luck, Walter confessed, that at the very moment he reached breaking point, and was ready to give our names and addresses, the questioning stopped and he was sent to Brandenburg. In prison the treatment was harsh, the food near starvation level, but there were no longer any interrogations. Now, he told us, he would never condemn anybody for ‘betraying’ comrades or friends. It was a physical matter of how long your nerves would hold out under prolonged and cruelly refined methods of interrogation. After his release he and Liesel could no longer be active, in their own and everybody else’s interest. But we still met at our flat privately and discussed matters as eagerly as before.
Then there were Hans Kaufmann and Elfriede Hollos, the wife of Julius, with whom I had worked on those short courses in basic Marxist theory for the International Workers Relief branches, and who had by then already left Germany for Prague, where he worked as a journalist. Hans was an old friend of theirs, the son of an architect, quite well off, with a flat in the west end of Berlin, where our small group continued to meet when it was no longer considered safe to use my flat. Elfriede and Hans became interested in Trotskyism rather late and not all that deeply, but they were both very reliable and ready to take risks.
One day Jan Bur came back from a trip to Magdeburg with a young Trotskyist called Edu. He believed that Edu would be of greater use in Berlin. He was indeed very active – until he was arrested in the street while keeping an appointment with another Trotskyist. As he was a Polish citizen he was released after about a year, but had to become inactive, and soon after escaped to Paris with his wife. There he was active within the German refugee group, which had contact with the French Trotskyists. He later became a successful journalist but in time both he and his wife turned their backs on Trotskyism and Marxism.
There was also Freddy and his sister, both still in their late teens, one a student, the other still at school. They were not in my group, but Jan Bur brought them home once or twice. They were both highly intelligent, enthusiastic and courageous. One day – all to soon – they were caught, and being Jewish had to expect even harsher treatment than other prisoners. Years later I heard that the Gestapo had had no clear evidence against the sister and eventually released her. She subsequently left for the USA. Freddy, however, was kept in prison for several years and eventually died there.
In spite of Jan Bur’s gifts of persuasion, he never succeeded in recruiting those who had been more receptive to the ideas of the Brandler opposition group while still members of the Communist Party. But we remained on friendly terms and continued to discuss with each other. There was Willy Best, slim, blond, highly intelligent and somewhat philosophically inclined. When bathing his baby son, he would get lost in contemplation about why water always runs out of the bath anti-clockwise, and similar phenomena. He and his wife had previously been very active in the party, but were now holding back. They both continued to come to us, and she greatly resented having to go home early to feed the baby while Willy would stay on. In those days nobody ever thought of taking the baby with them, wherever they went, whether to visit friends, to a debate or to a lecture at a summer ‘Marxism’ week. All traces of Willy and his small family vanished during the war. The house they lived in had been razed to the ground by Allied bombs and no one knew anything of their fate.
Willy was one of the three Musketeers, as they were called by their friends. Another of the three was Hans Steinke, who came from a well-to-do Jewish background, and became the economics editor of Rote Fahne. He joined the Communist Party Opposition, I believe, and in 1933 emigrated to England, where he had contact with C.L.R. James among others. In 1937 he was denounced to the British authorities by a former member of the German Communist Party and was deported to New York, where in time he became the editor and publisher of a highly specialised financial journal. I never met him until after the war, but had contacted him previously by letter and he gave me useful introductions to two or three people in England. One was C.L.R, James, whose room in the Bloomsbury district of London was best reached by a fire escape ladder. It was a large room, and it must have had a bed, table and one or two chairs, but all I remember is the piles of books, journals, and newspapers stacked on the floor all over the room.
The third Musketeer was Fritz Neufeld, a skilled worker in the printing trade. Though the German Communist Party was primarily a workers’ party, supported by intellectuals and artists of various kinds, the opposition – both Trotskyists and others – were primarily intellectuals with a middle-class background; there were very few workers. Fritz was an exception. But he was arrested very early on and sent to one of the concentration camps in north Germany, where the inmates were made to slave in a swamp cutting peat in the most appalling conditions. They composed the words and the music for a song, Wir sind die Moor-Soldaten (We are the soldiers of the swamp), which became widely known in Germany and among the emigrés abroad.
Many never came back from that camp, but Fritz did. Before the war broke out he managed to get to Norway. When the Germans occupied that country he tried to escape to neutral Sweden. Together with a few Norwegian comrades they went off on foot. They had made it into the mountainous border country and almost to the frontier when Fritz fractured a leg. To carry him would have endangered the whole group, so he was left behind. He stayed with a Norwegian family, marooned in one room for over two years, without leaving it even for a breath of fresh air. He used the time for reading, studying and even some handicraft work. He survived and after the war he left for the USA, where he died relatively soon after.
Through Fritz we got to know a friend of the Musketeers and of many others from the Communist Party Opposition, known by the nickname of Pfötchen, ‘Gentle paws’ – perhaps because of her manner in dealing with people in need. She was the mother of at least five children, all from different fathers. She was very poor, lived on the dole or some small earnings, but nobody ever left her house without being fed or given a comer to spend the night if need be. She was thin and haggard, but she was the kindest person I ever met. She cared for Fritz whilst he was in the camp, collecting money for parcels for him and other camp inmates (there was no refusing to contribute when she asked), and she befriended Fritz when he came out. She not only gave him shelter and food, but shared her bed with him, as she told me, because of all the deprivation he had suffered in those years.
All the while Jan Bur continued his attempts to extend the IKD’s influence and activity. He managed to re-establish contact with the Sozialistische Arbeiter Partei (SAP), the Socialist Workers Party, originally a breakaway group from the Social Democrats whose leader at one time was Paul Frölich, disciple and biographer of Rosa Luxemburg. In 1933 the SAP considered joining our organisation and supported the setting up of a new International. Apparently, however, Trotsky considered them to be too centrist and nothing came of it. Jan Bur now tried to interest them at least in joint actions where and whenever an opportunity arose. They probably still had some contact with industrial workers, which we did not seem to have at all.
Many were the occasions when he came home late in the night after protracted discussions with the SAP. I was always in a terrible state of anxiety, hanging out of the window, listening to the footsteps. Was it him coming? Was it the police? He used to arrive quite unconcerned, countering my reproaches with the announcement that ‘Tonight it was a historic meeting!’ and that any day now we, the Trotskyists and the SAP, would set up a united front. What could I say? I realised that it was not always possible to break up a meeting, or to let me know, especially as we had no telephone in the flat anyway. But in the atmosphere of that time it was very worrying, to say the least, if someone was late arriving home. I inevitably fared the worst.
Jan Bur was not the most considerate person at the best of times – he was a real bachelor, who did not want to feel tied down. One evening he went to play cards with a few of the former working-class comrades from the local branch, one of whom lived in the street next to ours. He used to go there from time to time and come back rather late. But on that particular occasion he was still not back in the early hours of the morning! I was frantic. I could not even go to the comrades to enquire lest I endangered myself and Olya! Then he arrived, cheerful and quite unrepentant. On the whole he was a merry and easy-going companion, if you knew how to take him.
He also absolutely refused to pull his weight as far as work in the house was concerned, much to my annoyance. I felt that as a socialist he should have a different attitude. Besides, I was working full-time, whereas he was at home a great deal and could at least walk down from the fourth floor (there was no lift) to empty the rubbish bin. Nor would he dream of peeling potatoes or similar chores. There was nothing I could do about it. He would parry all my reproaches with a gay laugh and say, ‘Well, let’s leave the potatoes for the poor’. He had had too many potatoes in his childhood and did not particularly like them anyway!
All the while he was very active, never afraid of taking reasonable risks, and often getting quite excited about even small successes. Yet he would not let me expose myself too much. It was understandable. I was the goose that laid the golden eggs by having a well-paid job. There would have been little value in endangering myself, Olya, Jan Bur, and the flat, which, in spite of all the coming and going still seemed relatively safe.
It was not all gloom and work and conspiracy, however difficult life was under Hitler. For three years running we went skiing in the Isar mountains. There were four of us, as we were always joined by Lieschen and Erich Lange. They knew a tiny village near the Czech border and usually stayed with a farmer’s family. It was simple, but comfortable enough without the to-do of well-known resorts. There were no ski-lifts or pistes and no entertainment in the evening. All they did on those holidays (the four had previously included Walter’s former girl-friend) was to play cards, which I had always hated. However, they insisted on my participating and tried to teach me. I tried, not wanting to be a spoil-sport. Luckily for me, I proved to be so stupid and unskilled that they were glad to get rid of me and leave me to my reading.
My initiation to the actual skiing was a bit forceful, but I survived. We arrived at the station on a clear frosty night, at about midnight. From there it was two or three miles up a mountain and down into the valley. I had never before stood on skis. But there was no other way. So we put on our skis, shouldered our rucksacks, and, after a brief explanation, off we went into the night, with the full moon shining through the high trees. With the help of the others I somehow scrambled up that mountain. Then I slipped or glided down, miraculously without mishap.
On the following days we were out skiing for about eight hours a day, either taking with us a picnic lunch and a hot drink, or stopping at an inn in the forest. It was hilly, wooded country and we went where the mood took us. The snow conditions were far from ideal, the mountain tops rather icy, while down below the snow was often too powdery. After two days I was so stiff that I could hardly lift my arms to put my anorak on. But I enjoyed it enormously and my companions were on the whole very patient with me when, tired, I occasionally got impatient and moody.
Jan Bur was a great lover of outdoor life and in the summer we often used to spend weekends out of town by one of the lakes surrounding Berlin. Then we bought a motorbike and ventured further out to the Parsteiner Lake, a very large, beautifully situated lake in completely deserted surroundings. We used to leave our tent, cooking utensils and belongings with peasants nearby, with whom he had made friends, clamber up to the high plateau overlooking the lake and spend the weekend away from all the strain of life under the Nazis, sun-bathing and swimming in the nude. We were often joined by old friends of his. Together we talked and relaxed and sang folksongs and ballads as well as hit songs, of which Alabama was the most popular at that time – I could never get enough of Oh, Susanna ...
Another singer was Oswald Hafenrichter, who always brought his guitar with him. He too was active in the illegal movement. His girlfriend had at some time been detained by the Gestapo and there were rumours that she had not come out quite clean, though she maintained she had only given the Gestapo names of people she knew had already been arrested. She eventually left for England, where she entered a fictitious marriage with a Trotskyist for the sake of a British passport and the right to work wherever she wanted. Oswald left Germany for Italy shortly before the outbreak of the war, where he became a very successful film editor and enjoyed life until Italy followed Nazi Germany in the persecution of Jews. This began so swiftly that Oswald escaped on the spur of the moment, without returning to his flat or taking anything with him, leaving his car parked in the street. In England, he served in the Pioneer Corps, like so many refugees from the Continent, doing the heaviest and dirtiest work. After the war he eventually got to know Alexander Korda and edited The Third Man for him, as well as several other films. Later he worked at the Elstree Studios and bought a house somewhere around there. He was quite content with his life in England, but died relatively young.
One weekend, when collecting our belongings from the village people our idyll was shattered. The stormtroopers had been around and would be back. Sure enough, the Nazis came and we all had to show our papers and explain our reason for being there. This time there was no bathing in the nude. But strangely enough they did not raise any objections to unmarried couples sharing the same tent – as long as both partners were, or at any rate appeared to be, Aryans. They did not particularly molest us but the peace of the place had gone.
Our carefree weekends at the Parsteiner Lake had to come to an end in any case. Jan Bur had worked illegally for over two and a half years, and the International Secretariat decided that he should leave Germany. He was to go to Paris, where there were some leading members of the Left Opposition and closer contact with Trotsky, who was in Norway.
This was quite a blow for us and the separation was not all that easy, in spite of our many arguments and incompatibilities. The time spent together in the atmosphere of Hitler’s Germany, the feeling that our illegal work had a certain importance, the shared danger of it, the constant anxiety connected with our activities, the moments of relaxation at weekends and on holidays, all had created a bond between us which we were reluctant to sever. And in France Jan Bur would have to face the precarious existence of a refugee, who had lost his roots and most means of existence. We didn’t think he was himself in immediate danger, but so many friends around us had already vanished from the political scene and we felt the noose tightening. The movement obviously considered him too valuable to lose. So in the autumn of 1935 he took the train to Paris – and was gone.
For the Berlin group his departure was a considerable loss. He was a good organiser and a staunch and persuasive supporter of the Left Opposition. Rummaging recently among old letters and papers, I came across a report sent to me in 1977 based on an interview with Friedel Kissin, the leader of the Danzig group of the Left Opposition. (Danzig was a disputed port on the Baltic Sea, in a corridor between Germany and Poland. It is now Gdansk, of Solidarity fame). The report says there were a total of five or more groups in Germany, the leading members of which had all been arrested in the course of 1935 and 1936. Kissin himself left Germany in July 1936, when the Danzig group seems to have been the only one left.
The Trotskyist organisation in Paris was quite strong and Jan Bur was immediately enlisted for work on the monthly bulletin of the Opposition and on Unser Wort. The group there also had good contacts with the French comrades.
I think, by and large, Jan Bur liked it in Paris, even though he did not speak French at first. There was plenty of scope for political activity, for factional discussions and arguments, for writing and studying political literature, and life in Paris was pleasant anyway – as long as one had enough for a cup of coffee in the cafes on the Boulevard St Michel. For the first few months he had the use of a small flat which belonged to one of the French comrades who was abroad. And as long as I was still working for the Soviet Trade Delegation, and the transfer of money from Germany was not restricted, I could of course help.
After Olya’s marriage, I had let her room to a young couple with a baby. They were very pleasant and quiet, not interested in politics or our activities. The only noise came from the baby, but even that was not too bad. Now that Jan Bur had left, I decided to let them have my room as well and only keep the small room, formerly his, for my own use. It was very small: long enough for a bed and a narrow, improvised wardrobe, and wide enough for a table, one or two chairs, and a bookcase, though most of the books had long since been taken to the cellar. In one corner there was also a small anthracite stove, which heated the room in no time. But it was sufficient for me. I was out all day, and in the evening I was mostly with comrades, at a meeting at Hans Kaufmann’s flat with Elfriede, or visiting the Friedrichs. It was now a much smaller circle, and there were, anyway, no more meetings at our flat, and I no longer had any particular social life. I also spent a great deal of time with Olya, who by now had a charming baby daughter. So life after Jan Bur’s departure became much quieter. There was no longer the constant anxiety, although the general atmosphere remained as oppressive as before.
Long before Jan Bur left for Paris, there was some new development in the life of my brother. Early in the summer of 1934, well over a year after he applied, his visa for the USSR came through – on condition that he become a Soviet citizen. I had sponsored him while I still had contact with the Communist Party and the International Workers Relief. It was crazy. By the time the visa came through, I had been a member of the Left Opposition for over a year, and I was still ignorant enough of conditions in Russia (as most of us were) to hope that, whatever the political aberrations there, he would at least be able to get some proper training and a decent job.
As my brother would never have received a transit visa through Germany, Olya and I decided to meet him for a day in Czechoslovakia, somewhere half-way between the frontier and Prague. It was a sad and, in some ways, an abortive meeting. He had arrived in Prague the night before, but with no money for a hotel. He decided to have a stroll and then spend the night in the waiting room at the station. When he returned, the station was closed. There was nothing for it but to go to a park and hopefully get some sleep on a bench. But no luck there either. Eagle-eyed policemen kept a sharp look-out for tramps and vagabonds. So he walked around all night, and was dead tired when we finally met at some pre-arranged spot in the country.
We should have let him sleep for a while, but time was so short and we had so much to talk about. Yet the talk was sluggish. He was depressed as well, because his Frieda had not as yet been granted her visa, though she had applied together with him. The time came for Andryusha to take the train back to Prague and from there to Moscow. A last embrace, a wave, and that was the last time we ever saw him.
We kept in touch by letter. His life in the USSR was not easy. He first went to Moscow and stayed for a while with Aunt Tori, her husband and their young son: all in one room, with half a share of the kitchen. Yet they were very hospitable. Then we heard that he was working as an electrician in a factory in the Urals. Unfortunately there was a power failure or a short circuit and, whether or not it was his fault, he had to leave. For a while he was a teacher at Kolkhoz, a collective farm, in Central Russia.
All the while he was petitioning the authorities for a visa for Frieda. But she could not believe that it was the Soviet authorities holding it up and thought my brother was prevaricating. When, after a year, he finally told her that the visa had come through, she no longer wanted to go to Russia, having convinced herself that this incomprehensible delay was his doing. It was a sad story. He was really fond of her and she seemed to have had a good influence on him.
Andryusha eventually returned to Moscow and, having accepted the fact that Frieda was not joining him, went to live with a Russian girl, a singer. It began well and they registered their marriage officially. But she was so very different from Frieda. She was not a Communist and interested in nothing except her singing. My brother complained that she was too ‘bourgeois’ and philistine. Cooped up in one room, with few common interests, they no longer got on, and he decided to divorce her. But first he had to get permission from the party branch, which was granted after lengthy and sorrowful discussions. To obtain the formal divorce after that was not difficult, but to separate physically was quite a different matter. The great housing shortage prevented him from finding a room, or even a corner with a bed. And for a while he continued to live in her room.
How it ended and what he did for his living we either did not know, or I do not remember. We did not hear from him much as correspondence between Soviet Russia and Germany was not advisable at the time, though we corresponded again after I left Germany for Prague.
How often have I thought of him with sorrow, and of the many other sincere and trusting communists, not only prominent activists or intellectuals, but simple men, some of them skilled workers, others unemployed, who felt they might be endangered if Hitler came to power and who, with the help of the International Workers Relief or the German Communist Party, gained visas for the USSR and then were never heard of again. Some may have survived, while others perished in the concentration and labour camps. But none of us could have foreseen developments in the USSR, and those terrible trials were then still years away.
The scene for the Moscow Trials was set in 1934 by the mysterious assassination of Kirov, the head of the party in the Leningrad district. The murder was officially ascribed to enemies of the state. In August 1936 the first trial began. Two others followed in January 1937 and March 1938, all of them involving a staggeringly large number of leading political figures and Red Army and Navy chiefs. The scope of these trials, and the charges of treason and plotting with the Left Opposition brought against the defendants, astounded all observers. But even more bewildering was the fact that all the accused, who were tried in public, pleaded guilty, and did their utmost to get themselves convicted, using the dock to extol the virtues of Stalin and the glories of the regime against which they had allegedly plotted. They included such old and active Bolsheviks as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, Radek, Bukharin, Rykov and many other participants in the October Revolution. Trotsky had already been expelled from the party and the country, but his name was repeatedly mentioned by the accused, as an agent of German and British imperialism as early as 1921 and 1926, as the instigator of the crimes of the accused, and so on. In spite of their ’repentance’ most of the defendants were executed. (Some have recently been rehabilitated, including Bukharin, but not Trotsky.) The grim irony was that at least two of the prosecutors and executors were in time themselves accused, and one of them, Yagoda, one-time chief of the GPU, was executed.
Stalin used the trials as an excuse to eliminate the opposition, right and left alike, and to cover up for the malfunctioning of the economy and the inefficiency of the state bureaucracy. Under Gorbachev and his policy of glasnost some revealing books have been published about that period. The Children of the Arbat, which takes its name from a district in Moscow, was written some thirty years ago but has only recently been published. It has also been translated and published in English. It is the deeply depressing story of a student, an editor of a wall newspaper, who decided in the early 1930s not to publish an editorial in a particular issue, just for a change. This led to an investigation, imprisonment and exile to Siberia for three years.
Suspicion, fear and the desire to ingratiate oneself with the authorities gradually involved more and more people. This was how, during the years of the trials, millions of ordinary people went to the concentration camps, and nobody knows how many of them died there. Could my brother have been sent to one of those camps?
One day, in the early summer of 1935, I received an official letter from the German Ministry of the Interior, informing me that I had been deprived of my German citizenship. The letter said that I was now stateless and would require a labour permit, to be renewed periodically. No reason was given. I protested, for the record, and asked for an explanation, but of course received no reply. So I surmised that it could only have been because of my political connections. This assumption was in a way confirmed by the police and the Authority for Non-German Citizens: when I applied for my new papers they referred to my work with the International Workers Relief and DEROP.
Obviously I felt uneasy, especially as the labour permit could be withdrawn at any time and as a stateless person I had no protection. But for the moment that danger was more potential than real, except that being stateless made journeys abroad and re-entry into Germany more uncertain and troublesome.
Nevertheless, in December 1935 I decided to go to Paris to see Jan Bur. I received the exit and return visa without difficulty and set out via Cologne, where I visited his mother. She was rather concerned about us. I think she would have liked us to stay together. She also presented me with six handkerchiefs embroidered with my initials.
Then I was in Paris – the dream of my youth, and of so many Russians. The cry of Chekhov’s Three Sisters: ‘To Moscow! To Moscow’, became among the Russian intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century a sigh: ‘To Paris! To Paris!’
Jan Bur met me at the station early in the morning and took me to the flat of a French comrade near the Porte des Lilas. He was living there while the comrade was away. It was in a newly built, modern house in a working-class district. There was one large room with a large triangular-shaped balcony, a tiny kitchen and a shower room. It was pleasantly furnished and had plenty of books. Jan Bur seemed pleased to see me but apologised for not being able to show me round, as on that particular day he had various appointments. That was all right by me, as I knew the language fairly well and was quite capable of going sightseeing on my own. What a day it was for me! I walked and walked, and looked, and absorbed the air, the atmosphere, the light on that fair December day and could not get enough of it. From my reading of Russian classics I was as familiar with Paris as I had been with Moscow: Place de la Concorde, the Tivoli, Place Vendome, Madeleine, the Opéra, the Boulevards, Champs Elisées, the Tuileries, the Louvre ... I knew them all. I had known their names since my childhood and now I was there myself! I was intoxicated.
Eventually I had to think of making my way back to Jan Bur. It was past five o’clock and he must have been wondering what had happened to me. I found the right bus stop and tried to get on the bus. In vain. Every time I made a dash for it I was pushed off the platform with a flood of incomprehensible words from the conductor. Occasionally the passengers chimed in as well. Eventually I noticed that everybody had a little slip of paper in their hands and saw they were tearing them off a machine fixed to the bus stop. That was the secret – the equivalent of a queue! So at last, equipped with my numbered slip, I managed to board the bus. By the time I arrived back Jan Bur had really got worried. He was amused by my enthusiasm.
The following days he took me round other parts of Paris: Montparnasse, Montmartre, Bastille, the Quartier Latin with the Boulevard St Michel – known to us as the Boul’Mich – and its numerous cafés. He also introduced me to some of the comrades and told me about their activities, an important part of which was the publication of the Bulletin of the Opposition.
I also met Hilde Robertson, the divorced Jewish wife of a German left-wing intellectual who had remained in Germany. He was quite wealthy and was able to support her and their two children. Hilde had bought a small farm outside Paris, but spent a great deal of time in Paris itself. Though not politically involved, she was extremely helpful to a number of refugees. She spoke French fluently and persuasively when necessary, accompanied refugees to the Mairie (the town hall) and the police when they needed an extension of their visas or work permits, knew how and when to put a banknote into their passports or applications, and helped when they were in difficulty with their landladies or concièrges. She had helped Jan Bur with his permit to stay.
I spent a week in Paris, and all too soon – and so very unwillingly – I had to take the train back home. My heart sank when I crossed the border and and saw those Nazi uniforms again. The two hours at Cologne, waiting for the train to Berlin, I spent in the famous Gothic cathedral, not sightseeing, but huddled up in a dark corner, crying my eyes out at having to return. When we approached Berlin I had exactly the same impression as I had had fifteen years earlier: a grey town, with large grey buildings that looked so oppressive.
Margaret Dewar Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 18 February 2023