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From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 39, 25 September 1944, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Nazi vogue of exterminating whole peoples has filled the normal human being with loathing for the barbarians guilty of such contempt for mankind.
Today, however, with the Nazi armies on the run, WE are being propagandized to follow the vogue set by the Nazis themselves, and exterminate not the Nazis as such – but the whole German people. Even so-called men of God, quoting the Bible as authority, come out with such ungodly statements as, “What remains to be done is to kill every German.”
It is easy to understand how the embittered European peoples, so long under the Nazi heel – suffering torture, horror and degradation in the cruelly refined manner the Nazis have mastered – might passionately hate all Germans and, out of bitterness, believe that all of them are capable of such inhumanity.
But the truth is that “Exterminate the Germans” is not as much a cry from the hearts of tortured people as grist in the propaganda mills of the United Nations. We are expected to believe that all Germans alike are responsible for the murder factories on the Lublin model. Newspaper reports, editorials, radio comments increasingly have that slant. And there is a reason why now, more than ever before, hatred of all Germans is the theme of the propaganda of the United Nations. With this propaganda they are laying the so-called moral basis for their plans regarding Germany, namely: to divide the country among the victor nations, dismantle its industries, and impose foreign dictatorships over every phase of life of the German people.
At this crucial stage in human history, the working people here and everywhere can little afford to be duped by lying propaganda. They must have a complete and realistic understanding of Nazism and its relation to the German people. To draw no line between the Nazis and their first and foremost victims – THE GERMAN PEOPLE – is to play directly into the hands of the very elements responsible for Nazism.
In reading about the extermination factories the Nazis established in conquered Europe, we must not forget that the Nazi butchers started their human slaughter houses inside of Germany first. In shaking our heads over the torture and terror the Nazis inflicted on Europe, we must remember that the Nazis came into power – and to this day continue in power – by torturing and terrorizing the Germans!
The working people of this country, of England, of Russia, of France, of Italy, have been encouraged by United Nations leaders to forget that the German workers once stood foremost in the world because of the strength of their economic and political organizations, and the class-consciousness of their political views. The Nazis annihilated a generation of advanced working people before they could go ahead and twist the minds and feelings of German youth to do the dirty work of Nazism.
To serve the imperialist plans of the United Nations powers, we are supposed to forget such facts. Let us see what other facts we are supposed to forget – facts that give evidence to the truth that German working people are like all other working people.
There are the eye-witness reports about German common people aiding the Jews in the days of the terrible pogroms – and being themselves jailed and tortured for giving such aid. There are the personal stories of foreign workers escaped from Germany, telling of the comradeship shown by German workers to the slave-workers from Poland, Russia, France, Italy; the sharing of meager rations with those who had less; the assistance in escapes given to foreign workers who wanted to join: the partisan forces of their own countries – all done at the risk of death at the hands of the Gestapo.
There are, furthermore, the accounts of how older German workers, still clinging to the ideals of working class emancipation, sought to teach the Nazified young workers some of the principles of working class struggle – this with Gestapo spies honeycombing every factory. There are reports of strikes by German workers and demonstrations by German housewives – even under the machine guns of the Nazi rulers. And there is an underground in Germany; yes, an underground in Germany, and a secret labor movement, even after
the extermination of the working class vanguard, the intellectuals and the progressives.
In a word, the line of demarcation between the Nazi overlords and the German people is no less than a battlefront. And lying propaganda, lumping all Germans under the head of Nazi, attributing the villainies of the Nazis to all Germans, and calling for the extermination of “every German” has – to put it mildly – held out neither hope nor help to the German people in their grim and un-publicized struggle against the Nazis.
The Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin triumvirate has not given the German masses any hope or help in their anti-Nazi struggle because these supermen are frightened by the mere thought of the overthrow of the Nazis by the German people. For this would mean the establishment of a people’s government in Germany, claiming the land and industries as their own, establishing their complete independence from foreign rule, and instituting socialist solutions to the overwhelming social problems facing them.
Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin aim for a military debacle of the whole German people, for the division of Germany among themselves, for plundering the industries of the country, for the complete subjugation of the sincerely anti-Nazi German working people.
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Last updated: 14 December 2015