Resistance to Nazism
Shattered Armies: How The Working Class
Fought Nazism and Fascism 1933-45
Edelweiss Pirates
Zazous
Arditi del Popolo
FAUD
43 Group
Anarchist Federation £1.50
Published October 2006
This online edition January 2007
(Free PDF edition with pictures available from www.afed.org.uk)
contents
Introduction, 3
Young People and the Nazis: The Edelweiss Pirates (Germany), 7
The 43 Group (Britain), 15
The FAUD Underground in the Rhineland (Germany), 16
The Zazous (France), 19
The Arditi del Popolo (Italy), 22
The underground Italian anarchist press inside & outside fascist Italy, 29
This pamphlet brings together a series of articles previously published in Organise!
about anarchist and libertarian resistance to Fascism in the mid-twentieth century.
Other interesting websites with further information include:
Remembering the Anarchist Resistance to fascism, by Andrew - WSM Thursday, Mar 3 2005: http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=87
The Anarchist Resistance To Franco, Francesco Torres, http://www.akpress.org/1996/items/anarchistresistancetofranco
Unknown Heroes: Biographies Of Anarchist Resistance Fighters, Miguel Garcia, http://www.akpress.org/2005/items/unknownheroes
Resisting the Nazis Page 3
Introduction
In this pamphlet, we explore different forms of resistance
to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. Firstly,
the Edelweiss Pirates, thousands of young German
people who combined a thirst for freedom with a
passion for street-fighting and satirical subversion
of the Nazi state. Secondly, the story of the FAUD,
German anarcho-syndicalists who went underground
in 1932 and undertook a long struggle
against fascism while continuing to develop networks
and ideas aimed at a free society through the
general strike against oppression. Finally, the Zazus,
French counter-culturalists and alternative lifestylers
– in our terms – who did much more than
simply celebrate their difference and party. They
fought as well. These stories reveal the power of
the organised working class and the danger to
capitalism and authoritarianism posed by the innate
and ever-present desire for freedom within
every human being. They also reveal the extent of
a resistance hidden within the shadows cast by the corpses of the remembered dead,
the statues of victorious generals and glorious martyrs or distorted by the commercialisation
of history.
The Second World War is remembered as a struggle between freedom and oppression
and so it was. But in social terms it was also a struggle between two different
forms of capitalism – authoritarian vs bourgeois – in which progressive forces in society
were almost entirely destroyed. Of the 20 million people who died, many millions
were communists, intellectuals, students, socialists and anarchists; virtually the entire
movement of organised labour, its trade unions and left-wing parties and organisations
were physically eliminated by hanging, shooting, starvation, disease and exile.
This was a crushing blow and has haunted anarchism ever since. Don’t look for organisational
reasons for why anarchism or libertarian communism have been marginal
forces in the development of Europe since 1945. Look for the graves, seek out
the places where its tens of thousands – and the millions of other progressive activists
– went down fighting.
When we think about the resistance to Nazism, three or four images come to mind:
the dour but romantic French maquis blowing up German troop trains, the beautiful
Resisting the Nazis Page 4
SOE operative parachuting into Occupied Europe, the tragic heroism of the student
pacifists pitting wits and bodies against the Gestapo and SS. Their struggles and suffering
are portrayed as a patriotic response to physical occupation and ideological
oppression, a thing that is forced upon them, an unnatural condition which ends with
the liberation until all that is left are grainy photographs and the quiet voices of old
people, remembering. There was the French resistance, the Warsaw uprising, Yugoslav
partisans: native struggles in response to alien occupation, whose only ambition
was liberation and the restoration of the nation-state. But there was more: blows
struck, voices raised that once went unheard but that speak to us still.
This pamphlet is about that other resistance, one involving hundreds of thousands of
people, that began not in 1939 but many years earlier. A resistance not against occupation
but against fascism and for freedom. A resistance that was international,
rejecting the tired slogans of empire and fatherland, not a desperate struggle for survival
against Hitler’s ten year Reich but a war begun on the barricades of 1848:
against tyranny, exploitation and war and for freedom, brotherhood and peace. A
resistance rooted in the organised working class and its understanding that fascism
brings only exploitation, terror and war, that authoritarian and totalitarian governments
of all kinds are good only for one class – the ruling class, the merchants, the
generals and industrialists. These histories remind us of the almost limitless strength
of the aware and self-organising working class, its capacity for struggle and sacrifice,
it’s determination to hold on to its ideals in the face of brutal oppression. There is
another history that we are writing even today.
Before Hitler could build the war machine he needed to acquire power for himself
and lebensraum for the German people – to be built amongst the mass graves of the
ethnically-cleansed east and south – he needed to defeat this powerful and dangerous
resistance. Hitler’s first victims were not the Jews, the intellectuals, the Poles or
Russians. The first victims of Nazism – deliberately so – were communists, trade unionists,
anarchists, working class communities and activists. Hundreds of thousands
of working class people, whole communities, trade union branches, workers’ societies
and leagues were liquidated, their members arrested, imprisoned, exiled or driven
underground, sent to forced labour and re-education camps and later, konzentrationslager:
concentration camps.
It is difficult, now, to imagine the strength of that resistance. Hitler is often portrayed
as a progressive campaigner who took to the air to criss-cross Germany, winning the
hearts and minds of its people. It’s not well-known that this was a tactic forced on the
Nazis because it was less dangerous than travelling by road or rail! Just months before
the National Socialists seized power, Goebbels was chased out of Koln – his
home town – ‘like a criminal’ by anarcho-syndicalist protests and mass action. All
over Germany before 1933, vigorous and determined action, taken over the heads of
Resisting the Nazis Page 5
social democratic and trade union leaders, gave the Nazis a very hard time.
Marches by Nazis were often surrounded and had to be protected by the police, their
hit squads often ambushed and beaten up (or killed) by organised workers.
The resistance took its strength from the experiences of workers and the lessons
learned during the period of social upheaval and repression following WWI. Its resilience
and dynamism was rooted in the desire for a socially-just, progressive and
peaceful society, things that millions of people were prepared to struggle, fight and
die for. Its weakness lay in the separate methods of organisation of anarchists, socialists
and communists and competition between them for the loyalty of working people,
rather than co-operation. And as with the period before WWI, nationalism, patriotism
and sectional identities weakened the front for progress and justice. The Second
World War was simply the final phase of a seventy-year struggle between authoritarian
and bourgeois capitalism, a long struggle that decimated progressive
forces in Europe and elsewhere, precluding the possibility of forming any other society
in the ruins of the old except on democracy’s terms.
In the 1930s, the level of repression was so severe that only individualist activities
were possible. In Germany, assassination plots – many against Hitler himself - and
murders were attempted, pamphlets and posters printed and distributed, sabotage in
the factories carried out. An underground network formed by the FAUD – German
anarcho-syndicalists - managed to raise money for anarchists fighting fascism in
Spain during 1936-39 and smuggled technicians across Europe to assist them. But
without a mass base, anarchists and those they worked with were gradually hunted
down, suppressed. Ernest Binder, a FAUD member wrote in 1946: “Since mass resistance
was not feasible in 1933, the finest members of the movement had to squander
their energy in a hopeless guerilla campaign. But if workers will draw from that painful
experiment the lesson that only a truly united defence at the proper time is effective
in the struggle against fascism, their sacrifices will not have been in vain.”
“Hopeless”? Maybe. Squandered? Never.
With the complete collapse of organised labour resistance to Nazism – its leaders in
prison or exile, activists in concentration camps or underground, working class districts
terrorised by SA and Gestapo raids and arrests, its funds and printing presses
seized, its organisations and newspapers declared illegal – anarchist resistance too
had to go underground and gradually lost coherence and the ability to act. This didn’t
just occur in Germany. Italian anarchists continued to fight the fascist gangs
throughout this period, forming their own partisan bands as social struggles became
military but retaining a hard political analysis and edge, continuing their call for social
revolution. The anarchist movement in France – because it was internationalist
and anti-war – was suppressed in 1939-40 for resisting mobilisation, with activists
arrested, imprisoned for refusing to be drafted or forced into hiding. After the
Resisting the Nazis Page 6
occupation in 1939, Polish trade union organisations were proscribed but syndicalists
gathered its militant remnants together in the Polish Syndicalist Union (the ZSP) and
organised both propaganda and overt resistance. An illegal new-sheet, the Syndicalist,
was published and the ZSP actively resisted in co-operation with the National
Army (the AK) and People's Army (AL); ZSP detachments took part in the Warsaw Uprising
in 1944.
Resistance coalesced amongst affinity groups or upon the remains of pre-war political
and industrial networks amongst organised workers. Anarchists who had direct experience
of fascism, for instance in Germany and Italy, retained their internationalist
and revolutionary goals and organised separately, though often co-operating with
resistance groups. They published radical pamphlets and bulletins and continued to
call for social revolution. One example is the Revolutionary Proletarian Group
formed in France in 1941 by revolutionaries of many nationalities and which issued a
manifesto in 1943 calling for an international republic of workers councils. It urged
economic resistance, the disaffection of German soldiers and workers and resistance
to forced labour drafts whilst forming clandestine factory committees and militias.
Thousands of German soldiers did desert but at the cost of hundreds of lives: executed,
starved, shot ‘while escaping’ or simply disappeared. At the same time, a secret
congress of anarchists and libertarians was held under the noses of the Vichy
authorities in Toulouse. It formed the International Revolutionary Syndicalist Federation
and aimed to organise a mass general strike as soon as conditions permitted,
while continuing guerilla resistance and economic sabotage.
Other anarchists were drawn into the struggles against Nazi occupation as an extension
of their long fight against fascism or the hope of social progress with liberation.
In 1940 there were 230,000 Spanish Republican exiles in France, of whom 40,000 –
anarchists, socialists and communists – joined the maquis; perhaps as many as
30,000 died in the struggle. Spanish exile units fought in many battles during the war
and anarchist battalions with names like “Durutti”, “Guernica” and “Guadalajara” on
their vehicles took part in the liberation of Paris while 50 French towns, including
Toulouse, were liberated by Spanish guerilla groups.
Yet, as the post-war settlement proved, democracy is simply a more benign form of
capitalist authoritarianism. National liberation and anti-imperialist struggles – though
ultimately victorious – simply further entrenched capitalist social relations within society.
Some anarchists predicted this. The Friends of Durutti, a radical group during
the Spanish Revolution, argued that anarchists and libertarians who had set aside
revolutionary goals to help the bourgeois Spanish Republic fight fascism had gained
nothing, suffering defeat, exile, death and the destruction of their popular workers
collectives and the other organisations by which people were self-managing society in
the midst of war. Even after victory, oppression continued: anarchists who had
Resisting the Nazis Page 7
refused to be drafted in 1939 or who had carried out ‘illegal’ actions against state targets
were arrested and convicted despite serving in the Resistance.
What this history tells us is the importance of fighting fascism wherever it rears its ugly
head, of the need to put aside sectarian differences. An aware, progressive and mobilised
working class is one of the most powerful forces in the world, strongest when it
acts from its own sense of what is necessary, weakest when badly led. And because
fascism is a facet of capitalism, it cannot be fought except upon the basis of the social
relations capitalism creates. National liberation without social revolution merely
postpones an inevitable struggle and continues an oppressive and deadening life
without freedom.
Anarchist Federation, April 2006
Young People and the Nazis:
The Edelweiss Pirates
Hitler’s power may lay us low,
And keep us locked in chains,
But we will smash the chains one day,
We’ll be free again
We’ve got fists and we can fight,
We’ve got knives and we’ll get them out
We want freedom, don’t we boys?
We’re the fighting Navajos!
Why were the Nazis able to control Germany so easily? Why was there so little active
opposition to them? Why were the old parties of the SPD and KPD unable to offer any
real resistance? How could a totalitarian regime so easily contain what had been the
strongest working class in Europe?
We are taught that the Nazis duped the German population and that it took the
armed might of the Allies to liberate Europe from their enslavement. This article aims
to show how the Nazis were able to contain the working class and to tell some of the
tales of resistance that really took place.
Resisting the Nazis Page 8
Dealing with the opposition
Acting with a ruthlessness that surprised their opponents, the Nazis banned their opponents,
the Social Democrats and the Communists. For the working class this was
far more serious than just the destruction of two state capitalist parties. It was accompanied
by the annihilation of a whole area of social life around working class communities.
Many of the most confident working class militants were arrested and sent to
concentration camps.
The repression was carried out legally. The SA (the Brownshirts) now acted in collaboration
with the police. Their brutal activities which once had been illegal but tolerated
now became part of official state activity. In some circumstances this meant simple
actions like beatings. In others, SA groups moved into and took over working class
pubs and centres. The effect was to isolate, intimidate and render powerless the working
class.
Many workers believed that the Nazis would not remain in power forever. They believed
that the next election would see them swept from power and ‘their’ parties returned.
Workers only needed to bind their time. When it became clear that this was
not going to happen, the myth changed. The role for oppositionists became to keep
the party structures intact until such time as the Nazis were defeated. There is no
doubt that even the simple act of distributing Socialist (SPD) or Communist (KPD)
propaganda took an incredible degree of heroism, for the consequences of being
caught were quite clear to all – beatings, torture and death. It meant that families
would be left without breadwinners, subjected to police surveillance and intimidation.
The result was often passivity and inaction.
As early as 1935, workers were aware of
the consequences that ‘subversive’ activity
would have on their families. A blacksmith
in 1943 expressed the problem
simply: “My wife is still alive, that’s all.
It’s only for her sake that I don’t shout it
right in their faces…You know these
blackguards can only do all this because
each of us has a wife or mother at home
that he’s got to think of…people have
too many things to consider. After all, you’re not alone in this world. And these SS
devils exploit the fact.”
Throughout the period of Nazi rule there was industrial unrest, there were strikes and
acts of disobedience and even sabotage. All these, however, attracted the attention of
Resisting the Nazis Page 9
the Gestapo. The Gestapo had the assistance of employers and stooges in the workforce.
The least a striker could expect was arrest. As a consequence, those who were
politically opposed to the Nazi state kept themselves away from industrial struggle. To
be arrested would have led not only to personal sacrifice, but also could have compromised
the political organisations to which he or she belonged. To reinforce the
message to workers, he Gestapo set up special industrial concentration camps attached
to major factories.
To put the intensity of Nazi repression into context, during the period 1933-45, at
least 30,000 German people were executed for opposing the state. This does not
include countless others who died as a result of beatings, of their treatment in camps,
or as a result of the official policy of euthanasia for those deemed mentally ill. Thousands
of children were declared morally or biologically defective because they fell
below the below the Aryan ‘norm’ and were murdered by doctors. This fate also befell
youngsters with mental and physical disabilities as well as many who listened to the
wrong kind of music.
However, Nazi domination of the working class did not rely solely on repression. Nazi
industrial policy aimed to fragment the class, to replace working class solidarity with
Nazi comradeship and solidarity with the state.
To start with, pay rises were forbidden. To strengthen competition, hourly rates were
done away with. Piece rates became the norm. If workers wanted to earn more then
they would have to produce more. Workers’ interests were to be represented by the
German Workers’ Front (DAF), which they were forced to belong to and which of
course represented solely the interests of the state and employers.
Unable to obtain pay rises with their employers it became common in a situation of
full employment for workers to move from one factory to another in search of higher
wages. On the one hand, this defeated the Nazi objectives of limiting pay; on the
other hand it further weakened the bonds of solidarity between workers.
Knowing that they could not rule solely through fear, the Nazis gave ‘welfare’ concessions
to the working class. Family allowances were paid for the first time; organised
holidays and outings were provided at low cost. For many workers this was their first
opportunity to go away on holiday. Social activities were provided through Nazi organisations.
There is little evidence that the Nazis won over the working class ideologically, nonetheless,
this combination of repression and amelioration served to confuse many who
would otherwise have been outright opponents.
Resisting the Nazis Page 10
The spectacles we have all seen of Nazi rallies, book burnings, parades and speeches
are not evidence that workers were convinced of Nazi rule. It was clear to all what the
consequence of not attending, of not carrying a placard or waving a flag would be.
However, they must have increased the sense of isolation and powerlessness of those
who would have liked to resist. As a result there was little open resistance from working
class adults to the Nazis throughout their period in power.
Young People
If the Nazi policy towards adults was based on coercion, their policy towards young
people was subtler. Put simply, the intention was to indoctrinate every young person,
to make them a good national socialist citizen proudly upholding the ideals of the
party. The means chosen to do this was the Hitler Youth (HJ).
By the end of 1933, all youth organisations outside the Hitler Youth had been
banned – with the exception of those controlled by the Catholic Church that was busy
cozying up to the Nazis at the time. Boys were to be organised into the Deutsches
Jungvolk between the ages of 10 and 14 and the Hitler Youth proper from 14 to 18.
They quickly incorporated around 40% of boys. Girls were to be enrolled into the
Bund Deutsche Madel (BDM), but the Nazis were much less interested in getting them
to join. The objective was to get all boys into the HJ. When this failed to take place,
laws were passed gradually making it compulsory by 1939.
In the early days, being in the HJ was far from a chore. Boys got to take part in
sports, go camping, hike, play competitive games – as well as being involved in drill
and political indoctrination. Being in the HJ gave youngsters the chance to play one
form of authority off against another. They could avoid schoolwork by claiming to be
involved in HJ work. The HJ provided excuses when dealing with other authority figures
– like parents and priests. On the other hand, they could also blame pressures
from school in order to get out of more unpleasant Hitler Youth tasks! In some parts
of the country the HJ provided the first opportunity to start a sports club, to get away
from parents, to experience some independence.
As the 1930s went on, the function of the HJ and BDM changed. The objectives of
the regime became more obviously military and aimed at conquest. The HJ was seen
as a way recruiting and training young men into the armed forces. As war became
more likely, the emphasis shifted away from leisure activities and into military training,
State policy became of one of forcing all to be in the HJ. T made seemingly harmless
activities, like getting together with your mates for an evening, criminal offences if
they took place outside the HJ of BDM.
The HJ set up its own police squads to supervise young people. These Streifendienst
Resisting the Nazis Page 11
patrols were made up of Hitler Youth members scarcely older than those they were
meant to be policing.
By 1938, reports from Social Democrats in Germany to their leaders in exile were
able to report that: “In the long run young people too are feeling increasingly irritated
by the lack of freedom and the mindless drilling that is customary in the National Socialist
organisations. It is therefore no wonder that symptoms of fatigue are becoming
particularly apparent among their ranks…”
The outbreak of war brought the true nature of the HJ even more sharply into focus.
Older HJ members were called up. More and more time was taken up with drill and
political indoctrination. Bombing led to the destruction of many of the sporting facilities.
The HJ became more and more obviously a means of oppression.
As the demands for fresh recruits to the armed forces became more intense, the divisions
within the HJ became more acute. The German education system at the time
was sharply divided along class lines. Most working class children left school at the
age of 14. A few went on to
secondary or grammar schools
along with the children of middle
class and professional
families. As older HJ members
were called up, the middle
class school students took the
place of the leaders. The rank
and file was increasingly made
up of young workers hardly
likely to take too well to being
ordered about at HJ meetings!
It is not difficult to imagine the scene of a snotty doctor’s kid still in school trying to
give orders to a bunch of young factory workers and having to use the threat of official
punishment to get his own way. Dissatisfaction grew. Initially, the acute labour
shortages of the early war years meant that the Nazis could not resort to the kind of
Nazi terror tactics that they employed against other dissidents. As the war went on,
many of these young people’s fathers died or were sent to the front. Many were
bombed out of their own homes. The only future they could see for themselves was to
wear a uniform and fight for a lost cause.
One teenager said in 1942: “Everything the HJ preaches is a fraud. I know this for
certain, because everything I had to say in the HJ myself was a fraud.”
By the end of the 1930s, thousands of young people were finding ways to avoid the
Resisting the Nazis Page 12
clutches of the Hitler Youth. They were gathering together in their own gangs and
starting to enjoy themselves again. This terrified the Nazis, particularly when the teenagers
started to defend their own social spaces physically. What particularly frightened
the Nazis was that these young people were the products of their own education
system. They had no contact with the old SPD or KPD, knew nothing of Marxism or
the old labour movement. They had been educated by the Nazis in Nazi schools, their
free time had been regimented by the HJ listening to Nazi propaganda and taking
part in officially approved activities and sports.
These gangs went under different names. Their favoured clothes varied from town to
town, as did their badges. In Essen they were called the Farhtenstenze (Travelling
Dudes), in Oberhausen and Dusseldorf the Kittelbach Pirates, in Cologne they were
the Navajos. But all saw themselves as Edelweiss Pirates (named after an edelweiss
flower badge many wore).
Gestapo files in Cologne contain the names of over 3,000 teenagers identified as
Edelweiss Pirates. Clearly, there must have been many more and their numbers must
have been even greater when taken over
Germany as a whole.
Initially, their activities were in themselves
pretty harmless. They hung
around in parks and on street corners,
creating their own social space in the
way teenagers do everywhere (usually to
the annoyance of adults). At weekends
they would take themselves off into the
countryside on hikes and camping trips
in a perverse way mirroring the activities initially provided by the HJ themselves.
Unlike the HJ trips, however, these expeditions comprised boys and girls together, so
adding a different, more exciting and more normal dimension than provided by the
HJ. Whereas the HJ had taken young people away for trips to isolate and indoctrinate
them, the Edelweiss Pirates expeditions got them away from the Party and gave them
the time and space to be themselves.
On their trips they would meet up with Pirates from other towns and cities. Some went
as far as to travel the length and breadth of Germany doing wartime, when to travel
without papers was an illegal action.
Daring to enjoy themselves on their own was a criminal act. They were supposed to
be under Party control. Inevitably they came across HJ Streifendienst patrols. Instead
of running, the Pirates often stood and fought. Reports sent to Gestapo officers
Resisting the Nazis Page 13
suggest that as often as not the Edelweiss Pirates won these fights. “I therefore request
that the police ensure that this riff-raff is dealt with once and for all. The HJ are taking
their lives into their hands when they go out on the streets.”
The activities of the Edelweiss Pirates grew bolder as the war progressed. They engaged
in pranks against the allies, fights against their enemies and moved on to
small acts of sabotage. They were accused of being slackers at work and social parasites.
They began to help Jews, army deserters
and prisoners of war. They painted anti-
Nazi slogans on walls and some started to
collect Allied propaganda leaflets and shove
them through people’s letterboxes.
“There is a suspicion that it is these youths
who have been inscribing the walls of the
pedestrian subway on the Altebbergstrasse
with the slogans ‘Down with Hitler’, ‘The
OKW (Military High Command) is lying’,
‘Medals for Murder’, ‘Down with Nazi Brutality’
etc. However often these inscriptions are removed within a few days new ones
appear on the walls again.” (1943 Dusseldorf-Grafenberg Nazi Party report to the
Gestapo).
As time went on, a few grew bolder and even more heroic. They raided army camps
to obtain arms and explosives, made attacks on Nazi figures other than the HJ and
took part in partisan activities. The Head of the Cologne Gestapo was one victim of
the Edelweiss Pirates.
The authorities reacted with their full armoury of repressive measures. These ranged
from individual warnings, round-ups and temporary detention (followed by a head
shaving), to weekend imprisonment, reform school, labour camp, youth concentration
camp or criminal trial. Thousands were caught up in this hunt. For many, the end was
death. The so-called leaders of the Cologne Edelweiss Pirates were publicly hanged
in November 1944.
However, as long as the Nazis needed workers in armament factories and soldiers for
their war, they could not resort to the physical extermination of thousands of young
Germans. Moreover, it is fair to say that the state was confused as to what to do with
these rebels. They came from German stock, the sort of people who should have
been grateful for what the Nazis gave. Unwilling to execute thousands and unable to
comprehend what was happening, the state was equally unable to contain them.
Resisting the Nazis Page 14
Wall of Silence
So why has so little been heard of the Edelweiss Pirates? When researching this article,
it was extremely hard to find information about them. Most seemed to revolve
around the research of the German historian Detlev Peukert, whose writings remain
essential reading. Searches of the internet revealed only two articles.
A number of explanations come to mind. The post-war Allied authorities wanted to
reconstruct Germany into a modern, western, democratic state. To do this, they enforced
strict labour laws including compulsory work. The Edelweiss Pirates had a
strong anti-work ethos, so they came into conflict with the new authorities too. A report
in 1949 spoke of the “widespread phenomenon of unwillingness to work that
was becoming a habit of many young people.” The prosecution of so-called ‘young
idlers’ was sometimes no less rigid under Allied occupation than it was under the Nazis.
A court in 1947 sent one young woman to prison for five months for ‘refusal to
work’. The young became enemies of the new order too.
The political opponents of the Nazis had been either forced into exile, murdered or
hid their politics. Clandestine activity had centred on keeping party structures intact.
They could not afford to acknowledge that physical resistance had been alive and
well and based on young people’s street gangs! To the politicians of the CDU
(Christian Democratic Union) and SPD, the Edelweiss Pirates were just as much riffraff
as they were to the Nazis. The myth of the just war used by the allies relied heavily
on the idea that all Germans had been at least silent during the Nazi period if not
actively supporting the regime. To maintain this fiction the actions of ‘street hooligans’
in fighting the Nazis had to be forgotten.
Fifty-five years on, interest in the Edelweiss Pirates is beginning to resurface. More is
being published on them and a film has been produced in Germany. We need to
make sure that they are never forgotten again. As the producers of the film say: “the
Edelweiss Pirates were no absolute heroes, but rather ordinary people doing extraordinary
things.” It is precisely this that gives us hope for the future.
We march by banks of Ruhr and Rhine
And smash the Hitler Youth in twain.
Our song is freedom, love and life,
We’re the Pirates of the Edelweiss.
Resisting the Nazis Page 15
The 43 Group
The 43 Group was formed by Jewish ex-servicemen and women as a direct action
organization to combat the re-emergence of Britain’s fascists after WW2, firstly on the
streets of London and later throughout the country. It’s history is told in a fascinating
book (see below); a hidden history of working class resistance and a manual of modern-
day direct action campaigning offering many useful insights into organizational
methods.
After WW2, Jews were alarmed at the resurgence of Britain’s fascists, aided and abetted
by the Labour Government’s complacency and often the connivance of the police,
town halls, watch committees and local magistrates, who defended the Fascist's
right to free speech but cracked down hard on counter-protests (sound familiar?).
Fascist groups and parties re-formed, newspapers and “book clubs” flourished, candidates
stood and hectored. After bitter and frustrating experiences directly confronting
the fascists only to be met with police strong-arm tactics and court appearances,
43 Jewish ex-servicemen and women met to form a group aimed at destroying the
growing fascist movement.
The group organized from the bottom up and by word-of-mouth with most recruitment
on a personal basis. It formed local cells but with access to the resources of the
whole organization, which grew quickly. Taxi drivers provided transport and a quick
getaway, people with fighting skills organized in flying wedges to drive in and break
up fascist street demos and meetings, others worked in intelligence and counterintelligence
(some even joining fascist groups) and security (looking for moles, moving
equipment). Contact was made with sympathetic policemen and journalists and
local communities mobilized against fascist groups and activities. It was a tough job:
fascism was still an international movement, thuggish Nazi prisoners-of-war had remained
behind in Britain, it could call on the wealth of the lunatic fringes of the aristocracy
and bourgeoisie for money and influence. But the constant pressure of the
43 Group and its supporters and allies, notably the Communist party, paid off.
Fascist groups found they could not organize and were under constant surveillance
and attack, meetings were constantly disrupted, local newspapers began to openly
scorn the fascists and indignantly call on the government to act against them and the
town halls, now aware of the depth of local feelings, began to deny them access to
the school halls and meeting rooms that gave them an air of respectability. By the
Resisting the Nazis Page 16
early 1950s, after years of struggle, the fascist menace was largely defeated – still
present, they were not likely to pose a serious threat and did not again until the
1970s.
This is a little-known but largely positive history, marred only by the fact that the Jewish
establishment, like many bourgeois liberals, attacked the 43 Group (which had, at
its height, thousands of members and supporters) for being ‘thugs’, ‘heavies’ who
delighted in violence – a sorry accusation leveled at Class War in the 1980s and
1990s and the Black Bloc even today. Any activity the middle classes cannot control
frightens them to death. The book is a good read that repays careful study.
The 43 Group, Morris Beckman, a Centerprise Publication ISBN: 0 903738 75 9
Anarchist Resistance to Nazism-
The FAUD Underground in the Rhineland
The anarcho-syndicalist union the Freie Arbeiter Union (FAUD) had a strong presence
in Duisberg in the Rhineland, with a membership in 1921 of around 5,000 members.
Then this membership fell away and by the time Hitler rose to power there were just a
few little groups. For example, the number of active militants in Duisberg-South was
25, and the Regional Labour Exchange for Rhineland counted 180 to 200 members.
At its last national congress in Erfurt in March 1932, the FAUD decided that if the
Nazis came to power its federal bureau in Berlin would be dissolved, that an underground
bureau would be put in place in Erfurt, and that there should be an immediate
general strike. This last decision was never put into practice, as the FAUD was
decimated by massive arrests.
In April or May 1933, doctor Gerhard Wartenburg, before being forced to leave
Germany, had the locksmith Emil Zehner put in place as his replacement as FAUD
secretary. He fled to Amsterdam, where he was welcomed, with other German refugees,
by Albert de Jong, the Dutch anarcho-syndicalist. At the same time the secretariat