Lorna L Waddington. Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 42, Issue 4. October 2007.
Of all the lessons that Adolf Hitler claimed to have drawn from his experiences in the Great War, none would prove to be more significant in its consequences than his discovery of the power of propaganda. Applauding the British wartime propagandists, in particular, for the purposefulness, indeed brilliance, of their efforts to undermine the German war effort, the future chancellor famously wrote in Mein Kampf that effective propaganda must ‘confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over’. Throughout the era of the Third Reich Hitler, his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the army of German propagandists active in the press, radio and other media essentially kept faith with this maxim, carrying out a series of sustained campaigns to promote essential tenets of nazi ideology in both the domestic and the international arenas. In the latter context the most prominent of these campaigns was that directed against the Soviet Union, home of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and the primary object of Hitler’s imperialist designs in Europe. Indeed, apart from the interlude occasioned by the tactical shift in German policy towards the USSR between 1939 and 1941, the propaganda onslaught against Bolshevism ranks as perhaps the most consistent strain of nazi pre-war propaganda to be designed with both a German and a foreign audience in mind. Given the pivotal role in Hitler’s Weltanschauung of those interlinked racial-political and territorial issues—namely the determination to extirpate ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and the requirement for additional Lebensraum—that lay at the core of his plans for the eradication of the USSR, it seems surprising that relatively little has been published about the German propaganda campaign against Bolshevism and the Soviet Union before 1939, although this is due in part to serious problems with the available sources. By drawing on new material, particularly from the surviving files of the Anti-Komintern, an agency established by Goebbels in 1933 with the specific aim of conducting anti-Bolshevik propaganda, this essay seeks to shed some light on this important issue and also to offer insights into the nature of nazi external propaganda conducted at a level several times removed from the extravagances of the Nuremberg rallies and other public manifestations of the regime’s opposition to the ‘red peril’.
The activities of the Anti-Komintern have received scant attention in the literature on German propaganda during the 1930s. Apart from a rather dismissive analysis by Walter Laqueur, which seeks to downplay if not ridicule its activities, virtually nothing of note has appeared in English-language publications. Laqueur makes some curious observations in his assessment of the AntiKomintern: suggesting, for example, that its aim was not so much to denounce the Soviet Union as to gain support for nazi policy abroad, as if somehow the two activities are not obviously and intimately connected. He is, moreover, well off the mark in suggesting that the leading functionaries of the organization were not genuinely anti-Bolshevik in outlook. In one of the few attempts by German historians to assess the work of the Anti-Komintern, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen is similarly sceptical of its significance, writing that, although it engaged in a great deal of activity, it could hardly chalk up many major successes. Yet great achievements could hardly be expected from what might justifiably be termed a ‘grass roots’ organization which worked patiently and unspectacularly towards its goal. The Anti-Komintern was surely unlikely to set the world alight with its investigations into ‘colonial Bolshevism’ or its support for the ‘International Women’s League against War and Bolshevism’, but these examples are themselves indicative of the diversity, range and nature of the Anti-Komintern’s efforts to spread its message as far and wide as possible. While major public appeals for international vigilance and co-operation against Bolshevism were regularly delivered by Hitler and other senior nazis, notably at the Nuremberg rallies of 1935 and 1936 and in other high-profile proclamations, and while these were supplemented by a range of diplomatic initiatives which eventually produced the Anti-Comintern Pact, the AntiKomintern worked quietly behind the scenes promoting anti-Bolshevism and in so doing played its part in the German attempt during the mid-1930s to ostracize and isolate the Soviet Union.
Despite the fact that the nature, purpose and activities of the AntiKomintern have been somewhat neglected, it would be unwise to dismiss it as a marginal or insignificant entity, precisely because the area of its operations—anti-Bolshevism and, as would become increasingly evident in and after 1941, anti-Semitism—were so central to nazi foreign and racial policies. Indeed, foreign and racial policy were intimately intertwined in the nazi concept of anti-Bolshevism, where plans for territorial expansion in Eastern Europe, notably in European Russia, merged with a virulent anti-Semitism to produce a scheme for the conquest of vast tracts of land in the East and its ‘ruthless Germanization’. These ideas had their roots in the early 1920s, when, under the influence of the likes of Rosenberg, Eckart and their associates, Hitler had convinced himself that the 1917 revolution in Russia had been engineered by Jews intent upon erecting a world dictatorship. Committing himself to the struggle against a supposed international conspiracy hatched by world Jewry, and convinced of Germany’s need for additional Lebensraum, Hitler proceeded to devise a foreign policy strategy designed to facilitate future German aims in the East, the main features of which were projected alliances with Britain and Italy and the neutralization of France by political or other means. The significance of the Anti-Komintern lies within the context of the pursuit of these foreign political aims of the nazi regime, firstly as an organization designed to demonize Bolshevism and denounce the Soviet Union before a worldwide audience; secondly as a vehicle to win friends and garner support for the broad anti-Bolshevik strategy of the NSDAP; and finally, as the case of the Spanish Civil War demonstrates, to operate on the front line of the propaganda war against the despised ideological adversary. In these ways the Anti-Komintern constituted an important component in the machinery that was designed ultimately to secure the annihilation of Bolshevism, an aim which even as late as February 1945 Hitler was still describing as the raison d’être of his movement.
In contrast to those areas of government where for some considerable time after their assumption of power the National Socialists would remain reliant on existing structures and bureaucracies, the NSDAP had already developed, during the 1920s, an efficient propaganda apparatus which had served them well during the Kampfzeit, not least in the domestic struggle against Bolshevism. The establishment in March 1933 of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, in effect the formal recognition of this condition, would prove to be a key development in determining the institutional framework for the conduct not only of propaganda but also of German foreign policy during the Third Reich. As subsequent events would demonstrate, few people had a keener appreciation than Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, of the possibilities offered by the conjunction of totalitarian power, which enabled the nazis to monopolize the instruments of mass communication, and a world eager for information on the views and intentions of the dynamic new regime which had appeared in Berlin.
The Reich Propaganda Ministry (ProMi) was staffed by a body of officials who were not only fully grounded in the art and techniques of propaganda, but also veterans of the internal struggle against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. Immediately after the Machtergreifung the fight against the Red menace was projected onto the world stage by a specially designated division of the ProMi, Abteilung Referat II, which was charged with combating Bolshevism in both domestic and international spheres. According to the head of the new department, Eberhardt Taubert, the fight against Bolshevism had from the outset constituted an ‘unmistakable guideline’ of the policy and propaganda carried out by the ProMi. Starting from the premise that Bolshevism was directed by the Jews, who saw the new Germany as the chief obstacle to their ultimate goal of world revolution, the ProMi propagated the idea that a ‘life and death struggle’ with Bolshevism could not be avoided, and in that connection sought especially to highlight the colossal military power of the USSR, with which it aimed to pursue its ambitions. On a more proactive plane, the ProMi set itself the goal of constructing a world movement against Bolshevism of which nazism, the ‘political antithesis’ of Bolshevik ideals, would be the natural leader. By thus taking the fight to the Bolsheviks, Germany not only hoped to win friends abroad, but, in time, to ‘assume leadership of a powerful [gewaltig] global force’ dedicated to the extirpation of international Bolshevism. To all intents and purposes, Taubert recalled in 1944, these aims had effectively set the ProMi on its own collision course with the USSR.
In the circumstances of 1933, at a time when the Reich was not only particularly vulnerable, both politically and militarily, but also keen to advertise its peaceful aims, it was naturally impossible overtly to promote anti-Bolshevik, and thus anti-Soviet, ambitions through a state agency, let alone one of the main ministries of the regime. One of Taubert’s first acts was thus to merge the major German anti-Communist organizations into a single unit, the Gesamtverband Deutscher Antikommunistischer Vereinigungen [GDAV] or, as it was subsequently renamed, the Anti-Komintern, a body which, although ostensibly privately financed and functioning independently of the nazi regime, constituted an integral division of the ProMi, whence it received its funding and operational directives. That much was admitted by Goebbels himself in December 1936, when, in response to confusion within the party about the status and purpose of the Anti-Komintern, he described it in a circular communication as a body which ‘for reasons of camouflage, appears to the outside to be a private association, but which is in reality an agency of my ministry’, the main purpose of which was to build ‘a world anti-Bolshevik movement under German leadership’.
The Director of the Anti-Komintern, Dr Adolf Ehrt, was a publicist and writer who, in the words of Alfred Rosenberg, was not only one of the Reich’s ‘leading authorities on Communism and Bolshevism’ but also an individual who had made a ‘significant contribution to the struggle against Marxism in Germany’. In 1930 Ehrt had published his first book, Ein deutscher Todesweg, in which he sought to alert the German people to the wholesale degeneration of economic and cultural life which had resulted from Bolshevik rule in the Soviet Union. Attracted by the anti-Bolshevik stance of the NSDAP, Ehrt joined the Party in March 1932 and subsequently published further books in quick succession, each a stinging attack on Bolshevism, some of which were clearly aimed at audiences outside Germany. In 1933, as part of his work as head of the newly inaugurated GDAV, he wrote an account of Bolshevik complicity in the Reichstag fire which was published shortly before the trial of van der Lubbe and his associates. Quite in keeping with the ProMi’s conception of its anti-Bolshevik functions, the book, entitled Bewaffneter Aufstand, concluded with the message that the ‘destruction of the Communist International is a task for all the nations of the Christian and civilized world’.
Surviving personal papers of Anti-Komintern officials suggest that its work held considerable appeal for young idealists. The average age of a sample of 20 employees was 29, with many, including Ehrt, having been born in Russia, where, according to one authority, they had gained their own ‘decisive impressions’ of the Bolshevik revolution. Because of the nature of its operations, and the wholesale destruction of its files during an Allied air raid in 1943, it is difficult to reconstruct with any precision the range and nature of the AntiKomintern’s activities, but an insight into its early work is provided by two documents drawn from the files of the Aussenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, both written by Georg Leibbrandt in the autumn of 1934. The essential aims of the Anti-Komintern, he noted on 2 October, were to advertise to the world the dangers of Bolshevism, and in particular to counter the machinations of the Comintern. In its foreign operations the Anti-Komintern did not employ agents to work abroad; nor did it seek to establish offices in foreign countries. It aimed instead to forge links with similar agencies and organizations through which it could disseminate its propaganda, largely in the form of exhibitions, books, brochures and articles. Recent Anti-Komintern successes, Leibbrandt continued, included the mounting of an anti-Bolshevik exhibition in Norway and the provision of advice and assistance to the Japanese Ministry of the Interior, which had wished to establish its own organization for combating Bolshevism. There had also been a considerable advance for the Anti-Komintern in Switzerland, where it had helped to establish two antiBolshevik bodies, the Pro-Deo Commission, which was effectively managed by the Anti-Komintern from Berlin, and a Geneva-based committee which had agitated strongly against the proposed entry of the USSR into the League of Nations.
Leibbrandt’s second memorandum, dated 10 October 1934, gave details of the Anti-Komintern’s plans for the immediate future, particularly those involving co-operation with the Pro-Deo Commission. These included a series of exhibitions to be mounted in Scandinavia, the Baltic states, Poland, Holland, France, the United States and Greece; a further special operation in France, where anti-Bolshevik forces had requested assistance to establish their own organization in opposition to the ‘governing Jewish Masonic clique’; and a series of publicity campaigns dedicated to exposing the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime against its own people, including its policies of deliberate starvation and forced labour.
By early 1935 the Anti-Komintern had succeeded in establishing an extensive network of connections throughout Europe. In the early stages of its activity particular emphasis appears to have been placed on the cultivation of links with Poland, which is hardly surprising in view of the Polish attitude towards the USSR and, in particular, the recent developments in German-Polish relations, which had been partially designed to facilitate future political co-operation against Bolshevism. This work consisted of exchanges of material with Polish anti-Communist organizations, including mutual translations of important works and exhibition pieces, orientation visits by representatives of the Anti-Komintern to investigate the nature and extent of anti-Communist activity in Poland and to explore the possibility of joint initiatives, and visits by leading officials, including that made by Ehrt to Warsaw in May 1936. In late 1935, parallel to initiatives which had already been taken in other spheres as part of the ongoing thaw in Italo-German relations since the early summer, discussions took place with an emissary from Rome with a view to initiating a degree of Italo-German co-operation against Bolshevism. According to Mussolini’s envoy, identified as Insabato in the Anti-Komintern’s record of the discussions, Russia’s anti-Italian attitude and the strong anti-fascist propaganda put out by Moscow as a result of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia had shaken the Duce’s Russian policy. In the light of these developments Mussolini had charged Insabato to make contact with the Anti-Komintern with a view towards the eventual formation of a block between Germany, Italy, Hungary and Poland directed against the USSR and Czechoslovakia.
One of the organizations with which the Anti-Komintern enjoyed very close relations during the 1930s was the Entente Internationale Contre la Troisième Internationale, the Geneva-based agency headed by Theodor Aubert, which counted among its numerous anti-Soviet activities the delivery of a lengthy document to the League of Nations protesting against the proposed admission of the USSR. The Entente Internationale assisted Ehrt and his colleagues in several important ways, not only in furnishing the Anti-Komintern with vast amounts of anti-Bolshevik literature, but also in more practical ways, such as in April 1935, when, on the eve of the League Council meeting to discuss recent German breaches of the Treaty of Versailles, Aubert arranged for every delegate to receive an Anti-Komintern brochure detailing the threat posed to all European countries by the Red Army.
A further area of the Anti-Komintern’s activities was the provision of assistance to fledgling anti-Communist organizations, such as that established in Yugoslavia in January 1936 under the direction of Senator Milan Popovic, and to more mainstream political organizations, such as Leon Degrelle’s Rexist movement in Belgium. Following consultations with the Wilhelmstrasse it was agreed to supply the new ‘Yugoslavian Anti-Marxist Committee’ with an AntiKomintern official, himself a Yugoslav national, who was delegated to assist and advise the new body during its first months of activity. Within three months arrangements had been made for Popovic himself to visit Berlin in order to deliver a lecture on conditions in Yugoslavia. As far as relations with Degrelle are concerned, the Anti-Komintern appears to have made its first contact with the Rexist leader through one of its senior officials, Alfred Gielen, who visited Brussels in October 1936. During a discussion between Gielen, Degrelle and the latter’s propaganda expert, René Lust, it was agreed that the Anti-Komintern should supply anti-Bolshevik material to the Rexists and also arrange the shipment to Brussels of an exhibition, a prospect which had appealed to Hitler and Goebbels when it was mooted in the course of Degrelle’s recent visit to Germany.
Publicity was a major activity of the Anti-Komintern, whose press division, headed by Rudolf Kommoss, was responsible for the production of two main publications: the bi-monthly Anti-Komintern Nachrichtendienst (AKND), an English language version of which started to appear in late 1934, and the UdSSR Dienst, which appeared thrice weekly, covering up-to-the-minute developments in the Soviet Union largely for German domestic consumption. The press division was also responsible for monitoring and supervising the appearance of anti-Communist articles in German newspapers and magazines, the preparation and dissemination of propaganda in languages other than German, and the provision of anti-Bolshevik material to the political leadership for the purposes of speech writing. Each AKND bulletin generally followed a similar format and consisted of easily digestible items covering various aspects of Communist activity in Europe and inevitably pointing to the USSR as both the font of all evil and a vivid reminder of the catastrophic results of Bolshevik tyranny. Familiar targets included the desperate social and economic conditions obtaining in the USSR, the Comintern’s attempts to subvert the political process in various European states and the formidable nature of the Soviet armed forces. Each issue also carried a section entitled ‘The Comintern at Work’, which detailed all known activities undertaken by Communist groups or individuals throughout Europe, including meetings, demonstrations and acts of violence and sabotage, as well as outlining the measures taken to combat such activities.
Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Spanish issues inevitably took centre stage in Anti-Komintern publications, nowhere more so than in the AKND bulletins, which, in compliance with the general direction of German diplomacy at the time, also carried articles on the heightened danger posed to Britain by Bolshevism. Nevertheless, the AKND still managed to devote a considerable number of column inches to purely Soviet issues and during 1938–39 the publication became if anything more overtly anti-Soviet in several respects. Additions to the format included two new regular sections, ‘Russia Today’ and ‘Moscow Overseas’, the purpose of the former being to bring home to the readership on a regular basis the plight of the average Russian citizen, while the latter sought to expose Stalin’s manipulation of the Popular Front movement, the aim of which was to sneak ‘into the ranks of those who for one reason or another are discontented’ in order to create the ‘revolutionary situation necessary for the Bolshevist upheaval’. Hoping to exploit the offence caused to the religious-minded by the Bolshevik promotion of atheism, the AKND also ran a series of articles on the machinations of the ‘Godless International’, which, so it was claimed, was determined to impose atheism on societies already paralysed by class struggle, thus serving the basic Bolshevik objective of the ‘annihilation of all religion’.
Apart from the regular output of the AKND, the main publicity effort of the Anti-Komintern in 1936 related to a collaborative international work entitled Der Weltbolschewismus. This 500-page volume, published in early 1936 and two and a half years in preparation, consisted of articles detailing the activities of the Comintern in regions as far flung as the South Pacific and Turkestan, and in countries as diverse as France and Outer Mongolia. Its main purpose was to expose the work of the Comintern in a brief, clear and accessible form and to indicate the various measures that were being taken around the globe to combat it. Whatever the merits of the publication, it clearly stimulated some interest. For example, shortly after its appearance the German Minister in Rome, who had recently been in negotiations with a certain Peter Ledit, a Jesuit priest who published his own anti-Bolshevik newsletter, the Lettres de Rome, requested several copies of the French and Italian editions of Der Weltbolschewismus, which he thought might usefully be distributed in Vatican circles.
Several of the contributors to this volume attended a major conference organized by the Anti-Komintern that took place at Feldafing in Bavaria in November 1936. The six-day event provided a forum for representatives of European and non-European countries to pool their experiences of the operations of Bolshevism; it also provided a platform for the leaders of the AntiKomintern to advise on measures to counter it. As a sign of the importance attached to this event by the German authorities, Goebbels and Taubert not only put in appearances at the conference but also held a reception for the delegates at the Rathaus in Munich. In his brief address to the conference Taubert sounded a familiar note: ‘Today we no longer stand alone in our fight against Bolshevism,’ he claimed. ‘In order to combat it effectively, it is necessary for all the healthy forces of the world to come together. Bolshevism is fundamentally interested in spreading war and confusion … The fight against Bolshevism is not a fight for the maintenance of culture in one’s own land, but a fight for world peace.’ The main result of the gathering at Feldafing was the decision to hold a future world conference against Bolshevism, for the purposes of which a standing committee was set up under the chairmanship of the Swedish delegate, Nils von Bahr. Although the subsequent ‘Organization Bureau for the First Anti-Communist World Congress’ was ostensibly unaffiliated to any state, evidence from the files of the AntiKomintern reveals that it was effectively an adjunct of that body which was all along secretly run by the Germans. Because of the paucity of documentation it is impossible to discover the nature and extent of the preparations which were in fact made for the planned congress. Indeed, from the statements made in April 1937 by the chairman of the ‘Organization Bureau’, Nils von Bahr, in a supposed press ‘interview’—in reality a written statement which he simply delivered to the offices of the Associated Press and the DNB—it might almost be inferred that the holding of the congress was secondary to the aim of publicizing the cause, which, in view of the elaborate preparations envisaged, would inevitably be assured. Indeed, the planned ‘world congress’ never materialized, for, after over two years of planning, it was finally set to take place in Madrid in May 1939 when it found itself overtaken by international circumstances, most notably the thaw in German-Soviet relations that set in soon after the Munich crisis.
The international anxieties generated by the Spanish Civil War provided Goebbels with an excellent focal point upon which to concentrate Germany’s anti-Bolshevik propaganda in the mid-1930s. The ProMi essentially ran two operations in Spain between which there appears to have been a considerable degree of duplication in terms of activity, but relatively little co-operation or co-ordination. The first of these, the Sonderstab Köhn, named after its head, Willi Köhn, a ProMi functionary who had formerly operated as the ministry’s representative in South America, was established in late 1936 at the insistence of Goebbels in order to provide political education and propaganda opportunities for the Spanish rebels. As Helmut Michels notes, Köhn’s organization was at least partially designed to compete with the Wilhelmstrasse and the German War Ministry in its own dealings with Franco, largely because of Goebbels’ conviction that civil servants and soldiers would hardly be in a position to appreciate the ideological dimension of the conflict. The chief activities of the Sonderstab included monitoring the Republican press and radio broadcasts, advising Franco’s supporters in the same areas, supplying material for use in Nationalist propaganda and offering translation services for German propaganda publications, notably the Anti-Komintern’s Nachrichtendienst, which might prove useful to Franco’s cause.
The Anti-Komintern itself began its long involvement with the Spanish Civil War almost immediately after its outbreak by despatching a special emissary to Lisbon, where, with the assistance of the Portuguese authorities, he arranged for news about developments across the border to be broadcast over the radio and otherwise disseminated by organs of the Portuguese propaganda authorities. This was followed in October 1936 by the publication of the first edition of a special fortnightly Spanish language newssheet, the Informaciones Antibolcheviques, subsequently renamed the Boletin de Informaciones AntiKomintern. Early the following year a special Anti-Komintern office was established in Salamanca, from which a variety of initiatives sprang before its dissolution following Franco’s victory in March 1939. These included the collection, collation and distribution of material for general propaganda purposes in Spain itself, Germany, Latin America, the United States and other European countries and ranged from exhibitions, publications and radio broadcasts to the compilation of a photograph archive for use by the press and in other anti-Bolshevik literature. The Salamanca agency was also involved in the production of placards, posters, postcards and leaflets which were either dropped over Republican-held areas or distributed in regions retaken from Republican forces in an attempt to drum up support and enthusiasm for the Nationalists, essentially by describing how appalling conditions had once been and might yet become again unless vigilance was maintained.
The Anti-Komintern was also the driving force behind a series of special initiatives in Spain ranging from the furnishing of advice to Franco’s director of propaganda at the fighting fronts, the aptly named Major Morales, through the interrogation of International Brigade prisoners held in Nationalist concentration camps, the purpose of the exercise being to build up a picture of international involvement in Spain, down to the monitoring of Soviet press coverage of the civil war and the cataloguing of refugee accounts of conditions behind the lines. Moreover, apart from its inevitable collaboration with the ProMi, the Anti-Komintern also worked with other party agencies on Spanish issues, notably Bohle’s Auslandsorganisation, which helped finance AntiKomintern operations in Spain, and the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, which interested itself keenly in the Anti-Komintern’s anti-Bolshevik material, some of which, relating specifically to Soviet involvement in Spain, Ribbentrop personally requested for use at sessions of the London-based Non-Intervention Committee.
Reflecting on its activities in Spain, the Anti-Komintern looked back with some satisfaction on its achievements. At the outset it had set itself two main goals: first, to supply Nationalist Spain with material upon which to base its own anti-Bolshevik propaganda and, in so doing, to create a permanent centre for anti-Communist agitation in Spain; second, itself to engage in extensive anti-Bolshevik propaganda abroad using the events in Spain as a central point of reference. By 1939 the Anti-Komintern judged that it had been successful on both counts, for not only had it been widely accepted that the USSR was responsible for the Spanish Civil War, but Spanish Nationalist propaganda was centrally rooted in anti-Communist arguments, in consequence of which German anti-Bolshevism itself had received widespread publicity and recognition. In general the work of the Anti-Komintern in Spain between 1936 and 1939 appears to have been very similar to, if somewhat more extensive than, that of the Sonderstab Köhn in that both organizations supplied the rebels with considerable amounts of literature, 2500 items alone in the case of the AntiKomintern, and other propaganda materials. In some ways, however, it is clear that the work of the Anti-Komintern held the greater significance, as demonstrated not only by the variety of its operations in Spain but also by the fact that in early 1938 the Salamanca office was absorbed by the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, where it was restructured on the lines of the Anti-Komintern central bureau in Berlin. From February 1938 onwards this new agency ran a news service called Servicio Antimarxista, and, in a bid to cement ties with Berlin, there followed shortly afterwards discussions towards a formal agreement between the ProMi and Franco’s propaganda specialists in the Delegacion para Prensa y Propaganda.
Moreover, whereas Köhn’s activities were confined to Spain itself, the AntiKomintern was able to exploit the Spanish situation in order to make propaganda further afield. Its extensive archive of Spanish material not only was useful as a source of reference for the German press but also formed the basis of numerous German and foreign language publications about Spanish conditions, and, inevitably, Soviet culpability, godlessness, terrorism and brutality. Some of this material was incorporated in a major Anti-Komintern publication on the Spanish Civil War, the Rotbuch über Spanien, which was specifically designed to demonstrate that the Bolsheviks had engineered the outbreak of the war in Spain and contained not only graphic depictions of Red atrocities, but also a good deal of evidence documenting the scale and nature of Soviet intervention.
The Anti-Komintern requested that maximum press coverage be given to the Rotbuch, which was widely distributed throughout the various echelons of the NSDAP. It was launched at a press conference on 21 June 1937 attended by Taubert, Rudolf Kommoss, head of the Anti-Komintern press section, and the Chargé d’Affaires at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin. In his account of the proceedings the DNB correspondent clearly grasped the essential purpose of the Rotbuch, which, despite its obvious focus on Spain, was intended to convey a much broader message. ‘It is not a civil war in the original sense of the word which is currently tearing Spain apart,’ ran his report. ‘It is not simply a case of Spaniard fighting Spaniard there, but of a people defending itself against the onslaught of a world revolutionary power.’ Following an initial publication run of 50,000, a further 50,000 copies were produced within three months of the book’s launch, and, according to an Anti-Komintern review of its activities in Spain, the Rotbuch not only was valuable in itself as a comprehensive guide to Soviet complicity in the Spanish Civil War but also served as the basis for many other anti-Bolshevik publications both in Germany and abroad.
Despite its official title, the Anti-Komintern had never functioned as the Third Reich’s counterpoise to the Moscow-based Communist International. From its very inception the emphasis had been not so much on the promotion of National Socialism as on the pursuit of Bolshevism in general, the fundamental aim being to mobilize the German and other nations for the coming showdown with the Soviet Union, rather than to cross swords directly with Georgi Dimitrov and his acolytes. To be sure, the Comintern inevitably and frequently came under fire in AKND bulletins and other Anti-Komintern publications, but this represented only one aspect of that organization’s activities, which, as the Spanish example demonstrates, were considerable and diverse. One might reasonably assume that the situation that developed in Spain after 17 July 1936 provided a perfect scenario for a clash between Ehrt and Dimitrov, and the bodies they headed, but ironically nothing of the sort occurred, not least due to the particular agenda followed by each organization. Thus, while the Anti-Komintern concentrated a good part of its energies on exposing Bolshevik machinations in Spain to the outside world, with much of its propaganda designed for non-Spanish consumption, the Comintern, though certainly not idle in terms of advertising its cause internationally, was equally interested in co-ordinating its efforts in areas under Republican control, and in acting as a stabilizing influence over the Spanish Communist Party. Moreover, the Comintern’s ability to engage in a direct confrontation with the likes of the Anti-Komintern, even had it wished to, was undoubtedly compromised by the weakening of its own position that occurred during 1936–7 as a result of Stalin’s purges.
Already, well before the outbreak of civil war in Spain, and if only in terms of its image abroad, the Comintern appeared to have lost some of its radical edge with the adoption of the Popular Front strategy at its seventh congress, held in Moscow during the summer of 1935. This certainly did not mean that the basic goal of world revolution had been abandoned, but the tactical shift towards the promotion of co-operation with other workers’ parties and the bourgeoisie undeniably diluted the force and credibility of the Comintern’s clarion calls for mass uprisings against the established order, which had in any case fallen on deaf ears across the European continent. This was nowhere more so than in largely rural Spain, where the heavy-handed approach of the Comintern, coupled with its promotion of ‘inappropriate and sectarian’ tactics and policies, had only succeeded in weakening the Spanish Communist Party and accelerating its marginalization during the 1920s and early 1930s.
When the initial disturbances broke out in July 1936, the Comintern was taken completely by surprise and, moreover, viewed the prospect of a protracted armed struggle with some reserve, for while the domestic situation in Spain was considered to be developing favourably from a revolutionary perspective, conditions were not yet such as to give any potential uprising a reasonable chance of success. Dimitrov nevertheless began to mobilize the Comintern for action, and in August–September 1936 the first measures were taken to assist the Republicans with funds and advisers, and to organize counter-revolutionary forces in the shape of the famous International Brigades. Before long, however, the Comintern’s work in Spain effectively ground to a halt. It was bad enough that its own communication network in the Iberian peninsula was fragmented and unsynchronized, which hardly augured well in a war with numerous and shifting fighting fronts, but it was the attitude and actions of Stalin himself that essentially undermined and destroyed the prospects for Comintern success in Spain.
Franco’s rebellion presented the Soviet leaders with something of a dilemma from both the ideological point of view and that of practical politics, for while, on the one hand, it represented an opportunity to fight ‘fascism’ and assist likeminded revolutionaries, whose enemies were being openly supported by Germany and Italy, on the other it threatened to involve the USSR in untimely international complications. Rejecting Litvinov’s advice to shore up the Soviet defence system by seeking to extend collective security, Stalin chose to tread a wary path at first and was anxious not to antagonize either the Western powers or Germany for fear of repercussions in Eastern Europe. If anything, by the turn of 1936–37 the Soviet leader seemed more interested in exploring the possibility of an improvement in relations with the nazis, such being the sense of a further approach made to the President of the Reichsbank and German Minister for Economics, Hjalmar Schacht, by the head of the Soviet trade delegation in Berlin, David Kandelaki.
This cautiousness in Soviet foreign policy was regrettable from the Comintern’s point of view, for it hardly smacked of revolutionary zeal, but it paled into insignificance in comparison with the decimation wrought within the organization by the ‘Great Terror’ of the mid-1930s. Within weeks of the opening of the show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936 the witch hunt for ‘Trotskyist’ deviants had spread to the Comintern, leading ultimately to what one authority has termed a ‘genocide’ within its ranks. Although the Comintern had already been shaken by the wave of arrests and denunciations of the early 1930s, it had escaped relatively intact and unscathed. It would not be so lucky during the ‘Great Terror’, however, when it is estimated that more than 200 of its officials and tens of thousands of foreign communists and political émigrés living in Russia fell victim to Stalin’s paranoia. Thus, during the Spanish Civil War the Anti-Komintern found itself facing a fratricidal and terrorized adversary whose functionaries were too paralysed by the fear of denunciation, and thus too concerned with their own affairs, to concentrate their full energies against its anti-Bolshevik message.
Latin America was a further major area of Anti-Komintern activity during 1937, links being either forged or further developed with Uruguay, Venezuela and Brazil in particular. The year also saw a good deal of coverage of Latin American issues in the Anti-Komintern’s Nachrichtendienst with a series of individual articles covering Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Bolivia, followed in December by an alarmist piece supposedly revealing Bolshevik plans to destabilize the whole of South America. Already in 1936 the Anti-Komintern had secured what appears to have been its first real foothold in that part of the world through the establishment of an ‘anti-communist office’ in Montevideo, which was sponsored and approved by the Uruguayan authorities and furnished with funds and extensive propaganda materials by the Anti-Komintern. From this base, argued Ehrt’s close collaborator, Alfred Gielen, it might eventually be possible to co-ordinate an anti-Bolshevik campaign extending across the whole of South America, and ultimately to ‘integrate the Latin American states into the anti-Soviet front under our leadership’.
Although this aspiration proved wildly optimistic, the Anti-Komintern was provided with further opportunities to influence the Uruguayan campaign against Bolshevism the following April with the creation of the Frente Anticommunistica Nacional, whose executive immediately requested literature and other resources from Anti-Komintern headquarters in Berlin. In Venezuela, where in 1936 a similar anti-Communist organization had been founded in response to the planned merger of several leftist parties, progress was more limited, but, through contacts established between the Anti-Komintern and the Venezuelan General-Consul in Berlin, Dr Trujillo, moves were undertaken to forge links between the German and Venezuelan press, quite clearly, in the German case, in the hope of exercising anti-Bolshevik influence in Caracas. By 1938, following consultations between the Anti-Komintern and a representative of the Venezuelan regime, Señor Ortega-Martinez, Berlin was supplying substantial amounts of anti-Bolshevik literature to the latter, who in October was appointed Director of the Centro de Colaboración y Servicio Social, a body which was described in Anti-Komintern communications as the ‘official anti-Communist office of the Venezuelan Government’ and which, as in the cases of Uruguay and Brazil, was heavily dependent on the Anti-Komintern for material.
It was in Brazil where the Anti-Komintern’s greatest hopes were raised, where the brunt of its South American activity was engaged and where ultimately its greatest disappointments were encountered. The contemporary documents indicate that the Anti-Komintern had first shown an interest in Brazil after the failure of the Communist uprisings in the northern provinces in November 1935, following which a good deal of progress was made, or at least claimed, both in promoting anti-Bolshevism per se and, more importantly, in ensuring that German influence was paramount in the nature and direction of anti-Communist propaganda. Not only were Anti-Komintern publications translated into Portuguese for distribution in Brazil and serialization in provincial newspapers, but the organization was centrally involved in the launching of a weekly anti-Communist newspaper, simply called Anti-Komintern, the first edition of which appeared in late May 1937 following lengthy negotiations with the Brazilian Ministry of Propaganda. A further important development in Brazil which was assisted by the Anti-Komintern came five months later, with the establishment of the ‘Brazilian League for the Protection of Society against Communism’, which held its first mass rally in Rio de Janeiro on 31 October. The founding of this organization, noted Dohms, corresponded precisely to the original intentions of the Anti-Komintern in its dealings with Brazil, and could therefore be considered ‘a complete success for our work’. By the close of 1937 the Anti-Komintern certainly had grounds for satisfaction with its work in Brazil, where even the head of state, General Getúlio Vargas, had requested its assistance in connection with an intended series of radio broadcasts on anti-Bolshevism. Nevertheless, all this positive activity failed to translate into any political advantage. The Brazilians were quite prepared to avail themselves of Anti-Komintern material and to receive instruction on the techniques of propaganda, but this was designed only to enhance their own role as the champions of anti-Bolshevism among the South American states. Although the possible accession of Brazil to the Anti-Comintern Pact remained a subject of discussion in Berlin, and a prospect in which the Japanese showed considerable interest, Vargas had no intention whatsoever of becoming party to the agreement. As would prove to be the case with other Latin American countries which, like Brazil, were undeniably opposed to Bolshevism, the new character of the Anti-Comintern Pact following the accession of Italy made association with it a less attractive prospect, in view of probable reactions in Britain and the United States.
Apart from its considerable activities in Spain, which understandably absorbed most of its energies, and the expansion of its initiatives in South America, the Anti-Komintern continued to promote anti-Bolshevism in Scandinavia and Western Europe, to which end it organized a series of exhibitions held in foreign capitals, including a fairly successful event in Britain in February 1937. More importantly, especially in view of the general aims of German diplomacy, and with particular reference to policy towards Britain, the Anti-Komintern echoed through its Nachrichtendienst the concerns which continued to be expressed by German political leaders about the Bolshevik threat to the British Empire. In its June 1937 issue, for example, it carried an article entitled ‘Red Imperialism threatens India’, accusing Moscow of seeking to exploit the successes of the Congress Party and naming the President of the Indian National Congress, Pandit Nehru, as a ‘puppet of Moscow’. India was not immune to the menace of Bolshevism, warned the article in conclusion, and it was to be hoped that the increasingly obvious signs that it was being prepared for revolution would soon ‘open the eyes of the authorities to the seriousness of the situation’. Five months later the AKND ran an article warning the British of Moscow’s subversive role in Palestine where, it was claimed, agents of the Comintern were cynically championing the Arab nationalist cause in the hope of sowing the ‘seeds of feud and dissension between the English and the Arabs’ and thus helping to fulfil Lenin’s avowed goal of ‘preparing world revolution by way of the colonies’.
By late 1937, however, Britain’s evident indifference to the Bolshevik danger had become a source of considerable disappointment and frustration to Hitler, who, after spending years in fruitless pursuit of an alliance with Britain, was now forced to concede that his aims would have to be realized ‘without England’. This reassessment of the role of Britain in German calculations, coupled with the prioritization of territorial expansion in Austria and Czechoslovakia as outlined at the famous Hossbach conference, would have significant repercussions for the work of the Anti-Komintern in the remaining years of peace. To be sure, Ehrt and his associates continued to pillory the Comintern, especially in connection with its operations in Spain, and to display a lively interest in all manner of international anti-Communist initiatives, but, in accordance with the new thrust of German foreign policy, they soon found themselves operating in less familiar terrain. In the summer of 1938, for example, the Anti-Komintern engaged itself in the Sudeten crisis through the production of a further Rotbuch, which damned Czechoslovakia as little more than a platform for the projection of Soviet power and Bolshevik doctrines directly into the heart of the continent. In keeping with the nazi leadership’s growing disenchantment with London, a new line also began to emerge towards Britain in Anti-Komintern publications, where senior figures of the British Establishment were suddenly revealed as supposed Bolshevik sympathizers. In 1939, in tandem with the increasingly strident anti-British propaganda emanating from the ProMi in the aftermath of Munich, the AntiKomintern not only accused the democracies of complicity in Bolshevik subversion in Spain but also devoted entire publications to Britain’s supposed will to war with the Third Reich. In these latter activities the Anti-Komintern was reflecting not only Hitler’s bitter disillusionment with his original conception of Anglo-German collaboration, in which his interest had all but evaporated by the time of the Munich crisis, but also the intense hostility harboured towards Britain by both Goebbels and the new Reich Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, who had succeeded Neurath in February 1938. The subsequent development of a serious dispute between Goebbels and Ribbentrop over the issue of which ministry, the ProMi or the Foreign Office, should bear responsibility for the generation and dissemination of foreign propaganda appears to have had no repercussions in so far as the work of the Anti-Komintern is concerned. It is surely unlikely that the officials of that organization remained ignorant of the burgeoning feud between the two ministers, yet no reference is made to it in the surviving internal correspondence, nor is there any suggestion that Ribbentrop sought to interfere with its activities. This might perhaps be due to the fact that, despite their differences in other areas, Goebbels and Ribbentrop were at least united in their negative attitude towards Britain, an attitude which, as indicated above, the Anti-Komintern was coming increasingly to reflect in 1938–9. In any case, whatever Ribbentrop’s pretensions in the press and propaganda sphere, the Anti-Komintern would remain an integral component of the ProMi until the fall of the Third Reich.
The Anti-Komintern’s operations against Bolshevism were inevitably further compromised by the development of the German–Russian rapprochement over the summer of 1939 and the cessation by August of that year of all anti-Soviet propaganda emanating from agencies within the Reich. In the early stages of the European war, with its budget already sliced by a third, the AntiKomintern found itself reduced to such mundane activities as the monitoring of foreign reactions to the German–Soviet association and the gathering of reports on the attitudes of the Soviet press and the Comintern towards the unfolding conflict. Such was the impact of Hitler’s apparent ideological volte-face that the suggestion was mooted in the international press that the fight against the Comintern might now have to be taken up by other powers, perhaps Spain or Italy, who were perceived to be more acutely threatened by its subversive machinations. What view the leading functionaries of the AntiKomintern adopted towards the new relationship with the USSR is difficult to gauge, but, in view of their past activities and the strength of their antiBolshevik convictions, it is unlikely that they set much store by it. One official, Karl Loew-Albrecht, believed that the nazi–Soviet pact provided the opportunity for a timely transformation of the organization into a genuine mass movement among the German people. The Anti-Komintern, he argued, should be stripped of its bureaucratic apparatus and formally distanced from both the state and the nazi party, in order more effectively to bring home the dangers of Bolshevism to the average German citizen. For now, in wartime conditions, the threat from the Comintern was greater than ever, not least as Stalin, whose aim had always been to set the capitalist nations at each other’s throats, might realistically expect a ‘rapid revolutionizing’ of the Reich once the privations and miseries of wartime began to take their toll. By refashioning the AntiKomintern into an organization designed to transform all Germans into ‘active anti-Bolsheviks’, a considerable step would be taken not only in safeguarding against Communist subversion at home but also in preparation for what Loew-Albrecht clearly expected: the ‘final confrontation between National Socialism and Bolshevism’.
Although these ideas were not acted upon—the Anti-Komintern continued to function as part of the ProMi until 1945—they are strangely redolent not only of Hitler’s earlier nightmares about the perceived impact of internal subversion on the Reich’s domestic situation during the Great War, but also of the utter lack of sincerity with which he approached his new association with Stalin. This is certainly not the place for any detailed intervention into the debate about Hitler’s foreign policy ‘programme’, his deliberations on German policy towards the Soviet Union or the ultimate considerations that lay behind his decision to invade that country in 1941. It is, however, entirely appropriate to register the point that, despite the nazi–Soviet pact, and indeed other instances of his opportunistic use of anti-Bolshevism to achieve short-term goals, Hitler remained committed from the early 1920s until his downfall in 1945 to the pursuit and destruction of Bolshevism. Even if he may have toyed fleetingly with the idea of accommodating the Soviet Union as a partner in Ribbentrop’s proposed Kontinentalblock in the hope of finally ending his war with Britain, a possibility discussed in some considerable detail but with little conviction on Hitler’s part during the visit to Berlin in November 1940 of the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, the fact remains that the struggle against Bolshevism constituted a fixed principle, the ‘lodestar’, as Ian Kershaw has put it, of his foreign policy. Indeed, given the intensity of Hitler’s views on the Jewish question, it could hardly have been otherwise from the moment in the early 1920s when he accepted that Bolshevism was an invention and instrument of the Jews, who wished to use it to impose their own tyranny across the globe.
This linkage between Jewry and Bolshevism, and the notion of an ‘international conspiracy’ which it fed, goes some way to explain why anti-Bolshevism featured so heavily in nazi domestic and external propaganda during the mid1930s. If in domestic terms it was the racial issue that dominated the agenda, on the international stage the propaganda onslaught was directed primarily against the Comintern, the global revolutionary arm of world Jewry. In this way the nazi leaders sought not only to steel their own people for the inevitable and apocalyptic showdown with Jewish Bolshevism, but also to create the optimum international conditions in which it might take place.
This brief study has attempted to shed some light on the purpose and functions of a significant yet marginalized propaganda organization which was centrally involved in this latter process. In one sense it might well be argued the Anti-Komintern was little more than a product of its times, for the advent of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the creation of the Soviet Union with its selfproclaimed goal of world revolution had spawned numerous anti-Communist organizations and groups throughout Europe and the wider world. Moreover, it might equally well be contended that organizations such as the AntiKomintern which concentrated on delivering polemical messages in an era already highly-charged by acute ideological divisions succeeded in little more than preaching to the converted. In any case, notwithstanding the inherent difficulties in measuring the effects of any form of propaganda, the lack of documentation makes it impossible to gauge the impact made by the AntiKomintern in any of the areas in which it operated.
Unlike many such organizations, however, the Anti-Komintern was sanctioned and financed by the nazi government and charged with the specific purpose of nurturing conditions under which a major foreign policy goal of the regime might be realized. Its aim was never essentially to promote National Socialism but simply to vilify Bolshevism and the Soviet Union in the hope of exploiting opportunities, as was most obviously the case in Spain, and gaining like-minded friends abroad. In that way the Anti-Komintern functioned as an integral if somewhat concealed component in the promotion of the broader aims of nazi foreign policy during the 1930s.