The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

led to a fusion between the KAU and the KAPD. But the divergences on the question of the party were too deep
for the new organisation to have a solid basis. In December 1933, the new ‘unified’ organisation was shaken by
intense factional struggles. The ex-members of the KAPD resolutely rejected the slogan of ‘going to the masses’
and advocated an activity corresponding to a period of counter-revolution and to strictly clandestine work. It was
no longer a question of ‘going to the masses’ but of maintaining the cadres of the party: creating circles of three
people, forming ‘professional revolutionaries’ on the bolshevik model. There were other, no less important
differences. The ex-members of the KAPD rejected any ‘united front from below’ with the left socialists, like
Willy Brandt’s SAP, even in clandestinity, in the name of a common struggle ‘against fascist repression’. 785
At this level, the KAU locally had succumbed to the temptation of the ‘antifascist united front’. 786 On the other
hand, the ‘kapdist’ fraction rejected any idea of fusion with the Rote Kämpfer group of Schwab, Schröder,
Goldstein and Reichenbach, even though the latter had broken organisationally with the ‘left socialism’ of the
SAP. 787 The new organisation thus broke up in the summer of 1934. The antagonistic fractions mutually
excluded each other. The result was a new organisation, the ‘Revolutionary Delegates’ (Revolutionäre Obleute)
which was in continuity with the KAU. It was this group which built links with the Dutch GIC and with Paul
Mattick’s council communist organisation in the USA. 788
785 Only the Rote Kämpfer had episodic clandestine contacts with the SAP. The group of Heinz Langerhans (1904-1976) – a
friend of Karl Korsch, who was militant of Kommunistische Politik, in 1927, returned to SPD in 1932 – had contacts with
all opposition circles (KPD, SPD, KAPD, KAU, RK, SAPD), and published in 1933 the clandestine review Proletarische
Pressekorrespondenz and the theoretical review Die Initiative. Langerhans was interned in a nazi lager from 1933 to 1939,
and could in 39 emigrate over Belgium to the States, and worked in the circle of Adorno and Horkheimer. [See: ‘Über Karl
Korsch’, in: Jahrbuch 1, 1973, pp. 267-291.]
786 This happened, for example, in Mönchen-Gladbach, where the circle formed in 1934 by members of the Brandlerian KPD
and of the KAU was dismantled by the Gestapo in 1936. In Aachen, an ‘Antifa-Komitee’ was formed with the SPD, KPD,
Leninbund, Korsch’s group, the ‘Unionist’ elements of the KAU and the anarcho-syndicalist FAUD [Cf. R. Theissen, P.
Walter, J. Wilhelms, Anarcho-syndikalistischer Widerstand am Rhein und Ruhr (Ens-Kapp Verlag, 1980), pp. 77 & 133.]
787 Cf. Olaf Ihlau, Die Roten Kämpfer. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik und im
Dritten Reich (Erlangen: Politladen-Reprint No. 8, 1971). Even before 1933, the KAPD had condemned the ‘centrism’ of
the Schröder-Reichenbach group, which recruited its ‘cadres’ from the social democracy. It thus concluded that “it could
have nothing to do with the RK group which is still inside the SPD” [‘Einheitsfront und Einheitsfrontstaktik’, in: KAZ
(Berlin), No. 7, July 1932). As for the Rote Kämpfer, they fudged the KAPD and the KAU to be the “ruins of the historic
decline” of the Union movement. They also rejected the ‘activism’ and ‘Unionist’ ‘semi syndicalism’ of the KAU [Cf. RK
Korrespondenz, 14 th Feb. and 16 th Aug. 1932.]
The matrix of the RK was the Sozialwissenchaftliche Vereinigung (SWV). This was – since 1924 – a loose agregation of
young socialists interested in theoretical and political discussions on the problems of socialism and held together by
monthly meetings and week-end seminars. Speakers at the meetings were several of the prominent figures from all
organizations of the left scene (including sometimes Rühle). The meetings were attended mostly by oppositional members
of the SPD, but also by others from veterans of the KAPD and the AAU. By 1928 the SWV organised around 800 members
within Berlin. In 1929 Karl Schröder came to the conclusion that the crisis of capitalism and the general political
development would lead to a period of dictatorship and illegality for revolutionary workers’ communists. They therefore
started to build up a nucleus within the SWV, a structured organization later to be known as “Rote Kämpfer”. Many former
members of the KAPD and AAU were recruited within the SPD, especially the youth-organizations, where they participated
in the debates and supported the left oppositional currents with the perspective of mass clarification and further recruitment
for the RK-network. From 1930-32 the Schröder-Schwab-Reichenbach-Goldstein group had fully taken over both the SWV
and the bulletin Der Rote Kämpfer, which originally was setup by a lokal SPD oppositional group in the Ruhr-area
(Freital/Gittersee). The RK were study and discussion circles, publishing some material, and acting before 1933 in the
strictest clandestinity. They had around 400 members, a considerable number given the extremely effective repression by
the Gestapo. It was purely by chance in 1936 that the Gestapo discovered the RKs activities. As a result, 150 members of
the RK were arrested and given heavy prison sentences. This included Schröder, Peter Utzelmann, and Schwab, who died in
prison in 1942.
788 From March 1933, the KAU published its bulletin Zur Information. To deceive the Gestapo, the title often changed: Neue
Rundschau, Arbeiterbrief, Brief an Arbeiter, Spiegel des Faschismus (‘Mirror on fascism’). They were published in
clandestine printings, including this of the illegal Proletarian Freethinkers’ Association (Gemeinschaft proletarischer
Freidenker – GpF) in Berlin-Neukölln. These issues can be found in the ABA in Copenhagen, in the Andersen-Harild
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