Raised fist, the salute of many German communists who ended up in the Nazi Party

The 41st federal congress of the PSOE has ended with a new display of ultra-leftism by the Spanish socialists.

The impressive numbers of German communists who joined the Nazi Party
Nazism's attempt to attract extreme left militants because of its affinity with them

Raised fists and the soundtrack of a communist dictatorship

As has happened so many times before, the event ended with the strains of "The Internationale", whose music was the anthem of the Soviet dictatorship until 1944. It is curious to see that many socialists who dislike Spain's national symbols have no qualms about singing an anthem that was the soundtrack to Stalin's purges.

Another significant detail is that Pedro Sánchez and most of the PSOE leaders have sung this anthem with their left fist raised (the communists sing it raising their right fist). The Servimedia agency has shown it in this video:

🔴#Sánchez y los militantes del @PSOE clausuran el Congreso Federal cantando 'La Internacional'

📹Toda la información👇https://t.co/EXtEalFUi6 pic.twitter.com/6hWeUiPTUs

— Servimedia (@Servimedia) December 1, 2024

The origin of the raised fist salute of a communist militia, the Rot Front

15 years ago I explained the origin of this leftist salute here. The first to use it was the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), specifically its militia, the Rotfrontkämpferbund (also known as Rot Front, "Red Front"). In European socialism it is now only used by Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese socialists.

As I mentioned then, the Rot Front, founded on July 18, 1924, adopted this salute as a reply to the Roman salute used by the Nazis (although some sources claim it was the other way around). That same year, Stalin launched a slogan: "fascism and social democracy are not antipodes, but twins." Following that line, since it was a member party of the Communist International directed from Moscow, the KPD began to describe the German social-democrats as "social-fascists", pointing them out as its main enemies. As I mentioned in 2010, these attacks helped the nazis to weaken the social-democrats and contributed to the rise of Nazism.

Nazism's attempt to recruit far-left militants

On the other hand, being movements with socialist roots (remember that the word "Nazi" is an abbreviation for "national socialist"), communists and Nazis competed to recruit far-left militants, to such an extent that the German communist magazine AIZ caricatured Hitler with Marx's beard, due to its eagerness to recruit communist militants for the Nazi Party. Both totalitarian movements contributed to the erosion of the Weimar Republic, the young German democracy established in 1919. As I noted here, on 241 issues addressed in the Reichstag and the Prussian parliament in 1929 and 1930, nazis and communists voted together 70% of the time.

The mass arrival of communists into the nazi ranks

Ultimately, the Nazi strategy was successful. According to historian Timothy Scott Brown in his book "Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance" (Berghahn, 2009), in Berlin, 70% of new SA recruits from January 1933 onwards were former communists. The flight of communist militants into the Nazi ranks was such that the KPD devised a strategy, the Scheringer-Kurs, to recruit nazi militants, with a manifesto that combined nationalism with communist ideas.

The Scheringer-Kurs was a failure. Rudolf Diels, the first chief of the Gestapo - the political police of the Third Reich - noted in his memoirs published in 1950 ("Lucifer Ante Portas: Von Severing bis Heydrich") that in Berlin 70% of new SA recruits from January 1933 onwards were former communists. Diel also noted something that many will find paradoxical, but which shows the closeness between these two totalitarian movements: entire units of the Rot Front defected to the SA, the Nazi Party militia.

Thus, many communists who started using the raised fist as a salute ended up joining the Nazi Party. I can't help but remember these events when I see those outdated socialists singing with their fists raised a hymn whose tune was the soundtrack of a totalitarian regime that massacred entire masses of dissidents. What a pity that Spain has such a pitiful left.

---

Photo: PSOE.