{"id":57933,"date":"2024-12-01T17:45:39","date_gmt":"2024-12-01T16:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/?p=57933"},"modified":"2025-12-01T01:13:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T00:13:18","slug":"raised-fist-the-salute-of-many-german-communists-who-ended-up-in-the-nazi-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2024\/12\/01\/raised-fist-the-salute-of-many-german-communists-who-ended-up-in-the-nazi-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Raised fist, the salute of many German communists who ended up in the Nazi Party"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The 41st federal congress of the PSOE has ended with a new display of ultra-leftism by the Spanish socialists.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><rel><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2020\/08\/24\/the-impressive-numbers-of-german-communists-who-joined-the-nazi-party\/\">The impressive numbers of German communists who joined the Nazi Party<\/a><\/rel><br \/>\n<rel><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2023\/03\/09\/nazisms-attempt-to-attract-extreme-left-militants-because-of-its-affinity-with-them\/\">Nazism's attempt to attract extreme left militants because of its affinity with them<\/a><\/rel><\/p>\n<p><big>Raised fists and the soundtrack of a communist dictatorship<\/big><\/p>\n<p>As has happened so many times before, <strong>the event ended with the strains of \"The Internationale\"<\/strong>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/State_Anthem_of_the_Soviet_Union\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">whose music was the anthem of the Soviet dictatorship until 1944<\/a>. It is curious to see that many socialists who dislike Spain's national symbols have no qualms about singing <strong>an anthem that was the soundtrack to Stalin's purges<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Another significant detail is that <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/PSOE\/status\/1863238211918545237\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Pedro S\u00e1nchez and most of the PSOE leaders have sung this anthem with their left fist raised<\/a> (the communists sing it raising their right fist). <strong>The Servimedia agency has shown it in this video:<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-media-max-width=\"665\">\n<p lang=\"es\" dir=\"ltr\">\ud83d\udd34<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/S%C3%A1nchez?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#S\u00e1nchez<\/a> y los militantes del <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/PSOE?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@PSOE<\/a> clausuran el Congreso Federal cantando &#39;La Internacional&#39;<\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\udcf9Toda la informaci\u00f3n\ud83d\udc47<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/EXtEalFUi6\">https:\/\/t.co\/EXtEalFUi6<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/6hWeUiPTUs\">pic.twitter.com\/6hWeUiPTUs<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Servimedia (@Servimedia) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Servimedia\/status\/1863213332389380117?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 1, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><big>The origin of the raised fist salute of a communist militia, the Rot Front<\/big><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2009\/09\/09\/origen-historia-y-paradojas-del-puno-en-alto\/\">15 years ago I explained the origin of this leftist salute here<\/a>. <strong>The first to use it was the Communist Party of Germany (KPD),<\/strong> specifically its militia, the Rotfrontk\u00e4mpferbund (also known as Rot Front, \"Red Front\"). <strong>In European socialism it is now only used by Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese socialists.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As I mentioned then, <strong>the Rot Front, founded on July 18, 1924, adopted this salute as a reply to the Roman salute<\/strong> used by the Nazis (although some sources claim it was the other way around). <strong>That same year, Stalin launched a slogan: <em>\"fascism and social democracy are not antipodes, but twins.\"<\/em><\/strong> Following that line, since it was a member party of the Communist International directed from Moscow, <strong>the KPD began to describe the German social-democrats as \"social-fascists\"<\/strong>, pointing them out as its main enemies. As I mentioned in 2010, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2010\/08\/12\/el-trampolin-comunista-de-hitler\/\">these attacks helped the nazis to weaken the social-democrats<\/a> and contributed to the rise of Nazism.<\/p>\n<p><big>Nazism's attempt to recruit far-left militants<\/big><\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, being movements with socialist roots (remember that the word \"Nazi\" is an abbreviation for \"national socialist\"), <a href=\"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2023\/03\/09\/nazisms-attempt-to-attract-extreme-left-militants-because-of-its-affinity-with-them\/\">communists and Nazis competed to recruit far-left militants<\/a>, to such an extent that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.metmuseum.org\/art\/collection\/search\/265644\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the German communist magazine AIZ caricatured Hitler with Marx's beard<\/a>, due to its eagerness to recruit communist militants for the Nazi Party. <strong>Both totalitarian movements contributed to the erosion of the Weimar Republic,<\/strong> the young German democracy established in 1919. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2010\/08\/12\/el-trampolin-comunista-de-hitler\/\">As I noted here<\/a>, <strong>on 241 issues addressed in the Reichstag and the Prussian parliament in 1929 and 1930, nazis and communists voted together 70% of the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><big>The mass arrival of communists into the nazi ranks<\/big><\/p>\n<p><strong>Ultimately, the Nazi strategy was successful.<\/strong> According to historian Timothy Scott Brown in his book <em>\"Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance\"<\/em> (Berghahn, 2009), <strong>in Berlin, 70% of new SA recruits from January 1933 onwards were former communists.<\/strong> The flight of communist militants into the Nazi ranks was such that <strong>the KPD devised a strategy, the Scheringer-Kurs, to recruit nazi militants<\/strong>, with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/deutsch\/referenz\/thaelmann\/1930\/08\/natsozbef.htm\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a manifesto<\/a> that combined nationalism with communist ideas.<\/p>\n<p>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 (<em>\"Lucifer Ante Portas: Von Severing bis Heydrich\"<\/em>) that <strong>in Berlin 70% of new SA recruits from January 1933 onwards were former communists<\/strong>. Diel also noted something that many will find paradoxical, but which shows the closeness between these two totalitarian movements: <strong>entire units of the Rot Front defected to the SA, the Nazi Party militia.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Thus, <strong>many communists who started using the raised fist as a salute ended up joining the Nazi Party<\/strong>. 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. <strong>What a pity that Spain has such a pitiful left.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>---<\/p>\n<p><small>Photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/PSOE\/status\/1863238211918545237\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">PSOE<\/a>.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 41st federal congress of the PSOE has ended with a new display of ultra-leftism by the Spanish socialists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19536,10375],"tags":[10444,14187,10872,693,23198,1604,10796],"class_list":["post-57933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-we-said-yesterday","category-history","tag-communism","tag-communist-party-of-germany","tag-national-socialism","tag-psoe","tag-raised-fist","tag-rotfrontkampferbund","tag-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57933"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}