Work in Progress

Austrain Stalinism and Fascism

We have received a great deal of information on the controversy in Germany and the ensuing court case over Hans Schafranek's Zwischen NKWD und Gestapo: Die Auslieferung deutscher und osterreichischer Antifaschisten aus der Sowjetunion an Nazi-deutschland 1937-1941 (ISP Verlag, Frankfurt AM, December 1990, DM29). Hans Schafranek works for the Documentary Archive of the Austrian Resistance and this book and his biography of Kurt Landau (a shortened versi~n of which we translated from the French and published in Revolutionary History, Volume 4, nos 1/2) are a part of a wider research project involving the fate of the Austrian Socialists who went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.

Researching in the archives of the German Foreign Office, Schaf­ranek found that the odious traffic in deportees had begun by February 1937, that preparations to do this had started in late 1936 whilst isolated cases had occurred even earlier. Schafranek was able to trace over 900 victims and to give short biographies of 192 Germans and 113 Austrians. A number of studies by other West and East German historians have begun to uncover what happened to the many German Communist Party (KPD) members who vanished into the Gulag or were shot in the cellars of the prisons of the ‘workers’ fatherland'. This research is only the start, and needs to be taken up by, and on behalf of, the Poles, the Balts, the Spaniards, the Yugoslavs and many more.

One of those deported was the Hamburg functionary Wilheim Pfeiffer. Completely worn out by his stay in a Russian prison, Pfeiffer was deported unwillingly, and his fate is unknown. That of Franz Koritschoner is known. This founder member of the Austrian Com­munist Party, until 1923 a Central Committee member, lost his in­fluence during the Stalinisation of the party, and from 1930 worked in the Profintern apparatus. Imprisoned already in April 1936, he was sent to forced labour in the Arctic circle. In April 1941 he was handed over to the Gestapo. In June he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered shortly after. He was Jewish.

Until fairly recently apologists for Stalinism were still casting doubt on the account by Margarete Buber-Neumann, widow of the executed KPD leader Heinz Neumann, of how she was handed over by the Soviet government to the Nazi regime after the signing of the Molotov-Rib­bentrop pact, along with other left wingers. When Buber-Neumann told her story in postwar West Germany, she was denounced by Stalinist apologists as a CIA agent, and so forth. Prominent in the campaign against her was Emil Carlebach, a pre-war KPD Landtag