The Nazi movement viewed the organized labor movement as its main opponent because worker resistance stood in the way of the Nazis seizing power and completely changing the focus of society to rearmament and war. This is why the first terror after the Nazis seized power was directed primarily at the socialist-minded labor movement. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in Munich was allowed to run for re-election to the Reichstag (lower house of parliament) on March 5, 1933, and even hold public election events, but it was already severely curtailed by prohibitions on the press and assembly by the Bavarian government and the Munich Police Headquarters. In spite of these prohibitions, pamphlets and newspapers were distributed (e.g., by Otto Kohlhofer) warning of the Nazi regime and calling for a general strike. Hundreds of workers protested against the Storm Battalion (SA) parades in various neighborhoods; members of the Communist Youth League protested on February 1 in Schwabing, during which the student Heinz Eschen was shot down by the police. The southern Bavarian KPD chairman Hans Beimler still expressed confidence in winning the fight against the Nazis during a campaign rally at Circus Krone on February 12, 1933.
Dismantling the KPD Structures by Early 1934
The new ruling powers began with mass arrests of functionaries and members of the KPD: On the one hand, the Nazis wanted to use the chance to take revenge on their fiercest opponents during the era of the Weimar Republic (‘Whoever votes for Hitler, votes for war’). On the other hand, they did not have to worry about greater solidarity with other adversaries since the Communists had long been socially marginalized. Per the ordinance dated February 28, 1933, on the ‘Protection of the People and State’ following the Reichstag fire, the Bavarian government directed the police to take aggressive action against the ‘Communist danger’ (Münchner Neueste Nachrichten dated March 2, 1933). In Munich, therefore, the offices of the KPD, the ’Red Assistance’, the ‘Red Trade Union Opposition’, the ‘Fighting League against Fascism’, the ‘Red Sports’, the printing press and business premises of the KPD newspaper Neue Zeitung were soon closed in an extensive police operation on March 1. On the days leading up to the election and March 5, election day itself, the homes of over a hundred Munich communists were searched and a total of 65 people were temporarily arrested for distributing pamphlets and posting slogans on house walls. Leading Munich communists hid in prepared illegal accommodations to maintain the organizational structure of the party in the event of it being banned. Due to the years of the harsh anti-communist policy of the Bavarian government, supporters were accustomed to working illegally and hoped that the working class would become active and that the new government would also soon fall.
However, the KPD did not expect the degree of terrorization to come. With the help of lists managed for years by the Political Department of the Police, widespread arrests of communists in Munich and Bavaria took place in the following weeks. Those arrested, such as Claus Bastian, Hugo Jakusch, and Adelheid Liessmann were first sent to various prisons. The majority was then brought to the newly created Dachau Concentration Camp for political inmates. In March and April 1933 alone, a total of 3,000 members of the KPD and so-called ‘sympathizers’ were arrested in Bavaria, including several hundred in Munich, so that the majority of inmates in Dachau Concentration Camp and the police prisons was comprised of communists during this time. Some Munich residents such as the parliamentarians Franz Stenzer, Joseph Götz, and Fritz Dressel or activists such as Wilhelm Franz and Josef Amuschel were soon murdered in the first few months. Magdalena Knödler, wife of the imprisoned Pasing city councilor Gottlieb Knödler, committed suicide in Stadelheim Prison. According to estimates, over a quarter of the KPD members in Munich fell victim to the various means of persecution between 1933 and 1945.
Despite this terrorization and extensive arrests, most neighborhood groups could continue illegally, although younger and less known communists – often from the worker’s sports – were now often appointed to leadership. The network of familial, neighborhood, or occupational contacts was still intact or could still be established in the summer of 1933. The goal was not just to maintain the party structures but to use large-scale propaganda to move the working class to mass resistance against the Nazi government. Pamphlets and issues of Neue Zeitung were produced in small batches, such as in cellars and garages (Sebastian Steer), on an island of the Isar river in the Pupplinger Au (Martin Grünwiedl), or in the attic of the Asam Church’s priest house. Up to thousands of copies of these pamphlets were passed on to comrades for secret distribution in mailboxes and companies. Anti-fascist slogans on house walls and bridges or the secret renaming of streets after murdered communists around the unemployment office were intended to show the existing presence of the KPD in Munich.
In several waves of mass arrests, the Bavarian Political Police (BPP) succeeded in crushing the traditional structure of the KPD neighborhood groups by 1934. The now arrested, often 20 to 30-year-old activists were imprisoned or even sent to Dachau Concentration Camp until their trial for ‘high treason’, served their sentences in penitentiaries after the verdict, and were then often transferred again to Dachau Concentration Camp for ’protective custody’. In the case of Adi Maislinger, organizational leader of the Munich KPD since the summer of 1933, imprisonment lasted until the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp in April 1945. In most cases, the convicted were freed upon serving their sentences, but were monitored, had to report to the police, and, branded a concentration camp inmate, often had great difficulty finding work.
For this reason, an important area of resistance was the secret collection of donations to support the families of those imprisoned, especially since other family members were often also imprisoned as alleged accomplices or supporters, such as in the case of Centa Herker, who, as the wife of the concentration camp escapee Hans Beimler, was held due to ‘guilt by association’ – partly at the same time as her sister, brother-in-law (Maria and Heinrich Döppel), father, and mother. Providing a special role in the secret support of those persecuted, the ’Red Assistance’ reached far beyond the circle of KPD members and now continued its work illegally.
Continuing the Resistance
Following the recent destruction of the party structures by the beginning of 1934, these contacts were to be used to establish further illegal groups in the interests of the foreign management of the KPD; however, these contacts should now be better protected by following strict, conspiratorial rules (code names, small groups, etc.). Considering the numerous arrests, the intimidation, but also the increasing acceptance of the Nazi regime by the population, setting up new resistance groups was extremely difficult.
Nonetheless, the KPD still managed to persuade people to join the resistance even during this phase in the mid-1930s. Illegal workplace groups such as those at BMW or Agfa did not go beyond initial attempts. It also became clear to central KPD leadership that mass resistance and the overthrow of the Hitler government could not be expected so quickly. Departing from this, the ‘Popular Front’ emerged as the central KPD strategy, in which bourgeois forces were to be won over in addition to the working class for joint illegal work.
In practice, resistance activities of the KPD were now primarily limited to supporting the needy, receiving and passing on literature smuggled in from abroad to trusted and like-minded people for preserving the political discussion (Anna and Hans Bauer), providing illegal accommodations for those at risk (Maria Reichenwallner and Anna Mäusle), and posting small stickers warning of the impending war. Nonetheless, spectacular operations were also planned: During the premiere in 1935 of a propaganda movie about the Nazi Party congress in a movie theater at Lenbachplatz, a glass engraved with the slogan, “The KPD lives!” was supposed to be glued to the projection window at the start of the screening so that the writing would be visible during the movie. However, the police uncovered the plan: As in many cases, this was probably also due to the police informant Max Troll, who, as an illegal functionary, betrayed probably well over a hundred communists from Munich and Bavaria to the police between 1935 and 1936.
The associated renewed mass arrests played a major role in ensuring that communist resistance came to a nearly complete halt in Munich for some time since many members of the KPD had been imprisoned, fought for their bare survival upon release, or didn’t see a point in participating in other organized resistance activities in light of Hitler’s growing approval among the population. Therefore, activists primarily focused on maintaining ties with like-minded individuals, private political discussions, listening to ‘enemy radio’ together, and helping each other – all of which was quite dangerous in view of the constant police surveillance. Nevertheless, the Gestapo continued to record signs of resistance such as pamphlets or stickers up to the beginning of the war.
Supporting the Spanish Republic against General Franco’s putsch in the summer of 1936 was an opportunity for a number of Munich-based anti-fascists from the socialist labor movement to actively fight in the International Brigades against fascism in Spain, thereby also working to prevent the impending world war. They had to illegally make their way to Spain. After the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, they were often extradited to Germany and sent to Dachau Concentration Camp as ‘Red Spaniards’. Here it should not be forgotten, that inmates in the concentration camps, including communists, offered ‘resistance’ in the form of providing aid to their especially harassed comrades, thereby helping them to ‘push through’ (Hugo Jakusch, Otto Kohlhofer).
Resistance after the Start of the War
The start of the war in 1939 complicated every form of organized resistance again. Persons formerly under ‘protective custody’ were, despite often being ‘unfit for military service’, drafted into the military (Hans Herker), surveillance and punishment became considerably worse, meanwhile Hitler’s approval in broad swaths of the population increased again in light of the first ‘war successes’. Moreover, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact disconcerted party members and its affiliates since the Soviet Union, the arch enemy of National Socialism, suddenly became its partner.
Still, thoughts of resistance increased as the war dragged on because it was associated with the hope of Germany’s military defeat and thereby the downfall of the Nazi regime. The invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive. Not only did it spark outrage among communists but it even sowed doubt among conservative circles as to the rationality of the Nazi and Wehrmacht leadership – especially considering the changed wartime situation from the end of 1941.
The lot of any concentration camp inmate, who was drafted from prison into the so-called ‘Bewährungsbataillone’ (Rehabilitation Battalions) and had to fight in them at particularly dangerous sections of the front for Nazi Germany, was particularly hard. Franz Scheider from Munich therefore tried to make contact with partisans and British troops in Greece to surrender his unit without a fight.
It was not uncommon for men and women, some of whom had already been imprisoned for years, to cautiously come together in small, conspiratorial circles to discuss initiatives in the event of the collapse of the Nazi regime. Groups in which communists also worked formed in some companies located in Munich; for example, the group working at Steinheil received pamphlets via Ludwig Ficker from Switzerland. The Hartwimmer-Olschewski-Römer group and the ‘Anti-Nazi German Popular Front’ (ADV) led by Emma and Hans Hutzelmann are examples of extensive networks in the Communist milieu that closely cooperated with the BSW (‘Fraternal Cooperation of POWs’) made up of Soviet POWs and ‘Eastern workers’.
The Hartwimmer-Olschewski-Römer group
After 1933, most of the group members already had experience with illegal political work and had served prison sentences in penitentiaries and concentration camps. They therefore shrank from risky, high-profile operations. Their goal was to form a communist cadre organization. The group was composed of people with two very different backgrounds. There were long-standing communists such as Simon Hutzler and Otto Aster, but also supporters of the national-revolutionary movement: former World War I officers such as Wilhelm Olschewski and members of the ‘Oberland League’ (Bund Oberland), such as Hans Hartwimmer and Josef (“Beppo”) Römer, who had been won over by communist ideas in the meantime. Imprisoned in Dachau Concentration Camp since 1934, Römer provided the impetus to form the group after his release in 1939. Starting in 1940, he forged connections to communist resistance groups led by Robert Uhrig in Berlin; there were also contacts in the Ruhr area. Like the activists in Berlin, those in Munich wanted to organize conspiratorial groups of five. They planned sabotage operations and set up arms caches. In the spirit of the ‘Popular Front’ strategy, they were also open to collaborating with other organizations, but the Gestapo managed to crush the group before this could occur: They arrested 43 people in Munich alone in February, 1942. Six of them were sentenced to death and executed (Otto Binder, Engelbert Kimberger), another six died from physical abuse while in Gestapo custody (Karl Huber, Georg Jahres), and the remaining detainees received sentences for prison or penal servitude (Viktoria Hösl).
Resistance and Individual Opposition
Even individuals who were not organized in groups from the communist labor movement showed resistant behavior and transgressed against the commandments of the National Socialist ‘people’s community’, which lost its binding power more and more the longer the war progressed. They listened to enemy broadcasts and expressed criticism of the Nazi regime. Others supported those who were persecuted or circumvented the prohibition on contact with foreign forced laborers.
The regime harshly cracked down on all these types of resistance, especially when activity that was more visible to the public eye was undertaken, such as that by Robert Eisinger and Emil Meier. Both men were supporters of the KPD but acted without the support of any organization. They also both had experienced the repression of the Gestapo at the beginning of the regime. They had met in 1937 in Dachau Concentration Camp, where they, as opponents of the regime known to the police, had been temporarily detained during Benito Mussolini’s visit to Munich. They became friends and, in 1943, they decided to inform the population of the impending catastrophe and call for the overthrow of the regime. They produced pamphlets that were distributed by Meier, who then continued the work – now with the help of a former Gestapo informant – when Eisinger withdrew resignedly after a few months. In December 1944, first Meier and shortly thereafter Eisinger were caught by the Gestapo. They only managed to avoid execution because the Americans liberated the city on April 30, 1945.
