Confronting Fascism Part 1

Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht and America's Limited View of Fascism
 By Elise Kehle, edited by Sophie Jones



     Amidst rising income inequality, state and vigilante violence against marginalized people, political power for religious extremists, and a weakened rule of law, workers have many questions. Is this fascism? If we are in the grip of a fascist movement, how widespread is it? Do all of its participants know that they are fascists? Is fascism based on the American system of racism, or the universal ones of class division and sexism? We must view the Trump regime as a major step back from democracy, yes, but we must see the processes that led to it. Trump is a new low of the oppressions and plunderings committed by the ruling class, who have pushed so far that they could only go further by upending the rules, as they are now doing.

     The ruling class must reinforce racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, transphobia, ableism, or some combination of the above among the working class to justify its rule. The social interests of a segment of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie thus coincide with the economic interest of the elite.

     For the purposes of this paper, we will take it as a given that liberal democracy is inherently worth defending against fascism, even though as socialists, we strive to replace liberal democracy with workers’ democracy. As Dimitrov said, “today the millions of toilers living under capitalism are faced with the necessity of deciding their attitude to those forms in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is clad in the various countries. We are not anarchists, and it is not at all a matter of indifference to us what kind of political regime exists in any given country: whether a bourgeois dictatorship in the form of bourgeois liberal democracy, even with greatly curtailed democratic rights and liberties, or a bourgeois dictatorship in its open, fascist form. While upholding Workers’ Democracy, we shall defend every inch of the democratic gains which the working class has won in the course of years of stubborn struggle, and shall fight to extend these gains.” (Italics added) Liberal democracy cannot sustain itself, and cannot deliver for the people, but it contains several lines of defense which we must man and cannot abandon if we wish to repel the fascist threat.


     That being said, liberal democracy’s weakness- its individualism- influences how liberals and liberal institutions define and treat fascism. This is not a new phenomenon, and can even be found in how we present the history of fascism’s most infamous example, Nazi Germany. We must understand fascism in its entirety, both in past and present, to have a better chance of repulsing it. However, most descriptions of fascism prefer to reduce it solely to its capitalist sponsors and its continuity with their crimes under bourgeois democracy, or to the terrorism of its most bloodthirsty believers. But this hideous alliance must be seen in its entirety, not focusing on either its economic or social aspects.


     The presentation of certain perpetrators of the Holocaust as innocent or less culpable is reproduced in our incomplete view of fascism as merely the most extreme practice of common identitarian hatreds, which leaves it still well within the scope of individual conduct, not mass movements.

     If Fascism were only the work of the street-corner bigot, or only of the owner class, it would be far less dangerous. It is the combination of greed, hatred and ignorance that produces fascism. Workers must decide for ourselves whether our whiteness, our cisness, our heterosexuality or our christianity are worth our freedom.

     Applied to histories of Nazi rule, these misinterpretations, intentional or otherwise, limit the culpability of all but a handful of perpetrators for the crimes of fascism. Many historians call this the “Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht”. Briefly stated, the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht is the idea that the murders of 11 million people for being Jewish, Romani, Socialist, Gay, Disabled, Prisoners of War, or miscellaneous dissidents that we call the Holocaust was perpetrated by the Nazi leadership working through its private security force, the SS, and not by the regular forces of the German military.

     This was introduced in the late 1940s to justify the alliance of right-wing elements in the United States with their West German counterparts, even as those counterparts had supported the Nazi rise to power and their worst atrocities. Insofar as fascism is seen as an aberration of the uniquely depraved few, and not the natural and often popular outgrowth of unchecked capitalism, we will not see the whole scope of the threat.

     The myth of the clean Wehrmacht is just that, a myth, for a variety of reasons, notably the fact that the German military, not the SS, took primary responsibility for the Holocaust itself in occupied Soviet Byelorussia and Yugoslavia as well as for the attempted pan-Slavic genocide of the Hunger Plan. Further, the German military had a long history of slaughtering marginalized people, was inextricably linked with both the German nobility and with the radical petty-bourgeois ideologues who founded the Nazi party. The German military represented in microcosm the alliance between Germany’s old money and eccentric bigots that produced fascism, was the instrumental tool of this alliance in crushing the revolutions of 1918-1923, and continued to legitimize Nazi rule throughout its 12.5 year duration.


     This deception justified the American authorities’ decision to recruit and arm former Nazis for action against the workers’ democracies of the world. This was naturally joined by the expansion of ties between American corporations and their German counterparts, even those which had participated in the Holocaust. Today’s popular depiction of Nazism in “The Man in the High Castle” pays no attention to the economic underpinnings of the Nazi dictatorship, and merely focuses on the enforcers of the regime. Just as before, if we are encouraged to look for the source of Trumpism coming solely from Breitbart or solely from Wall Street, or even from the local biker bar, we will miss vital parts of the abominable whole.

     Meanwhile, someone looking exclusively through Dimitrov’s analysis of the “terrorist dictatorship of the most rightwing part of finance capital” will be waiting a long time for a revolution to be launched by a working class infected with racism and religious extremism. (Though his predictions of how fascist movements behave when taking power remain prescient as ever) History has shown us the difficulty of resisting fascism when it buys the loyalty of the masses with privilege over the persecuted. We cannot ignore this- not only does it make fascism more dangerous, but it is also precisely the threat we face today.

     Those who insist, as Dimitrov does, that fascism will inevitably be brought down by its own working class, can point to few examples of this actually happening.  What has happened far more often is international coalitions forming to contain and extinguish a fascist threat, as happened in World War II, or regional systems of fascism being brought down by nationwide movements as happened with dejure Segregation in the US.  This poses serious concerns for modern antifascists, as we have few potential saviors to look to.  There is no Red Army waiting to save us, and Trumpism is a nationwide phenomenon.

     It is not always easy to see the full scope of the threat we face. Competing explanations of fascism’s rise have often clung to Dimitrov’s class analysis to the exclusion of all else, or have attempted to hide the class basis of fascism altogether. Some would say it is merely a social phenomenon, and all who share elements of identity with the fascist criminals are equally guilty. But thinking of fascism as only its masters, its thinkers, or its enforcers will only prevent us from seeing the threat we face in its entirety.