very deep roots even in the RussianZone.
The second front to be erected wasthe People's Congress , organized inNovember 1947. It had about the samefate as the Socialist Unity Party. Theelection of delegates to the third Peo ple's Congress in the middle of May,1949, was the turning point. The Rus-sian Zone was asked to vote" Ja" or" Nein" on the proposition of" a unitedGermany and a just peace," which waslike asking for a vote on the multipli-cation table. According to the officialfigures, 33.9 per cent voted" Nein."When the Soviet Military Governmentmade this figure public, the Commu nist leaders assumed they were beingtold to try something else.
The National Front, which was bornlast May, is still another effort to casta wider political net. This time the nethas no limits. The People's Congress had an" anti- Fascist and democratic"basis, whatever the interpretation ofthat might be. The National Front hasmade room for unreconstructed Nazis ." There should be drawn into the Na-tional Front those circles of the Ger man people who until now have stoodaloof or even rejected the GermanPeople's Congress movement becauseof its organizational setup and demo-cratic basis," Wilhelm Pieck has said.
" In view of the mortal danger to thewhole nation, we need not look backon the former[ Nazi ] party membershipof individuals, but we must have thesincere will to come together with everynationally- minded German who wantsthe unity of Germany , a just peace, andthereafter the withdrawal of the occu-pation troops," Walter Ulbricht saidrecently." We have today in the Soviet occupation zone not a few former ac-tive Nazis who are carrying out re-sponsible work."
" It is necessary that we should actmore coldly and courageously to drawinto the great national struggle thoseforces which until now have not takenpart in it, because they were and arestanding outside the anti- Fascist, dem-ocratic order," said Fred Oelssner inNeues Deutschland on August 7." Wemust draw into this great strugglemuch more courageously than untilnow the former officials and teachers,the active soldiers and officers, the for-mer Nazis and not merely the nom-inal ones."
in the National Front,there is no other condition than theirsincere will to fight for the unity andindependence of Germany ," said Pieck in Neues Deutschland on August 4.
The tactic behind the NationalFront is curiously parallel to that be-hind the Nazi- Soviet Pact ten years ago.Then, too, it was permissible to makea pact with the Nazis against the west-ern powers. Now any enemy of theUnited States Communist propagan-da hardly bothers with Britain orFrance - even a" former" active Naziwho is still enough of a one to have nouse for anti- Fascism or democracy, isconsidered a fit partner. Communistsare busy preaching just what they ac-cuse the western powers of practicing.
To justify this new line, the Commu nists assert that Germany is a" colonialproblem" and they are waging a strug-gle of" national liberation." Germany is actually put in the same class in theirpropaganda as Spain , Greece , andPuerto Rico . This" colonial" theoryserves two ends. It provides a politicalbasis for Communist- Nazi collabora-tion on the ground that the all- impor-tant issue is" national," not" social,"and it enables the Germans to think ofthemselves as a poor, oppressed peoplewho are paying, not for their own sins,but for the insatiable greed of Ameri can profiteers and warmongers.
If the Socialist Unity Party or thePeople's Congress had come up to ex-pectations, there would obviously be noneed for the National Front. The needis not so acute in the Russian Zone,where the Communists would likemore popularity but do not need it tostay in power. The National Front wasprimarily conceived for the westernzones, where the Communist vote re-cently declined from 1,634,545 to1,360,443, or from 9.4 per cent to 5.7per cent.
The weaker the Communists are, themore they need allies, and the most eas-ily available allies against the UnitedStates are on the extreme right. Thecommon stock- in- trade of all the neo-Fascist groups, like Otto Strasser 's il-legal but not inactive Black Front , nowcalled" The League for Germany 's Re-vival," is inflammatory nationalismwhich, in the western zones, is anti-American, anti- British , anti- French , orall three, as the case may be.
The National Front is solely a polit-ical basis for collaboration between the
extreme right and extreme left, tak-ing them and leaving them as they are,with only one thing in common: Ger man " national interest." This is doubt-less a dangerous game, as the Nazi-Soviet Pact was. Communist leadersadmit having trouble making the wholeSocialist Unity Party" understand" it.At the moment the two most over-worked words in the Communist vo-cabulary are" German " and" nation-al." The Communists insist that thereis a difference between" national" and" nationalism," but there is some ques-tion as to whether the objects of theirpropaganda always appreciate thatdifference.
Rightists. Except for the Free Demo-crats, only the parties of the extremeright increased their vote both abso-lutely and relatively. The chauvinisticGerman Party obtained almost a mil-lion votes; the neo- Fascist German Rightist Party almost half a million;the predominantly monarchist Bava-rian Party a million; and a special
The Reporter, October 11, 1949
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