This book highlights how failure of Communist-Social Democratic unity weakened fight against Nazis in Germany
T. Derbent’s book The German Communist Resistance, 1933-1945 examines how the German Communist Party (KPD) waged underground resistance against the Nazi regime, particularly between 1933 and 1935, despite severe repression, mass arrests, and forced changes in tactics and organization after 1935. It traces how the KPD’s structure was dismantled, with activists imprisoned, exiled, or forced to adopt different forms of protest, including the creation of illegal networks and participation in the Spanish Civil War.
When the KPD was banned, its paramilitary formations numbered more than 100,000 members, while the Antifa League had around 250,000 members. Under Nazi repression, activists who remained in Germany faced stark choices. Some abandoned the struggle, a few collaborated with the regime, but tens of thousands continued resistance. Though party structures collapsed repeatedly, clandestine organizations were quickly reorganized, dismantled, and rebuilt again.
The book narrates this cycle of repression and survival, bringing into focus a resistance often obscured in mainstream history. Nazi repression was swift, with leaders arrested and detained in concentration camps and thousands of cadres forced into exile to fight fascism abroad.
Derbent highlights networks such as that of Robert Uhrig, which organized factory-based resistance, and the Herbert Baum group, active in producing illegal leaflets and attacking Nazi propaganda in 1936. The Gestapo labeled several such networks the “Red Orchestra,” including those led by Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen, which distributed information and supported persecuted individuals.
The book also situates communist resistance alongside other forms, including the White Rose group and anti-Hitler factions among the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, such as the Kreisau Circle and the July 20, 1944 conspirators. Derbent argues, however, that comparing communist resistance to Christian or socialist efforts is misleading, since the latter were undertaken by individuals or small networks, while the communists embraced propaganda, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, espionage, union struggles, and armed resistance across Germany, in camps and in the army, from the beginning to the end of the Third Reich.
The book also reflects on the failure to establish a united front with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Derbent does not dwell on the Stalinization of the Comintern, which often imposed Moscow’s priorities on European struggles, but points to external factors and the antagonism between the SPD and KPD. The “social fascist” line is presented as justified, since social democrats at times used the state apparatus to repress communist organizing. This failure to unite, he argues, weakened the fight against Nazism.
Despite repression, KPD organizations continued clandestine action, repeatedly dismantled and rebuilt as militants were imprisoned, executed, or forced into exile. They organized propaganda campaigns, supported strikes, carried out sabotage of the war industry, and resisted within the army and concentration camps. Derbent also highlights the international role of communists in exile, including their involvement in the Spanish Civil War. He presents communist resistance as consistent and determined, even during the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, maintaining military resistance rather than political compromise.
The book emphasizes the scale of sabotage against Nazi war production, and challenges the Western consensus that places communism and fascism as equivalent totalitarianisms. Derbent suggests that just as in the past, liberal and progressive but anti-communist blocs today often compromise with far-right forces to preserve capitalist hegemony. He diagnoses fascism as a social movement with a mass base, driven by authoritarian visions of collective rebirth, that undermines liberal institutions while reinforcing economic and social hierarchies. In this framework, militant antifascism is engaged in a three-way fight against insurgent far-right movements and bourgeois democracy.
Derbent concludes that fascism cannot be permanently defeated without confronting the conditions that give rise to it—capitalism, white supremacy, and in contexts like North America, settler-colonialism.
---
*Freelance journalist
Comments