My ‘service’ in the Hitler Youth had never taken the form of ideological education, because my parents had not allowed me to go to camps. It is true that I had participated in the afternoon Heimabende, but all I had taken away from those was, at best, a form of pre-military training, not associated with any ideology. The fact that National Socialism, as it asserted, had introduced a new epoch in the history of the world, that the Volksgemeinschaft, i.e. ‘community of the people’, could be an important philosophical concept, was something that I had never known, nor would I have believed it or considered it to be correct.
The Christian faith, and the traditional middle-class way of life on the one hand, and the force of what was happening in the war had hit me hard. On the other hand, there was the undefined feeling that it was not unconnected with the Weltanschauung that so many villainous types had surfaced. In any case, it prevented me from getting more closely involved with it. Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was something that I had never read.
In the camp, things were completely different. My mind was full of uncertainties. My untrained intelligence was exposed to everything that streamed in on me under the apparently scientific cloak of Marxism. Marxism, the whole of the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, concerns ‘a theoretical interpretation of historical development, and in particular, of the motive laws of the capitalist means of production. That facilitates and accelerates the struggle for emancipation of the working class’. It was ‘the doctrine of dialectical and historical materialism. It led to a critique of political economy, a critical representation of the dialectical structure and motive laws of the capitalist means of production. It led to scientific socialism, to its statements concerning the future social order and the means of struggle leading to that social order being implemented’. Marxism starts from the basic premise that the material world is the only real world, and that human behaviour, thought and will, can be understood only in the context of material production. In its view, consciousness is ‘nothing other than material being, transferred into the mind’. Nature is interpreted as a unity based on its own materiality, which develops from the lowest forms of material being (and material movement), from dead material, through living material up to material which is capable of consciousness. The transition from one stage to the next occurs by means of a ‘qualitative leap’, so that this materialism is not required to reduce higher forms of being to those forms of being which are lower, but is capable of acknowledging the qualitative differences.... The historical function of the dialectical-materialistic theory of historical development principally consisted in the ideological confirmation of a belief in the progress of the working class’ (see Maiers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, vol 15, page 693).
Quite simply, it was impressive, and entirely new to me concerning materialism and dialectic, their essence and subject matter, concerning the law of coherence, evolutionism, its necessity and the ‘leaps’ and the law of opposition. No less upsetting for me was what I learned of historical materialism, of its basis, the doctrine of basis and superstructure, the doctrine of development, theory and practice, and ideology with its general features and its influences on philosophy, science, morality, and also on art and religion. My mind was not equipped with the weapons to make any kind of sound objection to what was being drummed into me. It was simply new territory into which I was being led at that time.
But course it was not as if those new ideas occupied my mind day and night. Our existence was too hard for that. The harsh reality we experienced, in the prisoner of war camp and outside it, was too much at odds with the theory that was being put forward. Once it was announced that a lecture was to be given by Strohmeier, entitled ‘What is to be done?’ It recalled one of Lenin’s writings of the same name. Even Communists, for whom this was right up their street, had to smile to themselves at this surreal question, to which there was only one answer, that was, ‘Go home’! But everyone was exposed to the suggestive effect of the slogans, and it affected many men as it did me. ‘The doctrine of Marx is all powerful, because it is right’, was one of the slogans, but there was also another Marxist slogan that said, ‘The idea becomes material power if it seizes hold of the masses’. Lenin’s slogan, ‘Learn, learn, learn!’ not only hung over the camp like a watchword, but it was ever-present at all the Antifa events.
Only many years later, after my own studies, when I was already working in my profession, did I find the time to come to grips intellectually with Marxism, and in particular to study controversial literature. I did that with the aid of the Handbuch des Weltkommunismus, published by Bochensky and Niemeyer, 1958. I used the judgement of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Constitutional Court) of 17 August 1956 concerning ‘The prohibition of the KPD’, or German Communist Party. It was a special printing of the judgement from the third volume published by C F Müller Karlsruhe. That judgement (pages 655–656) contains the following notable passage:
An overall assessment of this intensive work of training, recruitment, agitation and propaganda by the KPD compels recognition. There is careful harmonisation of all these actions with each other and in the efforts to include all classes of people. It uses the methods of propaganda and agitation that are most suited to each of them. There is an integrated plan that is directed towards weakening, as ‘the social order of a bourgeois-capitalist world’, the free and democratic order of society. It aims to bring about the time for the proletarian revolution. The particular danger that this disruptive propaganda poses to free and democratic social order results from the fact that the apparent ‘aimlessness’ pervading free democracy as a result of mutual tolerance is confronted by a coherent system of organising the world. It claimed to be based on clear scientific principles, that provided clear answers to very complex economical and political questions and thus attracts the attention of the person to whom such matters are otherwise very difficult to understand. Instead of a hard, never-ending struggle with other social groups, and progress in the direction of greater social justice and freedom in the State and in society, one is presented with the picture of a ‘paradise on earth’. That is certain to be attained only if the clear scientific perceptions of the KPD and the rules for political behaviour, deduced from these, are followed. The conclusion, that the ‘bourgeois-capitalist social order’ stands in the way of this development must be eliminated, should be self-evident.
In our Russian captivity in the Georgenburg camp, Lenin’s slogan ‘Learn, learn, learn!’ was exclusively restricted to the ‘all-powerful’ teachings of Marx. In the camps run by the Western Allies, especially before the end of the war, it went without saying that the prisoners were given the opportunity to learn. That was not the case with prisoners of war held by the Russians. The 10-hour day on our work for ‘restitution’ did not allow tired bodies and minds to concern themselves with anything else. It was not even possible to hold Russian language courses. Remarkably, among the many books in the library there was no Russian language primer. Thus, almost no prisoner of war was able to learn Russian. I, in my two-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war, was scarcely able to learn more than 200 Russian words, ‘parrot-fashion’. There were indeed other comrades who, thanks to their basic knowledge of Polish and Czech, easily mastered Russian. I came across two comrades who could speak Russian but only because they had spent some years in Russia.