The real state of the case however shows us millions of unsupported children, the existence of child labour and even the death penalty for children. Bolshevic propaganda deceitfully talks of the “emancipation of woman through communism.” The truth is that the institution of marriage has been completely set aside, that there is a terrible disintegration and abolition of family life, that there is an absence of employment for women and a state of prostitution that is alarmingly on the increase. Such a regime, in which theory and practice are in glaring contradiction, cannot possibly maintain its position except by the propagation of falsehood and unscrupulous hypocrisy.
Before January 30, 1933, each time that a workman was murdered by order of the Communists, the crime was imputed to the National Socialists. There were constant false reports of mutinies among the Storm Troops and honest German workmen were branded as strike-breakers. When Horst Wessel was assassinated, the public horror became so great that the Communists had to bow before it; and, to clear themselves, they put forward the story that this dastardly political misdeed arose from an altercation between rival claimants to a mistress. When Norkus, who was a member of the Hitler Youth, was stabbed by some communist brutes, the “Rote Fahne” barefacedly declared that Norkus was killed by a Nazi spy, so that the Nazis were alleged to have murdered a seventeen-year-old member of their own party in order to procure material to have the German Communist Party forbidden by law. The same happened when Maikowski and Gatschke were assassinated.
When National Socialism showed up the work of the Communist Party in Germany, the Communist International started the propagandist atrocity stories against National Socialism. The London mock trial was meant to acquit the Communist Party of any guilt of burning the Reichstag by claiming that it had been supported and approved by leading National Socialists. The dead member of the Reichstag could not deny what had been falsely attributed to him. Later on, however, avowals were made by people who had formerly been communist leaders, that not a single word of the truth was contained in the memorandum. The whole thing was avowed by them to have been falsified in all its details for the purpose of bringing National Socialism into discredit before the world. Jurists and journalists of repute, and even an English Lord, descended to the level of making marionettes of themselves at this London mock trial.
Since that time the communists have been carrying on a worldwide systematic work of propaganda against Germany, because they recognise and realise that the National Socialists are their most dangerous enemies. Among the eternally recurring themes of this communist agitation are the stories of war preparations in the interests of German imperialism, preparations for a revanche against France, annexations in Denmark and Holland and Switzerland, in the Baltic States and the Ukraine etc., and a German crusade against the Soviet Union, dissensions in the Party and the Government, especially between the Party and the Army, growing discontent among the masses, assassinations of leading men in Germany or attempts on their lives, preparations for an inflation and the coming of a complete economic collapse, the murder and torturing of prisoners, religious persecutions and cultural vandalisms of all kinds.
These propagandist falsehoods are sent out through thousands of channels and in thousands of ways; bourgeois intellectualism—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously—is pressed into the service of this campaign of defamation. In all European capitals there are large offices for the spread of this poison throughout the world and large subsidies are furnished by the Komintern to prepare and carry out the work. These organisations are constant centres of unrest among the nations. They never tire of stirring up trouble every way they possibly can.
That is Bolshevic propaganda. That is the form in which it clothes itself and lives, using falsehood and slander and chicanery, so as to make the nations suspicious of one another and hate one another, thus spreading a general spirit of unrest; because the Bolshevics know so well that they can never bring the communist idea to triumph except in an age that is distracted and sceptical.
In Germany we have religious controversies which arise from profound questions of conscience but have nothing whatsoever to do with a denial of religion. These controversies are exploited sometimes by harmless and sometimes malicious critics and a parallel is drawn between them and the absolutely dogmatic atheism of the Bolshevic International. To realise the grotesqueness of the parallel it is only necessary to point to a few examples in the theory and practice of Communism.
In the programme of the Communist International it is openly and freely declared that the struggle against every kind of religion must be carried on ruthlessly and systematically. Lenin declared that “religion is the opium of the people and it is a species of fusel oil.” These statements are published in the fourth volume of his “Works.”
At the second Congress of Atheists, Bucharin declared that religion must be “destroyed with the bayonet.” The Jew, Gubermann, who, under the name of Jaroslawski, is the leader of the Association of Militant Atheists in the Soviet Union, has made the following declaration: “It is our duty to destroy every religious world-concept… If the destruction of ten million human beings, as happened in the last war, should be necessary for the triumph of one definite class, then that must be done and it will be done.”
In its issue of November 6, 1930, The Atheist, the monthly periodical which is the central organ of the Association of Militant Atheists, the following appeared: “We shall burn down all the churches of the world and raze all the prisons to the ground.” In all educational establishments throughout the Soviet Union religious instruction is forbidden and in its place there has been introduced a systematic instructional course in Marxist atheism. Children under the age of 18 are forbidden to take part in religious services and prayers. The Church Law of April 8, 1929, has established a situation in which spiritual and religious communities are deprived of all rights. All the clergy and their families belong to the dispossessed class of Soviet citizens, thus automatically losing their right to work or earn their livelihood, and they are liable to be removed from their domicile at any time whatsoever.
Such is the theory and world concept of the juridical principles underlying Bolshevic atheism, and such principles are accordingly carried out in practice.
Up to 1930, 31 bishops, 1,600 clergy and 7,000 monks were murdered under the Soviet regime. According to statistics available for 1930, there were then confined in prisons, under starvation conditions, 48 bishops, 3,700 clergy and 8,000 monks and nuns. The “International League against the Third International” at Geneva issued statistics on August 6, 1935, showing that in Russia 40,000 priests had been arrested, banished or murdered. Nearly all the Orthodox churches and chapels have been either destroyed or else closed to religious worship and converted into clubs, cinemas, barns etc. Prior to our advent to power, the atheist propaganda carried out by the Marxists in Germany, whose forces we have overthrown, took its stand in favour of the dreadful state of things which I have described. The Social Democratic “League of German Freethinkers” alone had a membership of 600,000. The Communist “League of Proletarian Freethinkers” had close on 160,000 members. Almost without exception, the intellectual leaders of Marxist atheism in Germany were Jews, among them being Erich Weinert, Felix Abraham, Dr. Levy-Lenz and others. At regular meetings, held in the presence of a notary public, members were requested to register their declaration of withdrawal from their church for a fee of 2 Marks. And thus the fight for atheism was carried on. Between 1918 and 1933 the withdrawals from the German Evangelical Churches alone amounted to 2.5 million persons in Germany. The programme which these atheistic societies laid down in regard to sexual matters is amply characterised in the following demands publicly expressed at meetings and distributed in leaflet form: