Recently, I watched The Soviet Story, a documentary examining the evils of Soviet socialism and their striking similarities to Nazism, highlighting their collaboration. Centralized economies, Gestapo officers trained in torture techniques developed by the NKVD, and the Soviet Union providing the Germans with grain, oil, iron ore, and other vital resources for the war effort.
This made me reflect: what other socialist groups maintained formal and working relationships with the National Socialists? Delving deeper, I constructed a non-exhaustive list of European socialists who worked with them in their relentless pursuit of lebensraum (living space). True internationalists!
In the climate of political correctness—whereby youths proudly exalt their imbued, ignorant hatred against “fascism” in the name of socialism, are the same people who probably would not have viewed Hitler and his movement as monsters, but as enlightened, progressive individuals, just like them.
Swedish Social Democrats
Originally Marxists, the Social Democrats implemented a series of public policies, creating and expanding the welfare state, extending workers’ rights (the Saltsjöbaden Agreements to harmonize the conflict between labor and capital, minimizing the risk of strikes and lockouts), and applying Keynesian solutions to alleviate unemployment—increasing public spending. Agriculture was subsidized and protected from external competition in 1934, and the state influenced the economy by devaluing the krona to foster domestic industries and discourage imports—subsequently, purchasing power was reduced, facing lower-quality products in the domestic market. These policies were emulated in Germany from 1933 onward.
In 1928, Per Albin Hansson—who led the SAP from 1925 until his fatal heart attack in 1946—emphasized the importance of a shared community (the people’s house) through mutual responsibility and a sense of belonging—preceding the Volksgemeinschaft. Unsurprisingly, all these factors combined led the Swedish Social Democrats to cooperate with Berlin during the war, allowing German troop convoys to pass through the country after the occupation of Norway.
The Swedish industry worked hard for its new masters, extracting valuable ore from Swedish Lapland in exchange for coal! They reached the peak of their popularity during the war, enjoying a majority in both chambers of parliament. Near the end, Albin Hansson’s coalition cabinet detained and deported thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians to the USSR, apart from Estonian citizens with Swedish ancestry. Was it caution? Trauma from their defeat at the Battle of Poltava in 1709? It’s possible, but the left work in solidarity with their comrades, wherever they are from. A global government is their only haven.
Vidkun Quisling
Today synonymous with treason, Quisling was the prime minister of Norway for three years, but opposition to his governance was widespread. Even the Nazi leadership did not view him favorably: Curt Bräuer considered him useless, and King Haakon VII refused to appoint him as prime minister—Quisling only resurfaced in 1942, when the administrative council was dissolved. It was Reichskommissar Josef Terboven who held the real political power, subjecting Norway to central planning to benefit Germany.
This despite Quisling’s supposed opposition to Bolshevism or what he considered state capitalism in 1931 (Russia and Ourselves, p. 61), although he never voiced strong opposition to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. To make things more interesting, the manifesto of the Nasjonal Samling (National Unity) declared itself a socialist party that rejected the bourgeoisie—borgerlig—or, more precisely, positioned itself to the left of social democracy, to liberate Norway from the plutocrats! In 1936, influenced by the existence of Soviet councils (Quisling: A Study of Treachery, 1999, p. 104), he advocated for the creation of a cooperative assembly known as the Riksting and guild organizations.
This famous military officer, who had previously served as Minister of Defence, was politically illiterate, even declaring during his trial that Russia was the product of a “Great Norway.” In actuality, the Varangians were Swedes, and ignorance is a byproduct of leftism. Before founding the Nasjonal Samling, he offered his services to the Labour Party, which, for reasons unknown, rejected him (Norway, Neutral and Invaded, 1941, p. 98). He despised the League of the Fatherland, which was banned in 1940, which counted with the participation of the future libertarian Anders Lange, founder of the Progress Party. As for Vidkun Quisling, he was executed by a firing squad in October 1945, universally vilified by his compatriots to this day.
Frits Clausen and the Social Democrats
The Danish Quisling, Clausen co-founded and led the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Denmark, essentially a Scandinavian copy of the Nazi party, who funnelled funds to propel Clausen to power, unsuccessfully. The 1943 elections also demonstrated that, despite the “Aryan connection,” the DNSAP received only 2 percent of the vote (1.7 million), with its members coming from a working-class background.
Curiously (not really), the Social Democrats in government before the war were not overthrown by the Nazis in 1940, only hardening their stance in 1943. This should not constitute a significant surprise: they too expanded the welfare state and controlled major national industries. Thorvald Stauning’s first government was a coalition with the Radical Left (social-liberals), whose former leader—Madsen-Mygdal—aspired to a position in a Nazi ministry. His disarmament policy led to little resistance against the occupiers, with Stauning proclaiming in a speech from March 1941: “From what I understand, Germany is contemplating a division of labour in Europe, and if such a division is appropriate and reasonable, we have no reason to raise objections.” Only King Christian X acted with honor, protecting Danish Jews from persecution and willing to wear the Star of David, should the Jewish population be forced to do so. The Nazis reluctantly yielded.
French Collaborators
At the beginning of the war, the French Communists were instructed by Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, to undermine the war effort by sabotaging aircraft and denouncing both Chamberlain and Daladier (a centrist socialist no less) as reactionaries for waging an imperial war. For the following two years, many collaborators in Nazi-occupied France were recruited from the socialist camp. Pierre Laval had belonged to the early iterations of the Socialist Party, while another socialist, Marcel Déat, founded the Rassemblement National Populaire. Similarly, a socialist-converted-to-fascism, Jacques Doriot, led the Parti Populaire Français, with both parties advocating an anti-capitalist stance.
Speaking of the Communists, led by Maurice Thorez, they were more than eager to erect friendly relations with Hitlers Germany, with an edition of L’Humanité—Humanity—from July 1940 expressing the fraternal unity between Parisian workers and German soldiers. Of course, relations soured after 1941 and once the liberation of France began, the Communists carried out massacres against individuals with differing political and social views (and silencing their culpability), victimizing more than 120,000 people. How exactly does this differ them from a Hitlerite?
The most condemnable aspect is that many were not held accountable for their actions once the war concluded. We have the example of René Bousquet—appointed head of the Vichy police by Laval and a lifelong socialist—companion of Mitterrand during his golden years, before being shot dead by Christian Didier in the streets of Paris in 1993.
Freisler and the German Communists
Roland Freisler, President of the People’s Court in Germany from 1942 to 1945, infamously nicknamed the “bloodthirsty judge” for issuing death sentences against political opponents. Freisler was a “former” Communist who witnessed and studied the work of Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky during the Moscow show trials. A true democrat like his Soviet counterpart, Freisler wrote:
The law created by analogy, based on the National Socialist conception of the people, does not violate the principle of the authoritarian state, as the authoritarian state seeks to be nothing more than the function, the vital expression of the conception of the people.
The state imposing their authority, interfering in people’s lives!
After the July 20 assassination attempt against Hitler, this loudmouth of a jurist demanded the immediate arrest and trial of the famous (and Catholic, a religion despised by the regime) Ernst Jünger for his critique of totalitarianism in On the Marble Cliffs, as the intellectual instigator against the life of the Führer. He was stopped only by Hitler because public opinion would not allow such a trial to commence against a war hero. An American bombing brought an end to him and his kangaroo court.
Additionally, over 70 percent of the Storm Troopers were militants who defected from the German Communist Party, important stooges in administering the bloody orders of the Third Reich. The KPD failed to stop its membership drainage, with Ernst Thälmann going as far as combining nationalist elements with communist principles in his 1930 manifesto. And no wonder! In 1929 and 1930 alone, the Communists and the Nazis joined hands and voted 70 percent of the time together in both the Landtag (Prussian Parliament) and Reichstag.
All of them were openly hostile towards free-market capitalism, subjugating individuals to collectivism in the name of the “people” or the “state,” and fiercely nationalistic. Let this serve as an important lesson: where socialism prevails, freedom erodes, and war follows.
