Allies offer no hope for German workers¶
Core Argument¶
Here the text mounts a polemic against the Allied war aims, arguing that the invasion of Europe, despite its material superiority, has been met with desperate German resistance not out of Nazi loyalty but out of fear of the annihilation the Allies have openly promised. The core claim is that Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin are preparing a “peace of Carthage” — a punitive settlement far more savage than the Treaty of Versailles — and that this strategy is cynically designed to destroy Germany as a capitalist rival while blaming the entire German people for Nazi crimes.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical precedent of Versailles to expose Allied hypocrisy. It catalogues the treaty’s provisions: the stripping of Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar (Germany’s industrial heartland), the Polish corridor, the confiscation of the merchant marine, impossible reparations, unilateral disarmament, the demilitarisation of the Rhineland, and the post-armistice blockade that killed a million German children. The text argues that these exactions, far from being “generous,” produced the hunger, inflation (the mark reaching 12 trillion to the pound), and middle-class ruin that paved the way for Hitler. Now, the Allies propose to exceed even this: East Prussia is to be handed wholesale to Poland, and Soviet reparations claims are ten to twenty times the Versailles figures. Lenin’s description of Versailles as a “robbers’ dictated peace” sowing the dragons’ teeth of new wars is invoked; the present settlement, the text implies, is a super-Versailles that guarantees future conflict.
The polemic is directed at three targets. First, the Allied imperialists themselves, who have abandoned even the pretence of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms — Churchill openly admits the Charter does not apply to Germany. Second, the Stalinists and Labour leaders, who have betrayed internationalism and democratic rights by supporting draconian collective punishment, a betrayal that would have provoked a “veritable storm” in the labour movement of 1914-18. Third, the capitalist press (Daily Mail, Sunday Dispatch) that once backed Hitler and now demands vengeance.
Crucially, the text insists that despite this, German workers are beginning to move. It cites clandestine reports to the International Transport Workers’ Federation: in a Berlin factory, forty German workers included only two Nazis, while the rest opposed the regime but rejected the old parties; soldiers’ councils have formed in reserve battalions, starting with protests over warm meals — the same spark that ignited the 1918 fleet revolt. The argument is that Stalin’s refusal to offer an international socialist alternative has prolonged the war, but the wheel of history cannot be held back. The German workers will find their way to the Fourth International and fight for a socialist Germany within a socialist United States of Europe.