Why should German workers trust British labour leaders?¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the author launches a blistering polemic against the British trade union leader Walter Citrine, whose appeal to German workers is exposed as rank hypocrisy. The core argument is that Citrine and the Stalinists, not the German working class, bear primary responsibility for Hitler’s victory and the crimes of Nazism. The chapter systematically dismantles Citrine’s moral authority by juxtaposing his condemnation of German imperialism with his silence on British imperial atrocities. The evidence is stark: five million Indians starved to death under Churchill’s direct responsibility, a famine Citrine ignored entirely at the TUC conference. The author insists that Citrine serves the same City of London capitalists who financed Hitler’s rise, making his finger-pointing at German workers a cynical diversion.
The historical context is crucial. The chapter recalls the 1933 TUC conference at Brighton, where Citrine publicly justified the German Social Democratic leaders’ refusal to call a general strike against the Nazis, citing unemployment and the Reichstag fire’s aftermath. This cowardice, the author argues, directly enabled Hitler’s consolidation of power. The polemic extends to the Stalinists, citing Molotov’s infamous dismissal of fascism as a matter of “taste” and the Daily Worker’s 1940 editorial arguing that Britain, not Germany, was responsible for the war and should have pursued peace with Hitler. The author weaponises these quotations to demonstrate that the very figures now posing as anti-fascist leaders were, at decisive moments, apologists for or collaborators with fascism.
The chapter’s narrative thrust is to invert the accusation: it is not the German workers who are guilty, but the labour bureaucrats and Stalinist functionaries who betrayed them. The German workers, like the British workers, are not responsible for crimes committed in their name. The real villains are Citrine and his ilk, who “hope that the working class has a short memory.” The author concludes by drawing a direct line from the betrayal of 1933 to the present: Citrine would behave with the same treachery in Britain, and his current slanders against German workers are merely the continuation of a lifelong record of class collaboration.