Heartfield’s Cover Art for Michael Gold’s ‘Jews Without Money’

I put up a piece a few days ago about the great German radical artist John Heartfield, who used photographs to create stunning pictures. Heartfield’s best known for his political works celebrating Communism and savagely denouncing war and the Prussian aristocracy that promoted it, and especially Hitler and the Nazis. But he also worked for publishers producing book covers. This is his cover for Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money, about poor Jews living on the Lower East Side of New York. The decades from the late 19th century saw mass Jewish migration from eastern Europe to the west and America. Many of them were dirt poor, and poorly educated, living in low-quality, massively overcrowded tenements. It’s from this milieu that many of the great founders of the American comics industry, like the mighty Jack Kirby. Kirby came from the kind of neighbourhood where men wanted to be mechanics rather than artists, and ran with the street gangs before breaking with them to enter comics. This is the background to Will Eisner’s acclaimed graphic novel, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Tales. I’m putting this up here also to make the point that Jewishness isn’t synonymous with wealth and power, whatever the Blairites in the Labour party may think. You may remember that a few years ago one right-wing female Labour MP claimed that socialism was anti-Semitic because it attacked capitalism. Hitler wouldn’t have agreed that ‘Marxist’ socialism was anti-Semitic, because he believed it was created and dominated by Jews. But he would certainly have wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment that capitalism is Jewish. Other people realised the anti-Semitic nature of what she’d said, even though she obviously didn’t mean it as such, and called her out for it. In the meantime this is a striking piece of art illustrating a piece of American social history.

John Heartfield’s Satirical Piccie of Weimar President Von Papen – Parallels with a Certain D. Trump, Perhaps

John Heartfield was a radical German artist of the Weimar period, who settled in Britain after the War. He didn’t draw or paint, but used photographs. During his career he worked for a number of publishers producing book covers, as well as political posters reflecting his Communist, anti-racist and vehemently anti-Nazi political beliefs. It was Heartfield who produced the famous picture of Hitler standing there, his hand flung back in the lazy Nazi salute he used to do, palm flat, being handed money from a much bigger banker standing behind him. The caption for this pic read, ‘Small Man requests big donations’. I’ve also seen a version with the caption, ‘Millions stand behind me’.

But I was struck by this image of the right-wing German president Von Papen standing with his trousers rolled up and a gigantic ladle, like King Cnut, trying vainly stop the flood that’s about to overwhelm him. The caption reads, ‘Papen, what are you doing?’ ‘I’m draining the Bolshevik swamp’.

Draining the swamp? Now where have we heard that before? Oh yes, it was Donald Trump, who in fact made it much worse and far more fetid. They’re now trying to present him as somehow non-racist. He may personally have been, but some of his friends were firmly members of the Alt- and far right.

The Brutality of Nazi Colonisation in Eastern Europe

Poster by the German artist John Heartfield protesting against the Nazi extermination of the Czech village of Lidice. The men were all butchered, the women deported and the village burnt to the ground in reprisal for the assassination of the SS leader in Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich.

I’ve blogged quite a bit recently about the brutal treatment the Nazis inflicted on the conquered eastern European peoples. They regarded the Slavs as subhuman. One of the aims of the conquest of eastern Europe was to provide Lebensraum – living space – for the Germans to colonise. The conquered peoples – Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians and Russians, were to be deported from the areas earmarked for ‘Germanic’ colonisation, and then enslaved to provide cheap labour producing agricultural products for their German masters. Their own cultural achievements were to be destroyed.

Gordon R. Craig describes this process in his book, Germany 1866-1945 (Oxford: OUP 1981). He talks about the blatant seizure of property by the Nazis in the eastern European countries on page 745:

In areas that they occupied in Southern and Eastern Europe the Nazis were more blatant, resorting to confiscations of industrial and financial properties without regard for economic purpose. In the General Government of Poland, the area east of the Corridor, Posen and Silesia that had not been incorporated into the Reich in 1939 and was destined as a dumping-ground for Poles expelled from other areas, the Germans systematically removed all resources except those needed to maintain the life of the inhabitants at a bare subsistence level; and in Russia, of which Hitler had said, ‘Russia is our Africa, and the Russians are our negroes’, the SS deliberately removed or destroyed all forms of industrial production and operated large state farms with forced labour to produce grain for Germany.

In order to provide millions of industrial slave workers for the Reich, Hitler in 1942 established the office of Plenipotentiary General for Labour Allocation, held by Fritz Sauckel. In order to meet the require numbers of labourer, Sauckel rounded up eastern Europeans. Craig describes this process on page 746:

To meet the quotas he set, his agents in the east used the most brutal forms of compulsion, rounding people up in the market place or during church services or in cinemas, burning down villages that did not meet the demands made on them, inflicting merciless punishment on recruits who tried to escape, subjecting the convoys of prisoners of war to the most primitive conditions during the journey to Germany. By 1944 there were 7 million foreign workers in Germany, and another 7 million enslaved by the Reich in their own countries, in state farms, performing military construction work and menial jobs in Germany army camps and installations.

In 1941 Himmler announced his plans for the colonisation of eastern Europe. A roughly square area from Lublin-Zhitomir-Vinnitsa and Lwow was to become a Germany colony. This would serve as a base for SS units controlling the conquered Slav territories outside this area. In January 1931, Himmler told a meeting of SS officials that this would involve the extermination of 30 million Slavs. (p. 748). And I’ve already mentioned in a previous post that 3,700,000 Russian P.O.W.s were murdered by the Nazis in the camps. The Poles and the other eastern European peoples resisted, and did not bowed down to this brutal treatment. By 1943-4 there was an underground resistance movement of 300,000 people in Poland, for example. (p.751).

I’m writing about this not to stir up any resentment against the Germans, who have very strong laws against Fascism and Nazism, the rise of PEGIDA notwithstanding, but because of the way neo-Nazism is also emerging in the former eastern European countries that the Nazis themselves tried to conquer, and whose peoples they wanted to enslave and exterminate. The current ‘democratic’ government in Ukraine includes Nazis amongst the various Right coalition groups. Putin last year sponsored a Fascist junket in Russia, among whose guests was our sawdust Caesar, Nick Griffin. And a Polish Nazi, Marian Kowalski, is planning to come over here next month to meet expatriate Polish Nazis, some of whom are led by Mariusz Zawadzki.

I’ve stated very clearly that no self-respecting person, and especially no-one from eastern Europe, has any business joining any kind of Nazi organisation. How clear does anyone want it? Hitler stated that Slavs were the Nazis ‘negroes’. To the real, proper storm troopers, the Slav peoples of eastern Europe have far more in common, and should make common cause with, the Blacks and Asians the Aryan thugs of the BNP and associated groups hate and terrorise. The people who join Nazi movements, by definition, aren’t patriots. The real patriots were the 300,000 Poles and people like them across Europe, who fought against Nazism.