footnote

Hamburg, 18 April 1952

Dear Mr Deutscher,

As far as your discoveries when working through the Trotsky material are concerned, I have no knowledge of whether he acted on the instructions of the Politbureau or not, but I do believe that it corresponded entirely to his own opinions, for he recognized the acutely revolutionary situation in Germany while he was in the Caucasus, and stirred Zinoviev into activity. Jakob Walcher, a member of the kpd Zentrale, and August Enderle, the trade-union editor of the Rote Fahne,footnote9 were also in the Caucasus at that time; they had exhaustive discussions with Trotsky and, if I am not mistaken, with Zinoviev too. They reported on these when they returned, at the beginning or in the middle of July.footnote10 They reported that Trotsky had told them this: my proclamation calling for the Anti-Fascist Day, which was published on 11 July 1923, had given him cause to look into the situation in Germany thoroughly, for if Brandler writes a proclamation like that, something is afoot.footnote11 He had already outlined to both of them the strategy for the preparations, and in this context was already proposing entry into the Saxon and Thuringian governments, as a means of arming the workers. I am not mistaken, for I immediately declared, in a session of the Zentrale, that this was nonsense, because I knew that neither the provincial government of Saxony nor that of Thuringia had any arsenals at their disposal. We had cleared out the arsenals at the time of the Kapp putsch, and in part during the March Action. I knew that every time the police needed sub-machineguns they had to apply for them from the military camp at Döberitz and then fetch them. The Russians did not to my knowledge chalk up our entry into the government against us as opportunism. It was rather our failure, in that we did not arm the workers, but played out a parliamentary comedy instead.

Kindest regards to you, your wife, and your son.

H. Brandler

20 August 1952