Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism. Carol Jr. Sicherman

ablaze and not unfittingly labeled by a sign over the entrance: Klein Moskau [Little Moscow]…. I thought, lord help a Nazi in this neighborhood, but there were none.”155 The “better off areas” displayed Nazi flags. He saw “a troop of Nazis” and then “a much larger group of the Iron Front.” When the election results came in, the Nazis, although the largest party in the Reichstag, did not have a majority, and Hindenburg refused to name Hitler chancellor. The government collapsed. New elections were called for 6 November when, as already noted, both the Communists and the Nazis ganged up against the SPD in the transport strike.

      During his travels, Harry followed events in Germany through the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The “nationalist-militarist internal disposition” of the government, with its suppression of all leftwing thought and “collateral policy of strengthening right-wing opinion and parties,” was laying a firm foundation for the Nazis. The government attacked the KPD, whose national headquarters at Karl Liebknecht House “was searched and the Rote Fahne [Red Flag, the KPD newspaper] several times banned. Rewards are offered for information about illegal Communist literature–…now they set a price on its head.” The one certainty about the upcoming November elections was that the Papen government, which had bitterly criticized Hitler’s NSDAP, would face “some 500 or more hostile Reichstag members,” for only the DNVP supported Papen’s Zentrum. The Nazis lost ground in November, a temporary reprieve. Walking along the Kurfürstendamm a week before Hitler became chancellor, Harry saw “Nazis with 3 Hakenkreuz [“crooked cross,” swastika] banners marching in the snow, singing about Hitler unser Führer [our leader]. Sad demonstration of herd-mindedness.”156

      That month, the brief and brilliant academic career of Ernst J. Cohn shuddered to a halt. A year earlier, Cohn had been named “ordinarius [full professor] on the law faculty of the Univ. Breslau…at the extraordinary age of 28” and entered into a torment predictive of later events.157 His colleagues didn’t mind that he was Jewish, but the Nazi students did. In December 1932, the governing body of the university bravely declared that they would not dismiss him–only to do so a week later:

      Why? Because he had answered a newspaper’s request, made to a large number of people, to express an opinion whether or not Trotsky ought to be allowed to enter Germany. Cohn answered that he didn’t know the details of the matter, but that his principles would be: if Trotsky wanted to come to Germany for his health and as a private gentleman, he saw no reason for prohibiting his entrance. On the other hand, if he came as an agitator–We have enough of such already–Cohn said; Keep him out.

      This statement, deliberately misinterpreted as a call for Germany to give Trotsky political asylum, gave the university an excuse to fire him. There followed “a great row and the Prussian Kultusministerium [Ministry of Cultural Affairs] intervened.” Cohn, having apologized, “was once more returned to the fold,” again requiring police protection. Harry concluded: “This is merely one incident out of many to illustrate the penetration of some of the universities by politics of the most vicious order.”158 Two weeks after Harry reported Cohn’s troubles, Hitler took over.