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The transfer of the DKP archive to ABA in 1990 and the transfer of approximately 12,000 microfilm copies of documents from the Comintern archive in Moscow created in many ways a completely new basis for research into the history of DKP (and DKU) and its relations with the Comintern in the period 1919-1943. One example of this is the solidarity and aid organization Danish Red Aid.
By Hans Uwe Petersen
Due to the small size and strength of the DKP, the first attempts in 1924 and 1927 to form a Danish section of International Red Help (IRH) had only limited success. A new attempt was made in September 1928, but it was not until 1931 that we can speak of a more continuous activity.
Red Help held 3 congresses (May 1932, December 1933 and May 1936) and a national meeting (March 1934). At the congress in 1936, which marks the high point in the life of the organization, Martin Andersen Nexø was elected chairman of the Danish Red Cross.
Red Help was – like the DKP – organized according to the principles of “democratic centralism”, but unlike the DKP, Red Help sought to win both individuals and organizations as individual and collective members respectively. Red Help’s activities included relief work in connection with the Nakskov affair (1931) and especially its role as an aid organization for refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Alongside the general activities of the Danish Red Cross, a number of ad hoc committees were set up to deal with specific issues, primarily solidarity work with political prisoners, including a number of Danes who were arrested in Hitler Germany in connection with their participation in the illegal anti-fascist resistance struggle.
Although the Danish Red Cross was not officially disbanded, its activities – contrary to the wishes of the Comintern – were transferred to other organizations in 1936/37: the Liberation Committee for Victims of Hitler Fascism, the 1937 Committee for German Emigrants, Skandiahjælpen, and – in one of the few more successful attempts to create cooperation between Danish social democrats and communists – Red Cross joined the Social Democratic Matteotti Committee’s collection activities in connection with the Spanish War.
However, due to the generally poor relationship between the Social Democrats and DKP, a fierce ideological debate for and against the Danish Red Cross unfolded throughout the lifetime of the organization, and the authorities viewed the Danish Red Cross, its activities in support of German emigrants and criticism of the government’s refugee policy with considerable skepticism.
So far, the Danish Red Cross has been a very little explored topic. In most accounts of the DKP’s history, the organization is only mentioned sporadically. One exception is two theses from the first half of the 1980s. Torben Størner’s Røde Hjælp 1928 – 1941 (Aarhus University, 1981) was an attempt to depict the organization’s overall development and activities. The main weakness of the study is that it is almost exclusively based on contemporary printed material (newspaper and magazine articles and printed matter). Some original source material from the archives of the Social Democratic Party and LO in the ABA, as well as accounts from some key players in Red Aid, were brought forward by Minna Steffen Pedersen in Det danske Socialdemokratis fascismeopfattelse og holdning til den antifascistiske kamp i 30’erne (University of Copenhagen, 1983). In connection with the author’s study of Danish refugee policy in the 1930s, it turned out that the archives of the Ministry of Justice and the police contain some material about Red Aid in relation to emigrant aid work.
The absence of more comprehensive source material in DKP’s own archives can be explained by the occupation. Red Aid’s own archives were destroyed after April 9, 1940, and have thus been lost to posterity. But a few years ago, Gelius Lund, who played a prominent role in Red Aid in the mid-1930s, pointed out that there must be relevant material in Moscow, as he remembered that Red Aid had regularly sent reports and material to the IRH secretariat. The microfilm copies now received have fully confirmed this. Even though the material now available is still fragmentary and mainly only concerns the period from 1932/33 to 1937/38, it is now possible to draw a much more accurate picture of the Red Aid’s development and activities during the years in which the organization played a certain role.
If we look at the material received from the Comintern archives from an organizational point of view, we now have
- the organization’s statutes (1936)
- the draft for the 3rd National Congress (1936)
- internal papers from the national leadership (1936)
- circulars from the national organization (1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937)
- correspondence to IRH (1933, 1935, 1938)
- correspondence from IRH (1933, 1935, 1936, 1937)
- reports about the company to IRH (1935, 1936, 1937)
- reports from IRH’s representative in Denmark to IRH in Moscow (1936, 1937)
- correspondence between DKP’s representative in the Comintern Executive Committee (Arne Munch Petersen) and IRH (1936)
- The Comintern Executive Committee’s discussion of matters concerning the Danish Red Aid (1937)
- relations between Red Aid and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and its exile group in Denmark (1935, 1936), including internal material from KPD about Red Aid and conditions in exile in Denmark
- links between the KPD’s exile group and the DKP
- training material
- flyers, collection lists, material about various events
- the national organization’s press releases and publications
- material about the Central Commission for German Emigrants at Red Aid
- material from the Zealand District of the Danish Red Cross
- departmental magazines (both in Copenhagen and the provinces)
- material about the Liberation Committee for Victims of Hitler Fascism, Skandia-Hjælpen, Thälmann-Torgler-Komiteen and other ad-hoc committees set up by the Red Cross.
No attempt will be made here to provide a summary of the content or an overall assessment of this material. More generally, however, it should be noted that it is now possible to reconstruct the national organization’s efforts to create and develop local branches of the Red Cross. In this context, a lot of effort was spent on creating branch magazines, the content of which was largely based on material distributed through the national organization. Judging from the available branch magazines, this organizational “armament” took place in 1935 and 1936. And although the congress in May 1936 marked a high point in Red Aid’s development, it seems that the organization found it difficult to maintain the line of progress.
As a result, shortly after the congress, internal deliberations about the future of the Red Cross began. While Gelius Lund, among others, advocated the de facto closure of the organization, the continuation of emigrant aid work on a broader basis and increased efforts to improve relations with the Social Democratic Party in particular, this position met with serious resistance in IRH and Komintem. In the following period and up to the meeting in Komintem, i.e. with the German Komintem functionary Florin in June 1937 about the situation in Red Aid, the IRH representative in Denmark engaged in extensive and undisguised factional activity to prevent what the IRH and the Comintern described as the liquidation of Red Aid. Another party in these disputes was the leadership of the German communist exile group, which in its assessments was in line with the IRH and the Comintern. It is of not insignificant interest that the DKP leadership, through its chairman Aksel Larsen, sought to reassure the Comintern and IRH by presenting the alleged liquidation as a necessary reorganization of Red Aid’s work. It turns out that DKP actually maintained an independent position and did not want to submit to the prevailing views in Moscow. The main reason why Red Cross was not dissolved after all – as it appears from material from the Ministry of Justice archives – was that the Danish authorities were not willing to recognize any new refugee aid committee to replace Red Cross and represent its emigrants. As a result, Red Aid was retained as a “one-man organization”, a function handled by Rasmus Bonde Larsen, who exclusively handled contact between the authorities and the communist emigrants in matters relating to their asylum conditions, while Red Aid’s previous activities were effectively transferred to the 1937 Committee for German Emigrants and other ad hoc committees.
The material from the Liberation Committee for Victims of Hitler Fascism is particularly extensive. Here, Stig Veibel played a very active role in making the Danish public aware of the Nazi regime’s persecution of its political opponents. Together with other Nordic opponents of Hitler, the committee organized an inter-Nordic conference in 1936, which discussed developments in Hitler’s Germany, the Nazi danger in the Nordic region, and the Nordic countries’ refugee and asylum policies.
What’s even more interesting is that the material from the Comintern archive also sheds new light on the KPD’s exile group in Denmark and the German communists’ relationship with their Danish party comrades. There are reports from the exile group to the KPD’s then foreign leadership in Paris (1935, 1936), presentations from the exile group’s leadership and correspondence between them and the DKP. Of particular interest for the study of the exile in Denmark is the account of the communist exile group’s break with the interpolitical Emigrant Home at Rådhuspladsen (1938). This account is a clear testimony to the consequences of the Moscow Process and the hysterical campaign against the “Trotskyist danger”, which was used as a defamatory synonym for other emigrants who did not share the views of the KPD in all matters.
Taken as a whole, it is now possible to conduct an extremely comprehensive study of the history of the Red Army using the preserved printed material, including the Red Army’s journals and pamphlets, Arbejderbladet and the archive material in:
- DKP’s archive (ABA)
- Social Democratic Party archive (ABA)
- LO’s archive (ABA) and
- The archives of the Ministry of Justice, including the archives of the State Police/Chief of National Police (The National Archives).
Also not to be forgotten:
- the reporting material in Carl Madsen’s archive (The Royal Library) and in the undersigned’s own collection, as well as
- material about KPD, DKP and Red Aid in the former party archive in Berlin.
International Red Help
At the 4th World Congress of the Comintern (Nov.-Dec. 1922), it was decided to establish an aid organization for “victims of the class struggle”. And on November 30, 1922, the International Red Help was founded in Moscow. Although the organization was in principle intended as a cross-political international solidarity organization, it was closely linked to the Comintern and was to serve the communists’ united front policy. The IRH was tasked with providing moral and material support, including legal aid, to the victims of “bourgeois class justice”, “white terror” and “fascism”. The IRH campaigned for, among others, the Americans Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian Antonio Gramsci, the later leader of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov, and the Chairman of the German Communist Party, Ernst Thälmann.
The chairmanship of the IRH was held by 1st Marchlevski (1922-25), Clara Zetkin (1925-33), Yelena Stassova (1933-37) and Wilhelm Pieck (1937-41).
The IRH held two international conferences (1924 and 1927) and a single world congress (1932). In the 1930s, the fight against fascism became the IRH’s overriding field of work. In April 1933, the IRH took the initiative to form the International Relief Committee.
