Excerpt from Comrade Georgi Dimitrov’s “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism“:
Every day, in the concentration camps of fascist Germany, in the cellars of the Gestapo (German secret police), in the torture chambers of Poland, in the cells of the Bulgarian and Finnish secret police, in the Glavnyacha in Belgrade, in the Rumanian Siguranza and on the Italian islands, the best sons of the working class, revolutionary peasants, fighters for the splendid future of mankind, are being subjected to revolting tortures and indignities, before which pale the most abominable acts of the tsarist Okhranka2). The blackguardly German fascists beat husbands to a bloody pulp in the presence of their wives, and send the ashes of murdered sons by parcel post to their mothers. Sterilization has been made a method of political warfare. In the torture chambers, imprisoned anti-fascists are given injections of poison, their arms are broken, their eyes gouged out; they are strung up and have water pumped into them; the fascist swastika is carved in their living flesh.
I have before me a statistical summary drawn up by the International Red Aid [international organization of that time for aid to revolutionary fighters] regarding the number of killed, wounded, arrested, maimed and tortured to death in Germany, Poland, Italy, Austria, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In Germany alone, since the National-Socialists came to power, over 4,200 anti-fascist workers, peasants, employees, intellectuals — Communists, Social Democrats and members of opposition Christian organizations — have been murdered, 317,800 arrested, 218,600 injured and subjected to torture. In Austria, since the battles of February last year the “Christian” fascist government has murdered 1,900 revolutionary workers, maimed and injured 10,000 and arrested 40,000. And this summary, comrades is far from complete.
Words fail me in describing the indignation which seizes us at the thought of the torments which the working people are now undergoing in a number of fascist countries. The facts and figures we quote do not reflect one hundredth part of the true picture of the exploitation and tortures inflicted by the White terror and forming part of the daily life of the working class in many capitalist countries. Volumes cannot give a just picture of the countless brutalities inflicted by fascism on the working people.
From this platform we greet the leader of the German proletariat and the honorary chairman of our Congress — Comrade Thaelmann. We greet Comrades Rakosi, Gramsci, Antikainen. We greet Tom Mooney, who has been languishing in prison for eighteen years, and the thousands of other prisoners of capitalism and fascism, and we say to them: “Brothers in the fight, brothers in arms, you are not forgotten. We are with you. We shall give every hour of our lives, every drop of our blood, for your liberation, and for the liberation of all working people from the shameful regime of fascism.”
Comrades, it was Lenin who warned us that the bourgeoisie may succeed in overwhelming the working people by savage terror, in checking the growing forces of revolution for brief periods of time, but that, nevertheless, this would not save it from its doom.
Life will assert itself — Lenin wrote — Let the bourgeoisie rave, work itself into a frenzy, overdo things, commit stupidities, take vengeance on the Bolsheviks in advance and endeavour to kill off (in India, Hungary, Germany, etc.) hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands more of yesterday’s and tomorrow’s Bolsheviks. Acting thus, the bourgeoisie acts as all classes doomed by history have acted. Communists should know that the future, at any rate, belongs to them; therefore we can and must combine the most intense passion in the great revolutionary struggle with the coolest and most sober evaluation of the mad ravings of the bourgeoisie. [V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, New York (1949), pp. 81-82; Collected Works 31:101]
Ay, if we and the proletariat of the whole world firmly follow the path indicated by Lenin, the bourgeoisie will perish in spite of everything.
