Issuing body: Secrétariat provisoire européen (Provisional European Secretariat)
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AID FOR THE GERMAN PROLETARIAT
The bombardments of the German cities follow one another at an ever-increasing pace and intensity. In the depths of winter, thousands upon thousands of German and foreign workers are suffering the atrocious consequences of the imperialists' aerial war. Whole cities are razed to the ground within a few hours. Countless human beings perish every day and every night beneath the smoking ruins piled up without discrimination and without pity by these modern "knights of the air" and of death who are the airmen in the service of imperialism. Ever larger crowds of disaster victims flee in panic across Germany, having lost their homes, their clothing, their most basic possessions.
By intensifying the aerial bombardments of Germany, as elsewhere over the rest of occupied Europe, Anglo-Saxon imperialism is pursuing a pre-established plan of systematic destruction of the European economy. At the same time, while itself combating Hitlerite "racism," it unleashes a bestial propaganda against the German people, striving to camouflage the real causes of the present imperialist conflict — due to the internal contradictions of the capitalist regime and the irreconcilable antagonisms opposing the imperialists to one another — behind the myth of the "eternal Germans," aggressors, militarist warriors greedy for conquest. In doing so it consciously conflates the German labouring classes with the German imperialist bourgeoisie and with its political instrument, the present Hitlerite regime. But the dominant preoccupation of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, at the present stage of the war, is to stifle the European revolution which, since the Italian crisis of July 1943, has been advancing by giant strides, and whose principal centre will precisely be Germany tomorrow. Through its terrorist aerial action against the German population and through its racist "anti-Boche" propaganda, Anglo-Saxon imperialism seeks to demoralise the German proletariat, to break its faith in the internationalism of the working class, to turn the proletarians of foreign countries against their brothers in Germany, to fragment the revolutionary wave so as to finally succeed in strangling it.
The Stalinist parties, for their part, who interpret the struggle for the defence of the USSR after the fashion of the Soviet bureaucracy — as a war of extermination against the German people without distinction of class — march hand in hand with Anglo-Saxon imperialism in its anti-German racist campaign.
At a moment when a new wave of terror is descending upon the German population and when, in the wake of the recent Tehran conference, new threats from Anglo-Saxon imperialism, with the complicity of the Stalinist bureaucracy, foreshadow an intensification of the war of extermination against the great people of Europe, victim of both native and foreign imperialism, the Fourth International stigmatises this criminal policy and expresses its full sympathy with the cruel trials of the German labouring classes. It appeals to the moral and material solidarity of the proletarians of all countries with their class brothers in Germany. It calls upon the German proletarians to intensify their struggle for the overthrow of the Hitlerite regime and thereby to open the way to the German, European, and world revolution. It calls upon all its sections to wage a systematic campaign against the devastating and barbarous action of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, against its chauvinist propaganda, for fraternisation in the occupied countries with German workers in uniform, against the imperialist projects for a new Treaty of Versailles peace, for the Socialist United States of Europe and of the world.
The Provisional European Secretariat
In Quatrième Internationale, new series, no. 2 December 1943