¡nopasarán! · 2019. 1. 29. · internationaltransport workers’federation...

The ITFand thefight

againstfascism

International TransportWorkers’ Federation

¡No pasarán!IFF-AntiFascism:Layout 1 1/11/16 13:34


49-60 Borough Rd, London SE1 1DR+44 (0)20 7403 2733www.itfglobal.org

¡No pasarán!The ITF and the fight

against fascism© ITF 2016

Cover picture: 1936 SpanishCivil War poster by Pere Catalá.

Eyewitness reportcompiled in 1933 by ITF

representative JaapOldenbroek on the

situation in Germanyfollowing the Nazi

takeover.

ITF report from 1935describing the

underground tradeunion networks in Nazi

Germany.

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The struggle to defeat fascism in the 20th century didn’tbegin in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World

War. The anti-fascist fight had been going on for manyyears, and trade unionists were among the first to recognisethe unique dangers posed by this toxic ideology based onracial superiority, anti-semitism, militarism and dictatorship.

Trade union activists were key targets of fascist repression. InItaly, they were blacklisted and punished after Mussoliniseized power in 1922. Strikes were outlawed and opponentsof the fascist regime were brutally persecuted.

Trade unionists suffered a similar fate in Germany from1933 under Hitler’s rule. Unions were closed down, theirassets confiscated and many thousands of union activistswere sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Unions resisted and fought fascism throughout these years.They did so clandestinely in countries under the heel offascist dictators, as well as more openly in those whosegovernments pursued a disastrous policy of appeasementof fascism.

Transport trade unions and the ITF played a leading role inthis fight.

¡NO PASARÁN!The ITF and the fightagainst fascism

Anti-Nazi illustration producedfor ITF publications in the

1930s.

¡No pasarán! � 3

Although not an avowedlyfascist regime, the dictatorshipof Miklós Horthy in Hungaryfrom 1920 to 1944 displayed

many repressive fascistcharacteristics and led Hungary

into alliance with NaziGermany. In the summer of1920 the ITF organised aninternational rail border

blockade of the country inprotest at the persecution of

trade unionists and otheropponents of the regime. As aresult the government wasforced to make concessions.


An Italian poster produced byITF unions in the 1920s toencourage transport workersto take action against fascism.

In Italy more than 30,000railway workers were sackedafter Mussolini came to power.The union’s head office wasclosed, its leaders werearrested – and only releasedfollowing ITF pressure via theInternational LabourOrganization. The samepattern of repression wasrepeated across all transportsectors. By 1926 only fascistorganisations were allowed torepresent workers.

4 � ¡No pasarán!


Then based in Amsterdam, the ITF was active inunderground anti-Nazi activities in Germany following

Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Undercover missions werecarried out by ITF officials, and anti-fascist leaflets andnewsletters were distributed via secret trade union networks.

But the dangers for trade unionists were immense if theywere discovered. Hermann Jochade, who had been the ITFpresident from 1904 to 1916 and was the leader of thebanned German railway workers’ union (Einheitsverbandder Eisenbahner Deutschlands), was beaten to death byconcentration camp guards in 1939.

He was not the only transport union leader to die at thehands of the Nazis. Ludvik Buland of the NJF Norwegianrailway workers’ union (Norsk Jernbaneforbund) and PierreSemard of the French railway workers’ federation(Fédération des cheminots CGT) were also murdered.

From 1933 the ITF published the fortnightly Hakenkreuzüber Deutschland (Swastika over Germany). This wasrenamed as Faschismus (Fascism) and its focus spread toinclude Italy, Austria, Spain and Portugal. It continuedpublication until the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Most of this printed material originated in the Netherlandsand was smuggled to Germany by Dutch inland waterwayskippers and crews. Such action helped raise early politicalawareness of fascism in Holland and gave many Dutch


ANTI-NAZI ACTIVITIES

HermannJochade:

murdered bythe Nazis.

The anti-fascist newsletterFaschismus was published by

the ITF until 1945.



There is a memorialplaque at the head

office of the RMT railand maritime

workers’ union inLondon that namesthe British seafarersand railway workerswho volunteered tofight in the Spanish

Civil War.

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people experience in secretive operations and in buildingunderground organisations – something that would proveuseful during the Second World War.

From 1936 to 1939, the international cause of anti-fascism was focused on defending the Spanish

Republic against a rebellion led by General Franco andsupported by Hitler and Mussolini.

The Spanish Civil War saw the ITF and transport tradeunions around the world play an active part in efforts tostop another fascist takeover in Europe.

They warned that Franco’s victory would embolden thefascist dictators and lead inevitably to a catastrophic worldwar. They were proved right, and Britain and Francedeclared war on Hitler’s Germany in September 1939, justfive months after the defeat of the Spanish Republic.

Many hundreds of transport workers also joined theInternational Brigades – the 35,000 volunteers from morethan 50 countries who took up arms to fight for the SpanishRepublic in a remarkable display of international solidarity.

In addition, trade unions played a leading role inhumanitarian campaigns to send food and medical suppliesto Spain and to help refugees from the war.

The Spanish Republic had introduced social reforms, giving


THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

The ITF compiled secretreports of arms shipmentsand troop movements to

fascist-held Spain.



International Brigader and Liverpool docker JackJones was the general secretary of Britain’s

biggest union, the Transport & General Workers’Union, from 1969 to 1978, during which time he

was also a vice president of the ITF. He is pictured(right, in leather jacket) with other International

Brigaders before the Battle of the Ebro in thesummer of 1938.

British volunteers inBarcelona in September1936 named their unit afterTomMann, president ofthe ITF from 1896 to 1901.

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women the vote, expanding education and devolvingpowers from Madrid.

These moves were anathema to fascist and reactionaryforces in Spanish society. Meanwhile, the Westerndemocracies stayed out of the war and banned arms sales tothe Republic, thereby effectively condemning it to defeat.

Britain and France enforced a policy of ‘non-intervention’,and turned a blind eye to attacks on merchant shipslawfully trading with Republican Spain. Scores ofseafarers were killed and injured in these attacks byGerman and Italian bombers and submarines. At least29 British ships were sunk.

Only the Soviet Union and Mexico supported theRepublic. But their help was vastly overshadowed by thevolume of arms, aircraft and troops sent by Fascist Italyand Nazi Germany to help Franco. He was bolstered tooby sympathetic US corporations who sold him vitalsupplies of oil and trucks.

The Spanish Civil War was the first major ‘modern’ war ofour age. Civilians and urban centres were deliberatelytargeted by the fascists. The bombing of Guernica, forexample, was portrayed in a painting of the same namethat Pablo Picasso painted for the Spanish Republic.

As was to be the case in the Second World War, morecivilians than combatants were killed in the civil war, andthe sight of refugees in their thousands fleeing the fascistadvance in Spain would soon be replicated throughoutmuch of Europe.


This 1937 Spanish poster says:‘All the peoples of the world

are in the InternationalBrigades on the side of the

Spanish people.’

The British ship Stanwellfollowing a bombing raid on

the port of Tarragona.

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During the Spanish Civil War a groupof exiled anti-fascist Germans maderegular radio broadcasts fromBarcelona and Madrid to support theresistance inside Germany. There weretalks by politicians and writers, oftenrecorded in Paris and brought to Spainfor broadcasting. The ITF’sunderground newspaper Faschismus(Fascism) was mentioned inbroadcasts.

Artist John Heartfield made this posteradvertising the broadcasts.


The call to help the Spanish Republic resulted in manyships bound for Franco-held ports being boycotted by

trade union action. The ITF raised funds to send foodshipsto Republican Spain, and Edo Fimmen, the ITF generalsecretary, and other ITF leaders paid several visits to Spainto coordinate assistance.

According to one report, the ITF even had its own unit thatwas fighting on the side of the anti-fascist militia.

From the start of the war the ITF called on affiliatedunions to inspect all shipments to Spain in order to preventarmaments reaching the rebels.

On visits to Republican Spain, ITF leaders met Spanishtransport trade unions to coordinate assistance. Twoambulances were donated, and a special fund was set up tohelp transport union members killed in action.

Transport unions in Scandinavia urged a complete tradeboycott of Franco’s Spain. But this met resistance fromBritish unions, who did not want to defy theirgovernment’s ‘non-intervention’ policy.

However, several individual transport unions did takeaction, notably dockers in Antwerp.

In August 1936 the Norwegian Transport Workers’ Union(Norsk Transportarbeiderforbund, NTF) sent a circular to


This ITF report details u-boatactivity around Spain in the 12

months to February 1938.

ACTION TO HELP SPAIN



An Aid Spain anti-fascist meeting

organised by the ITF inMexico in 1938.

Prominent Belgian trade unionist OmerBecu – who would later serve as ITF

president and general secretary from1947 to 1960 – organised the

smuggling of weapons to RepublicanSpain on the Raymond. For this he wasarrested in 1937 and briefly imprisoned.

During the Second World War Becu wasexiled in London and New York, where,

as general secretary of the IMMOAInternational Mercantile MarineOfficers’ Association, he worked

closely with the Allies, particularly theOffice for Strategic Studies, a USwartime intelligence agency. Becu

recruited other union leaders to workwith the OSS and built a radio counter-

espionage network that made animportant contribution to the fight

against German u-boats.

A Belgiannewspaperreports the

arrest of OmerBecu for armssmuggling to

Spain.


local branches urging them to take steps to monitor andhalt any shipments of arms and ammunition to fascistSpain via Norwegian ports.

At the same time Norway’s national trade union federation(Arbeidernes Faglige Landsorganisasjon, AFL) launched asolidarity campaign, supported by the NTF, with the aim ofgiving financial support to Spanish unions and to theSpanish socialist party.

In the autumn of 1936 the Norwegian seafarers' union(Norsk Sjømannsforbund, NSF) advocated a blockade ofall fascist-held ports in Spain. The union told members tosign off from ships on their way to such ports.

More than 550 Danes, most of them seafarers, went toSpain to fight in the International Brigades.

Richard Jensen, chair of the Danish marine mechanics’union, became the agent for a Spanish government-ownedshipping company. He bought and chartered vessels,mostly manned by Danish seafarers, and smuggledammunition and weapons to the Spanish Republic.

In Germany, the ITF’s secret information network,especially among Hamburg dockers, was able to collectinformation on arms shipment to Hitler’s Condor Legionin Spain.

ITF observation posts were also established in the ports ofCardiff, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Gdynia in order tomonitor shipping traffic to Spain, and in numerous casesshipments of weapons and ammunition were stopped.


Dockers in Hamburg, fromwhere Hitler’s Condor Legionset sail for Spain, secretlymonitored shipments to

Franco’s Spain.

Aircraft parts in Hamburgready to load on a vessel

bound for Spain.



Published in Antwerp, the anti-fascist newsletterDie Schiffahrt (Shipping) was distributed among Germanseafarers and was circulated in Antwerp, Rotterdam and

ports in Denmark, Norway and the US.


Seafarers in Franco-held ports also relayed militaryinformation back to the ITF, which was then passed on tothe Spanish Republican authorities.

By the end of 1938, however, when it became clear thatFranco would win, the ITF’s work in Spain shifted moreand more to helping refugees.

Here is an extract, titled ‘On the situation in Spain’,from the illegal German ITF newsletter Die

Schiffahrt (Shipping), which was published between 1936and 1938…

The struggle of the working people of Spain against thereactionary fascist military clique goes on. Every worker,every peasant, every seafarer and every salaried employeeknows now what the war is about. The workers are fightingfor bread and freedom, that is to say, for a socialist Spain.The rebel generals are fighting for the suppression of the

workers and their trade unions and political parties. Theywant to combine the supremacy of profiteering capitalists andthe reactionary landed estates with the power of themalevolent Spanish clergy within an anti-progressivedictatorship.The German ITF group has given practical expression to

the solidarity of all German seafarers and boatmen, by whichranks of its stewards and activists have gone to Spain to takepart in the fight against the fascists alongside the governmentof the Popular Front.


SEAFARERS IN SOLIDARITY

Extracts from reports givento the ITF by escaped inmates

of German concentrationcamps in 1938.



Edo Fimmen (above) and NathanNathans (below).

The ITF’s headquarters were in Amsterdam during the1930s. In anticipation of war, most ITF staff relocated toLondon in August 1939. One, however, Arie Treurniet,volunteered to stay behind in charge of the Amsterdamoffice. He was there when the Nazis invaded theNetherlands a year later, was arrested shortlyafterwards and spent over two years in Buchenwaldconcentration camp.


German seafarers! Report all weapons shipments that areleaving German ports bound for the Spanish fascists! Stopthese transports by any means!Down with fascism! Long live the victory of the Spanish

workers and peasants!

Three Dutchmen at the head of the ITF were closelyidentified with the anti-fascist struggle.

As its general secretary, Edo Fimmen led the ITF throughthe period that witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe. Hetook personal charge of much of the clandestine activity inNazi Germany and strongly championed the cause ofdemocracy in Spain.

Nathan Nathans, a former clerk with Dutch railways, wasITF assistant general secretary from 1924. He was atireless campaigner for the Spanish Republic in the earlymonths of the Spanish Civil War, until his death in 1937 inan air crash near Brussels while on a mission to helpSpanish refugees.

Fimmen, who died in 1942, was succeeded as ITF generalsecretary by another Dutchman, Jaap Oldenbroek (later tobecome, from 1949, the first general secretary of theInternational Confederation of Free Trade Unions).

Oldenbroek used the ITF’s underground trade unionnetworks to collaborate with the intelligence services of the


DUTCHMEN AT THE HELM

Correspondence from exiledGerman anti-fascist Willy

Brandt to ITF general secretaryEdo Fimmen.



For more information

� ‘The InternationalTransportworkersFederation 1914-1945:The Edo FimmenEra’ byBobReinalda (ed.), Stichtingbeheer IISG: Amsterdam, 1997.

� ‘Solidarity: The First 100Years of theInternationalTransportWorkers’Federation (no author), Pluto Press:London, 1996.

� ‘Widerstandund internationaleSolidarität. Die InternationaleTransportarbeiter-Föderation (ITF) imWiderstand gegendenNationalsozialismus’ byDieterNelles,KlartextVerlag, Essen, 2001.

� ‘LaMarinaMercante y el TráficoMarítimo en laGuerraCivil’ by RafaelGonzález Etchegaray, Editorial SanMartín,Madrid, 1977.

� ITF archives at theModern RecordsCentre, University ofWarwick; seewww2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/studying/docs/antifascism

�Article on thewebsite ofStichtingSpanje 1936-1939, theDutchInternational Brigadesmemorialassociation: https://spanje3639.org/2015/04/24/zender-298

�See also the Finnish-based ‘Train toSpain’ project, bringing togetherartists, historians and labourmovement activists to remember theScandinavianvolunteers in theSpanishCivilWar: www.atraintospain.com

Allies to defeat Nazism. He oversaw many covertoperations, including acts of sabotage against transportfacilities used by the Axis Powers.

The heroic efforts of transport trade unionists whoopposed fascism deserve to be remembered today. The

early decades of last century saw the rise of modernfascism, a toxic creed that remains alive in the 21st century– though it tries to hide its true nature. Fascist-inspiredbeliefs still have the power to divide workers, provokeracial and ethnic conflict, destroy trade unions, trample onhuman rights – and cause wars.

Trade unions around the world must always be vigilant inthe face of such challenges. In doing so we can drawinspiration from that generation of brave transport tradeunionists who, against the odds and often sacrificing theirlives, were the first anti-fascists to say, as their slogan inSpain declared: ‘They shall not pass!’ – ‘¡No pasarán!’

REMEMBER THEM TODAY


‘Money for Hitler means war in Europe’: anti-Nazi sticker circulatedby the ITF in the 1930s.


Designed by Mick Jones,the commemorative plate

to mark the ITF’scentenary in 1996made reference tothe ITF’s role in

the fightagainstfascism.

With thanks to

�RienDijkstra, of theStichtingSpanje 1936-1939,Amsterdam.

�ToreAre Johansen, of theArbeiderbevegelsensArkivogBibliotek, Oslo.

�ReinhardtSilbermannof the Kämpfer und FreundederSpanischenRepublik 1936-1939 e.V., Hamburg.

This project has alsoreceived help from theBritish train drivers’unionASLEFand from theNorwegian locomotiveworkers’ unionNLF.

This booklet has been written byJim Jump, of the InternationalBrigadeMemorial Trust,London.



49-60 Borough Rd, London SE1 1DR+44 (0)20 7403 2733www.itfglobal.org

¡No pasarán!The ITF and the

fight againstfascism


¡nopasarán! · 2019. 1. 29. · internationaltransport workers’federation...

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