DATE: June 1944 (the document is signed "Juin 1944"; the volume's table of contents lists it as "juin 1945", apparently a typographical error in the table of contents; a footnote in the source text also cites a reprint in Quatrième Internationale, no. 5, June-July and August-September 1946) ISSUING BODY: European Executive Committee of the Fourth International
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WORKERS OF EUROPE! GERMAN AND "ALLIED" SOLDIERS!
The battles that will decide the war in Europe have begun. The western part of the continent has once again become the theatre of monstrous massacres, devastation and unheard-of suffering for the populations.
With extreme violence, the accumulated forces of the American and British imperialists, deliberately left inactive for a long time in order to weaken both Germany and the Soviet Union, and to leave an exhausted Europe incapable of resisting their domination, are today launching themselves into the assault to carry off victory.
After long feeding the Nazi war machine against the Soviet Union by supplying it, through the "neutrals" — Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Sweden, Argentina — with oil, wolfram, chrome, manganese and other materials indispensable to the conduct of modern war; after having watched as smiling spectators the crushing of all the peoples of Europe under the Hitlerite jackboot, the exhaustion of the continent's riches, the physical weakening of its undernourished populations; after having destroyed its most populous cities through massive bombardment, the Yankee and British financiers, the men of the great banks and of big industry, now judge the moment opportune to consolidate their gains.
The Aims of the Allied "Liberators"
To push the Soviet Union out of Europe, to break the expansive force of German imperialism, to open the way throughout Europe to their capital and their goods in the absence of any other competitor, to put the populations of the continent on short rations so that they will end up paying, through their frenzied labour, the enormous debts that the capitalist states have contracted during the war, as well as the sums they owe to the Yankee and British manufacturers of cannon and bombs, to whom they owe their "liberation" — these are the essential aims that the financial kings of New York and London are seeking to attain today in Europe.
The advance of the Red Army and the growing agitation of the masses in all the occupied countries, from Norway to Greece, from Poland to France, was placing these plans of plunder in danger. It was necessary to act, and to act quickly.
Workers of Europe!
For five years you have suffered cruelly under Hitlerite tyranny. You have known terror, famine, cold, death. Your organisations have been destroyed, your most elementary freedoms trampled underfoot.
Crammed into the war factories, you have toiled day and night without rest, underfed, mistreated, exposed to the worst dangers, to manufacture the weapons that the Nazi dictatorship has turned against the USSR, against the peoples of Europe and against the German people itself.
You have been uprooted from your native soil, deported, used like beasts of burden, without regard for your human condition. Hundreds and thousands of your own have fallen under the blows of the Gestapo and the SS praetorians. The prisons and concentration camps are crammed with the countless victims of Hitlerite tyranny. The scale that fascist terror has taken on during this war has only sketched out the terrible fate that awaits the workers if they fail to overthrow the capitalism that generates fascism and war. But the fate reserved for you under American and British imperialist domination will be no better.
The Victory of the "Allies" Means the Enslavement of Europe
It is a monstrous lie to say that those who oppress more than five hundred million men in their colonies, who refuse freedom to Ireland, who bleed and starve India, who covet China, who wish to place the Dutch Indies and the Philippines once more under their yoke, who strip the "enemy" Italian imperialism and the "allied" French imperialism of their colonies for their own profit, could bring freedom to the peoples of Europe.
It is a monstrous lie to say that those who fight their own striking workers with police, army and prison could secure "democratic" liberties for the European proletarians.
It is a monstrous lie to say that Churchill and Roosevelt, who openly defend Franco, the sinister executioner of the Spanish proletariat, who embrace the fascist Badoglio and the reactionary Giraud, who continue to maintain friendly relations with the most reactionary representatives of the Vichy entourage, are fighting against "fascism" and for "democracy." Before they even manage to occupy Europe militarily and establish their domination, their own declarations and their own acts have already dropped the mask.
Roosevelt and Churchill, these champions of "democracy" who, to hear them tell it, took up arms only to crush the "Hitlerite dictatorship," today refuse you the right to choose your own government and your own municipal representatives. In place of Hitler, the Quislings and the Lavals, their Gestapo, their SS, their police and their Milice, they send you Eisenhower and his generals, who propose to assume the government of the "liberated" countries for an entire period. De Gaulle himself has been obliged to protest against this humiliating treatment inflicted on him by his ungrateful "allies." Only your own action can make them retreat.
Workers of Europe!
You hope for immediate peace and freedom. They are preparing to mobilise you under the flags and orders of Eisenhower against their adversaries.
You hope finally to breathe again after five years of crushing under the fascist yoke, and to resume your struggles for the improvement of your social conditions. They are preparing to set against you the same police apparatus that oppresses you today, and praetorian hordes as ferocious as the Hitlerite SS.
You aspire to a lower cost of living, to normal provisioning, to adequate wages, to a substantial reduction in working hours. They begin by answering you with inflation, by means of the false money they mint in their banks, in order to force you to pay yourselves the costs of your "liberation."
You desire a stable peace, a Europe united, free and prosperous. They plan its Balkanisation through a new Treaty of Versailles, by dismembering Germany, by multiplying artificial frontiers, by opposing any understanding between its peoples, by stoking antagonisms and national hatreds. They plan a new super League of Armed Nations, gendarme of Yankee and British imperialism on the continent.
Workers of Europe!
You understand now, at least, what your immense pains and sacrifices would end up serving if you leave the imperialists a free hand. You perceive now, at least, what an enormous deception this "liberation" is.
What Is the USSR Doing?
At this critical hour, when the fate of Europe and of humanity is being decided for at least several decades to come, the eyes of the workers of the whole world turn anxiously towards the USSR and the Red Army. What game is the USSR playing in this war of brigands — the workers' state that emerged from the first victorious socialist revolution of 1917? What resistance does it offer to the imperialists' plans of plunder and enslavement of the labouring masses?
The workers must regard the Soviet masses and the Red Army as their best allies in their struggle against world imperialism, but they must have no confidence in the policy pursued in this war by the Stalinist bureaucracy. This policy is one of submission and retreat before the menacing advance of Yankee imperialism. It is a policy of betrayal of the labouring masses of the capitalist world and of the USSR itself. Through its retreats, its concessions to the imperialisms, despite the brilliant victories of the Red Army, and above all through the blows it deals to the revolutionary movement by dissolving the Communist International and drawing the Communist parties of the capitalist countries onto the path of sacred union and chauvinism, this policy is standing more and more sharply, day by day, against the proletarian revolution in Europe and in the world. The defeat of the revolution would inevitably mean the fall of the last socialist conquests in the USSR. To allow Yankee and British imperialism to triumph in Europe means allowing the noose to tighten around the USSR that will strangle it within a much shorter period than it took capitalism, after the last war, to launch itself against it.
Workers of Europe!
At the moment when the war of the imperialisms is entering its final phase in Europe, the so-called workers' parties, reformist and Stalinist alike, find nothing better to tell you than to fall in behind the flags of the Yankee and British brigands, in order thereby to win your "liberation." For years the Communist parties strove to win your confidence through their attachment to the revolution. But today, at the decisive moment when the power of the bourgeoisie in Europe, undermined and eaten away by five years of war, is disintegrating, the Communist parties are entering the bourgeois governments of the de Gaulles and the Bonomis and placing their authority at the service of the exploiters.
You have other tasks to accomplish than to play the miserable role that the cynical agents of the bourgeoisie and the contemptible Stalinist bureaucrats propose to you. Your task is to oppose to the imperialist solution of the war your own solution: the one that will give you peace, freedom, bread, through the triumph of the socialist revolution and the Socialist United States of Europe and of the world.
Workers of Europe!
This war, which has destroyed millions of human lives and immense material riches, which has marked the apogee of barbarism in human history, should never have taken place. Yet the impotence of the workers' movement allowed it to happen. If you leave the capitalist regime standing this time as well, you will know a brief period of "peace" amid economic crises, unemployment, misery, fascist oppression, and, very soon, the horrors of the third imperialist world war already spoken of by the licensed spokesman of Yankee imperialism, Wallace. Only the triumphant proletarian revolution can pull you out of the capitalist hell.
Workers, German soldiers!
The prolongation of the imperialist war will bring you nothing but new suffering, new mourning, new devastation. There must be an end to the war and to Nazism. Overthrow Hitler through your own action, open through the German socialist revolution the way to the European and world socialist revolution! Fraternise with the labouring masses of the occupied countries! Fraternise with the "allied" soldiers!
"Allied" Soldiers!
The financiers of New York and London are sending you, not to "liberate" a bloodied, ruined, devastated Europe, but to subject it to their exploitation. Refuse to serve their plans for the plunder and enslavement of the labouring masses of Europe! Fraternise with them in all their struggles for their social emancipation! Fraternise with the German soldiers!
Workers of Europe, German and "Allied" Soldiers!
Enough blood, ruin and mourning. There must be an end to the war of the imperialisms, to the fratricidal struggle of the workers. Rise together in a formidable class front against your common enemy: capitalism! In the factories, the neighbourhoods, the villages, the army, form your committees of representatives democratically elected by the mass of workers, peasants and soldiers; set them against the power of the bourgeoisie! With the words "liberation," "peace," "democracy" on their lips, the capitalist malefactors disarm you and strive, with the aid of their military machine and their praetorian bands, to crush the revolution of the European proletariat. The class war has been put on the agenda by the bourgeoisie itself. Arm yourselves, form your workers' militias, disarm the reactionary forces, meet arms with arms, force with force!
The imperialists are engaging in their final battles for the plunder and enslavement of Europe and of the world. The workers engage in the battle:
For immediate peace! Against sanctions, against annexations! For the socialist revolution! For the Socialist United States of Europe and of the world!
The European Executive Committee of the Fourth International June 1944