ABSTRACT
In the days between the First and Second World Wars the labor, socialist, and communist movements in the six important countries of Central Europe—Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Switzerland—whose proponents had faced the early postwar years, for the most part, with high hopes of continually increasing strength, fell victim sooner or later, with the exception of Switzerland, to the machinations of the forces of fascism and nazism. By the beginning of the forties, five of these six nations were ruled by Hitler and his followers; the labor and radical forces had been completely suppressed as a legal force. Where the latter existed at all, they operated only through refugee organizations outside of the borders of their respective countries or through scattered underground groups ready, with the defeat of Hitler, to resume their important role in the economy of their respective countries.
