ABSTRACT
National Socialism revealed its true face during the war. With its restless activism the movement always saw itself as being at war: against the Weimar Republic, the Versailles settlement, Marxism in all its forms, against a liberal-democratic world order, and against the sinister machinations of world Jewry. The HitlerStalin Pact left European Communists in a state of helpless confusion that was only relieved with the attack on the Soviet Union; but the fundamental problem of the KPDs resistance was that it strove to replace one brutal dictatorship by another, a prospect that had only limited appeal. The outstanding Communist organization in Nazi Germany was the Soviet spy network run by a Polish Jew, Leopold Trepper, first from Brussels and then from Paris. Hitler's triumphant campaigns against Poland and France further enhanced his charismatic authority. He had overcome the humiliation of a lost war and torn up the few remaining shreds of the Treaty of Versailles.
