Original Socialist Worker's Front

The original Socialist Worker's Front (German: Sozialistische Arbeiterfront or SAF) was a quasi fascist political party with a strong German imprint active in Germany between 1920 until it's ban in 1944 after the Night of the Bloody Knives.
The SAF emerged from the extremist German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.
The SAF was inherently racist and antisemitic and focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression. Unlike the Italian or Austrian fascists, the SAF advocated against religion and preferred a Germanic cult rallying behind a leader.
That leader, or Führer, being Gregor Strasser, while his brother Otto Strasser was the intellectual mastermind behind the party. The SAF itself didn't call it's ideology fascist but Völkisch Socialism and while being economically close to the Soviets, they despised Bolshevism and the Soviet Union as a whole, advocating for a total destruction of Soviet Russia. Their ideology is nowadays known as strasserism.
Pseudoscientific racist theories were central to strasserism, expressed in the idea of a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft). The party aimed to unite "racially desirable" Germans as national comrades, while excluding those deemed to be either political dissidents, physically or intellectually inferior, or of a foreign race (Fremdvölkische). The SAF sought to strengthen the Germanic people, the "Aryan master race", through racial purity and eugenics, broad socialist welfare programs, and a collective subordination of individual rights, which could be sacrificed for the good of the state on behalf of the people. To protect the supposed purity and strength of the Volksgemeinschaft, the SAF called for a radical, mass-action and worker-based form of fascism and sought to espouse economic antisemitism, to achieve a national rebirth.
Strasser, the party's leader since 1924, was appointed Reichskanzler by then Reichspräsident Otto von Habsburg-Lothringen on 12 April 1941 as part of the Osterschlag, after previously serving as vice chancellor from 1933 to 1940. Strasser initially supported the establishment of Otto's authoritarian regime, which became known as the Kaiserdiktatur, but was increasingly antagonized by Otto's coronation as German Emperor, his increasing pro-capitalist and anti-völkisch socialist stand and the developing cult of personality around now Emperor Otto.
After the Kaiserdiktatur was firmly established, the SAF became increasingly sidelined by the monarchist parts of the government.
In 1943 many members followed Propagandaminister Joseph Goebbels and deserted to the Soviet puppet regime in East Germany, known as the German Democratic Republic. This was used as an excuse by Emperor Otto to purge the SAF's elite and other political dissidents in the Night of the Bloody Knives, a very controversial event in German history that has influenced German politics ever since. Reichskanzler Strasser was killed in the process, being replaced by Hermann Göring, the SAF was banned and supposed loyal elements of the party were integrated into the new mass party Imperial Party (Kaiserliche Partei).
The party was later reinstated in 1968 under a more moderate leadership that opposed strasserism and fascism, known as the contemporary SAF, yet allegations of far-right tendencies, antisemitism and anti-republicanism remain prominent.
Category:Political Organizations
Category:German Parties
Category:German-related Topics