The extremist group Antifascist Action (Antifa) began as part of the Soviet Union’s operations to bring about a communist dictatorship in Germany, and worked to label all rival parties as “fascist.”
The Communist Origins of the Antifa Extremist Group | Epoch Times | Joshua Philipp:
September 23, 2025 - "The extremist anarchist-communist group Antifa is in the headlines because President Donald Trump has announced that he will be designating it as a terrorist organization. The organization was initially part of the Soviet Union’s operations to bring about a communist dictatorship in Germany, and it worked to label all rival parties as 'fascist.'
"The organization can be traced to the 'united front' of the Soviet Union’s Communist International (Comintern) during the Third World Congress in Moscow in June 1921 and July 1921, according to the German booklet 80 Years of Anti-Fascist Action by Bernd Langer, published by the Association for the Promotion of Anti-Fascist Culture. Langer is a former member of Autonome Antifa, formerly one of Germany’s largest Antifa organizations....
"Moscow ... sought to unite the various communist and workers’ parties of Germany under a single ideological banner that it controlled. 'The "unified front" thus did not mean an equal cooperation between different organizations, but the dominance of the workers’ movement by the communists,' Langer wrote....
""Benito Mussolini, a Marxist and socialist who ... founded the fascist movement as his own political party ... took power through his 'March on Rome' in October 1922.... The KPD [Communist Party of Germany] decided to use the banner of anti-fascism to form a movement. However, Langer noted that to the KPD, the ideas of 'fascism' and 'anti-fascism' were 'undifferentiated,' and the term 'fascism' served merely as rhetoric.... Both the communist and fascist systems were based on collectivism and state-planned economies. Both also proposed systems wherein the individual was heavily controlled by a powerful state and both were responsible for large-scale atrocities and genocide.
"According to the 2016 annual report of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, from the viewpoint of the 'left-wing extremist,' the label of 'fascism' as pushed by Antifa often does not refer to actual fascism but is merely a label assigned to 'capitalism'.... This held true from the beginning, according to Langer. For the communists in Germany, 'anti-fascism' merely meant 'anti-capitalism'.... A description of Antifa on the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s website notes that the organization still holds this same basic definition of capitalism as 'fascism'....
"Langer wrote that, historically, by labeling the anti-capitalist interests of the communist movement as 'anti-fascism,' the KPD was able to use this rhetoric to label all other political parties as fascist. 'According to this, the other parties opposed to the KPD were fascist, especially the [Social Democratic Party of Germany],' he wrote. Thus, in a move that today would be considered ironic, the group that the communist 'anti-fascists' most heavily targeted under their new label of 'fascism' was the social democrats....
"At this time, Hitler and his Nazi Party had begun to emerge on the world stage, and the Nazi Party employed a group similar to Antifaschistische Aktion in its use of political violence and intimidation, called the 'brownshirts.' Antifaschistische Aktion, meanwhile, began to attract some members who opposed the arrival of actual fascism in Germany and who did not subscribe to — or were potentially unaware of — the organization’s ties to the Soviet Union. However, the violence instigated by Antifaschistische Aktion largely had an opposite effect. The ongoing tactics of violence and intimidation of all rival systems under the Antifa movement, along with its violent ideology, drove many people toward fascism.
“'The Communists’ violent revolutionary rhetoric, promising the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a Soviet Germany, terrified the country’s middle class, who knew only too well what had happened to their counterparts in Russia after 1918,' Richard J. Evans wrote in The Third Reich in Power. 'Appalled at the failure of the government to solve the crisis, and frightened into desperation by the rise of the Communists, they began to leave the squabbling little factions of the conventional political right and gravitate towards the Nazis instead.'
"Langer noted that, from the beginning, the KPD was a member of the Comintern, and 'within a few years, it became a Stalinist party,' both ideologically and logistically. He wrote that it even became “financially dependent on the Moscow headquarters.' Leaders of the KPD, with Antifa as their on-the-ground movement for violence and intimidation of rival political parties, fell under the command of the Soviet apparatus. Many KPD leaders would later become leaders in the communist German Democratic Republic and its infamous Ministry for State Security, the Stasi.
"As Langer wrote, 'Anti-fascism is a strategy rather than an ideology.' It was brought into play in Germany in the 1920s, not as a legitimate movement against the fascism that would later arise in Germany, he wrote, but instead 'as an anti-capitalist concept of struggle.'”
A version of this article was first published on Aug. 18, 2017.
