Distorted mirror image

The relationship between Communism and Fascism continues to be hotly debated. In Germany Ernst Nolte presents Nazism as a justifiable response to Communism. In Britain Lord Rees-Mogg denounces the EU’s Austrian boycott (prompted by the Schüssel-Haider coalition) as one-sided, and points to Italian governments having Communist coalition partners. (In other words he sees no essential difference between the partisans who killed Mussolini and admirers of the Waffen-SS). Similarly the Telegraph’s Peregrine Worsthorne, aghast at the large turnout for Red Jessica Mitford’s memorial service, asked plaintively “How many of the Great and Good would attend the memorial service for her sister, Lady Mosley?” At the opposite end of the spectrum are veteran Communists who dress up unthinking subservience to Stalin as anti-Fascism. One such was Ruth Werner who has just died, aged 93, in Berlin. Her brother Jurgen Kuczyinski was creator of the Freie Deutsche Kulturbund in pre-war Hampstead and Rektor of the Humboldt University in post-war East Berlin. In the intervening years he acted as the link between atom spy Klaus Fuchs (then working at Birmingham University) and his sister Ruth, a Soviet-trained radio operator, living near Banbury. Like Fuchs and her brother, Ruth had grown up in Weimar Germany and embraced the Communist cause as an antidote to incipient Fascism. After training in Moscow she had been a Soviet agent in China before coming to Britain. Here she stayed until Klaus Fuchs was caught and then returned to the DDR with which she identified so strongly that she called German unification ‘Western annexation.’ Another of Ruth Werner’s obiter dicta was “we didn’t know of Stalin’s crimes.” She trotted out this threadbare alibi in spite of having lived in Switzerland in the late Thirties, and in the UK throughout the Forties. Let me conclude by reiterating my rejection of Rees-Mogg’s facile and mentally lazy Nazism-Communism equation. For all that, I think that Holocaust denial needs a corollary: Gulag denial. While the David Irvings of this world require our eternal vigilance, we ought not to ignore the likes of Ruth Werner either.