The March To Death Book

John Olday
Artist and Fighter for the social revolution

"John Olday was born in london. He spent his early childhood in new york where his mother had relocated after his birth. When she visited her native germany in 1913 she left him there with her mother.
He lived in germany until 1938 when he decamped to london, where he married Hilda Monte in September.
Kingdom of Rags (published 1939 by Jarrolds) is an account (288 pages) of his life in germany. The book is illustrated with 17 of his drawings."
Email from the John Olday Archive, 22 September 2003
John Olday, artist and Cartoonist in Australia - 1957
John Olday, Artist and Cartoonist in Australia, 1957.
Photo coutesy of Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs
In the early twenties, as an agitator with the 'Communist Youth', Olday got involved in plundering and looting by masses of starving people, who were suffering from continual food shortages. Olday was, however, quickly expelled from the 'Communist Youth' due to his "anarchist deviations".
Shortly thereafter he became a member of the "Anarcho-Sparticists". He fought in one of their guerrilla squads during the workers' uprisings in October 1923, which were bloodiIy suppressed. Throughout the next year, he was active in the Ruhr-Gebiet, the important mining and industrial region in western Germany, under French occupation at the time. As a revolutionary anarchist, he agitated for the reassertion of the movement for workers' councils.
In 1925 and through the next several years, Olday withdrew from the revolutionary movement so as to devote his energies primarily to artistic creation. Based on his extrordinary talents as a draughtsman, he soon developed into a recognized political cartoonist and expressionistic graphic artist. His socially critical theater-pieces, performed in Hamburg cabarets, also brought him renown. During this period, it appears that he spent his time completely on a career as a graphic artist and author.

He did reestablish his contacts with his Spartacist friends at some point in time before the National Socialists (NSDAP) came to power in 1933. For his friends, he illustrated flyers with very incisive anti-Nazi caricatures. After 1933, he continued to work with these social-revolutionary activists who had not yet been arrested by the fascists.

One activity of his comrades was to reduce the size of Olday' s drawings and their texts. In doing this, these much smaller revolutionary tracts could be sent unnoticed through the German mail, disguised as the instructions for the use of accompanying kitchen appliances.

At the same time, Olday played the role of an eccentric gay artist. This gained him admission to the highest circles of the Hamburg NSDAP. In this way, he secured first-hand information, which he then passed on to the anti-Nazi underground. In doing this he was able to give timely warnings to many comrades about impending arrests. He saved many friends from almost inevitable death in concentration camps. As for Olday himself, his popularity as a satirist and his close connection with leading Hamburg Nazis, who wished to maintain a sembalance of artistic freedom in Hitler's Germany, meant that he could continue to work on in Germany.

That is, until 1938. Political and intellectual repression sharpened, and it became impossible for Olday to remain in Germany any longer. So, with a Gestapo commando group hurrying to arrest him, Olday fled for Great Britian.

Olday quickly found good contacts among pacifists in London, when he arrived. In 1939, they helped him to publish a collection of his drawings entitled The Kingdom of Rags. Pictured in his strongly angular graphic style, he offered an impressive representation of the horrors of the Nazi regime to the British public, and thereby aided in exposing the nature of Germany's fascism. Besides his graphic talents, he also placed his considerable organizational talents at the service of the struggle against the impending war. 1

He aided in the coordination of the sinking ot a German munitions ship off the coast of Holland. He planned the assassination in Antwerp of a collaborator of the Nazis.

From time to time he was able to visit Paris and work with other exiled council communists. They drew up a "Call to the German Workers", which was transmitted over Radio Strasbourg on ihe German language program. Remembering the sucessful passive resistance of, especially, the coal-miners during the French occupation of the Rheinland following the First World War, Olday called for the workers to use similar methods, including sabotage, to block the Nazi war machine.

In connection with these kind of activities, Olday, without the knowledge of even his closest friends, married Hilde Monte in 1942. She was a German Jew. They had met three years before as preparations were being made for what turned out to be a failed bomb-attentat against Adolph Hitler in a Munich beer hall. Although she was a dogmatic Marxist intellectual, 2 Olday explained the marriage to his comrades on the grounds that he was protecting her with his British citizenship from possible deportation back to Germany.

Hilde Monte's political work included editorship of various German language publications, and support work for Jewish underground resistance in regions occupied by the German Army. In 1944, she was completing a mission as a courier, when, on the Swiss-German border, she was captured, then summarily executed, by an S.S. patrol. A museum in Israel now bears her name.

Upon Britian's 'entry into World War Two in 1940, the government had instituted compulsory military service. Olday was to have been included in this patriotic duty as well. He would have served as a sapper, had he not successfully deserted before he could be sent into the imperialist war. Supported by anarchists of the "Freedom" group, who provided him with false identity papers, he remained at large until 1944. During those years, he put all his energies towards the anti-militarist fight. In 1942, he was made a member of the War Commentary editorial board. He maintained his involvement as an editor when the new journal Freedom emerged from the War Commentary journal in 1945. Throughout these years, Olday ---signing himself "xxx"--- created political cartoons and caricatures, whose satire grew more and more caustic as the war raged on.

Olday, together wifh Marie Louise Berneri and Vernon Richards (both of whom were well known as libertarian activists) wrote a broadsheet that appeared every two weeks for the soldiers of the British Army. Entirely within the tradition of revolutionary anti-militarism, 3 Olday used the pages of that publication to argue for the construction of workers' and soldiers' councils, similar to those that he had fought for in the mutinous upheavals in Hamburg after World War One.

For Olday, the goal of the power of the councils was the libertarian communist reorganization of society. This propaganda, very well planned and widely distributed, soon had a telling effect on workers in Britian's war industries. Naturally, the government became rather upset. Soon, growing numbers of anarchist militants were being arrested. FortunateIy, an unshakable solidarity kept all but a few cases of sabotage from being proven.

During the war, Olday endeavored to aid the few social revolutionaries left in Hamburg in the underground war against the German regime. He facilitated the conveyance of information and supplies to Hamburg with the help of Scandinavian sailors and merchant marines whose work still carried them regularly into German ports even during the war. For the paper the Industrial Worker, Olday produced a constant supply of drawings and poems. Contacts formed here would later prove quite valuable to him.

With the dedicated backing of his friends from the 'Freedom' group Olday was able to publish a second collection of political drawings, called The March of Death, in 1943. In his characteristic, sharp graphic style, he unmasked the similarities betyleen the ruling powers -- whether they had a capitalist, imperialist, fascist or "socialist/state capitalist" ideological veneer -- in their oppression of "their" populations. Without any superfluous detail in the fourty-one works, he showed not only the comparable mechanisms of statist manipulations in the different systems of political povver, but also the consequent results: almost inevitable war-like conflicts becoming a "march of death" for the people. Inside of a year and a half, they sold ten thousand copies of The March of Death, a classic of anarchist anti-militarist propaganda...4

...Finally, in 1944, Olday was nabbed as he tried to procure a typewriter for the 'Freedom' group. Though the suspicion of theft was quickly proved to be false, Olday's true identity could not be kept secret. He was sentenced, in January 1945, to a year's imprisonment, having been found guilty of "theft through the finding and fraudulent use of an identity card".

After serving eight rnonths, Olday was granted an early release. Immediately, the military authorities took him to a prison camp where he began serving another two years for desertion... However, by means of a massive public campaign, and with the aid of sympathetic individuals like Herbert Read, George Orwell, and George Woodcock, Olday's friends of the 'Freedom Press Defense Campaign' engineered his release after only three months.

Based on his contacts with German prisoners of war held in Britian, Olday initiated the formation of a new revolutionary propaganda organization, the 'Internationalist Bakunin-Group' (IB-G), with the aim of revitalizing the anarchist movement, especially in Germany. This was in August of 1946. The proclaimed goals were "the destruction of statism in every fom: and the construction of a non- authoritarian commonwealth centered on the system of workers' and communal councils."

The 'IB-G' drew a lesson from the collapse of the labor unions and leftist parties in the face of Nazi-ism in 1933: "The class struggle can only be carried forward individually and through small groups, since true revolutionary mass organizations will not be tolerated by either state-capitalism or state-socialism." Olday was assigned the task of developing organizational prerequisites in an ideas-and- actions campaign in the English camps for German prisoners of war. He not only got leaflets and pamphlets smuggled into the camps, but also helped to build small anarchist groups linked together by couriers. The work progressed so well that by 1947 many well known anarchists were able to speak in front of the prisoners, under the cover of presenting an educational series on proper democratic practices for the undemocratic Germans.

The German prisoners were scheduled to be released from the camps in 1948. Olday developed a plan for the extention of the 'IB-G' s agitational and educational work. He suggested that the German anarchist movement could re- emerge by means of a "three-to-a-group" system. 5

The idea was for three German anarchists to form a clandestine group, with the aim of "gnawing like moles at the roots of the State." Since he felt it would be fairly simple for each anarchist to win two new sympathizing comrades, to then form second generation groups and so on, he felt that in this manner, "anarchism will grow like a stout tree and break the foundation of the State." From their uncompromising revolutionary sensibilities and "an unrelenting rejection of all half-measures", the 'IB-G' endorsed this policy of working in small, clandestine groups. They rejected every sort of collaboration in governmental institutions as reformist. Olday was assigned to generally oversee the new German section of the 'IB-G'.

The success of the British anarchists propaganda work was demonstrated shortly after the repatraition of prisoners of war to Germany. By the summer, the anarchists were fully involved in hunger-riots in the Rheinland. In an illegal manifesto, the German 'IB-G' called on the starving people to join in forming revolutionary councils. From London, Olday sent a periodic information bulletin containing suggestions, which ranged from rent strikes to consumer boycotts. Unhappily, because he lacked specific information concerning the immediate situation in Germany, his particular recommendations missed the mark and failed to have any lasting resonance. However, a new opportunity for the expression of his social revolutionary concepts was soon to appear.

In war-ravaged and now geopolitically divided Germany, the few surviving comrades confronted an atmosphere of complete social despair and loss of perspective. Rudolf Rocker was one of the few who made it. Between the First and the Second World Wars, he had been one of the leading militants of the anarcho-syndicalist 'Free Workers Union-Germany' (FAU-D)
....


Peter Peterson
Trafik 21,
Internationales Journal zur Kulture der Anarchie
translated by CE - Anarchist Workers Bulletin

(See also Part 2 : John Olday's Australian Memoirs)

1 This opposition was quite different from that of our contemporary so-called "peace movement".-A.W.B. typists note

2 And us folks at the A.W.B. aren't sure just what kind of 'dogmatic marxist' - A.W.B. typists note. More information on Hilde Monte can be found at the Spunk archive page which presents Monte as a council communist. This would also make sense of the marriage of convenience between Olday and Monte.

3 as opposed to pacifism and "peace movements" - A.W.B. note.

4 March of Death is available from Freedom Press in a 1995 edition.

5 This seems similar to the system of 'revolutionary confidential-men' amoung sailors of the German Navy towards the end of the First World War and the beginning of the German Revolution - AWB note, see for example, the Wilhelmshaven revolt, by 'Icarus', Ernst Schneider. For more information see the Subversion site on the German Revolution

6 During the movement towards civil war in Germany the 'FAU-D' denied the necessity of armed violence, and denied that the armed proletariat would have to use coercive measures against its enemies. Instead the 'FAU-D' saw a proletarian revolution as coming about simply through a big general strike where the capitalist state would vanish without any need on the part of the revolutionary forces to attack and suppress the state. This syndicalist idea criticised at the time by the Communist Workers Party of Germany (K.A.P.D.) and the revolutionary factory organisations like the A.A.U.D. and A.A.U.D.-E., is pretty clearly not an expression of revolutionary perspective. - A.W.B. typist note.
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