Antifa’s origin story traced to Communist Stalinist group that aided Nazi rise to power
The U.S.-based Antifa movement has embraced the label and symbols of Germany's "Antifaschistische Aktion" — a Communist group whose actions enabled the Nazis to take power.
Published: September 24, 2025 11:07pm
Updated: September 25, 2025 8:43am
The modern iteration of the militant Antifa movement draws its name, symbolism, and inspiration from Antifaschistische Aktion — a project of the German Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s which targeted center-left parties as the true fascist enemy and aided in the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Antifaschistische Aktion was founded in 1932 by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which viciously opposed the more moderate leftist Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), dividing the opposition and directly contributing to the successful rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) — the Nazi Party — and the eventual establishment of Hitler’s dictatorship.
The first Trump Administration repeatedly sought to go after the far-left American movement known as Antifa, and now, in the wake of violent anti-ICE protests and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump has designated Antifa as a “domestic terrorism organization.”
The modern iteration of Antifa seeks to burnish its anti-fascist bona-fides by linking itself through its name and its two-flagged banner to purported efforts by Antifaschistische Aktion to oppose Hitler and the Nazis, but the actual history of Germany’s Antifa movement is much more complicated than that.
Modern "Antifa": Rewriting history
The German Left was deeply divided during the years between the First and Second World Wars, as the SPD often attempted to defend the Weimar constitution and to preserve some of the Weimar Republic’s democratic institutions against both a Nazi fascist state and a Communist one, while the radical KPD, subordinated by Joseph Stalin's Comintern, sought a Soviet-style revolution in Germany.
The democratic German Weimar Republic, established in the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War One, was beset by massive economic problems flowing from the Great Depression, intense hyperinflation, political instability, and constant street battles between paramilitary groups, including those backed by Communists and Nazis. The German Antifa played a key role in the German Communist Party’s successful efforts to kneecap the SPD, contributing to Hitler and the Nazis managing to seize power amidst a divided and demoralized opposition.
Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, wrote in his 2017 book that “over the past decades, antifa have self-consciously adopted interwar anti-fascist symbols like the two flags of the Antifaschistische Aktion.”
Richard J. Evans, the author of The Third Reich in Power, argued that "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.”
Evans wrote that "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."
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