Henk Sneevliet (1883-1942),
rebel in Asia and Europe

This year it is seventy-five years since the socialist revolutionary Henk Sneevliet was murdered by the Nazis, together with seven of his comrades. Sneevliet was the leader of the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, an underground organisation founded immediately after the German invasion in May 1940. By then Sneevliet was already a prominent socialist; before the war he had travelled all over the world, supporting young communist parties and organising solidarity.

Sneevliet was born in 1883 into a poor family in Rotterdam and, after the death of his mother in 1886, was raised by his grandmother and aunts. He excelled at school and relatives of his family gave him enough financial support to attend secondary education. He later recalled that he had felt out of place among his wealthier classmates. After he graduated there was no way to study any further – something he looked back on with regret – so at the age of seventeen Sneevliet began working for a large railway company.

He witnessed the poverty around him and experienced class differences first-hand. This made Sneevliet aware of social issues at a young age. He must also have followed the wave of strikes at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1902 Sneevliet became a member of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP).

When he joined, the party and the labour movement had been severely weakened by a failed strike. Sneevliet, however, belonged to a younger generation, unburdened by this defeat. He and others of his age began to rebuild the movement.

At the age of twenty-four he became the first socialist town councillor in his new hometown of Zwolle. On the day of the elections Sneevliet was not yet old enough to vote, since one had to be twenty-five. He had also become a member of the railway workers' union and was elected its chairman in 1911.

Sneevliet was drawn towards the radical left wing of the SDAP. There he met Henriette Roland-Holst, or Aunt Jet as he affectionately called her. A well-known poet, Marxist theorist and figurehead of the Dutch radical left. Roland-Holst's socialism in those years was revolutionary and imbued with a strong sense of ethical commitment to the cause of the oppressed. Years later Sneevliet showed the same feelings when he spoke of:

[T]he richness, the Beauty, the Splendour of the Religion of Social Democracy… For Social Democracy, properly understood, is more than a political doctrine. It imposes the heavy obligation to bear witness, to sow the seed of propaganda in all circumstances.

In 1906 Sneevliet married Maartje Visser, but the marriage was dissolved two years later when she left him. From 1909 to 1924 he was married to Betsy Brouwer, a teacher. In 1911 they had two sons, twins, nicknamed Pim and Pam. Two years after his divorce from Brouwer, he married Sima Zolkovskaja, whom he had met in Russia in the early 1920s. They had a daughter, who was also named Sima. The marriage was dissolved and their daughter stated that 'the break was political. She had a sacred faith in Stalin,' while Sneevliet had become an opponent of the Soviet leader. In 1931 he married Wilhelmina Hendrika Draaijer.

In 1911 Sneevliet left the SDAP because the party and the trade union federation affiliated to it refused to support a strike by unaffiliated unions. Sneevliet saw this as an unacceptable violation of solidarity. His break with the party made his position in his SDAP-dominated union untenable. That situation only got worse when he joined the left-wing split-off from the party, the SDP (Social Democratic Party). He was unemployed and felt isolated in the small and sectarian SDP, and decided to start a new life in the Dutch East Indies. In 1913 he left for the Dutch colony.

Socialism in Indonesia

Sneevliet arrived in the Dutch colony at a crucial moment. Capitalist social relations were penetrating the islands ever further, leading to growing class differentiation and the early formation of a working class. At the same time a national consciousness was developing and the first magazines and movements were being formed by pribumi, inhabitants of the archipelago. The most important of these efforts was the Sarekat Islam (SI), the Islamic Union.

The SI was founded in 1909, originally as a mutual aid society of Muslim traders, but developed into a mass movement concerned with the social issues of broad layers of Indonesian society. Since Dutch colonialists controlled the economy, these problems soon became political.

Sneevliet eventually got a job as secretary of the Trading Association (Handelsvereniging) in Semarang, the capital of Central Java. Sneevliet was lucky: Semarang was a fast-growing city and the heart of radical activism in the Indies. In her book The Rise of Indonesian Communism, Ruth McVey writes:

During working hours Sneevliet did excellent work for the advancement of capitalism, and the Trading Association raised no objection to his activities outside working hours on behalf of socialism. They only asked him not to actually organise a revolution, but that is precisely what Sneevliet did.

Sneevliet became active in the Indonesian Railway Workers Union (VSTP), which, unlike other unions in the colony, admitted both Indonesian and Dutch workers as members. He successfully led the union in a more radical direction, towards the most impoverished Indonesian workers. In May 1914, on Sneevliet's initiative, several dozen socialists founded the Indies Social Democratic Association (ISDV). Initially the group consisted mainly of Dutch supporters of the reformist SDAP line. But radicals such as Sneevliet and his protégé Adolf Baars were convinced that socialists should be at the front line of the anti-colonial movement that was beginning to take shape.

Sneevliet convinced the ISDV to work towards Indonesian mass movements, especially the SI. Through its work with SI members, the group began to take root among the colonised population. The political orientation of the SI was still vague, but its supporters increasingly began to associate socialism positively with support for an independent and prosperous Indonesia.

Baars and Sneevliet tried to build a left wing within the SI and to draw young activists towards socialism. Among them were the leaders of the future Indonesian Communist Party, such as Semaun and Darsono. In 1920 the ISDV changed its name and became the first Asian party to join the Communist International. By that time, however, Sneevliet had been banished from the Indies.

At the beginning of 1917 he had enthusiastically welcomed the news of the February Revolution in an article titled 'Triumph'. 'The Russian Revolution,' he wrote, 'is the cause of humanity. The War blasphemes against humanity. It is certain to us that the Russian Revolution will hasten the end of the world slaughter.' Sneevliet's closing lines alarmed the right wing: 'Here a nation of millions has lived and endured and suffered and borne for centuries...' 'People of Java, the Russian Revolution holds lessons for you too.'

Sneevliet was accused of incitement and defended himself with a nine-hour speech. He was acquitted and his speech was published as an anti-colonial brochure.

The ISDV radicals had indeed paid attention to Russia and in the autumn of 1917 began organising soldiers and sailors into councils. Within a few months thousands were part of this movement. But it was a heavy blow to the movement when Sneevliet was expelled in December 1918.

On assignment for the Comintern

During his stay in the colony the SDP had become the Dutch communist party and had won two seats in parliament. Sneevliet joined the leadership of the then Communist Party of Holland (CPH) and became active in the National Labour Secretariat (NAS), the oldest trade union federation in the country. The NAS had more radical positions than its competitor, the Dutch Confederation of Trade Unions (NVV), but it also had fewer members.

Sneevliet did not stay in the Netherlands for long. In 1920, as representative of the Indonesian Communist Party, he attended the Second Congress of the Communist International, where the colonial strategy was on the agenda. Lenin was one of the first European Marxists to recognise the importance of liberation struggles. Some, such as the British Indian communist Manabendra Nath Roy, even foresaw that colonised countries would become the centre of gravity of the revolutionary movement. Sneevliet tended to agree with Roy on this point, but he also supported Lenin's proposal that communists in the colonies should support bourgeois-democratic movements – provided that this cooperation did not restrict the social struggle.

The anti-colonial struggle represented a new terrain for many Marxists and Sneevliet was one of the few people with experience of organising a socialist movement in a colonial context. With Lenin's support he became secretary of the Comintern Commission on the National and Colonial Question and a member of the leadership of the Comintern. He was put in charge of building up Comintern activities in Asia and one of his first assignments was to go to China, make contact with radical groups, gather information about the movements there and investigate the possibilities for communism.

Sneevliet went to Shanghai in 1921, only a few years after the May Fourth Movement had erupted. This combination of mass demonstrations and cultural initiatives aimed to free China from foreign domination and to modernise society. By the time Sneevliet arrived, the movement was past its peak, but workers' organisations and socialist groups emerged from it, some of which were merged into the Communist Party, which was founded in 1921. It is not certain whether Sneevliet attended the party's founding congress: he probably attended only its first session, which was broken up by the police.

The beginning of the party made little impression on the Dutch activist; only about a dozen people were involved and they were forced to work underground. Warlords were still in power and their murderous struggle tore China apart. Sneevliet was of the opinion that the party had been founded prematurely.

In an attempt to gather more forces, Sneevliet approached Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). In Indonesia Sneevliet had seen how a communist party could be built by working in a nationalist mass movement. He argued that the Chinese communists should abandon their dismissive attitude towards the Kuomintang and should develop political work within it, just as the ISDV had done in the SI. The Chinese communists initially rejected Sneevliet's proposal and were offended by his arrogance.

According to CCP leader Chen Duxiu, Sneevliet had even appealed to 'Comintern discipline' to force through his proposal. The Chinese communists eventually joined the KMT, but Sneevliet had become suspicious of Sun Yat-sen's militarism and the authoritarian character of the party. He believed that the Soviet Union should wait with military support for the party until it had been transformed into a revolutionary democratic party. Although the KMT eventually received this support, it never reformed. Under Chiang Kai-shek the KMT turned murderously against the left.

Sneevliet had more skill as a tactician than as a strategist; he was always more focused on reacting to the present than on plotting a long-term course. His dissatisfaction with the SDP came from the same source as his demand that communists work in nationalist mass movements: he feared that revolutionaries would isolate themselves.

From the CPN to the Fourth International

Sneevliet returned to the Netherlands in 1924 and was elected chairman of the NAS, which allowed him to devote all his time to politics. The NAS had been declining in membership for some time and Sneevliet tried to turn the tide by introducing organisational improvements.

His involvement with the NAS was the first source of conflict between Sneevliet and the Communist International. The Comintern wanted party members to work in mass trade union movements rather than shut themselves off in smaller radical formations, such as the NAS. Sneevliet argued that, unlike the larger NVV, the NAS organised political strikes and had a more horizontal structure. His personal experience in the NVV very probably played a role in his analysis.

Trade union policy was not the only source of disagreement. Sneevliet was of the opinion that the Russian party had too much power in the Comintern, which meant that Soviet interests guided its international strategy. He objected to the repressive character of the Soviet Union and began to side with Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition.

In 1927 the Comintern tried to force the Dutch communists to work within the NVV, and so Sneevliet and his followers left the CPN (Communist Party of the Netherlands). Two years later they founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP). A strong syndicalist current in the NAS rejected political involvement and Sneevliet wanted this new party to give the militant labour movement a political expression, independent of both the CPN and the SDAP.

In 1935 the party merged with the Independent Socialist Party (OSP), a left-wing split-off from the SDAP, to form the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party (RSAP). The new party had a little over three thousand members, mainly concentrated in the larger cities. The small size made its alliance with the NAS – which gave the party a foothold among the most radical Dutch proletarians – even more important.

The new party initially had close ties with the Left Opposition. After failing to reform the Comintern, Sneevliet and Trotsky both wanted to found a new International, but they did not fully agree on all points. Trotsky insisted first of all that communists should work in mass trade unions and not in smaller groups such as the NAS. Sneevliet, on the other hand, feared that the focus of the Fourth International was too narrow and that its membership would remain limited to marginal, purely Trotskyist groups. Sneevliet wanted to cooperate with groups such as the English Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM, Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), but Trotsky denounced these parties as centrists who could not choose between revolution and reforms.

Trotsky thought that the leaders of these movements were doomed to fail in times of crisis and that their followers could become revolutionaries in such times, but that the Fourth International had to offer a clear alternative to attract them. Sneevliet, on the other hand, gave priority to working with radicalising workers. In the end these differences of opinion would lead to a bitter break between the two revolutionaries.

Midnight in the Century

In 1933 Sneevliet was once again confronted with a charge of incitement, this time because of his support for a mutiny on the naval ship De Zeven Provinciën (The Seven Provinces). By occupying the ship, part of the mixed Dutch and Indonesian crew protested against poor wages and working conditions. After several days of negotiations the Dutch Minister of Defence gave permission to carry out an attack in which twenty-three crew members were killed. The mutiny became the symbol of the joint Dutch and Indonesian rebellion and was seen as part of the growing defiance of the Dutch colony. Sneevliet received a five-month prison sentence and his party campaigned under the slogan 'Sneevliet: from the cell into the House.' He won.

The election of Sneevliet represented one of the few bright spots in those years. In that same year, 1933, Hitler came to power. The largest and most established labour movement in Europe had not been able to stop the rise of fascism. And shortly afterwards the Moscow trials swept away a generation of revolutionaries, many of whom Sneevliet had known personally. As Victor Serge wrote, it was 'midnight in the century.'

The outbreak of the Spanish Revolution seemed to offer hope that the tide could still be turned. The RSAP threw itself into organising solidarity with the struggle against fascism. Enthusiasm for the Spanish cause swept through the entire RSAP, which spread information, raised money to support the POUM and organised members to go to Spain.

Abandoned by the 'democratic' governments, the Spanish Republic was driven into a corner, while Franco's fascists received support from Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany. Although the Soviet Union supported the Republicans, the USSR suppressed dissidents and the anti-Stalinist left. Piet van 't Hart, who after the war published a biography of Sneevliet under his resistance name Max Perthus, fought with the POUM militia. He was kidnapped and tortured by the secret police of the Soviet Union, which also murdered POUM leader and friend of Sneevliet, Andrés Nin.

The Soviet Union's attempts to destroy movements of oppositional communists had a direct impact on Sneevliet. Small as the RSAP was, it was still one of the largest revolutionary socialist groups in Europe, independent of both the social democrats and the communists. This attracted the attention of anti-Stalinist parties, as well as of the Comintern and the secret service of the Soviet Union, the NKVD. The Dutch communist party claimed that Nazi Germany was financing the RSAP and the communist members of parliament accused Sneevliet of being a Nazi agent.

In 1937 Ignace Reiss, a decorated Soviet spy, contacted Sneevliet. The two men had known each other since 1920. Reiss wanted Sneevliet's help to break with the Soviet regime, but on the way to the meeting Soviet agents murdered him.

The NKVD also helped to poison the relationship between Sneevliet and Trotsky. Trotsky's link to his European comrades ran through his son in Paris, Leon Sedov, whose secretary, Mark Zborowski, was a Soviet spy. Sneevliet suspected him, but Sedov and Trotsky trusted him and objected to the accusations made by Sneevliet.

The differences of opinion between Trotsky and Sneevliet deepened. Sneevliet resented Trotsky's harsh criticism of the POUM, which was fighting for its survival. An increasingly bitter and isolated Trotsky began to suggest that Sneevliet's trade union position was motivated by narrow self-interest – although Sneevliet had offered on several occasions to give up his position. In 1938 Trotsky wrote to his secretary, 'Can anyone believe for a moment that, in the event of Dutch participation in the war, Sneevliet will be capable of a revolutionary attitude? Only a blind man can believe that.' In this case Trotsky was completely mistaken.

Trotsky's criticism of the NAS was closer to the truth. The federation had its roots primarily among radical workers in the construction and transport sectors, with few members in modern industry. But even in the sectors where it was strongest, the union never organised more than a minority, albeit a militant one. Although the NAS had been decimated to about ten thousand members, Sneevliet refused to leave the organisation. The RSAP became increasingly isolated in the shrinking milieu of radical NAS members.

Meanwhile Sneevliet was confronted with incredible personal suffering. Both his sons committed suicide: Pim in 1932, Pam in 1937. Shortly before, Pam had quarrelled with his father: he wanted to go to Spain, but Henk forbade it and stressed that his son's party membership meant that he too was bound by the party decision that members could not take this decision individually. A few years later Sneevliet lost contact with his daughter Sima.

Sneevliet was a domineering, sometimes authoritarian leader, who had the kind of patriarchal leadership style that was not uncommon in the socialist movement. His son-in-law Sal Santen would later write that Sneevliet assumed he could make decisions in the name of the party's youth group. Behaviour like this contributed to a number of young activists, Santen included, leaving the party.

Sneevliet tended to treat political disagreements as personal betrayal. The RSAP was his party – he was its ideologist, its leader and its spokesman. Personal disagreements quickly turned into conflicts with the party. But Sneevliet was also a devoted leader with an unusual talent for inspiring dedication and courage in others.

The Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front

Before the war the RSAP discussed what to do if Germany were to occupy the Netherlands. The leadership decided that the most reliable party members would set up an underground organisation to organise clandestine resistance. The name became the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front.

On 10 May 1940 Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands and quickly overcame the Dutch defences. Sneevliet was in Belgium when the war began. He flouted a party order that he should leave the country in the event of an invasion and returned home. As a well-known left-wing leader, he was already in the sights of the Nazis. Sneevliet went into hiding, shaved his head and grew a long beard to avoid being recognised.

The first publications of the new underground organisation show a clear assessment of the situation. They predicted that the war would last about as long as the First World War and would eventually spread to the colonies. They had no illusions that Nazi rule in occupied Netherlands would be less harsh than in Germany.

Sneevliet and his comrades called for a Third Front, their version of the 'Third Camp' of a concept by the American socialist Max Shachtman. They published an appeal from Shachtman's Workers Party that described this Third Camp as 'the submerged, smouldering working masses of the world, those who do the work and go hungry in peacetime and die in wartime.' They argued that it was the task of socialists to organise these people.

The clarity of the Front was remarkable compared with most of the rest of the left: the NAS simply ceased to exist, the leaders of the SDAP declared that resistance was useless and dissolved the organisation, the communists tried to remain legal and refused, as long as the Hitler-Stalin pact was in force, to put forward political slogans.

The MLL-Front, by contrast, tried to organise actions in which workers combined the struggle for socialism with the struggle against fascism. The organisation kept away from nationalist resistance groups led by right-wing figures and also kept its distance from other left-wing groups that, in its view, did not sufficiently distance themselves from the belligerent countries. As the name indicates, the MLL-Front saw the Second World War as comparable to the previous war: for them both were a clash of imperialist powers.

The Front was aimed at reaching former SDAP supporters. These workers were more numerous and less ideologically hardened than the members of the CPN, and the MLL hoped that, after seeing the failure of their leaders, they could be convinced of the Front's strategy.

The February Strike of 1941 marked a high point in Dutch resistance against the Nazis. That month a Dutch fascist was killed in Amsterdam during a fight with a Jewish self-defence group. In response to the continuing resistance, the Nazis began sealing off Jewish neighbourhoods and, in a very violent fashion, rounding up Jewish men. Two members of the Communist Party, Piet Nak and Willem Kraan, called on people to go on strike at a protest.

The protest quickly spread to cities outside Amsterdam, with much of the organisation of the strike done by members of the Communist Party. But the strike was violently suppressed. Maurice Ferares, one of the CPN members who typed the famous pamphlet calling for the work stoppage, later said: 'nobody can claim ownership of the strike. It was an action of the entire population of Amsterdam against the anti-Jewish measures of the occupying Nazis.'

In the days leading up to the strike there had already been a growing sense of unrest. The MLL-Front called on people to resist Nazi antisemitism by forming self-defence groups and organising protests:

If men and women from the working-class districts flock to the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam... take up the fight against the paid bandits of the Dutch National Socialist movement, then we are dealing with a magnificent expression of spontaneous solidarity that must find higher and more decisive expression in the workplaces. … Pour out of the factories, leave the shipyards and the works and join en masse the class comrades fighting in your neighbourhoods.

Sneevliet and his comrades thought that the strike proved that a Third Front was possible.

Come, brothers and sisters

The members of the MLL-Front had little or no experience with underground work. They tried to reach Dutch workers by means of magazines, pamphlets, posters and graffiti. The Front did not consider ordinary German citizens to be the enemy, distributed propaganda among German soldiers and smuggled illegal publications into Germany. How much effect these activities had is hard to assess. But trying to reach others and showing that it is possible to resist Nazi rule helped keep hope alive. Throughout the war, members of the MLL-Front and successor organisations risked their lives for these activities and for hiding and helping people sought by the Nazis.

In early 1942 a member of the Front was betrayed to the Nazis. After hours of horrific torture the Germans obtained several names. Over the following weeks most of the group's leaders, including Henk Sneevliet, were arrested. Besides Sneevliet, Ab Menist, Willem Dolleman, Cor Gerritsen, Jan Schriefer, Jan Koeslag, Jan Edel and Rein Witteveen received the death sentence. Cor Gerritsen committed suicide in his cell, the others were executed on 13 April 1942.

After the war a prisoner who had been held in a cell across from Sneevliet and his comrades described their last hour:

They had then all been brought into one small cell, right opposite mine, measuring 90 x 200 cm. And then that moving moment: 'Let us shake hands', and with full voices seven men sang the Internationale an hour before their death. What a melody and what words! I have attended a concert many times, but never heard singing with such feeling and conviction. I am not ashamed that I wept.

In his farewell letter to his stepdaughter and son-in-law Sneevliet wrote:

Boys, of course I would have liked to be spared having to give my life in the service of my ideals. Es hat nicht sollen sein. The end comes suddenly, and I have reconciled myself to it in the awareness of having been a loyal soldier of my duty… Do not forget [your] friends and acquaintances. Until the last moment I hope to have the strength to make the Malay saying hold true: Berani Karena Benar – be brave because it is right! Farewell, dear boys, support one another, hold on to each other, a heartfelt farewell kiss. Your uncle Henk.

Sneevliet lived his life with an unshakeable faith in socialism. For him this did not mean the dictatorship of a party or a leader: the core of his socialism was the emancipation of working people, freedom and internationalism. Sneevliet and his comrades had no illusions about the Stalinist dictatorship and refused to make peace with capitalism. They found their own way through the political turmoil of the early twentieth century. Their memory remains a source of inspiration and their principles are still valid.