On the morning of 17 July 1932, a column of Reichsbanner men marched through Altona’s streets under the black-red-gold flag of the Weimar Republic.
They had come to show that democracy could still fight. By nightfall, seventeen lay dead, and the swastika flew a little higher over Hamburg. Within nine months, every banner they carried would be burned.
The Iron Front was never supposed to end this way. Born in December 1931 out of desperation and defiance, it was the last great republican coalition of the Weimar era, a formal merger of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (the Social Democratic defence league), the free trade unions, and the workers’ sports clubs.
Its target: the Harzburg Front of Nazis, nationalist DNVP, and Stahlhelm paramilitaries. Its slogan: ‘We are the republic.’ Its symbol: three arrows, aimed at monarchism, Nazism and communism, each design chosen to be painted over a swastika before the SA could reach the next street corner.
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May 2026
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