Antifa’s Origin Traced to Communist Group That Aided the Nazis' 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.

NOTE: Antifa was born in 1920s Germany, the Communist Party’s equivalent of Hitler’s Brownshirt thugs (the SA). Their purpose was to “fight fascism” — not through debate or reason but by violence — and the Nazis were the world’s foremost fascist party. Yet in reality, then as now, Antifa defined “fascism” as its opposite — Capitalism — and actually worked with the Nazis to destroy it. The story will shock you. — RDM

by Jerry Dunleavy
October 3, 2025

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.

The actual history is deeply disturbing, especially for today’s America. Read on.