The case of Richardstrasse 35 and comparable incidents, seen as calculated risks embarked on by the middle-level Party bureaucracy, appear to confirm the official Communist view that ‘individual terror’ resulted from the isolation of the Communist organization from the community at large. Even these incidents, however, when considered from the perspective of the rank and file, take their place among the routine activities of the local defence organizations. Those, in turn, demand consideration as an integral part of the life of the neighbourhood. It hardly needs to be argued that each fighting group was subject not only to the broadly ideological and organizational pressures that constituted official policy but also to the influences of the neighbourhood situation in which it operated. These included, at one end of the scale, the simple fact of spiralling popular and police violence, to the demands of which, as has been pointed out, the Party leadership was relatively sensitive. At the other end of the scale lay all the forces working on the fighters as members of a community with its own concerns, attitudes, styles of action and interaction.

Among the Communists, the combination of the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ – and the character of the violence that depended on it – was a function of the street-politics of the Party. It was hardly within the power of the Party to wipe out the pre-political personalities of most of its members in any case, but the official attitude was itself ambivalent. The process by which the Communist organizations merged with the community provided the dynamic for KPD tactics in the ‘Third Period’.