Spartacus uprising

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Spartacus uprising, barricade fighting in Berlin, January 1919

The general strike and the armed fighting in Berlin from January 5th to 12th 1919 in connection with the November Revolution are called the Spartacus uprising , January fighting or January uprising . The first term has become commonplace for it, although the Spartakusbund or the KPD neither planned, triggered, nor led this uprising and only participated in it after it began.

causes

The uprising was triggered by the dismissal of the Berlin Police President Emil Eichhorn ( USPD ) by the Council of People's Representatives under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert on January 4, 1919. Eichhorn was appointed by the first Council of People's Representatives. This was formed on November 9, 1918 from three representatives each from the MSPD and the USPD as a provisional government and accepted by the Supreme Army Command in the secret Ebert-Groener Pact . During the Christmas fighting , the People's Navy Division , which was tasked with protecting the transitional government, took Otto Wels (MSPD) hostage on December 23, 1918 in order to emphasize their demand for payment of the outstanding wages. Eichhorn had refused on December 24th, against the orders of the three MSPD people's representatives Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Otto Landsberg , to use the security forces subordinate to him against the People's Marine Division quartered in the Berlin Palace to free Wels. Since then, Ebert had considered him unreliable. The three USPD representatives ( Hugo Haase , Wilhelm Dittmann , Emil Barth ) left the Council of People's Representatives on December 29, 1918 in protest against Ebert's shooting order and the deaths in the Christmas riots. The MSPD representatives then appointed the MSPD members Gustav Noske and Rudolf Wissell as replacements in the rest of the council. The USPD no longer viewed this as a legitimate transitional government. MSPD majorities in the Executive Council of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Councils in Greater Berlin and in the Central Council of the German Socialist Republic , however, agreed to Ebert's request to remove Eichhorn and also to dismiss the Prussian Prime Minister Paul Hirsch (MSPD).

The real cause of the January Uprising was the conflicting political goals and methods of the groups involved in the November Revolution. The MSPD leadership around Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske sought a quick return to "orderly conditions" through the elections to the National Assembly. The USPD, the workers and the Revolutionary Obleute as well as the KPD wanted the continuation and safeguarding of the revolutionary goals (socialization, disempowerment of the military, dictatorship of the proletariat ) and recognized the dismissal of Eichhorn as an attack on the revolution. The historian Heinrich August Winkler sees it as an "uprising against democracy": Much like the Bolsheviks , who dispersed the democratically elected Russian Constituent Assembly by force of arms in January 1918 , Liebknecht and his supporters had already prevented parliamentarism before the elections to the National Assembly want.

Since the beginning of December 1918, in and around Berlin Volunteer Corps formed from the former front-line soldiers and volunteers. Since the beginning of the year, Ebert and Noske had them together with unions loyal to the republic, such as the republican soldiers' armed forces and imperial regiments, some of which were loyal, but mostly anti-republican regiments.

course

Poster for the reconquest of the forward building during the Spartacus uprising
Government troops in the forward building during the Spartacus Uprising
Barricade during the Spartacus uprising

On January 4th, the Berlin police chief Emil Eichhorn was released. The sacking was viewed as a provocation by the radical left. On the same day the executive committee of the Berlin USPD decided to hold a demonstration for the following day together with the Revolutionary Obleuten . The January 5th demonstration had reached a scale that exceeded all expectations of those calling for it. During the demonstration, armed demonstrators, instigated and with the help of informers and provocateurs, occupied the printing works of the social democratic forward and Berliner Tageblatt as well as the publishing buildings of Scherl , Ullstein , Mosse , the printing works Büxenstein and the Wolff telegraph office .

The leaders of the stewards, the USPD and the KPD met for a meeting on the evening of January 5th to determine how to proceed. Most of those present supported the occupation of the Berlin newspaper district and were in favor of taking up the fight against the social democratic government. Liebknecht was in a state of revolutionary euphoria due to the large demonstration and the false report that all regiments in and around Berlin were on their side been transferred. Only two spokesmen for the stewards, Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig , spoke out against this approach. Both advocated a second revolution against the Council of People's Representatives in principle, but considered the timing to be premature and tactically unwise; they only voted for a general strike. A provisional revolutionary committee for the overthrow of the government and for the takeover of power was resolved by approx. 70 people against 6 votes from the ranks of the stewards and formed from 53 people. Ledebour, Liebknecht and Paul Scholze were the three chairmen with equal rights.

The Revolutionary Committee called the Berlin workers on the following day to a general strike on January 7th and to overthrow the remaining government of Ebert. Around 500,000 people followed the call and flocked to the city center. A large crowd gathered in the streets and Berlin squares. In the days that followed, she did not take part in fighting, nor was she involved by the strike leaders, although, as on November 9, 1918, she was ready to disarm the soldiers. Some of their posters and banners featured the same slogans as at the beginning of the November Revolution: “Peace and unity”.

In the two days that followed, the committee was unable to agree on how to proceed. Some representatives called for an armed uprising, others called for negotiations with Ebert. In particular, the committee was unable to signal what to do to the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators waiting in the streets and squares for instructions. They therefore went home again on January 6th and 7th in the evening. According to the publicist Sebastian Haffner, on these two days they would have had the chance to overthrow the government of the People's Representatives by taking over the Reich Chancellery .

The KPD leader Karl Liebknecht advocated, initially against the advice of Rosa Luxemburg , the plan to unleash a civil war : The Council of People's Representatives should be overthrown by armed force and thus the first free elections to the National Assembly, scheduled for January 19, should be prevented. Liebknecht feared that otherwise the KPD might isolate itself too much from the workers who wanted to overthrow the government. At the same time, the KPD representatives tried to get some of the regiments stationed in Berlin, especially the People's Navy Division , on their side. This did not succeed, however, because most of the soldiers were already at home, because they either declared themselves neutral or because they were loyal to the previous advice of the People's Representatives. On the other hand, part of the Berlin population, especially the bourgeoisie, stood behind the Ebert government, responded to a strike call and, since January 6, secured government buildings as living shields.

From January 6th, the Revolutionary Committee negotiated with Ebert without a clear goal, mediated by the USPD leadership. On January 7th, the negotiations failed due to the mutual inability to compromise: the Council of People's Representatives demanded the evacuation of the occupied newspaper buildings, the insurgents insisted on Eichhorn's reinstatement. A compromise proposal by the moderate USPD politician Karl Kautsky to make the restoration of freedom of the press a condition was not fathomed, as both the MSPD and the Central Council spoke out against it. The chance for a non-violent settlement of the conflict was wasted. On the same day Ebert Gustav Noske handed over the supreme command of the troops in and around Berlin, and calls were made for the formation of further Freikorps in Berlin. Immediately after his appointment, Noske ordered all members of the Revolutionary Committee to be monitored by telephone in order to arrest them later. To this end, 50 selected officers were deployed in all Berlin post offices.

On January 8, the Council of People's Representatives called on the population to resist the insurgents and their intended takeover of government and published a leaflet with the title: "The hour of reckoning is approaching!" In it the insurgents were threatened with physical destruction. On January 9, 1919, the revolutionary stewards, the central executive committee of the Berlin USPD and the KPD called for the fight against “the Judasse in the government. [...] You belong in prison, on the scaffold. [...] Use the weapons against your mortal enemies. "

The bulk of the working class probably followed the call for a general strike to prevent the counter-revolution; but she did not want to know anything about military fighting. On the contrary, it still demanded the unity of the socialist forces and on January 9 at a large assembly in Humboldthain called for the resignation of all leaders responsible for the "fratricide". The Ebert government, but also Ledebour and Liebknecht, were seen as responsible for the situation. Numerous resolutions drawn up in the factories called for an end to street fighting and the creation of a government in which all socialist parties should be represented.

Insurgents shot by volunteer corps

On January 10, the Reinhard Brigade attacked the Spartakist headquarters in Spandau, under the direction of Berlin's commander, Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard . On January 11th, Noske gave the order against the occupants of the Vorwärts . The attackers were still armed with war equipment and were therefore far superior to their opponents. The Freikorps Potsdam captured the building with flamethrowers, machine guns, mortars and artillery. Other occupied buildings and streets in the newspaper district were also captured by January 12th. There were no organized battles because the insurgents were not prepared for them; often they surrendered voluntarily. Nevertheless, the military shot and killed over a hundred insurgents and an unknown number of uninvolved civilians on site. On January 11th, seven parliamentarians who wanted to negotiate the handover of the Vorwärts building were murdered . The military was not interested in negotiations and took the parliamentarians as hostages in the Berlin Dragoons barracks. Among the murdered were the Jewish socialist Wolfgang Fernbach and the working-class poet Werner Möller . An investigative committee of the Prussian state parliament later put the death toll at 156. The military had thirteen dead and twenty wounded.

On January 13th, the surrounding volunteer corps entered the city. The largest of them was the so-called Guard Cavalry Rifle Division under the officer Waldemar Pabst , who was subordinate to General Hans von Seeckt during the war . The Berlin newspapers welcomed the entry after the end of the fighting as a restoration of "calm and order". The military occupation was followed by considerable excesses of violence by the right-wing troops, which went far beyond previous acts of violence by some leftists.

Murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht

From the beginning of December 1918, the Anti-Bolshevik League had printed posters and appeals to the population of Berlin calling for them to find the "ringleaders" and hand them over to the military. For this she offered a high reward. A leaflet distributed in large numbers demanded:

“The fatherland is on the verge of destruction. Save it! It is not threatened from outside, but from within: From the Spartacus group. Beat their leaders to death! Kill Liebknecht! Then you will have peace, work and bread. The soldiers at the front. "

After the rebellion was put down, the Spartacist leaders feared for their lives and went into hiding. Now the regular government was also looking for alleged putschists in order to prosecute them for the coup attempt shortly before the free elections. A poem by Artur Zickler appeared in Berliner Vorwärts on January 13, 1919 , which ended with the following lines:

"Many hundreds of dead in a row" -
proletarians!
Karl, Rosa, Radek and Kumpanei -
nobody is there, nobody is there!
Proletarian!"

Fritz Henck, Philipp Scheidemann's son-in-law , publicly assured on January 14th in Berlin that the leaders of the uprising would “not get away with it”. In just a few days it will show "that they are being taken seriously too."

On the evening of January 15, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were met in the apartment of a friend, Dr. Markussohn, discovered by the Wilmersdorfer vigilante in Berlin-Wilmersdorf , arrested and taken to the Eden Hotel . Her whereabouts were likely known through the telephone surveillance ordered by Noske . Waldemar Pabst had the prisoners interrogated and mistreated for hours. Another arrested KPD leader, Wilhelm Pieck , witnessed this abuse and phone calls; Pabst probably ran one of them with the Reich Chancellery .

The murder should look like an assassination attempt. The soldier Otto Runge (1875–1945) gave Rosa Luxemburg a heavy blow from the crowd when she was being transported from the hotel. Already unconscious, she was shot on the way in the car of Lieutenant zur See Hermann Souchon with a gunshot in the temple. The body was thrown into the Berlin Landwehr Canal, where the body was not found until May 31, 1919. Shortly after Rosa Luxemburg, Liebknecht was also transported from the hotel and almost knocked unconscious; he had to get out on the way and was then shot from behind as a "fugitive". The dead man was handed over to a Berlin police station as an "unknown corpse". Pieck achieved that he should be transferred to a prison; on the way there he managed to escape.

Head of the funeral march at the funeral of Rosa Luxemburg on June 13, 1919

Riots

The murders of January 15 unleashed serious unrest and uprisings throughout the German Reich. Against and against the Soviet republics in some major German cities, Gustav Noske deployed the Freikorps and Reichswehr associations , which until the end of May 1919 violently suppressed all such attempts at overthrow - most recently the Munich Soviet republic . In many cases, there were similar fights as in Berlin, with a total of around 5,000 fatalities and some political murders of leading representatives of the left.

Thwarting punishment

The Berlin press presented the murders on January 16, 1919 as follows: Liebknecht was shot while fleeing, and Luxemburg was lynched by an angry crowd. This presentation was based on a document that Pabst wrote on the evening of the murders and had it published as an official report of his division. After this became known, the remaining government convened a special meeting; there Ebert is said to have expressed concern about the murders of his decades-long party comrades. MSPD representatives feared an expansion of the uprisings in the Reich as a result of the murders. Some briefly considered resigning. Noske, on the other hand, retrospectively referred to the murdered people in 1923 as the main culprit in the fact that the revolution had degenerated into civil war. Thousands had asked beforehand "whether nobody would render the troublemakers harmless".

Leo Jogiches , Rosa Luxemburg's former partner, took over the leadership of the KPD after her death and tried to solve the murders. In an article in the Rote Fahne from February 12, 1919, after his own research, he announced the names of some of the allegedly involved. He was arrested in March 1919 during further voluntary corps operations against left-wing labor leaders and murdered in prison.

Initially, criminal proceedings against alleged perpetrators did not get underway. Since February 16, 1919, KPD members have unsuccessfully requested an independent investigation by a non-military special court because of the risk of blackout . It was not until May 1919 that some of the executors - including Otto Wilhelm Runge and Lieutenant Kurt Vogel - were brought before a field war tribunal of their own division. The main hearing took place from May 8-14, 1919. It was stated several times that an "MSPD helper service" offered a head premium of 100,000 marks for apprehending the Spartacus leaders. Wilhelm Pieck became one of the most important witnesses to the incidents in the hotel that preceded the murders. He and hotel employees had noticed the mistreatment of those who were then murdered and telephone calls between officers and their superiors. Pieck testified:

"I then saw that an officer, who was addressed as a captain by the others, was walking around offering the soldiers cigarettes and saying: 'The gang must no longer leave the Eden Hotel alive!' […] A short time later a maid came up, fell into the arms of a colleague and shouted: 'I can't get rid of the impression of how the poor woman was knocked down and dragged around.' "

Runge received a two-year prison sentence and Vogel received a 28-month prison term. The officers involved, Heinz and Horst von Pflugk-Harttung , were acquitted. Their leader Pabst was not charged, and possible employers had not been sought. As commander in chief of the troops, Gustav Noske personally confirmed the judgment with his signature.

On May 17th, three days after the conviction, Vogel was fetched from the Moabit prison by Lieutenant Lindemann for transfer to the Tegel prison. Lindemann was really Lieutenant Wilhelm Canaris . Canaris brought Vogel to the Netherlands by car. Canaris was never prosecuted for this.

The KPD, USPD, some MSPD representatives and liberals viewed the military trial and the verdicts as a judicial scandal. Attempts to challenge the judgment and resume the process in a higher instance have been delayed. All other members of the Revolutionary Committee had been detained but were released in the absence of evidence of an armed coup plan. Only in 1929 was the judge Paul Jorns dismissed for bias.

In the stab in the back trial in 1925, the former General Wilhelm Groener exposed his secret pact with Ebert of November 9, 1918; whether he had also consented to the murder of the Spartacists remained unclear.

In 1934 the Nazi regime granted Otto Runge compensation from his detention and Kurt Vogel a cure from tax money. In January 1935, the National Socialists leveled the graves of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and probably also made the bones of those buried there disappear. Eduard Stadtler explained in his memoirs, published in 1935, that these were contract killings: He visited Pabst on January 12th and “asked him to do the murders”. Later the Pope told him who would carry it out. He was also in contact with Noske.

In 1959, Pabst had a conversation with Günther Nollau , who later became Vice President of the Federal German Office for the Protection of the Constitution , who recorded the content in a memo:

“He heard Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg speak in Berlin at the time. He said he mixed with the people in civilian clothes. His observations led him to believe that the two were extremely dangerous and that nothing of equal value could be set against them. That is why he decided to render these people harmless. "

In 1962, Pabst stated in an interview with Spiegel that Noske had allowed the murders and covered the failure to prosecute afterwards. In 1970 a letter was found in Pabst's estate in which he wrote:

“It is clear that I could not carry out the operation without Noske's consent - with Ebert in the background - and also had to protect my officers. But very few people understood why I was never questioned or charged. As a gentleman, I acknowledged the behavior of the then MSPD by keeping my mouth shut about our cooperation for 50 years. "

Noske has always denied the conversation Pabst testified and its content, an agreement to cooperate in the arrest and murder of the Spartacists. Souchon's later lawyer Otto Kranzbühler stated that Pabst had confirmed the phone call with Noske. The biographers also consider Pabst to consult with Noske or Hans von Seeckt from the army command as likely.

consequences

The uprising had no mass base; according to Heinrich August Winkler, it was just an “ attempted coup by a radical minority”. His swift overthrow was therefore not a surprise, it was probably also inevitable: Without it, a civil war throughout Germany and military intervention by the victorious powers would have been the result. But now Ebert's way of parliamentarization could be continued: On January 19, 1919 the elections to the National Assembly took place, which on August 11 finalized the Weimar constitution and created the first functioning German democracy, the Weimar Republic .

Nonetheless, the bloody suppression of the uprising created a heavy burden for the SPD: In the elections to the National Assembly it received 37.9 percent, the USPD 7.6 percent of the vote, so that the left-wing parties, who were already at odds, did not collect an absolute majority. In the further elections of the Weimar Republic, the SPD never again reached more than 30 percent and thus remained dependent on coalitions with the bourgeois parties of the center for government participation even after its reunification with most of the USPD (1920) throughout the Weimar period.

memory

Rathausstrasse 10, Berlin-Lichtenberg

Every year, on the second weekend in January, the Liebknecht-Luxemburg-Demonstration takes place in Berlin in memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and their murder. It ends at the memorial of the socialists in the central cemetery Friedrichsfelde .

At Rathausstrasse 10 in Berlin-Lichtenberg there is a memorial with the names of the fighters who were killed in the course of the later Berlin March fights .

literature

revolt

  • Karl Liebknecht: In spite of all that! (In: Die Rote Fahne, January 15, 1919), Karl Liebknecht - ML-Selected Works, Berlin 1952, pp. 505-520.
  • Ottokar Luban : The perplexed Rosa. The KPD leadership in the January uprising in Berlin in 1919. Legend and reality. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-87975-960-X ( Socialism 28, 2001, Supplement 1).
  • Frederik Hetmann : Rosa L. The story of Rosa Luxemburg and her time. 6th edition changed in the binding. Beltz and Gelberg, new edition 1987, ISBN 3-407-80814-3 .
  • Ralf Hoffrogge : Richard Müller - The man behind the November Revolution. Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02148-1 .
  • Annelies Laschitza : The Liebknechts. Karl and Sophie - Politics and Family . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-02652-3 .
  • Jörn Schütrumpf : Spartacus uprising. The suppressed report of the committee of inquiry of the constituent Prussian state assembly on the January 1919 riots in Berlin . Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-320-02357-7 .
  • Bernhard Sauer, The Spartacous Stand. Legend and reality. In: Heiner Karuscheit, Bernhard Sauer, Klaus Wernecke: From 'War Socialism' to the November Revolution . VSA publishing house. Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-89965-887-3 .

Murders

Web links

Commons : Spartacist Uprising  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: Weimar 1918–1933. The history of the first German democracy , Berlin 1993, p. 54 f.
  2. ↑ Original text printed in: Gerhard A. Ritter , Susanne Miller (ed.): Die deutsche Revolution 1918–1919 , Hamburg 1975, p. 179.
  3. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: The long way to the west . Volume 1: German history from the end of the Old Reich to the fall of the Weimar Republic. Beck, Munich 2000, p. 389.
  4. ↑ a b c d Richard Müller: History of the German Revolution , Volume 3, pp. 30 ff.
  5. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: Weimar 1918–1933. The history of the first German democracy , Berlin 1993, p. 57.
  6. ^ A b Heinrich August Winkler: The long way to the west. Volume 1: German history from the end of the Old Reich to the fall of the Weimar Republic. Beck, Munich 2000, p. 388.
  7. ↑ Ralf Hoffrogge: Richard Müller - The Man Behind the November Revolution , Berlin 2008, p. 99 ff.
  8. ^ Sebastian Haffner: The German Revolution 1918/19 . Rowohlt, July 2018.
  9. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wehler : Deutsche Gesellschaftgeschichte , Vol. 4: From the beginning of the First World War to the establishment of the two German states 1914–1949 CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2003, p. 537.
  10. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: Weimar 1918–1933. The history of the first German democracy , Berlin 1993, p. 58.
  11. ^ Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography , Droste Verlag, 1987, p. 311.
  12. ↑ quoted from Gerhard A. Ritter / Susanne Miller (eds.): Die deutsche Revolution 1918–1919 , Hamburg 1975, p. 190.
  13. ↑ Cf. Gerhard Engel : The worker poet Werner Möller (1888-1919) , in: Work - Movement - History , Issue III / 2016 as well as David Fernbach: Wolfgang Fernbach (1889-1919): Jewish socialist and victim of the Berlin January fights 1919 , in Work - Movement - History, Issue I / 2019, pp. 60–77.
  14. ^ Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography , Droste Verlag, 1987, p. 308
  15. ^ Gordon A. Craig: German History 1866-1945 , Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-42106-7 , p. 440.
  16. ↑ Hans Mommsen: The playful freedom. The way of the republic from Weimar to the downfall 1918 to 1933 , p. 49.
  17. ↑ a b Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography , Droste Verlag, 1987, p. 312 f.
  18. ^ Heinrich Hannover, Elisabeth Hannover-Drück: The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Documentation of a political crime ; Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972 3 ; Pp. 23-28.
  19. ^ Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography , Droste Verlag, 1987, p. 311.
  20. ↑ a b Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography , Droste Verlag, 1987, p. 309.
  21. ^ Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography , Droste Verlag, 1987, p. 310.
  22. ^ Klaus Gietinger: A corpse in the Landwehr Canal. The murder of Rosa L. , Berlin 1995, p. 48 f.
  23. ↑ Frederik Hetmann: Rosa L. , Fischer TB, p. 266 f.
  24. ↑ Frederik Hetmann: Rosa L. , Fischer, p. 271 f.
  25. ^ Quoted close Helmut Hirsch: Rosa Luxemburg , rororo Bildmonographien, Hamburg 1969, p. 127 ff.
  26. ^ Elisabeth Hannover-Drück, Heinrich Hannover (Ed.): The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. ( Memento of May 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (judgments of the 1st instance) Frankfurt / Main 1967, p. 116.
  27. ^ Michael Mueller: Canaris - Hitler's chief of defense. Propylaea, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-549-07202-8 , p. 99
  28. ↑ Hans Mommsen: The playful freedom. The way of the republic from Weimar to the downfall 1918 to 1933 , p. 49.
  29. ^ Eduard Stadtler: As Antibolschewist 1918–1919 , "Memories" series, Neuer Zeitverlag GmbH, Düsseldorf 1935
  30. ↑ Quoted from Frederik Hetmann: Rosa L. , Fischer TB, p. 291.
  31. ↑ I had Rosa Luxemburg judged. SPIEGEL conversation with the putsch captain Waldemar Pabst , in: Der Spiegel , 16/1962 of April 18, 1962.
  32. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: The long way to the west. Volume 1: German history from the end of the Old Reich to the fall of the Weimar Republic. Beck, Munich 2000, pp. 390 and 403-406.