August merges

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November Revolution in Braunschweig , November 8, 1918: the delegation of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council (from left to right: Friedrich Schubert, Henry Finke, August Merges, Paul Gmeiner , Hermann Schweiß and Hermann Meyer)

August Ernst Reinhold Merges (born March 3, 1870 in Malstatt - Burbach ( Saarbrücken ), † March 6, 1945 in Braunschweig ) was a German politician and revolutionary as well as a member of various communist and syndicalist organizations. He was one of the main actors of the November Revolution in Braunschweig , President of the Socialist Republic of Braunschweig , member of the Weimar National Assembly and the Braunschweig State Parliament . After 1933 he was a member of a resistance group against the Nazi regime . He died as a result of abuse by the Gestapo .

Life

August Merges was born on March 3, 1870 in Malstatt-Burbach, a current district of Saarbrücken. His mother died shortly after he was born. When his father was drafted into the Franco-German War as a soldier , he came to live with foster parents. There he developed rickets due to malnutrition. The result was that he remained short, had a lame leg and a hump, which earned him the nickname "Crooked August".

His father, a butcher, initially sent him to an apprenticeship as a tailor. Then he learned in the cutting academy in Berlin. He completed his journeyman time in Bremen.

In 1899 he moved to Delligsen in the Gandersheim district, where he worked as a tailor and married Minna, née Hermes. Their first son Alfred was born after almost nine months. He had two other sons (Walter, born in 1901, and Otto, born in 1905) and two daughters (Margarete married Krull , born in 1903, and Lisbeth, born in 1907).

Merges, who had been a supporter of social democracy since his youth, was elected in Delligsen from 1908 to 1910 for the SPD in the local council and appeared as a successful agitation speaker.

In 1906 he stopped working in his profession and worked as a paid functionary for the SPD in Hildesheim and Alfeld an der Leine . There he administered the trade union building. He took u. a. participated in the demonstrations of the workers' movement against the three-class suffrage and for democratic and equal elections in the state of Braunschweig.

In 1911 he moved with his family to Braunschweig, where he was registered as a travel agent first at the Marstall, later at Ölschlägern and from 1917 until his death at Altewiekring 70 . He worked as an advertiser for the Braunschweiger Volksfreund and became publisher and editor of this social democratic newspaper. He was later registered as a tailor, and his daughter Margarete ran an artificial pottery.

1914 to 1918: agitation against the First World War

At the beginning of 1915 August Merges, Sepp Oerter and August Thalheimer founded the "Braunschweiger Revolution Club". He was close to the " International Group ". There was contact to the Berlin “headquarters” via Thalheimer and Merges.

The "Revolution Club" consisted of around 15 people who were in opposition to the war support of the SPD executive committee. Half of the members were functionaries of the SPD and the trade union, the other half were opposition youths from the "Educational Association of Young Workers". Merges was a role model and point of reference, especially for the young people.

Merges was one of the first to sign a letter of protest that the International Group wrote to the SPD board on June 9, 1915, calling for an end to support for war policy.

At the beginning of 1916 the “Revolution Club” was renamed “Spartakusgruppe Braunschweig”. The group was able to present and discuss its guiding principles in the meetings of the SPD and thus quickly became the determining factor within the party. In almost all businesses it was possible to establish Spartacus stewards. In the same year Merges was put into “ protective custody ” for “anti-militarist activities against the war” .

In 1917 the SPD split into USPD and MSPD . Merges became a member of the USPD (which, in contrast to the Reich, made up the majority in Braunschweig). He was also a member of the Spartakusbund and worked actively with the International Communists of Germany .

Towards the end of the First World War , Merges headed a "deserters center" founded by the Spartacists , which gave deserters shelter and supplied them with forged passports and food stamps . On November 3rd, he spoke at an illegal protest rally on Leonhardplatz in Braunschweig, with around 1000 participants. Karl Liebknecht was supposed to speak at the rally, but he canceled at short notice.

1918 to 1919: November Revolution and "Socialist Republic of Braunschweig"

See also main article: November Revolution in Braunschweig

As a skilful speaker and agitator, Merges had a massive influence on political developments in the Free State of Braunschweig between the end of the war and mid-1919. On November 8, 1918 at around 7 a.m., he and a group of armed men occupied the SPD's Volksfreund-Haus the left-wing radicals provided their own mouthpiece. In the afternoon of the same day Merges and other forced the abdication of the last Brunswick Guelph -Herzogs Ernst-August , the city on the following day with his family into exile left.

The Workers 'and Soldiers' Council then took over political leadership in Braunschweig, its chairman was the "Hussar Schütz" (in reality an infantryman). Two days later, on November 10, 1918, a sole government of the USPD was proclaimed by the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council. The “Socialist Republic of Braunschweig” was proclaimed , and August Merges was proclaimed its president at the suggestion of Sepp Oerter . The following eight "People's Commissars" belonged to the Socialist Republic of Braunschweig: Minna Faßhauer (national education, the only woman), Karl Eckardt (work), Gustav Gerecke (nutrition), August Junke (justice), Michael Müller (transport and trade, on 28. Replaced by Rudolf Löhr on January 1, 1919 ), Sepp Oerter (Interior and Finance), Gustav Rosenthal (revolutionary defense, replaced by Herling on January 28, 1919) and August Wesemeier (City of Braunschweig).

On November 23, 1918, Merges took part in the Reich Conference of the Council of People's Representatives in Berlin. Together with the representative from Gotha, Merges was the only one to vote against the convening of a national assembly . In the election to the National Assembly on January 19, 1919, the Braunschweig Higher Regional Court Councilor August Hampe , lawyer Dr. Heinrich Jasper and August Merges determined.

On January 25, 1919, Merges was elected district chairman of the USPD.

After the state elections on December 22, 1918, the state parliament was opened on February 10, 1919. After the state government was elected in February 1919 by the state parliament, in which the MSPD, the German Democratic Party (DDP) and the Bürgerliche Einheitsliste (BEL) had a majority, these parties rejected Article 14 of the draft constitution. The draft provided for the workers 'and soldiers' council to exercise the "supreme legislative power". Thereupon Merges resigned all parliamentary offices on February 22, 1919 and thus also renounced the presidency because he saw the revolution betrayed by parliamentarism .

Until the Freikorps troops under General Maercker marched into Braunschweig on April 17, 1919 to end the general strike , Merges was the leader of local uprisings. To avoid his arrest, he first went into hiding in Braunschweig when the Maercker troops marched in and then fled to Berlin.

1920 to 1933 work in (left) communist and syndicalist organizations

Merges was a member of the KPD until 1920. In 1920 he resigned and was one of the founding members of the left-wing communist AAU and the KAPD . He was temporarily a member of the board. Merges was a supporter of the “federal minority” in the KAPD, which demanded the dissolution of the communist parties and the formation of “unions” and was very hostile to any centralization and thus to the international .

On March 15, 1920, August Merges spoke at a rally in Schöningen . An action committee made up of the SPD, KPD and USPD, which had formed at the beginning of the Kapp Putsch and in fact exercised executive power, called for this. The workers of all factories in Schöningen took part in a general strike, the farm workers were also on a strike, which had already started on March 12th in 18 towns around Schöningen before the outbreak of the Kapp Putsch. After the rally was over, many participants moved to the manor, to which the resident armed forces had withdrawn. They called on the resident guard to hand over their weapons to the workers. It was only during the night that the Reichswehr troops came to Schöningen and ended the siege of the manor. The following day, the commander of the resident army was shot dead at a rally. Colonel Stachow thereupon issued an arrest warrant against August Merges, who was held responsible for the incidents: he had incited the workers "to violently disarm the legal resident guard ... As a result of this, riots and fighting broke out, in which several people were killed and wounded . “Despite the search by several Reichswehr commandos, August Merges managed to speak at a meeting in Schöppenstedt on the following day, March 16. The workers present prevented his arrest.

In July 1920 he traveled to Moscow for the 2nd World Congress of the Comintern to negotiate with Otto Rühle about the admission of the KAPD to the 3rd International. The executive committee initially wanted to give the KAPD delegation an advisory voice and urged them to participate in the congress. In the preliminary discussions with the members of the Executive Committee of the International, Lenin , Bukharin and Zinoviev , Merges and Rühle rejected the "Guiding principles on the basic tasks of the Communist International" drafted by Karl Radek , which were to be decided on at the congress and conditions for admission to the Comintern included.

Both Merges and Rühle spoke out against the centralistic and bureaucratic structure of the International and did not want to accept the dependence of the individual parties on the “power center”. The principles formulated in the guiding principles on the question of the relationship between party, class and mass, on parliamentarianism and on the trade union question opposed the views of the KAPD.

Merges and Rühle therefore left before the start of the congress. On the way back she received another invitation from the Executive Committee, with the assurance that the KAPD would get full voting rights without any demands of any kind having to be met. Merges and Rühle did not allow themselves to be dissuaded from their decision not to participate. After their return, their behavior led to violent criticism within the KAPD, as a result of which the political currents around Rühle and Merges were excluded from the party.

Merges then reported on his sobering experiences while traveling through the Soviet Union in several lectures in various cities. His conclusion: "Although Russia is the first country to carry out the social revolution, it will be the last country to carry out socialism."

Merges then joined the KPD again for a short time and after his return to Braunschweig was active in the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers Union .

In October 1921 the General Workers' Union - Unity Organization (AAUE) was constituted after the KAPD and its affiliated company organization AAUD came to increased criticism of the subordination of the AAUD to the KAPD. The critics' approach was to build a unified political and operational organization. In Braunschweig, in addition to Merges, around 20 other people belonged to her, including the former Minister of Culture of the Socialist Republic of Braunschweig, Minna Faßhauer. Both Merges and Faßhauer also approached the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers' Union and appeared as speakers in its meetings. According to his son, Merges is also said to have been active in the Red Aid .

In 1926 Merges was one of the founders of the " Spartakusbundes left-communist organizations " and chaired its first and only Reich Conference in Göttingen . The "Spartakusbund Nr. 2" emerged after various splits of the AAUE from the former majority faction around Franz Pfemfert and Oskar Kanehl , which merged with an ultra-left KPD split around Iwan Katz and the "Industry Association for the Transport Industry".

Towards the end of the Weimar Republic, Merges withdrew from active party work, politics should now make younger people.

1933 to 1945: Resignation and resistance to the Nazi regime

For seizure of the Nazis in 1933 Merges wrote a pamphlet entitled Hitler means war and destruction , which printed his son Walter and Oswald Berger and distributed before the labor office.

However, Merges and Minna Faßhauer quickly came to the conviction that resistance to National Socialism in the situation at that time, in which the masses did not want to hear about a communist revolution, only meant "running your head against the wall and being martyrs." to accomplish". Others from the AAUE group, such as the bricklayer Hermann Schade , on the other hand, usually gathered young people to carry out actions against the Nazis. The “Schade Resistance Group” - which called itself the Communist Council Union - met conspiratorially and initially did not conduct any outward activities. It also included members of the SPD, the KPD and previously unorganized young people.

Schade brought the members of the group together with August Merges. Because of his age and his political concerns, he no longer wanted to take part in the active revolutionary-anti-fascist struggle, but carried out training courses for the younger members and gave political advice.

In 1934 the group began to produce and distribute various pamphlets (Kampfsignal, Der Rote Rebell, The brown plague) , on which Merges had also worked.

The AOK building, “protective custody” prison for the auxiliary police
Merges' grave in the Braunschweig main cemetery

In December, that same year, four members of the group were arrested by the police. In April 1935, 16 more followed, including August Merges and Minna Faßhauer. During the interrogations, Merges was severely ill-treated by the Gestapo , and he suffered a fractured pelvis . Treatment of the festering wounds was banned so he could not walk and was in severe pain.

Merges was charged with " high treason ". The National Socialist Prime Minister Dietrich Klagges ensured that the trials did not take place in Berlin before the People's Court , but in Braunschweig.

August Merges been to three years prison sentenced and released early because of detention inability 1937th At the instigation of Klagges, he was immediately arrested again and taken into " protective custody ". His son Alfred Merges succeeded through petitions to the People's Court that he was released under certain conditions (he was not allowed to leave the house, receive visitors and not appear at the window). He was repeatedly picked up by the Gestapo and imprisoned for a short time.

In 1944 his son secretly took him to his summer house, where he spent the last two years of his life. He died there on March 6, 1945 of complications from bone tuberculosis, which he had suffered from since the abuse by the Gestapo.

Honors

Memorial plaques on the Reichstag

Critical re-evaluation of lifetime achievement

In the context of the debate about an appreciation of the political life work of the Brunswick politician Minna Faßhauer , the SPD parliamentary group in the Brunswick city council made a motion in August 2013, in this context also the lives of other Brunswick politicians from the time of the November Revolution in Brunswick , the Weimar Republic to to subject the city to a critical reassessment towards the time of National Socialism . This proposal was supported by the CDU parliamentary group. The people whose life achievements are to be reevaluated include: Otto Grotewohl (first Prime Minister of the GDR ), Carl Heimbs ( DVP , responsible for the naturalization of Adolf Hitler ), Werner Küchenthal , August Merges ( USPD , first President of the Socialists Republic of Braunschweig ), Josef Oerter ( anarchist , USPD , Prime Minister of Braunschweig, later NSDAP ) and Ernst August Roloff ( DNVP , founder of BEL ).

Quotes about August Merges

  • Hermann Schroff: " [...] the special characteristics of the first and hopefully last President of the Free State of Braunschweig are his physical size, which is in inverse proportion to his mouth, a clubfoot and a so-called 'branch' [...] Robespierre of the Braunschweig Revolution [...] His Vengeance, his thirst for blood may not be as pronounced and unnatural as that of his colleague from the great French Revolution, but his viciousness and hatred of everything bourgeois is undoubtedly unlimited. "
  • Wilhelm Hilger ( KPD member and contemporary witness of the November Revolution ) describes Merges as follows: “ We in the working class youth had particularly good contact with August Merges. One had to be amazed what it brought and what it was possible to judge the political development here. He always spoke from the wrist. That was powerful! If someone made an interjection, he always knew the answer to it. "
  • Herbert Wallbaum (active in the Braunschweiger Arbeiterjugend in 1918): “ He was mocked and frowned upon for being just a little tailor, barely visible and severely physically paralyzed; I kept smoking a cigar, the cigar he never went out. When you were with him he would ask: Did you bring a cigar with you? Then we can talk. "

literature

To the country / regional history

  • Peter Berger: Brunonia with a red scarf. November Revolution in Braunschweig 1918/19. Hanover 1979.
  • Reinhard Bein : Braunschweig. City and duchy 1890–1918. Braunschweig 1985 (short biography, extensive source collection).
  • Reinhard Bein: We are marching in Germany. Free State of Braunschweig 1930–1945. Braunschweig 1984 (extensive source collection).
  • Reinhard Bein: Resistance in National Socialism - Braunschweig 1930 to 1945. Braunschweig 1985 (short biography, report on participation in the "Schade Resistance Group").
  • Friedhelm Boll: Mass movements in Lower Saxony 1906–1920: a socio-historical study of the different types of development Braunschweig and Hanover. Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1981.
  • Horst-Rüdiger Jarck , Gerhard Schildt (ed.): The Braunschweigische Landesgeschichte. A region looking back over the millennia . 2nd Edition. Appelhans Verlag, Braunschweig 2001, ISBN 3-930292-28-9 .
  • Gustav Füllner: The end of the Spartakist rule in Braunschweig. Deployment of government troops under General Maercker 50 years ago. In: Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch No. 50.Braunschweig 1969.
  • Horst-Rüdiger Jarck , Günter Scheel (Ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon - 19th and 20th centuries . Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1996, ISBN 3-7752-5838-8 .
  • Albrecht Lein: Antifascist Action 1945 - The "Zero Hour" in Braunschweig. In: Göttingen Political Science Research. Volume 2. Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1978 (contains an overview of the development of the labor movement in Braunschweig from 1914 to 1945).
  • Ernst-August Roloff : Braunschweig and the state of Weimar. Orphanage printing and publishing house, Braunschweig 1964.

To left communist and syndicalist groups

  • Hans Manfred Bock : Syndicalism and Left Communism. From 1918–1923 - on the history and sociology of the Free Workers' Union of Germany (Syndicalists), the General Workers' Union of Germany and the Communist Workers' Party of Germany. Verlag Kommunistischer Kampf, Berlin 1998 (reprint, contains a short biography of Merges), OCLC 600862442 .
  • Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. An overall picture. Klartext, Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8375-1282-3 (also: Berlin, Technical University, dissertation, 2014).
  • Jan Foitzik : Between the fronts. On the politics, organization and function of left-wing small political organizations in the resistance from 1933 to 1939/40 with special consideration of exile. Bonn 1986 (contains a short biography of Merges).
  • Olaf Ihlau : The Red Fighters. A contribution to the history of the labor movement in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. In: Marburg treatises on political science. Volume 14. Meissenheim am Glan 1969 (contains a short biography of Merges).

Contemporary witness reports / documentation

  • Hans Wilhelm-Binder, Peter Dürrbeck, Jürgen Klose (eds.): The red flag over the Braunschweig castle. November Revolution 1918/19 in Braunschweig. Hermann Wallbaum tells. In: Building block for the history of the Braunschweig workers' movement. Self-published, Braunschweig ~ 1978.
  • Robert Gehrke , Robert Seeboth: 50 Years of the November Revolution . A documentary about the revolutionary struggles of the Brunswick workers on the eve of the November revolution. Self-published, Braunschweig 1968.
  • Gerd Günter et al. (Ed.): Braunschweig 1918: "Illustrierte Zeitung" on the history of the Braunschweig workers' movement. Braunschweig 1978.
  • Teutonicus (= pseudonym of Hermann Schroff): Braunschweig under the rule of the red flag. Opinions, moods and facts . without publisher, place or year (approx. 1920).

Literary processing

  • Homo (pseudonym of Richard Wagner ): Gypsy blood in a filing cabinet. Biographical novel. Thuringian publishing house and printing company, Jena around 1925. (The autobiographical novel by the contemporary witness and popular friend editor Richard Wagner vividly describes the November Revolution in Braunschweig and the work of August Merges.)
  • Ehm withered : in the morning mist. Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1953. (In the novel by the contemporary witness Welk, the November Revolution in Braunschweig and the time up to the suppression of the “Socialist Republic of Braunschweig” is depicted. The novel is based on Welk's own experiences as well as on historical research by his wife. August Merges and other historical persons are represented by their names slightly alienated [ August Karges ].)

Literature on the Internet

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernd Rother : Die Sozialdemokratie im Land Braunschweig 1918 to 1933. Bonn 1990, p. 274.
  2. ↑ a b c d Reinhard Bein : Braunschweig city and duchy 1890–1918. Materials on national history. Braunschweig 1985, p. 239.
  3. ^ Peter Berger: Brunonia with a red scarf. November Revolution 1918/19 in Braunschweig. Hanover 1979, p. 110.
  4. ^ Volksfreund of January 29, 1919.
  5. ↑ a b Olaf Ihlau : The Red Fighters. A contribution to the history of the labor movement in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Meisenhain am Glan 1969, p. 174.
  6. ↑ History Commission of the DKP Lower Saxony (ed.): Sheets on the history of the Lower Saxony labor movement No. 1 August 1980. Hanover 1980, p. 5 f.
  7. ^ Hans Manfred Bock : Syndicalism and left-wing radicalism. From 1918 to 1923. On the history and sociology of the Free Workers' Union of Germany (Syndicalists), the General Workers' Union of Germany and the Communist Workers' Party of Germany. In: Marburg treatises on political science. Volume 13, Meisenheim am Glan 1969 ( syndicalism and left-wing radicalism on archive.org).
  8. ↑ a b c Reinhard Bein: Resistance in National Socialism. Braunschweig 1930 to 1945 . Braunschweig 1985, p. 111.
  9. ^ Albrecht Lein: The Antifascist Action 1945. The "zero" hour in Braunschweig. Göttingen Political Science Research, Volume 2, p. 126.
  10. ↑ SPD application of August 26, 2013: From Ernst August to August Merges to Heinrich Jasper - The time of the Weimar Republic in Braunschweig from the beginnings to the beginning of fascism (PDF file)
  11. ^ Teutonicus (pseudonym of Hermann Schroff): Braunschweig under the rule of the red flag. Opinions, moods and facts.
  12. ↑ a b quoted from: Gerd Günter, Dieter Rixe, Ulrike Rixe: Braunschweig 1918. “Illustrierte Zeitung” on the history of the Braunschweig workers' movement (student thesis at the HBK Braunschweig). Braunschweig 1978, p. 13.
personal data
SURNAME Merges, August
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Merges, August Ernst Reinhold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician and revolutionary
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Malstatt - Burbach
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 1945
Place of death Braunschweig