Bloodbath in front of the Reichstag on January 13, 1920

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The massacre in front of the Reichstag took place on January 13, 1920 in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin during a negotiation by the Weimar National Assembly on the Works Council Act . The number of victims is controversial, but it is certainly the bloodiest demonstration in German history. The event was outshone as a historic event by the Kapp Putsch that took place two months later , but it remained in collective memory in the labor movement and among the security forces in Berlin.

prehistory

In the spring and summer of 1919, the dispute over the question of parliamentarism or council rule , which had already been dealt with at the Reichsrätekongress in December 1918, revived in Germany, also in view of the debates of the National Assembly about a works council law (BRG). Article 165 of the Weimar Constitution stipulated that the works councils , which continued to exist in Germany as a legacy of the November Revolution, “had equal rights in community with entrepreneurs in regulating wages and working conditions and in the overall economic development of productive forces have to contribute ”. These requirements should be specified in the Works Council Act. In addition, they should " participate in the implementation of the socialization laws with the representatives of the entrepreneurs" in a Reich Economic Council .

The BRG bill, which became known in May 1919, was first discussed in the National Assembly in August 1919. After a few changes, it finally represented a compromise. On the one hand, there were the reformist sections of the free trade unions and the SPD , who saw the works councils as disruptive, syndicalist-revolutionary competition and wanted to make them the extended arm of the professional organizations in the factories . The employers' associations, in turn, were interested in the greatest possible dismantling of employee rights in the company, which reduced the involvement of works councils in internal welfare measures and participation in protection against dismissal .

Opponents of the bill were the leading left wing of the USPD in Berlin , which as a whole only had 22 of 421 seats in the National Assembly, and the KPD , which was not represented there. In addition, there was the influential, far-left Berlin umbrella organization of the free trade unions and the works council headquarters as the successor to the disbanded Executive Council . They all called for the "expansion of the works councils to become independent revolutionary organs alongside the trade unions" and instead of just participation they wanted the "full right of control over management" by workers , employees and civil servants in all private and state-owned companies. It should be exercised in all decisions relating to closure , the scale of production, pricing, the distribution of raw materials, and imports and exports, through representatives who could be removed by their voters at any time . As a consequence, the proposals aimed at the disappearance of “the entrepreneurship as a social class”.

When the second reading of the law was to take place in the Reichstag building on January 13, the USPD and KPD wanted to put public pressure on parliament by mobilizing dissatisfied masses. Together they called in the party organs Freiheit and Rote Fahne on the workers and employees of Berlin to stoppage from 12.00 o'clock and to the following protest meeting in front of the conference location under the motto: Out to fight against the works council law, for the revolutionary council system! The appeal emphasized that “comprehensive control” could only be achieved “in the fight against the state power that protects the entrepreneurs through Noskegarden […]” and that “parliamentary action of the counter-revolution must meet all imaginable resistance not only in parliament” .

One of the achievements of the November Revolution was the abolition of mandatory registration for open-air meetings. So the demonstration took place absolutely legally. In the days before the debate, the organizers had not come to an understanding with the security forces. In fact, the security police were hopelessly understaffed, given the large number of people in the streets around the Reichstag. The responsible Prussian Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Heine , saw himself exposed to violent accusations from his party friend Noske and other members of the Reich government: he had misjudged the situation in advance and was then completely overwhelmed by the events. On the other hand, the demonstration was also poorly organized: there were too few stewards of their own and apparently no meaningful end to the rally had been thought of. This was later criticized by parts of the left itself.

course

The building was protected by the militarily organized security police (Sipo). It was set up in Berlin between September 1919 and January 1920 by the Reich government, led by Social Democrats, in continued cooperation with the Army Command ( Ebert-Groener Pact ) to protect the existing order, because the Berlin police force was present in the November Revolution as well as during the Spartacus uprising had failed. The Sipo consisted mainly of former volunteer corps members and was commanded by army officers. Numerous relatives and officers were clearly right-wing extremists. Neither the leadership nor the team had police training . Smaller Sipo units with machine guns were posted in the Reichstag building, larger ones in front of the building's portal on Königsplatz and along Simsonstrasse .

On January 13th from around 12 noon, the employees in most of Berlin's large companies stopped working; these included, for example, AEG , Siemens , Daimler and Knorr-Bremse . They moved into the city center on the Königsplatz in front of the Reichstag, but due to the crowd, many only came as far as the adjacent side streets. The figures vary considerably, according to Weipert it was “at least 100,000, probably significantly more.” Speakers from the USPD, the KPD and the works council headquarters gave speeches. There were several physical attacks on MPs on their way to the meeting. Especially the two SPD members Hugo Heimann and Hugo Sinzheimer were played badly. After the last speech fell silent, the protesters did not leave the place. Even before Reichstag President Fehrenbach had opened the debate at 3:19 p.m. , demonstrators had mocked Sipo men in several places, pushed away some, then disarmed and mistreated them. Conversely, the policemen fought back with the buttocks of their carbines, and individual officers were reprimanded for assaults by their superiors. In the plenary session, the USPD members called either for Sipo to withdraw from the building or for the debate to be closed. As a result of massive disruption by the USPD faction, Fehrenbach had to interrupt the session at 3:48 p.m.

Members of parliament who were now watching the tumult on Königsplatz from the windows of the Reichstag were threatened with revolvers by excited demonstrators. A person from the crowd fired shots at Portal II of the Reichstag building. At least one policeman was hit. Members of the metalworkers' union immediately took the gun - apparently captured by the Sipo - from the shooter and beat him. The majority of the demonstrators kept quiet anyway or even tried to prevent aggression against the police.

The events that followed were highly controversial among contemporaries - and are still in research today. One version, represented by the then Chancellor Gustav Bauer , among others , blamed the demonstrators and especially the organizers for the escalation. Accordingly, around 4 p.m., demonstrators tried to penetrate the building, whereupon the Sipo on Königsplatz opened fire at the rally participants from a very short distance and threw hand grenades . Independents and communists, on the other hand, stressed that it had been shot for no reason or prior warning. It is unclear whether the warnings were issued. It is noteworthy, however, that according to consistent reports from the various sides, almost all of the dead and injured were south of the Reichstag, on the opposite sidewalk and in the adjacent zoo. There, on Simsonstrasse , the crowd was at least four meters away from the police. So there was neither a fist, nor a storm on the building. Most of the victims fell at this moment. Then the crowd fled in panic, the Sipo continued firing for several minutes with her rifles and machine guns. Nowhere in the sources is the sources alleged that demonstrators shot back. The figures on the victims vary between 42 dead and 105 injured on the part of the demonstrators and around 20 dead, including one police officer, and around 100 injured, including 15 police officers. In any case, it is the most sacrificed demonstration in German history.

When Fehrenbach reopened the meeting at 4:13 p.m., the USPD requested that the meeting be adjourned immediately, stating that “there are dead and seriously wounded people down in the house”. The President was not convinced of the reasoning, but asked the plenary the support question. Only a tiny minority supported the motion, but stormy protests by the USPD led to another interruption at 4:37 p.m. After the reopening at 5:09 p.m., Fehrenbach, who had meanwhile taken note of the fatalities, closed the hearing at 5:11 p.m.

The National Assembly passed the Works Council Act in one of its subsequent sessions on January 18. It came into force on February 4, 1920 when it was announced in the Reichsgesetzblatt.

consequences

Reichswehr Minister Noske assumed executive power for Berlin and the Province of Brandenburg . The next day, a state of emergency was imposed on Prussia and the northern German states and open-air gatherings were prohibited:

“ On the basis of the order of the President of the Reich of January 13, 1920, I forbid all meetings in non-closed rooms, removals and crowds of people for the state police district of Berlin, for the city district of Spandau and the districts of Niederbarnim and Teltow. A renewed attempt to disturb the legislative body of the Reich in its work by gatherings and rallies in front of or in the vicinity of the Reichstag building would be prevented from the outset by the ruthless use of weapons. Berlin, January 14, 1920. signed Reichswehr Minister Noske "

A total of 46 opposition newspapers have now been banned, including the Red Flag and Freedom. This made it almost impossible for the left to counter the serious accusations made by the government and the press supporting them. The fact that these were inadmissible preventive bans, as they were immediately prevented from appearing when the right of exception came in, was also legally sensitive. In the days that followed, the security forces arrested numerous members of the USPD and the KPD, including the two party leaders Ernst Däumig and Paul Levi . The - completely uninvolved - anarchists Fritz Kater and Rudolf Rocker were also affected . The total number of inmates is controversial: The Reichswehr Ministry counted 68 in its files, but according to Wilhelm Dittmann there were several hundred. A memorial service for the dead demonstrators took place in Neukölln on January 15 - despite a ban, around 10,000 people came to the event. On the same day, the workforce of several large Berlin companies also went on a brief protest strike.

In the predominantly left-wing working class in Berlin, especially among the supporters of the USPD and the KPD, the event sparked great bitterness and calls for resignation from the three main SPD politicians, Reich Chancellor Gustav Bauer , Prussian Interior Minister Wolfgang Heine and Berlin Police President Eugen Ernst out. Within the USPD, the split in the wing of the party worsened when Arthur Crispien accused the Comintern supporters at a Reich conference on January 28 of seeking a confrontation between revolutionary workers and state power, the outcome of which was determined from the outset, while the latter was under its revolutionary illusion saw rather strengthened. In Marxist-Leninist historiography, the Social Democrats Noske and Heine are responsible for the bloodbath that paved the way for the adoption of the Works Council Act.

Memories of the Spartacus uprising awoke in the bourgeois and social democratic public in Berlin, and so the use of machine guns and hand grenades against a leaderless crowd did not provoke any protest. In contrast, many Berliners showed solidarity with the Sipo, as shown by a successful collection of money for the relatives of a killed police officer.

Seeing the humiliation of individual comrades was seen by the members of the Sipo as a defeat, resulted in "unlimited bitterness against left-wing extremists " and a loss of reputation for their officers. When, when the Sipo was dissolved in October 1920, their members became the tribe of the Berlin Police, they took this experience with them. In the interplay with the class hatred of the supporters of the Communist Party in Berlin, who saw the police as a "voluntary mercenary troop of capital ", it was to prove disastrous for the security situation of the Reich capital in the final phase of the Weimar Republic.

The bloody incident had intensified the political antagonism between the divided workers' parties, without either side being able to record a success. In 1936, from exile in Prague, Friedrich Stampfer described the behavior of those responsible for the Social Democrats, who had enabled the protesters to storm the Reichstag building, and the communist organizers, who had deliberately left the protest to run by itself, as "madness".

In order to prevent such a clash from happening again, the National Assembly created a ban around the government district of Berlin with the law on pacifying the buildings of the Reichstag and the state parliaments of May 8, 1920 . Violations of the ban mile by supporters of the NSDAP and the KPD led to numerous police operations in the government district in the following years. On the day of his appointment as Chancellor on January 30, 1933, Hitler repealed the law. However, there were also comparable regulations later in the Federal Republic of Germany; since 2008 they have been summarized in the law on pacified districts for federal constitutional organs .

literature

  • Axel Weipert : At the gates of power. The demonstration in front of the Reichstag on January 13, 1920. In: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Volume 11, Issue 2, Verlag NDZ, Berlin 2012, ISSN  1610-093X , pp. 16–32.
  • Axel Weipert: The Second Revolution. Council movement in Berlin 1919/1920. Bebra Verlag, Berlin 2015, pp. 160–189.
  • Heinrich August Winkler : From Revolution to Stabilization. Workers and labor movement in the Weimar Republic 1918–1924. Dietz, Bonn 1984, pp. 284-289.
  • Hsi-Huey Liang: The Berlin Police in the Weimar Republic. Translated from the American by Brigitte and Wolfgang Behn. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1977, pp. 112-114, on Sipo: pp. 48-59. (= Publications of the Historical Commission in Berlin; Vol. 47)
  • Curt Geyer : The revolutionary illusion. On the history of the left wing of the USPD. Memories (= Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Graml (eds.): Series of the quarterly books for contemporary history. No. 33), Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1976, pp. 163–165.
  • Walter Wimmer : The Works Council Act of 1920 and the massacre before the Reichstag. Contributions to the history and theory of the labor movement, issue 11, Berlin, Dietz, 1957.
  • The truth about the massacre before the Reichstag, January 13, 1920. “Freiheit” publishing cooperative, Berlin, 1920

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Weipert (see literature), p. 16.
  2. ↑ On this Volker Hentschel: "Social policy in the Weimar Republic", in: Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.): The Weimar Republic 1918–1933. Politics - Economy - Society , 2nd revised edition, Federal Agency for Political Education, Bonn 1988, ISBN 3-89331-000-2 , pp. 202–204, quotation p. 204.
  3. ↑ The requirements are printed in Wimmer (see literature), p. 47.
  4. ↑ Quotation from Peter von Oertzen : Works councils in the November revolution, Droste, Düsseldorf 1963, p. 164.
  5. ↑ Weipert, p. 20.
  6. ↑ Weipert, p. 28.
  7. ↑ See the article by Bernhard Sauer: On the political attitude of the Berlin Security Police in the Weimar Republic, in: ZfG 53rd year 2005, issue 1, which clearly documents the numerous cases. Accordingly, some later appeared as SA and NSDAP members.
  8. ↑ For the history of the Sipo see Hsi-Huey Liang (see literature), pp. 48–59.
  9. ↑ The presentation of the details follows here Hsi-Huey Liang, p. 113f. and Weipert pp. 19-23.
  10. ↑ Weipert, p. 19.
  11. ↑ The course of the meeting is documented in: Reichstag protocols of January 13 and 14, 1920 : Reichstag protocols, 1919 / 20.6: National Assembly - 135th session. Tuesday, January 13, 1920. There is also the quote below.
  12. ^ So Friedrich Stampfer : The first 14 years of the German Republic , Bollwerk Verlag Karl Drott, Offenbach / Main 1947, p. 155f. Stampfer suspects "unfair elements" in the violent criminals without a more detailed description
  13. ↑ On the "shots from the crowd" see Annemarie Lange: Berlin in the Weimar Republic , Dietz, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-320-00833-1 , p. 257. This author also considers the shooters to be, without providing evidence Provocateurs.
  14. ↑ Weipert, pp. 20f.
  15. ↑ See the reconstruction of the process in Weipert, p. 21f. The reports come from two members of the USPD ( Otto Brass and Luise Zietz ), as well as from Interior Minister Heine and the Sipo commander on site, Hans von Kessel.
  16. ↑ Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs: Thinking into the Future - Epochs - Document: Works Council Act ( Memento of the original of February 19, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.in-die-zukunft-gedacht.de
  17. ↑ Hsi-Huey Liang, p. 113. This statement agrees with that of the President of the Reichstag. When he announced it in plenary a few days later, USPD MPs did not object. For Winkler (p. 289) these dead are “mostly” demonstrators. Weipert, p. 21, also writes of 42 dead and more than 100 injured, his presentation is based on the numerous press reports of the following days. The number of deaths may have increased after the events, as some of them died later from their injuries.
  18. ^ Ingo Materna: "Politics in the republican province", in: Ingo Materna, Wolfgang Ribbe (ed.): Brandenburg history. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-05-002508-5 , pp. 574–583, here 574: [1]
  19. ↑ Reichsgesetzblatt 1920, No. 9, p. 47, quoted from: "Ban on removals and meetings in the open air from January 14, 1920", in: Thomas Blanke, Rainer Erd, Ulrich Mückenberger and Ulrich Stascheit (eds.): Collective labor law . Source texts on the history of labor law in Germany. 1. 1840–1932 (= rororo studium. Law, 74), Reinbek bei Hamburg 1975, p. 211.
  20. ↑ On this and the following see Weipert, p. 24f.
  21. ↑ Winkler quotes: Hartfried Krause: USPD. On the history of the USPD. Frankfurt a. M. 1975, pp. 168f.
  22. ↑ Geyer (literature), pp. 143f.
  23. ↑ Walter Ulbricht (chairman of the editorial collective): Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED. History of the German labor movement in 15 chapters - Chapter VII - Period from January 1919 to the end of 1923. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1967, p. 69.
  24. ↑ On collecting money, see Hsi-Huey Liang, p. 113f.
  25. ↑ For the quote and the mentioned consequences see Hsi-Huey Liang, p. 113.
  26. ↑ Quoting from Hsi-Huey Liang, p. 109.
  27. ^ Friedrich Stampfer: The first 14 years of the German Republic. Bollwerk Verlag Karl Drott, Offenbach / Main 1947, p. 156.
  28. ^ " Law on the pacification of the buildings of the Reichstag and the Landtag ", Reichsgesetzblatt 1920, p. 909.