German Cheka

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In February 1925, the defendants in the Cheka trial were brought to the Reichsgericht in a car under heavy police surveillance

During the Weimar Republic , the judiciary and press referred to a communist underground organization as the German Cheka , which was founded after the failure of the Hamburg uprising at the end of 1923 and is said to have existed until autumn 1924. The aim of this "T-Group" was therefore to trigger the German revolution by carrying out terrorist acts such as bomb attacks and assassinations against political opponents. In the following Cheka trials , the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) succeeded in making the party's distancing from acts of terrorism credible.

Emergence

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Felix Neumann

After the indictment of the lawyer at the State Court in Leipzig, the group was founded on November 19, 1923 by Felix Neumann . However, the Soviet citizen of Latvian origin Woldemar Rose (also called Rose-Skoblewsky) was seen as a key figure . It is unclear whether this Reichs-Cheka was founded by the KPD itself or on the initiative of the real Cheka , which at that time had already been renamed the OGPU . On the basis of the more recent studies by Bernhard H. Bayerlein, Leonid G. Babicenko and other German and Russian historians, who were able to fall back on previously inaccessible Russian source material, it is now beyond doubt that the deputy OGPU chairman Josef Unschlicht (1879-1938 ) stayed in Germany in the summer of 1923 to prepare for the German Revolution ( German October ). It is still unclear whether Rose-Skoblewsky acted on the basis of his instructions.

Actions

The only murder that the Reichsgericht Leipzig was able to prove was the killing of the Berlin hairdresser Johann Rausch, whom Felix Neumann shot in his apartment on January 7, 1924 and who died on March 17, 1924 as a result of the assassination attempt. Rausch was suspected of being an informer .

The Cheka Trials

Two of the twelve defense attorneys, Kurt Rosenfeld on the left , Georg Löwenthal on the right, February 1925
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The two Cheka trials of 1924/25 attracted international attention and numerous foreign newspapers sent special reporters. Margarete Buber-Neumann was still amazed by the confessions in her 1967 memoir:

"The crimes that were confessed there, especially by Felix Neumann, one of the main defendants, sounded so hair-raising that the press was inclined to believe the claims of the communist newspapers that Felix Neumann was insane."

Especially Neumann's statement that he had tested deadly bacilli on a rabbit in order to use them as a biological weapon caused a sensation. The processes were also observed and recorded by the state security authorities at the time, especially the Reich Commissioner for Public Order Monitoring . There is a good hundred-page documentation The Cheka Trial . B. has been preserved in the files of the Reich Commissioner in the Lower Saxony State Archives in Oldenburg . However, it can also be assumed that the Reich Commissioner reported extensively on the trials to the police authorities of the federal states; These reports were all edited on microfiche by Ernst Ritter on behalf of the Koblenz Federal Archives in 1979 and are now available for inspection in numerous public libraries. Three of the accused, including Neumann and Rose-Skoblewsky, were sentenced to death by the court in 1925, but already in 1926 they were exchanged for several German students who were arrested in the Soviet Union on suspicion of espionage and sentenced to long prison terms ( Kindermann-Wolscht affair ).

Although Reichswehr Minister Otto Geßler in particular was against this exchange, since he saw it as an undermining of the authority of the judiciary, the Reichswehr leadership, including the former potential victim General Hans von Seeckt , apparently did not welcome this diplomatic solution to the secret cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army to endanger or intensify, since the Reichswehr was dependent on the training possibilities for tanks, airplanes and poison gas in the Soviet Union. In 1931, the social democratic Dietz publishing house in Berlin published the work Im Dienst der Communist Terror-Organization (Tscheka-Arbeit in Deutschland) under the pseudonym Walter Zeutschel . Allegedly the real name of the author was Adolf Burmeister. According to his own information, Burmeister was a member of a Cheka section in Mecklenburg. It is unclear whether the book is an authentic source; it is also possible that personal experiences were mixed with press reports. With the book, the publisher itself warned of a new wave of communist terrorism that had reached a temporary climax in 1931 with the double murder on Bülow-Platz in Berlin, in which Erich Mielke was apparently also involved. In fact, however, the terrorist component of the KPD's military work seems to have come to an end with the Cheka trials. This may also be due to the changed situation in the USSR itself. By asserting the position of Josef Stalin , who considered further attempts at revolution abroad to be unreal and regarded as pure putschism, the representatives of the revolutionary course around Leon Trotsky fell on the defensive. Rose-Skoblewsky was division commander (DivKom) of the Red Army in the 1930s . He was arrested as part of the Tschistka and executed on January 20, 1939 in a place obviously unknown by name. 1956 took place in the context of the de-Stalinization after the XX. Congress of the CPSU its rehabilitation . The liberal Berliner Vossische Zeitung had sent the special reporter Rudolf Brandt to Leipzig for the second trial from February to April 1925. He commented on the judgment in his article The Leipzig Monstre Trial of April 24, 1925 as follows:

“The prosecution's admonition that the Tribunal should“ not be fooled ”has been superfluous. Because the KPD lawyers - and with them, of course, the focus of the defense - in their efforts to whitewash the party as such, have expected the good faith of the State Court too much. Even those who had armed themselves with skepticism to the teeth against the evidence of the Reich Prosecutor had to gain the conviction from the results of the evidence that the Communist Party of Germany was willing in late 1923 to forcibly give Germany the blessings of Bolshevik rule make happy. It was of course a somewhat contestable streak when the examining magistrate, District Court Director Vogt , appeared as the last of the long row of witnesses and, in addition to what he had to express directly on the subject of the negotiation, also presented material from other proceedings before the court. It cannot be denied, however, that this process has improved the overall complex of communist activity, which one has to welcome from a political and moral point of view. In view of the information that was received, it seemed truly grotesque when the KPD defense tried again and again to make up the Communist Party of Germany into a Swiss Guards loyal to the death of the democratic republic and simply suppressed everything that was proven to the party to push the rubric “Defense against fascism”. The fact remains: In autumn 1923 the KPD did not want to play the preventive against organized right-wing radicalism out of concern about the German republic, but simply because at the time it hoped to overturn our entire state system. "

Egon Erwin Kisch saw the course of the process differently: “A servant is an informer, a king is an informer, Poege is forced to be an informant while in custody (...) informer, informer, nothing but informers, right-wing chekists explosive, and the nervousness discharges into purely formalistic motions by the irritated defense attorney and their rejection by the irritated chairman [ Niedner ]. (...) [T] he trial began under the sign of a cause célèbre with an effective indictment presented to the main defendant for days. And then? Since then nothing new has been learned, only doubts, weakening and inaccuracies. There is no longer any question of endangering the state, of rescuing it at the last moment. (...) Unfortunately, there is a means of preventing the sensation process from ending as a disgrace, the means that is the same with every sensation process of a political nature The more uncertain the evidence, the more secure it is, the more secure it is: the highest degree of punishment against the accused. (...) Perhaps they are the victims of political conspiratorial romance, but they are certainly even more victims of informality and sensation and, above all, of a legal right that condemns them in order to create grounds for new trials and new convictions with their convictions. "

The Weltbühne wrote:

“However - whatever the verdict may be; In this trial, alongside which the one against Fechenbach appears as a prime example of an objective and correct procedure, the judgment is irrelevant. For whatever truth will be the result of this negotiation; he will be worthy of her, namely be scandalous. Or how else should one call a process in which every request for evidence by the defense was rejected, every witness for exculpation was generally described as worthless, and in which a defense attorney was prevented from exercising his office by police force? In the legal history of the entire civilized world, the Cheka trial has no equal. "

literature

  • Viktor Gilensen: The Comintern and the "Organization M." in Germany in the years 1923-1925. In: Forum for Eastern European History of Ideas and Contemporary History , 3 (1999), no. 1, pp. 31–80. ISSN 1433-4887
  • Viktor Gilensen: The Comintern and the "paramilitary formations" of the Communist Party of Germany (1926-1932). In: Forum for Eastern European History of Ideas and Contemporary History , 5 (2001), no. 1, pp. 9–50. ISSN 1433-4887
  • Bernhard H. Bayerlein, Leonid G. Babicenko and a. (Ed.): German October 1923. A revolution plan and its failure. Berlin 2003. (Archives of Communism - Paths of the XXth Century. 3)
  • Bernhard B. Bayerlein / Hermann Weber (eds): Germany, Russia, Comintern, 2 .: Documents (1918 - 1943): After the archive revolution: newly developed sources on the history of the KPD and German-Russian relations , 2 volumes, Berlin 2015 . ISBN 9783110339765
  • Frank Hirschinger : "Gestapo agents, Trotskyists, traitors". Communist party purges in Saxony-Anhalt 1918–1953. Göttingen 2005.
  • Margarete Buber-Neumann: theaters of war of the world revolution. A report from the practice of the Comintern 1919–1943. Stuttgart 1967.
  • Document collection: The Cheka Trial. Indictment of the Attorney General, Leipzig v. 11/30/24. In: Communications from the Reich Commissioner for Public Order 1924/25. Lower Saxony State Archives Oldenburg (Nds. StAO) 136–2898, Bl. 679ff.
  • Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century. Munich 2003: Keyword Neumann, Felix. P. 314f., Keyword Skoblewski, Peter Alexej. P. 424., keyword M-Apparat (= military [political] apparatus of the KPD). P. 284f., Keyword: AM-Apparat (anti-military apparatus of the KPD). P. 22.
  • Walter Zeutschel (= Adolf Burmeister): In the service of the communist terror organization (Cheka work in Germany). JHW Dietz Nachhaben GmbH, Berlin 1931. (With an afterword by the author, a former communist, eyewitness to the events surrounding the Cheka, and a foreword by the publisher)
  • Manfred Zeidler: Reichswehr and Red Army 1920–1933. Paths and stages of an unusual collaboration. Munich 1993.
  • Ernst Ritter (Hrsg.): Reich Commissioner for the Monitoring of Public Order and News Collection Point in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Management reports (1920–1929) and reports (1929–1933). Holdings R 134 of the Federal Archives, Koblenz published as a microfiche edition. Introduction and indices. Munich u. a. 1979.
  • Bernhard Weiß : Police and Politics. Berlin 1928.
  • Heiner Möllers: Reichswehr Minister Otto Geßler. A study on "non-political" military policy in the Weimar Republic. Frankfurt am Main 1998.
  • Rudolf Brandt: The Leipzig Monstre Trial. In: Vossische Zeitung. April 24, 1925.
  • Out to protest! Against the triple judicial murder of the blood court! In: The Red Flag. April 23, 1925.
  • The judgment of horror in Leipzig, an act of the international campaign of white terror. In: The Red Flag. April 23, 1925.
  • The bourgeois press on the Leipzig blood judgment. General embarrassment. - Only the forward approves the verdict and surpasses anything in anti-Bolshevik agitation. - Sharp rejection of this jurisprudence even by the official party organ of the German Nationalists. In: The Red Flag. April 24, 1925.
  • Egon Erwin Kisch: “The two Chekas before the Reichsgericht”, Das Tage-Buch of March 21, 1925, p. 417ff. .
  • Rolf Sievers : The Cheka Trial , Die Weltbühne of April 21, 1925 p. 581 .
  • Arthur Brandt The Cheka Trial. Defense memorandum . Attica-Verlag, Hamburg 1979, ISBN 3-88235-007-5 (= new edition of the book first published in 1925 by Neuer Deutscher Verlag, Berlin)
  • Ingo J. Hueck: The State Court for the Protection of the Republic , Tübingen 1996, pp . 207ff. .

Web links

Commons : Cheka Trial  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sabine Hering, Kurt Schilde (ed.): Die Rote Hilfe. The history of the international communist “welfare organization” and its social activities in Germany (1921 to 1941). With a foreword by Rudolph Bauer. Opladen 2003, ISBN 3-8100-3634-X , p. 120
  2. ^ Arthur Brandt: The Cheka Trial Memorandum of Defense, Hamburg, Attica-Verlag, 1979, ISBN 3882350075 , p. 19
  3. ^ Main State Archives Hanover, Hann. 180 Lüneburg ACC. 3/030 No. 169 (1925)
  4. ^ Nolte, Ernst: The European Civil War 1917-1945. National Socialism and Bolshevism. With a letter from FRANÇOIS FURET to ERNST NOLTE attached. Pages 155-157. FA Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH., Munich. 6th edition April 2000, ISBN 3-7766-9003-8
  5. ^ Lamar Cecil: The Kindermann Wolscht Incident: An Impasse in Russo-German Relations 1924-26. In: Journal of Central European Affairs , Volume XXI, Number two, July, 1961, pp. 188-199
  6. ^ Zeutschel, Walter . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .