Ernst Bettelheim

Ernst Bettelheim ( Hungarian : Bettelheim Ernő ; * the 30th May 1889 in Sátoraljaújhely , Kingdom of Hungary , † 18th February 1959 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian lawyer and communist functionary in 1919 by the government Béla Kun as emissary to Austria was sent in order to urge the leadership of the KPÖ to a revolutionary takeover of power like in Hungary and Bavaria . When these attempts failed and the communist government in Hungary was overthrown, he did not return to Hungary, but stayed in Vienna until 1927. Bettelheim's activities in 1919 were sharply criticized by Karl Radek in the Soviet Union . Only when the situation in Vienna became too dangerous for him did he emigrate to the Soviet Union, where he worked for the Comintern. Only in 1948 did he return to Soviet-occupied Hungary under the false name Boljai or Bólyai Ernő, where he held high positions in state commissions.

Life

Ernst Bettelheim was born into a Jewish-Hungarian family in northeast Hungary in Semplin County. At the age of 16, he joined the labor movement and became a member of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party (MSZDP). He later studied Jus and became a lawyer. At the end of the First World War, in November 1918, he became chairman of the workers', soldiers' and peasants' council in his home county. In February he was appointed to the headquarters of the Communist Party in Budapest.

Revolution year 1919

prehistory

After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy , the Republic of German Austria was proclaimed in October 1918 . The attempt of the Red Guard, founded by Egon Erwin Kisch , Leo Rothziegel and Stephan Haller, to proclaim a council government in the chaos of that time in Vienna failed on November 12, 1918. As a compromise, this Red Guard was later integrated into the German-Austrian People's Army . Politically, there was a concentration government of all republican factions under the leadership of the socialist Karl Renner . After the election to the Constituent National Assembly on February 16, 1919, Renner was confirmed in office and now led a grand coalition of SDAP and CSP . In Vienna the young republic now seemed politically stable, while fighting between pro-Austrian militias with formations of the newly founded Czechoslovakia broke out in South Bohemia and South Moravia , and in Carinthia there was a defensive battle against troops of the SHS state .

Soviet Republic in Hungary

Meanwhile, in Budapest, the communists under Béla Kun surprisingly took power in a bloodless coup on March 21, 1919 and proclaimed the Federal Hungarian Socialist Soviet Republic . This was the first communist Soviet republic outside of Soviet Russia . However, Hungary was much more beset than Austria by territorial demands from neighboring states. There was fighting with Romanian troops in Transylvania ( Hungarian-Romanian War ), in the Banat with Serbian units and Czech troops advanced into Upper Hungary , which was mainly populated by Slovaks . Serious help from Russia was not to be expected because of the ongoing civil war there . But on April 7, 1919, the revolution in Bavaria broke out . The communists there took over power in Munich and proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic . In their distressed situation, the Hungarian communists did everything in their power to quickly instigate a revolution in Vienna in order to establish a connection with the Bavarian communists and to establish a communist bloc in Central Europe, consisting of Bavaria, Austria and Hungary. For this purpose, Ernst Bettelheim was dispatched from Budapest to Vienna in a hurry in May 1919 to take over the leadership of the KPÖ. An explanation of why the Hungarian communists considered a revolution in Austria to be indispensable was later given by Bettelheim in his writings:

“ In Austria all the equipment of the Austro-Hungarian imperialist army, all its ammunition and weapons, was amassed; Tens of thousands of machine guns, thousands of cannons of various calibers; large arms and ammunition factories from where the retreating Hungarian red troops could have been supplied. The Austro-Hungarian Bank was in Austria with all its technical equipment. The curse of white money, which had a counter-revolutionary effect, would have been removed in one fell swoop. Austria is an industrial state, and the Hungarian peasant would have been inseparably chained to the proletarian dictatorship with the help of Austrian industrial articles. "

- Ernst Bettelheim : Otto Bauer, The Austrian Revolution

Attempted coup in Vienna

In Vienna, Bettelheim posed as the emissary of the Third International founded in Moscow in March 1919 , which gave him legitimacy. However, it was later denied by Karl Radek and other Soviet Communists that Bettelheim ever had such a mandate. Nevertheless, he quickly took over power within the Vienna KPÖ, also with the help of extensive financial resources, as he had come from Hungary with a large number of kroner notes that were still valid in both countries . He replaced the elected party leadership, including Elfriede Friedländer , with a board of four appointed by him and cleared the party of the influence of procrastinators and “right-wing deviants”. He actively campaigned among the Austrian workers for support for the Hungarian Soviet Republic. In addition to financial and material help from Austrian comrades, parts of the people's armed forces also wanted to march off to fight in Hungary. However, the socialist Army State Secretary Julius Deutsch only allowed individual soldiers to voluntarily report to the Hungarian Red Army, not entire units. 1,200 volunteers registered and marched off to Hungary under the leadership of Leo Rothziegel. However, a large part of it fell a little later in the fight against the Romanian army, including Rothziegel himself.

Bettelheim resided in the barracks of the Volkswehr Battalion No. 41, which had emerged from the Red Guard von Kisch und Rothziegel. Prisoners of war returned from Russia, who arrived increasingly in the spring of 1919, strengthened the troops. Bettelheim never left the barracks without escorting up to 40 men, which is why he was not vulnerable to the socialist-dominated Viennese police. On Maundy Thursday, April 17, 1919, there was a demonstration in front of the Vienna Parliament by workers, unemployed and war returnees who protested against the poor supply situation. Bettelheim saw the moment had come for the seizure of power and sent his agitators among the demonstrators. Now it has been from the crowd , "Long live the socialist republic!" Called. State Chancellor Renner feared the storm of parliament and deployed the people's armed forces, which broke up the rally by force. Six people were killed and about fifty injured.

This was the first time there were deaths in fighting between the Austrian communists and the socialist-led state government (on November 12, 1918 there were only injuries), which led to a first serious break between the two wings of the labor movement. Still, Bettelheim stuck to his revolutionary program as the news from Budapest got worse and worse. Romanian troops had crossed the Western Carpathians and broke through the Hungarian lines on April 19th. By May 1st, the whole of Hungary east of the Tisza was occupied. On May 3, the Soviet Republic in Bavaria collapsed and Munich was occupied by right-wing Freikorps . The situation of the communists in Budapest seemed hopeless if the revolution did not break out quickly in Austria.

Due to the fighting in South Moravia and Carinthia, in which Austrian Free Corps and units of the People's Armed Forces also took part, the victorious powers of the Entente became more and more skeptical of German Austria. The military missions of France and Great Britain in Vienna finally gave the order to dissolve the people's armed forces at the beginning of June 1919. Bettelheim saw it as the time for the revolution and ordered that the parts of the people's armed forces that had emerged from the Red Guard should oppose disarmament in order to then take over power as the sole armed militia. State Chancellor Renner recognized this danger and intervened with the representatives of the victorious powers. They then withdrew their instructions. Bettelheim decided to carry out the putsch planned for June 15 anyway. The information about this came into the hands of Friedrich Adler on June 12, 1919 , who also enjoyed great respect among the communists. He considered an attempted coup to be completely wrong and informed the leadership of the SDAP on June 13 at the conference of workers' councils. On the evening of June 14th, Interior Secretary Matthias Eldersch (Karl Renner was in Paris for the peace negotiations ) had the entire leadership of the KPÖ arrested by the Vienna police, a total of 130 people. Only Bettelheim, protected in the barracks of the People's Army, remained unmolested. That night Bettelheim received a telegram from Béla Kun in Hungary, which asked him not to postpone the revolution. He therefore called on the communist workers for a large demonstration the next day. However, the socialist Julius Deutsch succeeded in negotiating with the soldiers' councils of Volkswehr Battalion No. 41. The following day they prevented the people's armed forces from marching out of the barracks by blocking the barracks gate with their revolver drawn. But Bettelheim managed to mobilize the sympathizers among the workers, and so on June 15 a mass of 10,000 demonstrators marched from the workers' districts towards the Ringstrasse and from there through the Hörlgasse towards the police prison in the Rossau barracks . The crowd tried to force the release of their officials arrested the day before, when the police and units of the People's Army loyal to the government opened fire. There were 20 dead and 70 seriously injured. One of the participants in this demonstration was the young Karl Popper , who then turned away from communism.

This was the third attempt at a communist overthrow within six months that failed. In Eastern Slovakia, a Slovak Soviet Republic was proclaimed on June 16, but it was crushed by Czech troops on July 7. When Romanian troops conquered Budapest on August 1st, the Hungarian council government also collapsed. Béla Kun fled to Austria, but was arrested there and arrested in the Drosendorf internment camp . The revolutionary wave in Central Europe was over and many sympathizers turned away from the KPÖ in disappointment. If the membership had risen from 10,000 in March 1919 to over 40,000 in May, it then fell again to 10,000 at the end of 1919.

Little is known about Bettelheim's whereabouts after August 1919. During a house search his notes were confiscated, which Friedrich Adler later published in the monthly magazine "Der Kampf" , which he edited . This betrayal of secrets led to heated discussions in Soviet Russia and within the Communist International, which, among others, moved Karl Radek to write an essay on the events in Austria in 1919. Thereupon Bettelheim published a self-published replica in 1922 with the title: On the Crisis of the Communist Party of Hungary: International Organizational Abuses. In it he describes Béla Kun, the former People's Commissar for the Interior Béla Vágó and József Pogány as impostors and swindlers. All of these three would fall victim to the Stalinist purges between 1938 and 1939 in exile in Moscow.

Further life

Bettelheim stayed in Austria after the end of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. After being in hiding for some time, he lived in Vienna and was still active in the KPÖ. In 1927 he traveled to the Soviet Union and worked there for the Comintern . In contrast to his former mentor Béla Kun, he survived the years of the Stalinist purges unscathed and remained in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. It was not until 1948, when the Soviets installed a Stalinist regime in Hungary, that he returned to his homeland under the pseudonym Bólyai Ernő. There he held various high positions in state commissions. It is not known whether and on which side he played a role in the popular uprising of 1956 . He died in Budapest in 1959.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Edmund Glaise von Horstenau : Minister in the corporate state and general in the OKW. Edited by Peter Broucek, Böhlau, Vienna 1983, ISBN 978-3-205-08743-4 , p. 424.
2. ^ The revolutionary Ernst Bettelheim is not identical to that Ernst Bettelheim, who was also a lawyer and was born on January 21, 1873 in Budapest and died on March 27, 1943 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, according to the website of the " A Letter To The Stars " campaign falsely claimed. This is a mix-up due to the same name. see: lettertothestars.at - Ernst Bettelheim
3. ^ Hugo Portisch : Austria I - The underestimated republic. 1989, ISBN 3-218-00485-3 , p. 111 ff.
4. ↑ Kommunistische-internationale.de: K. Radek: The Lessons of an Attempted Putsch: The Crisis in the German-Austrian Communist Party. ( Memento of the original from February 17, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) 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. 1921; see also: Marxists Internet Archive: Radek 1921 
5. ↑ Otto Bauer: The Austrian Revolution
6. ^ WB Bland: The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 , from: COMBAT - the theoretical organ of the Communist League of Britain, June 1978
7. ↑ Austria's Armed Forces: The deployments of the People's Army
8. ^ Otto Bauer : The Austrian Revolution, Third Section: The Supremacy of the Working Class, § 10. Between Imperialism and Bolshevism
9. ↑ kominform.at: Easter 1919: SP allows workers to be shot ( memento of the original from June 6, 2014 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. 
10. ↑ kpoe.at: KPÖ - constantly in motion , chapter "A stormy appearance" , essay by Walter Baier (PDF; 477 kB)
11. ^ Malachi Haim Hacohen: Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-521-89055-7 , p.81 and 82
12. ↑ KPÖ Mürzzuschlag: Chronicle of the KPÖ
13. ^ Ernst Bettelheim: On the Crisis of the Communist Party of Hungary: international organizational abuses , Vienna, self-published, 1922
14. ↑ AbeBooks.de: Bettelheim, Ernst: To the crisis of the Communist Party of Hungary. International organizational grievances . Red second-hand bookshop