Heinrich Dorrenbach

Heinrich Dorrenbach (born February 18, 1888 in Neuss , † May 18, 1919 in Berlin ) was a German officer and socialist revolutionary. He was one of the organizers of the People's Naval Division (but at no time - although this is often wrongly assumed in the literature - its commander) and played an important role during the 1st Reichsrätekongress , the Berlin Christmas battles and in the context of the January uprising . Dorrenbach was gunned down in the Moabit Criminal Court on May 17, 1919 by Detective Sergeant Ernst Tamschik , who had murdered Leo Jogiches a few weeks earlier , and died a day later in the Charité .

Life

Dorrenbach went through elementary school and high school in his hometown and then worked as a secretary for merchants and lawyers. When he showed solidarity with the striking workforce of a dye works, he was dismissed and joined the SPD (1910) . Until 1914 he lived and worked in the Rhineland , France , Belgium and the Netherlands . After the outbreak of war he volunteered, distinguished himself, became a lieutenant and received the Iron Cross, 2nd class . Seriously wounded in fighting in Champagne , he took an increasingly open stand against the war and was imprisoned for several months after attempting desertion in 1917 and then released from military service. He went to Berlin and took part in the preparation and implementation of the January strike .

In consultation with Karl Liebknecht , Dorrenbach tried on November 9, 1918 to set up an armed formation that was reliable in the spirit of the revolution. At the same time Hermann Wolff-Metternich was commissioned by Friedrich Ebert to set up a security guard. On November 11th, although he was never a member of the Navy, he was elected to the People's Naval Council of Greater Berlin and its suburbs , and on the same day, together with Paul Wieczorek , he initiated the formation of the People's Navy Division, which also included Wolff-Metternich's unit. After the attempted coup on December 6, 1918 and the dismissal of the previous commander, Hermann Wolff-Metternich, who was involved in these processes, the sailors elected Dorrenbach to the five-member main committee of the division, where he exercised great influence alongside the new commander Fritz Radtke . On December 17, before the Reichsrätekongress, he read out the demands of the soldiers 'councils of several Berlin regiments, which were accepted in a weaker form the following day as so-called Hamburg points (disciplinary violence and command violence in the garrisons at the soldiers' councils , election of commanders, abolition of the badges of rank, etc. ) - the worst setback for the SPD leadership at the congress, which otherwise went entirely in their favor. Dorrenbach, who also ensured that Liebknecht, Ledebour and Eichhorn could speak regularly to the sailors in the Berlin Palace , thus drew the emphatic hostility of leading Social Democrats; Ten years later, Hermann Müller saw in Dorrenbach a "rootless adventurer" who "caused mischief wherever he appeared".

After the negotiations between the People's Naval Council and the People's Commissar, Dorrenbach tried on December 23, 1918, to hand over the keys to the lock in the Reich Chancellery at Emil Barth's . The latter referred him to Ebert , who however let himself be denied; thereupon the angry Dorrenbach ordered the temporary lockdown of the Reich Chancellery and the occupation of its switchboard. In this way Dorrenbach inadvertently provided the desired pretext for the violent crackdown on the People's Navy Division: The sailors knew nothing of the two separate lines through which Ebert regularly communicated with the Prussian War Ministry and the OHL in Kassel ; In this way, Ebert was able to inform Groener of his “arrest” and call on him to “force the liberation militarily.” However, since the blockade of the Reich Chancellery was lifted again after a short time , the attack on the sailors led by Waldemar Pabst took place the following day under the pretext the liberation of the city commandant Otto Wels , who had been appointed by them in the meantime . In the fighting for the Berlin Palace on December 24th, Dorrenbach appeared with courage and circumspection. He effectively organized the only 30 or so defenders and brought a machine gun into position in the castle courtyard under fire, which enabled the attackers to prevent the attackers from advancing through the portal they occupied at the pleasure garden for a while.

According to Richard Müller , Dorrenbach's view, expressed on the evening of January 5th at a meeting of revolutionary stewards , the Berlin USPD and KPD , that not only the People's Navy Division, but also the rest of the garrison troops were outraged about the January 4th dismissal of the Police President Emil Eichhorn for the overthrow of the Ebert-Scheidemann government was the decisive factor in the decision to dare to openly revolt. For this purpose, a 33-member action committee was formed, which Dorrenbach also belonged to. As the next day it became clear, Dorrenbach's assessment was incorrect. The Berlin regiments were not ready to fight for the government, but neither did they support the rebels and declared themselves neutral. This also applied to the People's Naval Division, whose leader Dorrenbach, who was present in the stables , expressed mistrust the previous evening because of his “arbitrariness” and forced the action committee to move to the police headquarters .

After the January fighting ended, an arrest warrant was issued against Dorrenbach, he first fled to Kiel , returned shortly to Berlin and was arrested in Poznan in mid-February . However, he managed to escape that led him to Braunschweig . Here Dorrenbach was recognized at the beginning of March and accused by the bourgeois press of being responsible for the "giant thefts" in the Berlin Palace. However, the trial against him ended in his acquittal. Dorrenbach had committed himself to the KPD in court and appeared for them in April and May in Thuringia under the code name Heinz Brandt as a speaker at workers' meetings. On Good Friday he was found at Gotha train station by the former Berlin detective Martin Kirschbaum who was apparently on him - in the spring of 1919 a member of the "patrol company" of Lieutenant Eugen von Kessel , which was almost exclusively involved in fighting the KPD and involved in numerous murders and other crimes. overwhelmed, but then, according to Kirschbaum, “freed from a crowd”. On May 16 - according to other information on May 12 - Kirschbaum and two helpers managed to seize Dorrenbach's apartment of a KPD member in Eisenach . He was taken immediately to Berlin, where he was questioned by a public prosecutor on May 17, and then shot down "while on the run"; he succumbed to his serious injuries a day later. Shortly before his death, he assured his lawyer that he had not attempted to escape.

Dorrenbach was buried in the Weißensee cemetery.

Aftermath and honors

Dorrenbach was for a long time not popularized in the GDR to the same extent as other participants in the November Revolution and included in history education. That only changed around the 50th anniversary of the revolution in 1968. In 1981 Otto Gotsche , based in Marstall, published a biographical novel about the life of Dorrenbach, thoroughly researched in detail. In the GDR, today's elementary school on Arkonaplatz in Berlin-Mitte ( Heinrich Dorrenbach Oberschule ), the Border Regiment 33 of the GDR border troops ( Berlin-Treptow ) and a street in Strausberg bore Dorrenbach's name. In the memorial of the socialists his name is listed on the large porphyry plaque.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For example Winkler, Heinrich August, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung. Workers and Labor Movement in the Weimar Republic 1918 to 1924, 2nd, completely revised and corrected edition Berlin-Bonn 1985, p. 104 (“A delegation of the People's Navy Division under their commandant Heinrich Dorrenbach”) and p. 121 (“Dorrenbach, der Anführer of the People's Naval Division ").
2. ↑ After his election to the main committee of the division, Dorrenbach acted as "head of the reconnaissance, agitation and press commission". See Oeckel, Heinz, Die revolutionäre Volkswehr 1918/19, Berlin 1968, p. 85.
3. ^ Ernst-Heinrich Schmidt: Heimatheer and Revolution 1918: The military powers in the home area between the October reform and the November revolution . Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2017, ISBN 978-3-486-82640-1 , p. 403 ( google.de [accessed December 29, 2019]).
4. ↑ The Hamburg points are reproduced in Berthold, Lothar, Neef, Helmut, Militarismus und Opportunismus gegen die Novemberrevolution, Frankfurt am Main 1978, p. 317f.
5. ↑ See Rotheit, Rudolf, Das Berliner Schloss under the sign of the November Revolution, Berlin 1922, p. 68.
6. ↑ Müller, Hermann, The November Revolution. Memories, Berlin 1928, pp. 227, 252.
7. ↑ Bernstein, Eduard (new ed. By Heinrich August Winkler and Teresa Löwe), The German Revolution of 1918/19. History of the origins and first working period of the German Republic, Bonn 1998 (first edition Berlin 1921), p. 157. See also the information given by Wilhelm Groener during the cross-examination in the Munich stab in the back trial in 1925, printed in Herzfeld, Hans, Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die Dissolution der national united front in the world war, Leipzig 1928, pp. 383–391.
8. ↑ See Gietinger, Klaus, Der Konterrevolutionär. Waldemar Pabst - a German career, Hamburg 2008, p. 98.
9. ↑ Hortzschansky, Günter (inter alia), Illustrated History of the German November Revolution 1918/1919, Berlin 1978, pp. 250, 252.
10. ↑ See Müller, Richard, The Civil War in Germany, Berlin 1925, p. 31ff.
11. ↑ See on this and on the general role of the patrol company Kessel Sauer, Bernhard, On the political stance of the Berlin Security Police in the Weimar Republic, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft, 53rd year (2005), issue 1, pp. 26–45. Dorrenbach's murderer Tamschik is also said to have been a member of this company. See Dreetz, Dieter, Gessner, Klaus, Sperling, Heinz, Armed Fights in Germany 1918–1923, Berlin 1988, p. 53.
12. ↑ See Gumbel, Emil Julius, Vier Jahre political Mord, Berlin 1922, p. 27.
13. ↑ See Gumbel, Vier Jahre, p. 26.
14. ↑ See Lange, Annemarie, Berlin in the Weimar Republic, Berlin 1987, p. 218.