Red Ruhr Army

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Members of the Red Ruhr Army in Dortmund (1920)

In March 1920, the Red Ruhr Army led an armed struggle against the reactionary and anti- republic free corps and other Reichswehr troops , which is also known as the uprising on the Ruhr , in the Ruhr area in order to ward off the völkisch-nationalist Kapp Putsch and to implement revolutionary demands .

history

At the same time as the Kapp Putsch, a meeting of representatives of the USPD , KPD and SPD took place in Elberfeld on March 14, 1920 , at which the regional workers' parties allied against the right-wing extremist putschists. Their representatives signed a joint appeal for political power in the region. The general strike was called, in the larger towns of the Ruhr area, spontaneously formed local "executive councils" took over political power, the workers armed themselves and formed combat units.

This forming "Red Ruhr Army" numbered more than 50,000 armed men , for the most part workers with front-line experience from the First World War . A majority belonged to the free trade unions dominated by the SPD, a large minority belonged to the syndicalist trade union Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (FAUD). Insofar as there were members of parties among the militiamen, the USPD with almost 60 percent was well ahead of the KPD with around 30 percent and the SPD with 10 percent. "If opponents on the right described the fighters of the Red Ruhr Army as 'armed Spartacists', that was a propaganda distortion." (Winkler) The Red Ruhr Army was the militant part of a proletarian mass movement that reached far beyond the support of the KPD, according to Heinrich August Winkler "the largest that had existed in Germany until then."

A central management was missing after the "Central Council" in Essen was just as unable to assert itself as the more moderate Hagen "headquarters" against the local and regional leaderships with their different political dispositions.

While with the right-wing government under Gustav von Kahr a "Bavarian variant of a coup d'état" was accepted by the Reich government and the building of a "protective castle" for all legal forces who "wanted to eliminate the hated republic ..." (Winkler) could begin in Bavaria, the decided Reich government together with the Prussian government, both SPD-led, to have the "uprising" in the Ruhr area put down militarily by the Reichswehr.

A "Bielefeld Agreement" between the Reich government and the Prussian government on the one hand and the trade unions and parties involved, on the other hand, with which an armistice was initially sought, provided for an amnesty, the establishment of republican local guards and the surrender of the weapons of the units of the Red Ruhr Army. Local and regional leaderships, especially those dominated by the USPD, agreed, KPD-led such as the Central Council in Essen demanded the continuation of the negotiations, and still others rejected an armistice in principle. As in the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, a general strike took place on Essen's initiative, in which 330,000 Ruhr workers took part, three quarters of the Ruhr workforce.

This was followed by an ultimatum from the Prussian and Reich Governments, without consultation with them, exacerbated by the Reichswehr representative Lieutenant General Oskar von Watter through, among other things, an unrealizable appointment, further negotiations and finally the deployment of government troops since April 2, 1920 against those that have since been disbanded Worker units. At this point in time, the Reichswehr associations largely consisted of decidedly anti-republican free corps units that had recently stood on the side of the Kapp-Lüttwitz putschists against the Reich government. Their color was not black-red-gold, as demanded by government representatives, but demonstratively black-white-red, the tricolor of the right-wing opponents of the republic and the constitution.

The subsequent occupation of the Ruhr area by Freikorps such as the Marine Brigade von Loewenfeld and the Freikorps Lichtschlag and other armed units of the government "was accompanied by acts of violence and atrocities that put the 'red terror' in the shade." Members of the brigade shot dead near Pelkum Epp armed workers wounded in the previous battle. Countless militiamen were "shot while trying to escape".

The total number of deaths suffered by the Ruhr workers has never been precisely determined. It was certainly well over 1,000. Most of them were not killed until after they were captured. The government troops counted 208 dead and 112 missing, the security police 41.

literature

Movie

  • Dr. Heiner Herde: The Red Ruhr Army . NDR 3 , 1979

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gel Center. Portal [of the city of Gelsenkirchen] for urban and contemporary history, The Red Ruhr Army in the Ruhr War 1920, see: [1] .
  2. ↑ All information in this section, unless otherwise stated: Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933. The history of the first German democracy, Munich 1998, 3rd durchges. Ed., P. 131ff.