Rudolf Liepmann

Rudolf Liepmann, drawing from Die Rote Fahne , edition of April 21, 1929

Rudolf Liepmann (born April 23, 1894 , † after July 30, 1940 ) was a German officer , lawyer and involved in the murder of Karl Liebknecht .

Life

Rudolf Liepmann, son of the Privy Councilor Paul Liepmann , was a lieutenant in the reserve . During the First World War he served in the Guard Cavalry Division and was awarded the Iron Cross of both classes during the course of the war . At the beginning of 1919 he was an orderly officer Waldemar Pabsts in the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division .

On January 15, 1919, together with Horst von Pflugk-Harttung , Lieutenant zur See Heinrich Stiege and Oberleutnant zur See Ulrich von Ritgen, he formed the command that carried out the shooting of Karl Liebknecht in the Berlin zoo on the orders of Waldemar Pabst . As far as we know today, it was he who shot Liebknecht from behind. Like the rest of those involved in the killing of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, Liepmann had to appear before a field war tribunal of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division from May 8 to 14, 1919 , but was not found guilty of any offense.

In 1920 Liepmann was injured while participating in the Kapp Putsch . As a result, he began to study law ; In 1926 he wrote his dissertation with the title The Police Tasks of the German Wehrmacht (where Wehrmacht was a generic synonym for armed forces and not for the so-called Wehrmacht from 1935 ), in which he also addressed the issue of the use of weapons against refugees . With this work he earned the degree of Doctor of Law .

From 1933 onwards, Liepmann worked as a trainee lawyer in the judiciary, but in 1936 he was dismissed from the civil service as a "full Jew" within the meaning of the Nuremberg Laws . In 1939 he was able to emigrate to Shanghai , where he is lost in 1940. The Federal Archives have a letter dated July 30, 1940, which Liepmann wrote to a Dr. Richard Marcuse had sent in Berlin . Furthermore, the Houghton Library at Harvard University has an incomplete table of contents of a manuscript that Liepmann sent to the university from Shanghai in 1940 to participate in an author's competition entitled My Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933 , but which it apparently returned to it was sent back and its whereabouts are unknown.

literature

• Klaus Gietinger: A corpse in the Landwehr Canal - The murder of Rosa L. Verlag 1900 Berlin, 995. ISBN 3-930278-02-2 .
• Elisabeth Hannover-Drück / Heinrich Hannover : The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht . Edition Suhrkamp, ​​1967.
• Harry Liebersohn / Dorothee Schneider: My Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933: A guide to a manuscript collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University . American Philosophical Society, 2001. ISBN 0871699133 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Rudolf Liepmann in the catalog of the German National Library