The Hamburg uprising

At 5 a.m. on Tuesday 23 October 1923 armed groups of communists attacked police stations in the working-class districts of Hamburg and in neighbouring towns. Their main aim was weapons: the insurgents had so few that they spent the first hours of fighting seizing rifles from police armouries. In the Barmbek district barricades went up that held off police attacks throughout the day. The following night their defenders quietly abandoned them, and on 24 and 25 October the police, supported by the navy, were occupying empty streets. So ended the only armed attempt in Germany to carry out the plan that the leadership of the Communist International called the “German October”. Around a hundred people were killed in the fighting and shooting, most of them residents who happened to be caught up in it. The uprising broke out two days after the leadership of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) had called off a nationwide rising. To this day it is not known for certain why Hamburg went ahead alone.

Germany in the autumn of 1923

1923 was the worst year of the Weimar Republic. In January French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, and the government in Berlin called on the population to offer passive resistance, which it financed with the printing press. The result was hyperinflation: by the autumn a dollar cost billions, then trillions of marks, wages lost their value within hours, and the cities were short of food. In August a wave of strikes brought down the government of Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno. On 26 September his successor, Gustav Stresemann, called off passive resistance, and President Friedrich Ebert declared a state of emergency throughout the Reich and handed executive power to the army. The right called it capitulation. In Bavaria power was taken by the nationalist Gustav von Kahr, who openly defied Berlin, while in Munich Adolf Hitler was preparing a “march on Berlin” on Mussolini’s model. On 1 October illegal units of the so-called Black Reichswehr attempted a putsch at Küstrin. On 21 October separatists backed by the French proclaimed the Rhenish Republic in Aachen.

No one gained from the crisis as much as the communists. The unemployed, workers ruined by inflation and some of the young turned away from the Social Democrats, who shared in governing the republic. The KPD, a mass party since its merger with the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1920, formed paramilitary “proletarian hundreds” that practised drill and shooting. Memories of the defeats of 1919–1921, from the Spartacist uprising to the bloody suppression of the Ruhr uprising, were still fresh, but many activists believed that this time the situation resembled Russia in the autumn of 1917.

The plan for a “German October”

The Bolshevik leaders thought the same. In August 1923 the chairman of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev, called on the KPD to prepare for the approaching revolutionary crisis, and on 23 August a secret meeting of the Politburo in Moscow decided that it must be exploited. Zinoviev, the German specialist Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky were in favour of an uprising; Joseph Stalin was sceptical. The gravely ill Vladimir Lenin had been unable to speak since March and took no part in the decisions. A group of emissaries was sent secretly to Germany, among them Radek, Yuri Pyatakov and Józef Unszlicht, who was to take charge of armaments, while the embassy in Berlin managed the money for buying weapons. A communist Germany, industrial and populous, was to lift the Russian revolution out of its isolation. According to some accounts, Trotsky wanted to set the date of the uprising for 9 November, the fifth anniversary of the 1918 revolution.

The KPD chairman, Heinrich Brandler, hesitated for a long time, but in Moscow in September he allowed himself to be persuaded and gave assurances that the party would field more than a dozen divisions within a few weeks. The left wing of the party, led by Ruth Fischer in Berlin and Ernst Thälmann in Hamburg, had long been pressing for a fight. The starting point was to be Saxony and Thuringia, which were governed by left-wing Social Democrats. On 10 October the communists entered the Saxon government of Erich Zeigner, and Brandler took charge of the state chancellery. On 16 October the KPD also joined the government of Thuringia. Joining the coalitions was legal, and the Social Democrats hoped that together they could defend their states against the Bavarian right, but in Berlin no one doubted that the communists saw government as a springboard for insurrection.

The Reich government forestalled them. General Alfred Müller, who held executive power in Saxony under the state of emergency, banned the proletarian hundreds on 13 October and placed the Saxon police under his command, and units of the Reichswehr began to move into the state. On 21 October the KPD convened a conference of factory councils, trade unionists and workers’ delegates in Chemnitz. It was to proclaim a general strike, which would be the signal for the uprising. When Brandler put forward the motion, the Social Democrats threatened to walk out, and the delegates received it coolly. The party leadership concluded that the communists were isolated even in Saxony and called off the uprising. August Thalheimer later called the conference the German revolution’s “third-class funeral”.

Hamburg goes it alone

The communists were strong in Hamburg. The party had some 14,000 members in the city, and in working-class districts such as Barmbek it won one vote in five at elections. The local leadership of the Wasserkante (Coast) district was headed by Hugo Urbahns, and one of the leading figures was Ernst Thälmann, chairman of the party’s group in the Hamburg parliament, the Bürgerschaft. The fighting squads in Barmbek were commanded by Hans Kippenberger, later head of the KPD’s secret military apparatus.

During the night of 22–23 October the district leadership gave the order to begin fighting. Why it did so is still unknown. According to one version, word had reached Hamburg that the uprising was to begin before the Chemnitz conference called it off, and the courier carrying the cancellation arrived too late. According to another, the radical district leadership wanted to force the cautious party headquarters in Berlin to act. Former members of the military apparatus wrote years later that the rising was a kind of trial of strength, instigated by the emissaries from Moscow. None of these versions can be settled today.

At 5 a.m. on 23 October groups of insurgents struck at police stations. Sources differ on the numbers: according to some, 26 stations were attacked and weapons seized at 17; according to others, 24 stations were captured, 17 in Hamburg and 7 in neighbouring towns belonging to the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein. Around 250 rifles were taken. The number of participants is also unclear. Despite the party’s 14,000 members, only about three hundred people actually fought, according to German studies; other estimates put the figure at around 1,300 at the start and several thousand over the whole course of the uprising. Most communists, workers and residents stayed at home. The Hamburg KPD had not prepared a strike, and the Social Democratic dockers and shipyard workers did not join the fighting.

The action spread to the surrounding area. In Schiffbek and Bramfeld the insurgents disarmed police stations; in Bad Oldesloe, Ahrensburg and Rahlstedt they blocked railway lines and roads; and in the small town of Bargteheide they arrested the mayor and proclaimed the “Stormarn Soviet Republic”. Posters put up in Schiffbek proclaimed: “Long live Soviet Germany! Long live the world revolution!” The police quickly regained the initiative. In most places the rising collapsed within a few hours, in Schiffbek by the afternoon.

Barmbek held out longest. Residents helped build barricades of paving stones, overturned carts and felled trees, and brought the insurgents food. Riflemen posted on rooftops and at windows repelled police attacks throughout the day. The same happened in part of the Eimsbüttel district. The Hamburg police, reinforced by units from other cities, received support from the navy: the cruiser Hamburg and two torpedo boats sailed into the port. In the evening, convinced that no help would come from other parts of Germany, the insurgents in Barmbek quietly abandoned the barricades and dispersed or went into hiding. When the police launched a general assault on 24 October, they struck at empty air. Isolated shooting and searches continued until 25 October, the date usually given for the end of the uprising.

Victims and repression

According to the most commonly cited figures, 17 police officers, 21 or 24 insurgents and 61 bystanders were killed – around a hundred people in all. More than three hundred were wounded. The high number of civilian casualties resulted from fighting in densely populated streets, where both sides fired blindly and the police combed tenement blocks in search of snipers. Some 1,400 people were arrested, and several hundred were brought to trial. The largest trial, of 191 participants in the fighting in Schiffbek, opened in Altona in February 1925. Among those convicted were communist members of the Hamburg parliament. Urbahns, arrested in January 1924, took political responsibility for the uprising and was sentenced to ten years’ fortress detention, but was released after being elected to the Reichstag in the meantime. Thälmann and Kippenberger spent several months in hiding.

Thälmann’s actual role in the uprising is disputed. The propaganda of the KPD, and later of the German Democratic Republic, portrayed him as the leader of the fighting on the barricades. A former member of the KPD’s military apparatus, Erich Wollenberg, claimed on the contrary that Thälmann, as an open party functionary, had nothing to do with the clandestine preparation of the action and took no part in the fighting. Historians accept that he belonged to the leadership that pressed for the uprising, but did not command the fighting.

The end of the “German October”

Hamburg was an episode; the outcome was decided elsewhere. As early as 21 October the army began firing on demonstrators in Saxony. The bloodiest incident took place on 27 October in Freiberg, where soldiers killed more than twenty people. When Prime Minister Zeigner refused to remove the communists from his government, Ebert invoked Article 48 of the constitution and on 29 October ordered a Reich execution (Reichsexekution) against Saxony. Troops escorted the ministers out of their offices, and a Reich commissioner took over until a purely Social Democratic government was formed the next day. In Thuringia, which the Reichswehr entered at the beginning of November, the communists left the government in the middle of the month.

The harsh treatment of left-wing Saxony, while right-wing Bavaria was left alone, outraged the Social Democrats, who withdrew from Stresemann’s government at the beginning of November. On 8 and 9 November Hitler attempted a coup in Munich and was defeated. On 23 November General Hans von Seeckt, who during the night of 8–9 November had taken over full executive power in the Reich from Ebert, banned both the KPD and the NSDAP. The ban on the communists remained in force until 1 March 1924. In Moscow, the search for scapegoats began. The Comintern accused Brandler and Thalheimer of “opportunism” and removed them from the leadership, which passed to the left wing of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, and in 1925 to Thälmann. The dispute over the causes of the defeat also became a weapon in the struggle for power after Lenin: the “troika” of Stalin, Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev blamed Trotsky’s supporters, while Trotsky blamed Zinoviev and the Comintern for squandering a revolutionary opportunity.

Significance

For the republic itself the Hamburg uprising was less dangerous than the autumn crisis in Bavaria, but its consequences reached far. The Hamburg KPD turned it into the legend of a handful of heroes fighting against overwhelming odds. Every year Thälmann wrote about the “lessons of the Hamburg uprising”, and in the GDR it became one of the state’s founding myths. The conclusions the party leadership drew from the defeat, however, were authoritarian. Loose organisation and lack of discipline were identified as the cause, and so, under the slogan of “Bolshevisation”, the KPD was rebuilt on the model of the Russian party and placed under strict subordination to Moscow.

Even more important was what the uprising did to the German left. The Social Democrats, who governed Hamburg, came to regard the communists as enemies of the republic and stepped up repression against them. The communists repaid them with hatred for the “traitors” of the SPD, which at the end of the 1920s, under Thälmann, the Comintern labelled “social fascism”. When Hitler stood on the threshold of power in 1932, the two workers’ parties, together stronger than the Nazis, were still fighting chiefly each other. At the same time the autumn of 1923 entrenched among the German middle classes a fear of Bolshevik revolution. In the 1924 elections in Hamburg the nationalists made clear gains, and for years Nazi propaganda raised the spectre of a “red uprising”. When, after the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Hitler announced that the communists were preparing a coup and ordered the arrest of thousands of their activists, Thälmann among them, many Germans believed him precisely because they remembered 1923.