Hugo Eberlein

Hugo Eberlein belonged to the generation of German socialists who broke with Social Democracy during the First World War and followed Rosa Luxemburg. He was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany and, in March 1919, its only delegate to the congress in Moscow that created the Communist International. In keeping with the wishes of the murdered Luxemburg, he was the only participant who did not vote for the founding of the Comintern, which he considered premature. For almost ten years afterwards he was Moscow’s trusted man in Germany, responsible for the money the Comintern passed to the German communists. He was one of those KPD activists who wanted cooperation with the Social Democrats, and he lost out to Stalin’s line, which declared Social Democracy the main enemy in the very years when Hitler was on the rise. He escaped the Nazis but died at the hands of the NKVD: arrested in Moscow during the Great Purge, he was shot in October 1941, as German troops were approaching the city. His fate sums up the history of German communism from the revolution of 1918 to the Stalinist terror.

A lithographer from Thuringia

Max Albert Hugo Eberlein was born on 4 May 1887 in Saalfeld on the Saale, a small Thuringian town then belonging to the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen. He was the son of a factory worker. He trained as a lithographer and technical draughtsman and went to Berlin to look for work. In 1905 he joined a trade union, and in 1906 the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest socialist party in Europe. From the outset he belonged to its left wing, grouped around Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring, which criticised the party leadership for its reformism and its attachment to parliamentary politics. In 1913 he married Luise Harms in Charlottenburg. Their son Werner was born in November 1919.

The war and the Spartacus League

In August 1914 the Social Democratic group in the Reichstag voted for war credits and backed the policy of “civil truce” (Burgfrieden), the suspension of the class struggle for the duration of the war. The party’s left saw this as a betrayal of principle. Eberlein was part of the small group that gathered around Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches and published the illegal Spartacus Letters. In January 1916 he took part in the group’s first national conference, from which the Spartacus League grew. When opponents of the war formed the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1917, the Spartacists joined it while keeping their own organisation. Eberlein dealt with organisational matters and finances, which was to shape his entire later career.

In the autumn of 1918, before the revolution, he deserted from the army. He ended up in Gdańsk (Danzig), where he founded a Spartacist group. When the revolution overthrew the monarchy in November, he joined the leadership of the local Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. According to the German biographical dictionary of communists he was its deputy chairman; according to other sources, its chairman.

Founder of the KPD

In the last days of 1918 Eberlein was in Berlin, where the Spartacists and groups of left-wing radicals founded the Communist Party of Germany. At the founding congress, which met from 30 December 1918 to 1 January 1919, he delivered the report on party organisation on 31 December. He was elected to the party’s leadership, the Zentrale, on which he sat, with interruptions, until 1929. A few days later the Spartacist uprising broke out in Berlin and was crushed within a week by government troops and the Freikorps. On 15 January officers of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and on 10 March Jogiches was shot in a Berlin prison.

Delegate in Moscow

In January 1919 the Bolsheviks summoned the world’s communists to the founding congress of a new, Third International. Rosa Luxemburg believed it was too early: according to Eberlein’s account, she said that a new International should be created only once communist parties had grown out of a mass movement sweeping Europe, and she proposed a congress in the spring, between Easter and Whitsun. After her death the KPD leadership confirmed this position and sent Eberlein to Moscow with instructions to present the view of “Rosa and Leo”. He used the pseudonym Max Albert, formed from his own first names. According to Eberlein’s recollections, Eugen Leviné, who travelled with him, was stopped at the border, so Eberlein was the German party’s only representative in Moscow.

At the congress, which opened in the Kremlin on 2 March 1919, the German was a key figure, because the Bolsheviks were counting above all on revolution in Germany. He sat on the presidium alongside Vladimir Lenin, Fritz Platten and Gustav Klinger. As early as 1 March Lenin had tried to persuade him to found the International at once, and when Eberlein refused, the Bolsheviks agreed that the gathering would be merely a preparatory conference. Eberlein reported on the founding of the KPD and the fighting in Germany, arguing that the German proletariat faced a final showdown. When, after the arrival of the optimistic Austrian Karl Steinhardt, a motion was tabled to found the International immediately, Eberlein repeated that the whole of Western Europe was missing from the hall and that in many countries communist parties did not yet exist. Grigory Zinoviev replied that the communists’ watchword was “an international Soviet republic” and that the German party would take power within a few months. On 4 March the congress unanimously founded the Communist International, with Eberlein abstaining. As he later wrote, he did not vote against, because he considered the founding of the International necessary and only the moment tactically unfavourable. On 6 March he was the first to sign, as Max Albert, the congress’s manifesto to the proletarians of the whole world.

On returning to Germany he persuaded the party leadership to join the Comintern, and the KPD soon became its section.

The Comintern’s man in Germany

In the 1920s Eberlein was one of the people on whom the link between Moscow and the German party depended. In May 1919 he was head of publishing for the KPD’s central organ, Die Rote Fahne, and in the following years he managed the party’s printing works, publishing houses and all its finances. The money that the Comintern passed to the German communists went through his hands. He was at times elected to the Executive Committee of the International, and in 1922 he presented the report of the credentials commission at the Fourth Congress.

In March 1921 the KPD, encouraged by Comintern emissaries led by Béla Kun, launched the “March Action” in central Germany, an attempt to spark an uprising. Eberlein was then in charge of the party’s military apparatus and travelled to the area around Halle, where a strike was under way at the Leuna works, to organise acts of sabotage. The action ended in defeat, hundreds of arrests and the loss of a large part of the party’s membership. That same year Eberlein was elected to the Prussian Landtag, where he sat until 1933.

In the factional struggles that shook the KPD throughout the 1920s, Eberlein at first supported the leadership of Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer, which was removed from power after the failed attempt at an uprising in the autumn of 1923. He then belonged to the so-called Centre group, and from 1927 to the “Conciliators” (Versöhnler), who opposed the extreme line of the new party leader Ernst Thälmann and favoured united-front tactics with the Social Democrats. His private life changed a great deal too: his second wife was Inna Armand, daughter of the Bolshevik Inessa Armand, who worked in the Comintern apparatus. Their daughter Ines was born in 1923. In time the couple separated.

Defeated by Stalin’s line

In the autumn of 1928 the Wittorf affair broke: it emerged that the Hamburg party secretary John Wittorf, a close associate of Thälmann, had embezzled party funds and that Thälmann had tried to cover it up. The KPD Central Committee removed Thälmann from his post, but the Comintern, on the orders of Joseph Stalin, soon restored him to the leadership. For the Conciliators, who had wanted to exploit the affair, it was the end. Stalin was at that time settling accounts in Moscow with Nikolai Bukharin, and the Comintern was switching to the “Third Period” line, according to which Social Democracy was “social fascism”. Eberlein lost his places in the leadership of the KPD and the Comintern, and in 1929 he was no longer elected to the party’s governing bodies. He continued to work in the International’s apparatus under Béla Kun. For the next few years his party fought the Social Democrats instead of Adolf Hitler, and in January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor.

Exile

After the Nazis came to power Eberlein was briefly arrested. On his release he left for France and settled in Strasbourg, from where he conducted Comintern work among German émigrés and argued for a popular front of communists, Social Democrats and bourgeois parties, which the Comintern had for years refused. In 1935 the Seventh Congress of the International finally proclaimed the popular-front policy, and Eberlein joined its International Control Commission. That same year the French police arrested him in Strasbourg, and in March 1936 he was expelled to Switzerland. His companion in these years was a young communist, Charlotte Scheckenreuter, who worked with him in the party apparatus. In the autumn of 1936, on the party’s orders, he went to the Soviet Union and moved into Moscow’s Hotel Lux, home to émigrés from all over the world who worked for the Comintern. In April 1937 the Reich stripped him of his citizenship.

In the NKVD’s prisons

The Great Purge was under way in Moscow, and Comintern émigrés were among its chief victims. Eberlein, a former opponent of Thälmann and a man who knew the secrets of the party’s finances, was particularly exposed. Despite the intercession of his friend Wilhelm Pieck, he was arrested by the NKVD on 26 July 1937 (according to some sources, a day later). In a note he later managed to smuggle out, he described how from 19 January 1938 he was interrogated without a break for ten days and nights, made to stand without sleep and with almost no food, and beaten until the blood collected in his shoes. In April 1938 he was moved to Lefortovo prison, where the beatings went on for weeks.

On 5 May 1939 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to fifteen years in the Gulag for membership of a “terrorist organisation” within the Comintern apparatus, the so-called “anti-Comintern bloc”. On 1 June 1939 he was sent north – according to some sources to Vorkuta, according to others to Unzhlag. On the way he met Aino Kuusinen, the wife of one of the Comintern’s leaders, who described the encounter in her memoirs. By then Stalin had already made his pact with Hitler, and in 1940 some of the German communists imprisoned in the USSR were handed over to the Gestapo.

In 1941 Eberlein was taken to a camp in the Komi Republic, and from there back to Moscow. In July, after the German attack on the Soviet Union, his earlier sentence was quashed and his case reopened. On 30 July 1941 the Military Collegium sentenced him to death. The sentence was carried out on 16 October 1941, the day panic broke out in Moscow as German troops approached the city. In those weeks the NKVD shot many political prisoners. He was buried at the Kommunarka execution ground near Moscow. His brother was shot as well.

Remembrance

In October 1956, after the Thaw, Eberlein was rehabilitated. In the German Democratic Republic he was honoured as a co-founder of the KPD, and a guard regiment was named after him. Who had killed him was long passed over in silence: only in January 1988 did the SED newspaper Neues Deutschland, citing Soviet publications, report that Eberlein and his brother had been shot in the USSR. His son Werner, who after his father’s arrest spent eight years in exile in Siberia, returned to Germany in 1948, served as Nikita Khrushchev’s interpreter in talks with East German leaders, and in the 1980s was a member of the SED Politburo.

For the history of the road to the Second World War, Eberlein matters for two reasons. In March 1919 he was the only participant in the Moscow congress to voice a fear that Rosa Luxemburg had shared: that an International founded in haste by a handful of groups clustered around the Bolsheviks would be not a genuine union of parties but the instrument of a single centre. In the 1920s he himself helped to build that dependence, passing Moscow’s money and instructions to the German party. Yet as a Conciliator he lost out to the line that split the German left in the decisive years before 1933. He died like many communists who had fled Hitler to the Soviet Union: not at the hands of the Nazis, but in Stalin’s prisons.