The Ruhr uprising

On 15 March 1920, the third day of the Kapp Putsch, an artillery battery of the volunteer Freikorps (PL) Lichtschlag rode into Wetter on the Ruhr under the black, white and red flags of the Empire. Asked whose side he was on, its commander, Captain Otto Hasenclever, replied that he answered to General Oskar von Watter, commander of the military district in Münster, who stood “on the ground of General Lüttwitz” – in other words, with the putschists. Workers from the nearby mines and steelworks, who had been on strike for two days in defence of the Republic, took up arms and attacked. The battery was destroyed; Hasenclever, ten of his soldiers and six workers were killed. It was the first serious clash of an uprising that within a week placed the whole of the Ruhr, Germany’s largest industrial region, in the hands of armed workers. Begun as a defence of the Republic against a right-wing coup, it turned into an attempted revolution, and in early April it was bloodily suppressed by the Reichswehr and the Freikorps – including units that only days earlier had backed the putsch.

Date and name

German historians call these events the March Uprising, the Ruhr Uprising or the Ruhr War (Ruhrkrieg). English-language chronologies usually describe them without a specific date, as a consequence of the general strike against the putschists. The first demonstrations took place on 13 and 14 March, among other places in Bochum, where some 20,000 people took to the streets. The meeting of representatives of the three workers’ parties in Elberfeld that called for a joint struggle is dated by some sources to 14 March and by others to 15 March. The first battle was the skirmish at Wetter on 15 March, and, following the tradition of German historiography, the armed uprising can be counted from that day. It ended in the first week of April: on 6 April government troops entered Dortmund, and the last skirmish was fought in Gelsenkirchen.

The Ruhr after the revolution

With its coal mines, steelworks and armaments factories, the Ruhr was the heart of German industry. It was home to hundreds of thousands of miners and workers, many of whom had come from other parts of Germany and from the Polish lands. Since the November Revolution the region had known no peace. In the spring of 1919 great strikes for shorter hours and the socialisation of mining swept through the pits, and the government sent the Freikorps against them. The workers did not forget. Many turned away from the Social Democrats and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), the Communists or the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD). The split on the left, evident since the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, was especially sharp here. The Social Democrats wanted to defend the parliamentary republic they had helped to create, while a large proportion of the workers believed that the revolution had been betrayed and had to be completed by replacing parliament with workers’ councils.

The Ruhr was also in a peculiar position. Under the Treaty of Versailles the left bank of the Rhine was occupied by Allied troops, and a 50-kilometre strip on the right bank, which took in the western part of the Ruhr, formed a demilitarised zone into which Germany was forbidden to send troops. Any use of the army in the Ruhr therefore threatened a conflict with France.

The strike becomes an uprising

On 13 March, when the Ehrhardt Brigade occupied Berlin and the government fled to Dresden and Stuttgart, the call for a general strike fell on fertile ground in the Ruhr. The strike became universal, and in the towns power was taken over by spontaneously formed executive councils (Vollzugsräte), most of them dominated by the Independent Socialists and the Communists. In Elberfeld representatives of the SPD, USPD and KPD signed a joint appeal for a struggle against “reaction”, which even spoke of the seizure of political power through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Workers disarmed the security police and the citizens’ militias and formed workers’ self-defence units. Out of these grew the Ruhr Red Army (Rote Ruhrarmee).

General Watter, who commanded the troops in Westphalia, behaved ambiguously. Officially he did not support the putsch, but in the first days his subordinates and the Freikorps under his command openly sympathised with Kapp. To the workers, therefore, every military unit was an enemy. Wetter was followed by further successes. On 17 March at Aplerbeck, on the outskirts of Dortmund, several thousand armed workers defeated the main body of the Freikorps Lichtschlag, taking some 600 soldiers prisoner and capturing its guns. On 18 March the workers took Hamm and Bochum, and on 18–19 March, after fighting for the water tower, Essen, which had been defended by the police. Watter pulled the remnants of his troops back north towards Münster and Wesel. By 22 March the whole Ruhr, from Duisburg to Hamm, was in the insurgents’ hands. Düsseldorf and Elberfeld also came under their control.

An army without a leader

Estimates put the strength of the Ruhr Red Army at between 50,000 and 80,000 armed men; judging by the weapons later handed in, it was reckoned at about 50,000. It was more a confederation of local units than an army. Many of its fighters were war veterans, used to weapons and discipline. They were paid by the workers’ councils and often moved about by bicycle in small groups. Most belonged to the Social Democratic trade unions, and the syndicalists formed a strong minority. Of those who were members of political parties, the great majority belonged to the USPD and KPD, while the Social Democrats made up about ten per cent. Sources differ as to which of the two radical factions predominated.

The insurgents had neither a common command nor a programme. On 20 March a Central Council of Workers’ Councils was set up in Essen, but there were also rival centres in moderate Hagen, in Mülheim, where the syndicalists ruled, and in Duisburg, which was controlled by anarchists. In the eastern Ruhr, where the USPD predominated, organisation came faster, but the leaders there did not want to fight a government that was functioning again after the collapse of the putsch. In the west the syndicalists and left-wing Communists wanted to go further. In Hagen the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat was dropped as early as 19 March, and on 21 March a conference of the Ruhr workers’ parties rejected the introduction of a dictatorship of the councils. Even so, the authorities and the right-wing press portrayed the uprising as a Bolshevik assault on Germany – a picture which, according to more recent research, as the historian Rainer Pöppinghege writes, fails to capture its diversity. On 24 March insurgent units attacked the fortress at Wesel, the army’s last point of resistance in the west, but suffered their first defeat.

The Bielefeld Agreement

On 17 March the putsch in Berlin collapsed and the government returned to the capital. For the insurgents in the Ruhr the reason for fighting in defence of the Republic had ceased to exist, but they did not want to give up their weapons or their power without a guarantee that the army, which had sympathised with the putschists, would not take revenge on them. On 22 March the trade unions and workers’ parties declared the general strike in the Reich over, but in the Ruhr few returned to work.

On 23 and 24 March a conference was held in Bielefeld of representatives of the Reich and Prussian governments, the municipal authorities, the trade unions, the parties from the Centre to the KPD, and the executive councils. The key role was played by the Social Democrat Carl Severing, Reich and Prussian Commissioner for the Ruhr, who was accompanied by the Prussian Minister of Agriculture, Otto Braun, and the Postal Minister, Johannes Giesberts. The agreement reached on the evening of 24 March provided for an amnesty for those who had broken the law defending the Republic against the putschists, the punishment of those who had taken part in the coup, the surrender of weapons under the supervision of the municipal authorities and the councils, and the formation of republican guards. If the workers handed in their weapons “loyally”, the Reichswehr was not to enter the Ruhr. The USPD and the Hagen centre accepted the agreement; the Central Council in Essen and the KPD demanded further negotiations; and the radical councils in Mülheim and Hamborn, together with the insurgents’ military commanders, rejected it outright.

On 26 March the government of Gustav Bauer resigned, and the new chancellor, Hermann Müller, presented Essen with an ultimatum. Watter, without consulting Berlin, made it harsher, demanding that all weapons be handed in by 30 March, which was impossible in practice. The Essen council responded by proclaiming a general strike once again, and some 330,000 miners – three quarters of the Ruhr’s workforce – joined it. Severing extended the deadline to 2 April and promised that the army would not move in. On 1 April the leaders of the uprising, meeting in Essen, concluded that further fighting was pointless, but they no longer had control over the scattered units. As Severing later wrote – and the historian Heinrich August Winkler concedes that he was not exaggerating – reports of looting, extortion, mistreatment and shootings multiplied, and residents, town authorities and party leaders called ever more urgently for help.

The crackdown

By 2 April few weapons had been handed in. The army advanced into the Ruhr from the north, from the direction of Münster, and from the east. Its ranks included many Freikorps, among them the Loewenfeld Naval Brigade, which had sided with Kapp in Breslau (Wrocław) during the putsch, and units marching under black, white and red flags. The first bloody clash came on Maundy Thursday, 1 April, at Pelkum near Hamm, where the Bavarian Reichswehr brigade of General Franz von Epp routed the workers’ units. According to German studies, between 150 and 300 workers and nurses were killed there in the first days of April, and many of the wounded were finished off. Epp’s soldiers are credited with the slogan “Bavarians take no prisoners”.

The army’s superiority was overwhelming and its revenge was cruel. Searches, disarmament and mass arrests were accompanied by executions. Those caught with weapons were shot, including the wounded and ten nurses who had been carrying pistols. Many of the dead were reported as “shot while trying to escape”. By 3 April at least 50 people had been shot without trial and 205 sentenced by summary courts. That day President Friedrich Ebert banned these courts, but Watter did not forbid his soldiers to engage in “unlawful conduct” until 12 April, and killings continued even afterwards. The general justified himself by citing a letter from the Reichswehr Ministry that had given him “full freedom to do what the situation requires”. On 5 April many insurgents fled into the Allied-occupied Rhineland. On 6 April the army entered Dortmund, and the skirmish at Gelsenkirchen was the uprising’s last act.

The number of victims was never established precisely. According to Winkler, well over a thousand insurgents were killed, most of them after being taken prisoner. Government troops lost 208 killed and more than a hundred missing, the security police 41 killed, and the Freikorps, according to some sources, 273. Some 3,000 workers were arrested. The military courts at first did not apply the amnesty promised at Bielefeld and passed by the Müller government. Workers who had defended the Republic against the putschists were sentenced to long prison terms, while almost all those who had taken part in the Kapp Putsch escaped punishment.

The French response

The Reichswehr’s entry into the demilitarised zone violated the Treaty of Versailles. The German government had sought the Allies’ consent to use troops, but France refused. When the army moved in regardless, on 6 April French troops occupied Frankfurt am Main, Darmstadt, Hanau and several other towns on the Main. Britain did not support the move, one of the first serious rifts between the Allies over the enforcement of the treaty. The French withdrew on 17 May, once the Reichswehr had completed its operation in the Ruhr. The German troops halted on the Ruhr and did not enter the Bergisches Land, because the British threatened to occupy the region.

The uprising’s long shadow

The immediate consequence of the uprising was the Social Democrats’ defeat in the election of 6 June 1920. The SPD lost more than 60 seats, largely to the Independent Socialists, and for the first time since the revolution found itself out of government. The workers of the Ruhr remembered that a government with a Social Democratic president and chancellor had sent against them the very Freikorps that had just tried to overthrow the Republic. That memory, together with January 1919, fed the Communists’ hostility towards the SPD. A few years later, on Moscow’s instructions, the Communists were calling the Social Democrats “social fascists” and treating them as their main enemy, which made a joint defence of the Republic against the Nazis impossible.

For the right, the uprising was proof that Germany was threatened by Bolshevism, against which only soldiers and volunteers stood guard. Many of those who took part in the suppression later found their way into the Nazi movement. Among the soldiers of the Loewenfeld Brigade was Albert Leo Schlageter, whom the French executed in 1923 for sabotage in the occupied Ruhr and whom the Nazis turned into a martyr. Franz von Epp joined the NSDAP in 1928, and in 1933 Hitler appointed him Reich Governor (Reichsstatthalter) of Bavaria. In 1934 the Nazis unveiled a monument in Essen to the soldiers of the Freikorps, the Reichswehr and the police who had fallen in the fighting in the Ruhr, while the graves and memorials of the workers were frequently vandalised.

The crisis of April 1920 also foreshadowed future conflicts on the Rhine. France had shown that it was prepared to occupy German towns to enforce the treaty, and it did so on a much larger scale in January 1923, occupying the entire Ruhr over arrears in reparations. The demilitarised zone on the Rhine, which had held back the Reichswehr in 1920, remained one of France’s most important security guarantees until 7 March 1936, when Hitler marched troops into it – and this time France did nothing.