The Spartacist uprising

On 4 January 1919 the revolutionary government in Berlin, led by the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, dismissed the city’s police president, Emil Eichhorn, a member of the left-wing Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. To the capital’s radical left this was a provocation and proof that the Social Democrats meant to strangle the revolution. The next day tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, armed groups occupied newspaper offices and printing works, and the leaders of the left, among them Karl Liebknecht, proclaimed a struggle to overthrow the government. The uprising, named after the Spartacus League, lasted a week. It was crushed by volunteer units of former soldiers and officers who, on the orders of the Social Democrat Gustav Noske, entered the city with machine guns, mortars and artillery. On 15 January officers from one of these formations murdered Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. A week of fighting and two murders opened a chasm between Social Democrats and Communists that the German left did not bridge before Hitler came to power.

The dates need some explanation. Popular chronologies say the uprising lasted from 4 to 15 January. But 4 January was the day of Eichhorn’s dismissal – the immediate cause of the outbreak. The first great demonstrations and occupations of buildings came on 5 January, and the armed fighting lasted until 12 January, when government troops took the last centres of resistance. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were killed on 15 January, three days after the fighting ended. German historians usually speak of the “January fighting” or the “January uprising” of 5–12 January. The name “Spartacist uprising” has stuck, although it is misleading: the Spartacus League, and from 1 January the newly founded Communist Party of Germany, neither planned the rising nor led it. They joined it only once it had begun.

A revolution that divided the left

The November Revolution toppled the empire but did not give Germany a single left-wing government. From 10 November 1918 the country was ruled by the Council of People’s Deputies, made up of three Majority Social Democrats (SPD) and three Independent Socialists (USPD). In practice it was led by Ebert. That same evening he reached an understanding with General Wilhelm Groener by telephone: the army recognised the new government, and the government promised to help maintain discipline and fight Bolshevism. Ebert wanted to hand power as quickly as possible to a national assembly chosen by universal suffrage. After the Armistice of Compiègne his chief worries were the return of millions of soldiers, feeding the country and avoiding a civil war on the Russian model.

To his left stood groups for whom November was only the beginning. The Independent Socialists wavered between parliamentary democracy and the rule of workers’ councils. In the Berlin factories the so-called Revolutionary Shop Stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute) held sway – a network of radical workers’ representatives from the armaments industry who had organised the great wartime strikes. Furthest of all went Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s Spartacus League, which demanded that all power pass to the councils, that the officers be disarmed and the workers armed. Its leaders looked – though not uncritically – to the example of the October Revolution in Russia.

Most workers, however, followed the Social Democrats. At the national congress of workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Berlin (16–20 December 1918) a large majority of delegates backed elections to a National Assembly and set them for 19 January 1919. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were not allowed to speak. A few days later came the first bloodshed. The People’s Navy Division, a unit of sailors meant to guard the government, seized the Social Democratic city commandant Otto Wels in a dispute over unpaid wages. On 24 December Ebert ordered the army to attack the sailors in the royal palace and stables. The assault failed, several dozen people were killed, and on 29 December the Independent Socialists left the government in protest. Their places were taken by Social Democrats, among them Noske, who took charge of military affairs.

Between 30 December and 1 January the Spartacists and other groups of the far left founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Rosa Luxemburg wrote its programme, in which she promised that the Communists would never take power except by the clear will of the majority of the people. She also argued that the party should take part in the elections. The congress outvoted her: most of the delegates, young and impatient, wanted to win power through pressure from the streets and factories, not through parliament.

Eichhorn’s dismissal

Emil Eichhorn, a USPD activist, had become police president of Berlin on the day of the revolution, 9 November 1918. The security units under him, made up of workers and soldiers, were regarded as a force of the left. During the Christmas fighting Eichhorn refused to use them against the sailors, and in Ebert’s eyes he became unreliable. Once the Independents had left the government, the Social Democrats won the agreement of a majority in the council bodies to remove him. On 4 January 1919 Eichhorn was dismissed and the Social Democrat Eugen Ernst appointed in his place. Eichhorn refused to leave police headquarters on Alexanderplatz.

Some historians regard the dismissal as a belated but necessary decision; others as a deliberate provocation of the radicals, intended to deal with them before the elections. What is certain is that the same day the Berlin leadership of the USPD and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards called a demonstration in Eichhorn’s defence for Sunday 5 January. The KPD joined the appeal.

A week in the newspaper quarter

The demonstration of 5 January exceeded its organisers’ expectations. Tens of thousands of people poured into central Berlin, and armed groups – which probably included agents provocateurs – occupied the newspaper quarter: the building of the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts, the Mosse, Ullstein and Scherl publishing houses, printing works and Wolff’s telegraph bureau. In the evening some 70 leaders of the USPD, the Shop Stewards and the KPD met to confer. Intoxicated by the size of the demonstration and by false reports that the regiments of the Berlin garrison would come over to them, they decided to fight to overthrow the government. Only a few were against, among them the Shop Stewards’ leaders Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig, who thought it too early. A 53-member Revolutionary Committee was set up with three co-chairmen: Georg Ledebour of the USPD, Liebknecht of the KPD and Paul Scholze of the Shop Stewards. In a leaflet the committee declared the Ebert–Scheidemann government deposed.

On 6 January, answering the call for a general strike, hundreds of thousands of people – by various estimates – came out onto the streets. It was the high point of the movement and, at the same time, the moment of its defeat. The committee could not decide what to do next and gave the crowds no instructions. People waited for hours and in the evening went home. Attempts to win over the garrison regiments and the People’s Navy Division failed: the soldiers declared themselves neutral or stayed loyal to the government. Some Berliners, especially from the middle class, set out instead to defend government buildings. Most workers supported a strike against counter-revolution but did not want to shoot at other workers. On 9 January a great rally in Humboldthain park demanded the resignation of all the leaders responsible for “fratricide”, both in the government and in the Revolutionary Committee.

Rosa Luxemburg considered the rising unprepared and premature and sharply criticised Liebknecht within the party leadership. The Bolsheviks’ envoy Karl Radek, who was in Berlin illegally, also urged the Communists to pull back. Yet Luxemburg did not come out against the uprising in public, and Die Rote Fahne, which she edited, called for struggle. On 9 January the KPD, the Berlin USPD and the Shop Stewards issued a joint appeal calling the members of the government “Judases” who deserved “the scaffold” and urging the use of arms against “mortal enemies”. Talks with the government, conducted from 6 January through USPD leaders, collapsed a day later: the government demanded the surrender of the occupied buildings, the insurgents Eichhorn’s reinstatement.

Noske and the Freikorps

The government had no loyal army. The old army was disintegrating and the garrison regiments did not want to fight the workers. In the first days of the uprising the Council of People’s Deputies gave Noske command of the troops in and around Berlin. By his own account, when someone asked who would take this on, he replied: “Someone has to be the bloodhound.” Noske set up his headquarters in a girls’ school in Dahlem, on the outskirts of Berlin, and gathered there the volunteer Freikorps (PL), formed since December by professional officers from front-line soldiers, cadets and students. They were disciplined and well armed, but most were hostile not only to the Spartacists but also to the republic and to the Social Democrats themselves, whom they regarded as a temporarily necessary evil. On 8 January the government issued a proclamation announcing that “the hour of reckoning is approaching”.

On 10 January the units of Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard routed the insurgents in Spandau. On 11 January volunteers from Potsdam took the Vorwärts building, pounding it with flamethrowers, machine guns, mortars and field guns. Seven emissaries who had tried to negotiate the building’s surrender were taken to the dragoon barracks and shot there. That same day Noske marched through the city centre at the head of a column of Freikorps. On 12 January the last important centre of resistance fell: police headquarters on Alexanderplatz. There were no real battles. The insurgents were not prepared to fight regular troops and often surrendered of their own accord. Even so, soldiers shot more than a hundred of them on the spot, along with an unknown number of chance civilians. An investigating committee of the Prussian state parliament later counted 156 dead, and some studies give up to about two hundred. The government troops lost a dozen or so men.

On 13 January more Freikorps entered Berlin, among them the largest of these formations, the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division (Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division). It was formally commanded by General Heinrich von Hofmann, who had a heart condition, but in practice by its first general staff officer, Captain Waldemar Pabst. The division set up its headquarters in the elegant Hotel Eden in the west of the city and began hunting the leaders of the revolution. Since December Berlin had been plastered with posters – spread among others by the Anti-Bolshevik League, financed by industrialists – that urged: “Kill their leaders! Kill Liebknecht!”

The crime at the Hotel Eden

Liebknecht and Luxemburg hid in a succession of flats, finally at a friend’s in the Wilmersdorf district. On the evening of 15 January they were arrested there by a local citizens’ militia that knew whom it was looking for. Who gave them away is still unknown. The prisoners were taken to the Hotel Eden and handed over to Pabst. They were interrogated and beaten. Pabst decided that both were to die in a way that would look accidental. According to his later accounts, he telephoned the Reich Chancellery about the matter and spoke to Noske, who supposedly told him that he must know himself what to do. Noske denied this to the end of his life.

At about 10.45 p.m. a group of naval officers disguised in private soldiers’ uniforms drove Liebknecht away. At the exit a soldier, Otto Runge, struck him with a rifle butt. In the Tiergarten park, by the small lake of the Neuer See, the car stopped on the pretext of a breakdown. Liebknecht was led out and shot in the back, and his body was delivered to a nearby first-aid post as that of an unknown man. Shortly afterwards Rosa Luxemburg was brought out. Runge felled her with blows of his rifle butt; she was thrown unconscious into the car and shot in the temple at close range. The shot was most probably fired by a naval lieutenant, Hermann Souchon, although for decades the man in charge of the transport, Lieutenant Kurt Vogel, was held to be the killer. Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal. It did not surface until 31 May 1919. Wilhelm Pieck, later president of East Germany, who had been arrested in the flat the same evening, managed to escape on the way to prison.

The next day the division issued a statement that Liebknecht had been shot while trying to escape and that Luxemburg had been lynched by an enraged crowd. This version was soon discredited. The government called an emergency meeting. According to witnesses, Ebert was shaken by the deaths of his former party comrades, and the Social Democrats feared that the crime would ignite revolts across the country.

A verdict that was a mockery

The perpetrators were tried not by a civilian court but by a court martial of their own division. The trial was held only on 8–14 May 1919, after the Communists, led by Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg’s former partner, had themselves identified and published the names of some of the killers. Jogiches did not live to see the trial: in March he was arrested and shot in prison. One of the judges was a naval captain nominated by Pabst, Wilhelm Canaris, later head of the Third Reich’s military intelligence. The officers of Liebknecht’s escort were acquitted. Runge received two years in prison and Vogel two years and four months – not for murder but for, among other things, disposing of a body. Noske confirmed the verdict with his signature. Three days later Canaris, posing as another officer, took Vogel out of prison and helped him flee to the Netherlands. Pabst was never charged. In 1962 he told the weekly Der Spiegel that he had had them “executed”, and in a letter of 1969, found after his death, he wrote that he could not have carried out the operation without Noske’s consent, “with Ebert in the background”. Historians believe that Pabst consulted someone in the government or the high command, but whether Noske told him anything, and if so what, can no longer be proved.

The long shadow of January 1919

In the short term the government achieved its aim. On 19 January 1919 elections were held to the National Assembly, which in Weimar adopted the constitution of Germany’s first democracy. The Social Democrats won 37.9 per cent of the vote and the Independents 7.6 per cent, so the parties of the left had no majority between them. The Majority SPD never again exceeded 30 per cent in the Weimar Republic. January in Berlin became the pattern for the months that followed: on Noske’s orders the Freikorps crushed the council republic in Bremen; in March, in fresh fighting in Berlin, some 1,200 people were killed according to German studies; and at the beginning of May the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich fell. By the summer of 1919 several thousand people had died in fighting across Germany.

The most lasting consequence was hatred. The Communists never forgave the Social Democrats for the “bloodhound” Noske and the murder of their leaders, nor the Social Democrats the Communists for trying to overthrow the republic by force before its first free elections. The KPD, which became a mass party after merging with the left wing of the USPD in 1920, subordinated itself ever more closely to Moscow. From 1928, on the instructions of the Communist International and Joseph Stalin, it called the Social Democrats “social fascists” and the workers’ main enemy. In May 1929 the Berlin police, answering to a Social Democratic police president, killed more than thirty people during banned May Day demonstrations, which only deepened the divide. In 1931 the Communists joined the Nazis and the nationalists in backing a referendum against Prussia’s Social Democratic government. In the elections of November 1932 the SPD and KPD together won more votes than the NSDAP, but they could not even discuss a joint defence of the republic. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, he destroyed both parties within a few months. The KPD leader Ernst Thälmann spent eleven years in Nazi prisons and was murdered in Buchenwald in 1944. The Comintern abandoned the “social fascism” line and began building popular fronts only in 1935, when it was already too late.

The second legacy of January was the Freikorps. In 1919 the republic defended itself through the hands of men who despised it. Volunteers from these units, convinced that they had saved Germany from Bolshevism and that they could kill with impunity, took part in the Kapp Putsch of 1920, in which Pabst played one of the leading roles, and then in the assassinations of the republic’s politicians, among them Matthias Erzberger in 1921. Many of them ended up in the Nazi SA, which took over their style, their contempt for democracy and their cult of violence. The impunity of Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s killers showed that in Germany political opponents could be killed – provided they were on the left. The Nazis remembered this well. In 1934 they granted Runge compensation for his time in prison, and in 1935 they demolished the monument over the revolutionaries’ graves in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde cemetery.

The uprising also gave the right an image that became one of the pillars of Nazi propaganda. A revolution in which people of Jewish origin such as Luxemburg, Jogiches and Radek played an important part was used to build the myth of a “Jewish Bolshevism” threatening Germany from within. Hitler, who began his political career in Munich in 1919, fresh from the fall of the council republic there, repeated all his life that Germany must never allow a repeat of “November” and of “Spartacist chaos”. Anti-communism, fed for years by the memory of 1919, led many conservatives and officers in 1933 to see Hitler as the lesser evil.