Paul Sullivan explores the curious history and conflicted legacy of Germany’s former Communist Party leader…
An Uprising in Hamburg
On the night of October 23rd, 1923, around 1,300 communists took control of around 17 police stations in Hamburg, Altona, and nearby parts of Schleswig-Holstein. Armed with their newly-acquired pistols and rifles, the insurgents then barricaded themselves on the roofs of surrounding buildings and streets, ready to fight their way into the centre and eventually take control of the city.
The uprising was part of a nationwide Bolshevik-style plot to overthrow the Weimar Republic created by Moscow and German communist party officials, Stalin and Trotsky included. Named “German October”, it was timed to take advantage of a German state weakened by economic crisis and rampant hyperinflation, the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, and the mass strikes that had taken place that summer. With communists entering regional coalition governments in Saxony and Thuringia earlier in October, it seemed like the ideal moment to strike.
But the situation suddenly changed when Gustav Stresemann (Reich Chancellor) and Friedrich Ebert (Reich President) triggered Article 48—a well-known emergency decree, already used several times during the Weimar government’s short but troubled life, that allowed the use of military force to restore order. On October 21st, Reichswehr troops were sent into Saxony to reduce the communist threat by deposing the government there, making the KPD (German Communist Party) and Comintern realise that perhaps the time wasn’t right after all.
The national uprising was subsequently cancelled at the last minute—but either Hamburg never got the memo or, more likely, local militant leaders were pumped up and decided to proceed anyway. The assorted groups, sometimes supported by local populations in working-class districts such as Barmbek, Eilbek and Hamm, fought into the night, firing from behind their barricades and the rooftops. But soon they found themselves facing around 1,500 police officers and six armored vehicles, and by the next morning it was mostly over. By any measure it had been a failure, with more than 100 people dead in its wake, most of them innocent bystanders—including prisoners hit in the police stations and even a mother killed by a stray bullet in her apartment.
It was to be the final episode in a tradition of failed uprisings for the communists that included the Spartacist Uprising of 1919, the brief communist takeover of Bavaria (also 1919), and the March Action in 1921, all of which were suppressed. After the Hamburg Uprising, there were no further attempts by the KPD to take power by force. The blame for the fiasco was laid at the feet of then-KPD leader Heinrich Brandler, who was quickly replaced by a joint leadership consisting of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow in 1924. In 1925, one of the Hamburg ringleaders was made Party Secretary—a local man named Ernst Thälmann.
Ernst Thälmann: The Back Story
Ernst Thälmann was born in Hamburg in 1886. It was a modest upbringing to say the least, with both Ernst and his sister working long hours in their parents’ grocery store and haulage business, and spending time with a foster family when their parents were sent to prison in the 1890s for receiving stolen goods.
Ernst left school at the age of 14 and took a series of temporary jobs in Hamburg’s shipyards, which included working as a stoker on a steamship that took him to the USA, where he worked briefly as a farm worker near New York. On his return, Thälmann once again found work at Hamburg’s docks…