Murder: Misleading Confessions | nd-aktuell.de

Wilhelm Pieck couldn’t believe his eyes when he read about the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin in the “Tribüne”, the trade unions’ weekly newspaper, on January 12, 1951: “A few moments later, Lieutenant Krull approached me and gave me the order to come upstairs immediately; there was an editor from the “Rote Fahne” who I should shoot. I asked: ‘Who do the orders come from?’ He answered: ‘From the captain. Pope.’ (…) When I got to the top, I saw a man standing against the wall and two men sitting next to him. At the same moment the man standing came up to me and said: ‘Comrade, don’t shoot, I still have a statement to make.’ I then led him into Captain Pope’s room. About ten minutes later he appeared with Captain Pope, who said to me: ‘Runge, you have to make sure that nothing happens to this.’ He may also have said, take the man away. The stranger ran down the stairs in front of me and disappeared. In the guard room I then found out that the person in question was Wilhelm Pieck.” This is how Sergeant Otto Runge is said to have remembered, who was in the Berlin “Hotel Eden” on January 15, 1919, where the leaders of the KPD Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Pieck went had been kidnapped before their arrest.

After his – lucky – survival, Pieck always told his comrades that on January 15th he had identified himself to Captain Pabst (wrongly spelled in the “Tribüne” article) with the passport of a bourgeois journalist and that he was therefore not shot immediately, but rather Checked for his identity, he was taken to prison. When he was transferred to the police headquarters at Alexanderplatz two days later, on January 17, 1919, he managed to escape with the help of a police officer who sympathized with the communists.

Becoming President of the GDR on October 7, 1949, Pieck was lucky again in 1951. Since the fall of 1950, the GDR’s strong man, Walter Ulbricht, had been conducting a “review” by the SED in order to transform it into a compliant instrument with which he intended to attack society. Former “deviants” such as the editor-in-chief of the “Tribüne”, Jacob Walcher, and others who were convicted of independent thinking were only a nuisance. That’s why they were “cleansed out” together with former NSDAP and insubordinate former SPD and KPD members.

Jacob Walcher, who was recently brought back into the public eye a little by Regina Scheer’s impressive Hertha Walcher biography “Bittere Brunnen”, was not just anyone in the SED. At the end of December 1918, he and Pieck chaired a conference that would go down in history as the founding party conference of the KPD. However, on April 29, 1951, he was declared the “worst enemy of the working class” and – as he was expelled from the KPD in 1928 – now also expelled from the SED.

In the hysteria fueled by fear, what mattered most was survival. Anyone who took issue with Pieck’s role in January 1919 in 1951 did not in any way improve his chances of survival – apart from the fact that in such a situation historical articles found few readers anyway. What is more interesting, however, is that up until its heroic end, SED historiography actually managed to conceal Runge’s statement, which the “Tribüne” editorial team titled “The murder atoned for after 26 years.”

On June 2, 1945, in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, communists who had survived the Nazi era in concentration camps or prisons found the 70-year-old Runge, who was near death, and locked him in a cellar on Rykestrasse. They wrote to Ulbricht, who had just returned from Soviet exile and was KPD leader in Berlin until 1933: “Last night our comrades arrested Karl Liebknecht’s murderer and he is in custody. This morning he was supposed to be handed over to the commandant’s office; But we were afraid that he would then simply be taken care of, but we wish that it didn’t happen so quietly.”

These Berlin communists had not yet understood that the Soviet occupying power was the cook and they were merely the waiters. They had gotten Runge to give a statement. However, there should be no public confession. Runge died in Soviet custody on September 1, 1945, not from a bullet, but from old age. The military prosecutor of the Red Army in Berlin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Kotlyar (1910–1995), had Runge handed over to him by the secret service and had him placed in a hospital room specially set up for him. He died there before the trial could begin.

In total, Runge made three contradictory statements about the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on January 15, 1919. The first dates from the spring of 1919; At that time, Runge admitted sole guilt and covered up the real murderers: “The detectives suggested to me that I should take it all upon myself. I would be locked up for a maximum of four months. It was already agreed that an amnesty would be issued after about three months, then I would be free. In addition, I would receive the bonus of 300,000 marks offered by Scheidemann. If I didn’t take it all upon myself, but instead told the truth, there would be no peace… (…) In this interview (prosecutor) Jorns told me that I should take it all on myself. It would not be appropriate for me to be questioned as a witness, but rather for me to act as the accused. (…) The court doctor Leppmann also told me that I should behave like this in my statements, otherwise it would not be possible to prevent a little powder from being put in my soup.”

After Runge was sentenced to 21 months in prison in the Weimar Republic and after the most inhumane treatment and an assassination attempt, he “corrected” his “confession” in January 1920 and declared himself an accomplice in the hope of being released more quickly. Prison officials leaked the “confession” to the USPD daily newspaper “Freiheit,” which published key excerpts of it a year later. Runge had to be released.

But all his subsequent attempts to go public with the real events of January 15, 1919 were thwarted by a network of the military, judiciary and psychiatric system plus the press. Therefore, in his distress, on October 8, 1929, he turned to the “Rote Fahne,” the central organ of the KPD, the party that Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had co-founded in 1918. He then received a visit from a communist who remained anonymous, to whom he explained his view of things and who, on October 22, 1929, wrote a six-page paper with the handwritten note “W. Pieck” bears: »Shortly afterwards, Lieutenant Vogel and the director of the Eden Hotel led Rosa Luxemburg towards the entrance. (…) I then hit her on the shoulder with the butt. There was no way she could have suffered a serious injury.” But the editorial team of the “Rote Fahne” and the Central Committee of the KPD showed no interest in Runge’s statement.

Wilhelm Pieck obviously bought his life with worthless information in January 1919; At least to date it has not been reported that he harmed his comrades. Even in 1928, in an honorary court case brought against him, his opponents within the party did not succeed in expelling him from the KPD – unlike Jacob Walcher.

Otto Runge, on the other hand, fell by the wayside. Soon after the nefarious act of January 15th, the desk clerk Waldemar Pabst, who had given the order for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, public prosecutor Paul Jorns, who was protecting the real murderers at the time, and the court psychiatrist Leppmann succeeded in arresting the mentally challenged man To get the sergeant major to confess to being the sole perpetrator. In reality, Runge had nothing at all to do with the murder of Karl Liebknecht; After threatening to be put against the wall himself, he only injured Rosa Luxemburg in the shoulder, but did not smash her head in, as has been rumored by historians for decades. The real murderers were never brought to justice.

A more detailed text by our author Dr. Jörn Schütrumpf and his documents are available at: https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/51484

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