On Wednesday, January 15, 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered. The Burgergerwehr (Civil Guard) of Wilmersdorf, a suburb of Berlin, raided the illegal dwelling of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and took them both to the Eden Hotel in Berlin, the Staff Headquarters of Gardeschuetzen Horse Guards Division.
The imperialist officers of the German Republic rubbed their hands (despite the fact that the Government was headed by social democrats, it was representatives of the junkers who held all important military and police positions.)
A lieutenant - Jaeger Runge - hit Liebknecht as he sat in the automobile which had brought them to the hotel. After hitting Karl twice from behind with a rifle butt he then hit Rosa over the head. She fell. The car drove away into the night in the direction of the Tiergarten (a large well-wooded park in the centre of Berlin). It stopped in a dark avenue. Karl was told that the car had broken down and made to get out and walk. Armed soldiers bunched round the half-senseless man. He was led deeper into the wood, struck down and then shot.
Rosa was dragged, senseless, into another car. A man, not known, struck her again on the head with the butt end of a pistol. Ober-Lieutenant Vogel put his pistol to her head and blew out her brains. The car then drove to the Landwehr canal and her body was thrown over the bridge into its dark waters.
The murderers made their report: "Liebknecht shot whilst attempting to escape." They write further: "Rosa Luxemburg lynched by an infuriated mob."
The murderers then arranged a drinking bout in Eden Hotel. They felt safe: the social democrats in the Government might shed crocodile tears but they were really accomplices in the crime.
ROSA LUXEMBURG 1871 - 1919
[illegible] theoretician of German communism and author of a number of theoretical books on economics, politics and other questions. She played a very prominent role in the German, Polish and Russian labour movements before the first world war. From 1910 she headed the revolutionary opposition within German social democracy. In 1914, together with Liebknecht, she founded the German Communist Party. Rosa, "our Rosa" as the old revolutionary movement knew her, was born in Poland. At the age of 16 she was forced to migrate because of her revolutionary activities to Zurich, Switzerland. In 1893 she founded the Polish Social-Democratic Party (later known as the Social-Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania). In 1897 she began participating in the German socialist movement. It was Luxemburg, Mehring and Plekhanov who initiated the struggle against revisionism within the Second International (Bernsteinism and Millerandism) and compelled Kautsky to take a position against it. At the 1907 London Congress of the Russian party she supported the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks on all the key problems of the Russian revolution. The same year, in Autumn, together with Lenin she introduced at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International the revolutionary anti-war resolution which was adopted in essence by that Congress. Long before the war she came into conflict with Kautsky and other centrists in the German party. When the first world war broke out, she took an internationalist position from the outset. From gaol - she was incarcerated in February 1915 - she collaborated in the illegally published SPARTACUS LETTERS and in the work of the Spartacus League. In the spring of 1916 she wrote in gaol, under the pseudonym of Junius, the famous pamphlet THE CRISIS OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY in which she pointed out the urgent need of creating the Third International. (See elsewhere in this issue.) After the November 1918 revolution she was freed and joined in the work of creating the Communist Party, being the founder and editor of Rote Fahne, the party's central organ.
KARL LIEBKNECHT 1871 - 1919
Long before the first world war, he earned revolutionary renown by his struggle against militarism. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for writing his pamphlet, MILITARISM AND ANTI-MILITARISM. Liebknecht's name is a symbol of revolutionary international and irreconcilable opposition to imperialist war. On August 3, 1914, he opposed voting for war credits at a session of the Social-Democratic parliamentary fraction; but under pressure of party discipline he voted together with the entire party fraction at the Reichstag session on August 4, 1914. When the next vote was taken, on December 2, 1914, he was the only deputy who cast his vote against. But even before that, in October of the same year, he published, jointly with Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin, a statement against the official party position in the Swiss Social-Democratic press. In March, 1915, when the Reichstag took a vote on war credits, 30 Social Democrats left the chambers and the only ones who voted against were Liebknecht and Otto Ruehle. In 1915 he began to organise the Spartacus League, [illegible] the publication of the [illegible] Spartacus LETTERS. When the Zimmerwald Conference convened, Liebknecht was drafted into the army and could not attend, but he forwarded a letter to this conference which closed with the following words: "Not civil peace, but civil war - that is our slogan." On January 12, 1916, the Social-Democratic fraction expelled him from its ranks. On May Day, 1916, he distributed antiwar leaflets in Potsdam Square in Berlin, was arrested and sentenced to hard labour. The victory of the Russian October found him in prison where he greeted the conquest of the Russian workers and peasants, and called upon the workers to [illegible] this great example. The November, 1918, revolution in Germany freed him from prison, untying his hands for a direct struggle against the social-chauvinists and their centrist [illegible]. Together with Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogisches (Tyshko) he organised the Communist Party of Germany which broke all connections with the Independent Social-Democratic Party, headed by Kautsky and Haase. As a member of the revolutionary committee, he headed the uprising of the Berlin workers in January, 1919. After this uprising was suppressed he was [illegible].
* based upon an article commemorating the 5th anniversary of their assassination, which appeared in the January, 1924, issue of the British Communist journal, COMMUNIST REVIEW.