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The Murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht

From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement

The January 1919 uprising has gone down in history as the Spartacist uprising, but in his biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Frölich contests this definition: The truth is that there was no Spartacus uprising. As he explains, the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in fact counted on a gradual revolutionary process, and certainly not on immediate armed struggle on the streets of Berlin. Actually, indicates Frölich, the truth is that the January fighting was carefully prepared and cunningly launched by the leaders of the counter-revolution.

Consciousness brought from without

What therefore emerges is a party unable to hold back the masses in the face of provocation or to organise a conscious action or an orderly retreat. In this way, the Spartacist leaders themselves were swept along by the party base with its maximalist tendencies and by the optimism of relying on a mass movement in the absence of an organised force. As Georg Ledebour would testify in May 1919, most of the revolutionary leaders had the impression that the masses were pressing for action, that their patience was at an end.

We can note here the insistence with which Lenin in What Is to Be Done? stresses the limits of the proletariat’s class consciousness in its spontaneous development: The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, [...] that all worship of the spontaneity of the working-class movement, all belittling of the role of ‘the conscious element’, [...] means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers.

Heinrich August Winkler, a historian close to the Social Democratic Party (SPD), also believes the term Spartacist uprising to be wrong. In his book Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1918 bis 1924 (From Revolution to Stabilisation: Workers and the Labour Movement in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1924) he writes: The uprising of sectors of the Berlin working class was without a leader from the very beginning. It had not been the Spartacist leaders who planned to overthrow the government, but the supporters of the revolutionary delegates and of the newborn KPD. Winkler goes on to stress the differences between the communist leaders: Karl Liebknecht, a man of great personal courage, but at the same time a hot-blooded man who let himself be easily overwhelmed by the mood of the masses, gave in to pressure from below, as did most of the revolutionary delegates. Wilhelm Pieck was not able to make an autonomous assessment of the situation.

Rosa Luxemburg, for her part, had just explained to the KPD’s founding congress that, in her opinion, the moment for the communists to seize power was anything but ripe. But now the masses were acting spontaneously – and how could she contradict them? She who had always considered the spontaneity of the masses the most important driving force of history?. Leo Jogiches, like Luxemburg, was a firm opponent of putschist actions and even asked the party to publicly and unequivocally distance itself from Liebknecht.

What does the Spartacus League want?

On December 14th, ahead of the KPD’s foundation, the Spartacus League had published its own programme in Die Rote Fahne – What Does the Spartacus League Want? – written by Rosa Luxemburg. It anticipated the brutality of the reaction of which she herself would be a victim: The imperialist capitalist class, as last offspring of the caste of exploiters [...] defends its holiest of holies, its profit and its privilege of exploitation, with tooth and nail, with the methods of cold evil which it demonstrated to the world in the entire history of colonial politics and in the recent World War. It will mobilise heaven and hell against the proletariat. It will mobilise the peasants against the cities, the backward strata of the working class against the socialist vanguard; it will use officers to instigate atrocities; [...] it will force a score of Vendées on the revolution; it will invite the foreign enemy, the murderous weapons of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson into the country to rescue it. This describes, word for word, the action of the Eberts, the Scheidemanns, and the Noskes who, after supporting the world bloodbath, bloodily repressed the revolution springing from it.

Luxemburg then issued a warning against impatience and adventurism: The proletarian revolution can reach full clarity and maturity only by stages, step by step [...]. The victory of the Spartacus League comes not at the beginning, but at the end of the Revolution: it is identical with the victory of the great million-strong masses of the socialist proletariat.

The Bolsheviks’ appeal

In a letter dated January 9th to the KPD central committee, Karl Radek referred to this text: In your pamphlet on the programme ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, you state that you do not want to seize power without having most of the working class with you. This totally correct viewpoint is based on the simple fact that a workers’ government without the mass organisation of the proletariat is inconceivable. Today, the only mass organisations which can be counted on, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, have consistency only on paper. Consequently, those who command them are not the party dedicated to never-ending struggle, the Communist Party, but the social patriots and the independents. In such a situation, a possible seizure of power by the proletariat is out of touch with reality. If the government were to fall into your hands following a putsch, you would be cut off from the rest of the country and swept away in just a few hours [...] this battle is hopeless. Nothing can prevent those who are weaker from retreating before a superior force. In July 1917, when we were infinitely stronger than you are today, we did everything in our power to restrain the masses and, since we did not succeed, we led them, with immense efforts, into retreat from a hopeless battle.

Fiasco of organisational talent

In Germany, the revolutionary party, without a mass organisation after August 4th, 1914, did not even have the strength to lead the workers in retreat. Its leaders, also thanks to their theoretical leanings, were led to count on the movement of the masses, without, however, acting as a vehicle for strategy, i.e., of consciousness brought from without. What was to be done at that point? Pierre Broué suggested that, by adopting Radek’s positions, defended for example by Paul Levi, the Spartacists could have allowed the Communist Party to not appear as directly or indirectly responsible for the continuation of these clashes, to accompany the independents and confused revolutionary delegates, and to isolate within the Social Democratic Party those who dreamed of nothing but repression.

However, any a posteriori historical and political evaluation cannot underestimate the enormous difficulty of the KPD’s position at that moment and the desperate conditions it faced confronting a strategic situation unprecedented in its dimensions.

In an article published in Die Rote Fahne on January 8th, Rosa Luxemburg herself recognised the insufficiency of the German revolutionary party: Until the present day, Germany had been the classic land of organisation. [...] And what do we see today? At the decisive moments of the revolution, this so vaunted ‘organisational talent’ fails completely in the pettiest way. And on the 11th, just before her assassination, she went on to write: The absence of leadership, the inexistence of a centre charged with organising Berlin’s working class, cannot continue to exist [...] the revolutionary workers need to create governing bodies able to lead and use the masses’ combative energy.

But it was too late: at the height of the revolutionary movement, it was impossible to make up for the delay of the German party, which had suddenly emerged after the betrayal of August 4th, 1914.

The brutal and treacherous murder

The paramilitary units of the Freikorps were mobilised in the repression. Frölich writes that in January the manhunt for the Spartacists became a chorus of unleashed sadists. Liebknecht and Luxemburg refused to leave the capital and found refuge first at Neukölln, on January 12th and 13th, and then in a flat in Wilmersdorf. Here Rosa Luxemburg discovered from Vorwärts that Liebknecht had signed the proclamation of the revolutionary committee for the seizing of power. Disconcerted, she questioned him: Karl, is this our programme?

They were arrested in the Wilmersdorf flat, together with Wilhelm Pieck, on the evening of January 15th. The three of them were transferred to the Eden Hotel in the city centre and interrogated by Captain Waldemar Pabst. During the night, they left the hotel under escort, apparently with the order to transfer them to Moabit prison. The following morning, Vorwärts informed its readers of the arrest of the communist leaders, congratulating itself on the generosity of the victors, who had defended order, human life, and law against force. But as early as the afternoon of the 16th, the newspapers reported the news of Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s death, saying that the former had been killed while attempting to escape, and the latter lynched by the crowd waiting outside the Eden Hotel.

A very different truth gradually emerged: the communist leaders were murdered by soldiers after being beaten during the interrogations. Liebknecht, struck on the back of the head with the butt of a rifle by soldier Runge, was thrown bleeding into a car which took him to the Tiergarten, where he was executed on the command of officer von Pflugk-Harttung. His body was left at the Zoo police station as an unidentified corpse. Luxemburg, battered by the beatings she had suffered, and dragged outside the Eden Hotel by Lieutenant Vogel, was struck in the same way on the skull by Runge, carried away unconscious, and subsequently killed. On Vogel’s orders, her body was thrown into the Landwehr canal, which would finally release her in May 1919.

Speaking at the Second All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in January 1919, Lenin observed that the brutal and treacherous murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg was a warning for those who delude themselves that it is possible to speak of democracy in general regardless of its imperialist content, that there can be a democracy beyond or above classes, [...] that in modern society while the capitalists still retain their property, there can be a democracy other than bourgeois democracy, that is, other than a bourgeois dictatorship masked by false and hypocritical democratic labels.

In March 1919, at the First Congress of the Communist International, Lenin returned to the same topic: The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg is an event of epoch-making significance, not only because of the tragic death of these finest people and leaders of the truly proletarian Communist International, but also because the class nature of an advanced European State — it can be said without exaggeration, of an advanced State, on a worldwide scale — has been conclusively exposed. [...] ‘Freedom’ in the German republic, one of the freest and most advanced republics of the world, is freedom to murder arrested leaders of the proletariat with impunity. Nor can it be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy sharpens rather than dampens the class struggle which, by virtue of all the results and influences of the war and of its consequences, has been brought to boiling point.

Lotta Comunista, November 2025

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