Who Benefited from Karl Liebknecht's Death? The Murder That Changed Germany

[00:00:05]Berlin, a hotel taken over by soldiers.

[00:00:09]Just before 11:00 at night, they walk a prisoner out to a car.

[00:00:13]It drives off, then stops in the dark, away from any streetlight.

[00:00:18]He's shot from behind.

[00:00:21]Half an hour later, they walk out a second prisoner.

[00:00:25]She's killed, too.

[00:00:27]By morning, the government has its story.

[00:00:30]One prisoner tried to escape. The other was killed by an out-of-control mob.

[00:00:37]Both are lies.

[00:00:38]And the men who wrote them already know it.

[00:00:42]The first man was Karl Liebknecht, a member of Germany's parliament.

[00:00:48]It took more than 40 years for the truth to come out.

[00:00:51]And historians still don't agree on who actually benefited from these murders.

[00:00:57]Karl Liebknecht was a sitting member of the German Reichstag, the son of one of the founders of German social democracy, and for years the single most visible face of opposition to the First World War inside the German government itself.

[00:01:14]On December 2nd, 1914, 4 months into the war, Liebknecht stood up in the Reichstag and voted no, alone.

[00:01:25]Every other member of his own party, the Social Democrats, had already voted to fund the war.

[00:01:31]That vote made him a marked man inside his own movement before any general ever marked him as an enemy.

[00:01:39]Within months, the army conscripted him into a military construction battalion.

[00:01:44]In January of 1916, his own colleagues in the Reichstag voted 60 to 25 to expel him from the parliamentary group entirely.

[00:01:55]And later that year, after he stood in a Berlin square and shouted "Down with the war, down with the government." to a crowd ringed by police, it got him four years and one month in prison for treason.

[00:02:11]He served less than two of them.

[00:02:13]Germany's wartime government, desperate to calm a population that was starving and losing, issued a general amnesty in October of 1918.

[00:02:25]Liebknecht walked out of prison and straight into a revolution that was already underway without him.

[00:02:32]By November 9th, 1918, the German Empire was finished. The Kaiser was gone.

[00:02:39]Sailors were mutinying up and down the coast. And on that single day, Berlin got two different republics announced within hours of each other.

[00:02:49]From the Reichstag building, a moderate social democrat named Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German Republic, a parliamentary democracy >> [snorts] >> built to look as little like Russia's revolution as possible.

[00:03:04]A few hours later, from a balcony of the old Imperial Palace, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed something else.

[00:03:12]A free socialist republic modeled on the workers' councils that had taken power in Russia the year before. Same day, same city.

[00:03:23]Two completely different visions of what Germany was supposed to become.

[00:03:28]And the men running the new government had already decided which version they intended to win.

[00:03:34]Behind closed doors, the new chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, had cut a secret deal with the army's quartermaster general.

[00:03:43]The military would back Ebert's government.

[00:03:47]In exchange, Ebert would use that military to crush any attempt to push the revolution further toward Moscow's model, including from inside his own party.

[00:03:58]Historians call it the Ebert-Groener Pact.

[00:04:02]At the time, nobody outside that room knew it existed.

[00:04:07]What people did know, within weeks, was that thousands of armed paramilitary volunteers, mostly war veterans, furious about losing a war they didn't believe they'd lost on the battlefield, were being organized, funded, and aimed at people like Karl Liebknecht.

[00:04:27]They called themselves the Freikorps.

[00:04:31]On January 1st, 1919, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg announced the founding of the Communist Party of Germany.

[00:04:41]Two weeks later, both of them were dead.

[00:04:44]When Berlin's police chief, a left-wing sympathizer named Emil Eichhorn, was fired by Ebert's government on January 4th, it triggered a mass uprising.

[00:04:56]Hundreds of thousands of workers flooded into central Berlin.

[00:05:00]Newspaper buildings were occupied.

[00:05:03]Liebknecht, against Rosa Luxemburg's explicit objections, threw his support behind an armed attempt to bring the government down by force.

[00:05:13]It failed within a week.

[00:05:15]The Freikorps, with real artillery and machine guns against a movement that had almost none, crushed the uprising by January 12th.

[00:05:25]The dead numbered somewhere between 130 and 180 people, almost all of them on the workers' side.

[00:05:35]But while that fight was still going on, something else was running in parallel.

[00:05:40]A public campaign to get Liebknecht and Luxemburg killed, specifically by name.

[00:05:48]On January 8th, the entire governing council, Ebert included, signed a public leaflet warning that the hour of reckoning is approaching.

[00:06:00]The next day, that same line ran as official government news printed in the German Reich's own newspaper of record.

[00:06:08]Red posters went up across the city demanding the leaders be beaten to death naming Liebknecht outright.

[00:06:16]Hundreds of thousands of handbills repeated it.

[00:06:21]On January 13th, two days before the murders, the Social Democratic Party's own newspaper ran a poem widely understood at the time as an open call for their deaths.

[00:06:34]None of this happened in secret. It was printed.

[00:06:38]On the evening of January 15th, 1919, a civilian militia in Berlin's Wilmersdorf district raided an apartment where Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and a third Communist Party founder, Wilhelm Pieck, were hiding.

[00:06:56]Someone had tipped them off.

[00:06:58]Each militia member who took part later collected a payment of 1,700 marks from the local council chairman.

[00:07:06]A bounty paid for finding them.

[00:07:09]Pieck didn't share what came next. He talked his way out of it that same night and walked free.

[00:07:16]Three decades later, he became the first president of East Germany.

[00:07:21]Liebknecht and Luxemburg weren't so lucky.

[00:07:25]They were taken first to a local school, then driven to the real destination, the Eden Hotel, headquarters of the Guard Cavalry Schützen Division, the largest Freikorps unit in Berlin, and a heavily armed one run in practice by a captain named Waldemar Pabst.

[00:07:45]Pabst identified Liebknecht by the initials stitched into his clothing.

[00:07:50]By his own later account, it took him a few minutes to decide what came next.

[00:07:56]Both prisoners were going to be, in his word, "taken care of."

[00:08:02]He picked up the phone and called the Reich Chancellery.

[00:08:05]He got Defense Minister Gustav Noske on the line.

[00:08:09]Noske told him to go get a formal order from the head of the army first.

[00:08:14]Pabst said that wasn't going to happen.

[00:08:17]Noske's reported reply, "Then you yourself must know what is to be done."

[00:08:23]That's not an order. It's also not a refusal.

[00:08:27]It's the kind of sentence a lawyer calls deniable and a soldier calls a green light.

[00:08:34]A little before 11:00 that night, Liebknecht was walked out of the hotel disguised in an enlisted man's uniform while guests in the lobby spat on him and struck him on his way to the door.

[00:08:47]A soldier named Otto Runge, bribed by an officer who hadn't even been told the full plan, clubbed him with a rifle butt as he was put into a car.

[00:08:59]The car drove into the Tiergarten Park.

[00:09:02]The driver staged a fake breakdown at a spot with no streetlights.

[00:09:06]Liebknecht was walked a few steps from the car and shot from behind at close range by the edge of a small lake.

[00:09:15]His body was dropped at a nearby ambulance station and logged in as an unidentified man.

[00:09:22]30 minutes later, they brought Rosa Luxemburg out the same door.

[00:09:27]Runge clubbed her, too, hard enough, by witness accounts, that she was already unconscious.

[00:09:34]She was loaded into another car.

[00:09:36]A naval officer named Hermann Souchon jumped onto the running board as it pulled away and shot her in the head.

[00:09:44]Another officer ordered her body thrown into the Landwehr Canal.

[00:09:49]It would stay there for more than 4 months.

[00:09:53]By the next morning, that story already had an author.

[00:09:57]Pabst's own press officer, a man named Friedrich Grabowsky, had written the lines almost as soon as both prisoners were dead.

[00:10:05]Liebknecht shot while fleeing custody.

[00:10:09]Luxemburg killed by an enraged crowd nobody could control.

[00:10:14]For more than four decades, that was the official record.

[00:10:18]Liebknecht's family knew it was a lie.

[00:10:21]The Communist Party knew it was a lie.

[00:10:25]Nobody with the power to prosecute anyone seemed especially interested in proving it.

[00:10:31]Then, in 1959, evidence surfaced that it hadn't even been the officer convicted of her killing who fired the fatal shot.

[00:10:41]It was Souchon.

[00:10:43]And in 1962, Waldemar Pabst, by then an old man living comfortably in West Germany, broke his silence and gave a newspaper interview confirming what the cover story had always denied.

[00:10:58]He had ordered both killings himself.

[00:11:01]West Germany's own Federal Press Office didn't distance itself from that confession.

[00:11:06]It issued a statement backing Pabst's account calling Rosa Luxemburg's death an execution in accordance with martial law.

[00:11:17]Pabst went further in private.

[00:11:19]In a letter written in 1969 and only discovered after his death, he wrote that the Social Democratic Party should thank Noske and me on their knees, erect monuments to us, and have streets and squares named after us.

[00:11:36]He said he'd kept quiet for 50 years specifically to protect the party he believed had quietly signed off on what he did.

[00:11:45]There was a trial, sort of.

[00:11:48]It took the Communist Party's own internal investigation, not the government's, to even identify who'd been involved.

[00:11:57]When a military court-martial finally opened in May of 1919, the prosecutor running it was later accused by historians of slowing the case down on purpose.

[00:12:09]Otto Runge, who'd clubbed both victims with a rifle butt, was convicted of attempted manslaughter.

[00:12:16]The officer wrongly believed for decades to be Luxemburg's actual killer was convicted of nothing more than failing to report a body.

[00:12:26]And 3 days after sentencing, he escaped from custody with help from a young naval officer named Wilhelm Canaris.

[00:12:35]Canaris would go on to run Nazi Germany's military intelligence service during the Second World War and would himself be executed by the Nazis in 1945 for joining a conspiracy against Hitler.

[00:12:49]The naval officers who actually shot Liebknecht were acquitted outright.

[00:12:54]Waldemar Papst, the man who gave the order, was never even charged.

[00:13:00]Every one of those verdicts was personally signed off on by Defense Minister Gustav Noske, the same Noske who, weeks before taking the job, had told colleagues, in his own words, that someone must become the bloodhound.

[00:13:16]He didn't shy away from the description.

[00:13:19]He embraced it.

[00:13:20]And he wasn't finished.

[00:13:23]Within 2 months, Noske ordered Freikorps units to shoot on sight anyone caught fighting government troops during a second wave of unrest in Berlin.

[00:13:32]Estimates of the dead from that crackdown alone run into the thousands.

[00:13:38]January 15th set the template and Noske kept using it.

[00:13:43]Who actually came out ahead?

[00:13:45]The simplest answer is Ebert's government.

[00:13:49]Four days after the murders, on January 19th, 1919, Germany held elections for a national assembly.

[00:13:58]Elections that had been scheduled for weeks and that the uprising had threatened to derail entirely.

[00:14:05]Ebert's Social Democrats won the largest single share of the vote, 37.9% and went on to write the constitution that gave the Weimar Republic its legal foundation.

[00:14:18]By that read, the killings cleared the path for German parliamentary democracy to survive its first real test.

[00:14:27]A lot of serious historians push back hard on that framing.

[00:14:32]Look at who else benefited. The same officer class, the same conservative judiciary, the same industrial interests that the revolution had threatened to sweep away.

[00:14:44]The Freikorps units responsible for the killings didn't disband when the fighting stopped.

[00:14:50]Over the following decade, many of those men went on to form the backbone of Hitler's paramilitary storm detachment, the SA.

[00:15:00]In that reading, the night of January 15th protected the exact set of institutions that would help dismantle German democracy 14 years later.

[00:15:10]A different answer gets less attention and it's specifically about Rosa Luxemburg.

[00:15:16]Of everyone running a major communist movement in 1919, she was one of the very few willing to criticize the Bolsheviks from the inside. Their treatment of dissent, their dissolution of Russia's own elected assembly.

[00:15:32]She never finished the essay where she laid that argument out. She was murdered before she could.

[00:15:39]Some historians argue her death removed the one voice with the standing to build a serious alternative to the model Lenin and later Stalin would impose on international communism.

[00:15:52]Other historians push back just as hard, arguing she never actually broke with the Bolsheviks and wouldn't have.

[00:16:01]There's no settled answer here.

[00:16:03]But whichever account you believe, somebody's politics got a clearer field to operate in once she was gone.

[00:16:11]The most uncomfortable answer though is about the killers themselves.

[00:16:17]They did fine.

[00:16:18]Pops died in 1970 at 89, having run arms businesses through the Weimar Republic, the Nazi years, and the West German Republic that followed, and having never spent a single day in prison for what happened that night.

[00:16:36]Runge and the officer convicted alongside him were later given financial compensation for their prison time years afterward by the Nazi government.

[00:16:47]One of the naval officers acquitted, Outright, went on to help lead an attempted coup against the very Weimar Republic the murder supposedly protected before dying the following year when grenades in his own car detonated by accident.

[00:17:04]A government, a military cast, and a future fascist movement all walked away from the same crime scene with something they wanted.

[00:17:14]Pick whichever beneficiary you find most convincing.

[00:17:18]To this day, Germany's Social Democratic Party officially disputes any direct responsibility for what happened that night.

[00:17:27]The historical record, Papst's own phone call to Noske, his own later confession, his own private letter, makes that an increasingly hard position to defend.

[00:17:40]Every January, usually on the Sunday closest to the 15th, thousands of people still march through Berlin to the cemetery where Liebknecht and Luxemburg are buried.

[00:17:52]The march has been happening since 1926.

[00:17:56]In recent years, it's ended in clashes with police over banned flags, over chants, over who gets to claim what that march even means anymore.

[00:18:08]More than a hundred years later, Germany still hasn't agreed on who's responsible.

[00:18:14]The question just keeps resurfacing every January in the same city, in front of the same graves.