The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The KAPD, for its part, also fell into adventurism. When the workers of Central Germany, and those of the
Leuna chemical factories, hesitated to engage in armed struggle against the Social Democratic police, it pushed
for insurrection. It addressed exalted proclamations to the German workers: “With guns and knives, with fists
and teeth, go to work. The die is cast!” Not seeing the putschist manoeuvre of the VKPD, the KAP believed that
“the masses of the VKP are active and are following [their] slogans. They have compelled their leaders to do
this”. 545 The KAPD also formed a struggle committee with the VKPD to co-ordinate the action, as much on the
level of strikes as on the ‘military’ level.
However, faced with the government offensive, the strike call launched by the KAPD and the VKPD in the
whole of Germany got little response. In the whole country about 300,000 workers followed the call. The strike
met with very little response in Berlin despite the attempt to occupy the factories by surprise and prevent the
workers from going to work. The common demonstration of the two parties, the KAPD and the VKPD, attracted
4,000 people, and that only with great difficulty. In the majority of cases the workers remained very suspicious,
if not hostile, towards this type of action.
The KAPD, in spite of its great militancy in the March Action, was divided, particularly in central Germany. On
the one hand two leaders of the KAPD Franz Jung and Fritz Rasch were sent by the party centre to co-ordinate
strikes and actions with the VKPD. On the other Max Hölz, arriving in Berlin, organised in Central Germany but
without any link to the KAPD his own action commandos which conducted a guerrilla struggle against the police
in the mining district of Eisleben. It was the same for Karl Plättner and a throng of other anonymous leaders of
the KAPD, who set up their own militia, but in a less publicised way than Hölz. Such actions were, besides,
disowned by the workers of the gigantic Leuna factory, of whom at least half were sympathetic to the AAU and
the KAPD. The leaders of the AAU and the KAPD at Leuna, Peter Utzelmann 546 and Max Pretzlow, who had
called the strike and formed an action committee with the VKPD, which was concretised in the formation of 17
armed proletarian squads, rejected all armed struggle with the police. Given the unfavourable relations of force,
a confrontation would be “an insane and criminal holocaust”. 547 They were unaware that Max Hölz was several
kilometres away and that Jung and Rasch were on the spot. In consequence they evacuated a large part of the
insurgents on the night of the 28 th March to prevent a massacre. The next day the factory was bombarded by the
police who killed 34 workers and took 1,500 prisoners. There was great bitterness among the militants of the
KAPD at Leuna who disagreed with their party and with the tactic of Max Hölz. 548 This latter, with his 2,000
partisans, was surrounded, and after a battle lasting ten days, had to abandon the fight on 15 th April. On 31 st
March, the VKPD withdrew from the armed struggle. That was the end of the March Action, in defeat.
A heavy price was paid for the March Action: a hundred killed in the workers’ ranks, thousands arrested,
thousands condemned to the fortress. Hölz, Plättner, and Utzelmann were sentenced to hard labour. The result
545 KAZ (Berlin), Nos. 181 and 182. The KAPD incontestably gave in to putschism. It had been particularly strong in August
1920, for example on 21 st August 1920, in Velbert in the Ruhr the KAPD set up a ‘republic of councils’ which lasted 17
hours! [cf. O. Ihlau, Die Roten Kämpfer. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik und
im Dritten Reich (Erlangen: Politladen-Reprint 8, 1971), p. 19].
546 Cf. O. Ihlau, op. cit., pp. 19-21.
547 Franz Peter Utzelmann interview, February 1966, by Olaf Ihlau, op. cit. Peter Utzelmann (1895-1972) [pseudonym:
Kempin], born in Berlin, furniture maker, sailor, later operator; took part in the sailors’ revolt of Kiel in 1918, to the
Spartakist insurrection of January 1919, and the general strike against the Kapp-putsch. Sent to prison for life after the
March Action, he was released thanks to an amnesty in 1923. He left the KAPD then; after 1928, member of the SPD, then
member of the “Rote Kämpfer” group set up by Schröder and Schwab in 1930, until his arrest by Gestapo in 1937. He was
condemned to four and a half years of hard labour. During the war in a disciplinary battalion. He became member of the
SED in 1946, taking part in the activities of the Weiland’s group, and in 1949 he was in charge of wood industries in the
Soviet zone (SBZ). In jail in 1949; he could flee to Western Berlin in 1950, where he had some difficulty to be recognised
as a political refugee.
548 Utzelmann and other members of the KAP in Leuna would have “shot Hölz down”, if they had had the opportunity
(interview mentioned above). The Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II has given a romantic evocation of Max Hölz, as
‘political heretic’, in his book Arcángeles. Doce historias de revolucionarios herejes del siglo XX (Mexico: Editorial
Planeta Mexicana, 1998).
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