On returning to Germany in 1930 or 1931 he became a leading member of the paramilitary "Red Front-Fighters" ("Roter Frontkämpferbund" / RFB) in the politically volatile Hamburg region.
In 1932 he was involved in the Altona Bloody Sunday street battle and, following the National Socialist power grab at the start of 1933, he became a victim of "Nazi justice".
[3][4][5] August Lütgens was born into a working class Social Democratic family in Lübeck where he grew up, the eldest of his parents' twelve children.
As the eldest of them, on returning from school at the start of each afternoon, August Lütgens found himself, in the words of one source, acting as the "household maid", looking after the other eleven children, heating up the left-overs for lunch, and preparing the family's evening meal.
"That is a lie and defamatory", he wrote in red ink across a propaganda poster showing a German nurse from a hospital ship being variously tortured by two English sailors.
[1] Fighting in Wilhelmshaven persisted, and in January 1919 a group of naval officers and "professional soldiers" launched an organised counter-attack, targeting "communists", after which striking shipyard workers returned to work: in the "quasi-military" terms in which observers were inclined to assess the situation at the time, Lütgens was on the losing side.
Nevertheless, the hostile mainstream newspapers of the political centre and right made much of the bank clerk's allegations, branding Lütgens a bandit and a robber.
[6] In Petrograd he befriended Lisa Fiedler, one of five children of a Hamburg family who had relocated a few years earlier in response to an appeal from the recently installed Soviet government for skilled workers.
[6] It is not impossible that personal considerations also played their part: he arrived in 1930 or 1931 without fanfare, while Lisa Lütgens remained in the Zamoskvoretskaya apartment that she had hitherto shared with her husband and children.
[1] In 1938 Altona was subsumed into the expanded Hamburg conurbation, but in the early 1930s it was still a determinedly separate municipality, with an important commercial and manufacturing sector and a large politically engaged working class.
It was precisely the sort of expanding and vibrant place that the populists sought to politicise in support of their political agenda: but by 1930 people were speaking of "Red Altona".
[7] At some point the populists evidently gave up on the hearts and minds and decided, instead, that Altona must be brought round to their way of thinking through a strategy based on terror.
[6] In Altona he joined the "Association of Red Front-Fighters" ("Roter Frontkämpferbund" / RFB), a paramilitary organisation with close links to the Communist Party and branch operations across the country.
Its emergence was seen by members and supporters as a defensive reaction to the various paramilitary right-wing groupings that had been a feature of the German political scene since the end of the war.
Lütgens quickly became a leading figure in the Altona RFB, organising protection for the homes of workers in the "red districts" of town, which by now were increasingly being subjected to "Nazi street terror".
[1] Accounts of what happened on Altona Bloody Sunday very widely, depending on the perspective of the writer, but there seems to be a consensus that the event left 18 people dead and at least seventy more badly injured.
[11] As well as dealing with individuals arrested in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire, preparations were made to use the special court for various other self-evidently political trials that had not yet, from the government perspective, been satisfactorily concluded.
[10] Although it was not formally a murder trial, it was understood that the hearing proceeded from the fact that two of the eighteen people killed during the "Bloody Sunday" fighting had been Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitaries, shot dead, according to a communist source, by fellow National Socialist fighters or, perhaps, by policemen attending the incident on the instructions of Mayor Otto Eggerstedt.
[1][a] (Otto Eggerstedt, as a member of the Social Democratic Party, was himself arrested on 27 May 1933, a week before the conclusion of the trial, on suspicion of having breached of the government's new Press Law.)
[13] The sketch was presented as evidence that Lütgens had been the individual principally responsible for organising a sniper attack during the "Bloody Sunday" fighting on the streets of Altona.
This ensured that Lütgens became well known to generations of German antifascists, but it also caused a conflation of truth and fiction worthy of Hollywood: this has sometimes proven hard to disentangle in popular consciousness.
[16][12] After 1945 there had been at least 14 occasions on which applications to have the 1933 Altona Bloody Sunday verdict lifted or reversed were simply ignored or rejected by the Hamburg prosecutor's office, thereby implicitly endorsing the constitutional legality of the National Socialist's "special court".
[17] In the end it was only the publicity given to the affair following meticulous research undertaken by the French author and former Résistance fighter, Léon Schirmann that forced Hamburg justice officials to take the rehabilitation campaign seriously.
[5] In November 1992 a criminal division of the Hamburg district court decided to overturn earlier judgments and acquit Lütgens, Tesch, Möller and Wolff on grounds of "proven manipulations of justice".
After the war had ended these remains were sent back to Hamburg and in 1947 reburied in the vast Ohlsdorf Cemetery in the special section set aside for antifascist resistance fighters.
The small "pillow-stone" commemorating August Lütgens is positioned eleven places along from the left in the fourth row of the collected memorial stones.
[3][19] More recently four commemorative "Stolpersteine" have been arranged in a square formation on the pavement outside the court house in which Lütgens and his three comrades were sentenced to death.
The port city of Rostock, which was part of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) between 1949 and 1989/90 also paid special tribute to August Lütgens.