In 1945, after he was found dead in the little summer-hut in his son's allotment (where he lived for the last two years of his life) it was determined that ever since undergoing a succession of severe torture sessions at the hands of the security services during and after 1935, he had suffered without a break from the bone tuberculosis that killed him.
[1][3] In 1899 he relocated to Delligsen, a small country town between Hanover and Göttingen, where he continued to work at tailoring and where, that same year, August Merges married Minna Hermes.
Among the membership, more than four years of war caused a steady increase in anti-war sentiment, as the deaths mounted in the battle zones and extreme hunger became commonplace in the cities.
[3][12] During 1917/18 he also headed up "Deserteurzentrale", a group founded by the Spartakists that looked after army deserters, giving them shelter and providing them with (falsified) identity papers and (forged) food stamps.
[12] As the military lines in the west collapsed, and just over a week before war ended, on 3 November 1918 addressed a (n illegal) anti-war protest rally in Braunschweig attended by around (or at least: sources differ) 1,000 people.
[12][15] As a skilful and committed orator, endowed with strong strategic skills, August Merges had a huge influence on political developments in Braunschweig between the end of the war and the middle of 1919.
Four days after the outbreak of the naval mutiny in the northern ports, the factory workers' of Braunschweig were now invited to participate in a spectacular and meticulously choreographed series of events in the city centre.
[12][11] A little later, an armed group of USPD members appeared in the city centre at the building used for the production of the "Volksfreund" (SPD party newspaper) and took it over without difficulty or drama.
His party comrade Sepp Oerter, whose opinion carried considerable weight, favoured a more parliamentary approach from the outset, advocating a directly elected state parliament to work alongside the eight "people's commissars".
The draft electoral law adopted by the workers' and soldiers' councils of Braunschweig provided for equal and direct voting rights for all persons aged 20 or above, including even women.
[11][18] On 23 November 1918 Merges became a participant in the "Rat der Volksbeauftragten" (loosely, "Council of People's Representatives"), which was fulfilling some of the functions that would have been the responsibility of the German government, if there had been one in the aftermath of the resignation of Chancellor Max von Baden.
The vote significantly raised the public profile of August Merges, who found himself pilloried in print as the "red dictator" in what his son would later call the "capitalist press".
[5] His objections, which reflected the radical concerns of many leading figures in the Braunschweig commissariat, were based on the marginalising of the workers' soviets and central involvement in the proposal of Friedrich Ebert of the SPD.
[3][12][11] The creation of the Communist Party at a congress in Berlin at the beginning of January 1919 had been the result of a coming together of various left-wing groupings, including a large number of defectors from the USPD.
The Socialist Republic of Braunschweig was one of several regions in Germany, away from Berlin, where the USPD had remained strong, and the Communists were not yet able to attract significant levels of support from working class voters.
He did not hold back from spelling out his opposition to the insufficiently radical approach being taken by the national party leadership under Paul Levi, Clara Zetkin and Wilhelm Pieck.
[23] On 15 March 1920 August Merges addressed a political rally at Schöningen, a small town to the east of Braunschweig, and along the main road towards Magdeburg.
He had been invited to do this by an action committee of SPD, USPD and Communist Party members that had come together in response to the opening salvoes, in Berlin on 12/13 March, of the (ultimately unsuccessful) Kapp Putsch against Germany's republican government.
With a return to civil war a realistic prospect, the speech culminated with a call to disarm the Schöningen citizen militia, on the grounds that "the bourgeoisie do not need to be armed".
After the speech Merges pulled together an apparently ad hoc "workers' commission": these men were tasked with demanding the surrender of the weapons of the citizen militia from Adolf Lindemann, its leader.
Merges now joined with Mayor Schelz to try and calm the mood and dissuade the angry crowd gathered outside the town hall from following Lindemann and his captors to the castle square, but many demonstrators refused to be put off.
[1] Before the congress even opened Merges and Rühle took the opportunity of a preparatory meeting to object vociferously to the "guidelines on the basic tasks of the Communist International" which had been prepared by Karl Radek.
Before they had travelled very far, they received a renewed invitation to attend the congress, however, accompanied by an assurance that the KAPD delegation would enjoy full voting rights, and their participation would not be constrained by any preconditions.
[5] Meanwhile his eldest son Alfred spent much of the decade living "underground" after escaping from jail, in 1923, having been convicted on account of his own political activism, involving "violation of the Explosives Law".
The post-democratic Hitler government, during the early years of its rule, was popular even among many working class voters who under other circumstances might have been tempted by state communism.
August Merges and his long-standing activist ally Minna Faßhauer very soon became convinced that talk of a communist revolution under circumstances in which the masses were not wishing to listen would amount simply to "banging one's head against the wall and creating martyrs".
The "Schade resistance group" – as this emerging "council communist union" called itself – developed its ideas out of sight, at least in the short term, implementing a self-imposed ban on "outwardly visible actions".
[28][29] In 1934 the group began to show its hand, producing a number of political pamphlet with titles such as "Kampfsignal" (loosely, "Battle call"), "Der Rote Rebell" and "Die braune Pest" ("The brown – i.e. Nazi – plague").
These were distributed in and around Braunschweig, presumably left in small piles at tram stops or railway stations, on park benches and bandstands, or in public toilets; wherever those interested might find them.
By 1945 it was widely accepted that the war would be won by the Soviet Union and its western allies, but August Merges did not survive long enough to experience that fearsome liberation.