German October
The Reichswehr under Otto Gessler, with the support of the Stresemann cabinet and Reich President Friedrich Ebert, issued an ultimatum demanding the reorganisation of these governments to exclude the Communists.
Three major events in 1923, the occupation of the Ruhr, separatist unrest in the Rhineland and the Palatinate, and the danger of Hitler's far-right beer hall putsch in Bavaria spreading across the country put the Weimar Republic government under extreme pressure.
[1] Shortly after the Cuno government took office, Belgian and French troops marched into Germany on January 11, 1923, and occupied the Ruhr area.
The reason was that Germany did not fulfill her reparations obligations under the Treaty of Versailles by failing to deliver sawn timber, telegraph poles and coal.
"[6] As part of the passive resistance, public moments of silence were held and the officials and employees of the Reichsbahn delayed the travel of the coal trains to the west.
One consequence was that the paramilitary proletarian hundreds were not banned there, but began in August 1923 to intensify their military exercises and to collect weapons.
From October 21, 1923, the separatists brought some Rhenish city and community administrations (e.g. in Aachen, Koblenz, Bonn, Wiesbaden, Trier and Mainz) under their control, partly with the help of the Belgian and French occupation troops.
This approach was met with disapproval by the German, British and American governments,[4] as well as resistance from the population [4] and led to the end of the uprising by November 1923 after operations by Prussian police and auxiliaries as well as the withdrawal of the French support for the separatists.
Radek was supposed to influence the Central Committee of the KPD to follow the Moscow line, Schmidt was to act as the organizer of the revolutionary cells within the German trade unions, Pyatakov was responsible for general coordination and liaison with Moscow, and Unschlicht was responsible for paramilitary issues and for the formation of a German Cheka planned to operate after the coup.
According to Russian historian Vadim Rogovin, the leadership of the German Communist party had requested that Moscow send Leon Trotsky to Germany to direct the 1923 insurrection.
However, this proposal was rejected by the Politburo which was controlled by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev who decided to send a commission of lower-ranking Russian Communist party members.
Brandler, who had warned against hasty steps in August, now turned around and painted the project's prospects for success in the rosiest of colors: 253,000 communists were ready to fight in proletarian hundreds; fifteen divisions could be formed from them in six to eight weeks.
[4] On October 13, 1923, the "proletarian hundreds" were banned by the commanding Lieutenant General in Saxony Alfred Müller, who had also held the executive power since September 27.
[1][4] As planned, armed communists - around 300 men - raided 17 police stations to steal firearms and occupied public buildings.
The actions of the army took place without a formal decision by the federal government, but on behalf of the Reich President Friedrich Ebert.
After Zeigner's refusal to form a government without communists, a formal Reichsexekution according to Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution took place on October 29.
[16] The Saxon state government under the Social Democratic Prime Minister Erich Zeigner was de facto removed from office by the Reich President Ebert on the basis of these emergency decrees.
On October 30, Prime Minister Erich Zeigner formally resigned in favor of Alfred Fellisch as head of a pure SPD cabinet, which also ended Heinze's mandate as Reichskomissar.
In a "closed letter" dated November 5, the ECCI accused the KPD leadership of deliberately misrepresenting the situation in Germany.
The trio at the head of the Soviet Communist Party (Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev) by attacking the "right-wing" Brandler group in the KPD were able to also strike against Trotsky and his supporters at the same time.
[10] The Beer Hall Putsch is not historically considered a part of the German October although it was initiated at the same time and failed in November 1923.
Thus, a coup on November 9, 1923, was planned not only by the KPD but also by the far-right national camp with the Munich beer hall putschist Adolf Hitler and the World War I general Erich Ludendorff at the helm.
[10] The causal connections between the events only became fully clear long after, because the archives in Moscow - and the corresponding secret protocols - are only now accessible to historians.
The "German October" had to be broken off prematurely in Saxony and Thuringia, the "March on Berlin" did not even get beyond Munich, and Rhenish separatism collapsed miserably, not only because the attempts were amateurish, but above all because a "dictatorship of the proletariat" based on the Soviet model, a "Führer state" based on the Italian model or the destruction of the country's unity were only considered desirable by a small minority of the population.
