He attended the eight-classes primary school and thereafter did an apprenticeship with the machine production company R. Wolf in Magdeburg and became a qualified engine fitter.

In 1908 he was hired by the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft – HAPAG, an international shipping line and spent some years amongst others as a stoker; these vessels were used to move copra in the South Seas.

He became a contemporary witness of the Bourgeois revolution in China led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen.[1][2][3] In September 1913 he returned to Magdeburg as a reservist and resumed his job at the Wolf factory.

[3] In mid May 1916 the general war situation and the food supply in Kiel had deteriorated to such an extent that on 14 June, when the first early potatoes were distributed, there were assaults on sales points and storage halls.

[1] He was apprehended because of these activities and tried at a court martial, where he was sentenced to six months in a fortress prison, which he had to serve at Groß-Strehlitz in Upper Silesia.

[3] When later Artelt protested against a leaflet of the military newspaper An Flanderns Küste, which according to his statement, "heavily insulted" the striking ammunition workers in Germany, he was sent to a mental home in Bruges.

[2][6] Minutes of the Marinestation in Kiel mention Artelt as one of the "Haupthetzer (main agitators)" in a gathering in the union house on 12 April 1918.

Artelt was the first to raise political demands, including the "introduction of universal, equal and secret suffrage for both sexes"[11] and founded the first soldiers' council on 4 November 1918.

Artelt personally confronted some of those troops who came to quell the uprising and convinced them to either move back or to support the mutineers.

[13] The town archive Kiel keeps a photograph that was seen for a long time as depicting the burial procession for the victims of the revolution on 10 November 1918.

"Well into the Hitler war" a memorial plaque made of bronze was said to have been attached to the barracks building of the fifth company of the I. Torpedobootdivision in Kiel Wik, which read: Hier brach am 4.

On 6 January 1919, the Supreme Soldiers' Council, against the opposition of Artelt and Popp, gave its consent to the establishment of the 1st Marine-Brigade (also called the Iron Brigade or Division), which sailed for Berlin three days later to support the government against leftist forces.

In a short CV written in 1960, on the other hand, he justified his resignation with the fact that Noske was torpedoing his demand to build a "powerful Red Force".

[3] But in fact, the Soldiers' Council had prevailed over Noske at the end of December 1918 with the construction of a revolutionary security force.

[19] There he joined founding members of the KPD in mid February 1919[3] and was elected into the workers' council in March the same year.

The firm was closed down after salary demands were justified by the social courts of Naumburg, Jena and Berlin.

[3] After the end of the second world war, Artelt became an initiator for the KPD and SPD merger into the SED in the Querfurt district.

[3] In November 1948 Artelt held speeches with the consent of the Soviet and British occupational authorities at seven large rallies in Kiel and its surroundings.

[3] In the 1960s and 70s he became highly decorated and he gave lectures in factories, schools and so on, about his revolutionary past in Kiel and other parts of Germany.