Willy Sachse (7 January 1896 – 21 August 1944) was a German socialist and communist who took part in the Sailors' Revolt at the end of the First World War.
[3] Later, when he took to writing, many of his novels concerned life at sea, and were written with a descriptive clarity suggesting personal experience of seafaring far beyond anything that he would have acquired merely through serving in the navy during the war.
[2] Because of the leading role he had played in organising a sailors' mutiny in the imperial high seas fleet Sachse was sentenced on 26 August 1917[2] to death, withdrawal of citizen's rights for the rest of his life and dismissal from the navy.
Also, as it later transpired, a powerfully moving letter requesting mercy was sent on his behalf to the chancellor, pointing out, among other things, that he was his parents' only son, and so their only hope of avoiding destitution in old age.
There is much about this letter that remains a mystery but, regardless of why and how, the authorities commuted Sachse's death sentence, substituting a 15-year jail term, while the lifetime loss of citizen's rights was replaced with a finite five year deprivation.
It appears that being known as a man who had survived a death sentence for revolutionary activities back in 1917 gave Sachse a certain kudos with comrades, and during the 1920s he became increasingly effective as a writer-journalist who a took real delight in writing.
[3] In his posthumously published memoire, "Der Rote Graf" ("The Red Count") Alexander Stenbock-Fermor recalled Willy Sachse with affection: I liked him at once: a thickset man, who felt like an "agreeable neighbour", warm and open-hearted, who liked to live well.
Doch bei jedem Gespräch spürte man sein großes politisches Wissen und seine erstaunliche Allgemeinbildung[3][5]On 6 March 1926 the "Hamburger Echo", a Social Democratic newspaper, published exerts from a grovelling letter which Sachse was said to have sent to the Kaiser in 1917, begging for mercy in respect of the death sentence he received that year.
[2] The second half of 1926 Sachse spent in a Leipzig prison cell, held in "investigative custody" on suspicion of having committed high treason.
He was - as was normal in Germany - permitted to exchange letters and write articles for friends during this time, although outbound correspondence tended to be held up for weeks while prison staff laboriously copied down their contents.
[3] His arrest was triggered by a renewed interest on the part of the authorities in Sachse's role in the mutiny that had occurred in the imperial fleet in 1917.
On any suspected culpability regarding the naval mutiny, Sachse maintained that he had already been expelled from the navy and suffered five year's loss of civic rights, and was in any case the beneficiary of the judicial amnesty of 12 November 1918.
[3] It was presumably the same text by "Anti-Nautikus" that was published under the title "Germany's Revolutionary Sailors" ("Deutschlands revolutionäre Matrosen") during 1925, with a foreword added by Ernst Thälmann, a party leader.
[2] Despite being in prison, from May 1926 Sachse was listed as the Arts and Supplement editor ("Kultur- und Feuilletonredakteur") on the Leipzig-based "Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung" ("Saxony Workers' Newspaper"), then published on behalf of the party under the editorial direction of Paul Böttcher.
[2] Despite meeting with some success commercially, Sachse was excluded from the government sponsored Reichsschrifttumskammer (State chamber of writers) after he turned down the idea that he should write a book about sea travel "with a Nazi flavour" (" ... über die Seefahrt im nationalsozialistischen Sinne").
[3] Available sources are silent on what the group did, but by September 1941 it comprised more than 200 people, with connections to similar organisations in Leipzig, Munich, Vienna, Innsbruck and Essen.