August Lütgens

August Lütgens (16 December 1897 – 1 August 1933) was a communist activist who spent the 1920s exiled in the Soviet Union. 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". On 1 August 1933 August Lütgens was executed: four men were convicted and executed at the same time, but Lütgens was identified at the time as the leading figure among them, and of the four cases, it is the one involving Lütgens that has received the most coverage subsequently.

As one of the first and most highly publicised government opponents to be executed after the rapid switch to dictatorship in 1933, August Lütgens was soon being celebrated by government opponents as "one of the first victims of fascist justice to be killed". His fame was further enhanced after 1945. Particularly in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic / East Germany), he was celebrated as an antifascist hero. A naval academy was even named in his honour. Lütgens had been convicted in 1933 by a "special court", and in 1945 a campaign was launched in Hamburg to expose unsatisfactory aspects of his trial and secure rehabilitation for Lütgens and the three men executed with him. In 1992 the Hamburg district court reversed all four of the earlier judgements, citing "manipulations of justice" ("Justizmanipulationen").

Biography Provenance and early years August Lütgens was born into a working class Social Democratic family in Lübeck where he grew up, the eldest of his parents' twelve children. Since both parents worked long hours, for most of the time the children were left to their own devices. 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. As his sisters grew older they were able to take over the domestic duties, however, and August took a job as an errand boy, working for a pharmacist. In the evenings he distributed the newspaper of the Metal Workers' Union. 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. It was here that August Lütgens settled in the commercial heart of the town, close to the fish market. Like millions of others in Germany at this time, he was unemployed and living on welfare.

A wave of arrests followed. However, it was only on 25 August 1932, slightly more than a month after the battle, that August Lütgens was arrested at his girlfriend's apartment in the centre of Hamburg, and detained.

Dealing with communists On the night of 27 February 1933 Reichstag building in Berlin suffered a destructive arson attack. The alacrity with which the government responded has been taken by subsequent historians as an indication that they had somehow known in advance that the arson attack would take place. The Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending a range of basic civil liberties, was issued on 28 February 1933. The government let it be known that "communists" had been responsible for the attack, and a wave of arrests of known Communist Party leaders and activists rapidly ensued. As the trial of August Lütgens the previous week had demonstrated, the government still could not rely on the German courts to produce the right verdict when those arrested communists faced trial. The solution that presented itself was the revival of "special courts". By the end of March 1933 a network of special courts, specially designed to deal with political trials, was in place across Germany. 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. The case of August Lütgens was one of these.

The trial before the Special Court in Altona concluded on 2 June 1933.

The novelist Arnold Zweig used the story of August Lütgens' final months as the backdrop for his 1947 novel Das Beil von Wandsbek ("The hatchet of Wandsbek"). The book provided the basis for a film in 1952 and another in 1981. It was widely distributed and well known in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) but remained almost entirely unknown in the German Federal Republic (West Germany). It never purported to be other than a novel, but the narrative nevertheless drew much of its power from true facts incorporated and referenced in it. It became part of the wider process whereby during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s August Lütgens became a hero of Communist propaganda and iconography. 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.

Campaign for rehabilitation In the end it took slightly more than sixty years before friends, relatives, international justice activists and other campaigners secured from a Hamburg court posthumous rehabilitation for August Lütgens, and the three others executed with him at the Altona court complex on 1 August 1933. 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".

After decades of procrastination, and following yet another application, a retrial was ordered on the sixtieth anniversary of Altona Bloody Sunday.

Celebration The bodies of the four executed men - many sources identify them as victims not of execution but of murder - were quietly transported to Berlin and there cremated. Not till 1935 did the authorities secretly bury the urns containing their ashes in a corner of Berlin's Marzahn Park Cemetery. 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. 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 parkland surrounding the former Altona Hospital ("Alte Krankenhäuser Altona") has been renamed "August-Lütgens-Park" in commemoration and celebration. The park is one of several public amenities carrying the name of August Lütgens.

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. The government controlled training and education facility of the Deutsche Seereederei, the organisation responsible for all the East German shipping involved in foreign trade since 1952, changed its name to GST-Marineschule „August Lütgens“ in 1980, and a memorial tablet was placed in the inner courtyard of the training academy in Rostock's Krischanweg (street). The Rostock sculptor Wolfgang Eckardt created a medal showing his portrait. In 2001 an unknown attacker destroyed the memorial tablet in Rostock, but the cultural office of the city council has given repeat assurances that during the course of redevelopment along the Krischanweg the memorial will be appropriately restored, with a guarantee of public access.