Hans Kippenberger

Hans Kippenberger (15 January 1898 – 3 October 1937) was a German communist politician who led the Antimilitärischer Apparat, the intelligence arm of the Communist Party of Germany, for most of the Weimar era. He also served as a member of the Reichstag from 1928 and 1933.

Like many other party members at the time, he also operated under "party names" by which he may be identified in sources. They included "A. Neuberg", "Leo Wolf" and "Ernst Wolf".

Early life Hans Kippenberger was born in Leipzig. His father was a lay preacher. He attended school up to the middle level and then became an intern at a printing machine factory, also in Leipzig, shortly afterwards embarking on a traineeship for bank work. When Kippenberger was discharged in January 1919, he had reached the rank of Oberleutnant.

He became a leader in the Communist Party student group and played a leading role in the Hamburg Uprising, which erupted in October 1923. In the city's politically-left-wing Barmbek quarter, Kippenberger led a fighting group of workers and also managed to plant communist moles into Hamburg police and Reichswehr units.

It was thanks to his careful oversight and military training that the communist fighter groups retreated in good order.

Sources differ over whether he returned from the Soviet Union at the end of 1924 and then lived illegally (unregistered) in Germany During 1924 and 1925, he had still been sought, apparently without success, by the Hamburg police in connection with the part that he had played in the Hamburg Uprising. Members of the Parteiselbstschutz "served as bouncers at Party meetings and specialized in cracking heads during street battles with political enemies".

Representative

In May 1928, he stood for membership of the Reichstag in the general election. He was successful, despite being arrested during the election campaign. As an elected member of the Reichstag he enjoyed certain immunities, and once the election result became known, he had to be released.

At the twelfth party conference, held in 1929 in the central Wedding district of Berlin, Kippenberg was accepted as a candidate for the party's Central Committee membership. Seen from the perspective of the Nazi Party, the BB-Ressort was "the German Communist Party's most dangerous structure".

Bülowplatz Murders

Planning Walter Ulbricht, the mastermind of the Anlauf-Lenck murders, became General Secretary of the East German SED (1949–1971).

During the last days of the Weimar Republic, the KPD had a policy of assassinating two Berlin police officers in retaliation for every KPD member killed by the police. On 2 August 1931, KPD Members of the Reichstag Kippenberger and Heinz Neumann received a dressing down from Walter Ulbricht, the party's leader in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. Enraged by police interference and by Neumann and Kippenberger's failure to follow the policy, Ulbricht snarled, "At home in Saxony we would have done something about the police a long time ago. Here in Berlin we will not fool around much longer. Soon we will hit the police in the head".

Enraged by Ulbricht's words, Kippenberger and Neumann decided to assassinate Paul Anlauf, the 42-year-old captain of the Berlin Police's Seventh Precinct. Anlauf, a widower with three daughters, had been nicknamed Schweinebacke by the KPD (the insult literally means "pork cheek" but is closer to "fat bastard").

Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, Bülowplatz, was the KPD's headquarters from 1926 to 1933. Today, it is the Berlin headquarters of the Left Party.

According to Koehler, "Of all the policemen in strife-torn Berlin, the reds hated Anlauf the most. His precinct included the area around KPD headquarters, which made it the most dangerous in the city. The captain almost always led the riot squads that broke up illegal rallies of the Communist Party".

On the morning of Sunday 9 August 1931, Kippenberger and Neumann gave a last briefing to the hit team in a room at the Lassant beer hall. The Parteiselbstschutz members Erich Mielke and Erich Ziemer were selected as the shooters. During the meeting, Max Matern gave a Luger pistol to fellow lookout Max Thunert and said, "Now we're getting serious... We're going to give Schweinebacke something to remember us by".

Kippenberger then asked Mielke and Ziemer, "Are you sure that you are ready to shoot Schweinebacke?" Mielke responded that he had seen Captain Anlauf many times during police searches of Party Headquarters. Kippenberger then instructed them to wait at a nearby beer hall which would permit them to overlook the entire Bülow-Platz. He further reminded them that Captain Anlauf was accompanied everywhere by Senior Sergeant Max Willig, whom the KPD had nicknamed Hussar.

Kippenberger concluded, "When you spot Schweinebacke and Hussar, you take care of them". Mielke and Ziemer were informed that after the assassinations had been completed, a diversion would assist in their escape. They were then to return to their homes and await further instructions.

That evening, Anlauf was lured to Bülow-Platz by a violent rally demanding the dissolution of the Prussian Parliament.

According to Koehler, "As was often the case when it came to battling the dominant SPD, the KPD and the Nazis had combined forces during the pre-plebiscite campaign. At one point in this particular campaign, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels even shared a speaker's platform with KPD agitator Walter Ulbricht. Both parties wanted the parliament dissolved because they were hoping that new elections would oust the SPD, the sworn enemy of all radicals. That fact explained why the atmosphere was particularly volatile this Sunday".

Murder at the Babylon Cinema The "Babylon Cinema", the site of the assassinations of Anlauf and Lenck, as it appears today.

At eight o'clock that evening, Mielke and Ziemer waited in a doorway as Captain Anlauf, Sergeant Willig and Captain Franz Lenck walked toward the Babylon Cinema, which was located in Berlin at the corner of Bülowplatz and Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße. As they reached the door of the movie house, the policemen heard someone scream, "Schweinebacke!"

As Anlauf turned toward the sound, Mielke and Ziemer opened fire at point blank range. Willig was wounded in the left arm and the stomach but managed to draw his Luger pistol and fired a full magazine at the assailants. Lenck was shot in the chest and fell dead in front of the entrance. Willig crawled over and cradled the head of Captain Anlauf, who had taken two bullets in the neck. As his life drained away, the Captain gasped, "Wiedersehen... Gruss..." ("So Long... Goodbye...").

The funeral of Anlauf and Lenck was attended by thousands of Berliners.

According to Koehler, "Back at Bülowplatz, the killings had triggered a major police action. At least a thousand officers poured into the square, and a bloody street battle ensued. Rocks and bricks were hurled from the rooftops. Communist gunmen fired indiscriminately from the roofs of surrounding apartment houses. As darkness fell, police searchlights illuminated the buildings. Using megaphones, officers shouted, 'Clear the streets! Move away from the windows! We are returning fire!' By now the rabble had fled the square, but shooting continued as riot squads combed the tenements, arresting hundreds of residents suspected of having fired weapons. The battle lasted until one o'clock the next morning. In addition to the two police officers, the casualties included one Communist who died of a gunshot wound and seventeen others who were seriously wounded".

Anlauf's wife had died three weeks earlier of kidney failure. The KPD's murder of Captain Anlauf thus left their three daughters as orphans. His oldest daughter was forced to drastically rush her planned wedding to keep her sisters from being put in an orphanage. Lenck was survived by his wife.

After the murders, the act was celebrated at the Lichtenberger Hof, a favorite beer hall of the Rotfrontkämpferbund, where Mielke boasted: "Today we celebrate a job that I pulled!"

Aftermath German policemen lay a wreath on the monument to Anlauf and Lenck during the Day of the German Police, 16 January 1937. Although Anlauf and Lenck had been members of the SPD, the Nazi salute is given by many of those present. In 1951, Erich Mielke ordered the demolition of the monument. According to Koehler, "Kippenberger was alarmed when word reached him that Sergeant Willig had survived the shooting. Not knowing whether the sergeant could talk and identify the attackers, Kippenberger was taking no chances. He directed a runner to summon Mielke and Ziemer to his apartment at 74 Bellermannstrasse, only a few minutes walk from where the two lived. When the assassins arrived, Kippenberger told them the news and ordered them to leave Berlin at once. The parliamentarian's wife Thea, an unemployed schoolteacher and as staunch a Communist Party member as her husband, shepherded the young murderers to the Belgian border. Agents of the Communist International (Comintern) in the port city of Antwerp supplied them with money and forged passports. Aboard a merchant ship, they sailed for Leningrad. When their ship docked, they were met by another Comintern representative, who escorted them to Moscow".

Nazi Germany The political backdrop was transformed with the Nazi seizure of power, in January 1933. The new government lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Kippenberger was one of those who participated in the held at the , near Berlin, on 7 February 1933. The meeting would subsequently be celebrated as both the first and last meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee held in Nazi Germany.

The Reichstag fire, on 27 February 1933, was immediately blamed on the Communist Party, and by the end of the year, participants in the Ziegenhals meeting and most of the other active party politicians had either fled abroad or been arrested. The Communist Party structure was shattered. Kippenberger took on and preserved much of its paramilitary apparatus under conditions of enhanced secrecy and certain important tasks were accomplished, but the Gestapo nevertheless succeeded in infiltrating his information and communications structures.

In response to claims that the confessions had been obtained under torture by the Nazi Gestapo, Koehler wrote, "However, all suspects were in the custody of the regular Berlin city criminal investigation bureau, most of whose detectives were SPD members. Some of the suspects had been nabbed by Nazi SA men and probably beaten before they were turned over to police. In the 1993 trial of Mielke, the court gave the defense the benefit of the doubt and threw out a number of suspect confessions".

On 19 June 1934, the 15 conspirators were convicted of murder. The three deemed most culpable, Michael Klause, Max Matern and Friedrich Bröde, were sentenced to death. Their co-defendants received sentences ranging from nine months to fifteen years incarceration at hard labour. Klause's sentence was commuted to life in prison based upon his cooperation. Bröde hanged himself in his cell. As a result, only Matern was left to be executed by beheading on 22 May 1935.

Fall from grace In the context of increasingly-shrill attacks against him from Ulbricht, Pieck and their supporters, on 12 February 1935 the Party Politburo set up a commission of enquiry into Kippenberger. In October 1935, a party congress was held in which Ulbricht and his allies took over the party leadership. The resignation of two of Thälmann's old lieutenants, Hermann Schubert and Fritz Schulte, left Kippenberger unambiguously on the losing side. In Ulbricht, Kippenberger had acquired a powerful and uncompromising enemy at the top of the party who enjoyed the backing of the Soviet Communist Party. Kippenberger lost his position on the Central Committee, and the quasi-military underground operation that he had directed was dissolved. He was ordered to be relocated from Paris to Moscow, where he was provided with factory work. In February 1938, Thea, who now worked as a teacher, was arrested. A special NKVD tribunal sentenced her to a lengthy term in the Gulag. In 1939, she died in a concentration camp in Siberia. It would be another 22 years before she would learn of her parents' fates. The family nevertheless felt treated as outsiders, and while Margot built her life in the new country, Igor soon returned to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1984.

Works Together with Adolf Franck: Monistische Jugendbewegung „Sonne“ (Monistic Youth Movement "Sun"). Verlag Paul Hartung, Hamburg 1922 A. Neuberg: Der bewaffnete Aufstand. Versuch einer theoretischen Darstellung (Armed Insurrection. An Attempt at a Theoretical Presentation). Allegedly published by "Otto Meyer, Zürich" 1928. Reprinted with an introduction by Erich Wollenberg, EVA, Frankfurt am Main 1971. Authors: O. Piatnitzki, Michael N. Tuchatschewski, Hồ Chí Minh and others. A. Neuberg is a pseudonym. Chapter 4, "Der Aufstand in Hamburg" (The Hamburg Uprising), pp. 66–94, is by Kippenberger.