Otto Braun

Otto Braun (28 September 1900 – 15 August 1974) was a German communist journalist and functionary of the Communist Party of Germany with a long and varied career. His most significant role was as a Comintern agent sent to China in 1934 to advise the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on military strategy during the Chinese Civil War. At the time Braun adopted a Chinese name, Li De . It was only many years later that it became known that Otto Braun and "Li De" were the same person. He was also the first secretary of the Writers' Union in the GDR.

Early life Otto Braun was born in Ismaning, Upper Bavaria, near Munich. Even though his mother was still alive, he grew up in an orphanage.

He enrolled at a teachers' training college in Pasing in the Munich area. In June 1918, Braun was drafted into the ranks of the Bavarian army, part of the Imperial German Army, but the First World War ended before he could face combat duty.

After the armistice he went back to complete his studies at the teachers' training college. However, he did not take a job as a primary school teacher. Rather, he joined the newly founded Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He embarked on what would be a lifelong vocation and career and travelled widely, mainly in North Germany.

Communist activity in the 1920s and early 1930s It seems that it was in 1921 that Braun became a full-time paid KPD party worker.

He was involved in the theft of certain sensitive documents from Colonel Freyberg, a White Russian emigrant based in Berlin. He was detained by the police in July 1921 for his part in the matter. He was put on trial but managed to hide his communist connections and convince the court that he was a "right-winger." The bias in the judicial system of the Weimar Republic led to him receiving a lighter sentence. In the end, Braun avoided going to jail, and instead, went into hiding.

By that time, he was already a core member of the KPD apparatus by not only regularly writing articles for the party papers but also, after 1924, heading the party's "counter-espionage" efforts. He was also intimately involved in its militia and paramilitary activities.

The police caught up with him again in September 1926. He first served his "Freyberg sentence" of 1922 and then was kept in detention at the Moabit Prison. However, on 11 April 1928, a band of Communists, including his then-lover Olga Benário, succeeded in staging his jail break.

The daring escape received worldwide publicity. Braun and Benário then made their way to Moscow, where they became involved in the Communist International. Both of them were at the Lenin School, which was operated by the Comintern. Braun enrolled in the Frunze Military Academy while Benário worked as an instructor at the Communist Youth International, first in the Soviet Union, then in France and England, where she participated in coordinating anti-fascist activities.

Braun and Benário parted ways in 1931. She went on to marry the famous Brazilian revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes and moved to his country. She was later arrested by the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship and extradited to Germany, where she was eventually taken to the gas chamber at the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre. She is remembered as a martyr by the Left in Brazil and Germany. For his part, Braun embarked on the most significant and, in some ways, the most controversial, part of his career dedicated to a revolutionary cause, as the Comintern representative in China.

In China In 1932, following his graduation at the Frunze Academy, Soviet Military Intelligence's Fourth Directorate dispatched Braun to Harbin in Manchuria, China. From there he traveled to Shanghai, where he joined the local Comintern bureau. There he was in military affairs under the orders of "General Kleber" (nom de guerre of Manfred Stern), who maintained a "military section" in the city, and in political issues under Arthur Ewert, a fellow German Communist.

However, Shanghai was at that time a backwater in Chinese revolutionary affairs, the local communist movement having been effectively crushed by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) in the Shanghai massacre of 1927. The CCP had subsequently retreated to the countryside and started to organize in the province of Jiangxi. In the later part of 1933 Braun arrived in Ruijin, at that time capital of the "Chinese Soviet Republic" set up by the surviving Chinese Communists, where he became a military adviser.

The precise circumstances of his getting this appointment and his activities in the following years are still debated with some aspects remaining unclear. As noted by Freddy Litten, who thoroughly researched this part of Otto Braun's career, "[Braun]'s memoirs are an important, though dubious, source for the events of these years".

At the time, the Kuomintang, perceiving the CCP as a dangerous threat to its rule, launched a series of vigorous attacks on the CCP in urban areas. Its forces came near to Ruijin, which was in danger of being surrounded and became untenable. The CCP initiated the Long March to escape this danger. Braun, under his assumed Chinese name "Li De", was nearly the only foreigner to participate in the Long March and might have even been the original proposer of the idea of embarking on such a march in an effort to reach the safer interior of China.

In the later part of 1934, Braun/Li De assumed a position of command in the early First Front Army, together with Zhou Enlai and Bo Gu, with authority to make all military decisions. Braun advocated for the First Front Army to directly attack the far larger and better-equipped KMT Army. The First Front Army's suffered great casualties and so CCP forces fell drastically from 86,000 to about 25,000, within a year.

The Red Army was forced, in October 1934, to break out of Jiangxi province and begin the Long March to meet up with other Chinese communist armies to the east. Braun and Bo Gu were still leading the army at this point. In January 1935, after seizing the town of Zunyi, the CCP held the Zunyi Conference to assess their recent defeat. Mao Zedong and Peng Dehuai expressed their opposition to Braun, Bo Gu and their tactics. Mao argued that the direct attacks had cost lives and suggested that smaller and less-well-equipped forces should have run and surround the KMT by using the guerrilla tactics for which Mao was to become famed. Mao already distrusted European advisors from the Comintern, especially since in the 1920s advisers such as the Dutch Henk Sneevliet had given disastrous advice to the CCP. Other military wing leaders agreed with Mao and so Braun and Bo Gu were removed as the military commanders, and Mao become the leader of the Long March. and other languages.

Braun died at age 74, while on vacation in Varna, Bulgaria. He was buried in East Berlin, and his obituaries appeared in Pravda and in The New York Times.