By Mireya Castaneda
The only thing missing was the confession of the criminal. And now it's here. The German magazine Stern has published extracts of the unedited Memoirs of Captain Waldemar Pabst, the man who organised the arrest and murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
It was never a secret, since it was clear since 1919 who were responsible for the order and the shootings, but neither Pabst, nor his superior Gustav Noske, nor the direct murderers were ever sentenced for the crime.
According to the French daily L'Humanite (January 17, 1995), Pabst reaffirms in his Memoirs that he acted on the order of the minister of defence at that time, Social Democrat Noske. "Neither Noske nor I doubted that it was necessary to kill them."
These unfinished memoirs are now out in the open, 25 years after Pabst's death in the tranquillity of his home (but apparently not with a clear conscience) in what was at that time West Germany, where he received a government pension.
And in a second unpublished document, a letter to an editor who had been interested in the book, he considers that "if I open my mouth after keeping quiet for 50 years, it will be a destructive scandal for the Social Democratic Party".
Destructive scandal? Maybe for Pabst, inasmuch as it was never a secret that Noske gave the order to kill his fellow members of the Social Democratic Party, because Luxemburg and Liebknecht had initiated political disputes within the party. Later they quit the party because of theoretical convictions and more concretely because they opposed the war bonds that the party approved in 1914. Therefore, they founded the Spartacist League, and later in 1918, the Communist Party.
It was never a secret. Pabst's documents could be revealing, but only about the illegality of his trial and those of the other gunmen, Navy Lieutenant Herman Souchon and Colonel Waiss-Vogtmna, and of the cover-up.
One year before the death of Pabst, the regional TV network Sueddeutsche Rundfunk showed a documentary film in which Souchon appears shooting Luxemburg.
L'Humanite recalls in the article about Pabst's Memoirs that six members of the commando that committed the murders only appeared before a court of Prussian officers, who easily accepted the version that Liebknecht was killed during an escape attempt, and that Luxemburg's murderer was unidentified.
The fact that it never was a secret is shown in the liberal Cuban magazine Bohemia, which in May 1942 published an article under the title "The Fehme's Murders", about the Luxemburg and Liebknecht case and others.
This article indicates that the Fehme was a German institution of the Middle Ages, a secret court that disappeared in the 15th century and reappeared in the 20th to eliminate Liebknecht and Luxemburg.
It was never a secret. The assassins have always been Identified. This is how the above article in Bohemia describes the crime: "At the beginning of 1919 they were taken to the Eden Hotel in Berlin ... and there Captain Pabst ... ordered that they be taken to the Moabit prison and gave the order to liquidate them".
In his Memoirs, Pabst refers to a telephone conversation with Noske in which the latter demanded that he take action against Luxemburg and Liebknecht. "I returned to my desk to reflect upon how to carry it [the assassinations] out."
From the 1942 article: "Liebknecht was taken prisoner. They put him in a car which entered the Tiergarten ... they shot him twice; the body was taken back to the Eden Hotel reporting that he tried to escape ... Then it was Rosa's turn. They hit her on the head, took her outside the city and threw her into the municipal canal.'
Liebknecht was buried January 25, with another 31 murdered soldiers. Luxemburg's remains were identified five months later, and just as with Liebknecht, an impressive crowd followed her casket to the grave (the Friedreichfelde Cemetery in Berlin, on June 13, 1919).
The double assassination was the consecration of the brutal repression that drowned the 1918 German revolution in blood. Noske had stated at the time: "Someone has to become a bloodthirsty dog, and I don't fear assuming such a responsibility".
For history, for his own Memoirs, Pabst comes off as a confessed murderer, and Noske a bloodthirsty dog, as he defined himself.
Shortly before his arrest, Liebknecht had written an article titled "In Spite of Everything", in which he directly accused Noske of bloody repression: "The day of justice is coming for Ebert, Scheideman and Noske, and for all the capitalist tycoons who hide behind them. We will already be dead when that day comes ..."
And Rosa Luxemburg predicted in a letter to her friend Luisa Kautsky: "One day, I will die in the line of work, in prison, fighting on the street ..."
On the 50th anniversary of the double assassination, Le Nouvel Observateur wrote: "Rosa and Karl are not only human beings. They are symbols."
And that is how Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht have gone down in history.
[From Granma International.]