Witness to the German Revolution Read Online Free Page A

75 —intervened with the greatest brutality. One poor
woman was literally trampled underfoot by three uniformed brutes. Afterwards she was carried for first aid to Die Rote Fahne, whose offices were nearby. And that is significant.
    These people feel condemned, that they can’t go on living like this, and that the authorities are quite ready to give them bullets rather than bread.

July 29
    It is in these conditions that everywhere in Germany preparations are being made for the Anti-Fascist Day of action on July 29, in which the KPD is calling for the participation, not only of workers, but of the working middle classes, civil servants, small investors, peasants, in short all the ruined, all the hungry, all the infuriated, precisely all those whom fascism is asking to fight against the proletariat on behalf of high finance…
    After long hesitation, the government, greatly embarrassed, has made its mind up. The Reich minister of the interior, Herr Oesel, has proposed that all the states in the Reich should ban all open air demonstrations and disperse them, if necessary by force. Citizen 76 Severing, social democratic minister of the interior in the bourgeois Prussian government, the Severing of the odious provocations of March 1921, 77 immediately banned the demonstration on July 29. His colleague Noske, social democratic president of the Hanover government, had anticipated him by doing the same some days earlier.

    The demonstration will go ahead nonetheless. Peacefully or otherwise—that depends entirely on the government’s attitude—it will now, in any case, have a doubly revolutionary impact. Will Herr Cuno dare, if the situation arises, to use the troops against the proletariat and middle classes determined to demonstrate their willingness to struggle against fascism which, for its part, is mocking the Leipzig high court, defying the republican government and counting on the support of the Reichswehr and the police? When the Bavarian reactionaries disregard the republican laws of the Reich, the central government puts up with the blow and does not react in any way. The KPD today is strong enough not to submit to the decrees of ministers who are protecting fascism. On July 29 shall we see the police and the army mobilized alongside the fascist gangs, forming a common front with them? To tell the truth, it would be no surprise. But then the government of the “republic” would decisively discredit itself in the eyes of the backward working-class elements who still have illusions in it. And that would be a big step forward.
    The fascist organizations in Berlin are preparing a counterdemonstration for July 29. Their appeal is signed by the DNVP, the People’s Party of National Freedom (officially banned, but this detail is unimportant to it), the National Union of German Officers and the United Patriotic Associations. The fascist game is clear. If the government acts against the proletariat, make a bloc with it, impose vigorous repression, and then grab all the advantages from the situation. We are on the brink of civil war.

Ehrhardt and Noske
    Naturally Ehrhardt is still on the run. There are even good reasons to believe that at this moment he is the darling of the smartest salons in Budapest. There is nothing more revealing of the complicity of the republican regime towards reaction than the escape of
this commander in chief. The Saxon government has published some very interesting material on this subject. A cousin of Ehrhardt from Hamburg, a friend of various ministers and of Herr Cuno, was able to discuss freely in private in Leipzig jail with the man charged by the high court. The latter enjoyed all conceivable freedoms in prison. His escape still remains mysterious. Not a single door was forced. The prisoner evaporated leaving no trace. Good Lord! Benevolent jailers opened the doors for him. They expect to receive promotion—after the fascist coup. One detail: a few days before