Ernst Toller with a biography of Max Hoelz and a look at campaign for his release, which occurred shortly after this was written. Hoelz was a heroic working class figure who led the armed resistance to the 1920 Kapp Putsch and 1921’s ‘March Action,’ for which he was sentenced to life in prison. On his release he went to Moscow where he had, publicly, a hero’s status. Critical of Party policy, he and another German Communist military hero, Erich Wollenberg, were accused of a ‘counter-revolutionary’ plot by the NKVD. Max Hoelz died in a disputed drowning on September 15, 1933.

‘Max Hoelz’ by Ernst Toller from International Press Correspondence. Vol. 7 No. 46. November 24, 1927.

“The fundamental law of my volition and my actions has been that every man has a right to live, and the duty to help others. Throughout my life I have stressed most the value of fulfilling and realising the second half of this law: the duty of helping others. What once I did only instinctively, emotionally, for my neighbour, I do today with understanding and intelligence. It is a fine thing, Kant says somewhere, to do good to mankind from love and the impulse of sympathy, but the primary moral maxim to guide our conduct is solely duty. On that principle I act, therein lies my religion, my faith, which makes me inwardly strong and happy and self-confident. That is enough for me, all the rest is merely formal. You may reply that my theory is sharply opposed to my actual deeds I am never satisfied with merely understanding what is essential, but once I have understood, I try with all my might to translate it into fact. It is not for the sake of fighting that I am taking part in the revolutionary struggle. Once I had been driven to the realisation that the aim of human liberation could not be reached by the road along which the great Nazarene pointed, I drew the necessary conclusions and act in accordance with them, even if such action is contrary to my feelings, my emotions. I count myself among those who would be unspeakably happy if every struggle of man against man should cease. Whether that will ever be possible, I dare not determine. But I hold it my duty to exert all my strength in order that the crudest and most obvious causes of the struggle of man against man may be removed. I regard the existence of private property in land and the means of production as such…Of what use to mankind are the glorious intellectual creations and ideals of a Socrates, a Rousseau, a Kant, Fichte, Marx, if they remain mere words, mere dead letters? If they are not realised as life-giving, liberating actualities.”

SO wrote Max Hoelz to his defending counsel from the prison in Munster on July 24, 1922. No one can ignore the force and purity of his words, not even the citizen whose press portrayed Hoelz as a blood-thirsty robber captain, who was not satisfied if he had not burnt three mansions every day before breakfast and had three men shot at supper time. This confession of faith shows us a man who takes his own actions seriously, who follows his chosen path from a deep conviction of duty, knowing the tragic element in every revolution and yet possessed by a burning faith in revolution. Some have called Max Hoelz the heir of Thomas Münzer, and rightly, for only in the German Peasant Rising have the people brought forth such men.

The son of a small peasant and agricultural labourer, he himself began life as a farm labourer. The bright boy attracted the notice of an engineer, who took him under his care and sent him to England. There Hoelz found unpaid work in an engineering office. He returned to Germany and, as he could not find employment as a mechanic, he worked as a house-porter and labourer. Later, in Dresden, he attended a private school, meaning to study and prepare for a university engineering course. He earned the money for his school fees by serving in skittle alleys at public-houses, and later as a cinematograph operator.

The war broke out, and Max Hoelz volunteered with a Saxon regiment of hussars. At the front he was one of the bravest despatch riders. Hitherto he had been of the petty bourgeoisie, his ideal to get on, to do well, to push his way out of the ranks, to work his way up. His experience of the “great time ” opened his eyes. Where he had thought to find freedom, he saw oppression and complicity in the criminal schemes of the mighty. He joined the ranks of his struggling worker comrades, and after the war we find him in Saxony selling Socialist papers and speaking at meetings. As formerly he had spent his nights reading books on engineering, so now he studied in order to understand Socialist doctrine. His name first appeared in the papers on the occasion of an unemployed demonstration in Falkenstein. As a member of the Unemployed Committee he compelled the town authorities to provide food for the hungry, and wood and coal for the shivering people. The mayor called in the military, the Unemployed Committee was arrested, but Max Hoelz escaped. He worked and agitated under another name in the Launa works and other places.

At the time of the Kapp coup Hoelz hastened to Falkenstein and led an armed troop of workers against the Kappist insurgents. The workers gained the upper hand in Vogtland, and it was not until they were surrounded by fifty-thousand soldiers of the regular army that Hoelz disbanded his troop and crossed the Czech frontier. The Czech courts refused his extradition. He was not a common criminal; political motives had determined his actions. When he received news of the March rising in Middle Germany, Hoelz left his safe place of exile and, though a price was on his head, he fought in the foremost ranks, in the most responsible position. The rising was crushed, and the minutes of a Commission of Inquiry set up by the Prussian Diet give a terrible picture of the conduct of the military.

Again Hoelz escaped, in spite of fierce pursuit. The comfortable classes regarded him as their most dangerous adversary.

At last he was arrested; a spy betrayed him to the Berlin police. After his arrest the Berlin police authorities offered, on April 16, a reward of 50,000 marks for evidence that would lead to his conviction. Just think of it! A public authority deliberately seeks evidence that shall lead to the conviction of an accused person!

Erich Mühsam, in his courageous pamphlet, Justice for Max Hoelz, which the Rote Hilfe published in Berlin, writes:

“…Either the Public Prosecutor, seeking independent witnesses, as is his duty, really cannot produce a single one to confirm his suspicions that Max Hoelz has committed a certain crime for which he has been arrested–then, since his suspicions are proved mistaken, or since there is lack of evidence, he must drop the case and set the accused at liberty–or his inquiries produce the necessary evidence and he must hand the prisoner over to the competent court and ask for a date to be fixed for the trial, and must leave it to the court to determine whether, and how severely, the prisoner should be punished…We need hardly discuss the value of witnesses who hurried to offer their evidence regarding the “criminal” Hoelz after this proclamation.”

The trial was not held in Thuringia. Hoelz was brought alone before a Berlin court. He accepted responsibility for all his revolutionary acts. Only one he repudiated–the shooting of a landowner named Hess. But it was just that of which he was accused. The wife of the murdered man, who had not recognised Hoelz during the preliminary inquiry, thought during the course of the trial that she recognised the perpetrator in him, and another witness for the prosecution named Uebe, whose trustworthiness was even then open to serious doubt, clinched the matter. Hoelz defended his case in an admirable speech, which rose to a tremendous arraignment of capitalist society. It was of no use, the court held the case against him to be proved, and he was condemned to penal servitude for life.

There followed bitter years of penal servitude; he made unceasing efforts to get his case reopened. He felt himself to be unjustly sentenced, unjustly treated. The stronger a man’s character, the more hardly he suffers under imprisonment. European prisons make it their task to break the prisoner’s will. Woe to the man who shows strength of character. And Hoelz did show strength of character. It is strange; in bourgeois history books those men are crowned with praise who refused to bow, in spite of their opponents’ superior power. But if a worker adopts such an attitude, no one understands him.

At last, after five years, the investigations of Hoelz’ friends have brought about a decisive change in the situation.

In the Imperial Amnesty Committee, Felix Halle made the following statement on behalf of the Communist Parliamentary Party:

“A man called Friehe has come to Dr. Apfel, Hoelz’ defending counsel, in order to unburden his conscience, and has made the following declaration:

“He took part in the Hoelz rising of 1921 and in that capacity was at Roitzschgen, and fired the shots at the landowner Hess, for which Hoelz had been accused of manslaughter; further, he had shot at Hess with his rifle, in order to put him out of action, and moreover, he had called upon his comrades to shoot at Hess, feeling menaced by him. Because of this feeling that he was menaced, and being beside himself with fear and rage, he finally killed Hess, who had been shot at by the others as well.”

Halle, moreover, moved the following resolution:

“That the Amnesty Committee resolves to examine the locksmith, Uebe, on the subject of his conviction that in his statements before a Special Court in 1921 in the criminal case against Hoelz his evidence was in fact incorrect, in so far as he was no longer able to uphold his declaration that Max Hoelz fired several shots at the landowner Hess. After the statements made to him by the actual perpetrator, Uebe is convinced that the evidence then given by him was based upon a confusion of persons.”

As early as October, 1924, Mrs. Hess had declared that fresh doubts had arisen in her mind whether Hoelz was the real perpetrator.

Uebe’s recantation and Friehe’s confession made the deepest impression upon the Committee and upon German public opinion. The Amnesty Committee delegated its chairman, Dr. Moses, to visit the prison at Gross Strehlitz.

Meantime weeks passed. Those who had hoped that Hoelz would be set at liberty, at least provisionally, were disappointed. Hoelz had been excluded from the amnesty of 1921 solely because he was then accounted a murderer. As far as high treason alone was concerned, he must, in accordance with the intention of the law, have been included in the amnesty.

And now, what is to be done? Who can tolerate–wherever he may stand–that a man should remain one day longer in gaol for a crime that he has never committed? Should not public opinion raise a passionate demand for justice? Silence on all sides, but Hoelz need not fear that he will be forgotten. It is not the worst citizens of Germany who realise that this is no personal question, that it is an imperative moral duty to free this man of his heavy burden. And Germans, without distinction of party, have made the demand for Hoelz’ liberation a political demand. That is as it should be, for such a trial as this is never a purely judicial affair. Trial and sentence confirm the outcome of the political struggle for power.

Ehrhardt, Hitler, and all those who were sentenced for high treason on the side of the reaction in Germany enjoy their freedom; and Hoelz and the 1,300 to 1,500 others still immured in German prisons are to remain entombed, broken? No, freedom for Max Hoelz, freedom for all political prisoners!
International Press Correspondence, widely known as”Inprecorr” was published by the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) regularly in German and English, occasionally in many other languages, beginning in 1921 and lasting in English until 1938. Inprecorr’s role was to supply translated articles to the English-speaking press of the International from the Comintern’s different sections, as well as news and statements from the ECCI. Many ‘Daily Worker’ and ‘Communist’ articles originated in Inprecorr, and it also published articles by American comrades for use in other countries. It was published at least weekly, and often thrice weekly.