A Red Guard before Munich: Reportage from the Munich Soviet Republic

by Erich Wollenberg, Ed Walker (Translator, Introduction))

More than ten thousand men marched through the streets of Munich on April 22, 1919. They were members of Germany's first Red Army, recruited to defend the Bavarian Soviet Republic, under the command of Rudolf Egelhofer, a former sailor in the German Imperial Navy and barely 24 years old. Erich Wollenberg commanded the Red Army Group North (Dachau) infantry as it faced the advancing White Guard composed of Freikorps, backed by the Hoffmann government in Bamberg. It is a story of heroism and betrayal, as the Soviet Republic and the Red Army were crushed in just two weeks. Bonus material includes short biographical details about Wollenberg and Egelhofer, an essay on the Wollenberg-Hoelz "conspiracy" and Stalin's anti-German purge, and the courtroom speech of the leader of the Communist government in Munich, Eugen Leviné.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Germany

153 pages, Paperback

Published July 5, 2021

Reviews

[CivilWar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unfortunately unknown book translated by our party, Wollenberg's "A Red Guard Facing Munich" is a report about the struggles of the Red Army in Bavaria, the first Red Army in Germany and in the Western world, and it details the struggle in a lot of detail.

I had studied the Bavarian communist revolution before, and still reading this was profoundly illuminating - I didn't know about the extreme betrayal carried out by the theater kid anarchist Ernst Toller or his Independent social-democratic pals.

Considering that this has detailed descriptions of the military operations of the Bavarian Red Army, it's also interesting to see how such an army fought against an army made up of professionals, and could have even won in the purely military field, if not for the betrayal of the USPD.

Overall, highly recommended. The "Civil War in France" of the Bavarian Soviet Republic.