Assassination of Eichhorn

On 30 July 1918, shortly before two in the afternoon, the highest-ranking German in Ukraine, the commander of Army Group Kiev, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, was killed in an assassination in the Lypky district of Kiev. The bomb was thrown by 24-year-old Boris Donskoy, a member of the Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. The gravely wounded field marshal died the same evening. It was the second killing of a senior German representative in the east in less than four weeks, after the Left SRs shot the ambassador Mirbach in Moscow on 6 July.

The seventy-year-old field marshal

Eichhorn was 70 and had a long career behind him. From January 1915 to March 1918 he commanded the German Tenth Army, which fought among other battles in the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes and in August 1915 took Kovno. At the end of March 1918 he took command of the army group in Kiev, which occupied most of Ukraine, apart from the areas under Austro-Hungarian administration, as well as the Crimea and part of southern Russia. His staff, headed by General Wilhelm Groener, was associated with the whole of German policy in Ukraine: the April order on sowing the fields, which provoked a dispute with the Central Rada, and the coup that brought Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi to power.

In the countryside the occupation meant grain requisitions and the return of landowners to their estates, often escorted by German soldiers. In the summer of 1918 peasant uprisings broke out, the largest of which in June engulfed the Zvenyhorodka and Tarashcha districts in the Kiev region. Acts of sabotage multiplied. In the eyes of the revolutionaries Eichhorn was “the chief executioner and strangler of the peasantry”, and the Left SRs, opponents of the peace with Germany, had regarded him since the spring as one of the main targets for assassination.

The bomb in Katerynynska Street

The attack was prepared in Kiev by a group sent from Moscow by the party’s combat organisation: Irina Kakhovskaya, Grigory Smolyansky and Donskoy himself, supported by Ukrainian Left SRs. For several weeks they shadowed the field marshal. According to the findings of the Ukrainian historian Viktor Volkovynskyi, based on the investigation files, they established that every day at about one in the afternoon he walked from his flat to lunch at the staff officers’ mess in Katerynynska Street. That day he was walking along the pavement with his aide-de-camp, Captain Walter von Dressler. At the corner of Lypskyi Lane Donskoy, wearing a coat and a straw hat, took a bomb from his pocket and threw it towards the two officers. Some press reports of the time stated that the field marshal was riding in a carriage.

The explosion was so loud that Pavlo Skoropadskyi heard it from the garden of his nearby residence. The hetman ran to the scene and found Eichhorn being bandaged and laid on a stretcher. The field marshal recognised him. Beside him lay Dressler, his legs torn off. Both were taken to hospital. The aide-de-camp died the same day, and Eichhorn, according to the hetman’s proclamation, at ten in the evening. Skoropadskyi later wrote in his memoirs that he was sorry for “that worthy old man”, sensible and kindly, a grandson of the philosopher Schelling.

The assassin

Donskoy tried to escape in a cab, and when the horse would not move he began to run, but after a few dozen metres he stopped and raised his hands. In keeping with the tradition of SR fighters, he did not intend to hide. He was a peasant from Ryazan Governorate, during the war he had served as a sailor in the Baltic Fleet, and after the February Revolution he had sat on the executive committee of the soviet in Kronstadt. At his first interrogation he stated that the party’s Central Committee had sentenced Eichhorn to death because he had “strangled the revolution in Ukraine”, changed the system of government, carried out a coup by installing the hetman, and taken the land from the peasants. A German field court martial sentenced him to death, and on 10 August he was publicly hanged in Kiev.

The organisers planned another blow. On 1 August, during the memorial service in Kiev’s Lutheran church, the hetman was to be killed, but Skoropadskyi left before Kakhovskaya could reach the spot. Shortly afterwards she fell into a German ambush outside the city and was arrested.

After the assassination

The hetman issued an appeal to the Ukrainian people, in which he called the dead man a sincere friend of Ukraine and stressed that the crime had been committed not by a son of Ukraine but by a stranger. On 1 August the coffins of Eichhorn and Dressler were carried in a solemn procession through the city to the station and sent to Germany. The field marshal was buried in Berlin in the Invalids’ Cemetery. His successor in Kiev, from 8 August, was Colonel-General Günther von Kirchbach.

The assassination did not change German policy in Ukraine, but it showed how fragile the foundations of the Hetmanate were. The people of Kiev took it as a sign that the occupiers’ fortunes were beginning to turn. Mikhail Bulgakov recalled the killing of the field marshal in his novel The White Guard as a harbinger of the retreat of the Germans, whose affairs in the west were going from bad to worse.