Execution of Reichpietsch and Köbis

On the morning of 5 September 1917, at the Wahn artillery range near Cologne, a firing squad from a Landsturm unit, commanded by a major, shot two sailors of the German High Seas Fleet: 22-year-old Max Reichpietsch of the battleship Friedrich der Grosse and 24-year-old stoker Albin Köbis of the battleship Prinzregent Luitpold. They had been leaders of a movement that in the summer of 1917 collected signatures in the fleet for a peace without annexations and protested against the poor treatment and food of the crews. A court martial sentenced five sailors to death, but the sentences were carried out only on these two. The execution closed an investigation that had begun after the protest by the crew of Prinzregent Luitpold at the beginning of August.

The verdict

Reichpietsch, Köbis and three other members of the group that had coordinated the movement on the ships were tried by the field court of the IV Squadron in Wilhelmshaven. The investigation was conducted by the naval judge Dr Dobring, who from the outset presented the case as a conspiracy directed by the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). According to later research, with hours-long interrogations and threats he induced the detainees to sign statements he had dictated, and the accused were refused the defence counsel they wished to name. In its verdict of 25 August the court found that the sailors had created an organisation ready, on a signal from its leaders, to start a fleet strike and force a peace, by violence if necessary. The mere creation of such an organisation it already deemed accomplished “treasonable incitement to mutiny”. This interpretation decided the verdict: an attempt carried only penal servitude, the completed act the death penalty.

Even naval lawyers had doubts. Köbis’s defence counsel argued that the organisation had simply been recruiting members for the USPD and collecting lists of signatures that party delegates were to take to the socialist peace conference in Stockholm. Senior Judge Advocate de Bary, who on 30 August prepared a legal opinion before the verdict was confirmed, considered the conviction for accomplished incitement to mutiny legally open to challenge and advised commuting the death sentences to imprisonment. The verdict, however, was confirmed by the fleet commander, Admiral Reinhard Scheer. On 2 September Scheer wrote that he acknowledged the objections but, despite his doubts, accepted the court’s interpretation. For three of the condemned, Willy Sachse, Wilhelm Weber and Hans Beckers, he commuted the death sentence to 15 years’ penal servitude each. Reichpietsch and Köbis, regarded as the chief ringleaders, he did not pardon. By comparison, in a separate trial of those who took part in the walk-out from Prinzregent Luitpold itself, the stoker Bernhard Spanderen, sentenced to death on 23 August as a ringleader, received four years’ imprisonment from Scheer, because no links to the USPD had been proved against him.

Near Cologne

After the sentences were confirmed, the two condemned men were taken from Wilhelmshaven to Cologne, far from the fleet. The execution took place three days after Scheer’s decision, on the grounds of the foot artillery range at Wahn, where both were buried. The censors allowed no word of it into the press. According to the historian Christoph Regulski, the crews of the High Seas Fleet were told that the sentences had been carried out only on 9 September. In a farewell letter to his parents, later published by, among others, the writer Ernst Toller, Köbis is said to have written: “Though I do not die gladly so young, I die with a curse on the German militarist state.”

It did not end with the two death sentences. Many other sailors were sentenced to long years in prison or sent as punishment to the front in Flanders, and by the beginning of September the movement on the ships had been broken with the help of informers. The causes of discontent, namely the gulf between the wardroom and the lower deck, hunger and the idleness of the big ships, remained.

Repercussions

On 9 October the affair reached the Reichstag. The State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, Admiral Eduard von Capelle, and Chancellor Georg Michaelis accused USPD deputies, among them Wilhelm Dittmann and Georg Ledebour, of complicity in the conspiracy in the fleet. They relied on statements whose credibility was already being questioned within the administration itself, and a later investigation by the Reich Court found no evidence against the deputies. The Social Democrats supported the USPD’s motion of no confidence, and the embarrassment contributed to Michaelis’s fall at the end of October.

For the German left Reichpietsch and Köbis became martyrs. Dittmann, who in the 1920s went through the secret files for a Reichstag committee of inquiry, called their trial “a judicial murder by the navy”. Their convicted comrades left prison only during the November Revolution of 1918, when the new government proclaimed an amnesty for political offences on 12 November. The writer Theodor Plievier, himself a naval rating, dedicated his 1930 novel Des Kaisers Kulis (The Kaiser’s Coolies) to them. In 1947 Berlin’s Tirpitzufer, the embankment in front of the former Imperial Naval Office building, was renamed Reichpietschufer. In East Germany streets, ships and schools bore their names. The graves of both sailors lie to this day on the grounds of the Luftwaffe barracks at Wahn.