The Bloody March
The streets had turned into a scene of utter chaos. The instant Thälmann knocked me down, he snatched up a baton and sprinted toward the edge of the demonstration. “It’s an attack! The Nazis are assaulting the protesters!”
The antifascist volunteers of Antifa, caught off guard by the sudden gunfire aimed at me, lost their footing in the shock. Members of the Red Revolutionary Front immediately clashed with the assailants. “Brüning…!” How dare he drag the Nazis in here just to stop us?! …I didn’t necessarily believe the Chancellor had summoned them himself, but still.
“Emilia! Are you all right?!” Party members rushed toward me after I tumbled from the platform. “My God…!” “Uh… I’m okay, I think.” The whole thing had happened so fast that I barely had time to react before my comrades hoisted me onto their backs and dragged me to the rear.
So I had just come within inches of being shot and killed. And this wasn’t even the first time. Once my thoughts finally settled, my chest tightened with a sickening lurch. The second assassination attempt. A sniper had been hiding somewhere among those buildings.
The square in front of the Chancellery had transformed into a battlefield in the blink of an eye. Thankfully, aside from a few scrapes on my cheek from flying debris, I had escaped any serious injury. But my own safety wasn’t what mattered.
“Kyaaaaah!!!” Men in brown uniforms and others in dull steel helmets and military garb poured out from every direction. They slammed into the protesters guarding the streets. The swastikas and iron crosses on their chests stood out sharply. Though their numbers barely reached a few hundred, many were former soldiers from Der Stahlhelm, and they seized demonstrators and RRF members at random, beating them with batons. The brown-shirted Nazi stormtroopers charged in with weapons drawn as well.
Our side refused to simply take the punishment. Under Thälmann’s command, the trained members of the RFB and RRF responded with disciplined counterattacks. The square was drenched in blood within moments. When a Nazi Party member slammed a Social Democrat to the ground, a Communist would hurl a stone at the attacker’s skull. At the collapsed Antifa barricades, both sides collided in a frenzy, spilling rivers of blood.
The nature of the fighting was fundamentally different from the earlier clashes with the police. The police had sought arrests and suppression; between us and the Nazis, there was only murderous intent. In the end, the police forced their way in once more, broke up both sides by sheer force, and arrested everyone. Only then did the street violence finally subside.
The day’s events were christened “Bloody March” by the press. It was clearly modeled after Russia’s Bloody Sunday or the “Bloody Week” of the Spartacist uprising. Thanks to Thälmann’s help, a photograph of me barely dodging the bullet had made the front page of every newspaper.
At first I couldn’t understand why the Nazis and the German National People’s Party would do something so disadvantageous to themselves. If they wanted me dead, they should have finished the job properly. Yet public sentiment wasn’t turning against us. The citizens had already moved past the stage of cowering at home in fear of violence. They would not, as the far right hoped, trade their freedom for a false promise of safety. A democratic citizenry that had tasted liberation would not be so easily cowed.
Still, the deed was done. According to reports, the confirmed death toll stood at fifty-five. Among them: one from Der Stahlhelm, four stormtroopers, eleven from the Red Revolutionary Front, and thirty-nine ordinary citizens who had joined the demonstration. Hundreds more were injured, and nearly two thousand people from both sides had been arrested by the police.
In the end, the Nazis—who had burst into the protest and committed murder—may have suffered a serious blow to their public image, but they seemed to have achieved their fundamental objective. They had proven that a demonstration by the People’s Front could spiral into massive violence, bloodshed, and even murder.
Several centrist and conservative newspapers that had been on the verge of supporting us suddenly reversed course and began condemning both the People’s Front demonstrations and Nazi violence. We had only just managed to erase the false equivalence of “far right and far left are basically the same.” If another incident occurred, the middle class might well abandon us in favor of the far right’s promise of safety.
We had to win public opinion back, no matter what. The very next day, April 1, we held an urgent meeting with the editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung.
“Are you… are you sure you’re not hurt, Representative Heinz?”
“I’m fine. The Nazis have finally shown their hand. The National Socialists—who until now had been cowards, brainwashing workers and soldiers from the shadows and quietly building their power—have at last torn off their masks and stepped into the light! They have tried to kill me twice. And they will not stop here. They will keep going until the citizens surrender to that fear and voluntarily accept their rule. Anyone who opposes them will be targeted for death, just as I was. The people must awaken—now!”
“Representative Thälmann, what is your response to the unrelated civilian casualties?”
“They claim to be striking at the left, yet they murdered members of Antifa—citizens who came together of their own free will! Our Communist Party will not stand idly by in the face of this outrage! Let us fight! For the liberation of the working class of the world!”
“Representative Wels, how does the Social Democratic Party view this incident?”
“The National Socialist Party, which long concealed its true face, has finally revealed its ugly snout,” Otto Wels declared, his voice measured yet burning with newfound fire. “Under the banners of nation, glory, and prosperity, they will trample the workers and purge all who oppose them. In the eleven-year history of democracy in the German Empire, no faction has ever attempted to assassinate its political opponents. The capitalists and landowners are backing the Nazis, and the Chancellor is tolerating it. We can endure no more!”
This was our three parties’ first official joint interview since fully aligning our platforms under the banner of “revolution.” Wels, once the moderate within his own party, now uttered fiercely radical words without hesitation.
We moved as quickly as possible, using every media outlet we could to ensure the word “extremism” was never applied to us and that coverage of the Nazis remained consistently negative.
“The left bears no responsibility for this incident. If anyone does, it is those who awakened the democratic aspirations hidden within Germany’s free people. Will you hide their violence behind the labels of far right and far left, or will you advance toward a society free of struggle and war, liberated from capitalist oppression?”
The results remained to be seen… but we did everything in our power to tilt the press in our favor.
Once the immediate uproar had calmed on April 2, the Chancellor finally convened the Reichstag.
“What the hell is this?” Brüning glared at the right wing with pure venom. “When I proposed a formal coalition with the German National People’s Party, it was to secure even a shred of governing momentum. It was not an invitation to sell the country to incompetent capitalists and landowners who wish to shake the nation to its foundations! And yet you call yourselves ‘conservatives’ while collaborating with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the very people who carried out this massacre! Is this even acceptable?!”
At least Brüning still possessed some reason; he had denounced the National People’s Party before turning on us.
“His Imperial Majesty must be deeply disappointed. Eleven years ago, after the Great War had driven him to the brink, His Majesty entrusted the legislative, executive, and judicial powers entirely to the Reichstag, the cabinet, and the courts so the nation could be governed democratically and peacefully according to the will of the people. How could you mobilize far-right thugs to slaughter citizens?!”
But the sheer absurdity of it all finally made me speak.
“…Excuse me?” While the National People’s Party members blatantly ignored the Chancellor, I took the microphone. “None of this would have happened if you had listened to the citizens demanding your resignation.”
“…Nor can we say the People’s Front is without fault, Representative Heinz.”
“What?! So you’re saying we are at fault?!”
“I have stated it clearly many times in my national addresses. Crisis is followed by suffering. This is the hour of suffering! Without enduring pain, we cannot overcome the crisis! And to the Social Democratic representatives in particular—while you should be restraining the radical solutions pushed by the Communist and Workers’ parties and striving for national stability, is it truly responsible for the largest party in this Reichstag to join them instead?!”
It seemed the days of hearing protesters outside his office chanting “Resign!” had left him with quite a grudge.
“‘Responsibility (Verantwortung)’…?”
“Yes, responsibility! You may not have been able to preserve international peace or guide the citizens onto the right path, but to betray German democracy—”
“Enough of your sophistry, Chancellor.” Otto Wels cut Brüning’s lament short. The man who had once cooperated with previous governments was no longer that same Otto Wels.
“You always speak so plausibly. But you never offer real solutions, Chancellor. Increase austerity. When parliament opposes you, ask His Majesty to issue an emergency decree. When securing a majority after withdrawing the decree proves difficult, cooperate with the National People’s Party. I never knew your party could be such cowards in the face of policy failure.”
Wels unleashed his own barrage of sharp criticism. “Yes, until 1914 we cooperated in imperialist war. We believed that once that war ended, democracy would take root here and bring a society where everyone worked decently, ate abundantly, and lived without discrimination. Yet after eleven years since the armistice, what exactly has improved in Germany? The welfare and reforms the Social Democrats worked so hard to build have all collapsed under your emergency decrees. And the party you reached out to has already allied itself with fascists and National Socialists.”
“…Representative Wels!”
“You ask why we betrayed you? This is not betrayal—it is reflection on the wrong choice we made in 1914! The real traitor is not us, but you! You, the Chancellor who would destroy democracy! The parliament we tried to protect, the government we tried to defend—when capitalism is threatened, they turn not to the will of the people but to the will of the capitalists! This is not what we wanted! This is not democracy! What conscientious democrat could look at Germany today and still call it a democracy?!”
…Yes, Wels must have been the most disappointed of all. After all, we were still the largest party in parliament. No government could ignore the people’s demands like this. Yet the result had been far-right thugs sent by conservative allies of the Nazis slaughtering citizens in the streets.
“…Violence will no longer be tolerated.” Once again, Brüning refused to resign. “Effective immediately, the Communist Party’s Red Front Fighters League (RRF) and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party’s stormtroopers (SA) are hereby legally banned. Anyone within the German Empire who attempts to carry out the aims of these organizations will be punished under Article 124 of the Imperial Constitution, which prohibits the formation of civic associations whose purpose is to overthrow the government.”