Max Reichpietsch
Max Reichpietsch (24 October 1894 – 5 September 1917) was a German sailor executed in 1917 for socialist agitation in the Imperial German Navy.[1]
Life
Born in the town of Charlottenburg into a family of New Apostolic Christians, he joined the navy as a volunteer in 1912 and served on the battleship SMS Friedrich der Grosse during World War I. He took part in the bloody Battle of Jutland and, like his comrades, suffered from poor catering and harassments on the part of the naval officers.
In the summer of 1917, Reichpietsch became one of the leaders of a
Commemoration
The executions were denounced as "naval judicial murders" by antiwar politicians and newspapers, and helped trigger the antiwar and socialist
After World War II, the name of the Berlin street on which the former German Imperial Naval Office was located in the Bendlerblock was changed from Tirpitzufer (after Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz) to Reichpietschufer in honour of Max Reichpietsch, and a nearby street was named Köbisstrasse. There is also a Max-Reichpietsch-Platz in Kiel, and streets named Reichpietschstrasse in Cologne and Leipzig.
The shooting of Reichpietsch and Köbis is the starting point for the story of the East German film The Sailor's Song (1958). A television play about the case, Marinemeuterei 1917, was shown on West German television in 1969, directed by Hermann Kugelstadt and starring Karl-Heinz von Hassel as Reichpietsch and Dieter Wilken as Köbis.[2]
See also
- German Revolution
- (in French) Soldat fusillé pour l'exemple