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The Death of Rosa Luxembourg

On January 15, 1919, a middle-aged woman was led under police escort down from a room in the Hotel Eden in central Berlin to the hotel lobby. The hotel was serving as the temporary headquarters of the Garde-Cavallerie-Schuetzen-Division, a cavalry-rifleman division of the Imperial German Army that had been defeated in the First World War, which had just ended a few weeks earlier. As the woman entered the hotel lobby and was recognized a cry went up. One of the soldiers in the lobby, a man named Runge, ran forward and clubbed her to the ground. Other soldiers picked her up and carried her to a car waiting outside, a car which was supposedly to transport her to Moabit Prison. But the car was no more than a hundred yards from the doors of the Hotel Eden when a shot was heard.

Nothing more was officially admitted about the whereabouts of the woman until the following May, when a decomposed female body was found in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. Three physicians, fearing for their lives, refused to perform a postmortem examination and identification. Eventually, however, the body was formally identified (by her clothing) as that of Rosa Luxembourg--the woman who had been led into the lobby of the Hotel Eden five months earlier.

In the death of Rosa Luxembourg, three major political movements of modern European history came together. In life, Rosa Luxembourg had been one of the pioneering leaders and thinkers of the revolutionary Marxist movement. In death, she became a martyr heroine of a quite different Marxism, the Marxism-Leninism of the then-infant Soviet Union. The circumstances of her death, murdered and disposed of while in military custody, pointed ahead to the rise of Nazi Germany. The soldier who had clubbed her, and the lieutenant who had been responsible for her would eventually be granted a reward by Nazi Germany, and the public prosecutor who investigated the killing, and who was later found to have been ...

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The Death of Rosa Luxembourg. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:15, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690503.html