Max Hoelz (1889 - 1933)

Mon Oct 14, 1889

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Max Hoelz, born on this day in 1889, was a German Communist most known for his role as a “Communist Bandit” in the 1920s, leading raids against police, releasing prisoners, and destroying property deeds.

Hoelz was politically radicalized by the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and by contact with Georg Schumann, a member of the socialist Spartakusbund (Schumann was later to be executed by the Nazis in 1945).

In 1920, after the right-wing Kapp Putsch, Hoelz organized workers from Falkenstein and Oelsnitz in a Red Guard, leading armed bands against the police, the army, and the far-right paramilitary Freikorps. In this role, he became a kind of “Robin Hood”, raising money from employers under threat of reprisals, liberating prisoners, destroying property deeds and police archives, and burning villas of the rich.

Later in life, after the Nazis began to come into power, he moved to Soviet Russia. There, however, he became a dissident, criticizing bad working conditions in the country. On September 15th, 1933, he died in a “boating accident”, which is speculated by anarchist historian Nick Heath to actually have been an NKVD assassination.