Features Max Hoelz’s autobiography From the ‘White Cross’ to the Red Flag and his defiant Indictment of Bourgeois Society.
To his enemies in Germany he was known as “the Dictator of the Vogtland”. Max Hoelz became one of the most charismatic figures during the insurrections in Germany that followed the First World War. From the ‘White Cross’ to the Red Flag appeared in 1929. It follows Hoelz’s progress through Germany to London, his efforts to educate himself, and the breathtaking action and horrors he experienced as a cavalry messenger and front-line soldier. He returns from the fighting to lead his local unemployed workers’ committee, before taking up the armed struggle and a life on the run. As leader of the Red Army, Hoelz robs from the rich to give to the poor, but clashes with the Communist Party bureaucracy.
Framed for a murder he did not commit, Hoelz begins a new struggle against the cruel regimes of Münster, Gross-Strehlitz and Sonnenburg prisons. Finally amnestied, he is greeted as a hero by the workers of Berlin.
The introduction by Ed Walker recounts how Hoelz flees to the Soviet Union, where he is at first feted but then accused of masterminding a Trotskyist conspiracy, and murdered by Stalin’s henchmen.
