Funerary March for the Soldiers shot dead in Munich´s Luitpoldgymnasium, early May 1919

On 26 April, radical supporters of the Soviet Republic took eight hostages and brought them to the Luitpoldgymnasium in Munich's Müllerstraße. Seven of them were members of the anti-Semitic and anti-republican Thule Society, which had been involved in the foundation of the German Labour Party (DAP) in January 1919. In 1920, the DAP was to become the NSDAP. On 30 April, members of the Red Army shot the hostages together with two Prussian soldiers in the courtyard of the grammar school. The photo shows the funerary march for the murdered soldiers at Lenbachplatz in early May 1919.

This assassination had considerable consequences for the military operation to crush the Soviet Republic. The original plan was to take Munich on 2 May. However, when the "white" government troops heard of the terrorist act, parts of them immediately wanted to retaliate and uncoordinatedly stormed into the city. Where the Red Army had concentrated its soldiers particularly strongly, there were now heavy battles with losses on both sides. As a result, the government troops overestimated their opponents, whose supposed strength now served them all the more to legitimise brutal acts of revenge.

Unlike any other single event from the period of the Munich Soviet Republics, the shooting of the hostages in the Luitpoldgymnasium developed into a myth of the anti-republican right in Bavaria. This so-called "murder of hostages" later justified all anti-revolutionary acts of violence in 1919. During the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era, this offence served as a propaganda instrument for discrediting the revolutionary period and its protagonists.

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