Our Martyrs

From The Militant, Vol. X No. 13, 30 March 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Under the heading: Killed in the Struggle for Communism, the March 9 La Verité, organ of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, French section of the Fourth International, publishes the following tribute to four of the heroic German Trotskyist leaders murdered in the Nazi concentration camps:

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The long list of militants of the Fourth International who have fallen victims of the bloody Hitler dictatorship is not yet closed.

After recently honoring Marcel Hic, General Secretary of our French Section and L. Lesoil, leader of our Belgian Section, both martyrs of the Fourth International, we salute today the memory of four of the most outstanding fighters of our German Section, about whose murder in Nazi prisons we have just learned.

WEINER SCHOLEM, leader of the German Communist Party until 1923 and editor-in-chief of the paper. Red Flag in Berlin, member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International at Moscow. He joined the Trotskyist movement at an early age. After Hitler seized power, he was sent successively to the concentration camps of Sichtenburg, Esterwegen, Dachau, and finally to Buchenwald, where he was assassinated in 1940 by a shot from the revolver of an S.S. Officer.
WALTER ... (whose full name we withhold, since his family is living in the Russian zone) was a functionary of the German Communist Party for many years before joining the Fourth International together with Scholem. He was arrested in 1933, and after 11 years of suffering in Nazi concentration camps, he wa» mortally wounded on August 24, 1944, during an aerial bombardment.
EDWARD KOLISCHER, a delegate of the (German) Soldier’s Councils in 1918, who soon thereafter placed his military talent at the disposal of the Bolshevik Red Army. He was assigned to Leon Trotsky’s General Staff. After the expulsion of Trotsky, Comrade Kolischer was retained on the top General Staff of the Red Army and at the same time represented the Austrian Communist Party on the Executive Committee of the Communist International. He finally joined the Communist Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky and took part in the underground struggle against the Schuschnigg dictatorship. Arrested in 1938, he was deported to Buchenwald and then Auschwitz. He was murdered there in 1942, at the age of 49, by a series of blows dealt by a prison guard.
FRITZ REUTER, a baker by trade and one of the oldest German Bolshevik-Leninists, was imprisoned in Buchenwald, then in Dachau, where tuberculosis quickly carried him away.

Comrades, the example of your lives as militant fighters and as working class prisoners, the example of your sacrifices will not be in vain. Your heroic struggle will serve as a striking refutation of the capitalist lie that would have us believe in the solidarity of the German people with Hitler.

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