Wounded several times and feeling increasing disillusionment with
the war effort, Wollenberg became drawn to the Independent Social-
ists, the nucleus of the later Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands
(KPD), and led a group of revolutionary sailors in Königsberg during
the 1918 upheaval. The following year, he resumed his medical stud-
ies in Munich and emerged as a key figure in the short-lived Bavar-
ian Soviet Republic, commanding the infantry of the Dachau Army
Group. The three-year prison sentence that resulted only served to
harden his Marxist-Leninist convictions.
In late 1922, Wollenberg returned to Königsberg as an editor
and propagandist, targeting shipyard and railway workers as well
as members of the German army and navy. Given the code name
walter, he also belonged to the Military-Political Apparatus of the
KPD and helped lay the groundwork for a projected 1923 communist
revolution in Germany. His base of operations next shifted to the
French-occupied Ruhr area, where he helped channel the discontent
of striking workers into an armed but ultimately unsuccessful insur-
rection in Bochum. In August 1923, he was given the command of
the southwest area of Germany, where the much-anticipated revolu-
tion likewise came to naught.
Charged with “high treason, murder, and illegal use of explosives”
(a German court referred to him as one of the most dangerous men
in the country), Wollenberg was ordered by the KPD to Moscow in- There, after completing his military studies at a Comintern
military school, he held a number of positions and became a close
friend of Karl Radek. By the late 1920s, he headed the military cabi-
net of the Marx-Engels Institute, which trained German communists
for undercover work. He also wrote works such as Als Rotarmist von
München (As a Red Army Member from Munich), which appeared
in 1929.
In April 1931, Wollenberg returned to Germany as head of the
agitprop division of the Red Front Fighters Group and editor of
the newspaper Die Rote Fahne. In June 1932, an encounter with
members of the Sturmabteilung at a Nazi Party rally in Berlin left
him severely injured. He returned to Moscow in December, alarmed
that the KPD—acting on orders from the Soviet Union—refused
to regard the Nazis rather than the Social Democrats as the main
enemy.
504 • WOLLENBERG, ERICH