Max Reichpietsch

Who was Max Reichpietsch?

Max Reichpietsch was a German sailor executed in 1917 for socialist agitation in the Imperial German Navy. He joined the navy as a volunteer in 1912 and served on the battleship SMS Friedrich der Grosse. In the summer of 1917, he became one of the leaders of a movement among the sailors in the Imperial fleet whose complaints about food and other conditions soon developed into agitation against the war. He was arrested and condemned to death by a court martial in Wilhelmshaven on 26 August 1917 as the "main ringleader", along with Albin Köbis and three other sailors. The sentences on the other three were commuted to penal servitude, but Reichpietsch and Köbis were executed by firing squad at Wahnerheide near Cologne, on 5 September 1917.

These executions were denounced as "naval judicial murders" by antiwar politicians and newspapers, and helped trigger the antiwar and socialist mutinies in the Navy in 1918, which led to the German revolution. This has made Reichpietsch and Köbis heroes of the German socialist movement.

After World War II, the name of the Berlin street on which the German Navy headquarters was located was changed from Tirpitzufer to Reichpietschufer in honour of Max Reichpietsch, and a nearby street was named Köbisstrasse. There is also a Max-Reichpietsch-Platz in Kiel, and streets named Reichpietschstrasse in Cologne and Leipzig.