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Otto Braun | |
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李德 | |
 Otto Braun (Li De) in China | |
| Born | (1900-09-28)28 September 1900 |
| Died | 15 August 1974(1974-08-15) (aged 73) |
| Alma mater | Frunze Military Academy |
| Occupations | Comintern Agent, Political and Military Adviser |
| Employer | Soviet Union |
| Organization | Comintern |
| Political party | Communist Party of Germany |
| Other political affiliations | Chinese Communist Party |
| Spouse(s) | Olga Benário Xiao Yehua Li Lilian |
Otto Braun (28 September 1900 – 15 August 1974) was a Germancommunist journalist and functionary of theCommunist Party of Germany with a long and varied career. His most significant role was as aComintern agent sent toChina in 1934 to advise theChinese Communist Party (CCP) on military strategy during theChinese Civil War.[1] At the time Braun adopted a Chinese name,Li De (Chinese:李德;pinyin:Lǐ Dé). It was only many years later that it became known that Otto Braun and "Li De" were the same person. He was also the first secretary of theWriters' Union in the GDR.
Otto Braun was born inIsmaning,Upper Bavaria, nearMunich. Even though his mother was still alive, he grew up in an orphanage.[2]
He enrolled at a teachers' training college inPasing in the Munich area. In June 1918, Braun was drafted into the ranks of theBavarian army, part of the Imperial German Army, but theFirst World War ended before he could face combat duty.
After the armistice he went back to complete his studies at the teachers' training college. However, he did not take a job as a primary school teacher. Rather, he joined the newly foundedCommunist Party of Germany (KPD). He embarked on what would be a lifelong vocation and career and travelled widely, mainly in North Germany.
It seems that it was in 1921 that Braun became a full-time paid KPD party worker.
He was involved in the theft of certain sensitive documents from Colonel Freyberg, aWhite Russian emigrant based in Berlin. He was detained by the police in July 1921 for his part in the matter. He was put on trial but managed to hide his communist connections and convince the court that he was a "right-winger." The bias in the judicial system of theWeimar Republic led to him receiving a lighter sentence. In the end, Braun avoided going to jail, and instead, went into hiding.
By that time, he was already a core member of the KPD apparatus by not only regularly writing articles for the party papers but also, after 1924, heading the party's "counter-espionage" efforts. He was also intimately involved in its militia and paramilitary activities.
The police caught up with him again in September 1926. He first served his "Freyberg sentence" of 1922 and then was kept in detention at theMoabit Prison. However, on 11 April 1928, a band of Communists, including his then-loverOlga Benário, succeeded in staging his jail break.
The daring escape received worldwide publicity. Braun and Benário then made their way to Moscow, where they became involved in theCommunist International. Both of them were at theLenin School, which was operated by theComintern. Braun enrolled in theFrunze Military Academy while Benário worked as an instructor at the Communist Youth International, first in theSoviet Union, then inFrance andEngland, where she participated in coordinating anti-fascist activities.
Braun and Benário parted ways in 1931. She went on to marry the famousBrazilian revolutionary leaderLuís Carlos Prestes and moved to his country. She was later arrested by theGetúlio Vargas dictatorship and extradited to Germany, where she was eventually taken to the gas chamber at theBernburg Euthanasia Centre. She is remembered as a martyr by the Left in Brazil and Germany. For his part, Braun embarked on the most significant and, in some ways, the most controversial, part of his career dedicated to a revolutionary cause, as the Comintern representative inChina.
In 1932, following his graduation at the Frunze Academy,Soviet Military Intelligence's Fourth Directorate dispatched Braun toHarbin inManchuria, China. From there he traveled toShanghai, where he joined the local Comintern bureau. There he was in military affairs under the orders of "General Kleber" (nom de guerre ofManfred Stern), who maintained a "military section" in the city, and in political issues underArthur Ewert, a fellow German Communist.
However, Shanghai was at that time a backwater in Chinese revolutionary affairs, the local communist movement having been effectively crushed byChiang Kai-shek'sKuomintang (KMT) in theShanghai massacre of 1927. The CCP had subsequently retreated to the countryside and started to organize in the province ofJiangxi.[3] In the later part of 1933 Braun arrived inRuijin, at that time capital of the "Chinese Soviet Republic" set up by the surviving Chinese Communists, where he became a military adviser.
The precise circumstances of his getting this appointment and his activities in the following years are still debated with some aspects remaining unclear. As noted by Freddy Litten, who thoroughly researched this part of Otto Braun's career, "[Braun]'s memoirs are an important, though dubious, source for the events of these years".[4]
At the time, theKuomintang, perceiving the CCP as a dangerous threat to its rule, launched a series of vigorous attacks on the CCP in urban areas. Its forces came near to Ruijin, which was in danger of being surrounded and became untenable. The CCP initiated theLong March to escape this danger. Braun, under his assumed Chinese name "Li De", was nearly the only foreigner to participate in the Long March and might have even been the original proposer of the idea of embarking on such a march in an effort to reach the safer interior of China.
In the later part of 1934, Braun/Li De assumed a position of command in the earlyFirst Front Army, together withZhou Enlai andBo Gu, with authority to make all military decisions. Braun advocated for the First Front Army to directly attack the far larger and better-equipped KMT Army. The First Front Army's suffered great casualties and so CCP forces fell drastically from 86,000 to about 25,000, within a year.
The Red Army was forced, in October 1934, to break out of Jiangxi province and begin the Long March to meet up with other Chinese communist armies to the east. Braun and Bo Gu were still leading the army at this point. In January 1935, after seizing the town of Zunyi, the CCP held theZunyi Conference to assess their recent defeat.Mao Zedong andPeng Dehuai expressed their opposition to Braun, Bo Gu and their tactics. Mao argued that the direct attacks had cost lives and suggested that smaller and less-well-equipped forces should have run and surround the KMT by using theguerrilla tactics for which Mao was to become famed. Mao already distrusted European advisors from the Comintern, especially since in the 1920s advisers such as the DutchHenk Sneevliet had given disastrous advice[clarification needed] to the CCP. Other military wing leaders agreed with Mao and so Braun and Bo Gu were removed as the military commanders, and Mao become the leader of the Long March.[3] After this conference, the Comintern was pushed aside, and "Native Communists" took control of the CCP.
Braun continued on the Long March along with the CCP. No longer holding a military command, he was mainly involved in advisory work and some teaching of tactics. He remained in China until 1939.
In 1933, Braun marriedXiao Yuehua, a Chinese communist party member. They had a son but later divorced when Otto fell in love with the more beautiful and educated Li Lilian, who Otto married in 1938. Li Lilian was a Chinese actress and also a member of the Communist Party. On 28 August 1939, Braun left for the Soviet Union and never saw Li Lilian again[citation needed]. Though Braun never returned to China after 1939, he continued to show interest in China's affairs for the rest of his life.
In 1939 Braun arrived in the Soviet Union. At the time a very dangerous place for foreign communists, many of whom, including German communists, were imprisoned, tortured or killed byJoseph Stalin's secret police (NKVD), despite being completely loyal to the revolutionary cause and having often undergone persecution for its sake in their own countries. Braun managed to avoid such a fate though he faced some political difficulties immediately upon his arrival.[citation needed]
The MoscowForeign Languages Press gave him employment as an editor and translator. After theGerman invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, use was made of his German antecedents by making him a "polit-instrukteur" striving to turn the loyalty of German officers captured by the Soviets. In that role, he used an old alias from the 1920s, "Kommissar Wagner". He later performed a similar role towards captive Japanese officers as well.
Between 1946 and 1948, he was based atKrasnogorsk, Moscow Oblast, where he lectured in theAntifascist Central School. Afterward, he had another period of working in the Moscow Foreign Languages Press.
Only after thedeath of Stalin was Otto Braun allowed to return to his homeland after nearly three decades of exile.
Following his arrival at theGerman Democratic Republic (East Germany) Braun became a fellow at the Institute forMarxism-Leninism maintained by the Central Committee of the rulingSocialist Unity Party (SED), as the communist party was officially called. His main responsibility was the publication in German of the writings ofVladimir Lenin.
He was First Secretary of theGerman Writers' Association from 1961 to 1963 – when he fell from grace. Already in his mid-sixties, he was for some time a pensioner doing some freelance translation fromRussian.
His return to the authorities' good books was evident when in 1964 the ruling party's organNeues Deutschland carried the revelation that the otherwise unknown Li De, involved in the Chinese Long March of the 1930s, had been in fact none other than the German Otto Braun.
This gave Braun the possibility and the impetus to write hisChinese Notes. As mentioned, researchers consider these as full of interesting information, particularly useful as offering a different angle to that of official CCP historiography – but in themselves far from objective or impartial. They were written in the late 1960s when Braun was also a fellow of the Institute for Social Sciences. The memoirs were published in book form at 1973 and translated to Chinese, English[5] and other languages.
Braun died at age 74, while on vacation inVarna,Bulgaria. He was buried inEast Berlin, and his obituaries appeared inPravda and inThe New York Times.[6]
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