BATTLE IN GERMANY

Southland Times, Issue 20648, 21 November 1928, Page 6

BATTLE IN GERMANY

• TWO “PRIVATE ARMIES.” HUNDREDS OF MEN WOUNDED. Geesthacht, a small industrial town on the banks of the Elbe, 15 miles above Hamburg, has 'veen immortalized as the field of the first pitched battle between two of Germany’s private armies—the Republican, but predominantly Socialist, “Reichsbanner,” and the Communist League of the Red Front Fighters, whose General Staff sits in Moscow. Those hostile hosts have often clashed in minor skirmishes, and not without loss of life. But a recent encounter was not only more “magnifique,” but also much more “la guerre.” And although only one combatant—the local commander of the “Red Fleet”—was killed, the wounded or injured are eaid to run into hundreds. The casus belli was the election of the Municipal Council, which seems to have been forced by the Commander to mark their disapproval of the Mayor’s action in enlisting police protection against their literally physical kicks and blows. The election was to have taken place on a Sunday, but the opposing armies occupied the town on the previous evening, and on the Sunday morning received reinforcements so substantial that they are said to have outnumbered the adversary population. Issue was not joined until noon, when there was a collision opposite one of the polling stations which cost about a score of wounded. The police parted the adversaries, but they were powerless in the presence of the main shock which took place a couple of hours later for the possession of a slight hill on the margin of the town. The fight was conducted in regular military style by forces each about 1500 strong. Both sides fought in disciplined bodies, took shelter behind walls and trees, threw in reinforcements at threatened points, brought up reserves from the rear, and were served by ambulance detachments which carried the wounded out of the front line. The weapons used, it is true, were mostly brickbats, empty bottles, bludgeons, daggers, and knuckle-dusters, but a number of pocket firearms were also in action. “The combatants,” writes one of the correspondents on the spot, “rolled about on the ground locked in one another’s embraces tearing the clothes from one another’s bodies, and inflicting serious injuries. -Soon they were lying prostrate by dozens streaming with blood or staggering away to seek the protection of the garden fences.” Of the wounded, 12 or 14 were said to be in danger. Beside the dead Communist leader were found empty cartridges for his own revolver, but they will not prevent his party from representing him as the defenceless martyr of an unprovoked outrage. In consequence of the disturbances it was necessary to abandon the election. In Berlin a similar collision occurred between demonstrating Fascists and a Republican crowd, but there police were prompter in intervention, and nipped disorder in the bud.