Ernst Henning
* 1892

Ernst Robert Henning, born on 12 Oct. 1892 in Magdeburg, murdered by SA men on 15 Mar. 1931

Hassestrasse 11

Ernst Henning was born into a politically committed family: His father Otto belonged to the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and consequently faced repression in the German imperial period. The family had to move frequently, eventually settling in Hamburg-Bergedorf. Despite the numerous relocations, Ernst Henning was able to pass his high school leaving exam (Abitur), remaining true to his father’s line of work and learning the trade of a molder. In 1910, Otto Henning had founded his own iron foundry in Bergedorf. As a convinced pacifist, however, he did not want to supply any armaments in the First World War, as a result of which he no longer received any raw materials. Consequently, he had to give up his business and moved to East Prussia.

His son Ernst stayed in Bergedorf and started a family there. With his wife Marie he had three children: Emmi (born in 1913), Mariechen (born in 1915), and Otto (born in 1920). The family lived at Hassestrasse 11. At first, Ernst Henning was a member of the SPD like his father, then changing to the USPD in 1917 because this party rejected the war waged by the German Empire. In addition, he became active as a labor union official in the German Metalworkers’ Union (Deutscher Metallarbeiterverband – DMV). After the end of World War I, he collaborated in the establishment of the Bergedorf workers’ and soldiers’ council, which exercised local administrative power in the period immediately after the November Revolution.

In 1919, Ernst Henning became a member of the German Communist Party (KPD), just founded then. He worked at the Hamburger Motorenfabrik Carl Jastram, a medium-sized company in Bergedorf that in the mid-1920s employed a staff of some 250 people building motors for machines and ships but also working on a small shipyard. Henning was chair of the employees’ representative committee. In 1923, he participated in the preparation and implementation of the “Hamburg Uprising” (“Hamburger Aufstand”), which in the area of Bergedorf was limited to Schiffbek. After it had been crushed, Ernst Henning fled from Bergedorf to elude arrest. After a year, he gave himself up to police and was sentenced to four years of fortress detention, which he began serving in the Pomeranian town of Gollnow (today Goleniow in Poland). In 1925, a general amnesty resulted in his release.

Soon afterward, he became leader of the KPD’s subdistrict of Lauenburg. In 1927, he was elected to sit in the Bergedorf City Parliament, taking on the chairmanship of the local KPD and of the Alliance of Red Front Fighters [Roter Frontkämpferbund – RFB]. Furthermore, since 1928, he was a member of the Hamburg City Parliament. In its “Regional Committee” (“Landesausschuss”), he became committed to the concerns of the rural population in the Vierlande and Marschlande areas [of Bergedorf] and thus attained a certain degree of popularity there. For instance, he advocated improvement of the school system and fought, in 1931, after a dike burst in Nettelnburg, to secure quick assistance for residents affected. Owing to Henning’s efforts, the KPD was able to found numerous local branches in the Vierlande and Marschlande in the late 1920s. In this way, it entered into direct competition with the Nazi National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), which managed to score points particularly in the rural areas with farmers and tradesmen.

Toward the end of the 1920s, the political confrontations between the SPD and the KPD increased in terms of severity in Bergedorf as well. The two sides accused each other of secretly making a pact with the NSDAP: The SPD briefly and succinctly subsumed Communists and Nazis with the term “Kozis,” while in its leaflets and newspapers the KPD talked of the Social Democrats as “Social Fascists.” In Bergedorf, the mayor, Wilhelm Wiesner, came from the Social Democrats from 1919 until 1931. In the numerous elections around 1930, the SPD received between 4,200 and 4,600 votes in Bergedorf, the Communists reached about 1,000 votes. Until 1930, the NSDAP barely had any members and voters in Bergedorf but in the Reichstag elections in Sept. 1930, the party succeeded in increasing the share of votes tenfold: 2,377 people voted NSDAP (1928 Reichstag election: 220 votes).

Ernst Henning was involved in a confrontation with the Bergedorf Police Chief and leader of the Banner of the Reich” (“Reichsbanner”), Haase, which was carried on legally and by means of polemic leaflets. In Mar. 1931, he charged Haase in a leaflet with, among other things, ordering the arrest and mistreatment of children of the Young Spartacist League in 1929 and with having banned the May demonstration of the KPD in 1930, and accused him of having armed Nazi members during their event in Geesthacht on 26 Jan. 1931. The Communists had appeared there with a detachment to prevent the event. A shootout ensued, resulting in two fatalities and six wounded.

On 14 Mar. 1931, Ernst Henning joined his Altona party comrade Louis Cahnbley in participating in a public party event in the clubroom of the Albers restaurant in Zollenspieker. The title of the event was “Nazis, Sozis, and the other bourgeois lackeys are plundering the working people in the city and the countryside! Who will fight against the plunderers?“ Upon Henning’s arrival, three SA men from Bergedorf in civilian clothes sat in the front part of the restaurant. The event ended at about 11 p.m., and shortly after midnight, Henning and Cahnbley boarded the night bus to Hamburg. A few stations further on, the three SA men from the restaurant, as well as an SA man in uniform with a companion, boarded the bus as well. Apparently, the National Socialists confused Cahnbley with the Hamburg KPD leader Etkar André, who was particularly hated in their circles, for one of them addressed Cahnbley by this name and threatened to shoot him. When Ernst Henning intervened and explained that this person was not André but Cahnbley, he too was threatened. The SA men then shot not only at the two Communists but at other passengers, injuring some of them seriously. While Ernst Henning was dead immediately, Louis Cahnbley survived with severe injuries.

This assassination attempt, obviously premeditated, created a big stir among the public and reflected badly on the NSDAP, even among followers, especially because several innocent bystanders had been hurt. Probably because of this circumstance, the party initially distanced itself from the three identified murderers. They were excluded from the party and forced to give themselves up to police. At the same time, however, Adolf Hitler personally covered the cost of their defense, sending the star lawyer of the Nazi movement, Hans Frank, into the legal proceedings. (In 1933, Frank became Reich minister without portfolio, in the Second World War Governor General of Poland, known as “butcher of Poland.” In 1946, he was sentenced to death in the Nuremberg Trial and executed.)

The perpetrators, Albert Jansen, Otto Bammel, and Hans Höckmair, were sentenced to lenient six and seven years in prison. In Mar. 1933, they were released and provided for with well-paying posts.

The Hamburg Senate reacted to the murder with a ban on public meetings of the KPD and the NSDAP. The Social Democratic mayor Ross held a speech before the Hamburg City Parliament in which he condemned the murder and made the KPD and NSDAP as unbridled “enemies of the state” equally responsible for the increasing political violence. This equating the victims with the murderers triggered angry protests in the KPD, and there were tumults and protest rallies in the City Parliament and on the streets; ten KPD deputies were banned from the sessions for one month.

Ernst Henning was initially laid out in state in Winterhude, at the mortuary on Jarrestrasse, and then transported from there to Ohlsdorf for cremation. The funeral procession is said to have comprised 35,000 people, with flags and banners endowing it with the character of a demonstration. Ernst Thälmann, the Hamburg-born chairman of the KPD, held the funeral speech. After the funeral service and during the following night, street battles with police took place. Again, shots were fired, with one innocent bystander killed and one policeman injured. On 24 Mar. 1931, Henning’s urn was taken to Bergedorf and interred on the local cemetery. This occasion, too, saw a large-scale protest march. The Bergedorf funeral speech was held by Carl Boldt (see corresponding entry).

The shock about the murder of Ernst Henning led to a remarkable mobilizing effect among KPD followers. However, it did not result in the SPD and KPD moving closer toward each other or the non-Socialist parties defending the Republic more offensively against the threat by the NSDAP. Rather, it seemed to have further fuelled the spiral of protest, bitterness, mutual accusations, and willingness to use force that characterized the end of the Weimar Republic in Hamburg as well.

Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.