“Li De”, the only Westerner on the Long March and the Comintern military adviser blamed at Zunyi
Sent to China as a Comintern agent under the name Li De, he was nearly the only foreigner on the Long March, and the Zunyi Conference of 1935 removed him and Bo Gu from command. East Germany revealed only in 1964 that Li De was Otto Braun.
A German Communist from Munich who escaped prison in 1928 and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union. Sent to Shanghai as Comintern military adviser in 1932, he entered the Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 and with Bo Gu directed a positional defence that lost the fifth encirclement campaign. On the Long March the Zunyi Conference of 1935 condemned his and Bo Gu’s military leadership and elevated Mao. He returned to Moscow in 1939 and after the war lived in East Germany as a translator and lecturer, publishing his memoir A Comintern Agent in China in 1973.
Also known as: Li De · Hua Fu
Activities and affiliations
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1919–
Communist Party of Germany (KPD)
Military command -
1933–1935
Chinese Communist revolutionary forces (before 1949)Military adviser to the Central Red Army
Military command -
CominternMilitary Adviser in ChinaMain
Military command
Career Timeline
- 1928Escaped from prison in Germany and moved to the Soviet Union
- 1932Dispatched to China after graduating from the Frunze Academy
- 1932–1939Comintern military adviser in China
- 1933–1935Military adviser to the Central Red Army
- 1935Lost military command after criticism at the Zunyi Conference
- 1939Returned to the Soviet Union
Related historical events
- 1927–1936From Jinggangshan to Yan’an: the soviet bases and the Long MarchComintern military adviser “Li De”Lost the base with positional warfare and was removed from command after Zunyi.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarPolitical instructor for captured German officersAfter Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he worked to turn captured German officers’ loyalties.
Moscow Exile and the Antifascist Schools, 1939–1954
On 28 August 1939 Braun left China for the Soviet Union. It was then a dangerous place for foreign communists: many, German communists among them, were imprisoned, tortured or killed by Stalin's secret police despite their loyalty to the revolutionary cause. Braun avoided that fate, though he met political difficulties on arrival.
The Moscow Foreign Languages Press employed him as an editor and translator, and after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 his German origins were put to use as a polit-instrukteur working on the loyalty of captured German officers, for which he revived the 1920s alias Kommissar Wagner. He later did similar work among captive Japanese officers. From 1946 to 1948 he was based at Krasnogorsk in Moscow Oblast, lecturing at the Antifascist Central School, and he then returned to the Foreign Languages Press. Only after Stalin's death was he allowed home, ending nearly three decades of exile.