Guards Cavalry Rifle Division
근위기병소총사단
A Prussian Army division formed in spring 1918. During the German revolution of 1918–1919 it became one of the largest volunteer units, up to 40,000 strong, took a leading part in suppressing revolutionary uprisings, and its members murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
In depth
Its commander was Lieutenant General Heinrich von Hofmann and its first general staff officer Captain Waldemar Pabst. During the Christmas crisis of December 1918 it attacked the People’s Navy Division at the Berlin Palace, and in January 1919 it helped crush the Spartacist uprising. On 15 January the captured Liebknecht and Luxemburg were brought to the division’s headquarters at the Hotel Eden, interrogated by Pabst and then killed: Liebknecht in the Tiergarten by a squad of naval officers led by Horst von Pflugk-Harttung, Luxemburg clubbed with a rifle butt by the trooper Otto Runge and shot by Kurt Vogel. In the suppression of the March fighting in Berlin, under Noske’s order that anyone found bearing arms be shot on the spot, some 1,200 people were killed.