THE TERRIBLE SHOOTING OF THE BOLSHEVIKS "AMID THE RUINS OF THE GREAT WAR"

 Shooting the Bolsheviks

Amid the ruins of the Great War, an American camera crew filmed a shocking sight. That roll of celluloid has taken a strange trip through history. 

Shooting the Bolsheviks

By: Bertrand M. Patenaude

In the late afternoon of May 26, 1919, in a field about thirty miles outside Riga, Latvia, a squad of nine German riflemen executed eighteen Latvian Bolsheviks. The prisoners were shot in groups of three, each victim receiving one bullet to the chest and two to the head before toppling backwards into a freshly dug grave. “It was German efficiency at its best,” wrote U.S. Army Captain Howell Foreman, an American relief worker who witnessed the execution.

Captain Foreman was one of a dozen Americans whose presence on the scene may have influenced the operations of the firing squad that day. If so, this was because one of their number, Lieutenant Frank Johnson, happened to be a newsreel cameraman.

 His camera recorded the scene for the ages: the reading of the death sentence, the removal of the prisoners’ boots, and the businesslike procedure of the German soldiers. In its day, Johnson’s celluloid was one of the most sensational film sequences ever shot.

 Even today, after decades of atrocities recorded on film and tape, the choreographed dispatch of the eighteen Bolsheviks is a spellbinder. That piece of film is today housed at the Hoover Archives, as part of the Herman Axelbank Motion Picture Film Collection. The irony is that, at its first public showing, in New York in January 1920, Johnson’s film sequence was associated with the name of Herbert Hoover.

After the armistice of November 11, 1918, Hoover had joined President Woodrow Wilson and the other U.S. diplomats serving in Paris with the American Mission to Negotiate the Peace. 

Among Hoover’s several roles, as head of the American Relief Administration (at that time a U.S. government agency) he had the enormous job of coordinating American food delivery throughout Central and Southeastern Europe and the Near East. The delivery of food was complicated by the persistence of military hostilities in the scramble for territory that once belonged to the German, Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman empires.

In its day, this was one of the most sensational film sequences ever shot.

A chief concern of the Allied diplomats in Paris was that Bolshevism would fill a vacuum left by the withdrawal of the German military from the Baltic region. The Allies thus arranged for surrendered German troops to remain in place and help prevent the Russian Bolshevik infection from spreading.

 In the words of the official ARA history written shortly afterwards, “Bolshevism was the supreme peril, not Germany. Bolshevism was still uncontrolled and threatened the world. Germany, though still a danger, was beaten and could be controlled. At whatever cost, it must be seen that Bolshevism did not break through these barrier states.”

TURMOIL IN THE BALTICS

Latvia became the key battleground of this contest in the spring of 1919. Latvia had belonged to the Russian empire until it fell to the German invaders after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Then came a brief period of independence in the wake of the German surrender in November 1918, followed in January 1919 by the establishment of a Soviet government in Riga, the capital, whose residents were subject to a furious Red Terror.

There proved to be no shortage of German soldiers on the scene to help stem the Red tide. They included a Freikorps unit that had been stationed in Riga until the Red advance, new volunteers recruited from Germany by means of vague promises of land in the Baltic, and remnants of the German Eighth Army. These units came together as the Iron Division, under the command of General Rüdiger von der Goltz. This force was supplemented by the Baltische Landeswehr, a formation dominated by Baltic Germans. 

The Germans were successful in their effort to drive out the Red forces, yet in the process they chased the Latvian Provisional Government from its seat in the port city of Libau (today Liepa¯ja) on the Baltic. And after Riga fell to the Iron Division on May 23, 1919, that city became the scene of a White Terror that rivaled its Red predecessor in savagery.

“At whatever cost, it must be seen that Bolshevism did not break through these barrier states.”

Hoover’s American relief workers, demobilized officers who had served with the American Expeditionary Force, were poised to enter the scene on the heels of anti-Bolshevik forces and help restore a semblance of normal life. These Americans were scandalized by the behavior and attitudes of the German soldiers, who were quick to say that while they might have lost the war on the Western Front, they had won the war in the East. The objective of the German forces, the Americans concluded, was the establishment of German supremacy in the Baltic, the gateway to Russia.

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