German sailor executed in 1917 for socialist agitation in the Imperial German Navy. He joined the navy as a volunteer in 1912 and served on the battleship SMS Friedrich der Grosse during World War I. He took part in the bloody Battle of Jutland and, like his comrades, suffered from poor catering and harassments on the part of the naval officers.
In the summer of 1917, Reichpietsch became one of the leaders of a revolutionary movement among the sailors in the Imperial fleet whose complaints about food and other conditions soon developed into agitation against the war. He was arrested and condemned to death by a court martial in Wilhelmshaven on 26 August 1917 as the “main ringleader”, along with Albin Köbis and three other sailors. The sentences on the other three were commuted to penal servitude, but Reichpietsch and Köbis were executed by firing squad at the Wahner Heide proving ground near Cologne, on 5 September 1917.
The executions were denounced as “naval judicial murders” by antiwar politicians and newspapers, and helped trigger the antiwar and socialist mutinies in the Navy, which led to the German Revolution of 1918–1819. This has made Reichpietsch and Köbis heroes of the German socialist movement. The author Theodor Plievier, himself a sailor in World War I and participant of the marine’s mutiny, devoted his 1930 novel The Kaiser’s Coolies to them.
Link to Wikipedia biography