Otto Braun (Li De)

German Communist

Li De, born Otto Braun, was born on 28 September 1900 in Ismaning, Bavaria. Drafted at the end of the First World War, he joined the Communist Party of Germany after it and worked for years in its propaganda and clandestine apparatus. Arrested in 1926, he was broken out of Berlin's Moabit prison by comrades in April 1928 and made his way to Moscow, where he studied at the Frunze Military Academy.

China and the Fifth Campaign

After graduating from the Frunze Academy in 1932 he was sent to China, working first with the Comintern apparatus in Shanghai; in the autumn of 1933 he reached Ruijin, capital of the Central Soviet Area, as a military adviser, taking the Chinese name "Li De". During the fifth anti-encirclement campaign he and Bo Gu dominated the Red Army's military decisions, meeting the Nationalists' blockhouse advance with positional and blockhouse warfare; after the Red Army's defeat it was forced to abandon the Central Soviet Area and begin the Long March. He was one of the very few foreigners on the march.

The Zunyi Conference

At the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 his and Bo Gu's military command was criticised by most participants; according to the scholar Benjamin Yang, Braun said he had been only an adviser and did not accept the criticism. The conference stripped Bo Gu and him of supreme military command. Thereafter he held no command, completing the Long March mainly as a military instructor. CCP historiography has consistently blamed the defeat in the fifth campaign mainly on the erroneous command of Bo Gu and Li De.

Leaving China; the Soviet Years

In August 1939 Braun left Yan'an for the Soviet Union and never returned to China. In the Soviet Union he worked as an editor and translator at the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, and after the German invasion did political work among German prisoners of war.

East Germany and the Memoir

After Stalin's death he returned to the German Democratic Republic, working at the ruling party's Institute for Marxism-Leninism on German editions of Lenin, and served as first secretary of the German Writers' Association from 1961 to 1963. In 1964 the East German Neues Deutschland revealed that the "Li De" of the Long March was Otto Braun. His memoir, Chinesische Aufzeichnungen, appeared in 1973, and an English translation, A Comintern Agent in China, 1932–1939, was published by Stanford University Press in 1982; the historian Frederick Litten, who researched his career, calls the memoir "an important, though dubious, source". He died on 15 August 1974 while on holiday in Varna, Bulgaria.