The Spartacist Uprising - History in an Hour

The brilliant "History in an Hour" looks at the lives and deaths of the Spartacist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg HERE

In Berlin on 15 January, 1919, an un-named man was delivered to a morgue with gunshot wounds. That same night a woman was hit with the butt of a rifle, before being shot in the back of the head. Her body was then thrown into a nearby canal. These two acts of violence were neither mindless nor random. Rather, these two murders were fundamentally linked. The man and woman in question were Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and together they had led the Spartacist Uprising, an attempt to overthrow the post-war government and begin a socialist revolution in Germany.