Fritz Adler

In 1916 Friedrich Adler, a brilliant physicist who was also a leader of the Austrian Social Democrats and associate of the key European socialists, shot and killed Prime Minister Count Sturgkh.

Adler distanced himself from his counsel, who would explain the assassination by saying he was insane: “The defense counsel, from the responsibilities of his office, has the duty of seeking to save my life. I have the duty of standing up for my beliefs, which are more important to me than whether during this war in Austria one more man will be hanged or not.” Adler was tried before an especially moderate and untraditional judge who permitted him, when asked to present his version of the facts in the case, to analyze the indictment. The indictment stated that “the reprehensibility of murder as a political means cannot be a subject for debate among moral men in an orderly society.” Adler attacked the assumption that Austria at war was an orderly society and cataloged the illegal acts of the government. Throughout the trial Adler reversed the government case, constructing an indictment against the Austrian government, not for the court but for the public.

Although he frequently spoke his mind during the trial, working in his justification at every point, in his closing remarks Adler reasserted his indictment.

The real reason I want to speak is that I must explain that the question of murder, for me, has always been a real moral question.… I have always believed that the violent killing of men was inhuman, and that it is because we live in an Age of Barbarism that we are reduced to killing men. I completely agree with my colleagues who argue: War is inhuman. And I will not deny: Revolution is also inhuman.

When one comes to the historical realization that man cannot and should not be a true Christ in the Age of Barbarism, in the Age of Inhumanity, in the Age of Unkultur, in which we live, then there is only the alternative standpoint: If we must really kill and be killed, then murder cannot be a privilege of the rulers, we must also be ready to resort to force. If it is true that the Age of Humanity has still not come, then we should at least employ force only in the service of the idea of humanity.

I have heard the war justified, and I have understood the arguments which justified the war.

As they marched through Belgium and an innocent people fell as victims, as women and children were killed, they said: Necessity knows no commandments, it is war, there was no alternative.

As the Lusitania sank, and a mass of innocent civilians were killed, again they said: It is war, there was no alternative.…

We live in a time when battlefields are covered with hundreds of thousands of dead, when tens of thousands of men lie beneath the sea. It is war, it is necessity, they say to justify it.

But if one man should fall, a man who has destroyed the constitution of Austria, who has trampled the laws of Austria into the ground, if the one man who is most guilty for these horrors should fall, then suddenly they confront me and say: Human life is sacred.²

Adler concluded by saying that he knew what the verdict would be, but, quoting poetry, “Not all are dead who are entombed,/ For you cannot kill the spirit, ye brethren!”³ Adler was found guilty and sentenced to death. As he was escorted from the courtroom, he turned to the galleries and the windows and shouted, “Long live the International Revolutionary Social Democracy!” Since Austria lost the war, Adler was not executed, but had his sentence commuted to eighteen years imprisonment and finally was granted the amnesty extended to all political prisoners. By 1921 he was the organizer of a new international, the Social Workers International, and lived to be eighty-one years old.⁴