Karl Helmuth "Monster" Rabin (1879-1930) was a German-Jewish KPD leader and the chief of the Rotfront in the Yorckstrasse section of Kreuzberg, Berlin during the Weimar era
Biography[]
Karl Helmuth Rabin was born in Kreuzberg, Berlin, German Empire in 1879, the son of Jewish garment workers. Rabin followed in his parents' footsteps, working in a heavy machinery factory before being arrested in 1900 for his involvement in socialist agitation. Rabin was in and out of prison during the 1900s, and, in 1908, he was charged with the murder of a policeman in Tempelhof during a socialist riot. Rabin was sent to prison from 1909 to 1916, when he was drafted into the Imperial German Army. Rabin served in a penal battalion on the Eastern Front of World War I and was captured by the Russians during the Brusilov Offensive, and he learned the Russian language during captivity and spread Marxist ideals among his captors. Following the Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he was released from his prisoner-of-war camp, but he remained in Russia and became an agent of the Cheka. In 1918, he was sent back to Germany amid the November Revolution and recruited laborers for the communist cause, joining the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany. Rabin became the leader of the KPD's Rotfront armed wing along Yorckstrasse in his hometown of Kreuzberg, and he was nicknamed "Monster" for his large size and his brutality; he was known to torture captured Berlin Police officers and far-right paramilitaries alike. In 1925, Rabin was shot five times by an SA assassin, but he used a butcher's knife to dispatch his would-be killer before recovering from his wounds in an apartment used by the KPD as a medical facility.
Rabin organized several assassinations and street protests during his leadership of the Yorckstrasse Rotfront, and he directed street fights with the SA, Der Stahlhelm, and other right-wing adversaries. In 1930, he was finally arrested after being accused of planning a bombing of the Berlin Police station in Kreuzberg in retaliation for a police shooting of an unarmed communist, and he was shot dead by the police during an escape attempt.