Kurt Gustav Wilckens

Kurt Gustav Wilckens (1886-1923) was a militant German anarchist, known in Argentina for having avenged the massacre of hundreds of workers on strike in the repression unleashed by the Argentine government in response to the prolonged labor uprising later known as Patagonia rebelde/Rebel Patagonia (or The Patagonia Uprising). Wilckens assassinated Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela, the military leader in charge of the brutal repression.

The son of August Wilckens and Johanna Harms, he was born on November 3, 1886 in Bad Bramstedt, Prussian Province of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. He studied gardening, entering into military service in 1906 in the first company of the Prussian Garde-Schützen-Bataillon.

In 1910 he traveled to the United States to perfect his craft and encountered anarchist ideas. He worked in Arizona and New Mexico farms and soon he had his first conflict with repression. He was working in a pickling plant that produced two tiers of products, the higher priced product of good quality, and a lower priced product of lesser quality. The better products went to bourgeois neighborhoods and the lower quality products went to workers' neighborhoods. Kurt convinced his coworkers to reverse the delivery and was expelled from the factory. After joining the Industrial Workers of the World and participating in a series of strikes in his subsequent work as a coal miner, he was arrested along with other strikers and held in an internment camp for German immigrants. He escaped from the camp, was arrested again and deported to Germany on March 27, 1920.

At the start of the Argentine libertarian workers movement, on September 29, 1920, he arrived in Buenos Aires. There he worked as a correspondent for two German newspapers, the Alarm in Hamburg by Libertarian Anarchist Federation Libertarian Communities and Workers in Germany, and Der Syndikalist by Berlin, corresponding to the Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (Libertarian Workers Union of Germany).

In Argentina, he worked on Cipolletti fruit farms in the Rio Negro Province. Later, as a longshoreman, he made contact with rural workers and labor organizations. Wilckens, while covering the facts of the workers shot in Patagonia, became convinced that they deserved justice and the idea of proletarian justice took root in his mind. According to Osvaldo Bayer, Andres Vazquez Paredes would have been the one who gave him the bomb since Wilckens had no idea how a bomb was made. His training in Tolstoy, pacifism, and vegetarianism, also included more violent peers who could not endure the violence of the bosses and governments.

On January 27, 1923, Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela left his home around 7 AM. Seventeen wounds, thirteen produced by the bomb and four shots, were inflicted on Varela.

Wilckens was also injured while shielding 10-year-old María Antonia Pelazzo, who crossed between them. The wounds forced him to remain until police arrived. In a letter written on May 2, 1923, Wilckens wrote his reasons for the event:

It was not vengeance; I did not see in Varela a minor official. No, he was everything in Patagonia: governor, judge, executioner, and undertaker. I tried to hurt him as the naked symbol of a criminal system. But revenge is unworthy of an Anarchist! The dawn, our dawn, claims no quarrels, no crimes, no lies; it affirms life, love, science; we work to hasten that day.

— Kurt Gustav Wilckens

On June 15, 1923, Kurt Wilckens was killed in prison by Ernesto Pérez Millán Temperley, a member of the Liga Patriótica Argentina. Two years later, on November 9, 1925, Pérez Millán Temperley died after an attack from another inmate, Esteban Lucich, who acted on orders from the Russian anarchist Boris Wladimirovich.