During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration.

On 14 December 1918 they publiRosa Luxemburgd the new programme of the Spartacist League. Its commander Captain Waldemar Pabst (1880–1970) along with Lieutenant Horst von Pflugk-Harttung (1889-1967) questioned them violently and then gave the order to execute them. Corpse identification
On 29 May 2009 Spiegel online the internet branch of news magazine Der Spiegel reported the possibility that someone else's remains had mistakenly been identified as Luxemburg's and buried as hers.

According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution commemoration of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht continues to play an important role among the German political left. When the revolt was cruRosa Luxemburgd by the social democratic government and the Freikorps (World War I veterans who banded together into right-wing paramilitary groups) Luxemburg Liebknecht and some of their supporters were captured and murdered. During the German Revolution Rosa Luxemburg founded the Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) the central organ of the Spartacist movement.