August Ernst Reinhold Merges (3 March 1870 – 6 March 1945) was a German activist, politician and revolutionary. He was a member of various communist and syndicalist organisations; becoming one of the leaders of the German Revolution in Braunschweig, and subsequently a member of the Weimar National Assembly, convened in 1919 to draw up a constitution for the new German republic. In 1933, he came to the notice of the authorities as a "background member" of an anti-government resistance group. In 1945, after he was found dead in the little summer-hut in the his son's allotment (where he lived for the last two years of his life) it was determined that ever since undergoing a succession of severe torture sessions at the hands of the security services during and after 1935, he had suffered witho