Thälman, Ernst.

Thälman, Ernst, born 16-04-1886 in Hamburg, Niedersachsen,  the son of a class-conscious worker, was a Social Democratic Party member from 1903. Ernst Thälmann’s parents, Johannes Thälmann (called ‘Jan’; 11-04-1857, Weddern (Holstein)  – 31-10-1933), a farmworker, and Mary-Magdalene (born Kohpeiss; 08-11-1857, Kirchwerder – 09-03-1927) married in 1884 in Hamburg. Ernst’s parents had no party affiliation; in contrast to his father, his mother was deeply religious. After Ernst’s birth, his parents took over a pub near the Port of Hamburg. On 4 April 1887, his sister Frieda was born (died 8 July 1967 in Hamburg). In March 1892, Thälmann’s parents were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison because they had fenced stolen goods or had taken them for debt payment. Ernst and Frieda were placed in separate foster families. Thälmann’s parents were released early; his mother in May, and his father in October 1893. His parents’ offense was used 36 years later in the campaign against Ernst Thälmann.

Between 1904 and 1913 Ernst worked as a stoker on a freighter. He was discharged early from his military service as he was seen as a political agitator. In January 1915, on the day before his call up for military service in World War I, he married Rosa Koch. Towards the end of 1917 he became a member of the Independent Socialist Party of Germany  (USPD). On the day of the German Revolution, 9 November 1918, he wrote in his diary on the Western Front, “…did a bunk from the Front with 4 comrades at 2 o’clock.” When the USPD split over the question of whether to join the Comintern, Thälmann sided with the pro-Communist group which in November 1920 merged with the KPD. In December Thälmann was elected to the Central Committee of the KPD. In March 1921 he was fired from his job at the job centre due to his political activities. That summer Thälmann went as a representative of the KPD to the 3^rd Congress of the Comintern in Moscow and met Lenin

. Lenin died age 53, on 24-01-1924, in Gorki. In June 1922 Thälmann survived an assassination attempt at his flat. Members of the right-wing nationalist organisation Consul threw a hand grenade into his ground floor flat. His wife and daughter were unhurt; Thälmann himself came home only later. Thälmann participated in and helped organise the Hamburg Uprising of October 1923. The uprising failed, and Thälmann went underground for a time. After the death of Lenin in January 1924, Thälmann visited Moscow and for some time maintained a guard of honour at his bier. From February 1924 he was deputy chairman of the KPD and, from May, a Reichstag member. At the 5^th Congress of the Comintern that summer he was elected to the Comintern Executive Committee and a short time later to its Steering Committee. In February 1925 he became chairman of the Rote Frontkämpferbund (RFB), the defense organization of the KPD. In October 1925 Thälmann became Chairman of the KPD and that year was a candidate for the German Presidency. Thälmann’s candidacy in the second round of the presidential election split the centre-left vote and ensured that the conservative Paul von Hindenburg

  defeated the Centre Party’s Wilhelm Marx . Severing died age 83, on 03-08-1946, in Bonn. In 1933 Hindenburg would appoint Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor. In October 1926 Thälmann supported in person the dockers’ strike in his home town of Hamburg. He saw this as solidarity with the British miners’ strike which had started on 1 May and had been profitable for Hamburg Docks as an alternative supplier of coal. Thälmann’s argument was that this “strike-breaking” in Hamburg had to be stopped. In March he took part in a demonstration in Berlin, where he was injured by a blow from a sword.  the 12^th party congress of the KPD in June 1929 in Berlin-Wedding, Thälmann, in conformity with the position adopted by the Soviet Union leadership under Josef Stalin, adopted a policy of confrontation with the SPD. This followed the events of “Bloody May”, in which 32 people were killed by the police in an attempt to suppress demonstrations which had been banned by the Interior Minister, Carl Severing, a Social Democrat.  He died age 77, on 23-07-1952, in Bielefeld. During that time, Thälmann and the KPD fought the SPD as their main political enemy, acting according to the Comintern policy which declared Social Democrats and Socialists to be “social fascists. Another aspect of this strategy was to attempt to win over the leftist elements of the Nazi Party, especially the SA, who largely came from a working class background and supported socialist economic policies. These guidelines on social democracy as “social fascism” remained in force until 1935 when the Comintern officially switched to endorsing a “popular front” of socialists, liberals and even conservatives against the Nazi threat. By that time, of course, Adolf Hitler had come to power and the KPD had largely been destroyed. In March 1932, Thälmann was once again a candidate for the German Presidency, against the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg and Hitler. The KPD’s slogan was “A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler; a vote for Hitler is a vote for war.” Thälmann returned as a candidate in the second round of the election, as it was permitted by the German electoral law, but his vote count lessened from 4,983,000 (13.2%), in the first round, to 3,707,000 (10.2%), which seems to indicate that, despite his fierce opposition, Hindenburg received more than a million of communist votes. After the Nazis came to power in January 1933, Thälmann proposed that the SPD and KPD should organise a general strike to topple Hitler, but this was not achieved. In February 1933, a Central Committee meeting of the already banned KPD took place in Königs Wusterhausen at the “Sporthaus Ziegenhals”, near Berlin, where Thälmann called for the violent overthrow of Hitler’s government. On 3 March he was arrested in Berlin by the Gestapo. Thälmann’s trial, which he said that he looked forward to, never took place. Thälmann’s interpretation was that his two defense lawyers, both Nazi Party members (he nonetheless trusted them to a certain extent) at some point gathered that he planned to use the trial as a platform to appeal to world public opinion and denounce Hitler, and had told the court. Furthermore, Thälmann assumed that after the failure of the trial of Georgi Dimitrov for complicity in the Reichstag fire, the Nazi regime did not want to allow the possibility of further embarrassment in the courtroom. For his 50^th birthday, in April 1936, Thälmann received greetings from around the world, including from Maxim Gorky and Heinrich Mann. That same year the Spanish Civil War broke out, and two units of the International Brigades named themselves after him. Thälmann spent over eleven years in solitary confinement. In August 1944, he was transferred from Bautzen prison to Buchenwald concentration camp. There, on 18 August, perhaps on Hitler’s orders, he was shot. His body was immediately cremated. Shortly after, the Nazis announced that together with Rudolf Breitscheid,

    Breitscheid was a leading member of the Social Democratic Party. The precise details of Breitscheid’s last years are known only sketchily, as the sole information available stems from Nazi sources. According to the Völkischer Beobachter (the official Nazi Party organ), Breitscheid, along with Communist Party leader Ernst Thälmann, perished during an Allied air raid on 28-08-1944. Varian Fry, among others, believed that Breitscheid was murdered by the Gestapo on the orders of Hitler or another senior Nazi Party official. Breidscheid, age 69, is buried in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in the borough of Lichtenberg in Berlin.

Ernst Thälmann had died in concentration camp Buchenwald, age 58 on 18-08-1944 and is the remains were cremated and buried in Berlin, a symbolic grave.