Ernst Thälmann
Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann was a German communist politician, revolutionary, and leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1925 to 1933.
A committed communist, Thälmann sought to overthrow the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic, especially during the instability of its final years, and to replace it with a Socialist state, inspired by the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Under his leadership, the KPD became intimately associated with the government of the Soviet Union and the policies of Joseph Stalin. The KPD under Thälmann's leadership regarded the Social Democratic Party as an adversary and the party adopted the position that the social democrats were "social fascists". Both the SPD and KDP were already previously split on many key issues, however, this new stance clarified it was impossible for the two parties to form a united front against the Nazi Party.
Thälmann was leader of the paramilitary Roter Frontkämpferbund. After the Nazi regime began, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement for eleven years. Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov originally sought Thälmann’s release; after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, efforts to that end were abandoned, while Thälmann's party rival Walter Ulbricht ignored requests to plead on his behalf. Thälmann was shot dead on Adolf Hitler's personal order in Buchenwald in 1944.
Early life, family, and education
Thälmann was born in Hamburg on 16 April 1886, His parents, Johannes "Jan" Thälmann, a farmworker, and Mary-Magdalene, married in 1884 in Hamburg. They had no party affiliation; in contrast to his father, his mother was deeply religious. After his birth, his parents took over a pub near the Port of Hamburg. On 4 April 1887, his sister Frieda was born. 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.Thälmann and his sister 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 him. From 1893 to 1900, Thälmann attended elementary school. He later described history, natural history, folklore, mathematics, gymnastics, and sports as his favorite subjects; he did not like religion. In the mid-1890s, his parents opened a vegetable, coal and wagon shop in Eilbek, a suburb of Hamburg. The young Thälmann worked in the business after school and did his schoolwork in the morning before classes started. Despite this burden, Thälmann was a good student who enjoyed learning. He wanted to become a teacher or to learn a trade but his parents refused to lend him financial support. He had to continue working in his parents' business, causing much sorrow and conflict with his parents. As a result, he sought a job as an unskilled worker in the port. The ten-year-old Thälmann came in contact with the port workers on strike from November 1896 till February 1897 in the bitter labor dispute known as the Hamburg Docker's Strike 1896–1897.
Leaving home, World War I, and desertion
At the beginning of 1902, Thälmann left home. He first lived in an emergency shelter, later in a basement apartment, and in 1904 he was a fireman on the steam-powered freight ship AMERIKA, which also traveled to the United States. He became a Social Democratic Party member in 1903. On 1 February 1904, at age 17, he joined the Central Union of Trade, Transport and Traffic Workers of Germany and ascended to the chairman of the Department Carters. In 1913, he supported a call of Rosa Luxemburg for a mass strike as a means of action of the SPD to enforce political demands. From 1913 to 1914, he worked for a laundry as a coachman. In January 1915, one day before he was called up for military service in World War I, Thälmann married Rosa Koch. He was posted to the artillery on the western front, where he stayed until the end of the war, taking part in the Battle of Champagne, the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras, the Second Battle of the Aisne, the Battle of Cambrai, and the Battle of Soissons. For his service, Thälmann received the Iron cross Second Class, the Hanseatic Cross and Wound Badge.Towards the end of 1917, Thälmann became a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. In late October 1918, while on home leave from the front, Thälmann deserted together with four fellow soldiers. On 9 November 1918, he wrote in his diary on the Western Front that he "did a bunk from the Front with 4 comrades at 2 o'clock."
''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands'' (KPD)
After his desertion, Thälmann was active in the German Revolution of 1918–1919 in Hamburg that began on 29 October 1918. From March 1919, he was chairman of the USPD in Hamburg, a member of the Hamburg Parliament, and worked as a relief worker in the Hamburg city park before taking up a well-paying job at the employment office. There, he rose to the rank of Inspector. When the USPD split over the question whether to join the Communist International, Thälmann sided with the pro-communist faction which merged with the KPD in November 1920, and in the following December he was elected to the KPD's Central Committee. In March 1921, he was fired from his job at the employment office due to his political activities. That summer Thälmann was a representative of the KPD to the Congress of the Comintern in Moscow and met Vladimir Lenin personally.In June 1922, terrorists from the ultranationalist group Organisation Consul threw a hand grenade into his ground floor flat; the assassination attempt failed and he survived. Thälmann helped to organise the Hamburg Uprising of October 1923; as this failed, Thälmann was forced to go in hiding. After Lenin's death in late January 1924, Thälmann visited Moscow and maintained a guard of honour at his bier. From February 1924, he was deputy chairman of the KPD and from May 1924 he was also a Reichstag member. At the 5th Congress of the Comintern in July 1924, 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 KPD's paramilitary organisation, the Roter Frontkämpferbund ; this organisation was banned by the governing SPD in 1929 after the events of Blutmai. In September 1925, Thälmann became chairman of the KPD and thus a candidate for the German Presidency. Thälmann's candidacy in the second round of the presidential election split the centre-left vote, ensuring that the conservative Paul von Hindenburg defeated the Centre Party's Wilhelm Marx.
In October 1926, Thälmann supported the dockers' strike in his home town of Hamburg. He saw this as an act of solidarity with the British miners' strike which had started on 1 May, although that strike had been profitable for the Hamburg Docks as an alternative supplier of coal.
KPD vs. SPD
After the Revolution of 1918 and during the Spartacist uprising, the government ordered the suppression of the revolt and the extrajudicial murders of KPD leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by members of the Freikorps. That same year, the German Army under orders of the SPD-led republic government used military force against the Bavarian Soviet Republic. In 1920, there was a fierce suppression of the Ruhr uprising. At the 12th party congress of the KPD in June 1929 in Berlin-Wedding, Thälmann 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 and SPD member Carl Severing.Thälmann's KPD thus fought the SPD as one of their main political enemy, seeing it as a Bourgeoisie party, acting according to the Comintern policy, which declared social democrats to be "social fascists". This made it difficult for the two leftist parties to work together against the emergence of Adolf Hitler. The KPD under Thälmann declared that "fighting fascism means fighting the SPD just as much as it means fighting Hitler and the parties of Brüning." Thälmann declared in December 1931 that "some Nazi trees must not be allowed to overshadow a forest" of social democrats.
By 1927, Karl Kilbom, the Comintern representative to Germany, had started to combat this ultra-leftist tendency within the KPD but found Stalin machinating against his efforts. 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; his vote count lessened from 4,983,000 in the first round to 3,707,000 in the second.
After the Nazis came to power in January 1933, Thälmann proposed that the SPD and KPD should organise a general strike to topple Hitler's rule. This was rejected by the SPD, as they did not want to work with the KPD after the long years of Thälmann and the KPD's accusations of "social fascism". In February 1933, a Central Committee meeting of the then already banned KPD took place at the "Sporthaus Ziegenhals" in Königs Wusterhausen, near Berlin, where Thälmann had called for the violent overthrow of Hitler's government. The Comintern's 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 fascist threat—an attempt to win over the leftist elements of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, especially the Storm Division, who largely came from a working-class background and supported socialist economic policies. By that time, Hitler had risen to power to establish Nazi Germany and the KPD had been largely destroyed.