Hans Mahle
Hans Mahle was a German party official, working successively for the Communist Party, the Socialist Unity Party and, after being co-opted into its leadership team in 1961, for the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin. During the Second World War he became a founding member of the Soviet-sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany. As the war ended, on 30 April 1945, he was one of 30 men quietly delivered in a Soviet army truck to Bruchmühle, just outside Berlin, as a member of the so-called “Ulbricht Group”. He was part of the first of the three ten man cohorts, who had been flown across from the east, via Minsk, as far as the Oder, but the final part of the journey was undertaken with greater discretion. The men had arrived from Moscow with a meticulously detailed nation building plan, which would unfold in the Soviet occupation zone over the next few years. In a departure from the original plan, however, on 12 May 1945 Mahle was redeployed to an even more important project for which he was particularly well suited, on account of his wartime experience of radio technology and his talents, recognised and much prized by the Soviet party leadership, for “political education”. The Soviet military mayor-administrator in Berlin, Nikolai Berzarin ordered him to take charge of what became the East German Broadcasting Service. He remained a figure of major political importance in the Soviet occupation zone throughout the rest of the decade. However, by 1950 senior comrades were beginning to distance themselves from him, a clear sign that he was losing the leader's backing. In 1951 he was dismissed from his post on suspicion of espionage. His fall from grace was not as brutal nor as total as he might have feared at the time, and by 1956 he was the beneficiary of a gradual rehabilitation process. He never recovered his former status and influence within the party, however.
Life
Provenance and early years
Heinrich August Ludwig Mahlmann was born into a working-class family in Hamburg. He grew up, after his mother lost her jobs as a cook when he was not quite 6, in Hamburg-Eppendorf. He was the younger by two years of his parents’ two sons. His father had been conscripted and was away when the family had to move, Adolf Mahlmann had nevertheless had the good fortune to suffer a serious injury early during the war, whereby he had lost his trigger finger. His physical disability meant he was unable to fire a gun, and he was therefore kept way from the worst of the fighting for much of the time. Politics was in the blood. Adolf Mahlmann would be a co-founder of the Communist Party in Hamburg less than a decade after his younger son's birth, and would die as an inmate of the Buchenwald concentration camp on account of his political convictions and activism. At the time of his birth Hans Mahlmann's parents were both in domestic service, employed over many years at one of the three homes of the wealthy businessman and ship owner Edmund Siemers. Adolf Mahlmann, had worked at the Siemers’ house as the coachman. His mother, born Helene Grashorn, was the cook. The family lived, till 1917, in a basement apartment beneath their employer's 25 room Hamburg villa. After a period of homelessness with their worldly good transported in a little cart, they found a two-room apartment space. At Easter 1918 Mahlmann entered the local school, though the asthma he had contracted during an early childhood marked by wartime austerity and hunger meant that initially he missed two thirds of the classes. His health appears to have improved subsequently.On leaving school, he undertook a commercial apprenticeship. By this time he had already been an early member of the local “Young Pioneer Children's organisation” for several years. Another early member of the movement whom he came to know as a child was Irma Thälmann. From 1928 he and Irma Thälmann were members of the same “Young Pioneer” troupe. Through Irma he also got to know her father, Ernst Thälmann, the man who as leader of the Communist Party of Germany between 1925 and 1933 did much to determine the direction of politics in Germany for a generation or more. Meanwhile, in 1926 he joined the Young Communists. Membership, at least in Mahlmann's case involved courier work for the party, initially within Germany and later internationally. Two years later, still aged just 17, but having nevertheless completed his two-year commercial apprenticeship, Mahlmann became district leader of the “Young Pioneers” for the entire Hamburg region, while at the same time taking on the leadership of the Young Communists for the organisation's north-western sub-region.
Having evidently been talent spotted by the party leadership. In the early summer of 1931, still aged only 19, he was summoned to Moscow to attend an International Young Pioneers Leadership conference. In the Soviet capital there were many new experiences to absorb, and he underwent a certain amount of appropriate training. Having returned to Germany he was ordered by the party to relocate to Berlin in November 1931. He was co-opted into the “Young Pioneer” national leadership team and given responsibility for producing “Trommel”, the organisation's journal. Once again, promotion within the Young Pioneer organisation went hand in hand with promotion among the Young Communists, 1931 was also the year in which Hands Mahlmann became a member of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League, a role which he retained during slightly more than three eventful years, till 1935.
Communist Party
In 1932 he reached the age of 21 and joined the Communist Party itself. He accepted nomination as “First Secretary of the Pioneer Organisation in Germany”. In October or December 1932 he represented Germany in this capacity at the Young Communist International meeting of the Comintern in Moscow, spending several months working as Germany's representative at the International Children's Office which had been established in 1925. The position was a somewhat shadowy one, and there are indications that Mahlmann himself never really understood was expected of him. Nevertheless, of the various representatives from different countries who were there with him, he enjoyed a certain kudos, since Germany had by far the largest and most active Young Pioneer movement outside the Soviet Union at this time. As matters turned out, he was the last person ever to hold the position.Mahlmann had been reluctant to leave Germany at the end of 1932. With political polarisation spilling onto the streets, and the national parliament deadlocked through the refusal of the Communists and the Hitlerite parliamentary parties, to collaborate with the democratically oriented parties or with each other, there was a widespread expectation of a political explosion looming over the horizon. While Mahlmann was in Moscow, in January 1933, the National Socialists did indeed apply a skilful blend of intransigence and cunning in the face of the on-going political crisis to take power. That was followed by a rapid transition to one-party dictatorship. Well before Mahlmann was ordered back to Germany in July or August 1933, any sort of political engagement on behalf of the Communist Party had been made illegal. Many party leaders and activist members had already been arrested or fled the country. Those who remained were living and operating “underground” - somewhere other than at the address registered as their home – in order to avoid being found by officers of the security services. Mahlmann's journey home was anything but direct, For the first time in his life he travelled by plane, flying from Helsinki to Stockholm and from there to Copenhagen. Instead of continuing back to Hamburg he kept away from Germany at this stage, and flew in to Amsterdam. In the Netherlands he was able to arrange a meeting with Fritz Große, a senior party comrade who had been operating in Germany as recently, probably, as May 1933. From Große he gained a detailed briefing on the practicalities of living out of the sight of the authorities as an active communist in Hitler's new Germany. Youth organisations – other than the Hitler youth – had been outlawed and were being ruthlessly suppressed. Große and Mahlmann engaged in intense discussion as to what might be done to put an end to “this brown barbarism” as soon as possible, and what personal contributions Mahlmann might best make in support of that objective. Große was also able to share an already extensive roll-call of party comrades who had been arrested or murdered by government agencies.