Ernst Thälmann

Ernst Thälmann (April 16, 1886—August 18, 1944) was the leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during much of the Weimar Republic. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement for eleven years, before being shot on Adolf Hitler's orders in 1944.

Imprisonment

His trial - which he said he looked forward to - never took place. Thälmann's interpretation was that his two defence lawyers, both Nazi Party members (whom he nonetheless trusted 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 court room.

Related Topics:
Georgi Dimitrov - Reichstag fire

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For his 50th birthday on 16 April 1936 he received greetings from around the world, including from Maxim Gorky and Heinrich Mann. That same year the Spanish civil war broke out, and two battalions of the International Brigades named themselves after Ernst Thälmann.

Related Topics:
16 April - 1936 - Maxim Gorky - Heinrich Mann - Spanish civil war - International Brigades

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Ernst Thälmann spent over eleven years in solitary confinement. On 17 August 1944 he was transferred from Bautzen prison to the concentration camp Buchenwald, where on 18 August on Hitler's orders he was shot and his body immediately burned. Shortly after the Nazis announced that together with Rudolf Breitscheid, Thälmann had died in a bomb attack on 23 August.

Related Topics:
17 August - 1944 - Concentration camp - Buchenwald - 18 August - Rudolf Breitscheid - 23 August

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