Ernst Thälmann
* 1886

Ernst Thälmann, born 16 Apr. 1886 in Hamburg, shot by SS in Aug. 1944 at Buchenwald concentration camp

Tarpenbekstraße 66

Ernst Thälmann was the son of Johannes and Maria Magdalena Thälmann, née Kohpeiss, who wed in 1884. The family lived at Alterwall 68. Their daughter Frieda was born on 4 Apr. 1887. The only information we have about Frieda is that she was not politically active and lived in Hamburg until her death on 8 July 1967. According to the registry of births, they probably had more siblings who died during infancy or as toddlers. Ernst and Frieda were placed with foster families while their parents served time in prison in 1892-1893 for receiving stolen goods.

As children the two had to work many hours in their parents’ grocery store and haulage business, leaving little time for school. Despite good grades – he had been admitted to Selekta – Ernst left school at the age of 14. [Selekta refers to a special feature of the Hamburg school system at the end of the 19th century, start of the 20th century. After completing the nine years of elementary school, talented students could undergo Selekta and qualify to attend teacher training college, among other things.] Hence, Ernst did not have the requirements to be trained as a craftsman or teacher as he had hoped. He worked for two more years in the family business. Eventually he left his family home due to constant fights over his pay – his father only paid him pocket money for his work – and for more personal freedom. He took a series of temporary jobs in Hamburg shipyards. It was there that his self-confidence first showed through, a quality he displayed equally as a stoker on board the steamship Amerika as he did in 1910 during a brief interlude as a farm worker near New York.

Having returned to Hamburg, Ernst Thälmann again found work at the docks. It was there that he became politicized by his experience as a temporary worker. In 1903 he joined the Social-Democratic Party and in 1904 the Transport Workers Union where he rose to become chairman of the carriage workers section prior to World War I. When he met his future wife Rosa Koch in 1910, he was working as a carriage driver. Rosa, born on 27 Mar. 1890 in Bargfeld, ironed clothing at the laundry Frauenlob which was on one of Thälmann’s routes. The couple married in 1915, shortly before Ernst Thälmann was drafted into the artillery. Like many who were on the left before 1914, he loyally fought for his homeland throughout the entire war. When the army was disbanded in autumn 1918, he returned to Hamburg. Even as a leading communist, he remained proud of his Iron Cross, 2nd class, a medal that was awarded en masse in spring 1918 to raise the morale of the dispirited troops. Ernst Thälmann was wounded at least twice in combat.

Back in Hamburg, he found a well-paid job at the employment office where he was promoted to inspector. During that period, his only child was born, his daughter Irma, on 6 Nov. 1919. Ernst Thälmann’s political career took a rapid upturn after the war. He joined the local Hamburg chapter of the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD) which had spun off from the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (Socialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD). As a leading member of their left wing, he campaigned for merging the USPD with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which was ultimately achieved in Dec. 1920. As of Feb. 1919, Thälmann was a Member of the Hamburg Parliament, a mandate which he held until 1933.

Ernst Thälmann was dismissed without notice on 29 Mar. 1921 after he absented himself from work without permission to follow a call to arms by the KPD and join the so-called March Action. That revolt was an attempt, primarily on the part of KPD members from central Germany, to weaken the bourgeois republic. It failed. Afterwards, Thälmann again worked for a brief period for his father as a carriage driver and in shipyards. After the March Action he primarily earned a living as a full-time staff member of the KPD.

During a wave of radical rightwing terror, an attempt was made on Ernst Thälmann’s life in 1922. On 17 June a hand grenade exploded in front of the family’s ground floor apartment at Siemssenstraße 4. Not only did it cause property damage, it also gave his wife and young daughter a terrible scare.

In 1924 he was elected to the German Parliament, the Reichstag, where he led the KPD parliamentary group until the end of the Weimar Republic. That role entailed prolonged stays in Berlin. Moreover, Thälmann was regularly invited to Moscow, both in his role as a leading German communist and as a member of the executive committee of the Communist International. The executive committee determined the policies of its member parties, coordinated them according to uniform principles, and pursued world revolution as its ultimate goal.

His bearing as a "man of the people" – untrained transport worker with a Hamburg accent and mariner’s cap – helped his rise to become leader of a German communist party with Stalinist leanings. However he himself was never close to Stalin. In autumn 1925 Ernst Thälmann became head of the KPD due to an intervention by Stalin and as such became Germany’s most prominent communist. His candidacy for the office of Reich President in the elections of 1925 and 1932 thrust him once more into the spotlight of domestic political attention.

His nickname "Teddy" spread throughout the KPD after the so-called Hamburg Rising of 1923. According to one party myth, he had demonstrated exceptional fighting spirit – he was a fighter whom all communists should strive to emulate.

Thälmann’s political activities increasingly became an ordeal for his family. His wife stayed in Hamburg with their daughter, from 1929 at Tarpenbekstraße 66 where they took an apartment on the second floor for security reasons. Rosa and Irma lived with Rosa’s father in a "typical worker’s household", as a senior KPD functionary expressed it. In Berlin Thälmann continued to clothe himself and speak like a working-class man from Hamburg. He felt ill at ease when he had to meet with people who did not come from his background. It was probably his longing for a home which led to an affair with his landlady Martha Kluczynski, a KPD comrade.

Ernst Thälmann and his close colleague Werner Hirsch were arrested in her apartment at Lützower Straße 9 in Charlottenburg on 3 Mar. 1933 during a raid carried out by the security police. Martha Kluczynski was never to see him again. (She died in East Berlin in 1975.) According to police records, Thälmann had already packed his bags, ready to go – evidence of his decision, which came too late, to go into hiding.

Ernst Thälmann spent nearly twelve years in solitary confinement in Hitler’s dungeons. He was tortured during the first years. Later he was offered his release if he publically renounced Soviet communism. He did not accept the deal. Thälmann first was held at the Berlin prison in Moabit before he was moved to Hanover and later to Bautzen.

At least on one occasion there was a serious plan to release him from prison, but the KPD leader living in exile stopped the attempt at the last minute.

During all those years, Thälmann was regularly visited by his wife. By maintaining contact with various couriers, she acted as a connection between her husband and the KPD leadership living in exile. Rosa exposed herself to great risk by remaining loyal to her husband. She was arrested by the Gestapo on at least one occasion. Moreover, she collaborated closely with Thälmann’s lawyer in Hamburg until the National Socialists shattered all prospects of a court trial in the mid 1930s.

As he did previously during World War I, Thälmann proved himself a diligent letter writer in prison. Surviving documents provide insight into his personality. In letters to his close relatives – from his daughter and wife to his father and brother-in-law – he moved seamlessly from family affairs to political topics. He developed a particularly close relationship with his father who had joined the KPD in 1927 after inflation had “swallowed” his family’s entire savings. Thälmann learned of his father’s death on 31 Oct. 1933 from the confines of his cell in Moabit Prison. He was not allowed to attend his funeral in Hamburg on 4 Nov. 1933. His mother, to whom he was not as close, had passed away on 9 Mar. 1927 in Hamburg.

Ernst Thälmann liked to read news about Hamburg in the newspaper and emphasized how proud he was to come from a city which described itself as the "center of world trade" and the "gate to the world". In his memories he glorified life in his home town and underscored that he always felt most comfortable with the people there.

The assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944 was to blame for Thälmann’s killing. Shortly after the failed attack, Hitler told Himmler, Thälmann "is to be executed". During the night from 17 to 18 Aug., he was taken from Bautzen Prison to Buchenwald concentration camp where SS men shot and killed him. In post-war West Germany, there were several attempts to convict his alleged killers, but they remained unsuccessful.

Rosa and Irma Thälmann were detained at Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944 and were liberated by the Red Army. After the war, they lived in East Germany and helped create the politically motivated "myth" of Ernst Thälmann. During the Spanish Civil War, a battalion of the International Brigade bore his name. In 1948 the “Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organization” was founded in the Soviet occupation zone. Later, innumerable streets and squares, schools and workers collectives in East Germany and other communist countries were named after him. Even towns were named after him. Off the south coast of Cuba, in the Bay of Pigs, there is an "Ernst Thälmann Island". In Hamburg too, a street was named after him in 1946 for several years. After the violent suppression of the uprising in Hungary ten years later, the street was given the name it still has today, Budapester Straße, since officials did not want to publically exalt the name of a communist in the midst of the Cold War.

The Ernst Thälmann Memorial at Ernst-Thälmann-Platz (re-named accordingly in 1985) in Eppendorf keeps alive the memory of the "son of his class", the title of a Defa film. The volunteers at the memorial also had a Stumbling Stone laid for him. After German re-unification, the name Ernst Thälmann had largely disappeared from public life in the newly formed German states, and today’s young people hardly know anything about him.

Ernst Thälmann’s wife Rosa died on 21 Sept. 1962 in East Berlin, their daughter Irma on 10 Dec. 2000 in a reunified Berlin where she had run an unsuccessful campaign as a German Communist Party candidate for parliamentary elections in 1998.

Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.