Ernst Thälmann
* 1886

The historiographical assessment of the role the German communist Ernst Thälmann played on the eve and at the height of the great crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s was influenced by the examination of the earlier Marxist writing of history, an examination which took place during the second half of the 20th century. In a kind of heroic legend writing, the Marxist version of history had made him into the “leader of the revolutionary avant-garde” and the “great son” of the German people.

In his position as party leader, Thälmann played an ignoble role fighting and ultimately permanently destabilizing the first German republic. As his party was brought in line with the Communist International, its political fight moved to the streets and the party’s radicalization deepened the rift within the German workers’ movement, helping to create a climate in which the national right was able to carry out a successful attack on the republican system. In the late 1930s, Stalin exchanged some members of the Communist International in Germany with “troublesome German immigrants” in the USSR. As chairman of the “Executive Committee of the Communist International” in Germany, it was ultimately Thälmann’s personal tragedy that he was not included in the exchange, as was the execution of many of his closest associates during the Stalinist purges in the USSR.

Ernst Thälmann was born on 16 Apr. 1886 in Hamburg. His father, the carriage driver Fritz Johannes Thälmann, ran a tavern for coachmen during those years. Until his father opened a store selling colonial goods in the 1890s, the boy was mostly raised by his relatives. While still attending school, he and his sister had to help their parents in their store. After finishing school, he first worked as a carriage driver in his parents’ business which had, in the meantime, been expanded to haul coal and transport furniture.

At the age of 16, Thälmann left his parents’ home and scraped by for a time with different jobs at the docks until he finally found a job as a transport worker for the Janssen Brewery in Hamburg. It was there that he first encountered the young socialist workers. Those contacts along with his own experience working on the docks as a young person led him to join the Socialist Party of Germany in 1903 at the age of 17. After he changed over to working in the transport industry, Thälmann joined the “Transport Workers Association” early in 1904.

At the age of 20, Ernst Thälmann was drafted as a soldier into the 9th Artillery Regiment in Cologne. He fell ill, received an early release and signed on with the "Hamburg-America Line". From Oct. to Dec. 1907, he worked on the steamer AMERIKA as a coal trimmer. Three voyages took him to New York where he admired the “advanced technology”, the comparatively good living conditions and, not least, the elevated legal standing of women in American society, as he wrote in his curriculum vitae in 1935.

After leaving military service, Thälmann worked temporary jobs at the Hamburg dockyard, as a transport worker and finally as a dispatch clerk for various laundry services, including the Welscher industrial laundry in Wandsbek. At the Trumpf laundry service he met his future wife, the manager Rosa Koch.

Until the outbreak of World War I, Thälmann held various voluntary positions in the Transport Workers Union and in the SPD. Politically he saw himself as part of the left wing of his party. At party meetings, he advocated for Rosa Luxemburg’s position and the minority group of SPD parliamentary members close to her.

In Jan. 1915 Ernst Thälmann was called up as a reservist and deployed to fight on the western front in Champagne, Aisne and the Somme. Disciplinary offenses kept Thälmann from being promoted and from receiving military decorations, despite being injured twice. In autumn 1918, he did not return to his unit after taking leave from the front. As he waited in Hamburg for the war to end, he first worked at his parents’ store and then as a worker at ship demolition yard at the docks. In 1920, he finally found a permanent job as an inspector at the employment office.

In Nov. 1918, he joined the USPD in Hamburg and was elected to the Hamburg Parliament as their representative in Mar. 1919. Two days after the opening session, he voted against the Law on Provisional State Authority which transferred the highest power of state to the Parliament until a new, democratic constitution was passed. As a representative of the left wing which declared its support for continuing the revolution and establishing a Soviet-style republic, two months later he was elected chairman of the USPD in Hamburg.

At the extraordinary party conference in Halle in Oct. 1920, he was a spokesman for the left wing of his party which called for merging with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and joining the Communist International. At the Berlin Combined Party Conference of the communist party KPD and left USPD, Thälmann was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party – then temporarily called the United Communist Party of Germany (Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands – VKPD).

In 1921 Ernst Thälmann became chairman of his regional chapter of the KPD in Hamburg and at the same time member of the district management. That same year, he was appointed a full-time functionary of the KPD in the “Wasserkante” district. As a member of the Central Committee of the German Communists, he took part in the 3rd World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in June 1921 where he first encountered Lenin and Trotski. As a proponent of the leftwing, party-internal opposition, he repeatedly spoke out against Heinrich Brandler’s policies. As the leader of the Hamburg KPD, Thälmann was involved in preparations for the Hamburg Uprising in Oct. 1923, but he did not make an appearance as a leader while the uprising was carried out.

His election to the post of deputy party chairman in Jan 1924 marked a decisive step towards rising to the top of the party leadership of the German communists. In that role, he collaborated closely with the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) to shut out the right wing of the party. It was also the backing by the ECCI which promoted him to the office of party chairman in 1925 following the downfall of his former allies Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow. And in 1928 the ECCI rescued him once again by reversing a decision by the KPD Central Committee to suspend Thälmann from his party posts for attempting to cover up the misappropriations of his fellow Hamburg party member John Wittorf. Ernst Thälmann was a man of the "Comintern" whose executive committee he belonged to as of the summer of 1924. He was held in high regard by the executive committee despite him being not nearly as uncontroversial a figure in the German KPD as the SED party historiography would have everyone believe.

Thälmann did not stand out as a trend-setting theoretician. Even parts of his own party regarded him as an opportunist in the service of Moscow and a “star of leftwing rhetoric” who overestimated himself. Clara Zetkin wrote Nikolai Bucharin in 1927, “It has become fatally […] apparent that Teddy [Thälmann] is unknowledgeable and unschooled in theory, was lured into uncritical self-deception and blindness, bordering on megalomania and lacking self-control. As a consequence he allows his good proletarian instincts and judgment to deceive him about people and lead him astray […].” The fact that all attempts by party-internal opposition to bring Thälmann down failed time and again due to the stance of the ECCI leads us to believe that he would not have been able to maintain his position as party chairman until 1933 without Moscow’s backing. Hermann Weber reckons that the Comintern thrust Thälmann "into a position that he was not up to, mentally or politically". That does not, however, detract from Thälmann’s popularity, above all in his hometown of Hamburg. He was held in high regard by the party base due, in particular, to his own roots in the labor force and his undisputed populist appeal.

As of 1924 Thälmann became a representative in the Reichstag in addition to fulfilling his mandate in Hamburg’s Parliament. In 1925 he ran for the office of Reich President for the first time which contributed significantly to his growing popularity in the party. His candidacy admittedly risked the consequences of the republican candidate Wilhelm Marx (Zentrum) losing to the rightwing candidate Paul von Hindenburg by 900,000 votes in the second round of voting – the token candidate Thälmann had received 1.9 million votes (6.3%). At the same time, Thälmann tried to solidify his position as party leader by having himself elected as leader of the League of Red Front-Line Fighters.

As co-founder of the Anti-Fascist Operation, he called for a “united front” under KPD leadership in 1932. At that time his party was not only hopelessly divided, the party had also become so far estranged from the SPD, which he had doggedly accused of “social fascism” in his speeches and writings, that joining forces under the leadership of the communists for German social democracy was no longer an option. Negotiating a united front between leaders of the social-democratic party and labor unions was ruled out from the start.

The communist notion of a united front aimed to merge the social-democratic and the communist workforces through joint action. To avoid any misunderstanding, the “Thälmann Central Committee”, which was fully in line with the 11th World Congress of the Communist International, also made it clear that the Anti-Fascist Operation signified “by no means the slightest weakening of the fight against social fascism”. Intentionally or not, what actually emerged from Thälmann’s efforts was a united front of republican opponents, the NSDAP and KPD, which even culminated in joint action, such as the referendum in 1931 against the Prussian minority government of Braun and Severing and a strike by the Berlin transportation companies at the end of 1932.

On 7 Feb. 1933 Thälmann once again chaired a KPD conference at Sporthaus Ziegenhals near Berlin. Immediately after the burning of the Reichstag on 27 Feb. 1933, a warrant was put out for his arrest and the arrest of the other members of the Central Committee of the KPD. Contrary to newspaper reports that he was in Denmark, Thälmann hid in a Berlin garden allotment with his secretary. He was reported to the police and arrested on 3 Mar. 1933.

Even though he was charged with “preparing high treason” in spring 1935, he was never put on trial. The warrant for his arrest was suspended, however Thälmann continued to be detained. He was held in remand prison in Berlin-Moabit until Aug. 1937, then spent 6 years in Hanover Remand Prison until he was transferred to Bautzen Penitentiary in Aug. 1943. His political reflections surviving from his time in prison are profound and also emphasize conciliatory points in their, at times, self-critical, realistic political analysis: “We too made some serious and occasionally grave political mistakes in the past, and in the convoluted muddle of those times we unfortunately overlooked and failed to seize opportunities to stop fascism in its tracks."

After a total of eleven and a half years in solitary confinement, Ernst Thälmann was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp on 18 Aug. 1944 where he was killed the same day by members of the SS Command 99 on direct orders from Himmler. The order to kill Thälmann was issued at the same time as Operation Storm began, the regime’s response to the failed assassination attempt on Hitler of 20 July in which thousands of potential regime opponents were rounded up across the Reich, killed, deported or sentenced.

Thälmann’s wife Rosa and his daughter Irmgard were arrested in late Sept. 1944 and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. After the war, Rosa Thälmann was a member of the East German Parliament and died in Berlin in 1962, a veteran of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

Today the Ernst Thälmann Memorial is located at Tarpenbekstraße 66 in Hamburg, Thälmann’s last residence.

Author: © Biography used with kind permission of the Parliament of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (ed.), from Jörn Lindner& Frank Müller: "Mitglieder der Bürgerschaft – Opfer totalitärer Verfolgung", 3rd revised and extended edition, Hamburg 2012

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