Ernst Thälmann memorial in Weimar.

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. Download high resolution version (600x1100, 124 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Download high resolution version (600x1100, 124 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... April 16 is the 106th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (107th in leap years). ... 1886 is a common year starting on Friday (click on link to calendar) Events January 18 _ Modern field hockey is born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England. ... August 18 is the 230th day of the year (231st in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1944 was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... The Communist Party of Germany (in German, Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands – KPD) was formed in December of 1918 from the Spartacist League, which originated as a small factional grouping within the Social Democratic Party (SPD) opposed to the First World War on the grounds that it was an imperialist war in... The period of German history from 1919 to 1933 is known as the Weimar Republic (Pronounced Vye-Mar, and in German it is known as the Weimarer Republik). It is named after the city of Weimar, where a national assembly convened to produce a new constitution after the German monarchy... The Gestapo was the official secret police force of Nazi Germany. ... 1933 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... Solitary confinement is a punishment in which a prisoner is denied contact with any other persons, excluding guards. ... Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889–April 30, 1945) was the Führer und Reichskanzler (Leader and Imperial chancellor) of Germany from 1933 to his death. ... 1944 was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ...

Political career

Born in Hamburg, Thälmann was a Social Democrat Party member from 1903. Between 1904 and 1913 he worked as a stoker on a freighter. He was discharged early from his military service as he was already seen as a political agitator. Position of Hamburg in Germany Hamburgs central broadway Jungfernstieg at the Alster lake, between 1900 and 1914 This article is about the city in Germany. ... The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD – Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) is the second oldest political party of Germany still in existence and also one of the oldest and largest in the world, celebrating its 140th anniversary in 2003. ... 1903 has the latest occurring solstices and equinoxes for 400 years, because the Gregorian calendar hasnt had a leap year for seven years or a century leap year since 1600. ... 1904 is a leap year starting on a Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1913 is a common year starting on Wednesday. ...

One day before his call up for military service in World War I on 14th January 1915, he married Rosa Koch. Towards the end of 1917 he became member of the USPD. On the day of the German Revolution, 9th November 1918, he wrote in his diary on the Western Front, "...did a bunk from the Front with 4 comrades at 2 o'clock." Ypres, 1917, in the vicinity of the Battle of Passchendaele. ... 1915 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... 1917 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... USPD election poster, 1919 The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or USPD) was a short-lived political party in Germany during the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic. ... Revolutionaries at machine gun posts, Berlin, November 1918 The German Revolution describes a series of events that occurred in 1918-1919, culminating in the overthrow of the Kaiser and the establishment of a democratic republic. ... 1918 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... See Western Front (disambiguation) for other meanings. ...

In November 1920 the USPD merged with the KPD. In December Thälmann was elected to the Central Committee of the KPD. In March 1921 he was fired from his job at the job centre due to his political activities. That summer Thälmann went as a representative of the KPD to the 3rd Congress of the Comintern in Moscow and met Lenin. 1920 is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar) Events January January 7 - Forces of Russian White admiral Kolchak surrender in Krasnoyarsk. ... The Communist Party of Germany (in German, Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands – KPD) was formed in December of 1918 from the Spartacist League, which originated as a small factional grouping within the Social Democratic Party (SPD) opposed to the First World War on the grounds that it was an imperialist war in... 1921 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... The first edition of Communist International, journal of the Comintern published in Moscow and Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) in May 1919. ... Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ( Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин  listen?), original surname Ulyanov (Улья́нов) ( April 22 (April 10 ( O.S.)), 1870 – January 21, 1924), was a Russian revolutionary, the leader of the Bolshevik party, the first Premier of the Soviet Union, and the founder of the ideology of Leninism. ...

On 18th June 1922 an assassination attempt was made on his flat. Members of the fascist organisation Consul threw a hand grenade into his ground floor flat. His wife and daughter were unhurt; Thälmann himself only came home later. 1922 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ...

Thälmann participated in and helped organise the Hamburg Uprising of 23rd to 25th October 1923. The uprising failed, and Thälmann went underground for a time. 1923 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ...

After the death of Lenin on 21st January 1924, Thälmann visited Moscow and for some time maintained a guard of honour at his bier. From February 1924 he was deputy chairman of the KPD and, from May, Reichstagsmember. At the 5th Congress of the Comintern that summer he was elected to the Comintern Executive Committee and a short time later to its Steering Committee. 1924 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1924 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ...

On 1st February 1925 he became chairman of the Rote Frontkämpferbund (RFB), the defence organisation of the KPD. On 30th October he became Chairman of the KPD and that year was a candidate for the German Presidency. 1925 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ...

In October 1926 he supported in person the dockers' strike in his home town of Hamburg. He saw this as solidarity with an English miners' strike which had started on 1st May and had been good for the business of Hamburg Docks as an alternative supplier of coal. Thälmann's argument was that this "strike-breaking" in Hamburg had to be stopped. 1926 was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ...

On 22nd March 1927 Ernst Thälmann took part in a demonstration in Berlin, where he was injured by a blow from a sword. 1927 was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ...

At the 12th party congress of the KPD from 9th to 15th June 1929 in Berlin-Wedding, Thälmann steered a clear course of confrontation with the SPD after 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, a Social Democrat.

On 13th March 1932 Thälmann was once again candidate for the German Presidency, against a Paul von Hindenburg standing for re-election. The KPD's slogan was "A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler; a vote for Hitler is a vote for war.". Shortly after this Thälmann proposed to the SPD the formation of an antifascist coalition as a united front against the Nazis. 1932 is a leap year starting on a Friday. ... Paul von Hindenburg President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg (full name Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg) (October 2, 1847 – August 2, 1934) was a German Field Marshal and statesman. ... The Nazi party used a right-facing swastika as their symbol and the red and black colors were said to represent Blut und Boden (blood and soil). ...

When the Nazis (NSDAP) gained power on 30th January 1933, Thälmann proposed that SPD and KPD should organise a general strike to topple Hitler, but this was not achieved. On 7th February a Central Committee meeting of the already banned KPD took place in Königs Wusterhausen, near Berlin, where Thälmann emphasised the necessity of a violent overthrow of Hitler's government. On 3rd March 1933 he was arrested in Berlin by the Gestapo. 1933 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... A general strike is a strike action by an entire labour force in a city, region or country. ...

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 (who 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. Georgi Dimitrov Georgi Mikhailov Dimitrov (Георги Димитров, also known as Georgij Mikhailovich Dimitrov) (June 18, 1882 - July 2, 1949) was a Bulgarian Stalinist leader. ... The Reichstag fire was a pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi Germany. ...

For his 50th birthday on 16th 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. 1936 was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (Алексей Максимович Пешков) (March 16, 1868–June 18, 1936), better known as Maxim Gorky (Максим Горький), was a Russian author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. ... Luiz (Ludwig) Heinrich Mann (March 27, 1871 – March 12, 1950) wrote German novels with social themes whose attacks on the authoritarian and increasingly militaristic nature of post-Weimar German society led to his exile in 1933. ... History of Spain Series -Timeline -Roman Spain -Visigothic Spain -Moorish Spain -Age of Reconquest -Age of Expansion -Age of Enlightenment -Reaction and Revolution -First Spanish Republic -The Restoration -Second Spanish Republic -Spanish Civil War -The Dictatorship -Modern Spain Topics -Economic History -Military History -Social History The Spanish Civil War (July... Blason of the International Brigades The International Brigade was the name given to the band of volunteers and mercenaries who travelled to Spain to fight against the Nationalist forces led by General Franco and helped by Nazi German and Mussolini Italian forces, and defend the legitimate Spanish Republic government in...

Ernst Thälmann spent over eleven years in solitary confinement. On 17th August 1944 he was transferred from Bautzen prison to the concentration camp Buchenwald, where on 18th 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 23rd August. A concentration camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, often during a war. ... Slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp (Elie Wiesel is second row, seventh from left). ...

Legacy

After 1945, Ernst Thälmann was - along with other leading communists who had been killed such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht - widely honoured in East Germany, with many institutions (eg schools, streets, factories) named after him. His name was also given to the East German pioneer organisation, the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation. A member of the organisation would pledge that "Ernst Thälmann is my model" and that "I promise to learn to work and fight as Ernst Thälmann teaches". In the 1960s Cuba named a small island, Ernst_Thälmann_Island, after him. 1945 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Rosa Luxemburg (March 5, 1870 or 1871 - January 15, 1919, in Polish language Róża Luksemburg) was a Polish and German Jewish Marxist politician, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. ... Karl Liebknecht (August 13, 1871 - January 15, 1919) was a German socialist and a co-founder of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany. ... East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist state that existed from 1949 to 1990 in the former Soviet occupation zone of Germany. ... Czechoslovakian pioneers A pioneer movement is an organization for children operated by a communist party. ... The Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation, consisting of the Young Pioneers and the Thälmann Pioneers, was a youth organisation of schoolchildren aged 6 to 14, in East Germany. ... Ernst-Thälmann-Island (Spanish: Cayo Ernesto Thaelmann) is a 15 km long and 500 m small Cuban Island in the Bay of Pigs, Located at 22°0118 - 81°2332 to 22°04 - 81°2724 in the northeastern edge of the Gulf of Cazones. ...

In his time as head of the KPD, Thälmann closely aligned the German Communists with the hegemony of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow. Supporters of a more autonomous course were sidelined. This has been criticised in particular from the German left. Clara Zetkin, together with Rosa Luxemburg one of the leading German women communists, described Thälmann as "uninformed and not educated in theory", and as caught in "uncritical self-deception and self-infatuation", which "borders on megalomania". The strategy of the KPD during the Weimar Republic, of treating the SPD as its main political enemy, is often seen as having sharply weakened anti-fascist forces and as having thereby contributed to the Nazis' rise to power. Hegemony is the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; or more broadly, that cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group. ... For other usage of the initials CPSU see CPSU (disambiguation). ... Clara Zetkin, maiden name Eissner (born 5 July 1857 in Wiederau, Saxony; died 20 June 1933 in Archangelskoye near Moscow) was an influential socialist German politician and a fighter for womens rights. ... Rosa Luxemburg (March 5, 1870 or 1871 - January 15, 1919, in Polish language Róża Luksemburg) was a Polish and German Jewish Marxist politician, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. ... The period of German history from 1919 to 1933 is known as the Weimar Republic (Pronounced Vye-Mar, and in German it is known as the Weimarer Republik). It is named after the city of Weimar, where a national assembly convened to produce a new constitution after the German monarchy...

External link

• Ernst Thälmann speeches and papers (in German) (http://www.marxistische-bibliothek.de/_thaehlmann.html)