Ernst Thälmann

Ernst Thälmann (16 April 1886 – 18 August 1944) was a German communist politician. He was leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) from 1925 to 1933. A committed Stalinist, Thälmann played a major role in the political instability of the Weimar Republic in its final years, when the KPD explicitly sought the overthrow of the liberal democracy of the republic. Under his leadership the KPD became intimately associated with the government of the Soviet Union and the policies of Joseph Stalin, and from 1928 the party was largely controlled and funded by Stalin's government. The KPD under Thälmann's leadership regarded the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as its main adversary and the party adopted the position that the social democrats were "social fascists." Thälmann viewed the Nazi Party as a lesser evil than the social democrats, and in 1931 his party cooperated with the Nazis in an attempt to bring down the social democrat state government of the Free State of Prussia. Thälmann believed that a Nazi dictatorship would fail due to flawed economic policies and lead to a revolutionary situation in which the communist party gained power. Thälmann was also leader of the paramilitary Roter Frontkämpferbund, which was banned as extremist by the governing social democrats in 1929, and in 1932 he established Antifaschistische Aktion or Antifa, which concentrated its attacks on the social democrats. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement for eleven years; Stalin did not seek his release when he entered into the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, and Thälmann's party rival Walter Ulbricht ignored requests to plead on his behalf. Many of Thälmann's closest associates who had emigrated to the Soviet Union were executed during the Great Purge of the 1930s. Thälmann was shot in Buchenwald on Adolf Hitler's personal orders in 1944.