Ernst Thälmann | Hope for Stalin

On the night of August 17-18, 1944, Ernst Thälmann was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp. The heinous act had been decided three days earlier, on August 14, during a meeting between Himmler and Hitler in the "Wolf's Lair." On his notebook, the "Reichsführer SS" and Reich Minister of the Interior had noted twelve points that sealed the fate of prominent opponents and critics of the regime. The list included the names of the former German ambassador to the Soviet Union, Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, Marshals Günther von Kluge and Erwin Rommel, and former Reich Chancellor Joseph Wirth, as well as, under point 12, Thälmann: "Is to be executed."

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The Archives of the President of the Russian Federation contain a total of 24 letters and other documents by Thälmann, which Rosa Thälmann delivered for forwarding to Moscow during eleven visits to the Soviet embassy in Berlin between November 1939 and April 1941. These letters were ultimately intended for Stalin and his aide Molotov, even though in most cases no addressee was named. But Stalin was uninterested in the problems that Thälmann, his unconditionally loyal follower, so desperately wanted to bring to his attention. He ordered that Thälmann's letters be deposited in the archives as "Top Secret" and made accessible only to members of the Politburo.

For more than half a century, Thälmann's texts remained under lock and key. Only the changes in the Soviet Union, initiated under the slogans of "glasnost" and "perestroika" in the second half of the 1980s, opened the possibility of retrieving them from the archives and thus rescuing them from oblivion. In 1996, the texts were published in German for the first time. In the same year, Thälmann's twenty-four writings appeared in Russian in the journal "Novaja i novejšaja istorija."

Just as remarkable as Thälmann's texts themselves were and are the circumstances under which they reached Moscow. Since contact with the KPD's foreign leadership had been lost since the beginning of 1939, and there had been no discernible attempt to reestablish this contact for months, Rosa Thälmann saw no other option than to visit the Soviet embassy in Berlin to reconnect with her comrades. On November 8, 1939, Alexander Shkvarzew, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, reported that a woman had called at the embassy and introduced herself as Ernst Thälmann's wife. The telegram to Moscow continued: "The woman conveyed her husband's request to find out whether Moscow was still concerned about him. She wanted to hand over personal letters from Thälmann from prison to Moscow to remind Moscow of Thälmann."

Like every prisoner in a similar situation, Ernst Thälmann repeatedly wondered when and how he might regain his freedom. Shortly after his arrest, he wrote to his wife that he had prepared himself for a longer period of imprisonment. One would "just have to hold on." His entire life up to that point had been stormy, and it would probably remain so until his death.

From the beginning, Thälmann, arrested on March 5, 1933, pushed for an expedited trial: he wanted to gain clarity about his situation through the court proceedings. He considered an acquittal, fought for by himself, as in the case of Georgi Dimitrov in the Reichstag Fire Trial in September 1933, just as possible as a short prison sentence. In a lengthy letter from the end of September 1934, which had been retrieved from the prison by a guard, Thälmann had spoken of expecting a maximum sentence of three years, "perhaps even just prison" instead of penitentiary. His comment: "I'll just sit on my buttocks." Then again, he fantasized about a solo escape: "In my opinion, it would also be conceivable to escape here at night. Of course, the person [guard] who opens [my cell] must immediately disappear with me, never to be seen again. [...] If I manage to get through the courtyard and the wall, that's absolutely conceivable." But that requires nerves and people. I have them, whether others do, I don't know. So, it's a hopeless case! Perhaps later. I'm still young and fresh, and I would like to once again utilize the great lessons and experiences I've gathered and stored here for the great, the mighty, the unswerving faith of working humanity."

As early as March 28, 1933, approximately three weeks after Thälmann's arrest, Hans Kippenberger was commissioned by the party leadership to appoint a member of his military-political apparatus who would "deal exclusively with Thälmann's affairs." Initially, the task was simply to establish a stable connection with Thälmann and his wife, through which verbal and written information could be exchanged. But the scope of his duties quickly expanded. While Thälmann was still in prison at the police headquarters on Berlin's Alexanderplatz, Kippenberger's staff were investigating the possibilities of a rescue operation.

Concrete plans for Thälmann's escape began in mid-1934. By this time, Thälmann had already been held in the Moabit remand prison for more than a year. Franz Schubert, the head of the KPD's Central Counterintelligence Office in Prague, had managed to establish contact with one of the prison guards stationed in Thälmann's entourage through an intermediary: Emil Moritz, a former Social Democrat, agreed to play a key role in Thälmann's release in both senses of the word. He was to use specially made duplicate keys to open Thälmann's cell door and all other doors on the way out of the prison. The escape plan had been worked out and prepared in detail over weeks and months. Schubert himself had checked all stations along the escape route for weak points. By early January 1935, all preparations were complete. But despite repeated inquiries, there was initially no response from Moscow. It was not until early March 1935 that the plan was harshly prohibited from being carried out. The argument that the security of the entire operation could not be guaranteed because the number of people who knew about the escape plans was too large was not really convincing.

The assumption that Thälmann's release was fundamentally no longer desired at this point, i.e., at the beginning of 1935, is contradicted by the fact that there was probably another serious attempt to free Thälmann from the Moabit remand prison in 1937. However, it is unknown who initiated this second release attempt. Therefore, it is also conceivable that it was a "private" operation, prepared without the knowledge of the KPD leadership or the Moscow authorities. This second attempt most likely failed due to a mishap on the part of prison guard Emil Moritz, who had once again agreed to cooperate in Thälmann's release: Moritz had oiled the lock of Thälmann's cell to reduce the inevitable closing noise when the door was secretly opened during the night. However, Moritz had left a few oil stains behind, which made other members of the guard staff suspicious. Initially, Moritz was transferred within the prison, but was then arrested in June 1937 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison in October 1937. He allegedly committed suicide the day after the verdict was announced...

After more than two and a half years in solitary confinement, during which he was determined to prove his unshakable steadfastness to friend and foe alike, Thälmann also experienced moments when hopelessness and even despair broke through. He therefore asked his comrades: "Why are you such bastards and abandon me here? Even a few brave men can achieve what one would call the miracle of the 20th century. Since when have we become pacifists and fear the walls and courtyards of the barbaric state power?" But then Thälmann immediately reflected: "If higher power demands that we endure, fine, I submit, even if forced and reluctantly!"

In his memoirs written in the early 1960s, Walter Trautzsch, then living in exile in the Czech Republic under an assumed name, reported that in early January 1937, Thälmann expressed the idea that the Soviet government could secure his release through an exchange. According to the further report in the so-called Thälmann Courier, he conveyed this idea to Paris. After a few weeks, he was informed "that the Soviet Union considered Thälmann's proposal unsuitable, or rather, not feasible." A year and a half later, in August 1938, Trautzsch reported that Thälmann had again raised the question of an exchange during a visit to his wife. And not only that. Thälmann had developed precise ideas about how an exchange could be arranged. Thälmann pointed to the tense economic situation in Germany, which would offer opportunities for economic rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could exploit the situation "to obtain various kinds of concessions through new economic negotiations." In this context, he asked about the possibility of "requesting his release through negotiations by contacting leading trading partners and achieving it one way or another?" But this question also remained unanswered. This was by no means because a few weeks later, the courier "Edwin" was arrested and contact with Thälmann was lost.

The decision as to whether the Soviet government would take steps to free Thälmann, i.e., whether it would enter into negotiations for an exchange, lay solely with Stalin. And Stalin, in whose political calculations human life never played a role, never showed any interest in helping Thälmann. He neither wanted to be reminded that the policies Thälmann had pursued at the head of the KPD at the behest of Moscow in the years before the fateful January 30, 1933, had failed in every respect, nor did he want to tolerate another top communist official, alongside Dimitrov, the "Lion of Leipzig," attracting attention intended solely for Stalin himself.

But Thälmann was neither willing nor able to accept the thought that Stalin might not advocate for his release. The German-Soviet rapprochement, which culminated in the Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939, and the Border and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939, was of utmost importance to Thälmann in several respects. Like countless communists around the world, Thälmann was surprised and confused by the sudden shift in Soviet foreign policy. But he did not allow himself to articulate this surprise and confusion. Thälmann was certain that the German-Soviet treaty would make his imminent release possible. As early as September 1, 1939, he wrote euphorically: "The hour of my release has hopefully soon come. I am firmly convinced that the Thälmann case was brought up during the negotiations in Moscow between Stalin and Molotov on the one hand, and Ribbentrop and Count von der Schulenburg on the other. To what extent he has been dealt with in such a way that I can expect my imminent release, I cannot know, but my hope is more confident today than ever."

Eight weeks later, on October 24, 1939, Thälmann again turned to Moscow with a letter smuggled out of prison by his wife. He reiterated that he was "absolutely convinced" that "Stalin and Molotov had raised the question of the release of political prisoners, including Thälmann, somewhere and somehow." But in 1939, it was not the state of war that prevented Thälmann's release. Neither Stalin nor Hitler had any interest in Thälmann's fate. Rather, they had to ensure that the unnatural pact, which their foreign ministers had negotiated and signed under very specific and unrepeatable conditions, was not burdened or even jeopardized by "trivialities" such as Thälmann's individual fate. Neither side could have been interested in prematurely testing the strength of the pact through a "test case." In this respect, it was and is historically wrong to assume that Stalin's proverbial "snap of the fingers" would have been enough to get Thälmann released.

Until the day of the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Stalin and his aide Molotov desperately tried to avoid anything that Hitler could have interpreted as a "provocation." This was one of the reasons why Molotov had forced Comintern chief Dimitrov to abandon a campaign marking Thälmann's 55th birthday at the end of March 1941 with a corresponding "recommendation." With the outbreak of the German war against the Soviet Union, Thälmann had to realize that there was no longer any realistic chance of release. It speaks volumes about Thälmann's human greatness that, even in this hopeless situation, he was unwilling to make the declaration repeatedly demanded by his tormentors, admitting his failure as a communist and thus buying his way to freedom.

A new biography of Thälmann has just been published by the Berlin historian Dr. Ronald Friedmann: "If Moscow wants it so..." (Trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, 522 pp., hardcover, €44.80).