Toggle menu
Toggle personal menu
Not logged in
Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits.

Ernst Thälmann

From ProleWiki, the proletarian encyclopedia
More languages
(Redirected from Thälmann)
Ernst Thälmann
Born
Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann

16 April 1886
Hamburg, German Empire
Died18 August 1944 (aged 58)
Buchenwald concentration camp, Weimar, Thuringia, Nazi Germany
Cause of deathExecution by gunshot
NationalityGerman
Political orientationMarxism-Leninism
Political partyKPD


Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann was a German politician and Marxist-Leninist who served as the Chairman of the Communist Party of Germany from 1925 until his imprisonment in 1933. He rebuilt the Communist Party following the failures of the Spartacist uprising and German October. In February 1933, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed, and the Nazi government began arresting dozens of Communists. Thälmann was forced into hiding until his eventual arrest in Berlin on 3 March 1933 by the Gestapo. He was executed at the Buchenwald concentration camp on Hitler's personal orders in 1944.

The Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation (a youth organisation in the German Democratic Republic), the Thälmann Battalion (a battalion of the International Brigades which fought on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War), the Ernst Thälmann Company, a number of awards in East Germany, various streets, stadiums, towns, shipyards, factories, and schools in Germany, Donetsk, and Russia, a training ship, a mountain range in Antarctica, and even an island off the coast of Cuba all bare/bore his name.