Ernst Thälmann Ernst Thälmann ( 16 April 1886 – 18 August 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 in Buchenwald on Adolf Hitler ' s orders in 1944 . During the Spanish Civil War , several units of German republican volunteers ( most notably the Thälmann Battalion of the International Brigades ) were named in his honour . Political career . Born in Hamburg , Thälmann was a Social Democratic 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 seen as a political agitator . In January 1915 , on the day before his call - up for military service in World War I , he married Rosa Koch . Towards the end of 1917 he became a member of the Independent Socialist Party of Germany ( USPD ) . On the day of the German Revolution , 9 November 1918 , he wrote in his diary on the Western Front , " . . . did a bunk from the Front with 4 comrades at 2 o ' clock . " KPD . When the USPD split over the question of whether to join the Comintern , Thälmann sided with the pro - Communist group which in November 1920 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 Congress of the Comintern in Moscow and met Vladimir Lenin . In June 1922 Thälmann survived an assassination attempt at his flat . Members of the terrorist nationalist organisation Consul threw a hand grenade into his ground floor flat . His wife and daughter were unhurt ; Thälmann himself came home only later . Thälmann participated in and helped organise the Hamburg Uprising of October 1923 . The uprising failed , and Thälmann went underground for a time . After the death of Lenin in 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 , a Reichstag member . 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 . In February 1925 he became chairman of the " Rote Frontkämpferbund " ( RFB ) , the defence organisation of the KPD . In October 1925 Thälmann became Chairman of the KPD and that year was a candidate for the German Presidency . Thälmann ' s candidacy in the second round of the presidential election split the centre - left vote and ensured that the conservative Paul von Hindenburg defeated the Centre Party ' s Wilhelm Marx . In October 1926 Thälmann supported in person the dockers ' strike in his home town of Hamburg . He saw this as solidarity with the British miners ' strike which had started on 1 May and had been profitable for Hamburg Docks as an alternative supplier of coal . Thälmann ' s argument was that this " strike - breaking " in Hamburg had to be stopped . In March he took part in a demonstration in Berlin , where he was injured by a blow from a sword . In 1928 during the " Wittorf affair " he was ousted from the party central committee for trying to cover up embezzlement by a party official who was his close friend and protégé , John Wittorf , possibly for tactical reasons . But Stalin intervened and had Thälmann reinstated , signaling the beginning of a purge and completing the Stalinization of the KPD . KPD vs SPD . At the 12th party congress of the KPD in June 1929 in Berlin - Wedding , Thälmann , in conformity with the position adopted by the Soviet Union leadership under Joseph Stalin , adopted a policy of confrontation with the SPD . This followed 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 , Carl Severing , a Social Democrat . During that time , Thälmann and the KPD fought the SPD as their main political enemy , acting according to the Comintern policy which declared Social Democrats and Socialists to be " social fascists " . By 1927 , Karl Kilbom , the Comintern representative to Germany , had started to combat this ultra leftist tendency of Thälmann within the German Communist Party , but found it to be impossible when he found Stalin was against him . Another aspect of this strategy was to attempt to win over the leftist elements of the Nazi Party , especially the SA , who largely came from a working - class background and supported socialist economic policies . These guidelines on social democracy as " social fascism " remained in force until 1935 when the Comintern officially switched to endorsing a " popular front " of socialists , liberals and even conservatives against the Nazi threat . By that time , of course , Adolf Hitler had come to power and the KPD had largely been destroyed . In March 1932 , Thälmann was once again a candidate for the German Presidency , against the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg and Hitler . The KPD ' s slogan was " A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler ; a vote for Hitler is a vote for war . " Thälmann returned as a candidate in the second round of the election , as it was permitted by the German electoral law , but his vote count lessened from 4 , 983 , 000 ( 13 . 2 % ) , in the first round , to 3 , 707 , 000 ( 10 . 2 % ) , which seems to indicate that , despite his fierce opposition , Hindenburg received a substantial number of communist votes . After the Nazis came to power in January 1933 , Thälmann proposed that the SPD and KPD should organise a general strike to topple Hitler , but this was not achieved . In February 1933 , a Central Committee meeting of the already banned KPD took place in Königs Wusterhausen at the " Sporthaus Ziegenhals " , near Berlin , where Thälmann called for the violent overthrow of Hitler ' s government . On 3 March he was arrested in Berlin by the Gestapo . Imprisonment and execution . Thälmann ' s trial , which he said that he looked forward to , never took place . Thälmann ' s interpretation was that his two defence lawyers , both Nazi Party members ( he nonetheless trusted them 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 courtroom . For his 50th birthday , in April 1936 , Thälmann received greetings from around the world , including from Maxim Gorky and Heinrich Mann . That same year the Spanish Civil War broke out , and two units of the International Brigades named themselves after him . Thälmann spent over eleven years in solitary confinement . In August 1944 , he was transferred from Bautzen prison to Buchenwald concentration camp . There , on 18 August , perhaps on Hitler ' s orders , he was shot . His body was immediately cremated . Shortly after , the Nazis announced that together with Rudolf Breitscheid , Thälmann had died in an Allied bombing attack on 23 August . Legacy . While heading the KPD , Thälmann closely aligned the German Communists with the Soviet Communist Party . Supporters of a more autonomous course were expelled . A leading German communist , Clara Zetkin , described Thälmann as " uninformed and not educated in theory " , and as caught in " uncritical self - deception and self - infatuation [ which ] borders on megalomania . " During World War I and the Weimar Republic , the KPD competed for leadership of the working class with the more moderate Social Democratic Party of Germany ( SPD ) , particularly after the latter supported German involvement in the War . Thälmann and the KPD focused their attacks primarily on the SPD to prevent it from retaining power . Thälmann did this at the expense of ignoring the then - young Nazi Party , which likely allowed them to gain power several years later . During World War II Tito organized a battalion of Danube Swabians and Wehrmacht defectors as the Ernst Thälmann Battalion to fight the Nazis . After 1945 , Ernst Thälmann , and other leading communists who were murdered , such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht , were widely honoured in East Germany , with many schools , streets , factories , etc . , named after them . Many of these names were changed after German reunification though it is still easy to find streets and the like named after Thälmann in cities like Berlin , Hamburg , and Frankfurt an der Oder . The East German pioneer organisation was named the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation in his memory . Members pledged that " Ernst Thälmann is my role model , " adding that " I promise to learn to work and fight [ struggle ] as Ernst Thälmann teaches " . In the 1950s , an East German film in two parts , " Ernst Thälmann " , was made . In 1972 , Cuba named a small island , Cayo Ernesto Thaelmann , after him . The British Communist composer and activist Cornelius Cardew named his " Thälman Variations " for piano in Thälmann ' s memory .