Transcript
Narrator “Thälmann is dead”, the Nazi paper Gauzeitung proclaimed in mid-September 1944. The chairman of the KPD, Germany’s Communist Party, was alleged to have died in a bomb attack on Buchenwald. The message was cause for agitation among the inmates. Robert Siewert recalled:
Robert Siewert “There was hardly anyone in the camp who believed that lie.”
Narrator There was good cause for doubt: for one thing because the bomb attack had taken place four days earlier, and for another because Thälmann had never been an inmate at the Buchenwald camp. Robert Siewert, who had been in the camp since 1938, noted:
Robert Siewert “Everyone was of one opinion: Ernst Thälmann had been murdered by the SS thugs!”
Narrator And it was true: The Gestapo often used Buchenwald as a place of execution, not only for inmates but also for those not detained at the camp. Here, outside the ambit of the law, unwanted individuals could be easily disposed of: with no legal procedure, no witnesses and no evidence left behind. The number of people murdered in this way is unknown, but estimates put it at more than 1000 men and women. The most well-known victim of this kind of execution – known in SS jargon as “special treatment” – is without a doubt Ernst Thälmann.
Thälmann’s rise from casual labourer to one of the most prominent politicians of the Weimar Republic began after the First World War. In 1920 he switched from the SPD to the Communist Party via the USPD, held political offices first in his hometown of Hamburg, then entered the Reichstag in 1924. The following year he became Chair of the KPD and was a candidate for President of the Reich. While he did not stand a chance in the election, he became well known beyond the limits of Hamburg.
As the party chairman, Thälmann followed the lead of the Soviet Union and furthered the Stalinization of the KPD: Centralized authoritarian leadership replaced lively discussion within the party; opponents and dissenters were disempowered or shut out, including, incidentally, Robert Siewert.
The political archenemy of the Weimar Republic KPD was social democracy. The workers’ movement was deeply divided and a common fight against the Nazi party was largely impossible.
Nevertheless it was possible – especially with the world economy in crisis – to expand the party’s support base: During the Reichstag election of November 1932, the KPD received almost 17 percent of the vote.
With the National Socialist “seizure of power”, the KPD was broken up, its members persecuted, its chairman apprehended in March of 1933. Moabit, Hannover, Bautzen: For eleven years, the head of the KPD was held in solitary confinement without having been sentenced. In the end, Ernst Thälmann was taken to Buchenwald on the 18th of August 1944 and shot in the cellar of the crematorium by a detachment of the camp SS.
In the face of his death and in spite of the falsehood of the newspaper report, communist inmates organized a memorial ceremony. The memorial address was given by Robert Siewert, who had swung back to the party line in his years of detention. In the mid-1950s he described the decorated cellar of the disinfection building:
Robert Siewert “The room was decorated with red and black fabric. From the camp nursery we had brought in flowers and bay trees. In the front of the room was a large picture of Thälmann framed in red and black fabric. To the right and left of the picture pylons had been set up, and the solid fuel tablets placed in tin bowls were lit at the opening of the ceremony. This was the only source of illumination, but it gave the room a particularly ceremonious and celebratory atmosphere.”
Narrator If so inclined, one can see in this the origin of the cult of personality that arose in East Germany, honouring Thälmann as a communist martyr.
For some of those who participated in the ceremony for Thälmann, it also had direct consequences: Through an informer the SS learned of the illegal meeting and arrested several inmates. Robert Siewert was among those who ended up in the bunker. For more than half a year, he was held there, released back into the camp only a few days before the liberation of Buchenwald.
