Ernst Reinke

Ernst Reinke (28 November 1891 –- 28 April 1943) was a German Communist activist who became a politician and, in 1930, member of parliament. After 1933 he went on to become a resistance activist. He spent his final years as a concentration camp inmate. Sources identify his 1943 killing by government paramilitaries at Camp Flossenbürg, in the mountains east of Nuremberg, as a murder.

Life and works Ernst Reinke was born at Adlig Schmelz, Between 1897 and 1905 he attended school in what was then Tilsit. After leaving school he worked on the barges. That month he was also one of 77 Communist Party candidates elected to the Reichstag (national parliament). Reinke was excluded from his membership of the assembly on 30 June 1931, however. His parliamentary seat was taken over by Hanna Sandtner. On 28 February, as the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed by parliament, communist members of parliament and other activists were arrested. Ernst Reinke was one of them. He was taken to the Alexanderplatz Police Station and "badly mishandled". Around the same time, in the state-owned graphite products factory of VEB Elektrokohle Lichtenberg, a brigade (work group) was given the name "Ernst Reinke Brigade". Since its erection in front of the Reichstag building in 1992, Ernst Reinke has also been one of 96 murdered members of the Reichstag individually commemorated by the Memorial to the Murdered Members of the Reichstag.