Fritz Schulte

Fritz Schulte (28 July 1890 – 10 May 1943) sometimes identified in contemporary sources by his later party code name as Fritz Schweizer, was a prominent and increasingly influential member of the German Communist Party leadership team between 1922 and 1934.

He represented a Düsseldorf electoral district as a member of the Reichstag (German parliament) between 1930 and the abolition of democracy three years later. As a well-known communist leader, he was forced to flee the country, and in December 1934 ended up in Moscow.

Like many left-wing political refugees from Hitler's Germany, during the years that followed he fell foul of the Soviet dictator's intensifying paranoia. He died as an inmate of a Soviet labour camp, almost certainly as a result of torture suffered during the course of a long succession of questioning sessions conducted by the Soviet security service. After the war ended he was scapegoated by the party leadership in the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany), following East Germany's launch in October 1949. It was said that as a member of the Communist Party leadership before 1933 he had been responsible for allowing the National Socialists to take power because he had fomented bitter division between the Communist Party and the centre-left Social Democratic Party. After 1945 the need for the political left to remain united emerged as a central tenet of the new political establishment in East Germany. Mainstream commentators nevertheless agree that the blame for the bitter feuding on the political left in Germany before 1933 should more properly be imputed to the Communist Party leader of that time, Ernst Thälmann, who had for many years taken his lead from Stalin in condemning the Social Democrats as "Social Fascists" and refusing, in defiance of the more nuanced strategic perceptions of comrades, to contemplate any sort of political alliance or other arrangement with them. Thälmann had been shot in response to a personal order from Adolf Hitler, after eleven years as an inmate of successive prisons and concentration camps, on 18 August 1944.

The East German party leadership had cast Thälmann as a heroic martyr figure: there could be no question of blaming either Thälmann or Stalin (who remained alive and very much in power till 1953) for the feuding on the political left in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Life Provenance and early years Fritz Schulte was born in Hüsten during the high period of Wilhelmine Germany. Hüsten was a small industrial town set in the countryside to the east of Dortmund which had been dominated since the 1840s by a single enterprise, the "Hüstener Gewerkschaft" (a large steel mill). His father was a factory worker. The family was powerfully Roman Catholic, and Fritz Schulte is reported to have served for a number of years as a youthful official with Catholic youth organisations, Schulte attended school locally and then moved some 50 miles to the west of Dortmund, to Düsseldorf, where he took unskilled factory work between 1904 and 1912, before going on to work at a Bayer chemicals plant in nearby Leverkusen.

Communist Party Schulte was politicised by his experiences of the First World War, which broke out in July 1914 and lasted for more than four years. He was also a member of the Unterbezirksleitung (sub-district leadership team) for the party in the Solingen region. Through the 1920s the Communist Party remained fractious, and it may have been in part a reflection of his early hesitancy about joining the party at its launch that Schulte was regarded as a representative of the party's right wing. In 1923 he was reportedly talking about "the idiot Thälmann" which cannot have endeared him to his (sometime) political mentor the man who emerged after a few more years of splits and divisions as the party leader. In 1924 he was still reading the (illegal) pamphlets circulated by the party's "Brandler faction". However, during 1924, possibly in response to a more general shift in mood within the party, he made his own decisive switch to the Communist Party's increasingly powerful left wing. Later that year he was accepted as a member of the "Bezirksleitung Niederrehin" party leadership team for the entire Lower Rhine region. Within the team, in July 1925 he became "Secretary for Communal Policy" and then "Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda", a role to which the Communist Party - taking its leader from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - attached great importance. Further appointments included that of "Organisationsleiter" in May 1926 and in 1927 of "Polleiter", again in respect of the entire Lower Rhine region. Schulte was for a short time replaced in the role by Lex Ende, apparently in order to that he might be made more available for national party functions.

In September 1930 Schulte was elected to membership of the Reichstag (German parliament), representing Electoral District 22 (Düsseldorf-East). and again in that of November 1932.

Schulte remained engaged in the internal politics of the Communist Party from his "Lower Rhine" power base, irrespective of any parliamentary or other political duties in Berlin. In the aftermath of the Wittorf scandal he stepped forward as leader of the party's left-wingers, in opposition to the so-called compromisers. "Regional Polleiter" Lex Ende, who was seen as having ended up on the wrong side of the relevant moral arguments, was removed from his regional leadership post to which, in November 1928, Schulte was restored. After 1929 he nevertheless remained installed as the party's "Regional Polleiter" for the entire "Lower Rhine" region for another two years, till 1931.

In the fall/autumn of 1933 the four men were ordered by the party leaders who had made the French capital their base, to relocate to Paris. They complied. Schulte, crossing the border to the south of Berlin and travelling via Prague, became the last of the four to leave Berlin. He had been, in addition, the last member of the party politburo to leave Germany in the wake of the Hitler take-over. He now remained in Paris between 1933 and 1935.

In Paris, Schulte found himself allied with Hermann Schubert, as the two of them adopted the party tactics of imposing control by means of the "ultra-leftist intransigence" to which comrades had become accustomed during the period of Thälmann's leadership. During 1934 they found the support for their approach slipping away, however. Both Schubert and Schulte found themselves increasing marginalised within the leadership group, as other former Central Committee members came to favour a "united front" strategy, necessary to resist the still intensifying tide of fascism. Meanwhile, between 1933 and 1935 Schulte briefly resumed at least nominal leadership of the RGO; but the RGO itself was already collapsing, crushed in Germany by the government, while outside Hitler's reach exiled elements decided that the movement had become, at best, a distraction from the need to unite against Hitler. and the couple's son, both of whom had remained in Germany, were taken into "Protective custody".

Between 15 December 1935 and 1 June 1936 Schulte was placed in charge of the "Agitation and Propaganda" office at the "Profintern" ("Red International of Labour Unions " / "Красный интернационал профсоюзов"), an offshoot of the Comintern tasked with international coordination of communist activism in trades union movements. He was then removed and sent to work in a large Moscow-based company. Naturally, during what was a period of great paranoia on the part of the Soviet leadership, especially in respect of all the foreign political exiles living in Moscow, he was kept under surveillance. There are indications that the new leadership of the exiled German party may have been plotting his further degradation ("Zersetzung") and destruction. It later emerged that one of those reporting on Schulte and his allegedly dubious "connections" to the Soviet security services was Herbert Wehner, a fellow communist exile living in Moscow who much later came to prominence in West Germany as a canny pipe-smoking Minister of Intra-German Relations and long-standing leader of the Social Democratic parliamentary group in the West German Bundestag. One of Wehner's reports that survives (and which may, of course, have been dictated to him only under duress) identifies Schulte as the "leader of the sectarian opposition in the Communist Party of Germany".

Arrest and death It appears from Wehner's reports that by the end of 1937 Schulte had been identified as a Trotskyite (and thereby an enemy of Stalin's government). He was arrested on 21 February 1938, one of many "Чистка" (purge) victims arrested in Moscow at around the same time.

On 7 April 1941 an NKVD "special tribunal" sentenced Schulte to an eight year term of detention at a labo(u)r camp. He was sent to the camp at Sewpetsch (far to the north, inside the arctic circle) and placed on a programme of "Исправительные работы" (loosely, "correctional work"). Fritz Schulte died at the labour camp on 10 May 1943, his death having almost certainly been hastened by the harsh living and working conditions top which he had been subjected in the Soviet "correctional" camp. His son, also called Fritz Schulte, had become a wartime soldier and was "killed in action" soon afterwards in the fighting on the Russian front.

There are reports that in Moscow, during the period identified in some sources as the Khrushchev Thaw, Fritz Schulte was probably posthumously "rehabilitated" on 26 March 1956. If that was indeed the case, then it appears that no one bothered to communicate the information to his widow in West Germany. Gertrud Schulte was still alive in 1960: in October of that year she placed a "wanted photograph" of her late husband in "Die Tat", a weekly magazine produced by the "Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes" ("Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime").