Hermann Richard Schubert

Hermann Schubert (26 January 1886 – 22 March 1938) was a German political activist and politician. In 1924 he briefly sat as a member of the national parliament (Reichstag), representing the Communist Party of Germany.

In 1933, some months after the Nazi power seizure, he fled from Nazi Germany, ending up as a political refugee in Moscow. He was later arrested by the Soviets in 1937 and executed in 1938.

Sources may refer to him using the name "Max Richter", the cover-name under which he sometimes operated between 1933 and 1935. He attended school in the town. One source states that his early work was as a miner Reichstag membership would normally have secured him some level of parliamentary immunity. However, in the wake of street disturbances across several parts of Germany during 1923, in November of that year a court had declared the Communist Party illegal: the ban was still in force through the summer of 1924 and election to the Reichstag in May 1924 provided no effective immunity against re-arrest. In July 1924, after just two months, Schubert resigned his Reichstag seat and relocated to the Ruhr area in the west of the country, which at this point was still under French military occupation in connection with an ongoing dispute about war reparations. Schubert pursued his (now illegal) party work in the Ruhr region, where he was appointed regional party secretary at Bochum. However, on 21 October 1924, despite holding a false passport, Schubert was re-arrested. He was succeeded in that position by future resistance leader Anton Saefkow.

At the 1929 party conference, held that year in Berlin-Wedding, Schubert's name was placed on the candidate list for membership of the Communist Party Central Committee, which was the party's ruling body nationally. After just two years, in 1931, he was co-opted into the Central Committee, and in 1932 the party leader Ernst Thälmann, appointed him to membership of the Politburo, which was the executive committee within the Central Committee.

Nazi Germany: Soviet exile In January 1933 the political backdrop was transformed when the Nazi Party took power and converted Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Political activity - except in support of the Nazi Party - became illegal. At the end of February 1933 the Reichstag fire was instantly blamed on the Communists, and in March 1933 the party leader, Schubert's friend Ernst Thälmann, was arrested: Schubert immediately went to Berlin, as recently agreed with Thälmann, in order to take over the chairmanship of the illegal Communist Party. This unleashed a political struggle with Schubert and John Schehr on one side and Walter Ulbricht on the other. Ulbricht was already a shrewd and ruthless political operator who coveted the party leadership for himself. Schehr was discovered and arrested in November 1933, but Schubert remained active in the party leadership. Schubert and Schehr, backed by a politburo majority that included Wilhelm Florin, Fritz Schulte and Franz Dahlem, were keen to continue with Thälmann's uncompromisingly left-wing Communist agenda, while Ulbricht, backed by another future heavy hitter, Wilhelm Pieck, appeared to advocate a more pragmatic future for the party. The division reflected a series of bitter disputes and splits that had affected the German and Soviet Communist Parties during the 1920s, and would provide a defining context for Schubert's political career in the run-up to his execution in 1938. so Schubert himself was becoming increasingly marginalised inside the party. It was the Ulbricht / Pieck faction that was becoming mainstream, and both Florin and Dahlem switched sides, joining Ulbricht's group. The first party conference since the Nazis seized power was held in Moscow in October 1935. It was here that Schubert and his friend Fritz Schulte were excluded from the party central committee, scapegoated for the party's misfortunes and distanced from the apparatus of the party and of the Comintern. He was given a relatively low-profile position in International Red Aid, the international Communist workers' welfare organisation. He was identified as a participant in the "Anti-Comintern block", and on 22 March 1938 he was condemned to death and, later the same day, shot.

Two months later, in May 1938, the government back home in Germany posthumously stripped Hermann Schubert of his German citizenship.