Walter Stoecker

Walter Stoecker (9 April 1891 – 10 March 1939) was a German Communist politician. He served as a member of the Reichstag between 1920 and 1932. During or after his school career he completed a commercial training, mostly through attending evening classes after work.

Stoecker became a member of the Cologne Young Socialist Movement ("sozialistische Arbeiterjugendbewegung") in 1908, and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1909.

Through 1919 Stoecker was active at a party level. There were two USPD party conferences held that year, in March and October. Walter Stocker attended them both as a delegate. In June/July 1919 he was appointed secretary to the party's national leadership team, a job which carried significant influence. The party leadership was based in Berlin-Grunewald: it may have been the new appointment that caused him to leave his journalistic job in the Ruhr region. He represented Electoral District 26 (Düsseldorf-West) By the end of 1920 he was sitting not as a USPD parliamentarian but as a Communist Party (KPD) member. He would remain a member of the Reichstag for twelve years, till July 1932.

In 1925, following the "open letter" affair and the removal of Ruth Fischer along with the leadership team around her, and its rapid replacement with a more uncompromisingly pro-Moscow leadership team under Ernst Thälmann, Walter Stoecker, still identified as a left-leaning comrade quickly recovered his influence within the party apparatus. Then at the Essen party congress in March 1927. Stoecker was briefly critical of Thälmann's role in the aftermath of the Wittorf affair in 1928, and even at one point vote for Thälmann's temporary suspension pending further discussion. However, it very quickly became clear that Ernst Thälmann retained the Soviet leader's total confidence, and Stoecker was one of many comrades in and around the party leadership team who quickly came to realise that Thälmann's judgement of John Wittorf could not, after all, have been at fault. Stoecker's party career did not, at the time, appear to have suffered any lasting damage over the matter. 1929 saw him re-elected to membership of the party central committee. By the time of the July 1932 general election, the party was no longer even listing him as a candidate for re-election.

Hitler years In January 1933 the Hitler government took power and lost no time in exchanging German democracy for a one-party dictatorship. On 7 February 1933 Walter Stoecker was one of the participants at the , celebrated subsequently (especially during the "East German" years) as the last meeting held by the German Communist Party leadership before the participants were arrested, killed, or in a few cases managed to flee abroad. The Reichstag Fire took place over night on 27/28 February 1933 and was followed with a rapidity which commentators, even at the time, found suspicious, by the Reichstag Fire Decree. Walter Stoecker was one of many known communists taken into government custody on the night of the fire, a few hours following its outbreak. The Stoecker's children were at particular risk from a National Socialist government since, according to at least one source, Elfriede was deemed Jewish. The Montagus were surprised to see Elfriede and her children, but agreed to look after the children. Reports vary as to whether Elfriede returned at once to Germany or remained for some time in England. Helmuth, aged 12 and Helga, aged 8 found themselves enrolled at Summerhill School, a progressive boarding establishment in Suffolk, created and directed by the formidable education reformer Alexander Sutherland Neill from Forfar. Rowna Hellstern-Montagu, aged 11, was already a pupil. During April/May 1934 the Sonnenburg camp was closed and Stoecker was one of several hundred former inmates transferred the Lichtenburg concentration camp near Wittenberg. At each camp Stoecker emerged as a member of the (illegal) communist leadership team. He was also able to correspond with his wife, through whom he secured the discussion and passage of an important resolution at the party's "Brussels congress".

The final move came in August 1937 when he was sent with hundreds of other prisoners to a vast construction site at the Ettersberg hillside, just outside Weimar. The others included Theodor Neubauer and Albert Kuntz. With other inmates, the three men set up the kernel of a communist cell inside the Buchenwald ("Beech Wood") concentration camp, as it was becoming known.

At some point Helmuth and Helga Stoecker moved out of Ivor and Hell Montagu's home, and were instead fostered by a Captain Lamont in Yorkshire, in the northern part of England. His professorship followed quickly. He continued to teach at the University of Berlin till his retirement in 1986.