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, although by the time he grew up he was describing himself as "religionslos" or a "Dissident", indicating subsequent rejection of organised religion. 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 fought as a soldier in the German army. When he returned home he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD) which had broken away from the mainstream Social Democratic Party a couple of years earlier as a result of intensifying dissent among party members over the leadership decision back in 1914 to vote in favour of war funding measures. After the Communist Party of Germany was founded at the end of 1918 Schulte initially opposed proposals that the USPD should merge with it, but as the USPD splintered apart he was one of many comrades who had a change of heart. However, during 1920 he was appalled at the way in which many industrial workers in Leverkusen were being treated: this drove him, in December 1920, to cross over to the Communist Party. Over the next few years he took on a succession of administrative posts in it.
At the Bayer plant he became the Works Council chairman. In 1921 he was expelled from the "Fabrikarbeiterverband" (trades union) in the context of a major strike at the plant, and after speaking out in support of the political split within the union which took place shortly afterwards. Schulte himself emerged as a leading figure within the radical left wing break-away group, becoming in 1922 full-time secretary of the new - Communist Party oriented - trades union that had resulted from the split. During 1923 he spent three months in Berlin as a trainee in the party's trades unions department. Then, till 1925, he worked for the party local group in Leverkusen-Wiesdorf, first as an "Organisationsleiter" and then, in the more influential position of a "Polleiter" (loosely, "policy leader"). As "Polleiter" Schulte acquired a reputation as a particularly aggressive advocate of communist doctrine, acquiring among comrades in the region the soubriquet "the Noske of the Lower Rhine". 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.
At the Communist Party's eleventh party congress, held in Essen during the first week of March 1927, Schulte was elected to the Party Central Committee. By this time he had already been a deputy member of the Prussian State Council, the upper, indirectly elected, house of the Prussian parliament, since February 1926. Between 1928 and his resignation from it in 1930 he served, in addition, as a full member of the Landtag of Prussia, the more directly elected lower house. In 1928, during July/August, he spent a month on Moscow attending a course organised by the party. During 1928/29 he also held an important trades union position as a member of the national committee of the "Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition" (RGO), the slightly shadowy parallel German trades union confederation with close links both to the German Communist Party and to Moscow which never quite achieved the traction with German workers that its backers had hoped. Between July 1932 and 1933, possibly at the suggestion of party leader Ernst Thälmann, Schulte served as the official national leader of the RGO in succession to Franz Dahlem.
In September 1930 Schulte was elected to membership of the Reichstag (German parliament), representing Electoral District 22 (Düsseldorf-East). He was re-elected in the General Election of July 1932 and again in that of November 1932. with the difference that after each of the 1932 elections he sat as a member representing Electoral District 23 (Düsseldorf-West). The period was one of parliamentary deadlock during most of which the principal extremist parties held more than 50% of the seats. Since neither the leaders of the Communist Party nor of the National Socialist Party had any particular commitment to parliamentary democracy they refused to work either with each other or with members of the more moderate parties. To the extent that government enacted any legislative changes at all, it did so by emergency decree. Sources are silent as to what, if anything, Fritz Schulte contributed as a member of the Reichstag.
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. An indication that he remained at this stage influential in the national party came at the twelfth party congress, which took place at Berlin-Wedding during June 1929. Schulte was re-elected to the Party Central Committee and also, this time, elected to membership of the central committee's inner caucus, the Politburo. From now on, however, the Comintern and the Soviet party Moscow began to take an increasingly hands-on approach to its German sister party. Ernst Thälmann's poor judgement in respect of the Wittorf scandal had left him exposed to criticism from comrades in the upper echelons of the German party. In the event, however, Wittorf was almost immediately purged from party agendas. Thälmann's leadership became more secure than ever, due to the powerfully supportive currents created by Stalin's backing. But Thälmann was no longer his own man, while those who had been critical of his involvement in the Wittorf affair, among whom Fritz Schulte was prominently undiplomatic, found themselves being distanced from party decision making. At the next party congress, held under conditions of some difficulty in 1935, the size of the Party Central Committee would be much reduced, and Schulte would no longer be in it. After 1929 he nevertheless remained installed as the party's "Regional Polleiter" for the entire "Lower Rhine" region for another two years, till 1931.
Hitler years and political exile in Paris (1933 to 1935)