Werner Hirsch

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Marxism–Leninism Germany Germany (Jewish) 1899–1941 ✕ Died in prison

Editor of Die Rote Fahne and Thälmann's secretary who passed through Nazi camps and Soviet prisons

Born into a Jewish judge's family in Berlin, Hirsch joined the USPD and the Spartacus League in 1917 and took part in the Kiel naval mutiny and the KPD founding congress. He left the party after Levi's expulsion in 1921, returned in 1924 and in 1928 became editor-in-chief of Die Rote Fahne with Heinz Neumann. In 1932 he became Thälmann's secretary and in March 1933 was arrested with him, passing through Nazi camps. Released, he emigrated, but was arrested in Moscow in 1936, sentenced to ten years, and died in Butyrka prison in 1941.

Also known as: Werner Daniel Hirsch

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

From Die Rote Fahne to the prisons of two regimes (1928–1941)

In 1928 Hirsch became editor-in-chief of Die Rote Fahne in Berlin together with Heinz Neumann, a mouthpiece of the social-fascism line. After Blood May 1929 he called the Berlin police president Karl Zörgiebel a "mass murderer" and a "coolly calculating Social Democratic butcher of workers", for which he was fined 1,000 marks in April 1930; that year he also published Blutige Maitage in Berlin. In What Next? Trotsky cited Hirsch's article in Die Internationale of January 1932, which, following Stalin, taught that there was no essential difference between fascism and parliamentary democracy, and argued that such theory meant the political capitulation of the proletariat.

Thälmann's secretary from 1932, Hirsch was arrested with him on 3 March 1933. Held in "protective custody" and tortured, he passed through police prisons, Gestapo headquarters and the Brandenburg, Lichtenburg and Oranienburg camps, and testified at the Reichstag fire trial. Released after his mother appealed to Hermann Göring through Emmy Göring, he emigrated to Prague and wrote about his experience of the camps.

But his very release from Nazi custody made him suspect. Hans Kippenberger and others denounced him as a "Trotskyist Gestapo agent", and the party ordered him to Moscow to clear himself. Arrested at the Hotel Lux on 4 November 1936, he refused to confess despite torture, but in November 1937 he was sentenced to ten years in the camps on charges including handing Thälmann to the police. On Solovki he went on hunger strike and was repeatedly punished with solitary confinement; gravely weakened, he was moved to Butyrka prison, where he died in June 1941.