The 'Red Millionaire' who exposed Nazi terror through publishing, the Comintern's greatest propagandist, who broke with Stalin
"Stalin, you are a traitor!" — Münzenberg's response to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
The Comintern's most brilliant mass-propagandist. He founded Workers International Relief, co-founded the League Against Imperialism, and his Brown Book (1933) exposed the Reichstag fire as a Nazi frame-up. He broke with Stalin and died under mysterious circumstances.
Career timeline
- 1915–1919Secretary, Intl. Union of Socialist Youth Organizations
- 1919–1921First Secretary, Young Communist International
- 1921–1937Founder & leader, Workers International Relief (IAH/Mezhrabpom)
- 1924–1933Reichstag deputy for Hesse-Nassau (KPD)
- 1927–1935Co-founder & leader, League Against Imperialism
- 1933–1939Directed anti-fascist exile publishing & solidarity (Paris)
- 1939–1940Publisher of Die Zukunft, independent anti-Nazi/anti-Stalinist line
Baltic German Nazi ideologue from Reval who served as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941–1945
Born in 1893 in Reval (Tallinn), in the Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire, he studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. In 1918 he left for Germany with the retreating German army and in January 1919 joined the German Workers’ Party, eight months before Hitler; in 1923 he became editor of the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1930 he published his racial treatise The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and he fed Hitler’s belief in Jewish conspiracies by introducing him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941, he had Hinrich Lohse installed as Reichskommissar for Ostland, though his own authority was severely limited. He saw the Baltic lands as German “Lebensraum”. Found guilty on all four counts at Nuremberg, he was hanged on 16 October 1946.
Career timeline
- 1919Joined the German Workers’ Party
- 1923Editor of the Völkischer Beobachter
- 1930Published The Myth of the Twentieth Century
- 1941–1945Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
- 1946Sentenced to death at Nuremberg and executed
Nazi Party propaganda chief and minister who promoted antisemitism and dictatorship.
Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi Party propaganda leader who headed the party organization in Berlin from 1926 and became its propaganda chief in 1930. Appointed minister of propaganda by Hitler in 1933, he brought the press, film, radio, and cultural life under Nazi ideological control and promoted antisemitism and persecution of Jews. He was a chief instigator of the November 1938 pogrom and later campaigned for total war.
Career timeline
- 1926–1945Nazi Party Gauleiter for Berlin
- 1930–1945Nazi Party propaganda chief
- 1933–1945Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
- 1944–1945Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War
Youngest member of the Ulbricht Group who fled to Yugoslavia in 1949 and became a leading Western scholar of Soviet communism
Born Vladimir Leonhard in Vienna, he went into Soviet exile with his Communist mother in 1935; she was arrested in 1936 and spent twelve years in the Vorkuta camps. After the Comintern school he became an announcer for Radio Free Germany, and on 30 April 1945 he returned to Berlin as a member of the Ulbricht Group. He worked in the agitation and propaganda department of the KPD and then SED Central Committee and from 1947 lectured at the party college. Convinced that Germany would replicate the Soviet system, he fled via Czechoslovakia to Yugoslavia in March 1949 and moved to West Germany in 1950. His 1955 memoir Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder became an international bestseller, and from 1966 to 1987 he taught Soviet history at Yale.
Career timeline
- 1935Went into Soviet exile with his mother
- 1943Announcer at Radio Free Germany
- 1945Returned to Berlin with the Ulbricht Group
- 1947Lecturer at the SED party college
- 1949Fled to Yugoslavia
- 1955Published his memoir
- 1966–1987Professor at Yale
