31 Facts About Edwin Hoernle

Edwin Hoernle was a German politician, author, educator, agricultural economist and a Marxist theoretician.

Edwin Hoernle spent the Nazi period in Moscow where, during the final years of the Second World War, he was a founding member in July 1943 of the Soviet-backed National Committee for a Free Germany.

Edwin Hoernle was born in Cannstatt, a rapidly industrialising suburb on the northern edge of Stuttgart.

Edwin Hoernle was one of his parents' four recorded children.

Edwin Hoernle then attended secondary schools in Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart, successfully completing his school final exams in 1902.

Edwin Hoernle performed his military service with an infantry regiment in 1903.

Edwin Hoernle studied Theology, Philosophy and History at Tubingen and Berlin between 1904 and 1909.

In 1909 the couple married and Edwin Hoernle passed his "Theological service exam", taking work as a church vicar.

Edwin Hoernle was arrested in June 1916 and sent to the frontline in August 1916 as a member of a "punishment battalion".

Edwin Hoernle was arrested again in April 1917 and assigned to a Punishment Unit after it was determined that he had been distributing copies of the illegal anti-war so-called "Spartakusbriefe".

In Stuttgart Edwin Hoernle became a member of the city's Workers' and Soldiers' Soviet.

Edwin Hoernle is described as a co-founder of the Communist Party, although he is not listed among those who actually attended the new party's founding congress in Berlin, which took place over three days, between 30 December 1918 and 1 January 1919.

Between 1921 and 1924 Edwin Hoernle was a member of the national Communist Party leadership team.

Edwin Hoernle's previously published poetry he now identified as "by-products of Communist Party Work".

Hoernle then aligned himself with the party "pragmatists" such as Ernst Meyer, but Meyer was falling out of favour with the extremists who were in the ascendancy and during 1924 Edwin Hoernle ceased to be a member of the national Communist Party leadership team.

In 1923 Helene Edwin Hoernle left her husband and went to live with their friend and party comrade Heinrich Rau.

Edwin Hoernle remained a Reichstag member through a period of increasing political polarisation, leading to parliamentary deadlock, till 1933.

One of Edwin Hoernle's colleagues was Ernst Putz, who was not yet a party member.

Edwin Hoernle undertook several missions to the Soviet Union with delegations of farmers, keen to acquire and share knowledge about what might become, from the Communist perspective, the future of farming.

Edwin Hoernle was no admirer of the Social fascism concept which asserted that Social Democrats were the class enemy and there could be no question of co-operating with them to resist the rising tide of National Socialist populism.

In 1931 Edwin Hoernle was a co-author of the Communist Party's "Farm Support Programme".

Edwin Hoernle himself avoided arrest through what one source identifies as a happy coincidence.

Between December 1933 and November 1940 Edwin Hoernle was employed at the International Agriculture Institute in Moscow.

In 1943 Edwin Hoernle was one of those who successfully called for the creation of the National Committee for a Free Germany.

Edwin Hoernle made his own direct contribution as a teacher at the Prisoner of War school in Oranki.

In May 1945 Edwin Hoernle returned from Moscow to Germany, which was now being administered as the Soviet occupation zone.

Edwin Hoernle applied to be allowed to retire - almost certainly on genuine health grounds - early in 1948, but his resignation was accepted only in September 1949.

Edwin Hoernle now accepted a less onerous posting as Dean of Faculty for Agriculture Policy at the German "Walter Ulbricht" Academy for Civil Jurisprudence at Forst Zinna.

Edwin Hoernle died of heart failure, after a long period of illness, at a sanatorium in Bad Liebenstein, beyond Erfurt, in the extreme south of what had by now become the German Democratic Republic.

Edwin Hoernle was arrested during 1936 and on 4 November 1937 sentenced to five years of imprisonment.

Edwin Hoernle seems to have survived that treatment, but was then starved to death.