36 Facts About Hans Mahle

Hans Mahle was part of the first of the three ten man cohorts, who had been flown across from the east, via Minsk, as far as the Oder, but the final part of the journey was undertaken with greater discretion.

Hans Mahle remained a figure of major political importance in the Soviet occupation zone throughout the rest of the decade.

Hans Mahle's fall from grace was not as brutal nor as total as he might have feared at the time, and by 1956 he was the beneficiary of a gradual rehabilitation process.

Hans Mahle never recovered his former status and influence within the party, however.

Hans Mahle grew up, after his mother lost her jobs as a cook when he was not quite 6, in Hamburg-Eppendorf.

Hans Mahle was the younger by two years of his parents' two sons.

Hans Mahle's father had been conscripted and was away when the family had to move, Adolf Mahlmann had nevertheless had the good fortune to suffer a serious injury early during the war, whereby he had lost his trigger finger.

Hans Mahle's mother, born Helene Grashorn, was the cook.

Hans Mahle was furnished with false identity papers and ordered to travel by train to Berlin.

Hans Mahle made his way to his new base at Leipzig-Lindenau.

Hans Mahle had been issued with half a torn cigarette card with which was to make himself known at the new safe house: the comrade meeting him would be holding the other half of exactly the same card.

Hans Mahle left the supposedly safe house and made his own arrangements, via a trusted comrade called Rudi Hardtmann, to install another apartment, living with a family who proved trustworthy, and were indeed able to provide a number of services such as providing him with a new alternative set of identity documents, legitimising him as an insurance company representative.

Hans Mahle's fictitious identify papers identifying him as an insurance representative, backed up by a briefcase stuffed with fictitious insurance documents, all carefully crafted by the family with whom he was accommodated during the first three months of 1934.

Hans Mahle managed to get away and stumbled into a little roadside hotel, hoping to find a room and clean himself up, only to find himself in the middle of a conference of SA officers.

Hans Mahle managed to get away through his hotel bedroom window which was at the back of the hotel, and not too far from the city's main railway station.

Between March and July 1934 Hans Mahle took charge of the Young Communists organisation in Berlin-Brandenburg.

Nevertheless, the party was controlled on a Stalinist top-down basis and during the summer Hans Mahle was posted to Duisburg to take charge of one of the five newly decentralised regions.

Hans Mahle was uninterrupted as he explained his situation, and when he had finished his plump interlocutor immediately invited him to accept sole use of the apartment he owned at the top of the house three buildings along the road from his own home.

Hans Mahle worked as an instructor and regional secretary in the Ruhr area, which traditionally had, like his home city Hamburg, been an area in which the Communist Party had been particularly strong.

Many German communist exiles from Hitler who had settled in Moscow fell foul of Stalin's political purges during this period, but Hans Mahle avoided that fate.

In 1944 it became known that a German court martial had convicted Hans Mahle and sentenced him to death, in absentia, on a charge of high treason.

Hans Mahle was present at the conference, becoming a founder member of the NKFD and chairman of its youth commission.

Hans Mahle was the youngest of the 30 members of the Ulbricht Group.

Hans Mahle was part of Berlin-based cohort, working directly under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht.

Hans Mahle was initially installed in the city centre Tiergarten quarter which he already knew well from his time as an underground resistance activist.

Early on, Hans Mahle took to the microphone himself in order to launch an appeal for records and sheet music, works of Russian literature and works of German literature that had attracted opprobrium from the Nazis.

Hans Mahle was not universally admired for his achievements at Berlin Radio.

Hans Mahle was one of them, albeit the sixteenth on the list.

Between June 1945 and September 1947 Hans Mahle was listed as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany and, following the contentious political merger of April 1946 which gave birth to its successor, of the Socialist Unity Party.

Nevertheless, Hans Mahle was well networked and appears to have enjoyed the backing of Stalin till 1953.

Ulbricht let it be known, in front of senior comrades, that he thought Hans Mahle should relocate with his family to a part of the city in the Soviet sector, but Hans Mahle resisted the idea.

Nevertheless, Hans Mahle's career benefitted through the 1950s, and as result of the cautious relaxation of some of the less subtle methods by which the East German rulers controlled the country.

In Schwerin, Hans Mahle remained under close security service surveillance, but he nevertheless rose through the ranks of the local agricultural co-operative, becoming a member of its executive board.

Hans Mahle had already been installed as de facto editorial director since, according to one source November 1954,.

Hans Mahle remained in charge of the production of the Schweriner Volkszeitung till February 1959.

Hans Mahle died through Kidney failure in the hospital at Berlin-Steglitz on 18 May 1999.