23 Facts About John Schehr

John Schehr was a German political activist who became a Communist Party politician and ultimately, chairman of the Communist Party of Germany, following the arrest on 3 March 1933 of Ernst Thalmann.

John Schehr died when he was one of four men shot by Gestapo officials, reportedly "while escaping" during an overnight transport, following arrest.

John "Jonny" Schehr was born into a working-class family in the Ottensen quarter of Altona, Hamburg, at that time a robustly independent municipality, but subsequently - in 1937 - subsumed into Hamburg.

John Schehr attended school locally in Ottensen and then completed an apprenticeship as a skilled metal worker with "Firma Meier", an Altona manufacturing company.

In 1916 or 1917 John Schehr was conscripted into an artillery regiment and sent to serve at Neu Breisach, an important redoubt which at that time was part of Germany.

John Schehr quickly became an energetic party activist: his brother recalled later that during the early 1920s he was out almost every evening, undertaking party work.

In 1924 John Schehr became a party "Polleiter" for Altona where he was already, by this time, a municipal councillor.

The dire economic situation during the early 1920s made this a period of expansion for the communists in the industrial regions, and during 1925 John Schehr was appointed to lead the party organisation in the recently established Harburg-Wilhelmsburg sub-district in succession to Johann Skjellerup.

Also in 1927 John Schehr was again a delegate at the party's eleventh party congress, held that year in Essen.

John Schehr was reinstated as party "Orgleiter" for the Hamburg-Wasserkante district, retaining the post till March 1930.

In 1929, at the eleventh party congress John Schehr was again present as a delegate, and he was yet again included on the candidates list for Central Committee membership.

In 1930 John Schehr took over the job of regional party secretary with the Hanover-based regional leadership team for the Lower Saxony region in succession to Willi Bohn, whom the national party leadership had decided should be sent to the International Lenin School in Moscow for two years of party training.

John Schehr relocated to Berlin, becoming both secretary to the Central Committee and a member of its inner caucus, the Politburo.

John Schehr was now, in all but name, deputy to the party leader, Ernst Thalmann.

Regardless of the legal basis for the arrest, as a member of the Reichstag till some months after the regime change in 1933, John Schehr enjoyed certain privileges, and it would appear to have been on account of these that on this occasion his release came so swiftly.

On 7 February 1933 John Schehr was one of the participants at the "illegal" Sporthaus Ziegenhals meeting held just outside Berlin, and celebrated subsequently as the last meeting held by the German Communist Party leadership before the participants were arrested and killed, or in some cases managed to escape abroad.

John Schehr was taken to the Columbia concentration camp, a former military police station on the edge of Berlin that had stood empty since 1929, till its conversion into a prison during 1933.

The Gestapo knew that John Schehr was a senior party functionary and they did their best to extract statements from him, employing some of the worst forms of torture.

John Schehr suffered severe burns and there are reports that one of his eyes was knocked out of its socket.

John Schehr was officially declared dead in 1949.

John Schehr's youngest daughter, who had been born in 1942, and with her family had escaped to West Germany after a final cuddle from her father in 1945, grew up convinced that her father was a good man traduced by Soviet propaganda.

John Schehr was able to undertake extensive research in the scrupulously maintained files that the East German security services had compiled and maintained during the intervening decades, and she was forced to accept not just that her father was the man who had murdered "John Schehr" and his comrades, but that this had been just the first in a succession of escalating atrocities for which Bruno Sattler had been responsible during the twelve Nazi years.

Already, in 1954, John Schehr's physical remains had been disinterred from their resting place in Berlin-Marzahn to the Friedrichsfelde Main Cemetery where they were placed in the "Gedenkstatte der Sozialisten", the special section reserved for heroes of socialism.