26 Facts About Max Maddalena

Max Maddalena was a German political activist and trades union leader whose political allegiance, after 1920, was to the recently launched Communist Party.

Maximilian Maddalena was born at Riedheim, a hill-country village in the extreme south of Baden, close to the Swiss frontier and, beyond that, Schaffhausen to the west.

Max Maddalena's mother, Katharina Osswald, was a local girl from whom he inherited both his name and his German nationality.

Max Maddalena became, in the eyes of the respective laws, an Italian national.

Enrico Max Maddalena is described as a mosaics worker, a trader in gypsum statuettes and a day-labourer.

Max Maddalena grew up in Riedheim with his mother, living in the house of his maternal grandmother, and, until 1909, attending the local school.

Maximilian Maddalena was still an apprentice, and only 16, when he joined the DMV.

Max Maddalena joined the Social Democratic Party just two years later, in 1913.

War broke out in July 1914 and Max Maddalena lost no time in volunteering for service in the German navy.

Max Maddalena served in Flanders as a member of an elite marine attack company and received a number of medals, including the Iron Cross twice.

The objective of the stoppage, which took place with the full support of Max Maddalena, was to secure the reinstatement of two works council members whom the company had dismissed.

Max Maddalena began to acquire a reputation as a public speaker, not infrequently in the context of public demonstrations.

Max Maddalena called on workers to stand together at a time when the republic and the achievements of the revolution were under threat.

In January 1925 Max Maddalena became a full-time party official, working until April if that year in Berlin in the Trades Union department of the Party Central Committee.

Max Maddalena was a re-elected repeatedly until March 1933, by which time he was representing not Schleswig-Holstein but the Breslau electoral district.

Meanwhile, parliamentary democracy was being progressively abolished and Max Maddalena himself was living in relative safety in Moscow.

Max Maddalena spent several weeks in a prison at Rastatt, but was released by on 7 December 1932 either in the context of a wider Christmas amnesty for political prisoners or because the authorities belatedly accept his claim of parliamentary immunity from imprisonment.

Either way, when an implausibly wide-reaching wave of arrests targeting communist politicians and activists took place in the immediate aftermath of the Reichstag Fire, Max Maddalena was probably already on the way back to Moscow, where he continued to work in the European Section of the Profintern until November 1933.

Max Maddalena was given responsibility for co-ordinating trades union activities in Austria and Czechoslovakia with those in Germany and later, across western Europe more generally.

Max Maddalena nevertheless made his way to Berlin and, presumably, set about trying to contact any comrades still at liberty in the German capital in order to create a new leadership team for Berlin and reorganise what remained of the now illegal communist trades unions in line with precepts predetermined in Moscow.

Max Maddalena was to undertake the work jointly with Adolf Rembte, who had arrived in Berlin eight days earlier, and Robert Stamm, who had arrived back from Moscow a week or so before that.

Max Maddalena was taken to the Moabit Investigation Prison in west-central Berlin.

Max Maddalena was found guilty, like the others, of preparing to commit high treason under aggravating circumstances.

Max Maddalena died on 22 October 1943 at the vast Brandenburg-Gorden Prison.

The short life of Maddalena's son, called Max Maddalena, was particularly tragic.

On 12 March 1938 the younger Max Maddalena was arrested in Moscow by the homeland security services.