13 Facts About Wilhelm Florin

Wilhelm Florin was a German Communist Party politician and a campaigner in opposition to National Socialism.

Wilhelm Florin was born in Poll, already a suburb of Cologne, across the river and to the south-east of the city centre.

Wilhelm Florin's family was working class and strongly Catholic; early on he became involved with the Catholic Young Men's Association.

Between 1918 and 1920 Wilhelm Florin was a member of the Works Council at a Cologne river-ship yard.

Wilhelm Florin was a Works Council leader at the gas-engine factory where he worked in the early 1920s, and continued as a volunteer union activist till 1923.

That was the year in which, at the instigation of Eugen Eppstein, Wilhelm Florin was appointed Leader of the KPD Organisation and Publicity Department for the Middle-Rhine region, an appointment that was formally terminated at the end of that year when the French, who were still occupying the Rhineland militarily, expelled him from the region.

Wilhelm Florin was selected as a parliamentary candidate at the start of 1924 and was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924: he remained a prominent KPD member of it until 1933.

Wilhelm Florin stood by Ernst Thalmann and, starting in 1925, undertook a reorganisation of the faction-riven Ruhr region Communist party, which he took over and which, by 1932, was following the Stalinist line.

Wilhelm Florin was re-elected to the party central committee in 1927 and to the politburo in 1929, while the party press took to calling him "Leader of the Ruhr Proletariat".

At the 1935 Communist International Wilhelm Florin was a member both of the organisation's executive committee and of its International Control Commission, positions he retained until the Comintern itself was unceremoniously dissolved in 1943.

From 1943 till his death Wilhelm Florin was an active founding member of the Moscow-based National Committee for a Free Germany.

Wilhelm Florin died in Moscow on 5 July 1944 as a result of a short illness, and was initially buried in Moscow.

Wilhelm Florin's son, Peter Florin, was a top East German diplomat.