Max Maddalena

Max Maddalena (17 January 1895 - 22 October 1943) was a German political activist and trades union leader whose political allegiance, after 1920, was to the recently launched

Maximilian Maddalena was born at Riedheim (Hilzingen), a hill-country village in the extreme south of Baden, close to the Swiss frontier and, beyond that, Schaffhausen to the west. To the east lay Konstanz. His mother, Katharina Osswald, was a local girl from whom he inherited both his name and his German nationality. Soon after his birth, however, his mother married his father, Enrico Maddalena (1868–1937). Maximilian Osswald became Maximilian Maddalena. He also became, in the eyes of the respective laws, an Italian national. Enrico Maddalena is described as a mosaics worker, a trader in gypsum statuettes and a day-labourer. While he was still a child the marriage of Maximilian's parents ended in divorce, but he retained his Italian name and, indeed, his Italian nationality. He grew up in Riedheim with his mother, living in the house of his maternal grandmother, and, until 1909, attending the local school. Money was in short supply, but the proximity of the border and the mountain terrain provided opportunities for supplementing the household income. His mother had already spent time in jail in 1894 for smuggling sugar syrup, and in June/July 1913 mother and son each served six week prison terms for the same offence. Directly after leaving school he relocated to Lyon where he moved in with his father, intending to learn a craft skill, but he did not remain in France for very long. In 1910 he embarked on an apprenticeship in industrial metal work with Georg Fischer A.G. at their Singen works. (Georg Fischer A.G. was - and remains - a resolutely Swiss company but had opened a substantial factory in the German side of the border to circumvent the fees and tariffs levied by the German authorities on imported products.) ^[1][4]

Political engagement and another war

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

There were battles to be fought inside the union too. Within the regional leadership there were still, at this stage, activist members representing both the SPD and from the Communist Party. Differences surfaced dramatically in August 1921 in connection with a work stoppage at the Singen aluminium plant. The objective of the stoppage, which took place with the full support of Maddalena, was to secure the reinstatement of two works council members whom the company had dismissed. After a few days, however, the dispute had to be called off because there was no majority support for Maddalena's position from the regional DMV leadership. The incident exposed deeper and more intractable differences in approach between Social Democrats and Communists. In the immediate aftermath of the failure of the stoppage Maddalena found himself pilloried in the SPD media. The “Volkswacht” (SPD newspaper) of 1 March 1922 accused him of having staged an industrial “coup d’etat in the aluminium works” which, from the outset, had been sure to fail, but which had nevertheless depleted union funds to the tune of 21,000 marks. The underlying difference was that whereas SPD union officials and activist members were content to take an incremental “step by step” approach to improving the social and legal position of workers, communist leaders such as Maddalena responded to the economic crisis with a polarising fixation on class struggle between the providers of labour and the providers of capital. For Maddalena and his allies within the union, tactical disputes or concern for preserving union funds in accordance with union statutes were of very much less importance than the wider class struggle in which workers were engaged.^[4]

During the early 1920s Maddalena also worked for the local party in Singen-Konstanz, apparently on a part-time basis. He also began to acquire a reputation as a public speaker, not infrequently in the context of public demonstrations. At the end of June 1922 he addressed a large street protest that came together to protest against the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by right-wing extremists. He called on workers to stand together at a time when the republic and the achievements of the revolution were under threat. A week later, on the day of Rathenau's funderal, Maddalena appeared as one of the principal speakers at another demonstration. This time, however, the organisers lost control of what turned first into a riot and then into a pitched battle between left-wing demonstrators and right-wing “Freikorps” former soldiers (and others). The demonstrators first invaded the site of the Maggi factory in Singen, and then moved in on the Villa Paulssen, followed by the Villa Scherer. Several of the demonstrators were badly injured, and towards the end of the incident Major Julius Scherer (1873–1922), suspected by some of being involved in some sort of a right-wing traditionalist conspiracy to overthrow the republic, was fatally shot.^[4][6]

Party official

In January 1925 Max Maddalena became a full-time

In October 1925 the party posted Maddalena to the “Wasserkante” district, far away to the north, where he was appointed to membership of the party secretariat (leadership team) for Hamburg and the surrounding region. Hamburg was the homebase of the new party leader, Ernst Thälmann: the area was one in which the Communist Party had been particularly powerful from its inception. The focus of his work in Hamburg was, as before, on “Trades Union matters”. He was accompanied by Hilda Epple (1898–1994) a comrade who accepted a senior administrative position in Hamburg with the newly established paramilitary “Roter Frontkämpferbund” organisation and whom, in 1931, he would marry as his second wife.^[1][4]

Reichstag

In 1928 Max Maddalena was elected to membership of the

Although in 1933, when leading communist activists had fled Germany, three alternative headquarters for the exiled party had begun to emerge, by 1935 power over the party was increasingly concentrated not in Prague or Paris but in Moscow. It was from Moscow that early in 1935 the Central Committee of the German Communist Party ordered Maddalena to return to Germany, where remaining Communists were operating, if at all, “underground” and the security services were becoming increasingly skilled in their ability to infiltrate spies into supposedly secret cells of political activists. Such infiltrations were followed by arrests. With the benefit of hindsight it is hard to avoid the conclusion that when he crossed back into Germany on 11 March 1935, Max Maddalena was on something of a suicide mission. He 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. He 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.^[4][11][12]

Arrest and detention

On 27 March 1935 all three men were arrested in Berlin by the security services, together with several other comrades including Käthe Lübeck who had also been engaged in the project to rebuild an “underground” version of the Communist Party. Their activities had been reported to the authorities by a Gestapo spy in their midst. Maddalena was taken to the Moabit Investigation Prison in west-central Berlin. During the next two years Maddalena and the others were subjected to repeated interrogation sessions including some that involved torture. While he awaited his trial he was able to write reassurance to his mother and his friends in Singen: • “I will bear the trial verdict like a man, secure in the knowledge that my efforts were driven only by the need to help working people and, above all, the German working people to improve their situation. Knowing this – not through egotism or personal ambition – along with having been active in the labour movement for twenty-five years and having been focused on the welfare of working people, has given me the necessary strength”.^[3]

On 4 June Maddalena, Rembte and Stamm all faced trial in the special People's Court which had been reconfigured and relaunched a few years earlier to handle criminal cases regarded by prosecutors as “political” in nature. Defence lawyers were excluded from the hearing. The prosecutor applied for the death sentence for all three men, and in the case of Rembte and Stamm the court agreed to the application. In the case of Maddalena they did not: at least one source attributes this to some combination of the exceptional level of international press coverage that the trial had attracted and his own exceptional record of service in the navy during the war. He was found guilty, like the others, of preparing to commit high treason under aggravating circumstances. But his sentence was to “life imprisonment”. In view of his deteriorating health and the appalling conditions under which he would spend the next six years, this amounted to what sympathetic commentators described as a form of “creeping execution” ("schleichenden Hinrichtung"). Max Maddalena died on 22 October 1943 at the vast Brandenburg-Görden Prison. The cause of his death is given as “serious stomach and liver illness”, exacerbated by the conditions under which he was detained, for which inadequate medical care was provided.^{[1][3][12][13][14]}

Personal

Maximilian Maddalena was born and baptised a Roman Catholic but as an adult, where reference is made to his religion, he is described as “konfessionslos”, indicating that he was not registered as a payer of church taxes. He was married twice. His first marriage, in 1916, took place in Singen and was to Lina Happle (1894–1978). The marriage ended in divorce in 1929, though there are indications that the partners had ceased living together some time earlier. The marriage was followed by the births of the couple's children, Hilda, Max and Freya in 1913, 1917 and 1921. Maddalena's second marriage was to Hilda Epple (1898–1994), a Kindergarten teacher who joined the party in 1920 and accompanied Maddalena when he relocated to Hamburg in 1925. They were married in 1931.^[1][2][4]

The short life of Maddalena's son, also called Max Maddalena (1917–1942), was particularly tragic. He accompanied his father to Moscow in 1932. Through contacts in the