Provenance and early years 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.) For the unions the pressure was on to achieve increases the levels of wages and salary increases that were commensurate with price increases. The demand for wages of stable value, possibly through paying wages in gold marks, became a central priority for union leaders.
Party official 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. At some stage he also accepted a parallel appointment back in his home state as “Secretary for Trades Union Issues” in
Baden. Meanwhile, in March 1925 Paul Langner was arrested. Langner was the “Polleiter” (loosely, “Policy Head”) for the party's neighbouring
Württemberg region. The position of Württemberg “Polleiter”, based in
Stuttgart, was an important leadership role, and in July 1925 Maddalena was appointed to replace his arrested comrade, whoi was still detained pending trial, in the post. As internal feuding among the party leadership again intensified during the second half of 1925, Maddalena was, like Langner, identified as part of the party's left-wing, and thereby as a backer of the party's emerging new leader,
Ernst Thälmann. He became immediately persuaded by
Comintern’s “Open letter” of August 1925, widely distributed to trades union members. The letter had evidently been drafted and sent from Moscow in accordance with
Stalin’s preferences, supporting Thälmann’s leadership bid against the incumbent,
Ruth Fischer.
Hamburg 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. He 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. During his time as a parliamentarian Maddalena naturally spent much of his time in Berlin, and he came close to several members of the
party leadership team including the leader,
Ernst Thälmann (1886–1944), the eminence grise,
Klara Zetkin (1857–1933) and his near-contemporary (and a communist party star of the future),
Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973). Between the end of 1930 and the middle of 1932 he served as a member of the National Executive Committee of the
“Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition” (RGO), which was the Communist Party's version of the German Trades Union Congress. Within the RGO he was head of the section for metals-based industries. Through his work as an effective communist agitator during a period of intensifying political polarisation in the Reichstag and, increasingly, on the streets, Maddalena necessarily found himself in regular contact with the judiciary. In April 1931 he was sentenced to a two-year prison term, having been convicted on a charge of “preparing to commit high treason”. Sources are agreed that he did not serve out the sentence in full, but there is inconsistency over some of the associated detail. It appears that in the first instance he avoided imprisonment by taking an extended trip to
Moscow. However, approximately eighteen months later, in November 1932, he was arrested at
Tilsit, a border town in
East Prussia while apparently attempting to visit
Germany. He 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.
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”. == Personal ==