Arthur Ewert
[2] Anxious to escape the drudgery of rural life, at the age of 14 Ewert accepted a position as an apprentice in an uncle's saddle-making factory in the urban center of Berlin.
[2] The growth of the automotive industry convinced the young Ewert that there was little future in saddle-making, however, so he left that trade to take a job as a worker in a Berlin steel works.
[7] During this period the couple used the party pseudonyms "Gustav" and "Elsie" and procured false identity documents under the names "Arthur Brown" and "Annie Bancourt" to better avoid law enforcement officers.
An informer tipped off the authorities that the pair would be in Toronto for a party meeting on March 23, 1919, and plainclothes detectives picked up their trail from the gathering to a boarding house, where arrest and search warrants were served.
[11] To support himself he went to work in Berlin as a laborer at the giant electrical corporation AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft), becoming one of the leading KPD activists among that company's workers.
[14] From 1920 onwards German-speaking veterans of the Soviet revolution and Russian Civil War were employed to establish paramilitary "military-political organizations" throughout Germany in preparation for armed insurrection.
[15] The leadership of the KPD was divided over the advisability of such preparations for armed struggle, with Hungarian Comintern plenipotentiaries Bela Kun and József Pogány dispatched to Germany early in 1921 in an effort to win support for the strategy from faltering party chiefs.
[19] In April 1921 the KPD leadership dispatched Arthur Ewert to the city of Halle to attempt to rebuild the party organization there following its destruction in the March Action.
[19] After only a couple weeks Ewert was arrested for his organizing activity, however, and he was transferred to the prison facility at Frankfurt, where he was held for two months with other communist activists without formal charges being filed.
[23] Ewert was also put to work as a lecturer at the Comintern's International Lenin School, an institution established in 1925 for the intellectual and technical training of leading party cadres for life as "professional revolutionaries.
[22] In 1926, Ewert was again selected as a delegate of the KPD to the 6th Enlarged Plenum of ECCI, at which he made use of his English-language skills as chair of the British Commission under the pseudonym "Braun.
"[22] Ewert was again elected to the 8th Enlarged Plenum of ECCI, held in Moscow in May 1927, where he chaired the American Commission, which attempted to resolve the ongoing factional war inside the Workers (Communist) Party of America.
[2] Ewert's familiarity with the English language and with the affairs of the America Communist Party made him a useful agent to the US, to which he traveled a false passport on Comintern business in 1930.
[26] Of primary concern to the Comintern was obtaining an independent assessment of the solidity of the hold over the party apparatus by the faction headed by Earl Browder and William Z.
[29] Ewert worked closely with Comintern representative August Guralsky to win popular expelled Brazilian political leader Luís Carlos Prestes to the communist cause, regarded as a top priority task.
[2] Following an abortive insurrection against the regime of Getúlio Vargas in November 1935, Ewert was arrested in Rio de Janeiro and was subjected to severe torture by authorities seeking the whereabouts of opposition leader Prestes.
[22] He returned by ship to the Soviet zone of control in East Germany in August 1947 but the mental problems which followed his torture and imprisonment proved insurmountable and he was forced to be hospitalized in a sanatorium for the rest of his life.
