Edwin Hoernle (11 December 1883 – 21 July 1952) was a German politician (KPD), author, educator, agricultural economist and a Marxist theoretician.

He spent the Nazi period in Moscow where, during the final years of the Second World War, he was a founding member in July 1943 of the Soviet-backed National Committee for a Free Germany ("Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland" / NKFD).

[4] At the age of ten, by now growing up in the village of Beimbach back in Württemberg, he was already writing poems and beginning to distance himself ideologically from the Protestant piety of his parents.

Three months later he broke with his family, quit the church and, early in 1910, joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD).

[4] During the politically fevered pre-war years there were various other SPD publications to which Hoerle contributed, including the bi-monthly magazine Die Gleichheit, produced by Clara Zetkin, and seen by commentators as Germany's leading journal of the Social Democratic women's movement.

He was arrested again in April 1917 and assigned to a Punishment Unit after it was determined that he had been distributing copies of the illegal anti-war so-called "Spartakusbriefe" (Spartacus Letters).

[1][4] Military defeat in November 1918 was followed by a year of revolutionary uprisings which started with a navy mutiny in Kiel and quickly spread to the industrial cities and then, as frontline survivors made their way home to face unemployment and acute shortages, across the country more generally.

Hoernle initially aligned with the "right-wingers" around Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer, but these two were blamed by comrades for the failure of the Hamburg uprising and summoned to Moscow to explain matters.

A police profile from this time describes him as 1.72 meters (5 ft 7 in) tall with dark blonde hair and a pronounced Swabian dialect.

Despite opposition from the party leadership in Berlin, one of those 45 seats went to Edwin Hoernle, who sat as the only Communist Member from the East Prussia electoral district.

Putz was a working farmer who won widespread respect, since along with Hoernle he was one of the few people in a position to combine an influence on Communist Party policy with a deep knowledge of agriculture.

He also undertook several missions to the Soviet Union with delegations of farmers, keen to acquire and share knowledge about what might become, from the Communist perspective, the future of farming.

Nor did he back the RGO strategy for planning to use the trades union movement as a vehicle for taking power by force from Germany's "bourgeois" political parties.

The aftermath of the Reichstag fire, which occurred at the end of February 1933, demonstrated that leading members of the (now outlawed) Communist Party were in particular danger.

The speed with which leading communists were rounded up before or shortly after dawn directly after the fire had been reported triggered questions in the international press - never convincingly answered - over how the government came to be so well prepared to announce the identities of those to be blamed for it.

On a brighter note, there is no indication in the sources of his having been caught up in the Stalinist spy purges which peaked in 1938 and which interrupted or terminated the careers of many other high-profile political refugees from Hitler's version of Germany who had sought sanctuary in Moscow.

In 1941 his name was included on the Gestapo Special Wanted List ("Sonderfahndungsliste") of people to be sought out and dealt with in the event of the Soviet Union coming under German control.

[8] As the German military threat receded, Muscovites who had been evacuated to Tashkent were able to return to Moscow as the end of the war began to appear on the horizon.

In Berlin Hoernle was one of sixteen co-signatories of the Party Central Committee's appeal to the German people which was published on 11 June 1944, calling for the creation of an Antifascist-Democratic future.

[1] He now accepted a less onerous posting as Dean of Faculty for Agriculture Policy at the (East) German "Walter Ulbricht" Academy for Civil Jurisprudence ("Deutsche Akademie für Staats- und Rechtswissenschaft" / DASR) at Forst Zinna (in the countryside on the southern side of Berlin).

[4] Edwin Hoernle died of heart failure, after a long period of illness, at a sanatorium in Bad Liebenstein, beyond Erfurt, in the extreme south of what had by now become the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).