Ernst Friedrich

Ernst Friedrich was born in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) as the 13th child of a cleaning lady and a saddler.

After the end of the war, he was a member of the youth organisation Freie sozialistische Jugend by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

After its dissolution in 1920, he founded his own anarchist youth group "Freie Jugend" in Berlin.

The group was also founded in Preußen, Sachsen, Thüringen, Rheinland, Westfalen as well as in Austria and Switzerland.

[5] From 1923 on, the group fusioned with the Syndikalistisch-Anarchistische Jugend Deutschlands (SAJD), an anarcho-syndicalist youth movement that promoted antimilitarism.

Among other activities, he was a speaker at an anti-war demonstration in front of Berlin Cathedral on 31 July 1921 that had over 100,000 participants.

[5] In 1925, he founded the Anti-Kriegs-Museum (Anti-War Museum) in Berlin, because he wanted to create a space for peace education.

[5] Later he published the weekly magazine "Die schwarze Fahne" ("The Black Flag") which had a circulation of up to 40,000 copies.

Jacoby called him in retrospect an "apostle of a radical youth movement, prophet of an anti-hierarchical socialism [and] aggressive antimilitarist".

He was the victim of violent assaults by the Sturmabteilung regularly and the windows of his museum were destroyed so often that he could not find insurance for it anymore.

Close to the village Barre-des-Cévennes in the Département Lozère he ran the farm "La Castelle" together with his second wife Marthe Saint-Pierre.

In 1954 he received compensation money for losing his property and for his wounds due to the Third Reich.

With this money, he bought 3,000 m2 of forest on a Seine island close to Le Perreux-sur-Marne.