[2][3] A record of political activism meant that he spent most of the twelve Nazi years in state detention: Lohagen's wife was murdered in Auschwitz.

In 1915 Lohagen joined the "International Group", set up that year by Rosa Luxemburg to oppose the parliamentary votes that funded the war.

[4] As the country continued to be ravaged by quasi-military groups, in 1920 Lohagen was a "staff member" of the Ruhr Red Army, set up as a response to the abortive Kapp Putsch.

[4] The background was one of widespread amnesties for participants in the post war unrest as the central government struggled to establish a measure of stability.

After the authorities had succeeded in suppressing the uprising he fled to Berlin where till 1922 he lived illegally under a false name as "Peter Paulsen".

[4] During 1932/33 he was working as an instructor with the (already illegal) paramilitary "Red Front Fighters" ("Roter Frontkämpferbund" / RFB), as a result of which he spent several weeks during November/December 1932 back in prison.

Through a well judged combination of guile and determination the Nazi Party took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

His political activity, with which he continued, now became illegal: in April 1933 he was arrested and taken into "protective custody", initially near the Dutch border in the concentration camp at Neusustrum.

[4] He was let out in April 1934 after signing a number of declarations which amounted to an undertaking to desist from further actions damaging to the state ("nicht mehr staatsfeindlich zu betätigen"), and returned to his role as regional "Policy chief" ("Polleiter") on Hessen-Kassel for the (now illegal) Communist party.

[9] Nationally Ernst Lohagen was a member of the party Central Committee, the real fulcrum of political power in the country, from 1950[4] or earlier.

[10] The attack was quickly and robustly refuted in Neues Deutschland, the party's mass circulation daily newspaper for the region becoming known as East Germany.

Stalinisation was the order of the day, and he was particularly savage in his attacks on the aging "right-wing" communist, Arthur Lieberasch,[4] whom he described as a "professional enemy to the party" (als "professionellen Parteifeind").

[4] Lohagen now responded to the critical article in Tägliche Rundschau with a public piece of "self-criticism", published in Neues Deutschland, which included an undertaking not to repeat his error.

It came in the form of an open letter addressed to him and signed by Annemarie Allgeyer, a librarian from the small mining village of Beierfeld; but the withering content of the letter indicated that it had originated high up in the party power structure, an impression that was only strengthened the next day when it was reproduced in the mass circulation party newspaper, Neues Deutschland.

[7] In the event, of course, Walter Ulbricht would win, while several senior comrades who might have been seen as alternative leaders including, most notably, Paul Merker, spent the next few years in prison.

[14] Various sources indicate that Ernst Lohagen was one of a number of casual scapegoats caught up in a long running top level power struggle, but that did nothing to ameliorate his position at the time.

In May 1952 he received a formal rebuke for "damage to the party and conduct unworthy of a leading official" ("parteischädigenden und eines führenden Funktionärs unwürdigen Verhaltens").

In June 1952 he was removed from the party regional leadership in Saxony and required, with immediate effect, to resign his seat in the national parliament ("Volkskammer").

[4] By this time a Central Committee decision had already been taken, in March 1952, to give Lohagen a new job as a "trainee overseeer" of the brown coal industry in the Ölsnitz-Zwickau district.

However, in January 1953 he was appointed to head up the Finance and Control department in the district of Potsdam, a position he retained till September 1955.

[1] In May 1957 Ernst Lohagen celebrated his sixtieth birthday and in June 1957 the National Party Control Commission ("Zentrale Parteikontrollkommission") cancelled or expunged his penalties.

[1] There were no more public sector jobs for the "Labour veteran" ("Arbeiterveteran"), but he did work on an unpaid basis for the Marxism–Leninism Institute for some years starting in 1961.

[6] Paula Lohagen was born into a politically aware (Social Democrat) family on 17 January 1897 in Herford, a midsized town a short distance to the north of Bielefeld.

She remained in Kassel after the Nazis took power at the start of 1933, and played a leading role in organising anti-Fascist actions by Communists in the region.

After the Communist Party was banned she worked in a resistance group and organised illegal political activity, which she undertook together with workers at the Henschel factory, which was an important production centre for railway locomotives and trucks.