Ernst Schmidt (12 October 1924 – 16 December 2009) was a German communist activist in West Germany during the Cold War.
Schmidt was an eager member of Hitlerjugend and served as a soldier on the eastern front during the Second World War.
After being taken prisoner of war, he attended a Comintern indoctrination school in the Soviet Union and became a fanatical Stalinist prior to his return to Germany.
In the 1970s, he began revisiting his political views and finally came to abandon communism, which he later would describe as the second totalitarian ideology he had succumbed to.
Late in life, he built an archive on the local history of Essen in the 19th and 20th centuries, and published an autobiography titled Vom Staatsfeind zum Stadthistoriker ("From Enemy of the State to City Historian").