After fellow soldier Johannes Harms reports that a revolution has broken out at home, Thälmann - who leads a revolutionary cell on the Western Front - and his friend Fiete Jansen rebel against their officers, Zinker and Quadde, and desert.

When Hamburg faces an attack by Zinker's forces, as part of the Kapp Putsch, the workers organize a general strike; after laborers are shot by the rebels, Thälmann ignores the bourgeois social democrats who reject violence, ambushes the Freikorps and captures their officers.

Thälmann makes a speech in the USPD congress, calling to unite with the KPD, when the Soviet steamship Karl Liebknecht, loaded with wheat for the city's unemployed, reaches the port.

When the presidential elections take place, veteran SPD member Robert Dirhagen is reluctant to support Paul von Hindenburg, although this is the party line.

In Berlin, Thälmann leaves his cell to be executed, while contemplating on Pavel Korchagin's words from How the Steel Was Tempered: "...All my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world - the fight for the liberation of mankind."

At the third meeting, on the 27th, the members decided that portraying Thälmann's entire life would make the film too cumbersome, agreeing it should concentrate only on the important historical events.

At the fourth meeting, it was suggested to begin the plot only in 1931 and stress Thälmann's part in the 1932 public transportation strike; yet member Otto Winzer pointed out that in order to appeal to the youth, the picture should deal with the protagonist's earlier years.

The plot began with the four-year-old Ernst shoving socialist pamphlets in his trousers to hide them from the police officers who raided his father's tavern, where an illegal meeting of the SPD took place.

Under the influence of events in the Soviet Union, the Ministry of Culture accused the DEFA filmmakers of taking up a Formalistic approach, and demanded they reject it and adopt a Socialist realist line.

Semionov personally made an adjustment to the script; he requested that a scene in which Thälmann appeared to be harboring doubt be removed, since it was not in accordance with the principles of the proletarian struggle.

In general, however, he approved of the presentation;[19] the script also introduced elements fitting the atmosphere of the Cold War, in the form of the films' main villain, the American capitalist Mr.

[22] Ernst Thälmann - Son of his Class premiered in the Friedrichstadt Palast, on 9 March 1954; over 3,000 people attended, including Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht.

[24] Director Kurt Maetzig, Willi Bredel, Michael Tschesno-Hell, cinematographer Karl Plintzner and actor Günther Simon were all awarded East Germany's National Prize, 1st Class, on 7 October 1954.

[29] On 5 June 1956, a month before the 9th Karlovy Vary Festival, Alexander Abusch wrote the SED Politburo a letter notifying them on the removal of montage featuring Stalin from the film, so it would be fit for screening in Czechoslovakia.

After the 1961 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which espoused a strict anti-Stalinist line, a group of officials in the East German Ministry of Culture held a conference from 25 to 27 November 1961.

On 28 March 1954, Minister of Culture Johannes R. Becher called Son of his Class a "national heroic epic," and a "masterful depiction of history" in an article published in the Tägliche Rundschau newspaper.

The Das Volk magazine critic Kurt Steiniger claimed his "heart was beating in coordination with the thousands of people around Thälmann" when he watched the picture.

[32] In West Germany, a Der Spiegel review from 31 March 1954 dismissed the first part as communist propaganda, calling it "a machine of hate" that is "bearable to watch only due to Kurt Maetzig's mischievous sense for details.

"[36] Detlef Kannapin wrote the films were "propagating a myth", intended to "espouse propaganda elements... in a Socialist Realist style" and their main aim was to depict Thälmann as "the great, faultless leader.

"[41] Shortly after the script of Son of his Class was approved, DEFA director-general Joseph Schwab told the Thälmann committee members that he was concerned about the veracity of the plot.

He pointed out three inaccuracies: in 1918, there were no Workers' and Soldiers' Councils on the Western Front, only inside Germany; the American general accompanying Mr. McFuller could not have been present in Berlin during the crushing of the Spartacus Uprising, since peace with the United States was not achieved yet; and finally, Wilhelm Pieck was not with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on 9 November 1918.

[42] In a meeting held in East Berlin's Academy of Sciences on 17 November 1955, West German film critic Klaus Norbert Schäffer told writer Michael Tschesno-Hell the second part focused solely on the communist resistance to the Nazis, ignoring the Social-Democrats and others who opposed the regime.

Another point made by Schäffer was that the arms shipment promised to the communist rebels in Hamburg was intercepted by the army, and not held back by Thälmann's enemies in the party, as seen in Son of his Class.

"[43] René Börrner noted the film skipped over the years between 1924 and 1930, thus ignoring Thälmann's ascendance to the position of party chief - and the many controversies and ideological rifts which characterized the KPD in those days.

[15] Journalist Erich Wollenberg, a former member of the KPD, wrote a review of Son of his Class in 1954, in which he claimed the film was a "cocktail of heroic lies and distortions, with few drops of truth mixed in it.

[45] Historian Detlef Kannapin noted that, while the film portrays Thälmann as seeking to convince the reluctant Social-Democrats to join forces against the Nazis, he never pursued this policy.

According to Kannapin, the figure of Robert Dirhagen, the minor SPD member, symbolizes the Social-Democrat wing of the SED, which united with the KPD under Soviet pressure.

[46] Seán Allan and John Sandford wrote that in the film, the blame for Hitler's rise was "laid solely on the Social-Democrats", thus justifying the KPD's Stalinist line and its rivalry with the SPD before 1933.