Mainstream commentators nevertheless agree that the blame for the bitter feuding on the political left in Germany before 1933 should more properly be imputed to the Communist Party leader of that time, Ernst Thälmann, who had for many years taken his lead from Stalin in condemning the Social Democrats as "Social Fascists" and refusing, in defiance of the more nuanced strategic perceptions of comrades, to contemplate any sort of political alliance or other arrangement with them.

Thälmann had been shot in response to a personal order from Adolf Hitler, after eleven years as an inmate of successive prisons and concentration camps, on 18 August 1944.

Hüsten was a small industrial town set in the countryside to the east of Dortmund which had been dominated since the 1840s by a single enterprise, the "Hüstener Gewerkschaft" (a large steel mill).

Schulte himself emerged as a leading figure within the radical left wing break-away group, becoming in 1922 full-time secretary of the new - Communist Party oriented - trades union that had resulted from the split.

Then, till 1925, he worked for the party local group in Leverkusen-Wiesdorf, first as an "Organisationsleiter" and then, in the more influential position of a "Polleiter" (loosely, "policy leader").

In 1923 he was reportedly talking about "the idiot Thälmann" which cannot have endeared him to his (sometime) political mentor the man who emerged after a few more years of splits and divisions as the party leader.

Schulte was for a short time replaced in the role by Lex Ende, apparently in order to that he might be made more available for national party functions.

Ernst Thälmann's poor judgement in respect of the Wittorf scandal had left him exposed to criticism from comrades in the upper echelons of the German party.

But Thälmann was no longer his own man, while those who had been critical of his involvement in the Wittorf affair, among whom Fritz Schulte was prominently undiplomatic, found themselves being distanced from party decision making.

[1] In January 1933, exploiting the deadlocked political situation, the Hitler government took power and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

Immediately after the Reichstag Fire at the end of February 1933 the authorities began seeking out and arresting (and worse) those identified as government opponents, concentrating in the first instance on communist leaders.

Both on account of his position as a senior party official and because he was a well-known communist member of the Reichstag (parliament), Schulte was at particularly acute risk of government persecution from National Socialists and their paramilitary backers.

[1][15] In Paris, Schulte found himself allied with Hermann Schubert, as the two of them adopted the party tactics of imposing control by means of the "ultra-leftist intransigence" to which comrades had become accustomed during the period of Thälmann's leadership.

Both Schubert and Schulte found themselves increasing marginalised within the leadership group, as other former Central Committee members came to favour a "united front" strategy, necessary to resist the still intensifying tide of fascism.

Ernst Thälmann himself, who continued to enjoy Stalin's favour, had now been imprisoned by the National Socialists and, as a probable future martyr to the cause, was already being prepared for political canonisation.

There could be no question of blaming Thälmann for a strategy that had split the political left in Germany and handed the keys of power in Berlin to Adolf Hitler.

Coincidentally (or not) it was also at the "Brussels Conference" that Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck emerged as the "obvious" leaders of the Communist Party in exile.

Naturally, during what was a period of great paranoia on the part of the Soviet leadership, especially in respect of all the foreign political exiles living in Moscow, he was kept under surveillance.

It later emerged that one of those reporting on Schulte and his allegedly dubious "connections" to the Soviet security services was Herbert Wehner, a fellow communist exile living in Moscow who much later came to prominence in West Germany as a canny pipe-smoking Minister of Intra-German Relations and long-standing leader of the Social Democratic parliamentary group in the West German Bundestag.

One of Wehner's reports that survives (and which may, of course, have been dictated to him only under duress) identifies Schulte as the "leader of the sectarian opposition in the Communist Party of Germany".

[19] He was sent to the camp at Sewpetsch (far to the north, inside the arctic circle) and placed on a programme of "Исправительные работы" (loosely, "correctional work").

[1][20][19] There are reports that in Moscow, during the period identified in some sources as the Khrushchev Thaw, Fritz Schulte was probably posthumously "rehabilitated" on 26 March 1956.

Gertrud Schulte was still alive in 1960: in October of that year she placed a "wanted photograph" of her late husband in "Die Tat", a weekly magazine produced by the "Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes" ("Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime").