He spent several months in Nazi concentration camps, then left Germany, eventually living in exile in the Soviet Union.
He continued his education,[1] learning Russian and going to school in Moscow at the "Rabfak", the Workers' University, in addition to working at a factory.
[2] On 1 April 1936 Sobottka, Max Maddalena Jr. and Harry Schmidt were involved with an article in the Deutsche Zentral Zeitung, the newspaper of the German-speaking section of the Communist International, entitled "Wir freuen uns auf unser Jugendfest!"
[2] On the evening of 4 February 1938 he was arrested on the street by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and immediately taken for an interrogation that lasted 15 hours.
[4] Subsequent interrogations in the following days included abuse and torture, which began when Sobottka denied having engaged in counter-revolutionary activity.
Certain he could withstand no more beatings and pressured by the command to fabricate misdeeds, Sobottka Jr. tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrists with glass shards from a broken lamp.
[2] Sobottka was later accused of having ties to the anti-Comintern conspiracy involving Béla Kun, Osip Piatnitsky and Waldemar Knorin, all former Comintern leaders.
[7] With Nikolai Yezhov's fall from grace by the end of 1938, the NKVD began investigating charges of torture and mishandling of the Hitler Youth Conspiracy.
He also denied he had ever planned to kill Molotov in August 1937, as he had "admitted", and furthermore, that he had never possessed the gun, and that he could not have gone to the appointed place because he was then on vacation in the Caucasus, which could easily be confirmed by records from the three cities he had visited.
[4] In June 1939, Sobottka's parents were finally told the whereabouts of their son, that he was being held in Taganka Prison, but that because of insufficient evidence, the trial could not proceed.