He attended school up to the middle level, and then became an intern at a printing machine factory, still in Leipzig,[4] shortly afterwards embarking on a traineeship for bank work.

[6] He became a leader in the Communist Party student group and played a leading role in the Hamburg uprising which erupted in October 1923.

In the city's politically left-wing Barmbek quarter Kippenberger led a fighting group of workers, also managing to plant Communist moles into Hamburg police and Reichswehr units.

Badly wounded, for several months he lived illegally (unregistered with the local city hall) in Leipzig till March 1924[2] when Kippenberger fled to the Soviet Union.

While living in Moscow, Kippenberger was personally recruited by General Yan Karlovich Berzin into the Soviet military intelligence service, or GRU.

According to John Koehler, "World War I veterans taught the novices how to handle pistols, rifles, machine guns, and hand grenades.

"[10] According to John Koehler, members of the Parteiselbstschutz "served as bouncers at Party meetings and specialized in cracking heads during street battles with political enemies.

According to Koehler, the KPD's Selbstschutz men "always carried a Stahlrute, two steel springs that telescoped into a tube seven inches long, which when extended became a deadly, fourteen-inch weapon.

[2] Outside the chamber he built up the so-called "Betriebsberichterstattung (BB-Ressort)", originated in 1927 within the party's illegal military apparatus, but from 1932 consciously separated from it.

It was a quasi-military body comprising approximately 300 members who undertook economic-espionage tasks on behalf of the Soviet Union, also reporting back on social, political and economic developments more generally during what was a period of rising tension inside Germany.

[15] On 2 August 1931, KPD Members of the Reichstag Kippenberger and Heinz Neumann received a dressing down from Walter Ulbricht, the Party's leader in the Berlin-Brandenburg region.

"[16] Enraged by Ulbricht's words, Kippenberger and Neumann decided to assassinate Paul Anlauf, the forty-two-year-old Captain of the Berlin Police's Seventh Precinct.

"[17] On the morning of Sunday 9 August 1931, Kippenberger and Neumann gave a last briefing to the hit-team in a room at the Lassant beer hall.

According to John Koehler, "As was often the case when it came to battling the dominant SPD, the KPD and the Nazis had combined forces during the pre-plebiscite campaign.

At one point in this particular campaign, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels even shared a speaker's platform with KPD agitator Walter Ulbricht.

By now the rabble had fled the square, but shooting continued as riot squads combed the tenements, arresting hundreds of residents suspected of having fired weapons.

[25] Senior Sergeant Max Willig was hospitalized for fourteen weeks, but made a full recovery and returned to active duty.

The parliamentarian's wife Thea, an unemployed schoolteacher and as staunch a Communist Party member as her husband, shepherded the young murderers to the Belgian border.

Kippenberger took on and preserved much of its paramilitary apparatus under conditions of enhanced secrecy and certain important tasks were accomplished, but the Gestapo nevertheless succeeded in infiltrating his information and communications structures.

To the extent that the quasi-military apparatus under Kippenberger remained effective, it supported the opponents of Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck in the increasingly polarised leadership struggle that ensued.

Arrest warrants were issued for ten other conspirators who had fled, including Mielke, Ziemer, Ulbricht, Kippenberger, and Neumann.

[31] In response to claims that the confessions were obtained under torture by the Nazi Gestapo, John Koehler wrote, "However, all suspects were in the custody of the regular Berlin city criminal investigation bureau, most of whose detectives were SPD members.

In the context of increasingly shrill attacks on him from Ulbricht, Pieck and their supporters, on 12 February 1935 the party politburo set up a commission of enquiry into Hans Kippenberger.

The resignation of two of Thälmann's old lieutenants, Hermann Schubert and Fritz Schulte left Kippenberger unambiguously on the losing side.

[2] Two decades later, following a change in the political wind direction, Hans and Thea Kippenberger were posthumously rehabilitated by a Moscow tribunal on 30 September 1957.

However, both their deaths and their subsequent rehabilitations remained officially undisclosed by the ruling party in what had, by this time, become the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

[2] One afternoon in November 1937 two secret policemen turned up at their school in Moscow and removed Margot and Jeanette Kippenberger from their lessons.

[2] After her parents' rehabilitation Margot Kippenberger was able to leave the Soviet Union with her five children, arriving in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in May 1958.

Their marriage never having been officially recognised (because Margot was foreign) Igor was not permitted to accompany them, but following a personal appeal to Nikita Khrushchev he joined them in 1960.

[35] The family nevertheless felt themselves treated as outsiders, and while Margot built her life in the new country, Igor soon returned to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1984.