[3] Schubert was born in Lengefeld, a small mining town in the hills south of Chemnitz, not far from the German border with what was, at the time, the Austrian province of Bohemia.

One source states that his early work was as a miner[1] and another adds that he trained locally as a metal worker with "Wittig & Schwabe".

Three years later the USPD itself broke up, and Hermann Schubert was a member of the majority group that now joined the recently launched Communist Party.

However, in the wake of street disturbances across several parts of Germany during 1923, in November of that year a court had declared the Communist Party illegal: the ban was still in force through the summer of 1924 and election to the Reichstag in May 1924 provided no effective immunity against re-arrest.

In July 1924, after just two months, Schubert resigned his Reichstag seat and relocated to the Ruhr area in the west of the country, which at this point was still under French military occupation in connection with an ongoing dispute about war reparations.

At the end of 1928 serious differences arose between the two men, and Schubert was transferred, briefly, to party duties in Berlin where he worked till March 1929 in the "Comradeship Department" ("Genossenschaftsabteilung") of the Party Central Committee, before being sent to East Prussia as a regional "Polleiter" ("Leiter der Abteilung Politik" / Policy Head).

At the end of February 1933 the Reichstag fire was instantly blamed on the Communists, and in March 1933 the party leader, Schubert's friend Ernst Thälmann, was arrested: Schubert immediately went to Berlin, as recently agreed with Thälmann, in order to take over the chairmanship of the illegal Communist Party.

Schubert and Schehr, backed by a politburo majority that included Wilhelm Florin, Fritz Schulte and Franz Dahlem, were keen to continue with Thälmann's uncompromisingly left-wing Communist agenda, while Ulbricht, backed by another future heavy hitter, Wilhelm Pieck, appeared to advocate a more pragmatic future for the party.

The division reflected a series of bitter disputes and splits that had affected the German and Soviet Communist Parties during the 1920s, and would provide a defining context for Schubert's political career in the run-up to his execution in 1938.

[1] In Autumn 1933 Hermann Schubert fled from Nazi Germany, crossing the frontier from his home region into Czechoslovakia where leading exiled German communists were attempting to regroup in Prague.

He moved on to the Saarland, a part of Germany still at this point under French military occupation, and from there to Paris, where a more permanent headquarters for the German Communist Party in exile was forming.