By this time the country was very rapidly being transformed into a one-party dictatorship, meaning that the party John Schehr led was outlawed, with those members of the leadership team who had not escaped abroad now living "underground" (unregistered) and in hiding.

[1][2][3] After the Nazi regime ended, Schehr and his three murdered comrades became celebrated, for the benefit of a new generation, in the German Democratic Republic by means of a poem written, probably, shortly after the killing, by Erich Weinert.

[5] John Schehr's younger brother, Franz, later recalled that the family always read the Hamburger Echo and Wahre Jacob, both staunchly SPD newspapers.

[5] Schehr attended school locally in Ottensen and then completed an apprenticeship as a skilled metal worker with "Firma Meier" (Gerberstraße), an Altona manufacturing company.

[5] In 1919 when, in its turn, the USPD), Thälmann and Schehr, were among the early recruits to the newly launched Communist Party in the wake of the so-called November revolutions.

[2] Almost all the USPD activists in the Hamburg district made the same move, which can be seen in large measure as a tribute to Ernst Thälmann's oratorical and political powers of persuasion.

[1] The dire economic situation during the early 1920s made this a period of expansion for the communists in the industrial regions, and during 1925 John Schehr was appointed to lead the party organisation in the recently established Harburg-Wilhelmsburg sub-district ("Unterbezirksleiter") in succession to Johann Skjellerup.

In 1929, at the eleventh party congress (held in Berlin-Wedding) Schehr was again present as a delegate, and he was yet again included on the candidates list for Central Committee membership.

[1][10] An East German newspaper tribute which appeared in 1967 states that on this occasion he was elected to full membership of the party Central Committee,[11] but other more plausible sources refute this.

It was in the resulting context of intensifying crisis that in April 1932 John Schehr was elected to membership of the Prussian Landtag (regional parliament) in Berlin.

(Neumann had clashed with Thälmann who he believed, along with Joseph Stalin, was dangerously underestimating the strength of the threat presented by Adolf Hitler.

Regardless of the legal basis for the arrest (which remains vague and unclear), as a member of the Reichstag (national parliament) till some months after the régime change in 1933, John Schehr enjoyed certain privileges, and it would appear to have been on account of these that on this occasion his release came so swiftly.

It was the Comintern, presumably under instructions from Moscow, that transferred the party chairmanship to John Schehr, as Thälmann's de facto deputy.

[1] He was taken to the Columbia concentration camp, a former military police station on the edge of Berlin that had stood empty since 1929, till its conversion into a prison during 1933.

[19] The Gestapo knew that Schehr was a senior party functionary and they did their best to extract statements from him, employing some of the worst forms of torture.

This was Alfred Kattner, a one-time confidant of Ernst Thälmann who had been arrested in March 1933, tortured, persuaded to gather information for the security services and then, in August 1933, released.

[1] At the time of Schehr's arrest other leading party activists were also captured, including Eugen Schönhaar and Rudolf Schwarz.

During the night of 1/2 February 1934 these three, together with Erich Steinfurth (who had been arrested back in March 1933) were shot dead at the Schäferberg / Kilometerberg (hill) on the edge of Berlin by Gestapo personnel, allegedly "while attempting to escape".

In reality commentators agree that the murder was an act of quick retribution following the shooting the previous day of the government spy Alfred Kattner.

Da liegen sie mit erloschenem Blick, jeder drei Nahschüsse im Genick, John Schehr und Genossen.

Although John Schehr and his three fellow victims became heroic figures in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic / "East Germany"), the kidnapping and sentencing of their killer never made it to the national schools curriculum.

She was able to undertake extensive research in the scrupulously maintained files that the East German security services had compiled and maintained during the intervening decades, and she was forced to accept not just that her father was the man who had murdered "John Schehr" and his comrades, but that this had been just the first in a succession of escalating atrocities for which Bruno Sattler had been responsible during the twelve Nazi years.

According to "The Great Soviet Encyclopedia" he published an anthology of poems in Moscow as early as 1934: this may have included his tribute to Schehr, but it would not have been widely available in Germany under the Hitler dictatorship, nor anywhere else in western Europe.

[23][26] John Schehr's grave forms part of the Memorial to the Socialists (German: Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten) in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Berlin.

In July 1967 a cargo ship was launched at the government shipyards in Rostock for the East German Deutsche Seereederei fleet and given the name "John Schehr".

[29] Most (though not all) of the streets renamed in his honour during the SBZ and GDR periods retain Schehr's name three decades after reunification, even though he never became a folk hero for generations of westerners in the way he had in the east.

At the Kilometerberg (hill) a memorial still stands to John Schehr and the other resistance activists who were "shot while attempting flight" ("auf der Flucht erschossen").

This part of the city, previously filled with Soviet-era rows of identical "single family homes" of prefabricated construction, has become semi-derelict as people have moved away since 1990.

On the John Schehr memorial, set in a small "grove of honour" a short distance to the right of the main entrance, serious efforts have been made to chisel out the words which are, accordingly, hard to make out.

Before 1990 the 4. motorisierte Schützendivision ("Fourth Motorised Defence Division"), which carried the honorary suffix "John Schehr", was stationed in this building.