[3] Ulbricht continued to lead the government until 1971, while 1958 was the year in which Schirdewan was thrown out of the Politburo[4] and placed in charge of the National Archives at Potsdam,[2] a position from which he retired in 1964[4] or 1965.

[8] His step-parents both worked, in administrative/custodial capacities, at the Botanical Institute in Breslau, but in 1918 his step-mother died of tuberculosis, and his relationship with his step-father's new wife never became close.

This followed the Reichstag Fire, which the Nazi regime used as a pretense to round up hundreds of thousands of political opponents into the first concentration camps.

On 10 May 1934, he was sentenced by the special "People's Court" to three years in prison: the charge was the usual one under the circumstances of "conspiracy of high treason"[2] ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat").

[11] During 1946/47, however, his political engagement was unavoidably compromised by illness, as a result of which a stay in a Berlin Hospital was followed by a period in the Sülzhayn Sanatorium.

[13] Two senior officials with suitable diplomatic and intellectual abilities worked for Dahlem on liaison with the residual Communist Party in the British and US occupation zones.

[13] By 1949, however, it was becoming clear that imposing a Soviet-style solution across the western zones of Germany would not be possible without successful prosecution of another major war, and as the party structures adapted to this reality it was no more than part of a natural progression that in February 1949 Karl Schirdewan was appointed as deputy head of the "Westkommission",[13] described by one authority as an operation "looking for ways to win over West German politicians for the Communist cause".

[17] The 20th Congress is remembered by historians for a speech entitled "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" in which the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, spelled out in considerable detail the errors of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin.

[17] It was clear to Schirdewan, as it must have been to many delegates, that Khrushchev's speech opened up huge risks both for his own career and for the future political direction of the Soviet Union and of "Communist" Central Europe.

[7] Although the speech itself remained secret, on 5 March 1956, Khrushchev distributed a written account of Stalin's crimes to the 18 million Soviet citizens who were also Communist Party members, and who now discovered that their idol was a mass murder (at least, according to his successor).

[17] Towards the end of March 1956, Schirdewan again encountered Nikita Khrushchev, this time at the funeral of the Polish leader, Bolesław Bierut who had died suddenly - some said he was poisoned - a couple of weeks after returning to Warsaw following the 20th Party Congress in Moscow.

Khrushchev took the opportunity to express his fury over the way his publicising of Stalin's crimes had been communicated to the party leadership by the Ulbricht government in Berlin.

[17] During a visit to East Berlin in 1957, Khrushchev invited Schirdewan to give his opinion on the possibilities of a more collaborative relationship with Social Democratic parties.

[17] Recalling his working-class upbringing in Breslau, Schirdewan related how the left-wing elements in youth movements of the Social Democratic Party in 1920s Germany had worked well with their Communist comrades.

[17] The Soviet leader pressed for more details and then suggested Schirdewan should holiday with him at the Black Sea resort of Sochi so that the two of them might discuss the future further.

[17] It is still not clear for how long, nor how powerfully Schirdewan had been arguing the case for reform with his Politburo colleagues in Berlin, but it is apparent that by 1957, his relationship with Ulbricht was not good.

It is true that the sentences handed out to Wolfgang Harich, Walter Janka and their alleged fellow conspirators[19] in 1957 were less savage than those received by Johann Burianek or Günter Stempel in 1952,[20] and the propaganda accompanying the show trials in 1957 was less shrill than it had been earlier in the decade.

Nevertheless, there was nothing in the government's domestic policy to suggest that the Communist regime was about to apply the radical reformist thinking advocated by Khrushchev the previous year.

Meanwhile, Moscow was increasingly preoccupied with events in Hungary, where the fast moving aftermath of the Secret Speech had culminated in a government declaration of intent to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact at the end of October 1956, and a Soviet military intervention with tanks on the streets of Budapest in November.

[1] The expulsion, enacted at the 35th Plenum of the Central Committee, was attributed to "Factionalism" ("Fraktionstätigkeit")[21] and was accompanied by a "stern rebuke" ("strenge Rüge").

In 1990 the PDS formally rehabilitated Schirdewan,[3] more than three decades after its predecessor had expelled him, and recruited him into its "Council of elders" ("Ältestenrat"): his widow is still (2015) one of its (approximately 20) members.

[18][24] A second autobiographical volume, "Ein Jahrhundert Leben: Erinnerungen und Visionen : Autobiographie", was published in 1998 which was the year in which he died.

[5] The number of his grandchildren was not given, and sources focused on his political career are silent on his private life, which is usual with East German politicians.