Earlier, between 1928 and 1933, he served as a Member of Parliament (Reichstagsmitglied), but sources indicate that even during these crisis years his party work and trades union activism were more to the fore than any contributions that he made in the increasingly deadlocked Reichstag.
[1][2][3][4] Maximilian Maddalena was born at Riedheim (Hilzingen), a hill-country village in the extreme south of Baden, close to the Swiss frontier and, beyond that, Schaffhausen to the west.
Directly after leaving school he relocated to Lyon where he moved in with his father, intending to learn a craft skill, but he did not remain in France for very long.
There was no longer an on-going war to oppose, and a sizeable minority of members returned to the SPD, which by this stage had become Germany's party of government.
At the end of 1920 the majority of former USPD members switched to the recently launched Communist Party (“Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands” / KPD), however.
The objective of the stoppage, which took place with the full support of Maddalena, was to secure the reinstatement of two works council members whom the company had dismissed.
The “Volkswacht” (SPD newspaper) of 1 March 1922 accused him of having staged an industrial “coup d’etat in the aluminium works” which, from the outset, had been sure to fail, but which had nevertheless depleted union funds to the tune of 21,000 marks.
The underlying difference was that whereas SPD union officials and activist members were content to take an incremental “step by step” approach to improving the social and legal position of workers, communist leaders such as Maddalena responded to the economic crisis with a polarising fixation on class struggle between the providers of labour and the providers of capital.
This time, however, the organisers lost control of what turned first into a riot and then into a pitched battle between left-wing demonstrators and right-wing “Freikorps” former soldiers (and others).
Several of the demonstrators were badly injured, and towards the end of the incident Major Julius Scherer (1873–1922), suspected by some of being involved in some sort of a right-wing traditionalist conspiracy to overthrow the republic, was fatally shot.
The position of Württemberg “Polleiter”, based in Stuttgart, was an important leadership role, and in July 1925 Maddalena was appointed to replace his arrested comrade, whoi was still detained pending trial, in the post.
The letter had evidently been drafted and sent from Moscow in accordance with Stalin’s preferences, supporting Thälmann’s leadership bid against the incumbent, Ruth Fischer.
He was accompanied by Hilda Epple (1898–1994) a comrade who accepted a senior administrative position in Hamburg with the newly established paramilitary “Roter Frontkämpferbund” organisation and whom, in 1931, he would marry as his second wife.
[1][4] In 1928 Max Maddalena was elected to membership of the ”Reichstag” (Germany's parliament) as a party list candidate for the electoral district of Schleswig-Holstein.
Between the end of 1930 and the middle of 1932 he served as a member of the National Executive Committee of the “Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition” (RGO), which was the Communist Party's version of the German Trades Union Congress.
Through his work as an effective communist agitator during a period of intensifying political polarisation in the Reichstag and, increasingly, on the streets, Maddalena necessarily found himself in regular contact with the judiciary.
However, approximately eighteen months later, in November 1932, he was arrested at Tilsit, a border town in East Prussia while apparently attempting to visit Germany.
Either way, when an implausibly wide-reaching wave of arrests targeting communist politicians and activists took place in the immediate aftermath of the Reichstag Fire, Maddalena was probably already on the way back to Moscow, where he continued to work in the European Section of the Profintern until November 1933.
According to his own later recollection he had “occasional disagreements” with comrade-colleagues in the Profintern headquarters, as a result of which he was permitted to resign, being sent instead to work as a ”Revolverdreher” (specialist lathe operator in a gun factory) in another part of Moscow.
With the benefit of hindsight it is hard to avoid the conclusion that when he crossed back into Germany on 11 March 1935, Max Maddalena was on something of a suicide mission.
[4][11][12] On 27 March 1935 all three men were arrested in Berlin by the security services, together with several other comrades including Käthe Lübeck who had also been engaged in the project to rebuild an “underground” version of the Communist Party.
Knowing this – not through egotism or personal ambition – along with having been active in the labour movement for twenty-five years and having been focused on the welfare of working people, has given me the necessary strength”.
[3] On 4 June Maddalena, Rembte and Stamm all faced trial in the special People's Court which had been reconfigured and relaunched a few years earlier to handle criminal cases regarded by prosecutors as “political” in nature.
In view of his deteriorating health and the appalling conditions under which he would spend the next six years, this amounted to what sympathetic commentators described as a form of “creeping execution” ("schleichenden Hinrichtung").
[1][3][12][13][14] Maximilian Maddalena was born and baptised a Roman Catholic but as an adult, where reference is made to his religion, he is described as “konfessionslos”, indicating that he was not registered as a payer of church taxes.
He was one of a number of Germans arrested in Moscow at the same time, having been identified as suspected “Hitler Youth members planning an attack on Stalin”.