Philipp Dengel
[6] In Berlin during early 1920, Dengel participated in defeating the Kapp Putsch and briefly became a member of the extremist breakaway Communist Workers' Party.
The next year, he was switched to work as a senior journalist with newspapers backing the party in Germany's principal industrial regions further to the west.
[10] In July 1925, at the KPD's tenth party congress held in Berlin, Dengel was elected to the Central Committee, remaining a member through a decade of mixed political fortunes till 1935.
The German executive commission of the Moscow-based Comintern, presumably taking their lead from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, became disenchanted with the leadership of Arkadi Maslow and Ruth Fischer after the second 1924 federal election seven months later, which saw the party's vote share drop back below 10%.
Some commentators saw this development as a result of an improvement in the German economy, but for Stalin and the KPD left-wingers it was a sign that their party was becoming insufficiently differentiated from the political mainstream.
Capitalist stabilization imperilled the class struggle on which future political success for Soviet style communism in Germany depended.
[12] A triumvirate comprising Dengel, Ernst Thälmann, and John Schehr led support for the "open letter" during the run-up to a Central Committee meeting which took place between 28 August and 1 September 1925.
[1][3][13] In the late summer of 1928, at the sixth Comintern World Congress which took place in Moscow, Dengel was elected a member of the organisation's executive committee and of its praesidium.
[1] In October 1928, the Wittorf affair, a major embezzlement scandal within the KPD, seriously undermined the powerful alliance at the top of the party between Thälmann and Dengel.
[1] Back in his Ingelheim home base, reports surfaced that he had been expelled from the national party leadership due to conflicts with Thälmann.
From December 1933 to August 1935, he headed the Comintern regional secretariat for Scandinavia, which involved a number of trips to Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Dengel's wife Katharina now joined him in Moscow where the family were from now on to be based, though he would continue to travel extensively in connection with his Comintern work.
[1] Between November 1935 and April 1936, Dengel undertook a lengthy visit to Paris where he worked with the so-called "Lutetia Circle" attempting to create a "popular front" against the Nazis.
The KPD, along with their Soviet backers, took the lead in the Lutetia project while insisting that membership should be broadly based as was open to all who opposed Nazism in Germany.
Somehow, the energy the exiled communists devoted to the Lutetia Circle, served only to dampen the enthusiasm from other parts of the anti-Nazi political spectrum.
[16][d] In 1936, Dengel was recalled to party work, sent to Prague between April and September to facilitate and secure the production of the German-language Deutsche Volkszeitung newspaper being produced in the city at that time.
[3] At the "Bern congress" which actually took place in Draveil, on the edge of Paris, a unanimous decision was taken to enlarge the Central Committee, and Dengel was re-elected to it.
[1] The conference itself had an unforeseen and disappointing epilogue: a few months after the KPD exiled leaders had passed resolutions committing to victory over fascism, they learned of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union which, that same day, Dengel suffered a serious stroke from which he would never properly recover.
