Between 1946 and 1950 he served as the first director of the newly established "Karl Marx" Party Academy in the Soviet occupation zone (after 1949 the German Democratic Republic).

Rudolf Lindau was born in Riddagshausen, a small village which was at that time a short distance outside and to the east of Braunschweig in northern Germany.

Rudolf Lindau's first job was in a bakery after which he took work in a foundry, before he moved into the transport sector, first joining a trades union in 1904.

The younger Rudolf Lindau (1911-1934), as a local Young Communist leader, was one of those found guilty of involvement: he was executed on 10 January.

In the case of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union this occurred in June 1941, following repudiation from the German side of the non-aggression pact that the two dictatorships had concluded nearly two years earlier.

During his time in Moscow Lindau taught at the Party Academy and, later, at the Anti-Fascist School set up for the re-education of German prisoners of war.

Additionally, at the Krasnogorsk-based "Academy for Leninism" at, a short distance outside Moscow, he got to know Walter Ulbricht who by 1949 would have emerged as the leader of a new kind of German state.

In September or October 1950 both Rudolf Lindau and Paul Lenzner were removed from the Party Academy directorship, to be replaced by a single director, Hanna Wolf.

[1] Lindau was one of a small but determined group of like-minded historians who promoted the orienting of historical seminars and institutions according to the precepts of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).

This was seen as necessary because, especially in the early years of the German Democratic Republic, the country's mainstream historians were drawn, for the most part, from outside the Marxist historical tradition.