He was arrested, detained and then, a few weeks short of his thirtieth birthday, handed over to the Gestapo who shot him at the beginning of February 1934.
In the German Democratic Republic he came to wider public attention when the popular author Stephan Hermlin included his story in a 1951 book about resistance to Nazism.
From 1922 he led a party youth group in Prenzlauer Berg, a quarter on the north-east side that had grown up during the closing decades of the nineteenth century as the city's population had been massively boosted by immigration from the countryside and from the east more widely.
[1][5] His principal duties involved working for what shortly afterwards became known as the "Antimilitaristischer Apparat" ("AM"), a shadowy organisation with an intentionally misleading name, which was part of the party's paramilitary section.
[6][7] Schwarz's particular area of responsibility involved targeting members of the National Defence Force ("Reichswehr")[a] and of the Police Service.
[1][5] He was taken to Columbia House which later came to be administered as part of the Concentration Camps Network, but which at this stage was being used as prison accommodation, staffed by Nazi paramilitaries from the SS and the SA.
On 1 February 1934 John Schehr, Eugen Schönhaar, Erich Steinfurth and Rudolf Schwarz were shot dead at the Schäferberg / Kilometerberg (hill) on the edge of Berlin by Gestapo personnel, while being transported to Berlin-Wannsee, and allegedly "while attempting to escape".
In reality the murder was an act of quick retribution following the shooting the previous day of the government spy Alfred Kattner.
[1][12] Rudolf Diels, the Gestapo chief in 1934, published a memoir after 1945 in which he recalled that The Leader had reacted to Kattner's killing by demanding that "a thousand hostages from among the communists under arrest" should be shot.
[13] Hermlin's contribution formed the basis for a film produced by the DEFA studio which found its way onto the East German television service in 1987.
[17] In 1954 the physical remains of Rudolf Schwarz were located, exhumed, cremated and buried at the Memorial to the Socialists (German: Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten), the place of honour in the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery reserved by the East German government for the leaders and activists of Germany's socialist and communist history.