“My people — the people I belong to and love — are the German people, and my nation, which I honor with deep pride, is the German nation: a chivalrous, proud, and determined people. I am of the blood and flesh of the German workers and therefore became, as their revolutionary child, their revolutionary leader. My life and work have had only one purpose: to dedicate my mind and knowledge, my experience and energy — indeed my entire being — to securing Germany’s future and to serving the victorious socialist struggle for freedom in the new spring of the German nation.”

— Ernst Thälmann, from a letter to a fellow prisoner, Bautzen Prison, 1944