Today marks 82 years since the German communist leader Ernst Thälmann was executed by the Nazis.

The order was given by Hitler himself, after 11 years of solitary confinement. After 11 years of solitary confinement, he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp and shot on the personal order of Adolf Hitler. His body was cremated, and the Nazi propaganda machine stated that he had been killed in an Allied bombing campaign. He was a two-time presidential candidate with the KPD and a key figure in the anti-Nazi resistance who attempted to organize the overthrow of Hitler's government. In March 1933, the Gestapo arrested Thälmann in a safe house.

From prison, Thälmann secretly wrote letters to Stalin. Between November 1939 and April 1941, his wife Rosa smuggled 24 letters and documents out through the Soviet embassy in Berlin, handing them over during eleven visits. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he hoped to be traded to Moscow, the way Hungary's Rákosi was. Stalin never replied. He ordered the letters filed as "strictly secret," accessible only to Politburo members, and they stayed sealed for more than fifty years. Historian Bernhard Bayerlein argues new evidence suggests Stalin may have consciously decided to abandon him. The originals are held today in the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation.

In 1925, Thälmann became chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and led the Red Front (Roter Frontkämpferbund), a militant organization founded by the KPD to resist the rise of fascism in Germany and Europe.