Spanish Sky Spreads Its Stars: The Story of the Thalmann Battalion and the First Germans in Armed Struggle Against Fascism
Ewald P Schulz, International Brigade Commemoration Committee, £6

MORE than 4,000 Germans fought in the International Brigades or in the anti-fascist militias and other Spanish military units during the Spanish civil war. Over 1,000 of them gave their lives.

Their story is recounted in this booklet by Ewald P Schulz, a Berlin-based lawyer and journalist who is active in the KFSR, the International Brigade Memorial Trust’s (IBMT) sister organisation in Germany.

The booklet’s title is taken from the song The Thalmann Column by composer Paul Dessau and his wife Gudrun: “Spain’s sky spreads its stars over our trenches/ And the morning already greets from afar.”

Usually known as the Thaelmann Battalion in Spain, the battalion was named after Ernst Thalmann, leader of the KPD, German Communist Party. He was arrested as soon as Hitler took power in 1933 and executed on the Fuhrer’s personal orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.

As Schulz points out, the German volunteers differed from their British, Dutch, French and Scandinavian counterparts in that they were effectively homeless. Many were already in exile from Nazism and those who travelled to Spain from Germany could also not return home. The same was true for the battalion’s Austrians following the Anschluss of March 1938, when Germany marched into Austria.

The decision to fight fascism in Spain — on occasions pitted against the airborne Condor Legion sent by Hitler to help Franco’s rebels — had a special meaning for the German volunteers.

“For the first time they had the opportunity to stand up to the fascists and to oppose their violence,” he writes. 

Between 60 and 70 per cent of the German volunteers were communists, the rest mostly social democrats, anarchists or supporters of other left organisations.

“They were all united by the conviction that Spain should not suffer the same fate as Germany.”

Three Germans are given brief biographies. Hermann Drumm, a miner from Saarland in south-west Germany, was a member of the SPD social democrats and became a company commander before being killed, aged 38, at Belchite in September 1937.

Kathe Hempel (1911-66) was originally from Waldheim, a town west of Dresden. In the summer of 1936 she was living in Switzerland, from where she cycled to Barcelona to take part in the planned People’s Olympiad, which was being organised as an anti-fascist alternative to the Berlin Olympics. She was a communist and served as a nurse in Spain.

Alois Weisberger (1904-?) was another miner from Saarland and was one of the few members of the Catholic Centre Party to join the Thalmann Battalion. The party, indeed, had voted in favour of Hitler’s Enabling Act that gave the Nazi leader untrammelled powers. After the war in Spain, Weisberger was interned in France and in 1943 handed over to the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp.

The German volunteers fought in all the great battles of the war in Spain: the defence of Madrid, Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro. Having no homes to go to after the International Brigades were stood down in September 1938, the Germans, along with the Austrians and Czechs, took up arms again in January 1939 bravely covering the flight of refugees towards the French border as Franco’s forces advanced through Catalonia.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the booklet is the account of what happened to the surviving Thalmanns after the war. Interned by the French in a network of camps, some managed to secure visas to Britain, Mexico, the Soviet Union and the US. Others were recruited to French labour battalions. Those still in the camps following the French surrender to the Germans in 1940 were sent to concentration camps, where many perished, or escaped to join the French Resistance.

After the defeat of Nazism in 1945, contrasting receptions awaited the veterans in West and East Germany. In the Federal Republic, they fell foul of the state’s official anti-communist ideology, which included the banning of the KPD in 1956. While former members of the Condor Legion received pensions for their service in Spain, there was no such recognition for those who had fought fascism and Nazism in Spain.

In the GDR the International Brigade veterans were officially honoured. They served in leadership roles in the East German army as well as in the country’s police and in government positions. 

Some, Schulz acknowledges, were regarded with suspicion during the Stalin era, above all any who had lived in Western countries before returning to Germany. A few lost their jobs and were unjustly persecuted, such as prominent writer Walter Janka.

In contrast with West Germany, however, the volunteers in Spain entered the cultural canon of the GDR. “Countless books, songs and films were published. Streets were named after Spanish fighters. Medals were awarded and every child learned about the war in Spain at school.”

Born in 1968 in West Germany, Schulz says he only found out about the Thalmanns after 2000. Most older leftwingers in the Federal Republic of Germany first came across their story through the songs of singer-composer Ernst Busch, two albums of which were released in the 1980s.

The songs had been recorded in Barcelona in 1938 with the help of an International Brigade choir. Some of the recordings were released in New York in 1940 under the title Six Songs For Democracy, with US actor, singer and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson writing in the sleeve notes: “Valiant and heroic was the part played by the International Brigade in the glorious struggle of the Spanish Republic.”

Schulz’s text for this booklet is based on a talk he gave in 2023 as part of Belfast’s annual Feile an Phobail (People’s Festival). The event was hosted at the Shankill Library by the IBMT-affiliated International Brigade Commemoration Committee.

The booklet also includes tributes to Manus O’Riordan, the son of Cork Brigader Michael O’Riordan, and Belfast-born volunteer Paddy McAllister.

Copies of the booklet can be ordered from the IBCC for £6 plus £2.50 p&p within the UK. Contact Lynda Walker of the IBCC for more details: lyndaernest@btinternet.com.