Page "Herbert Wehner" Paragraph 3

Wehner rose quickly and was elected to the Landtag state legislature of Saxony in 1930.

Nevertheless, he resigned one year later to work at the KPD politburo in Berlin with Walter Ulbricht.

After Hitler's Machtergreifung in 1933, he participated in the communist resistance against the Nazi regime from the Saar Protectorate.

When the Saar was re-incorporated in 1935, Wehner went into exile, first to Paris, then in 1937 to Moscow, where he lived at Hotel Lux, wrote for the Deutsche Zentral Zeitung and had to face Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38.

After Wehner's death, German news magazine Der Spiegel magazine documented accusations that he informed the NKVD on several party fellows like Hugo Eberlein, presumably to save his own life.

After being sent to neutral Sweden in 1941 in order to re-enter Germany, he was arrested at Stockholm and interned for espionage in 1942.

If he deliberately went into custody has not been conclusively established, at least he was excluded from the Communist Party by politburo chief Wilhelm Pieck.