a long-standing theme of his political career. Aspects of his party's policy which he advocated on the floor of the parliament included free school meals and access to "learning resources" along with free medical and dental check-ups for school children and pre-school children. His military skills again came into play during the 1921 March Action (brief uprising) which this time was a Communist-led insurrection, though sources are unclear as to the nature and extent of his involvement. During 1921 there are indications that Schneller may have been drawing close to Paul Levi and his group of "moderates" within the Communist Party. However, he remained a loyal Communist Party member after Levi, who had started 1921 as party leader, was excluded from it. At the end of 1921 Schneller himself was elected to head up the local party leadership team for the Aue-Schwarzenberg sub-district. He nevertheless still managed to combine his various political roles and responsibilities with his work as a school teacher, leading what some regarded as a somewhat ascetic existence. He avoided alcohol. By 1923 he was closely associated with the party leadership around Heinrich Brandler, who in 1923 entrusted him with building up the para-military Proletarische Hundertschaften (loosely, "Proletarian Centurions") in Saxony (within which he took a leadership role) and other quasi-military tasks. Involvement in the Hamburg Uprising in October 1923 led to his suffering a period of what one source describes as "persecution by the regime's justice system" ("...von der Weimarer Justiz verfolgt"). He was briefly arrested and then, because of his connections to the Communist Party, dismissed from the schools service in November 1924. Elsewhere it is stated unambiguously that he resigned from the schools service of his own volition. Either way, the loss of his teaching job opened the way for a switch to national politics, and he moved to Berlin, becoming a salaried party official. The events of October 1923 were widely seen within the party as a set-back, and Schneller's immediate reaction was to swing towards the moderate faction: shortly before the 1924 Party Conference in Frankfurt, however, he declared his allegiance to the left-wing in a party that was always prone to acute and sometimes destructive outbursts of factionalism. Reichstag and Central Committee member In December 1924 Schneller successfully stood for election to the national parliament ("Reichstag"). He sat as a Communist Party member, representing Electoral District 30 (Chemnitz–Zwickau) from the end