of 1924 till 1933. His entry in the official Parliamentary directory ("Reichstags-Handbuch") is unusually brief: it describes him as a "teacher in Schwarzenberg (Saxony)" and as a "dissident". The Ninth Party Congress was held at Frankfurt in April 1924. At it Ernst Schneller was one of the fifteen delegates elected to membership of the powerful "Parteizentrale", precursor to the Party Central Committee and effectively the governing body of the party. Within that committee he took responsibility for important military and organisational matters. In 1925 he was elected to take charge of the National Party Academy ("Reichsparteischule Rosa Luxemburg") at Schöneiche–Fichtenau. After moving to Berlin and becoming a full-time party official at the end of 1924 he became identified as an adherent of the Ruth Fischer leadership faction in the party. Fischer had been appointed co-leader of the party in April and was identified as a resolute "anti-Stalinist". Schneller was soon given responsibility for the department in charge of "Theoretical work" and "Agitprop". During 1924 the Fischer-Maslow leadership team came under increasing pressure from committed pro-Stalinists within the party, and early in 1925, as the influence of Karl Korsch and the "ultra-left-wingers" increased at the expense of the formal party leadership, Schneller became the publisher of the theoretical newspaper "Internationale" and leader of the "Marxist-Leninist Circle". He quickly made himself as reputation as a leading proponent of the "Struggle against Trotskyism and Luxemburgism", which implicitly but unambiguously meant that he was now lining up with the pro-Stalinists. The Tenth Party Congress was held at Berlin in July 1925. The "Parteizentrale" was replaced by a Party Central Committee and now had eighteen members. One of these, as before, was Ernst Schneller. He presented the Report of the "Parteizentrale" to the assembled delegates and was treated as "general secretary", although the position was not one that, formally, yet existed within the party. After the death of Lenin in 1924 the power of Stalin in Moscow appears to have become almost limitless. There were close links between the Communist Party leaderships in Moscow and Berlin, and Stalin seems to have become virtually a "de facto king-maker" for the German party, which in part was a reflection of the acute divisions within the German party itself. To the disappointment of some, it turned out that Stalin was not an admirer of Karl Korsch and the "ultra-left-wingers". Nevertheless, for the next few years, until the Communist