Wilhelm "Willi" Münzenberg (14 August 1889 – June 1940) was a German Communist political activist and publisher. Münzenberg was the first head of the Young Communist International in 1919–20 and established the famine-relief and propaganda organization Workers International Relief in 1921. He was a leading propagandist for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the Weimar Era, but later grew disenchanted with the USSR due to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s. Condemned by Stalin to be purged and arrested for treason, Münzenberg left the KPD and in Paris became a leader of the German émigré anti-fascism and anti-Stalinist community until forced to flee the Nazi advance into France in 1940. Arrested and imprisoned by the Daladier government in France, he escaped prison camp only to be found dead a few months later in a forest near the commune of Saint-Marcellin, France. Walter Laqueur described him as "a cultural impresario of genius". Early years Münzenberg was born 14 August 1889 in Erfurt, in the Prussian Province of Saxony (present-day Thuringia). The son of a tavern keeper and grandson of a baron from the House of Seckendorff, Münzenberg grew up in poverty. As a young man working in a shoe factory, he became involved with trade unions and in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He gained his first experience as an organiser in 1907, when he attempted to organise apprentices in Erfurt with the local branch of the Union of Young German Workers, an activity which led to his brief imprisonment. He subsequently travelled through Germany in search of work, eventually reaching Zürich in Switzerland in 1910, where he stayed for the following eight years. Whilst there he initially gravitated towards anarchist politics, and studied the works of Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. He subsequently shifted back towards social democracy. When the SPD split in 1914 between the moderate Majority SPD (MSPD) and the radical Independent SPD (USPD) over the issue of World War I, Münzenberg sided with the USPD. In 1915, having already become leader of the Swiss socialist youth movement, he was elected secretary of the International Union of Socialist Youth Organizations, and was elected to the executive of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland the following year. The same year he was also appointed editor of the publication of the International, Jugend-Internationale based in Zurich. During World War I, Münzenberg often visited Vladimir Lenin at