From 1925 Edwin Hoernle , together with his comrade Heinrich Rau , returned to work in the party 's Agriculture Department , working on an agricultural policy which in some respects would be played out after 1945 in the Soviet occupation zone of postwar Germany . One of Hoernle 's colleagues was Ernst Putz , who was not yet a party member . ( He joined in 1926 . ) Putz was a working farmer who won widespread respect , since along with Hoernle he was one of the few people in a position to combine an influence on Communist Party policy with a deep knowledge of agriculture . He also undertook several missions to the Soviet Union with delegations of farmers , keen to acquire and share knowledge about what might become , from the Communist perspective , the future of farming . During 1927 and 1928 the party moved Hoernle back to Stuttgart to take charge at the " Süddeutsche Arbeiterzeitung " ( regional party newspaper ) . Although there was necessary party work to be undertaken in Stuttgart , there are suggestions that it also suited the party leadership to send him away from Berlin because of the increasing vehemence with which he had been participating in disagreements within the leadership . After 1929 , with the Stalinist Ernst Thälmann imposing the uncompromising Soviet approach to party strategy , Edwin Hoernle 's own influence with the party leadership continued to decline . Hoernle was no admirer of the Social fascism concept which asserted that Social Democrats were the class enemy and there could be no question of co-operating with them to resist the rising tide of National Socialist populism . Nor did he back the RGO strategy for planning to use the trades union movement as a vehicle for taking power by force from Germany 's " bourgeois " political parties . In 1931 Edwin Hoernle was a co-author of the Communist Party 's " Farm Support Programme " ( '' " Bauernhilfsprogramm " der KPD '' ) . After several years of parliamentary deadlock the National Socialists took power in January 1933 . The Hitler government quickly transformed the country into a one-party dictatorship . Although the scale of the killings for which the regime would later be remembered was not yet something that most people could have imagined , it very quickly became apparent that people identified as Jews and/or non-Nazi political activists were at heightened risk of persecution , arrest and worse . The aftermath of the Reichstag fire , which occurred at he end of February 1933 , demonstrated that leading members of the ( now outlawed ) Communist Party were in particular danger . The speed with which leading communists were rounded up before or shortly after dawn directly after the fire had been reported triggered questions in the international press - never convincingly answered - over how the government came to be so well prepared to announce the identities of those to be blamed for it . Hoernle himself avoided arrest through what one source identifies as a happy coincidence . During the night in question he was out , safely hidden at the home of Hedda Ickert ( 1902-1989 ) , the woman who at around this time became his second wife . In April 1933 , in obedience to a resolution of the party leadership , Hoernle fled to Switzerland : he engaged actively with the Communist Party there . By the end of 1933 he had made his way to Moscow , which was quickly becoming one of two informal headquarter locations for the exiled Communist Party of Germany Between December 1933 and November 1940 Hoernle was employed at the International Agriculture Institute in Moscow . Till 1935 he was deputy director of the Department for Central Europe and Scandinavia . Thereafter , for the next five years , he headed up the department . Meanwhile his progress had not gone unnoticed back in Germany : his German citizenship was revoked in 1938 . On a brighter note , there is no indication in the sources of his having been caught up in the Stalinist spy purges which peaked in 1938 and which interrupted or terminated the careers of many other high-profile political refugees from Hitler 's version of Germany who had sought sanctuary in Moscow . It was also in 1938 that he received his doctorate in " Applied Economics " ( '' " Wirtschaftswissenschaften " '' ) from the Soviet Academy of Sciences . In 1940 he became an academic researcher at the Institute for International Economics and Politics ( '' " Institut für Weltwirtschaft u. Weltpolitik " '' ) at the Academy of Sciences . In 1941 his name was included on the Gestapo Special Wanted List ( '' " Sonderfahndungsliste " '' ) of people to be sought out and dealt with in the event of the Soviet Union coming under German control . ( The non-aggression agreement between the German and Soviet governments had broken down in June 1941 with the launch of a German invasion of the Soviet Union . ) As the fighting drew closer to Moscow , in October 1941 Hoernle was among tens of thousands of evacuees sent to live in Tashkent . Here he taught and pursued research into Science and German History . By this time , back in Germany , he had been convicted ' in absentia ' of high treason and sentenced to death . As the German military threat receded , Muscovites who had been evacuated to Tashkent were able to reurn to Moscow as the end of the war began to appear on the horizon . Although he was not himself a member of the core 30-man Ulbricht Group which were now engaged in a highly detailed planning exercise for a German " nation building " project , Hoernle did help with work on theie programme , most notably in respect of agriculture and land use planning
Stalinist spy purges
Great Purge
Edwin Hoernle