Thälmann Battalion

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The Thälmann Battalion was a battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. It was named after the imprisoned German communist leader Ernst Thälmann (born 16 April 1886, executed 18 August 1944) and included approximately 1,500 Germans, Austrians and Scandinavians. The battalion notably fought in the defence of defence of Madrid. Its commanders were the German writer, historian and World War I officer Ludwig Renn, respectively the Prussian officer Hans Kahle, who was later promoted to lead the Republican 45th division for a time.^[1]

The German-speaking batallions ^[2] were one of the first and eventually largest groups that formed in the International Brigades, coalescing out of the 'Thaelmann Centuria' of the early war days.^[3] In their home countries of Germany and Austria, fascism had already conquered, giving their foreign struggle a special grim context. As Robert G. Colodny writes in The International Brigades:

The history of the Germans in Spain... ...is the history of strong men who proved and overproved their courage and endurance, their resistance to pessimism and despair. It is the story of men who died or were broken physically in doing this. They brought to the International Brigades an offensive spirit, a bitter desperate courage at rare intervals in war priceless, essential, but always costly. They set an early example of what shock troops could be like. They tried to do the impossible, and paid for it. And during the early days in Aragon, in the futile fighting around Huesca, at Tardienta, the Germans, in countless bayonet charges against fortified positions, took their objectives, buried their dead, and waited with a caged restlessness for the next day's orders.^[3]

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