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When Thuringian workers were being egged on to revolt against the Weimar Republic in 1923, Walter Ulbricht was one of two Reds who doomed them by persuading Moscow that they needed no arms, "because every Thuringian worker already has a rifle behind his stove." When untrue rumors began to drift to Moscow in the '20s about the intelligentsia, which had assumed command of the German party, Zinoviev, the boss of the Comintern, went to the files, found that all the adverse reports had been signed by Comrade Ulbricht. When Moscow decided in 1925 that the German party must be atomized so that it would be utterly obedient to the Kremlin, it was Ulbricht, under the pseudonym Zelle (Cell), who proceeded to chop it into a confusion of small cells. Ulbricht plotted with the Nazis in the 1932 transport strike, which ruined the democratic Social Democrats and helped propel Hitler to power. He was among the first to flee Nazi Germany (although he tampered with his biography later to suggest that he had stayed for a while in Berlin to fight in the underground). He was the man to eliminate any comrades in Spain who had begun to doubt Stalin. In the Stockholm underground in 1940, he methodically turned over to the Gestapo any comrades in hiding who expressed dismay over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. West Berlin police still hold a yellowed warrant for Ulbricht's arrest for the murder of two policemen in 1931.
Even in the company of men whose lives and works have been devoted to evil, Walter Ulbricht stands out as a man without warmth or sentiment, humor or mercy. "In Ulbricht," wrote a commentator who found some redeeming features in other German Communists, is "only the worst." Another once described him thus: "Ulbricht is the kind of man who wants to enter a house which is guarded by a policeman at the front door, then decides it is easier to go in by the back door. He first begs a slice of bread, then seduces the maid, cleans out the refrigerator, works his way into the master bedroom, steals the owner's clothes, and then strides through the house to the front door and tells the policeman to go away."
Compared to shrewder and more flexible Reds like Yugoslavia's Tito or Italy's Togliatti, Ulbricht is a small and limited man. But by the beginning of World War II, years of internal fratricide, Russian purges and Nazi scythe-swinging had cleaned German Communism of its commanding figures, and left only what Nikolai Bukharin once called a band of "obedient dunces." To Moscow, Walter Ulbricht seemed the safest choice. He was ordered to Moscow for most of the war years to prepare for the day when the Red flag would be raised over Berlin.
Ulbricht took up Soviet citizenship, helped organize German P.W.s and captured officers (among them, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus) into the pro-Communist shock corps that was supposed to go home and paint Germany Red after V-day. The propaganda barrage laid down on the encircled Wehrmacht armies at Stalingrad was written by Ulbricht and delivered in his guttural German over front-line loudspeakers. In Moscow, where he rubbed elbows with Red princelings from all over Europe, e.g., Tito, Togliatti, Thorez, he shared quarters in the Lux Hotel with a plain, buxom German émigree named Lotte Kühn (years later, in 1951, he made Lotte an honest woman).