Edwin Hoernle

Edwin Hoernle (1883 to 1952) was a German communist politician, author, educator, agricultural economist and Marxist theoretician. Born in Cannstatt near Stuttgart to a missionary father, he studied theology, philosophy and history at Tubingen and Berlin between 1904 and 1909, then broke with the church and joined the Social Democratic Party in 1910, where he became a friend and supporter of Rosa Luxemburg. He became an early member of the central committee and Politburo of the Communist Party of Germany, sat in the Reichstag from 1925 to 1933 and was one of the party leading agricultural experts. He spent the Nazi years in Moscow, was a founding member of the National Committee for a Free Germany, and after the war served as minister of agriculture in the Soviet occupation zone until he resigned in 1949.