tag the following year. A teacher, he took particular interest in a
complete reform of the education system. Although he served in the
Reichstag from 1924 to 1933, his main expertise lay in expanding
and perfecting the party’s underground network. As a member of
the KPD’s Central Committee and head of the Reichsparteischule
in Berlin-Fichtenau, he took charge of the M-Apparat, which con-
tinued to seek a revolutionary overthrow of the country. In 1928,
he also became a candidate for the executive committee of the
Comintern.
In the aftermath of the Reichstag fire, Schneller was arrested on 28
February 1933 and found guilty of high treason. In July 1939, he was
transferred from the Waldheim prison in Saxony to the Sachsenhau-
sen concentration camp. Schneller’s attempt to foment an uprising
among the inmates resulted in his execution on 11 October 1944.
Numerous streets and schools in the German Democratic Republic
were later named in his honor, although most returned to their origi-
nal designation after 1990.SCHOLZ, ALFRED (1921–1978). A prominent senior counterintel-
ligence official of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), Al-
fred Scholz was born on 11 February 1921 in Gross-Ullersdorf (now
Velké Losiny, Czech Republic), the son of a carpenter. Entering the
Wehrmacht in 1941, he was captured by the Red Army the following
year and later served as a scout for a partisan brigade in Belorussia
and the area surrounding Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). A number
of police functions in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany fol-
lowed after 1945 and culminated in his appointment in 1950 as head
of the main investigative organ of the MfS, where he showed little
hesitation in personally administrating the harsh interrogation tech-
niques developed by the NKVD (Soviet People’s Commissariat of
Internal Affairs). A close confidant of Erich Mielke, Scholz shared
the conviction that the “hand of the enemy” must be zealously sought
in each individual case. In 1958, the Minister’s Working Group, the
largest of the administrative organs at Mielke’s disposal, came under
his direction. He was designated deputy minister of the MfS in 1975.
After his death on 11 August 1978, Scholz was honored as one of 34
“chekists of the first hour,” replete with a large commemorative coin
and an MfS unit bearing his name.
404 • SCHOLZ, ALFRED