Ewald Munschke (born and died Berlin: 20 March 1901 – 21 October 1981) was a General in the East German quasi-military Kasernierte Volkspolizei (People's Police in Barracks) and subsequently one of the creators of the National People's Army.
Between 1930 and 1945, he was a member of the German Communist Party and actively engaged in resisting Nationalsocialism.
Life
Early years
Ewald Munschke was born into a working-class family in Berlin a few weeks after the start of the twentieth century. His father was a stonemason and his mother was a cook. By the time he was twelve his mother was a widow and he was working in Berlin with a large hand cart, delivering drinks to bars and kiosks. This enabled him to contribute three marks each week to the family housekeeping budget. His schooling formally ended after eight years, with his wish to get an apprenticeship unfulfilled. Between 1915 and 1917 he obtained a training of sort, working as a messenger for an insurance company, and also, during this time, working as a building labourer.
In 1917/18 he joined the army and was sent to the Eastern Front where he served as an infantry auxiliary and messenger. He returned to Berlin and worked in a range of jobs, most of them involving the railways. He joined the Transport Workers' Trades Union in 1920, and in 1923 he joined the recently formed German Communist Party, which he later said he had done "out of curiosity". He resigned from the party in 1924, but would later, in 1930, join it again, this time permanently. During the 1920s he held a succession of manual jobs, mostly involving transport or the building trade, but also including a period working as a packer in a soap factory. He participated in the occasional demonstration, but was not particularly active politically before 1930.
Politics and exile
Between 1931 and 1933 Munschke was unemployed. However, having rejoined the Communist Party in 1930 he participated actively in the party's "military-political" apparatus in the Berlin-Brandenburg region during these years. In January 1933 the NSDAP (Nazi party) took power and set about creating a one-party state in Germany. Munschke's Communist Party activities now became illegal and party members were subjected to harassment, assault and, in many cases, arrest followed by imprisonment. In October 1933 Munschke emigrated to the Soviet Union where he would remain till 1936. Between 1934 he was a student at a Comintern Academy in Moscow, also finding the energy to work on construction sites for the Moscow Metro and to undertake agricultural work.
In 1936 Munschke joined the International Brigades to fight for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He started out as a "war commissar" in the multi-national Chapayev-Battalion of the XIII International Brigade. Later, jointly with Anton Ackermann and Franz Dahlem, he headed up a commissars' "party school" in Benicàssim. In 1938, the Party leadership, now in exile, summoned him to Paris in preparation for a posting on behalf of the Communist Party to Czechoslovakia. In the event that posting never came about because Czechoslovakia was surrendered to Germany. Instead Munschke was sent north to Belgium and the Netherlands where he would later become the head of the German Communist group in the country. In 1940 the German army invaded the Netherlands and Munschke became a resistance leader. He quickly mastered the Dutch language to the point where, armed with a forged Dutch passport, he was able to work for the Communist Party under a false identity as a Dutch businessman called Anton Bakker.