Arthur Ewert

Arthur Ernest Ewert (13 November 1890 – 3 July 1959) was a German communist political activist and functionary of the Communist International (Comintern). Ewert is best remembered as an official Comintern representative to the United States, China, Argentina, and Brazil during the late 1920s and 1930s. After being subjected to torture and sentenced to 13 years in prison for his political activity in Brazil, Ewert lost his sanity. He was granted amnesty in May 1945 and ultimately returned to East Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life in a series of medical facilities. Arthur Ernest Ewert was born November 13, 1890, in the town of Heinrichswalde, East Prussia (now called Slavsk). He was the son of a poor peasant family. Largely self-educated, Ewert completed only a primary school education in a one-room rural schoolhouse. Anxious to escape the drudgery of rural life, at the age of 14 Ewert accepted a position as an apprentice in an uncle's saddle-making factory in the urban center of Berlin. The growth of the automotive industry convinced the young Ewert that there was little future in saddle-making, however, so he left that trade to take a job as a worker in a Berlin steel works. Earning low wages to perform difficult and sometimes dangerous work in the steel plant proved to be a radicalizing experience for Ewert.