Ernst Ottwalt

Ernst Ottwalt (13 November 1901 – 24 August 1943) was the pen name of German writer and playwright Ernst Gottwalt Nicolas. A communist, he fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and went into exile in the Soviet Union, where he fell victim to the Great Purge and died in a Soviet gulag. Later, when the Allies of World War II prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, the chief prosecutor from the Soviet Union quoted from an anti-Nazi book by Ottwalt.

Ottwalt was born Ernst Gottwalt Nicolas in Zippnow, today Sypniewo, in the district of Deutsch Krone in the former West Prussia. He was baptized Lutheran in Zippnow on 16 March 1902. He attended secondary school in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, finishing 15 September 1920. He studied at the universities of Halle and Jena. After the First World War, he joined the German nationalist Freikorps, but then changed his political views, becoming a communist and joined the Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors (BPRS). He described his Freikorps experiences in his 1929 novel Ruhe und Ordnung.

In November 1930, Friedrich Neubauer staged his play Jeden Tag vier, about a mine disaster in Neurode in Silesia, at the Piscator Bühne. In 1931, he wrote the courtroom novel Denn sie wissen was sie tun, in which Ottwalt portrayed the social structure of the German judiciary. Kurt Tucholsky wrote, "The career of an average German lawyer is portrayed through the means of an early naturalistic novel." The script has since been lost. He collaborated with Bertolt Brecht to write the screenplay for the 1932 film Kuhle Wampe.

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