Otto Braun

He was born in Munich, Germany in 1901. He supported left-wing Socialism at the close of World War I and then joined the KPD. He became a member of its secret apparatus in 1923 and was linked to the Soviet intelligence service. In 1926 he was arrested by the German authorities and then accused of high treason and imprisoned. In April of 1928 he was freed from Berlin’s Moabit Prison and then he left secretly for the Soviet Union, where he attended a military school.

At the beginning of 1930’s he was sent to China as an emissary of the Comintern. In Shanghai in 1931-1932 he met Richard Sorge, a German working in intelligence. In 1933 Braun went to Juichin, capital of the liberated region of Kiangsi, then under control of Mao Tse-tung and Chu The. Using a pseudonym Li The, he acted as a military advisor to the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee. He wrote for the Chinese Communist newspaper review "Revolution and War".

He helped to develop the historical Long March plans and in January 1935 he attended the Tsunyi Conference which approved Mao’s elevation to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. In the new liberated region of Yenan he became a professor at the Military Academy, whose director at that time was Lin Piao.

In 1930 he returned to Moscow and during the Great Patriotic War he served as officer in the Red Army. In 1949 he finally returned to GDR, where he worked in the Marxist-Leninist Institute, translating Soviet political and literary works into German.

In 1973 he published his memoirs from China. Her died in August of 1974.

Giuseppe Vittorio

He was born in Italy in 1892 and was forced to leave the secondary school in order to work as a farm labourer. In his youth he became involved in politics and in 1910 was elected secretary of the local school youth federation. He became involved in trade union activities and in 1913 participated in the central committee of the Italian syndicalist union. He was in the Italian Army from 1915-1918, after that he resumed his trade union activities. In February of 1921 he was elected as a deputy to the Italian parliament.

In 1924 he joined the Italian Communist Party and headed its agrarian section and in that year he founded and headed the National Association of Peasants. In 1925 he was arrested in Rome, and when he jumped bail, he fled to France and he was sentenced to 12 years in absentia. The leadership of the ICP sent him to Moscow in 1928 as its international representative, a position he held until 1930. He worked for the Comintern and took part in the tenth plenum of the ECCI in 1929.

In 1930 he returned to France where he joined the CC of the ICP. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 he became a Commissar of the First International Brigade, under the name of Mario Nicoletti and finally Commissar of the Italian Garibaldi Brigade. In 1937 he returned to France and directed the Italian newspaper La Voce degli Italiani.

When World War Two broke out he was forced to hide from the French authorities, but in 1941 he was arrested in Paris and imprisoned in various jails across France and Italy. He was freed in 1943 after the downfall of Mussolini and shortly after that became the head of the National Federation of Agriculture and joined the ICP leadership.

At the first postwar Congress of Italian Trade Unions in 1945, he was made secretary of the General Confederation of Labour and then was elected as the vice-president of the World Trade Union Federation.

In 1946 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party. He was also elected as President of the World Federation of Trade Unions in 1953 and 1957. He died in November of 1957.