Throughout the 1920s, German politician and activist Ernst Th?lmann (1886–1944) was the leader of the largest Communist Party organization outside the Soviet Union. Th?lmann was the most prominent left-wing politician in the country's 1932 election and ran third in the presidential race after Hitler and von Hindenberg. After the Nazi Party's victory in that contest, he was imprisoned and held in solitary confinement for eleven years before being executed at Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 under the F?hrer's direct orders.