Germany after unification 1994
A portrait of Lenin and a book by Ernst Thalmann lie on the floor in the ruins of a Young Persons Communist retreat in East Germany 1990. The Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation, consisting of the Young Pioneers and the Thälmann Pioneers, was a youth organisation of schoolchildren aged 6 to 14 in East Germany. They were named after Ernst Thälmann, the former leader of the Communist Party of Germany who was executed at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
The group was a subdivision of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ, Free German Youth), East Germany's youth movement. It was founded on 13 December 1948 and broke apart in 1989 on German reunification. In the 1960s and 1970s, nearly all schoolchildren between ages 6 and 14 were organised into Young Pioneer or Thälmann Pioneer groups, with the organisations having "nearly two million children" collectively by 1975