A uniformed Gestapo officer with a whip of hippopotamus hide in his hand then beat my buttocks with measured strokes, Driven wild with pain I repeatedly screamed at the top of my voice. Then they held my mouth shut for a while and hit me in the face, and with a whip across chest and back. I then collapsed, rolled on the floor, always keeping face down and no longer replied to any of their questions." After the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and Germany's invasion of Poland of 1939, and despite Thälmann's loyalty to Stalin during his time leading the KPD, Moscow pragmatically removed a slogan which read in part, "Long live Comrade Thälmann!" from the 1939 International Youth Day. It was replaced with, "Long live the wise foreign policy of the Soviet Union, guided by Comrade Stalin's instructions." It later became known that Thälmann's long-time party rival Walter Ulbricht had ignored several requests for help from Thälmann's family when the thawing in German–Soviet relations could have made a release possible, preferring to let Thälmann remain imprisoned. Fellow German Communist, Wilhelm Pieck had managed to escape to the Soviet Union and in July 1936 he issued a statement calling for the release of Thälmann: "If we succeeded in raising a tremendous storm of protest throughout the world, it will be possible to break down the prison walls and as in the case of Dimitrov, deliver Thaelmann from the clutches of the Fascist hangmen. The fact that Ernst Thaelmann has got to spend his fiftieth birthday in the gaols of Hitler-Fascism is an urgent reminder to all the anti-Fascists of the whole world that they must intensify to the utmost their campaign for the release of Thaelmann and the many thousands of imprisoned victims of the White Terror." However, these attempts at raising publicity for his plight resulted in nothing and at the same time numerous German communists who had been close to Thälmann had been murdered in Stalin's camps in the 1930s. Thälmann spent over eleven years in solitary confinement. In August 1944, he was transferred from Bautzen prison to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was shot on the 18th August. His body was immediately cremated. Shortly after, the Nazis claimed in an announcement that, together with Rudolf Breitscheid, Thälmann had died in an Allied bombing attack on 23 August.