Authors: Anne Nelson
That left the Russians. In intelligence terms, the Soviets held many practical advantages. Secret police and espionage agencies were long-established institutions in Russian society, and had an impressive international reach. The Soviets had liberally seeded their embassies with intelligence scouts (such as Sergei Bessonov, one of the officials who cultivated Arvid Harnack in 1932), and drew on networks of Communist sympathizers around the world.
In late 1936, an obscure encounter transpired that would determine the fate of the Harnacks and the Kuckhoffs.
That December, two stocky middle-aged men met in Moscow. Both were survivors of the savage early decades of international communism. Their encounter took place in the “chocolate house,” a small brown building on a side street near the Kremlin that housed the Intelligence Service of the Soviet army.
Jan Berzin, the Soviet officer behind the desk, was a forty-six-year-old Latvian with cropped, graying hair and a falcon's gaze. Director of the Red Army Intelligence Service, he had weathered some of the most violent struggles of the Old Bolsheviks at the dawn of the revolution.
Berzin's guest was a stolid forty-two-year-old Pole named Leopold Trepper. Trepper was the embodiment of Adolf Hitler's worst nightmares. “I became a Communist,” he declared, “because I am a Jew.” Like Hitler, Trepper had been born in an outpost of the vast Austro-
Hungarian Empire, his birthplace ceded to Poland after World War I. Trepper led a peripatetic youth, abandoning Poland in the 1920s in reaction to a rash of anti-Semitism. In Palestine he joined the local Communist Party and organized Arab citrus workers to strike against Jewish landowners, to the ire of British authorities. In 1928 his community in Palestine was broken up, and most of his fellow Communists left for the Soviet Union.
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The British deported Trepper, who went first to France and then, in the summer of 1932, to the USSR. On his way he passed through Berlin, where he observed the Nazis' momentum and worried that the German Communists weren't taking them seriously enough.
Once in Moscow, Trepper enrolled in the University for National Minorities, which included some seven hundred students in twenty different sections.
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But he also joined a larger closed community of several thousand international Communist agents-in-waiting.
Trepper received intensive instruction in the Soviet intelligence system, which was divided into three branches. Trepper was attached to Soviet military intelligence under the command of Jan Berzin, who cultivated international Communist militants and sent them out under cover to report back to Moscow. The Comintern had a parallel network of agents, also mostly non-Soviets. The third branch of intelligence was the NKVD, the internal state security. The much-feared secret police was responsible for the control of foreign agents on Soviet soil, but was always ready to extend its mandate.
Trepper and Berzin agreed that the Soviets needed to do more to monitor the Nazi threat, and they contrived a plan for a vast network of agents across Europe, with an outpost in Germany itself.
Trepper and Berzin were not alone in their concern, but already, political alignments were not as simple as they seemed. After 1933, Moscow's exile community swelled with hundreds of Germans fleeing the Nazis. Their arrival coincided with Stalin's growing anxiety that he was losing his grip on the Soviet Union and the Communist International apparatus. Stalin made noises of solidarity to welcome the exiled German comrades, but he regarded them as more of a threat than an asset. The German Communists had a long history of factionalism and insubordination, and many of the artists and intellectuals who washed up in Moscow had never bothered to join the party at all. More disturbingly,
Stalin knew that many German leftists supported his blood enemy, Leon Trotsky, who had once nearly derailed Stalin's path to power. Trotsky would not get a second chance.
Stalin reacted with brutal resolve. In 1934 he orchestrated the assassination of his perceived rival Sergey Kirov. This event served as an excuse for a massive campaign of arrests and executions, whose scope and savagery has had few parallels in history.
Stalin's agents began by rounding up leading Soviet Communist Party members and subjecting them to highly contrived show trials in connection with Kirov's murder. The public watched in confusion as Old Bolsheviks, who only recently had been held up as heroes of the revolution, were publicly humiliated, tortured into unlikely confessions, and executed. Trotsky had been driven into exile years earlier, but now anyone with any remote connection to him was in peril. The arrests spi-raled into the thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Over 1937 and 1938, millions of Soviets were dragged off to labor camps, most of them never to return.
Informed guesses place the casualties of Stalin's Great Purge, including those who died in the camps, at nine to ten million.
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The numbers are painfully uncertain. The Soviets kept less meticulous records of their victims than the Nazis did. There was no postwar liberation of Stalin's prisoners, or an international tribunal for his crimes. The scope of Stalin's atrocities were obscured for almost two decades, and their full details will never be known.
Foreign Communists were directly in the line of fire, and Stalin reserved special vitriol for the Germans. His victims included Hugo Eber-lin, one of the founders of the KPD; four members of the German Politburo; and ten members of the Central Committee.
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John Sieg's colleagues from the
Rote Fahne
suffered heavy casualties. Former editor in chief and Central Committee member Heinz Neumann, once a Stalin confidant, was shot in 1937, accused of hiring a traitorous reporter for the paper in 1930.
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Other
Rote Fahne
victims included editors in chief Heinrich Susskind and Werner Hirsch, and four of their assistant editors.
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In April 1938 the German representative on the Comintern's Executive Committee reported that 842 German antifascists had been arrested by the Soviets.
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Bertolt Brecht, with his unfailing instinct for self-preservation, managed to steer clear of Moscow over this period. He puzzled over events from his outpost in Denmark, manically listing friends and colleagues in Moscow who had disappeared:
koltsov too arrested in moscow, my last connection there. nobody knows anything about tretiakov, who is supposed to have been a “japanese spy”. nobody knows anything about [carola] neher who is supposed to have done some business for the trotskyists in prague on her husband's instructions … literature and art are up the creek, political theory has gone to the dogs …
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Brecht's collaborator on the
Kuhle Wampe
screenplay, experimental novelist Ernst Ottwald, was denounced for artistic “diversionism” in the Soviet press. He disappeared into a Soviet concentration camp, where he was shot in 1943. When
Kuhle Wampe
's blond starlet, Marta Wolter, was arrested in Germany with her fiancé, Walter Husemann, in 1936, Huse-mann's brother Wilhelm had counted himself lucky to escape to Moscow. But now he was arrested and shot by the Soviets.
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Brecht's amber-eyed muse, Carola Neher, was another early victim. The actress who created the role of Polly in
Threepenny Opera
had fled to Moscow with her second husband in 1934, and the couple was arrested two years later on suspicion of links to Trotsky. Her husband was shot and Neher was sentenced to ten years' hard labor. She failed to complete her term. One report stated that Neher was loaded onto a transport to a labor camp in Central Asia in 1942 and died shortly afterward of typhoid fever. A later account holds that she was shot in a Soviet prison camp in 1941.
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Even the Soviets fighting in Spain could be vulnerable. One was Leopold Trepper's contact Jan Berzin, the Old Bolshevik who headed Soviet military intelligence. Berzin was sent to Spain in 1936 to help organize the Loyalists' defense. A practical man, he complained that Stalin's purge of the internationalists was damaging his field operations.
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Berzin was recalled to Moscow in June 1937, arrested the following May, and executed six weeks later.
With Berzin's execution, Stalin forfeited one of the most successful intelligence officers in the world. Berzin had recruited a spectacular network
of spies that was now positioned across Europe, crucial to the war ahead. But Stalin seemed to be determined to destroy his country's military capacity. Over the course of the two-year purge, 30,000 Soviet officers were eliminated through imprisonment, torture, or execution. These included 3 of the 5 marshals, 14 of 16 army commanders, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 divisional commanders, and 221 of 397 brigade commanders.
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Their posts were assigned to inexperienced and incompetent personnel without a unified vision of strategy or command.
The impact of Stalin's purges traveled far beyond the Soviet Union. The Soviet diplomatic corps was decimated, including the embassy staff in Berlin. Boris Gordon, one of Arvid Harnack's first acquaintances at the Soviet embassy, was summoned back to Moscow in 1937 and executed. Sergei Bessonov, the economist who had arranged Harnack's trip to Russia in 1932, was recalled to Moscow and arrested that same year. Bessonov withstood months of questioning, but finally succumbed to torture and a notorious treatment called “the Conveyor,” consisting of sleep deprivation and endless interrogations. The diplomat “confessed” that he had acted as an emissary for Trotsky and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was shot on September 8, 1941.
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Five of the eight intelligence officers from the Soviet embassy in Berlin were recalled and executed.
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Boris Vinogradov, the Soviet intelligence agent who had won Martha Dodd's heart and recruited her as a source, was shot in 1938.
Stalin's purges left the antifascists in Germany even more isolated than before. Arvid Harnack was now perfectly positioned to supply vital economic intelligence from the Reich ministry, but the Soviet embassy was gutted of diplomats and intelligence officers, leaving him without a working contact. Harnack had only the vaguest information about what was happening in Moscow, but he was distressed by the little he could learn.
In later years Martha Dodd wrote that Arvid Harnack “did not like what Stalin was doing.” He “spoke vehemently” to her about it, and had “agonizing doubts about the turn of the propaganda” coming from the USSR.
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Fortunately, the Americans now offered him a practical alternative. At the end of 1937, the State Department appointed Donald Heath to the
post of first secretary in Berlin. Heath, forty-three, was a tall Kansan with a broad mustache and an understated manner. After serving in World War I, he worked as White House correspondent for the United Press before joining the State Department. Assigned to serve under Ambassador Hugh Wilson, he stayed on in Berlin after Wilson's recall.
Heath's State Department assignment was only half of his position. He was also assigned to a secret intelligence role as monetary attaché, reporting directly to Roosevelt's treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau. This reflected the bias in Washington at the time: there was far more emphasis on monitoring German economic policies than on documenting concentration camp conditions or disenfranchisement of the Jews.
The Harnack-Heath connection began when Heath's wife met Mildred Harnack at a social occasion. Heath was excited to hear that Mrs. Harnack's husband had studied in the United States, and set out to meet him. He tracked him down at his desk in the Economics Ministry and suggested they have lunch. Arvid Harnack happily agreed.
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Donald Heath's needs and Arvid Harnack's intelligence were complementary, and the two men quickly forged a partnership. Harnack's work at the Economics Ministry concerned Germany's balance of payment and foreign exchange. According to one coworker, he was:
in direct contact with all the various country desks; and his position as chief of a basic desk [trade policy] allowed him to participate in all decisions that were made. … He systematically acquired a reliable overview of our current economic capacity, our production and our reserves, and he evaluated our foreign trade situation at any given time. In this way, Harnack became one of the persons most knowledgeable about the state of the economy.
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Harnack was among the first and most important of Heath's sources. It was a struggle for Heath to explain the political profile of German antifascists like Harnack to his superiors, whose suspicions were aroused by their Nazi Party membership. Their positions within the regime, he argued, were precisely what made them useful.
Heath's informants tended to be from the second tier of government
officials, approached in weekend settings in which they could speak freely. Most of them had begun their careers under the previous regime as serious and well-trained public servants. If the majority were now Nazi Party members, Heath reported to Washington, “It is indeed a practical necessity for them to be members if they are to advance or even retain their positions in the government.”
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This was a perfect description of Arvid Harnack and his friends and relations.
Heath tried to describe the attitudes of Berlin's cultivated parlor leftists to his American superiors:
The majority of this group are inclined to be moderately Socialist in their views. They do not disapprove of the increase of state intervention and the control of industry and commerce under the National Socialist regime. What they object to is the restriction on personal liberty, freedom of thought and the present policy of military aggression, instead of international cooperation, which they feel will eventually lead to a European war.
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At the same time Heath was drawing on Arvid Harnack's storehouse of secret information, he and his wife, Louise, enjoyed a public friendship with Arvid and Mildred Harnack as members of Berlin's American expatriate community. Heath took his young son Donald Jr. on walks with the Harnacks to promote the appearance of an innocuous family friendship. When the men's conversation turned to intelligence matters, the boy learned to fall in step with Mildred, whom he greatly admired.
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