The Comintern and its organs were by the nature of their work particularly liable to the charge of contact with foreign countries. The Communist Party of the Western Ukraine, which had been kept organizationally separate from the Communist Party of Poland, was already being purged as a nest of spies in the late 1920s.3 In 1936, a purge took place in the Communist Party of Latvia in which numbers of the Party’s leadership then in Moscow were repressed “for treachery and treason.” This amounted to “in effect the dissolution” of the Party.4 The Latvian Party had been little more than a branch of the Soviet Party—in earlier times, even officially so—though many Latvians, like Rudzutak, were prominent in Russia, and their origin was used against them. The Estonian Communist Party, too, was denounced as “compromised.” So few Estonian Communists survived that on the Soviet annexation of their country in 1940, one of the highest posts went to a man of Estonian origin who had hitherto been an assistant station master in the North Caucasus.5 The entire Lithuanian Central Committee was also arrested, and charged with working for the Lithuanian government.6 In any case, all this was a mere preliminary. In 1937, the storm broke over the main body of foreign Communists.
In the dingy corridors of the Hotel Lux, the Comintern officials led a rather bohemian existence. Full of foreigners with nowhere else to go, the hotel became something like a frontier village raided nightly by bandits. Occasionally there was trouble. One Polish Communist shot down several NKVD men before he was overcome.7
On 28 April 1937 Heinz Neumann, former member of the German CP’s Politburo, was arrested. After being one of the leading foreigners in the Canton Commune, with his friend Lominadze, he had been removed from the leadership of the German Communist Party early in the 1930s, but had been working for the Party in Moscow since 1935.
Neumann’s “dark, petite, vivacious and gay”8 wife describes his arrest. At one o’clock in the morning, three uniformed police officials and the manager of the Lux, Gurevich—himself certainly an agent—came in and roused Neumann. Forbidding the couple to speak in German, they made a long search, lasting until dawn, of his documents, taking a trunkful and sixty books of allegedly oppositionist content. When Neumann was finally taken out, he said to his wife, “Don’t cry.
‘That’s enough. Get a move on, now,’ ordered the leader. At the door, Heinz turned and strode back, took me in his arms again and kissed me. ‘Cry then,’ he said. ‘there’s enough to cry about.’9
In December 1937, Neumann was removed from the Lubyanka, and he was evidently sentenced about then, since the order confiscating his goods was handed to his wife in January 1938.10 He seems to have been transferred to the Butyrka in the summer of 1938 and still not to have signed any confession.11 His wife had by then been sentenced to five years as a socially dangerous element.
Three other members of the German Politburo disappeared at about the same time: Hermann Remmele, Fritz Schulte, and Hermann Schubert—the last arrested in July.12 Schubert was denounced by an Austrian woman Communist for having mentioned Lenin’s 1917 deal with the Germans in connection with Trotsky’s alleged relations with the Nazis. Togliatti then managed the attack on him.13 Other prominent German victims included Hans Kippenberger, head of the Party’s military apparatus; Leo Flieg, the organizational secretary of its Central Committee; and Heinrich Susskind and Werner Hirsch, editors-in-chief of
The veteran Hugo Eberlein had been the only genuine delegate at the conference at which the Comintern was founded. The “delegates” allegedly representing foreign countries were mostly just foreigners in the Soviet service; for example, Unshlikht represented Poland. Eberlein had instructions from Rosa Luxemburg to oppose the formation of the new International and did so firmly (though abstaining in the final vote).
His arrest was now reported in a Swiss paper, and he gave a press conference denying it, only to be arrested the next day. He is reported as being brutally interrogated while he was suffering from asthmatic attacks in the Lefortovo prison, and to have been sentenced to twenty-five years.16 When with a group of prisoners being moved from Kotlas to Archangel, he was too ill to travel and was shot.17
