For lesser figures any excuse served, as with Soviet citizens. One German Communist was arrested for saying that the only Nazi with principles was Goebbels. This was construed as “counter-revolutionary agitation.”18 Another was accused of “counter-revolutionary agitation against the Soviet State” on the grounds (in any case false) of having belonged to the opposition within the
Several of the arrested were Jews. This did not save them from charges of fascist espionage, any more than it had Yakir. An interrogator is quoted as saying, “The Jewish refugees are Hitler’s agents abroad.”21 The German occupation of Czechoslovakia resulted in Czechs, too, being regarded as German agents. One Czech is reported as having had to confess that he became a German agent early in the First World War, at a time when neither Czechoslovakia nor the Soviet Union existed.22
Willi Miinzenberg, the German Communist Party’s propaganda genius, was summoned to Moscow to share the fate of Flieg, who had been arrested as he stepped off the train on arrival from Paris (as is also reported of Eberlein; one or the other was evidently the leading German Communist who was brought in, in precisely these circumstances, to Ivanov-Razumnik’s cell in the Butyrka, in his neat Western suit—horrified to learn from those present that he was, of course, a Nazi spy)23 Miinzenberg refused to go and was expelled from the Party in 1938. He was in France and was interned at the outbreak of war in the following year. When the refugee camps were opened by the French in view of the Nazi advance in 1940, Miinzenberg struck for the Swiss border with another inmate. A few days later, his body was found in a forest near Grenoble, hanging from a tree. His face was battered, and reports make it clear that suicide is unlikely.24
After the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in 1939, about 570 German Communists were assembled in the Moscow prisons.25 A number of them were sentenced by the Russians, but the majority were told that they had been judged by a Special Commission of the NKVD and expelled as undesirable aliens. These German Communists, who included Jews and men especially wanted by the Nazis for armed resistance to them during the street fights of the early 1930s, were hustled over the bridge to German-occupied Poland at Brest-Litovsk, while NKVD men checked the lists with Gestapo men. They included the widow of Erik Miihsam, the poet, and the composer Hans David, a Jew eventually gassed by the Gestapo in the Maidanek concentration camp.fn1 The actress Carola Neher, who was originally on the list, disappeared in Russia instead.26 She was sentenced to ten years but is believed, according to a recent Soviet article, to have been shot in Orel in 1941. Her son had been taken from her, and only found out his parents’ names in the late 1960s.27
The son of Ernst Torgler, the main German defendant at the Leipzig Trial, who had been Communist leader in the Reichstag, was then about thirteen. He appeared at protest meetings in the West and eventually went to Russia. There he got a long sentence as a German spy. He was reported at a camp in the Komi area in the far north, where he had the job of disposing of bodies. He had by this time become completely assimilated into the young criminal element. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he too was handed over to the Gestapo with the other German Communists28
The Hungarian losses were also heavy. They included Béla Kun, leader of the 1919 Communist Revolution in Hungary, himself. His conduct of the Terror in Budapest preceded even worse actions when, on fleeing to Moscow, he was put in charge of the newly conquered Crimea, and was censured and withdrawn by Lenin for his excessive cruelties. He then operated in the Comintern, and had been partly responsible for the Communist fiasco in Germany in 1921. He has been described as “the incarnation of intellectual inadequacy, uncertainty of will, and authoritarian corruption.”29
