Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 11

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One evening, toward the end of June, Albert Walter requested me to meet him at ten in the Café Rheingold in St. Pauli, amusement district of Hamburg.

“It has to do with a strictly conspirative matter,” he warned me. “I know you can be trusted.”

At the Rheingold, over a glass of Niersteiner, Walter introduced me to a man called Hugo, an inconspicuous young man with a sharp nose, steady eyes and somewhat oblique manner. He wanted exact information about the number of reliable communists aboard Hamburg-America Line steamers on the North Atlantic run. I told him that the Party had strong positions on four of these ships; one of them, the Westphalia, was due to leave in a few days. Hugo was pleased. He confided that three comrades whose lives were endangered had to be smuggled to America aboard the Westphalia.

Hugo’s full name, I later learned, was Hugo Marx. He was the resident agent of the G.P.U. in Hamburg. Next morning he took me to the apartment where the three fugitive comrades were hidden. They were mere boys, and two of them were rather drunk. All of them were overjoyed when they heard that a way had been found to ship them to New York.

After Hugo departed, they began to talk. It was with amazement that I learned that they had been the leaders of one of the holdup gangs which the underground section of the Party—the Apparat—had organized to carry out payroll robberies, a practice originated in Tsarist Russia by Joseph Stalin to fill empty Party coffers. At the head of a band of fifteen communists they had held up and robbed the payroll of the municipal gas works of Berlin-Charlottenburg in January, 1923, and a few weeks later they had seized another payroll in a factory at Berlin-Spandau. Their technique was simple. Masked and armed with revolvers, they had invaded the respective offices with the words: “In the name of the revolution—hands up!” Their loot they delivered to the military section of the Party in Berlin. Then one of their gang had broken down, and would not carry on. Threatened with death by his comrades, he turned informer for the Berlin police.

“Why don’t you go to Russia?” I demanded.

The three knew no answer. “Hugo said we must go to America,” one of them blurted out.

“Why don’t they go to Russia?” I asked Hugo Marx at our next meeting.

“They are known to the police,” the G.P.U. agent replied. “We cannot incriminate the Soviet Government.”

There may have been other reasons for sending the fugitives to New York. It is not customary to ask questions regarding internal Party matters. A night later I had three of our militants from the Westphalia come ashore. Each of them received twenty-five dollars from Hugo Marx for smuggling the three youngsters aboard their ship, and to supply them with food during the voyage. Hugo sent a courier with a supply of women’s clothing. Disguised as girls and escorted by the seamen, the three fugitives boarded the ship at night and were safely hidden in a space formed by large crates in hold number one. They reached New York harbor undetected, were duly smuggled ashore, and disappeared. Their names were Emil Bergeman, Paul Gorisch, and Paul Eyck.

There is an epilogue to the Odyssey of these youths. Abandoned by the Party, they eventually returned to Germany after long and aimless wanderings. Captured by the police and brought to trial years later, each was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. The Party did not even organize a campaign in their defense.

Less than a week after the hapless brigands had clandestinely left Germany, Hugo Marx requested me to release a number of my best men on Hamburg-America Line ships from all official Party work. I flatly refused. The men he wanted to have at his disposal were the backbone of our organizational network on the North Atlantic. Hugo Marx did not quarrel with me; he quietly went to Party headquarters and complained about my stubbornness. A few hours later a messenger from headquarters summoned me into the presence of Ernst Thaelmann, then the Party chief in Hamburg. Thaelmann had been a transport worker in his youth. He was a burly, thick-faced man, blunt of manner, and a victim of the habit of pounding table-tops with his sledge-hammer fists. Rudely, he asked me if I knew the meaning of the word sabotage.

“Yes,” I said timidly, overawed by the nearness of one of the strongest figures in the German Communist Party.

“What you do looks to me like sabotage,” he growled. “Why do you refuse to co-operate with Comrade Hugo?”

The outcome of it was that I promised to follow all of Hugo’s directions. I did not know the power wielded by the G.P.U. in Party affairs; I had not yet realized that the G.P.U. was completely in charge of the Apparat—vital subterranean section of the Party machine; and that it safe-guarded itself by the crude and effective method of intimidating even its most lowly assistants.

When I stepped out of Thaelmann’s office, I found Hugo Marx waiting for me. He gave me a thin smile. We boarded a taxi and rode to the Dammtor Station. At a corner table, we joined a swarthy, middle-aged, elegantly dressed man. He gave his name as Meyer. With gnashing teeth I surrendered to him and Hugo Marx a list of about thirty communist seamen in the North and South American trade. “Meyer” busily made notes. He looked more like a Levantine merchant than a German Bolshevik. During the following weeks, in addition to the usual harbor propaganda, Hugo Marx and “Meyer” contacted me each time a German vessel had returned to Hamburg from New York or Buenos Aires. I was instructed to escort individually the selected communists among their crews to a basement beer hall on the water-front where they were interviewed by “Meyer.” I was not permitted to be present at these interviews. Invariably I received next day a brief note and a ten-dollar bill; the note ordered me to shun in future all contacts with the respective seamen.

For many months the nature of “Meyer’s” schemes remained a deep mystery as far as I was concerned. Most of the sailors who had been transferred to the G.P.U. organization were older Party members than I. They kept their secret well. Only some years later, in 1926, after I had myself advanced into the inner circles of the Apparat, did Hugo Marx solve the mystery for me. The communist seamen whom I had surrendered to “Meyer” were employed in a large scale man-smuggling enterprise created by the Party and the G.P.U. to acquire funds for the purchase of arms and ammunition from Belgium. Prospective emigrants from Germany and the East European countries had been lured to Hamburg by promises of cheap transportation to the United States and the Argentine, with no questions asked. “Meyer” had established several boarding houses in Hamburg where the emigrants were fed and housed for one dollar a day while waiting for a suitable ship. Three officials of the Hamburg-America Line had been bribed by “Meyer” to sign up the emigrants as regular members of the crews of outgoing ships. The communists aboard these ships then assisted the illicit immigrants to desert their ships in New York or Buenos Aires. The fee exacted from each of the voyagers ranged from fifty to a hundred dollars. They made the crossing as pot-washers, kitchen helpers, coal-heavers or ordinary seamen until an investigation started by an officer aboard the Cap Polonio—one of the largest German passenger liners—threatened a scandal. In November, 1923, this traffic in human contraband was stopped by an order from Moscow. “Meyer,” whose real name was John Bornos, attempted to carry on the smuggling business for his private profit. The G.P.U. ordered him to pack up and go to the Soviet Union. Bornos-Meyer refused. He was then denounced to the German police. He and ten of his collaborators were seized and sent to jail.

The Party ordered me to take a sailor’s berth aboard the steamer Fredenhagen, a Baltic tramp trading between Bremen, Hamburg and the ports of Finland. Before this ship left port, I was summoned to Party headquarters. With me were several of my shipmates. Similar calls were sent to groups of communists from other ships.

In a dingy little office on a top floor we found a sleek communist from Berlin, a hard-headed ex-marine engineer and trusted lieutenant of Albert Walter, and the inevitable Hugo Marx. We crowded into the office until we stood packed together like herrings in a barrel. The ex-engineer opened the session with a resounding grunt.

“For a while you boys will become rum-runners,” he announced.

I thought at first that he was joking. He explained that much money could be made in smuggling hard drinks to countries where liquor was banned, and that the Party was at financial ebb tide and therefore in need of all the money that could be raked together. One responsible comrade was appointed for each ship. I became the leader of the Fredenhagen unit. Our assignment was to buy large quantities of rum, whisky and cognac free of duty in the free-port zone, and to sell this contraband in the ports of Finland. The selling was to be accomplished through specially created agencies in Helsinki and other ports. Among the ships represented at this conference were, besides the Fredenhagen, the steamers Pleskow, Amisia, Fortuna, Bolheim, several ships in the Swedish ore trade, and others which were in the North Atlantic service. We were in high spirits; the adventurous flavor of our assignment made us forget that we were actually strike-breakers. The ex-engineer unwrapped a shoe box filled with million mark bills, and Hugo Marx carefully noted down the amounts allotted to each ship.

I chose to believe that the money we raised by serving the Party as alcohol smugglers would be used for the purchase of arms and ammunition. Already it was an open secret in our midst that Soviet officers had been sent from Moscow to act as technical advisers, and that military preparations for the expected armed rising were well under way.

Through a ship-chandler’s runner who was a Party member I bought eight hundred bottles of assorted liquors. To do this a customs certificate was necessary. I obtained a certificate for eight bottles of cognac. At Party headquarters this certificate was forged by Hugo Marx who added two zeros to the eight. The contraband was brought aboard at night. For hours we were busy burying the eight hundred bottles in the bunkers under tons of coal.

Four days later our ship entered the harbor of Helsinki. From there the Fredenhagen proceeded to Viborg and Kotka, other ports on the south coast of Finland. In each of these ports, as soon as the steamer had come to a rest, a dozen Finnish customs officials came aboard to search the ship. The customs law, however, permitted each member of the crew to have one bottle of hard drink for personal use in his cabin. So, as the Finnish customs men crawled through every corner of the ship—but never taking the trouble to dig up the coal in the bunkers—they were offered a gratuitous drink in each cabin they entered. They were not averse to drink. By the time they had finished ransacking the ship for contraband, most of them were well loaded with spirits. When they departed, they left behind a routine guard or two.

Invariably, during the night the two customs guards were lured to a carousal below decks by communist seamen appointed to this duty. Then I went ashore to the address given me by the sleek communist from Berlin. I found a small office in a conservative building in Helsinki near the Park where military bands give concerts during the summer months. The sign on the door read: “Koskinen & Niminen.” This firm was in reality a Finnish Comintern organization camouflaged as a restaurant supply firm. Ironically the words “Export—Import” had been added to the sign.

A husky young woman sat in the office. She spoke Swedish.

I gave her the watchword: “The pneumonia medicines are here.”

“That’s good,” she said. “What ship? How many?”

“Ship Fredenhagen; eight hundred bottles,” I answered.

She telephoned. After a while she informed me, “Return to your ship, comrade. Friend Koskinen is mobilizing the customers. They’ll be streaming in on you all night.”

I went back aboard. Two hours later our “customers” arrived, whole swarms of them at a time. Men and women, thirsty stevedores and well-to-do citizens, waiters, bell-boys, chambermaids, prostitutes and others of more opulent aspect. They paid from sixty to a hundred Finmarks for each bottle. A Finmark had gold value. Having bought the liquor with German paper money, our profits exceeded 3,000 per cent. Each bottle brought more than thirty times its original price. While the customs men amused themselves below with drink and enterprising water-front wenches, the Party unit did a thriving business. By daybreak approximately six hundred bottles had been sold. The proceeds, I calculated, were the equivalent of three machine guns at Belgian wholesale prices. The rest of our stock we sold in Viborg and Kotka, where branch offices of “Koskinen & Niminen” had been established.

This smuggling business in behalf of the Party was not always transacted without friction. Non-communist members of the Fredenhagen’s crew had formed their own private smuggling-rings. Even the captain, the mates, the engineers—all dealt in contraband because the wages they earned would not even pay the rent for their homes after the voyage was completed.

The rival syndicates aboard were in fierce competition with one another. They began by going into the bunkers at night and dumping all the coal they could shovel atop of our stores so that we were unable to reach them when the customers came. We answered by digging up the bottles of our competitors, emptying them of their contents and filling them with water or tea. More than one sturdy Finlander came raging aboard, as often as not with a dagger in his hands, after he had discovered that what he had bought as rum turned out to be cold tea. In the end, the communist group prevailed. Out at sea, at night, we destroyed or heaved overboard the remaining contraband of our rivals, and put guards armed with crowbars over our own.

We left Finnish waters without serious mishap, homeward bound. An emissary of the Party awaited me on the locks as the Fredenhagen passed into the Kiel Canal. I handed our smuggling profits to the Party courier.

My ship went to Bremen. Before she left on her next voyage, I had aboard, again through Party funds, almost two thousand bottles of three-star cognac for “Koskinen & Niminen.” Each round trip to Finland lasted three weeks. Each trip the volume of our contraband increased. On the third trip not only the bunkers, but also the life-boats, the bilges, the fore peak and even the spare water tanks were crammed with bottles, all carefully wrapped in burlap. The success of our previous enterprises had made our chiefs cast prudence to the winds.

The Central Committee of the small illegal Communist Party of Finland under Nillo Virtanen mobilized the larger part of its organization in Helsinki to take this record consignment off the Fredenhagen. About a hundred men and women boarded the steamer, and left it with bottles packed into sacks or strapped around their waists. Three such expeditions were made in the course of a single night. In the early hours of the morning, the leader of the Finn transport column asked me:

“How many bottles have you got left?”

“Plenty,” I said. “Better have them off the ship by daybreak.”

I realized that the “unloading” had been so conspicuous that it would endanger us to keep the rest of our contraband aboard for another day. The harbor seemed suddenly well-manned with customs men.

The Finn growled in disgust: “Whoever heard of financing a revolution by selling booze!”

I explained that the German Communist Party, by using dozens of ships, had made a good fortune out of such smuggling enterprises. It meant rifles and hand-grenades for quite a number of proletarian companies. And doubtless, I hinted, the Communist Party of Finland was making a fair profit as well.

The Finn agreed. He sent a boy to reconnoiter the location of customs patrols on nearby docks, then armed five local communists with five bottles each, and told them to run athwart of the customs officials to detract their attention from what was going on aboard the Fredenhagen.

The five did their job well. We heard them run, the customs men in pursuit. There came the sound of bottles being splintered on the cobbles. Meanwhile, the Helsinki comrades emerged from freight sheds and with the aid of every communist in the Fredenhagen’s crew managed to get the remaining bottles ashore. I went to the office of “Koskinen & Niminen” to wait for the money which belonged to the German Party.

I waited fully nine hours. The Fredenhagen steamed for Viborg—without me. In the afternoon a Finn came barging into the office, spitting and cursing.

“Where’s my money?” I demanded.

“Money, hell!” he ranted. “Do you know what your precious master Bolsheviks are responsible for? I’ll tell you! The whole Communist Party of Helsinki is stone-drunk.”

This was not what I had expected. I told the Finnish comrade that the cognac had been the property of the Communist Party of Germany, and, therefore, the property of the Comintern. Moscow would not like it.

Most Finns are of a type that is hard to rouse, but when their tempers burst into open flame things are apt to burst asunder. I feared this Finn would go berserk. “Satana,” he said with a ferocious twist of his lips. “I have no money. Get out of here.” This was followed by a cataract of Finnish of which I did not understand a word. And then: “I regret you’re so husky. I’d lynch you—you merchant!”

I fled. From opposite doorways I watched the entrance of the house in which the office of “Koskinen & Niminen” was located. At nightfall Koskinen himself entered the building. I ran across the street and stopped him on the stairway. He was a portly, mild-mannered man whose whole body winced when I grasped his shoulder from behind.

He said nervously, “Why do you bother me?”

“At least give me enough money to take a train to Viborg,” I demanded.

He handed me a hundred Finmark note. “We are dissolving our firm,” he said. “There have been some arrests. You must notify our friends in Hamburg. They must never, never forget that Finland is a fascist country.”

I raced to the station, cursing my own carelessness and the monumental thirst of the Finns. I boarded the east-bound train and arrived in Viborg in time to catch my steamer, the Fredenhagen. After four days I was discharged in Bremen. No reasons for my discharge were given. I hastened to Hamburg to report to Walter and Hugo Marx. They had already a complete report of what had occurred at Helsinki. News of the fiasco had left them unperturbed.

In September the Party began to organize its able-bodied members into military companies of one hundred men each—Hundertschaften. There were eleven such companies in Hamburg, and several hundred of them in all the Reich. Each formation consisted of five detachments of twenty men. Each Sunday the hundreds marched out for military training in lonely stretches of forest or heath. Young Soviet Russian officers, most of whom spoke German, directed the training. Five or six such officers operated in the Hamburg area. They had come to Germany in the guise of sailors aboard Soviet vessels, and “activists” from Albert Walter’s corps had smuggled them ashore at night. Under assumed names, using false German passports, they had their quarters in the homes of Party members. Their chief in Hamburg was a short, gruff, square-headed Russian who called himself Otto Marquardt, nominally an official of the Soviet Trade Mission in Hamburg.

I was detailed to the seventh proletarian company of the Hamburg area. This formation, chiefly composed of seamen, proudly called itself the “Red Marines,” and Thaelmann considered it one of the best shock-brigades along the North Sea Coast. In the intervals between week-end maneuvers in the heath south-west of Hamburg, I was singled out for service in the courier corps of the Hamburg organization. At first I thought this service rather dull, because it was simply a matter of relaying messages between the known leaders and their Russian military advisers, men like Otto Marquardt, who took good care not to be seen in the company of German communists well known to the police. But the weekly trips to Kiel, Luebeck, Cuxhaven and Bremen, and two journeys to Berlin, gave me an insight into the doings of an underground élite whose existence I had barely suspected.

Outstanding in this political underworld was the figure of Johnny Dettmer, whose reckless daring could well measure up with that of the pirate heroes of my boyhood. Dettmer was a blond, blue-eyed giant of twenty-four, quick-tempered, clever, and with the strength and agility of a panther. He was one of those honest political desperadoes who are invaluable fighters in riot and upheaval, but who invariably come to grief once orderly conditions have been established. It was Ernst Wollweber, one of the Comintern chieftains, who remarked to me in later years of Comrade Dettmer, “We need men like Johnny to win the fracas, but after the revolution we’ve got to shoot them.”

In the early fall of 1923, Johnny Dettmer was a gun runner for the Red Hundreds of northern Germany. Otto Marquardt and an unnamed superior of Hugo Marx sent him to Kolberg, a small town on the Baltic between Stettin and Danzig. There, in a tavern, he met a youthful Soviet officer and a German communist named Lukowitz. I came to know Lukowitz well. He was a grizzled, slow-moving man, a former tug-boat captain who later became one of the Party chiefs in the Luebeck district. Scattered in third-rate hotels in Kolberg were about a dozen other communists of Dettmer’s caliber. All of them had had seafaring experience. Lukowitz sometimes took them out to sea in three motor launches which had been purchased by the Comintern—seemingly to no purpose at all. The three launches—Liese, Anita, and Sturmvogel—were staunch old boats, built of oak, thirty-six to forty feet in length, fitted with old gasoline motors and capable of making seven knots in friendly weather. (I saw the boats in 1930. Reconditioned, they were then used by the Comintern bureau in Danzig for the smuggling of communist literature to Poland, where the Party was illegal, by way of the lower Vistula and the port of Gdynia.)

Johnny Dettmer and his comrades loafed in Kolberg for a week, justifying their presence by appearing to be interested in the purchase of a boat. Then a courier from Berlin brought a message for the Soviet agent in Kolberg. The Russian summoned Lukowitz. Lukowitz rounded up his waiting crew and between them they manned the three launches, knowing that at last something was afoot.

They left the Kolberg fish pier at daybreak, keeping a steady north-north-west course. Dettmer was aboard the Anita, Lukowitz on the Sturmvogel. Offshore they spread out so as not to attract the attention of passing craft.

It is fifty-five miles from Kolberg to the southern tip of Bornholm. With the high shores of the island in sight, they cut their motors, brought sea-anchors out and drifted, a lookout man on duty on each boat.

They waited until eleven at night, watching the lights of passing westbound steamers. At eleven a steamer which had crawled up slowly from the east flashed a signal after it had reached a spot five miles south of the southern extreme of the island. The signal was the letter L—dot-dash-dot-dot, repeated at intervals until Lukowitz answered with similar flashes. Then the steamer turned south and the launches followed until they were out of sight of Bornholm.

The steamer was a small tramp-ship. It showed no flag, but all knew that it was a Soviet vessel. As the launches approached, sailors lowered a grating covered with canvas to screen the steamer’s name. The launches made fast alongside, and Lukowitz spoke a few words with a man who leaned over the steamer’s rail. Heavy bundles tied up in pieces of tarpaulin were lowered into the launches. Each bundle contained ten obsolete rifles which had once belonged to the Tsarist army. Then came small barrels full of cartridges buried in flour. Three hundred rifles were trans-shipped in less than an hour, and after a curt salute the launches drew away from the steamer’s side. The launches waited until the Soviet ship had disappeared in the night, heading toward the Kiel Canal and a legitimate port of call.

Lukowitz instructed his crews: “Should the coast patrol stop us—over the side with the stuff.”

All next day they drifted, pretending to fish. In the following night the launches ran shoreward. They landed their contraband at a point between Kolberg and a fishing village called Deep. There was a cluster of huts and a shallow channel running a little distance inshore. A truck was waiting beside a heap of rotting fish. They loaded the arms and ammunition into the truck, and covered the whole with rotting fish. The truck, manned by two taciturn youngsters, departed as soon as it had been loaded, heading toward the highway of Stettin.

Johnny told me this story in Low German, his native tongue, which he was in the habit of using. Low German has a tough and earthy flavor, and nuances of rollicking disrespect impossible to translate. As it is, Johnny is beyond bearing me a grudge for doing insufficient honor to his beloved water-side dialect, for, in 1934, his head came off under the Nazi ax.