Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 13

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I entered upon my duties as a courier for the underground organization of the Party at the end of September. My first trip was from Hamburg to Berlin. I was instructed to deliver a sealed letter to an address at 104 Moeckernstrasse. There, in a cozy apartment, I was received by a voluptuous-looking olive-skinned young woman. I recognized that she was Russian from the way she spoke German. Her name, I learned subsequently, was Maria Schipora. But the message which I carried from Otto Marquardt was not for her. It was for Hugo Eberlein, a member of the Central Committee of the Party, who was then in charge of communist contacts in the German army and navy.

Maria Schipora served me benedictine while I waited for Eberlein. She kept on urging me to drink. After three or four drinks, I began to fear that this Russian woman might be a spy for the police. I rose and said brusquely: “I do not like this. Who are you? What’s your business?”

She leaned forward over the table and laughed.

“You came to meet Comrade Eberlein?” she asked.

“Yes”

“Who sent you?”

I refused to answer.

“I know Marquardt well,” she said. “We’ve worked together for years.”

I realized then that Maria Schipora was on the payroll of the G.P.U. We quickly became friends. I harbored admiration for communists engaged in international work. She spoke simply. And she was swift and avid. Her lips were full and red. She grasped my hair and kissed me.

“Comrade Eberlein always comes late,” she said.

Eberlein did not come that day. Instead a tall, gloomy ascetic-looking man, in his early thirties, arrived, and I handed the Hamburg letter to him. The stranger immediately began plying me with questions about the excellent intelligence service which the North German Lloyd, the Hamburg-America Line and other shipping companies had established in the fringes of communist water-front organizations. I gave him what little information I had. When the woman, who listened attentively, mentioned the caller’s name, Felix Neumann, I was electrified. When the functionaries of the Red Hundreds spoke of Neumann, it was in whispers. He was the head of a new organization of T-units, terror groups, the skeleton staff of a future German Tcheka. He told me to stay in Berlin until the next day because he wanted me to take to Otto Marquardt some material which would not be ready before morning. He then asked me about my Party work. I told him that I preferred assignments which called for more action than shuttling between towns as a courier.

“Did you ever kill a man?” Neumann asked abruptly.

“No,” I said.

“Well, then, how would you do it?”

“I’d shoot him.”

Neumann grinned gloomily. “Wrong,” he said. “If you shoot at a man and only wound him, what then? He’ll go to the hospital and tell the police all about it, is that right?”

Maria Schipora interjected: “Usually a man is shot at night. At night it’s dark. In the dark one can’t see.”

“Besides, shooting makes noise,” added Neumann.

“How would you do it?” I asked.

“Always make sure that he’s dead,” Neumann explained with characteristic cold-bloodedness. “The safest way is to make him unconscious by blows on the head, then to cut his veins with a razor. If you do that, you’re sure he’ll be dead.”

I did not know what to make of it. Was he in earnest? Did he merely want to test my nerves? Was he joking? At that time I did not know the answer. It came to me in fragments, piece by piece, wiping away the doubts. Felix Neumann had spoken in dead earnest.

I spent the night at the Moeckernstrasse apartment. Maria Schipora made a simple supper and, while we ate, we talked about the political mood of the workers and about the strategy of street-fighting. Maria told of an interview she had had with a Kremlin agent, a Tartar by origin, who called himself August Kleine, but whom Brandler, the German Party chief, had nicknamed “the man from Turkestan.” Felix Neumann told of an arms buyer for the Party named Grenz who had skipped with $5,000 he had received from the Soviet embassy. They then talked of the tasks of the T-units to keep the Party clean from spies, and of murder.

Late at night five other people arrived, two girls and three men, among whom was a powerful six-footer with slightly Jewish features, Edgar Andree. I took an instinctive liking to him from the beginning. We became staunch friends, and the friendship lasted until he, too, died at the hands of Hitler’s headsmen. The two girls were Eva and Lu, both members of the T-units. Eva—small, dark, catlike, was Neumann’s mistress. Lu, whose name was Luise Schneller, was angular and hard-boiled; she related that Ruth Fischer, a Party leader, had approached her with the request that a T-unit should give her colleague and rival, the “fat Brandler,” a terrific beating. Ruth Fischer had even supplied Lu with the addresses of Brandler’s secret meeting places. For me this was the first intimation of the existence of fierce jealousy and rivalry among leaders whose word was law for the rank and file.

Long after midnight the talk shifted to the strategy of the coming insurrection, which was to begin with a rising in the provinces and end with a march on Berlin. Partisan corps were being organized all around the capital, a task which lay in the hands of Edgar Andree and his aides. The two of his aides who were present, Gromulat and Bozenhard, looked capable enough; their idea was to emulate on a large scale the exploits of Max Hoelz, the communist Robin Hood of 1921, who since then had been condemned to prison for life. The hours slipped by, and the men and the girls talked and talked as only communists of that wild and irresponsible period could talk when they were among themselves. They were as preoccupied with their own importance and their revolutionary tasks as children are with new and engrossing toys. I listened as if under a spell. After all, compared with the tight-lipped conspirators of a later decade, we were like children partaking of a heady wine.

Finally, halfway between midnight and dawn, Felix Neumann rose and said dramatically: “Children, I want to sleep.”

The apartment of Maria Schipora seemed to be a camping place for a great number of functionaries passing through Berlin on illegal missions. Each of those present drew blankets from a stack in a closet. Felix Neumann and Eva had a room of their own. So had Maria. The rest slept on couches and on the rug.

Quite openly Maria said to me: “We two sleep together.”

I was a bit embarrassed by Edgar Andree’s quizzical glance and by his remark, “Maria, can’t you get enough Reichswehr officers to keep you content?”

“Bah,” Maria snapped, adding in a soft voice: “Comrade Edgar, there is nothing better than good, clean youth.”

Turning to me, she said half-angrily, “Don’t mind these old troopers. Don’t you think there is a reason for my letting you stay here?”

Felix Neumann woke me at eight. He had already been outside to telephone. Andree and his assistants had departed, and Eva and Lu were making ready to leave.

In the morning light Neumann’s hollow face was gray. “Snatch your coffee in a restaurant,” he said crisply. “A friend wants to see you.”

We rode in a taxi to a little hotel in Neukoelln. In a dingy front room of the hotel a man clad in pajamas rose from the bed when we entered. Scattered on the bed and the floor were the morning newspapers.

“This is the comrade from Hamburg,” Neumann said.

Dark, strong eyes sized me up. The man in pajamas was about thirty-three years old; his body was strong and lithe, his fair hair tousled, and his sharply-cut face had an expression of unsmiling, wide-awake determination. He looked like a Russian or a Lett. He asked me how our units in Hamburg were armed, how the training progressed, and if the rank and file had confidence in their leadership. He made short-hand notes of the things I told him, and observed that he thought it necessary at times to inform himself of the opinions of the comrades at the bottom. He then instructed me to take two parcels to Hamburg, one for Otto Marquardt, the other for a young lady named Anja Daul. Both packages would be handed to me at the station before I boarded the Hamburg express.

“Do you need money?” he asked me suddenly.

“No,” I answered, though I was nearly penniless.

“We might need you,” the man said quietly.

Neumann and I were bidden to wait in the room until the other had dressed and departed. When he had gone, I asked Neumann why we had not been allowed to leave first.

“A precaution,” Neumann replied. “This is an important comrade. He never sleeps twice in the same place.”

“Who is he?”

“General Wolf. Did you ever hear of the Kronstadt rising against the Bolsheviki? Well, General Wolf is the man who crushed it.”

Maria Schipora saw me off at the station. She brought the two packages. They were rather bulky bundles, but light for their size.

“Now what’s that?” I gasped.

“Soiled towels,” she laughed, her liquid eyes twinkling. “Have them washed and send them back.”

Each bundle of towels contained a sealed parcel of cigar-box size. I do not know what the boxes contained. One I delivered to Otto Marquardt, the other to Anja Daul who lived with her sister in a two-room place on a short street called Venusberg. Both Daul girls were smartly dressed, young, blonde, uncommunicative, and both wore short bobs. Also, both were Russian, and members of the Hamburg T-units. Both were caught and sent to prison in 1925.

The situation in Hamburg was tense. Two police officers had been murdered, and Ernst Thaelmann had sought cover by going underground. Each day the Party organized the plundering of food stores and raids on transports carrying food. These plunderings were mass affairs, provoked to test the militancy of the mass of unorganized workers.

After a few days of minor activities with the Red Marines, I was again sent to Berlin to deliver a slender envelope to the man I had come to know as General Wolf. The letter was glued to the skin of my back by Marquardt’s elephantine secretary, a good-natured but efficient girl known as Fat Grete. She was working in the office of the Soviet Trade Mission, and was destined to become one of the most trusted female veterans in the movement.

Maria Schipora, lissome, bright-eyed and elegantly dressed, met me at the station in Berlin. In a cab we rode to the Melanchthon Strasse, got out and walked to a restaurant where Maria told me to wait. After a short while, she returned with a sedate young man who introduced himself as Karl. Karl escorted me to another restaurant several blocks away, and in the lavatory he loosened the letter from the skin of my back. At a table near the door General Wolf and a soft, pale-faced man were having coffee. I sat down at the table and slipped the letter to General Wolf. He pocketed it without reading.

“Neumann will see you soon in Hamburg,” General Wolf said.

Immediately he and the pale-faced man left. As before, I was told to wait. For a full half-hour Karl and I sat at the table, staring at each other without a word. The mysterious comings and goings of General Wolf and his friends intrigued me considerably. His pale-faced companion I later recognized as Fritz Heckert who, in 1923, directed the Comintern courier system between Berlin and Moscow; a communist of international importance and a Reichstag member for many years, he perished in Moscow, during the great purge.

Maria Schipora was waiting for me in the street. She had, it seemed, much money to spend. For some time we rode about Berlin in a cab, then had dinner in Café Bauer, and after dark she invited me to her apartment. Again she treated me to benedictine, and was violently amorous, whispering now and then how sweet and easy life could be if one only had money. At first I was puzzled by her behavior, and then I began to develop a strong distrust of her. “What’s her game?” I asked myself.

“You act like a bourgeois,” I told her. She laughed lazily. “Wouldn’t you? It’s nice to make money.” She went on: “All this political nonsense makes me sick! It’s hopeless, anyway. Should someone come to you and say: ‘Here are a thousand goldmarks if you do me a little favor,’—would you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Oh, sell interesting items to some people.”

“Which people?”

She drew up her knees and clasped her arms around them.

“Hugo Stinnes, for example,” she drawled. “Or General von Seeckt. Why not?”

For a moment I was stupefied. I pushed her away and made a grab for my hat and coat. Hugo Stinnes, the industrialist, owned half of Germany’s mines, ships, factories. Von Seeckt was the creator and commander of the Reichswehr, the real power behind the government of the Republic. Maria Schipora had turned her back. She was observing me in a mirror. She gave a giddy little laugh.

“Please stay,” she said. “I was joking.”

I took the first train to Hamburg, and was naive enough to rush to Party headquarters to contact Hugo Marx. The ground burned under my feet. Something had to be done with Maria Schipora. I found Hugo Marx, and reported my discovery of a traitor in the party Apparat.

Hugo Marx grinned. “That’s all right,” he said.

Nothing happened. Maria Schipora was no spy. She had tested me, in her own way, under orders from Felix Neumann.

During the following days Felix Neumann was in Hamburg. I met him in the home of Erika Zcympanski which had become for me a refuge for rare free hours. She had given me a duplicate key to her apartment. I was free to use her books and to eat anything I found in her larder. As soon as I came, Neumann motioned her to leave. When we were alone, he showed me a mimeographed circular letter. The headline read: “Kill spies and provocateurs.”

“Do you agree with that?” he demanded.

Without hesitation I said, “Of course.”

“We are going to use you for special work,” he said. He drew a sheet of note-paper from his pocket and put it on the table. Then he handed me a pencil. “Sign this.”

Typewritten on the paper was the following text:

“I herewith admit my participation in the robbery on the bookmaking establishment in Bremen, Bahnhofstrasse.”

Neumann noted my surprise.

“A formality,” he said.

“But I don’t even know of such a robbery,” I protested.

“Just the same, anyone who’s active in the T-units must sign such a declaration. As I said—a formality. We must be sure of our men. Sign.” He fairly rapped it out.

I thought Felix Neumann was mad. I saw no sense in this transaction. I refused to sign it.

“Very well,” he said with an air of finality. “We’re through with you. We’ve been mistaken.” His eyes grew dull in his cadaverous face.

I hastened to Albert Walter’s office. He had acquired a four-story building in the Rothesoodstrasse, near the water-front, which now served as headquarters for his harbor brigades. The place buzzed with activity. Men from the docks and the ships were shouldering in and out. I told him of Neumann’s proposition and proposed at the same time that he, Walter, should find a way to relieve me of further courier duties and put me back to work on the water-front where I felt I belonged.

Albert Walter gave his volcanic temperament free rein.

“That Neumann is a bloody jackass,” he raged. “Tell him to go to the devil. Never mind, I’ll tell him.” He went on wishing the plague on “all the little Tchekists in Berlin.” When he calmed down, he wrote a curt note to Otto Marquardt. “Tell that infernal Neumann to leave my men alone,” the note said. Turning to me, Albert Walter concluded, “Take this to Marquardt. He is a sensible man.”

Felix Neumann was quick to denounce Albert Walter for his peremptory refusal to release me for duties in the T-units of General Wolf. But Walter knew well how solid a reputation he enjoyed in the Kremlin. He wrote to Moscow, referring to Felix Neumann as a “lunatic.” And Moscow backed Walter because the burly old sailor was the most capable man it had to lead its campaigns in the harbors and on the ships. I did not know at the time how lucky I was to return to the Red Marines instead of blundering into the fold of Maria Schipora, Felix Neumann and their clique. For the gloomy Neumann, whose thought and talk revolved around murder, was suddenly arrested. To save his own skin, he betrayed the whole officer corps of the T-units—the German Tcheka—into the hands of the Reich police. Some months later General Wolf himself was captured and charged with murder.

General Wolf had been sent to Germany by the Soviet Government to handle the military end of the planned insurrection. He arrived in Berlin bearing a false Norwegian passport. Soon afterwards a wide network of Red Hundreds and T-units came into existence. He maintained three private apartments in Berlin, one in Dresden, one in Hamburg and another one in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin. In Hamburg, he was known as Herrman, in Berlin as Helmuth or General Wolf, in Dresden as Goresoski, in the Soviet army as Gorev, and upon his arrest he gave his name as Peter Alexander Skoblevski, under which he made history, too.

Felix Neumann went to work for Skoblevski as liaison agent between the military high command of the Party and the Soviet legation in Berlin. On one occasion he drew $35,000 in American currency on order from Skoblevski; on another occasion, $50,000 for the account of “the man from Turkestan.” These sums were spent on arms and propaganda.

Felix Neumann was, nevertheless, promoted to the leadership of the T-units. Skoblevski gave Neumann $5,000 to recruit new members for this Apparat, and to put the terrorists to work. The revolutionary committee demanded the assassination of General von Seeckt, head of the Reichswehr, on the eve of the insurrection. This, they hoped, would disorganize the army and lash the revolutionary hopes to a frenzy. None other than Zinoviev himself, the President of the Comintern, wrote in a manifesto, “General von Seeckt is the German Kolchak, the greatest danger for the workers,” while he described Adolf Hitler, who was then preparing his Munich Putsch, as “a ridiculous petit bourgeois.”

Felix Neumann at once put the War Ministry under surveillance to gather information about the movements and habits of von Seeckt. He also telephoned the general’s aide-de-camp, presenting himself as a seller of French military secrets, and asked for a private interview. Neumann’s plan was to have General von Seeckt murdered in his own office. But the head of the Reichswehr refused to fall into this trap.

Meanwhile Skoblevski’s agents had discovered that the general went riding horseback in the Berlin Tiergarten each morning. Felix Neumann bought a quantity of an edition of the Berliner Illustrierte, which contained von Seeckt’s picture. He had the pictures cut out and distributed to the members of the Berlin T-units. For three days in succession the Reichswehr chief was followed during his morning rides by G.P.U. agents on horseback, while other terrorists lurked behind trees along the route. Von Seeckt, however, was accompanied on his rides by a group of Reichswehr officers, all of them armed to the teeth. Finally a seventeen-year-old girl, Anny Gerber, the mistress of one of the Tchekists, was assigned by Felix Neumann to cultivate a love affair with one of General von Seeckt’s orderlies or stable-men. The plan was to hide a Tchekist on the grounds of the general’s official villa, and to shoot him off his horse before his fellow officers could join him. The girl was frightened, and Felix Neumann threatened to have her killed if she did not follow orders. Anny succeeded in finding a lover among the general’s men, but, it seems, she fell in love with him herself. General von Seeckt was warned, and stopped riding. And Skoblevski decreed the assassination of Anny Gerber.

A stormy session between Neumann and Skoblevski followed. Felix Neumann feared that he might be discharged for incompetence. To be discharged meant to be killed. He later admitted before a high court of the German Republic that he had feared for his own life. The G.P.U. never allows those who know too many secrets to retire. The session ended with a command by Skoblevski: “Von Seeckt must die within three days!”

So a last attempt was made in December, 1923. General von Seeckt had gone to Weimar, but when he returned to Berlin, G.P.U. men were waiting for him in the main hall of the Anhalter Bahnhof, among them Felix Neumann himself. All were armed with new Ortgies pistols.

Von Seeckt sensed trouble. He waited in his train until the arrival of the guards he had summoned. Surrounded by officials and station detectives, he swept through the station to the waiting automobile of the War Ministry. After the decisive defeat of the German Communist Party in the following weeks, Karl Radek, through Brandler, ordered that the plans to kill von Seeckt be dropped.

Other prominent personalities whose death warrant Skoblevski had issued were Hugo Stinnes, Germany’s richest man, and Privy Councillor Borsig, the head of the German steel trust. Felix Neumann was put in charge of both undertakings. Tchekists shadowed Stinnes and invaded his residence at the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin. Felix Neumann’s men also closed in on Borsig’s villa in Tegel, a fashionable suburb. A strike of the steel workers was in progress; the Party chiefs hoped that Borsig’s death would raise the strike to a more violent, revolutionary pitch. This time no shooting was to be done. Skoblevski suggested poisoning. From a mysterious source he obtained glass tubes containing typhus and cholera germs. These he entrusted to Felix Neumann. They were to be used in individual murders, and also against army and police officers in case of the outbreak of civil war. Neumann selected a special group from among his agents to procure rabbits and conduct experiments with the germs. Attempts to kill Stinnes and Borsig failed. The steel strike ended in defeat. But the glass tubes were found by the police, and became major exhibits in the Tcheka trial in Leipzig.

Weeks of maneuvering to take the lives of leading figures did not detract the T-Apparat from its chief task,—counter-espionage and the silencing of police spies in the communist organizations. The death-list included a certain Wetzel, head of the communist unit in the textile workers’ union; Police Commissioner Schlotter, in charge of the anti-communist drive in southern Germany, and others. But what proved to be the undoing of Skoblevski and his secret division was the assassination of one Rausch in Berlin. Rausch was a member of the Party and also an undercover agent of the Berlin political police, and in touch with the Hitler movement.

Suspicion first fell on Rausch through the alertness of Hugo Marx in Hamburg. About the middle of October, a motor lorry loaded with rifles and hand-grenades, on its way from Stettin to communist Hundreds of the Weser country in the west, was held up by fascist detachments on the highway between Luebeck and Hamburg. Two of Skoblevski’s German assistants, in charge of the arms consignment, put up a resistance and were killed. The fascists, reputedly former members of the Iron Division and the Free Corps of Captain Ehrhardt, made off with the heavily loaded lorry to haunts on Junker estates in Mecklenburg or Pomerania. Only a spy in Skoblevski’s own Apparat could have betrayed this transport of guns and grenades to the nationalist Feme organizations.

Hugo Marx, assigned to investigate, reported that Rausch might be the informer. “The more a man engaged in conspirative work talks of violence and bloodshed,” Marx observed, “the more likely is he to be in the pay of the police.” Hugo Marx’s suspicions were soon verified. The police raided two communist basement arsenals in Berlin. A bomb factory, also in a Berlin cellar, was likewise raided. Members of the T-units, who returned to Berlin after they had bombed a few government buildings in Hanover, were arrested at the station. These arrests and raids were traced to Rausch by one of Skoblevski’s female counter-spies, and Felix Neumann received instructions to put Rausch out of the way.

Three attempts were made, one with the help of a girl from Maria Schipora’s group, the second in the lavatory of a brothel where Neumann had posted Tchekists armed with razors, and the third in Rausch’s own home. Felix Neumann himself, with the snarl, “Take this, you bastard!” emptied his pistol into Rausch’s groin.

Felix Neumann was too excited to follow the advice he had given me a few weeks earlier. He did not use a razor to slash his victim’s throat. Still alive, Rausch was rushed to the St. Lazarus hospital in Berlin.

The court records in Leipzig have it that Skoblevski, hearing that Rausch was not dead, had blurted out: “That’s not the way. The man must die!”

Rausch died. Felix Neumann fell into the hands of the police. At once the G.P.U. got busy trying to bribe a prison physician to order Neumann’s transfer to an insane asylum, but to no avail. Felix Neumann was broken by the political police. Skoblevski and fourteen other Tchekists were arrested and charged with treason and murder.

Most of the captured terrorists gave way under a year of police pressure. But Skoblevski himself admitted nothing. He maintained stubbornly that he was a Russian student stranded in Germany, that his arrest was a mistake, that he had never set eyes on any of the other men in custody. The trial before the Supreme Court of Leipzig lasted nine weeks. Felix Neumann, Skoblevski and a third G.P.U. man were condemned to death. The others received long terms in prison. Between two court hearings an attempt was made in prison to assassinate Felix Neumann, the traitor. He was struck on the head, but escaped.

Before the Leipzig trial began, a silent drive was inaugurated by Felix Dzerjinsky, founder of the Tcheka and supreme chief of the G.P.U in Soviet Russia, to liberate General Skoblevski. As his tool Dzerjinsky chose the twenty-one-year-old but unscrupulous Heinz Neumann, who was the son of a wealthy Berlin grain dealer. Heinz Neumann, later a member of the Reichstag and one of the most talented agents of the Comintern, acted in 1923 as liaison man between the G.P.U. and the Comintern headquarters in Moscow and the German Communist Party. It is the same Heinz Neumann who was to emerge in later years as a close friend of Stalin and to gain the reputation of the “Butcher of Canton” in the Chinese civil war.

Three young Germans who had come to Moscow in 1923 under the auspices of Berlin Party headquarters were invited to drinking bouts by Heinz Neumann. One of the three, Dr. Carl Kindermann, betrayed homosexual tendencies. This, and a few critical remarks about the conditions in the Soviet Union, gave Heinz Neumann a pretext to denounce the three to the G.P.U. They were arrested and charged with having been sent to Russia by the secret fascist organization “Consul” to assassinate leading Soviet officials. Month after month, the three German radicals languished in the Lubianka dungeons in Moscow, and the German press made a big stir about them, demanding their release.

At this stage the G.P.U. began secret negotiations with the German Ministry of Justice, offering to exchange their German prisoners for Skoblevski. The German government refused. Skoblevski had been sentenced to die. The G.P.U. answered by bringing the three Germans before the highest military tribunal in Moscow. It was the first of the so-called show trials. Carl Kindermann stood up and denounced the G.P.U. in open court. Felix Dzerjinsky himself, Kindermann reported, had bargained with him to obtain a “confession.” Another of the accused, the student von Dithmar, followed Kindermann’s example. The third, the student Wolscht, had been broken down and made a deal with the G.P.U. while in prison. He had become a member of the Bolshevik Party during his confinement in the Lubianka, and now, while on trial, he praised the Soviet policies and implicated himself and his comrades. All three were condemned to be shot as spies.

Still the German government refused to exchange Skoblevski. Whereupon the G.P.U. arrested a number of German consular officials and their wives, accusing them of anti-Soviet conspiracies. At the same time, the negotiations to free Skoblevski were renewed.

Skoblevski was not executed. In September, 1926, he was exchanged for eleven German prisoners of the G.P.U. Carl Kindermann and von Dithmar were freed. Wolscht, who had “confessed,” died in the Lubianka prison in Moscow, according to a Soviet announcement. As for the lesser Tchekists who had been sentenced in Leipzig, the Party abandoned them to their fate.

There is a sequel to this chapter. In 1937, I was questioned about General Skoblevski by the director of the Foreign Division of the Gestapo, Regierungsrat Schreckenbach. I then learned that Skoblevski, under the name of Gorev, had become a Soviet military adviser to the Loyalist armies in Spain.

“May I see a photograph of this Gorev-Skoblevski?” I asked.

“There is none,” was the reply. “The police records of him were stolen in 1927.”

General Skoblevski, however, was never put on trial to answer for the thousands of lives sacrificed in the adventurous uprisings which he had organized in Germany during 1923. On October 16 of that year Otto Marquardt appointed me leader of a detachment of twenty men of the Red Marines. Six of these twenty were armed with old Russian carbines, five had new automatic pistols of Belgian make, four had old revolvers of various caliber, the rest were armed with knives and clubs. Between us we possessed six rejuvenated German World War hand-grenades of the egg-shape type. The oldest in my group was twenty-seven years old, the second oldest twenty-three and the youngest sixteen, a husky riveter’s apprentice. On October 19, I took my detachment aboard a train bound for Bremen. We got off at Buchholz and had maneuver practice in a nearby forest; a footpath was a city street, selected rocks represented tenements, and fallen trees served as barricades. We agreed on certain signals for assault, for co-operation in ambush, for retreat and for scattering. Then we marched to Hamburg, following the railway, taking sharp note of the terrain on both sides. On October 21, each man bought a quart of kerosene for the purpose, if need be, of setting buildings, barricades, or police lorries afire. On the same day Hugo Marx gave me a detailed plan of Police Post 42 in Hamburg-Eimsbuettel, and I took five of my comrades to the Eimsbuettel district to study all details and approaches of the station at close range. In doing this, I was as serious as any earnest young skipper who shaped the first course of the first ship under his command. We did not think of ourselves; we thought of our duty to prepare the great break-through into a better future.

How strong were we really? Every comrade asked that question; few could answer it. Our leaders maintained that the majority of the German workers stood behind the Communist Party. They always talked that way on the eve of a major blow, so as to inspire confidence among those of their followers who were willing to throw away their lives.

For weeks Moscow’s decision as to the general uprising had hung in the balance. Courier after courier arrived in Berlin from Moscow, bearing message after message. Moscow ordered revolution, countermanded the order, and restored it. In Berlin, the Central Committee of the Party, under Karl Radek, was undecided. Our leaders were immersed in factional squabbles, confused by conflicting commands from the Kremlin, while the Party couriers waited to carry to the Red Hundreds in the provinces the signal to go ahead. The story has been told by Walter Zeutschel, an active participant in the events.

When the Social Democratic Party refused to join the planned communist revolt, Ernst Thaelmann, in a rage, dispatched the couriers with the order for the rising. This exploded like a bomb. The other members of the Central Committee leaped from their seats and stared at each other in bewilderment. Brandler was first to regain his composure. He sent his men out to stop the couriers. But the courier for Hamburg had already started. Brandler’s messenger rushed to the station.

“Too late,” he was told. “There goes the train.”

For a while the messenger stared at the tail lights of the train which rolled toward Hamburg. Then he went home.