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
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 German Communist Party from 1931 to 1932.19 A Soviet writer reports a German Communist in the Butyrka in 1937 with body scars from the Gestapo and crushed fingernails from the NKVD.20
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
A meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in May 1937 saw his fall. Manuilsky made a speech violently denouncing him for insulting behavior to Stalin and contacts with Romanian Secret Police since 1919. The other members of the ECCI looked on in silence.fn2 Kun, who was quite unprepared for the attack, went white. He “roared like a mortally wounded lion: ‘this is a terrible provocation, a conspiracy to get me murdered. But I swear that I have not wanted to insult Comrade Stalin. I want to explain everything to Comrade Stalin himself.’ “But everything had been set up in advance. As Kun, pale and shocked, left the room in a dead silence, two NKVD men escorted him out.30 But he was not arrested immediately. A few days later, Stalin telephoned and “gaily asked Kun to receive a French reporter and refute a rumour of Kun’s arrest.” This he did; the denial was published; and he was arrested soon afterwards.31 He had had several members of his own Politburo arrested earlier.32
Bela Kun was taken to the Lefortovo, where he was tortured. He is reported as having been kept standing on one foot for periods of from ten to twenty hours. When he returned to his cell after interrogation, his legs were swollen and his face was so black as to be unrecognizable.33 He was in the same cell as Muklevich.34 He was then held in the Butyrka until his execution for espionage—as an agent of Germany since 1916, and of Britain since 1926.35 This took place on 29 August 1938.36 It seems clear that the formalities were complied with, for he is described as having been “sentenced on the basis of a faked indictment.”37 Kun’s frail wife, IrMa, was arrested on 23 February 1938,38 and got eight years, going first to Kolyma,39 but survived and was eventually released. His son-in-law, the Hungarian poet Hidas, was also sent to a labor camp.40
Of the other leaders of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, twelve more People’s Commissars of the then Communist Government in Budapest were arrested. These included the Grand Old Man of Hungarian Communism, Dezso Bokanyi, and Jozsef Pogany, known under the name of John Pepper as the Comintern’s representative to the American Communist Party. Of the twelve, two survived imprisonment. Theorists like Lajos Magyar also perished.
Many Italian Communists died—such as Edmondo Peluso, who had been with Neumann in the Canton Commune. He got a letter out of prison begging friends for help and saying that his strength was failing through torture, but that they should believe his innocence. Because this was suspected to be a police trap, there was no response. The few who were later released found that their stories of prison were not believed. Togliatti’s brother-in-law Paoli Robotti was arrested in 1937. The torturers broke his teeth and incurably injured his spine,41 but he was eventually released and was later, in 1961, to say that he had kept silent about all this because.42 it was not the business of Italian, but of Soviet, Communists to speak.’