he laughed:
“Oh, you are the rich American uncle who sent me good books and food.”
In Moscow Hoelz was a hero for a time. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, a factory in Leningrad was named after him, and he was furnished with a good apartment at the Hotel Metropole. But when the Communists capitulated to Hitler in 1933 without firing a shot, and it became clear that this was the official policy of Stalin and the Comintern, Hoelz asked for his passport. He was put off day after day, and spies were set on his trail. He became furious. He demanded immediate permission to leave. His friends in Moscow now avoided him. The Ogpu refused to return his passport. A little later an insignificant notice appeared in the Pravda announcing that Hoelz had been found drowned in a stream outside Moscow. In the Ogpu I was told that after the rise of Hitler, Hoelz had been seen coming out of the German Embassy in Moscow. The fact is that Hoelz was killed by the Ogpu because his glorious revolutionary past made him a potential leader of the revolutionary opposition to the Comintern.
The defeat of the March uprising in Germany sobered Moscow considerably. Even Zinoviev toned down his proclamations and manifestoes. Europe was quite evidently not done with capitalism. Nor was Russia itself—for after the suppression of the peasant rebellions and the Kronstadt revolt, Lenin made important economic concessions to peasants and business men. Russia settled down to a period of internal reconstruction, and the world revolution went decidedly into the background. The Comintern was busy finding scapegoats for its defeats, cleaning out Communist Central Committees in various countries and appointing new leaders in their places. Factional fights in the Communist Parties abroad kept the machinery of the Comintern busy drawing up resolutions, counter-resolutions and expulsion orders.
In January, 1923 I was working in Moscow in the third section of the Intelligence Department of the Red Army. Word reached us that the French were about to occupy the Ruhr in order to collect reparations. I was living at this time in the Hotel Lux, which was also the chief residence of the officials of the Comintern and of visiting foreign Communists. . . .
I want to explain that the Hotel Lux was, and still is in fact, the headquarters of Western Europe in Moscow. Through its lobbies pass Communist leaders from every country, as well as trade union delegates, and individual workers who have in some fashion earned a trip to the proletarian Mecca.
Consequently, it is important for the Soviet government to keep a close watch upon the Hotel Lux, in order to discover exactly what the comrades in every country are saying and doing, to know their attitude toward the Soviet government and toward the warring factions within the Bolshevik Party. For this purpose the Hotel Lux is honeycombed with Ogpu agents registered as guests and residents. Among the agents who lived at the Hotel Lux and kept the Ogpu informed about the doings of foreign Communists and workers, was Constantine Oumansky, at present Soviet ambassador to the United States.
I met Oumansky in 1922 for the first time. Oumansky, born in Bessarabia, had lived in Rumania and Austria until 1922 when he came to Moscow. Because of his knowledge of foreign languages, he received a position with Tass, the official Soviet News Agency. His wife was a typist in the Comintern office.
When Oumansky’s turn came to serve in the Red Army he told me that he did not wish to “waste” two years in common army barracks. Soviet life then had not assumed the caste character it now bears, and his remark shocked me. Most Communists still look upon service in the Red Army as a privilege. Not so Oumansky. He presented himself at the offices of the Intelligence Department with a recommendation from Foreign Commissar Chicherin and from Doletsky, Chief of the Tass, requesting that he be permitted to “serve” his two years in the Army as a translator for the Fourth Department.
That very evening while I was in the company of Firin, at that time assistant to General Berzin, Chief of the Military Intelligence Department, I saw Oumansky in a Moscow restaurant. I went over to his table and asked him why he was dropping his job with Tass. He replied that he was going to kill two birds with one stone—keep his Tass job, and serve his military term in the Fourth Department offices.
When I told this to Firin, he replied angrily:
“You may rest assured that he will not work in the Fourth Department.”
In those years soft berths were not easily arranged, and Oumansky did not get the translator’s job with the Red Army. But he succeeded in staying out of those uncomfortable barracks by serving as a diplomatic courier of the foreign office. This was considered a substitute for military service, because all diplomatic couriers are on the staff of the Ogpu. Without giving up his Tass job, Oumansky traveled to Paris, Rome, Vienna, Tokyo and Shanghai.
Oumansky served the Ogpu in the Tass News Agency too, for here were Soviet journalists and correspondents having a dangerously close contact with the outside world. Oumansky was able to spy upon Tass reporters from every vantage point, from the Moscow office and from abroad. And at the Hotel Lux he kept his ear tuned sharply to bits of stray conversation exchanged by foreign Communists. All of Oumansky’s superiors, in every department in which he has worked, have either been removed and broken or fallen before the bullets of the purge. These include his former chief in the Tass, Doletsky, as well as nearly all his colleagues there; his former chief in the foreign office, Maxim Litvinov; Alexander Troyanovsky, first Soviet ambassador to the United States, and Vladimir Romm, Tass correspondent in Washington, his personal friend. Troyanovsky and Romm were recalled to Moscow from Washington while Oumansky was working side by side with them in the United States.
Oumansky is one of the few Communists who succeeded in crossing the barbed-wire frontier that separates the old Bolshevik Party from the new. During the purge there was only one passport across this frontier. You had to present Stalin and his Ogpu with the required quota of victims. Constantine Oumansky made good. . . .
When news reached our department of the French occupation of the Ruhr, a group of five or six officers, including myself, were ordered to leave at once for Germany. Within twenty-four hours all arrangements were made. Moscow hoped that the repercussions of the French occupation would open the way for a renewed Comintern drive in Germany.
Within a week I was in Berlin. My first impression was that Germany stood on the eve of cataclysmic events. Inflation had carried the reichsmark to astronomical heights; unemployment was wide-spread; there were daily street fights between workers and police, as well as between workers and nationalist fighting brigades. The French occupation added fuel to the flames. For a moment it even looked as if exhausted and impoverished Germany might take up arms in a suicidal war against France.
The Comintern leaders followed German events cautiously. They had come off badly in 1921, and they wanted to be certain that no blow was struck until internal chaos was complete. Our Intelligence Department, however, had given us very definite instructions. We were sent to Germany to reconnoiter, to mobilize elements of unrest in the Ruhr area, and to forge the weapons for an uprising when the proper moment arrived.
We at once created three types of organizations in the German Communist Party; the Party Intelligence Service working under the guidance of the Fourth Department of the Red Army; military formations as the nucleus of the future German Red Army, and Zersetzungsdienst, small units of men whose function was to shatter the morale of the Reichswehr and the police.
At the head of the Party Intelligence Service we named Hans Kiepenberger, the son of a Hamburg publisher. He worked tirelessly, weaving an elaborate spy net in the ranks of the army and police, the governmental apparatus, and every political party and hostile fighting organization. His agents penetrated the monarchist Stahlhelm, the Wehrwolf and the Nazi units. Working hand in hand with the Zersetzungsdienst, they secretly sounded out certain officers of the Reichswehr concerning the stand they would take in the event of a Communist uprising.
Kiepenberger served the Comintern with great loyalty
