Abstract
When the Soviet intelligence agent Walter Krivitsky looked down one morning in May 1934 from NKVD headquarters at the columns of singing Schutzbündler, the defeated militants of the Austrian Civil War fought three months before marching now in step across Lubianka Square, his reverie on international solidarity was sharply interrupted. His colleague Volynskii, a counter-intelligence officer, expressed the opinion that “in six or seven months seventy percent” of the receding marchers would find themselves in custody.1 The prediction was somewhat off the mark — the Austrian political refugees remained relatively unscathed till the Comintern cadre reviews of 1936.2 None the less, Volynskii, a section leader in the Special Department of the GUGB, was correct in intimating that German-speakers were a “suspect category” after Hitler’s accession to power.
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Notes
Walter Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 39–40.
Barry McLoughlin, Hans Schafranek and Walter Szevera, Aufbruch-Hoffnung-Endstation. Österreicherinnen und Österreicher in der UdSSR, 1925–1945 (Vienna, 1997), pp. 352–90.
Carola Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung. Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil (Münster, 1996), pp. 97, 108.
Hans Schafranek, Zwischen NKWD und Gestapo. Die Auslieferung deutscher und österreichischer Antifaschisten aus der Sowjetunion an Nazideutschland 1937–1941 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), p. 11.
Over 1,000 victims’ biographies (KPD) were published by the successor institute of the East German Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the last months of the Gorbachev era. See Institut für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (eds), In den Fängen des NKWD. Deutsche Opfer des stalinistischen Terrors in der UdSSR (Berlin, 1991).
In respect of the gruesome “cadre-screening” to which KPD members in Russia were subjected, see the following by Reinhard Müller, Die Säuberung. Moskau 1936: Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1991); Die Akte Wehner, Moskau 1937–1941 (Berlin, 1993); and ‘Unentwegte Disziplin und permanenter Verdacht. Zur Genesis der “Säuberungen” in der KPD’, in Wolfgang Neugebauer (ed.), Von der Utopie zum Terror. Stalinismus-Analysen (Vienna, 1994), pp. 71–95.
Hermann Weber, “Weiße Flecken” in der Geschichte. Die KPD-Opfer der Stalinschen Säuberungen und ihre Rehabilitierung (new enlarged edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 19–21.
Unless stated otherwise, all statistics relating to German victims are taken from N. Okhotin and A. Roginskii, ‘Iz istorii “nemetskoi operatsii” NKVD 1937–1938 gg.’, in I. L. Shcherbakova (ed.), Nakazannyi narod. Repressiprotiv rossiiskikh nemtsev (Moscow, 1999), pp. 35–75, especially the tables, pp. 63–6.
For the text of the “German” order, see A. Ia. Razumov (ed.), Leningradskii martirolog, torn 2, oktiabr’ 1937 goda (St. Petersburg, 1996), pp. 452–3.
L. A. Golovkova (ed.), Butovskii poligon. Kniga pamiati zhertv poUticheskikh repressii. Vypusk chetvertyi (Moscow, 2000) p. 353 (extract from report on NKVD officer Ivan Sorokin, GARF, f. 10035, NKVD investigation-file no. P-55763). Excerpts from the documentation assembled to prosecute UGB departmental and group leaders were copied many times and inserted in the files of the prisoners these units had interrogated — in Sorokin’s case the 3rd UGB.
Reinhard Müller, ‘Der Fall des “Antikomintern-Blocks” — Ein vierter Moskauer Schauprozeß?’, in Hermann Weber, Dietrich Staritz et al. (eds), Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 1996 (Berlin, 1996), pp. 200–1.
Oleg Del’, Ot illiuzii k tragedii. Nemetskie emigranty v SSSR v 30-e gody (Moscow, 1997), p. 90 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 73, d. 61,1. 18).
For the controversy on the mysterious circumstances of Beimler’s death, see Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, third edn (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 366, 482, 488; Patrik v. zur Mühlen, Spanien war ihre Hoffnung. Die deutsche Linke im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg (Berlin and Bonn, 1985), pp. 148–52, 247–62.
For the remarks of the ECCI representative from Austria concerning such interventions, see Ernst Fischer, Erinnerungen und Reflexionen (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1969), pp. 358–9.
K. M. Anderson and A. O. Chubar’ian (eds), Komintern i vtoraia mirovaia voina, chast’ I, do 22 iiunia 1941 g. (Moscow, 1994), pp. 508–10.
Hans Schafranek (in co-operation with Natalia Mussienko), Kinderheim Nr 6. Österreichische und deutsche Kinder im sowjetischen Exil (Vienna, 1998), pp. 129–36.
Natalia Musienko, ‘Kinder im Exil. Kinder der Karl-Liebknecht-Schule in Moskau während der stalinistischen Säuberungen’, in Ernst Heinrich Meyer-Stiens (ed.), Opfer wofür? Deutsche Emigranten in Moskau — ihr Leben und Schicksal (Worpswede, 1996), p. 77.
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Schafranek, H., Musienko, N. (2003). The Fictitious “Hitler-Jugend” Conspiracy of the Moscow NKVD. In: McLoughlin, B., McDermott, K. (eds) Stalin’s Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523937_10
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