PRISONER OF STALIN AND OF HITLER

PRISONER OF STALIN AND OF HITLER

second part

LEO VALIANI

Leo Valiani, born Leo Weiczen (Rijeka, 9 February 1909 - Milan, 18 September 1999), was an Italian journalist, anti-fascist, politician and historian. Unlike Fascism as a boy, he was sent confinement (1928) on the island of Ponza, where he joined the Communist Party of Italy at a very young age. Having fled to France, he broke with the Pcd'I after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in 1939,Valiani thought he was leaving the Communist Party before the outbreak of the war, right after the notorious pact, but hostilities began and Leo waited, saying nothing for fear that his comrades read in his gesture the vile attempt to avoid the arrest by the French authorities who were stopping all foreign communists. He is also locked up and only in Vernet camp in the Pyrenees announces its decision. The reaction of the companions is very hard. "The following day all the Communist internees, perhaps four thousand, or a little less, took away my greeting, as one man: it is hard to see oneself take the greeting from

four thousand comrades ”, he writes in Sixty Years of Adventures and Battles.

Leo Valiani is Mario in Arthur Koesler's autobiographical novel "Scum of the Earth"1942

Arthur Koestler, writes a novel in 1941, with the title Darkness at Noon: describes the arrest, detention, interrogation and execution of an important member of the Soviet Communist Party during the period of the great Stalinist purges.

"Finally, I find myself guilty of having proposed the idea of man to that of humanity ..."

"I no longer believe in my infallibility. That's why I'm lost. "

Arthur Koestler sentences uttered by the protagonist of the novel Nicolaj Rubasciov,

political commissar in the Stalin era.His job is to discover and question the opponents of the regime.
One day, however, Rubasciov falls into disgrace .........

Margarete Buber-Neumann

Margarete Buber-Neumann was born in Potsdam in 1901, was educated as a nursery school teacher and at the age of twenty joined the Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands (KJVD) (literally:German Communist Youth Union) and since 1926 of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD).

In 1922 he married Rafael,son of Martin Buber,a Jewish philosopher.From the marriage,
two daughters were born, Barbara and Judith,the latter daughter of the Israeli philosopher Joseph Agassi.
In 1929 he divorced Buber,after they had been living apart for four years.
The reasons for ending the marriage were linked to the gradual detachment of the husband from the communist movement.

Heinz Neumann

Heinz Neumann was a German Communist Party politician and a journalist.

He dropped out of university in 1922 and became editor of the Rote

Fahne (Red Flag). He was arrested and spent six months in prison, during which he took up Russian, learning it well.In 1922, he met Joseph Stalin on a trip, speaking to him in Russian. From that point until 1932, he was a strong supporter of Stalin.

He first belonged to the left wing of the KPD,There, he succeeded Ivan Katz as Communist Party representative to the Comintern. From July to December 1927.He represented the Comintern in China.Neumann went back to Germany in 1928 and after the Wittorf Affair, became one of the most important politicians of the KPD. Neumann was the leader of the KPD's paramilitary wing, the Party

Self Defense Unit (German: Parteiselbstschutz). As such, Neumann had a major role in the 1931 assassination of Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck, both of whom were SPD members and Precinct Captains in the Berlin Police.

Elected to the Reichstag in 1930, in 1931, Neumann developed differences with Stalin and Ernst Thälmann, feeling that they were underestimating the danger of a takeover by the Nazis,He was defeated in October 1932, relieved of his party functions in November  1932, and lost his seat in the Reichstag.

In 1929 Margarethe married Heinz Neumann. With the advent of Hitler they emigrated in Moscow, there was no worse place for a Communist leader like Newman is still there 1932 had challenged the party line dictated by Stalin of a break with the Social Democrats.

HOTEL LUX

The hotel born as a France hotel was renamed Hotel (de)luxe after the October revolution from 1921 there was placed La Foresteria (The GUEST) of the communist international. In 1933 the building was expanded into two floors, at that time, it had 300 rooms could accommodate 600 guests.

 Members of the German Communist Party, in exile in the 1930s were very well treated, although they complained that it was infested with rats.

The following famous people lived in the hotel for a longer or shorter time:

Ruth Fischer, female exponent of the Austro-German communist party, who was held under house arrest for ten months, Wolfgang Leonhard, Ruth von Mayenburg (Communist Party of Austria), Walter and Lotte Ulbricht, in 1935, and Herbert Wehner, from 1937 until early 1941.Johannes R. Becher, Bolesław Bierut, Willi Bredel, Georgi Dimitrow, Fritz Erpenbeck, Klement Gottwald, Antonio Gramsci, Aino and Otto Kuusinen, Elisabeth Markstein, Imre Nagy, Wilhelm Pieck, Theodor Plivier, Ernst Reuter, Rudolf Slánský, Richard Sorge, Ernst Thälmann, Josip Broz Tito, Palmiro Togliatti, Erich Weinert, Markus Wolf, Clara Zetkin.

Great Purge 1936-1938

There is no clarity as to what the real figures of Stalinist repression were.In 1990 Vladimir Kriuchkov,
director of the KGB, declared that 3.8 million people were imprisoned between 1930 and 1953,
of whom 786,000 were sentenced to death. Figures that are not questioned by historians.
Given that the Soviet authorities signed more than 600,000 death sentences in just two years,
between 1937 and 1939, the numbers presented by the KGB official seem plausible.

The processes. The purge in the Communist Party and the Red Army

Sergej Kirov

The Great Purges were a vast repression occurred in the USSR in the second half of the thirties

,wanted and directed by Stalin after the murder of Sergej Kirov, leader in Stalingrad, in favor of collectivization
programs and forced industrialization, in the first half of the thirties assumed a role of growing influence
within the Stalinist leadership group.The Trials, during the years of the Great Purges, were numerous,

but the main ones are generally considered the three, public,held in Moscow,
before the Tribunal of the Military College of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union and a fourth,
secret, against some of the most high officers of the Red Army.

Grigory Zinoviev

1 "trial of the sixteen" 19-28 August 1926

The trial aimed to hit the major exponents of the left-wing opposition of the party and,

was defined in the official reports "trial of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite terrorist center".

All were sentenced to death.

The executions were announced twenty-four hours after the sentence.

2 "process of the seventeen" from February 23-30, 1937

RADEK

In the official reports it was called "trial of the Trotsky anti-Soviet center".
During Radek's interrogation the name of Marshal Tuchačevsky was made,
who will be arrested, sentenced and executed a few months later.
The sentence also warned the absent Lev Trockij, expelled in 1929:
if he returned to the Soviet Union he would be arrested and referred to the court.
The trial ended with thirteen death sentences.

3 "trial of the officers" June 1937

 

Marshal Tuchačevskij

The accusation was based on false documents prepared by the Sicherheitsdienst,
SS Security Service, directed by Heydrich and sent to the investigating bodies
by the Soviet ambassador in Prague. The main deputy was the deputy commissioner of defense
Marshal Tuchačevskij, whose name had been made, a few months earlier, by Radek in the previous "trial of the seventeen".

In addition to the marshal, seven army generals or army corps were condemned and killed.

Due to the purges,the Soviet military lost 3 marshals out of 5, 8 admirals out of 8,
9 tenths of army corps commanders and 35,000 officers out of 144,300

4 "trial of the twenty-one" from 2 to 13 March 1938

BUCARIN

The main exponents of the right-wing opposition of the party were hit.
In the official reports it was defined:
as "the process of the anti-Soviet blockade of the right and the Trotskyites".
At the end of the trial, all the twenty-one defendants were found guilty,
eighteen were sentenced to death, three to prison terms

In the three public trials Vasilij Ulrich exercised the functions of the president of the court and the attorney general of the Soviet Union
Andrej Vyšinskij those of the public prosecutor.
They had no qualms about using torture, drugs and any other means to make the accused confess.
The alleged crimes were among those defined
by Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Socialist Federal Republic.
This article, subdivided into fourteen paragraphs, provided for the death penalty for various cases,
whose formulation, deliberately generic.

______________________________________________________________

Heinz Neumann was arrested in April 1937 and sentenced to death,
although in the jargon of Stalinist justice his sentence was called:
"10 years of imprisonment without the right to correspond".
From the day of her arrest Margaret no longer lives her husband and,
receives no reliable news on the date the place is the way of her death.

"My husband Heinz Newman was arrested by the NkVD on April 28th,
where he is, I can visit him, I can leave a package or a letter for him."
On the opposite side of the Lubyanka was the office that provided information
to relatives of those arrested by the political police

After months and months of research among the Moscow prisons,
in a vain attempt to find traces of her husband,
Buber-Neumann decided to try to get out of the USSR,
but all the foreign communists and in particular the inhabitants of the Lux hotel,
from the chiefs del comintern, to young collaborators from the moment they entered the Soviet Union,
they became prisoners of the Soviet security organs.
their passports were withdrawn by the secret police,
who returned them only at the express permission of the summit of the Comintern and,
the Soviet leaders.

Munzenberg

Munzenberg,at the end of 1936,anticipating the imminent arrest, being able to convince Togliatti,
who he headed the comintern during Dimitrov's absence that the situation in Spain,
required his departure for Europe is to wrest him permission to receive the passport.
Munzenberg, leave for Paris the same day, earning a few years of life.
Margarethe tried to follow the same tactics to get her passport back,
but evidently the wives of the arrested agents had no value whatsoever and,
she, who had been evicted from the Hotel Lux for a long time,
could not be received by any leader of the Comintern.
Thus I get her turn, in 1938 a year after the arrest of Hans Neumann,
she was arrested and she too was sentenced to 5 years in jail in the gulag,
"as a socially dangerous element".

If he had remained in the Soviet camp his sentence to just 5 years,
would have been at least doubled as has happened to all the prisoners:
to prolong the imprisonment not even a new court sentence was needed,
usually a directive from the state security organs was enough to Moscow,
or a simple decision by the camp commander.

Map of the Soviet concentration camp system

Vasilij Ulrich

Andrej Vyšinskij