Willi Münzenberg

File:WillyMünzenberg.jpg

Münzenberg

Willi Münzenberg (1889–1940) was a communist political activist. Münzenberg was the first head of the Young Communist International in 1919-20 and established the famine-relief and propaganda organization Workers International Relief in 1921. He was a leading propagandist for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the Weimar Era.

Biography

Early years

Willi Münzenberg was born 14 August 1889 in Erfurt, Thuringia the son of a tavern keeper, Münzenberg grew up in poverty. As a young man, he became involved with trade unions and in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Following the SPD split in 1914 between the moderate majority (known as the Majority SPD, MSPD) and the radical minority (known as the Independent SPD, USPD) over the issue of the First World War, Münzenberg sided with the Independent faction.

During World War One, Münzenberg often visited Vladimir Lenin at his home in Zurich, Switzerland . In 1918, Münzenberg was a founding member of the KPD.

Münzenberg was also the head of the Young Communist International and was the delegate of the YCI to the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International in 1920.

Political career

In 1924, Münzenberg was elected to the Reichstag, and served as a member until the banning of the KPD in 1933. Münzenberg was one of the few KPD leaders of working-class origin, a fact that was a source of immense pride for Münzenberg.

During the Weimar period, Münzenberg earned the reputation of a brilliant propagandist. His first major success was an effort to raise money and food for the victims of the Russian famine of 1921. In 1924 he launched Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, which became the most widely-read socialist pictorial newspaper in Germany. In addition, Münzenberg worked closely with the Comintern and the Soviet secret police (known as the Cheka between 1917–22 and as the OGPU 1922–34) to advance the communist cause internationally.

Münzenberg founded a number of front organizations such the World League Against Imperialism, the International Worker's Relief Fund, and the International Labor Defense, to propagate communist ideas. He instructed his assistant, fellow Comintern agent Otto Katz, to travel to the United States to garner support for various pro-Soviet and anti-Nazi causes (Katz would later found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League with Dorothy Parker). In order to obfuscate the origins of his operations, Münzenberg created numerous front organizations to control other front organizations. Western and fascist intelligence agencies generally referred to all of these organizations as the "Münzenberg Trust". In addition, Münzenberg used these front organizations to make business investments - Münzenberg liked to live in high style and was popularly known as "The Red Millionaire".

After directing the Comintern's handling of the Sacco and Vanzetti case in 1925, Münzenberg became in charge of the League Against Imperialism, created in Brussels in 1927. He then achieved his greatest success with the Counter-trial he organized in London in which he blamed the Reichstag fire on the Nazis. During the Counter-trial, Münzenberg and his staff manufactured most of the evidence that he claimed proved that the Nazis had set the Reichstag on fire. In 1933 and in 1934, the "Münzenberg Trust" published two best-selling books, The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror and its sequel, the Second Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire. The two Brown Books were widely accepted as fact by historians until 1960 when the journalist Fritz Tobias exposed numerous inaccuracies and false information in the Brown Books. As an example, Tobias revealed that the “secret tunnels’ that supposedly allowed the Nazis to enter and leave the Reichstag unseen were in fact tunnels for water piping.

Münzenberg

Münzenberg lived intermittently in Paris, France from 1933 to 1940. It has been suggested that during his years in exile, Münzenberg may have had some role in recruiting Kim Philby to work for the Soviet Union, but there is no clear evidence for this. The argument for this theory is that Philby was recruited to work for Soviet intelligence through one of the "Münzenberg Trust"'s front organizations, the World Society for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism based in Paris.

Münzenberg sent Czech writer Egon Kisch to Australia where he addressed a crowd of 18,000 in Sydney's Domain telling Australians of his first hand experience with the dangers of Hitler's Nazi regime.

In 1934 Münzenberg's influence reached the antipodes when his Comintern machine sent Egon Kisch to the All-Australian Conference of the Movement Against War and Fascism (an Australian Communist Party Front organization). What could have been a low key visit from an unknown Czeck writer quickly polarized Australian society when the Conservative Lyons government declared Kisch as "undesirable as an inhabitant of, or visitor to, the Commonwealth" and attempted to exclude Kisch from Australia. Unable to produce any legal proof that Kisch was a communist, the government case collapsed and Kisch became a popular speaker disseminating Münzenberg's Comintern message. However attempts to foster a United Front against fascism in Australia eventually came to nothing.

Until 1936, Münzenberg remained loyal to Stalin and to the aims of Soviet foreign policy. He was well aware of the enormity of Stalin's crimes: he had personally witnessed the use of slave labour in the construction of the White Sea Canal, during which about 100,000 prisoners died, and had witnessed of the betrayal of the German communist party to serve the ends of Soviet foreign policy. Yet he had never broken with Stalin. Urged to return to Moscow by fellow KPD exile Walter Ulbricht, Münzenberg refused, as he suspected that he would be implicated and liquidated in the same Stalinist purges his disinformation organizations had previously sought to obscure (Ulbricht knew this as well, and would later serve Stalin in eliminating 'disloyal' Germans fighting on the Republican side in Spain). Münzenberg continued to work on behalf of anti-fascist causes throughout Western Europe, where he played a role in organizing the recruitment and acquisition of Soviet arms for the International Brigades to fight for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

However, by 1937 the writing was on the wall. Having been expelled from the German communist party (KPD) on trumped-up charges, Münzenberg finally moved into open opposition to Stalin. Back in Paris, he became a genuine leader of German emigre anti-fascism and an anti-Stalinist. His new journal, Die Zukunft, was the intellectual forerunner of Encounter and other Cold War publications.

But his time was running out. His closest professional associates, Karl Radek, Heinz Neumann and countless other German communists, were either shot or worked to death in Soviet labor camps. His sister-in-law, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was imprisoned in Karaganda. The NKVD eventually arranged for her to be handed over to Hitler in 1940, inadvertently saving her life. After spending the war in the relative safety of Ravensbruck concentration camp, Buber-Neumann fled at the end of the war, reaching safety with Anglo-American forces just ahead of the advancing Soviet troops.

In June 1940, Münzenberg fled from Paris, where he had been making anti-Nazi broadcasts, in order to escape the advance of German forces. While in the south of France, he was imprisoned by the Daladier government in the camp for foreigners at Chambaran in Lyon. It was there that a fellow communist prisoner, an unknown to Münzenberg's colleagues, befriended Münzenberg, and in the chaos of the Armistice, proposed that he escape with him. Some sources believe this unknown communist was an agent of Beria's NKVD. Münzenberg agreed, and disappeared with the stranger and one or two other young men in the first days of flight. It was the last anyone saw of him alive. Münzenberg's partially decomposed corpse was later discovered by French hunters in a forest only two hundred yards from the camp, hanging by a rope from a tree on October 21, 1940. The Vichy French verdict of his death, which did not involve interrogations of his friends at the camp, was officially one of suicide. However, several eyewitnesses later reported that Münzenberg remained in high spirits during his days at the camp and in the first days of his flight from Chambaran.

Further reading

• Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg: A Political Biography. Translated by Marian Jackson. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1974
• Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, 1917-1940. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
• Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals. New York: Free Press, 1994.
• Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.
• Fritz Tobias, The Reichstag Fire. Arnold J. Pomerans, trans. New York: Putnam, 1963.
• Boris Volodarsky, The Orlov KGB File: The Most Successful Espionage Deception of All Time. New York: Enigma Books, 2009.
• Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing. The Second Volume of an Autobiography: 1932-40. (1954) London: Vintage, 2005; pp. 250-259, 381-386.
• Martin Mauthner, German Writers in French Exile, 1933-1940, London: Vallentine and Mitchell, 2007; ISBN : 978 0 85303 540 4.

External links

• Lying for the truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern Hanging link 23 September 2009.
• Russell Jacoby, "Willi the Red," The Nation, 29 January 2004. Retrieved 23 September 2009.