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 and courage. During the events of 1923, his life was in danger every day. In the end he suffered the fate that befell all loyal Communists. Elected to the Reichstag in 1927, he became a member of the Committee on Military Affairs. Regarding himself as the Comintern’s representative on that body, he supplied the Soviet Military Intelligence with valuable information for many years. He remained in Germany for some months after Hitler came to power, continuing to do dangerous underground work for the Communist Party. In the fall of 1933 he fled to Russia. In 1936 he was arrested as a Nazi spy.
The Ogpu examiner pressed him for an admission that he was in the service of the German Intelligence. Kiepenberger refused to “confess.” “Ask Krivitsky whether I could become a Nazi agent,” he pleaded. “He knows what I did in Germany.”
“Didn’t you know General Bredow, head of the Reichswehr Military Intelligence?” asked the Ogpu examiner.
“Of course I knew him,” replied Kiepenberger, “I was a member of the Communist fraction of the Reichstag and on the Military Affairs Committee.” (General Bredow had frequently appeared before the Reichstag Committee.)
The Ogpu had no further “incriminating” evidence against Kiepenberger. Nevertheless, after six months of “questioning” the dauntless fighter “confessed” that he was in the service of the German Military Intelligence. “There is a nail in my head,” he kept repeating. “Give me something that will put me to sleep.”
We Soviet officers organized German Communist Military formations, the foundation of the German Red Army that was never to be, in a very systematic fashion, dividing them into units of one hundred men, Hundertschaft. We prepared lists of Communists who had served in the war, cataloging them according to their military rank. Out of this list we expected to create the officers corps of the German Red Army. We also organized a technical staff of experienced specialists: machine-gunners, artillery officers, the nucleus of an aviation corps, and a liaison personnel chosen from trained wireless and telephone operators. We set up an organization of women and trained them for hospital duty.
In the Ruhr, however, as a result of the French occupation, we were faced with an entirely different problem. The Ruhr was the scene of one of the strangest spectacles in history. Unable to oppose French arms by force, the Germans were waging a war of passive resistance. Mines and factories shut down, leaving only skeleton staffs at their places to prevent the mines from flooding and to keep factory equipment in working order. Railroads were almost at a standstill. Unemployment was universal. The Berlin government, already faced with a fantastic inflation, supported virtually the entire population of the Ruhr.
Meanwhile the French began to encourage the Separatist movement which aimed to detach the entire Rhineland from German and form an independent state. Casual observers thought that the Separatist movement was nothing but French propaganda. In fact, however, it was native and very serious, and if the British had not opposed it, the Rhineland would have severed itself from Germany in 1923. In many Rhenish homes I saw busts of Napoleon, the creator of the Confederation of the Rhine. Often enough I heard the inhabitants complain that their rich country was exploited by Prussia.
The Communist Party opposed the Separatist movement by every means at its disposal. The slogan of the Comintern was “War Against Stresemann and Poincaré!” The slogan of the Nazis and their nationalist allies was: “War Against Poincaré and Stresemann!” It was during these days that Schlageter, a Nazi terrorist, was executed by the French military authorities. Schlageter’s death would have passed unnoticed outside the narrow circle of his comrades had not Karl Radek, the Comintern’s cleverest propagandist, brought it home to the German people. “Join the Communists,” cried Radek, “and you will liberate the Fatherland nationally and socially!”
For a time negotiations went on between Radek and a number of Nazi and Nationalist leaders, notably Count Reventlow. The basis for collaboration was that German nationalism’s sole chance of success was in joining hands with Bolshevik Russia against imperialist France and Great Britain. But this union was not consummated. It was not until 1939 that it finally took place under conditions vastly different from those contemplated by Moscow when Germany was the underdog.
Meanwhile everything was prepared for a Separatist coup d’état. The