by Merilyn Moos
But what is certainly the case is that Lotte maintained her identification with the left here, though less active than Siegi. She told me that she attended the Mosley rally in Olympia in 1934. She wished to give support to those disrupting it. She remembered how the ILP boys had been chased by Mosley’s thugs, some into the ‘rafters’ of Olympia. (Dozens were badly injured. The rally had the unintended consequence of showing up the British League of Fascists as thugs.) That took courage and political commitment - and a good dose of foolhardiness: she would have been deported if arrested. There is again an ILP link here. This fascist rally was not open to the ‘public’ but the ILP managed to obtain some tickets. So Lotte got her ticket from the ILP. We already know she had other ILP links.
When Siegi finally got to London, he initially moved in with Lotte. Later, he was to plead to the Home Office in Lotte’s defence, that he was in no state to maintain any sort of relationship.
Lotte had become a part-time teacher of German at the Linguists Club in London in 1934. There she met Brian Goold Verschoyles. Maybe she fell for an attractive lonely young Irish Communist when she herself was suffering from a sense of displacement and isolation. It is not clear what the exact character of Brian and Lotte’s relationship was, but Lotte was clearly willing to risk leaving the UK and travel across Europe without an extant passport to be with Brian in 1936. This was against strict Party instructions to Brian that she should not do so. Brian was being groomed to be some sort of low level spy, probably not much more than a paper carrier, but significant for all that. Having a foreign woman unaccountably just turning up drew an unwanted attention to Brian and almost from the time Lotte got there (itself an amazing and difficult feat), she and Brian got into serious trouble with their GPU handlers. Even people they thought they could trust turned out to be informers. Lotte and Brian behaved with irresponsible, naïve abandon, openly criticising the Soviet system. This was 1936 and the show trials were just round the corner.
Based on Barry McCloughlin’s evidence, I strongly suspect a deal was done. Brian allowed the GPU to send him to wherever they chose, in return for letting Lotte out of the USSR. One of the many intriguing aspects of this saga is that throughout this time, Siegi was writing to Lotte, sending her money, at her request, and agitating for her release. Lotte was finally allowed to leave. ‘More of an escape’ was how she put it to me, in those last months of her life when the existence of Brian had become official.167
Brian was sent to Spain, around Barcelona, by the Comintern, where he worked as a radio engineer, his official trade. (My guess is that both Brian’s USSR minders and Brian himself would probably have had Spain in mind - where the USSR were in need of skilled staff in the burgeoning Civil War and Brian maybe believed he could disappear over the Pyrenees, if needs must.)
Safely back in London, Lotte continued to communicate with Brian, foolishly sending ‘coded’ messages, critical of the USSR, despite strict instructions to both of them that her departure was conditional on there being no further contact. This is corroborated in the NKVD transcript of Brian’s lengthy interrogation and other of their notes (quoted in McCloughlin 144, also other NKVD notes in private possessions, thanks to McCloughlin).
That Lotte had sent Brian at least one card (in personal possession).and articles defending POUM will have - wrongly - fuelled the Russians suspicions of Brian’s ‘true’ political allegiances. In the hysterical political climate of 1936/37, where Trotskyists were hiding under every bed, Lotte and Siegi were seen as ‘active Trotskyists’ (NKVD notes on Brian, quoted in McCloughlin, 2007).
In 1937, Brain was tricked onto a Soviet ship off Barcelona and taken back to a ‘trial’, in the USSR. Brian, when interrogated, was asked persistently about his relationship with Lotte and her circle of friends. He denied he knew any of her friends and assured them the only person who knew he and Lotte were cohabiting was Siegi. There is no way of avoiding the conclusion that Lotte’s association with Brian helped send him to his death.
For the next fifty odd years, Brian and his fate disappear from view. But Brian continued to play in Lotte’s memory till her death. When I cleared Siegi and Lotte’s utterly chaotic home, there, under the sofa where Lotte lay all day (and often all night) was a small cardboard box containing carefully preserved, well organised mementos relating to Brian.
It is impossible to know how Siegi felt about his wife’s disloyalty. We have a clue in the letter he sent her where he said she was all he had left to live for, a cry which mixes personal and political despair. Did Lotte present her trip to Moscow as a political act, that she wanted to see how far the USSR was a ‘socialist utopia’, or that she and Siegi might both need to flee again and the USSR would be one possibility. But I have my doubts - there was enough already known about the role of the Comintern and the nature of the USSR.
After all, Lotte stopped living with Siegi fairly soon after he arrived in London. The relationship between Siegi and Lotte had already become rocky, prior to Brian’s ‘entry’. By August 1934, only a few months after getting to London, Siegi was living by himself in Christ Church Road, London NW3, which belonged to a Mr Meyer (from the MI5 files. It is possible that this is the same Hermann Meyer from the KPD exile group, but it has not proved possible to establish this). When Lotte goes to meet Brian in the USSR, Siegi moves into her room in 9, Lawn Road, Hampstead, though still using Dr Meyer’s phone.
Their relationship was not going well. In an amazing statement of support to the Home Office in 1940, to help argue Lotte’s case and get Lotte out of prison, Siegi explained Lotte’s behaviour by explaining that he was in no emotional state to maintain a relationship. Such a terrible confession is unlikely unless true. The previous few years have cost him dear psychologically. How does it feel to know that one could be caught, tortured or killed over a six months period of an underground existence? When every little decision – whether to turn left or right at a fork in the path – can bring you up against the Gestapo? How does it feel to be hungry and fear hunger day after day? How does it feel to stop being able to trust anybody? Did Siegi also start to doubt that Lotte would wait for him? When Lotte went to London leaving him in Paris, did he doubt her commitment to him?
Siegi was emotionally drained out by the time he and Lotte met up again in London. He did not have enough emotional elasticity or resilience for his relationship with Lotte, who was not always that sensitive to others needs and was not enjoying living in a misty alien country without family or friends. Lotte, the person whom he had at least in part left Germany (and then Paris) for, had now left him. The being he had loved and who had, in her own way, provided him with the rock of his existence, had deserted him.
I once asked my father, in a rare moment of intimacy, whether he had ever considered suicide. I did not know at the time that his brother, Adolpho, had killed himself. My father’s eyes took on a look as if he were seeing far-away sights invisible to anybody else and said: ‘Of course.’ He added: ‘Doesn’t everybody?’ but I knew even then that he said that to reassure me. Can I second guess how my father felt when Lotte left him to go to Brian in Moscow? He felt that he didn’t want to live anymore. He felt that his life had been in vain. That he had been defeated politically and now, he had been defeated personally. He had nobody to turn to, nobody who could comfort him. What was the point of being alive?
Lotte returned from Moscow with fearsome stories of shortages and, worse, of repression and fear. Soon after, Brian’s disappearance troubled her considerably. Siegi had already been encouraging and assisting Brian’s mother, who also lived in Oxford, to put pressure on the Foreign Office to find Brian, though, correctly, Siegi had no expectation of success (personal conversation with Brian’s nephew). Lotte, once back, also gave Brian’s mother support, but my impression from personal interviews with Brian’s nephew, is that it was Siegi, rather more than Lotte, who was principally involved in supporting Brian’s mother. While this shows Siegi as behaving with extraordinary honour and comradeship,
what he felt about the ‘triangle’ is another matter.
Even on her return, Lotte lived separately and headed off on a couple of occasions to France, and sent cards back to Siegi from the area of the Pyrenees; she was almost certainly trying to find a trace of Brian amongst those fleeing Franco into France. By 1937, Siegi had moved to Nassington Road, and, as there is no alternative address for Lotte, one assumes they were, in some sense anyway, living together again after many years of separation. Indeed, they had not spent any sustained time together since the beginning of 1933.
Lotte was soon to head off to the US. In 1939, when in New York, Lotte tried to trace Brian by going to see Krivitsky, an exile Russian (a GPU defector with intimate contacts with MI5, unknown to her) who had had an article published showing knowledge of Brian’s fate. She was desperate to find out what had happened to him. The official USSR line, which came down to her via the Foreign Office at some later point, was that Brian had been killed in a train transporting prisoners when it was hit by German bombs. In fact, McCloughlin recently established Brian was in effect murdered in a far-flung Soviet prison in the Gulag.
Although the fate of Brian was not known, Siegi would have listened to his wife’s stories of what had happened to her and the events taking place in the USSR. These would not just have been tales of bread queues and her and Brian being spied on. The show trials had already started in August 1936 and somebody as acute as Lotte, who spoke and read Russian, would have sensed which way the wind was blowing. Individual victimization, apart from of Trotsky, had already taken place. In 1932, Zinoviev and Kamenev, two of the triumvirate which took over after Lenin’s death, were - falsely - claimed to be plotting to overthrow Stalin. Kirov, another old Bolshevik, had been assassinated in 1934. Zinoviev and Kamenev were then tried in 1935 for their involvement in Kirov’s murder and in 1936, the case against them widening all the time, were sentenced to prison. Both agreed to confess on condition that they received a guarantee that they and their families’ lives would be spared. The defendants were then sentenced to death and subsequently shot. The trial was taking place at the very time Lotte was in Moscow in August 1936. Moreover, Siegi, always an avid reader of all forms of revolutionary press, will probably have known about the ‘Trotskyite’ criticisms that had already emerged of the USSR, and have read about the trials. Lotte will have confirmed this ‘news’ for him. Siegi, probably more than Lotte, will also have understood Brian’s likely fate within that context. It will have confirmed him in his resolve to leave the KPD.
It is not easy to understand the relationship between Siegi and Lotte at this time. They end up together and from 1938 onwards, they were never again parted. Letters give us a glimpse into their lives. We owe it to Siegi that we have copies of Lotte’s letters to him during the many periods when they were separated during the 1930s and early 1940s, including when she was travelling to the USSR. My father preserved the letters. Unfortunately, Lotte did not save Siegi’s letters. I knew nothing of these letters till I found them, clearing their home. What right did I have to read their private correspondence? I have not found an answer to this. I cannot lay claim to bringing historical truths to light. In the end, curiously overcame my qualms, but I find, having read the letters once, that I do not want to do so again.
Their letters, which at the beginning are written in German, are full of the minute details of living, inevitable when both of their circumstances are changing so very fast.166 They both at points express or refer to deep love for each other, though Lotte, certainly around the time of her travels to the USSR, makes clear that she will always give support to, but, by implication, not necessarily, love Siegi. She professes eternal friendship, but she emphasises that this is not the same as partnership. Lotte frequently asks for forgiveness. When she did not hear from Siegi, her letters express alarm and concern. But by 1937, she is again writing of her love for Siegi.
Siegi wrote a crucial letter to Lotte in August 1937, already referred to. Siegi writes (in English) ‘I was glad to find your letter….Why do I love you? Because you are you and I have time and strength to discover you and because you are the only human being who makes life worth living…I very much doubt if I would live on without you as nothing is left of my belief from which I received my strength and my joy. And as my lost beliefs destroyed my energy, the only thing I have left is my relationship to you.’ This is the most politically - and personally - explicit of all the letters. They were both too careful to write explicitly about politics. Lotte became all that Siegi had left to live for.
I cannot separate out my feelings as a daughter towards my parents. Although their move to London in 1966 seemed to finally bring them closer together, I do not feel that their prior relationship was easy. It was rather as if they were both stuck on a life-raft where they had to battle the elements together or they would drown. Brian, I was to realise, haunted my mother: it was his ‘mementos’ which lay hidden beneath the sofa where Lotte lay in the years after Siegi’s death. My hunch is that Lotte’s dalliance with Brian and his ‘disappearance’ ricocheted through Lotte and Siegi’s relationship, doing unseen damage.
The period from 1933 to 1938 was one of continuous political and personal crisis for Siegi. Over a matter of five years, Siegi had risked his life in flight from the Nazis across the width of Germany, had risked being caught crossing from Saarland into France, had arrived in and left Paris, and penniless had finally reached London. Struggling to stay in the UK, forbidden from getting a job, rejected - or rejecting - the KPD group in exile, never sure whether the police might come knocking to deport him back to Germany because of his forbidden political activities, his wife developing a relationship with another man, and without any source of income, Siegi must have felt adrift from all he had known and loved.
End-notes
125. Hobsbawm (2002) describing his arrival in the UK in 1933 scathingly describes the strictness of British sexual mores, the overriding importance of its class rituals and traditions and how having the wrong sort of accent marked out the refugee as an outsider. Later, he describes how, nominated by the army for a cipher course, he was turned down because his mother was not British, which could cause divided loyalties. (Hobsbawm, born in 1917, was a vital thirteen years younger than Siegi, so was more eligible for conscription.)
126. Rudolph Olden, an anti-Nazi German writer and lawyer arrived in England in November 1933 and campaigned and wrote, including in the New Statesman and Manchester Guardian, about the true nature of Hitler and Nazism (Brinson and Malet, 1995). His non-alignment with the KPD/CP did not stop the British secret service finding him of great interest.
127. Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt arrived in October 1933, a courageous and well-known peace activist (Furness, 1995) who had been arrested on the 28th February 1933, the morning straight after the Reichstag fire (the night Siegi slipped into the underground), but following a brief and vigorous international peace campaign, was released and smuggled into Holland in March 1933. From there, he got to England where he campaigned steadfastly against political persecution in the Nazi regime and for the release of political prisoners; later he exposed Germany’s secret re-armament.
128. Another writer and leading theatre critic, though one who had not been on the left in Germany, Alfred Kerr, was already in his 60’s when he got out in February 1933 and finally arrived in England, where his prolific writings on the dangers of Nazism had some limited influence at an official level, including making contributions to the BBC (Vietor-Englānder, 1995).
129. Brinson and Dove: A Matter of Intelligence: MI5 and the Surveillance of anti-Nazi Refugees. MI5’s history partly explains their obsession. MI5 had originally been established to tackle the threat of German espionage, but during the 1920s and subsequently, its concern had shifted to include tackling Communists, firstly in the UK, but then in relation to Soviet espionage here. Siegi (and Lotte) will have conformed to all their stereotypes.
130. In July 1938, the Evian Conference, organised by the US to
deal with the issue of the Jewish immigration problem, reveals just how unwelcoming the British government were. The British delegate announced that Britain could not welcome more refugees, as Britain was already full, but he did suggest their going to the British colonies of E Africa which could take a small number of refugees.
131. An Eastwards trajectory from Germany is illustrated by the case of Gerhard Hinze, an actor, and a member of the KPD from 1930, who, after being arrested in Germany in 1933 and released in 1934, went East to the USSR, as did a couple of thousands fleeing Germany. Hinze finally made it to the UK, after he was ‘encouraged’ to leave the USSR (based on a personal conversation with Hinze’s son). Many of these exiles, though the exact number is not known, seeking socialism in the USSR, did not survive.