by Merilyn Moos
23.4.1938 So today you are probably moving into your new home [in Oxford]. Accept my fondest and sincerest wishes for your moving. May this new home be the starting point of a very happy, satisfying and successful life for you. Even if perhaps not all your wishes will be granted, you can still be happy with your fate, compared to all those who can’t see a light. I can tell long stories of disappointment and cold attitude of people who have obviously not yet heard about our fate. In spite of that, I don’t give up.
29.7.1938 I won’t leave anything untried to help you as much as possible - of course only totally legally - with starting a new existence in the USA.
12.8.1938 As long as one breathes one has to remain faithful to ones patriotic attitude and ones honest feeling and thinking, even if the environment does not see or acknowledge it.
I want to let you know that descendants of my family tree live in Pittsburgh. I wish for you that you can make and shape your journey through life alone with your own strength, but it can’t do any harm if you can find access to local families through family support. I have written to your dear parents in Berlin about purchasing tickets through a Jewish emigration institution. I have offered my help, but your parents doubt whether it is allowed in the time in question. Money fulfils its ideal value only if it is used for noble purposes. Giving is always bliss.
7.12.1938 As you can imagine I am trembling for my home and I hope I can keep it, if not I’ll have to bear that as well. A. and B. will have got the necessary papers for emigration together, but the winding up of the businesses will still take months.
27.4.1939 You can imagine that due to all the incidents I haven’t got the income any more and also not the property as before. Also the circle of needy relatives and good friends, as well as charities, has grown. I am unfortunately subjected to restriction in this respect. The Berlin family is very close to me.
17.7.1939 Yesterday afternoon I could admire an absolutely wonderful sea of flowers in the garden so that wandering from one tree and bush to the next, I forgot all that could sadden me. The very first pear tree on the espalier the ‘good Louise of Arranches‘ has to suffer under the very massive group of birch trees that take a lot of light, air and also food away, but it survives and bears its beautiful and delicious fruits year by year delighting heart and also stomach until the beginning spring.
You’ll be as pleased as I am with the prospect of our dear children being together again soon and hopefully being healthy. Let us wait calmly until it will be realised.
No date. (Last letter) I have stayed in this pension for the last 16 days and have every reason to be content. But both of us would be very happy to have a home of our own again.
Appendix 4
Brief biographies of some of the members of the committee of the illegal cell of the Proletarian Free-thinkers
Though this falls outside the period where we can trace Siegi’s movements in Germany, it is nevertheless worth spending a moment in memory of these courageous fighters against Nazism. Fomferra’s letter also gives us a brief glimpse of how illegal work was organised - as well as its terrible risks.
Fomferra, born 1895, in Essen, from a working class family, joined the SPD in 1912, the USPD between 1918-22, the Communist Workers Party between 1920 and 1923, then condemned to 18 months prison for assault on a bank, from 1923, a member of KPD in Ruhr and leader of the Proletarian Hundreds, followed by another 16 month prison stint for explosive offences. In 1929-30, he went to the Comintern school in Moscow and worked for the secret underground intelligence department of the KPD.
In Berlin, Fomferra’s responsibility was for print and distribution of all illegal papers and printed matters. Printing was done by Eugen Schonhaar, who was arrested or murdered/executed at the Kilometraberg, in connection with the Kattner affair. (The leader of this unit was Willy Reimers, arrested in 1933. Fritz Brilla took over responsibility for printing until April 1934, along with Comrade Countess von Hardenberg, Fritz Domnick and others, as well as the comrades in charge of the District.)
In March 1934, five comrades were arrested in different places, including Fomferra, Brilla at Dahlem Dorf tube station, Comrade von Hardenberg in her flat, the messenger at Templehof Station and Fritz Domnick at Dortmund. They had been observed for weeks, as they found out during interrogation. Fomferra spent 3 years in Luckau Suchthaus (hard labour camp) till May 1937, after which he became active in the Mett group, before being re-arrested in 1939 as part of the Munich special action following the failed attempt on Hitler’s life in Munich, though released after five weeks interrogation. He was active in Unit 6A with comrade Seigewam, Uhrig, Pfeifer, Karl 1991 and others. After the arrest of Mett and Uhrich, Fomferra apparently became active in the group Matthils Coehnen until the collapse of Germany. He died a natural death in 1979.
Walter Weidauer, a member of the Proletarian Freethinkers, was born in 28.7.1889 in Saxony, the son of a basket maker. He became a carpenter, joined the proletarischen Jugendbewegung in 1916 (proletarian youth movement) in 1920 USPD, (the Independent Social Democratic party) and early in 1922, the KPD, and became a city councillor in Zwickau. In 1929, he was expelled from CC of carpenters union for KPD activity, and then began his main work for the KPD. Until 1932, he was the leader of the KPD publishers in Essen, and the ‘election leader’ of the KPD Proletarian Freethinkers in Saxony.
He seems to have combined legal and illegal activities in the crucial 1932-33 period. His ‘career’ suggests the degree to which these two worlds cannot be understood discretely for this period. In July 1932 Weidauer was elected as a KPD’s nominated delegate to the Reichstag. until his arrest in February/March 1933, when he was held in ‘protective custody’. He was released in 12.33.
He then continued with illegal work in the Freethinkers, though, interestingly, this is not included in his CV presented by the German parliament (probably because the record is based on Weidauer’s submission in 1932 when he would not have included any illegal activity.)
In 4.34, he is re-arrested and charged by the central court in Saxony, Dresden, in November 34. In 28 .2.1935, he is surprisingly set free. He then escaped to Denmark till the Nazis caught up with him - in 1940, he was arrested by Danish police - and in January 41 handed over to Gestapo in Hamburg, where he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
He survived to join the SED in 1946, becoming mayor of Dresden around 1948. He died a natural death in 1986 in Dresden (from German parliamentary notes on Bundestag membership).
Fritz Bischoff, another member of the proletarian freethinkers, was born in 1900 near Berlin in a working class family. He trained in a Business school and later worked in universal films. He joined the Sparticist group in 1916 and the KPD in 1918. He was employed by the Soviet trade delegation in Berlin and Hamburg until 12. 1930. Nominally, he led the KPD agit-prop department in Berlin - Brandenburg and Wasser Kante Hamburg. By the end of 1930, he was the head of Proletarian Freethinkers in Hessen, Frankfurt. So he and Siegi overlapped in two spheres and must have known each other well, probably well.
Unlike Siegi, Fritz stayed in Germany and in 9/1934, was arrested in Heidelberg and in 12. 34, sentenced to 8 years prison. In 1942; he was moved from prison in Kastel to Sachenhausen CC, then in 1944, to Neuengamme Concentration camp. At the very end of the war, he was one of 45 prisoners who were put on ship Ancona, and died two days before the end of WW2. (Source: Reimann papers)
Nothing could be found about Hans Mainz or Walter Jopp, other committee members of the Berlin Proletarian Freethinkers.
Appendix 5
On the divisions amongst the revolutionary left, Germany 1929
For those interested in such matters, it is worth noting in passing the fate of the KPDO and of the LeninBund. In Offenbach, Frankfurt, only the KPDO won over a majority of the membership, functionaries and the communist electorate on the issue of the left turn in 1928/9. They did, however, have significant influence within the KPD in the districts of Württemberg, centred on Stuttgart; Silesia, centred on
Breslau, and in Saxony, especially the southwest of the region with an epicentre in Chemnitz. Brandler was one of the leading figures. Leaflets were distributed at factory gates and meetings held, e.g. by Paul Fröhlich, but the CC had control of the channels of communication. The strength of support for the Right among trade-union Communists also brought invitations (for example to Brandler) from cell groups to speak on the implications for factory work, but the CC used force to prevent this happening. Drawing from Weber’s Wandlung, LaPorte (2002) reveals the fate of the ‘right’. On 22 December 1928, they were accused of attempting to refound a Spartacus Bund, of representing a ‘socialist current in the communist movement’ and having broken with Leninism. At the end of December eight prominent leaders (J.Walcher, A. Schreiner, Max Koehler, P. Fröhlich, A. Enderle, Hans Tittel, A.Schmidt and Karl Rehbein) were expelled; Brandler and Thalheimer, who were members of the CPSU, were also purged. (LaPorte, 2002) The CC acted against supporters of the Right who remained in the KPD by imposing a solidarity declaration. The formation of the KPDO as an independent party at the end of 1928 only organised between 4,000 and 6,000 former members of the KPD (LaPorte, 2002) But the Right opposition had comprised full-time trade-union officials, party union functionaries and factory councilors; councilors in the local government, part of the militant workers movement who regarded left-wing SPDs as potential Communists rather than the social basis of ‘social fascism’.
The Lenin Bund, an unstable political construction led by the expelled Left Opposition leaders around Fischer, Maslow, Urbahns and Scholem, was an attempt to unite the Left factions in the KPD with those already expelled from it in a campaign for a left-wing policy but few in the KPD joined them and, once the KPD had again turned ultra-left in 1928, one fraction, under Fischer, attempted to rejoin and the majority were allowed to return on condition that they desisted from oppositional activities for six months (LaPorte, 2002: 182). LaPorte (2002) drawing on Szejnmann, C.C. W., 1994, gives the figure of only some 50 SPD members in Leipzig joining the left-socialist SAPD in 1931: in Zwickau the party lost 20 per cent of its membership-significant but not a viable alternative Szejnmann, C-C. W. 1994, ‘The Rise of the Nazi Party in Saxony between 1921 and 1933’, Ph.D. thesis (King’s College, University of London.) But even in Leipsig, there is no evidence of organised co-operation between rank-and-file members of the KPD and the KPDO, which comprised some 500 members in Leipzig’s skilled textile and printing trades (LaPorte, 2002:361)
Appendix 6
The Weber/ LaPorte debate over the Stalinisation of the KPD
Much of the following is drawn from LaPorte, Kevin Morgan and Matthew Worley’s article: Stalinization and Communist Historiography in Matthew Worley, Kevin Morgan, and Norman LaPorte’s, Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern
Weber, in his Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus, sought to explain how a mass working class party with a high level of internal democracy in the years soon after its formation became subordinated to the Comintern and the priorities of Soviet foreign policy, in a way which had never happened before in the history of the workers’ movement. Weber particularly looked to the period from the midto late 1920s in which, as Stalin established his authority in Moscow, the Comintern exploited factional tensions from 1924, As argued throughout its work, the KPD which had already become Stalinised by the end of the 1920s, proved incapable of significantly modifying the Comintern’s assessment that social democracy rather than Nazism was communism’s ‘main enemy’, resulting in Nazi victory. LaPorte suggests the distinctiveness of Weber’s analysis is that he combined four separate but interrelated variables: the domination of the party by the party apparatus; the role of internal factionalism, which prevented the KPD developing its distinct ideological stance and gave the Centre far more important directional role than it otherwise would have had; political and material dependence on the Comintern, in part because of the decline of its activist base and therefore its subs; and the KPD’s marginality to German politics, particularly following the failures of 1918 and 1923 (discussed later in the text).
This model, while broadly accepted, has been questioned including in terms of Weber’s periodising, and that his approach is not bottom up, one of the strengths of LaPorte’s approach. Another approach, also discussed within the text itself, is to analyse the relative appeals of and disastrous divisions between the SPD and KPD in class terms.
Finally, Mallman K-M. Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik: Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), also referred to in the text, in a more recent critique of Weber’s approach, argues that the KPD had greater relative autonomy, in which there was a divergence of local experiences in the relationship between KPD and SPD members. While LaPorte analyses the ‘exceptionalism’ of Saxony, Mallman studied the Saarland (contested as another atypical region of Germany) and argued for the existence of a ‘left-proletarian milieu’ where workers could unite in struggle, and not be dominated by the Party line.
Many other debates have taken place which this is not the space to enter into: about whether the KPD was ‘stalinised’ before Stalin, about how far the differences with other Communist parties illuminate KPD specificity etc.
Appendix 7
Russian Oil Products (ROP)
This appendix refers only to matters of relevance to the biography and therefore ends in 1932, the last year that Siegi could have had dealings with them - though the little evidence available actually suggests his role was restricted to 1931 and 32. So this appendix, which is drawn from Files at the PRO is in no way an overview of the information on this company. It is also worth mentioning that most of these files were supposedly to be held secret for up to another 30 years but that a FOI request resulted in their going into the public domain in 2007. However, some of the material is still redacted!
To start with a brief background of the company Russian Oil Products in the UK: it was created in 1924, and subsequently registered, set up an office in London (and Dublin) and started building a network of 35 depots between and 1938 (HO KV5/73, HO144/17916 and 7, Competition Commission publication on petrol distribution in the UK, 1914 - 1970) for cut price petrol. Serious price wars with larger distributors broke out and there was even a sustained media campaign in the 1930’s to boycott Russian oil.
It is clear that from 1926 to 1932 (c.f. Letter from 12th Dec, 1932, signed by the Under-Secretary of State, directing attention to a report from March 1932) that the Home Office, the Secret Service and parts of the police thought the ROP, unlike other Russian companies, was not just a commercial company but also an organisation that hid potential spies, and was the seat of political propaganda in the UK for the communist cause, financed it was suggested by the sale of oil, and could provide the basis for insurrection. In a couple of HO documents from the late 20s and early 30s (HO 144/17917), MI5 explicitly states that ROP’s facilities and staff would or could be used to bring about acts of espionage for the USSR and sabotage in the event of hostilities with the USSR. Unlike the other oil companies, ROP cannot be discounted in terms of sabotage (’secret’ document ‘Dangers to Internal Security…in an Emergency’) ‘Definite orders have been found from Moscow that in the event of a declaration of war, workers must be able to frustrate the campaign by a general disorganisation’ (dated 8 May 1932 in HO144/17916) Note, amongst the political hysteria, the assumption that the USSR would inevitably be on the opposite side.
It was also believed that ROP provided links with underground elements of the British Communist Party (HOKV 5/73) and that the CPGB had a cell in the ROP which developed networks with other Communists working in factories across the UK, and fed the USSR with relevant commercial-as well as political - information, although it was not clear how this actually took place. On p7, the report suggests that the Soviet Government ‘hoped to make use of the pseudo-Communist Drug and Chemical workers Union, which was built up under the auspices of ROP’, and whose membership largely overlapped with theirs
.
The Home Office had an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the ‘communist activists and employees working at ROP, Russian and British (eg, a HO document ‘ROP and their employees’ dated 23 February 1932 and sent to Kell at MI5 {see below} and list of names submitted by Josh (?) at the Metropolitan Police, 14 January 1931, to 5 initialled recipients (KV 5/73)) (One source is cleara disgruntled British employee, hoping for consequent rewards from HM Government). At one point (p6), the Report on ‘Russian Oil’ states: ‘The most influential British Communist …is Ross Shar who is known to be concerned with espionage and to make occasional visits to Moscow.’ There follow copious details of his contacts in Moscow. Clearly, MI5 kept a close watch on the company.
Unfortunately, the papers do not mention Siegi but do on a couple of occasions mention a German link. For example, towards the end of the document dated 5th May 1932, referred to above, it states: ‘The Company in Germany [Derop, ‘ROP’s sister company’) is very definitely a centre for political intrigue and espionage and is so regarded by the German authorities’. In another brief reference to Derop, the report states: ‘The political and revolutionary uses of DEROP are more [than in the UK] clearly visible’ In another reference to Germany, the ‘secret’ marked report from 7.12.32 on ROP in India (HO144/17917), states: ‘We have definite information that Wilhelm Münzenberg the prominent German Communist and head of the League against Imperialism in Berlin received direct from the German branch of the Naptha Syndicate a large sum which was not entered in any cash books of the company.’ Though Naptha was nominally in competition with ROP (but appears to have held shares in it at the same time), this style of link was unlikely to be a one-off and increases the possibility of a similar sort of arrangement with Siegi.