Beaten But Not Defeated

by Merilyn Moos

  The report (HO144/17917), on ROP in India, dated 10.1.33, so soon after ‘Moos’s’ purported involvement with Vakil on behalf of ROP, analyses which Indian companies are taking ROP oil. As already referred to in the body of the biography, the report refers to Felix Bauer’s mission to India at the end of 1930 to arrange for the sale of Russian petrol, the consequent appearance of the YIOD company in India in January 1932 and of the return visit of Vakil and Joshi to Moscow in Bauer’s company during 1931.’The report (p2) expresses the fear that although YIOD had an ostensible economic purpose, ‘yet there is cause for the suspicion that this will not always be the case.’ The report continues (p3) that this suspicion is heightened by the fact that when there was a dispute with Burma Shell Co, YIOD dispatched Vakil -again-to help sort it out. It continues that Vakil sent cables from Moscow (incredibly quoted verbatim in the report!) about negotiations. In other words, Vakil was both a key operator between the Indian company and Russia and apparently trusted in Moscow. London was moreover a place where negotiations occurred on more than one occasion.

  The Report continues (p4) by expressing a fear that ‘political suspects’ such as Congressmen (!), Communists and agitators might become more significant. Again quoting from intercepted correspondence, the report suggests (p4, 5) that the ROP link may not be successful. It concludes: ‘Until the result of the negotiations in Moscow [by Vakil] are known, it is difficult to see how the wind is blowing. The dangers of the position are only too apparent.’ The Home Office and MI5 were clearly exceedingly concerned in the operations of ROP in India, maybe even more so because it involved oil.

  A telling aside: the document to Kell from 2 March 1932 reveals that the previous Russian managers of ROP in the UK were being withdrawn by Moscow (p2) and replaced (p3) (though they too were apparently seen as incompetent!) In a report sent from Wilson on behalf of Kell, to MacIver, in their correspondence from 1931, it states that the Russian directors of ROP who had ‘bone-fide knowledge of the oil business and real commercial ability, have recently been dismissed for refusing to subordinate the commercial interests of the Company to Soviet political purposes‘, later referred to as ‘causing general disorganisation at the time of a national emergency.’ But It may not surprise all of us that: ‘A letter of February 3 1930 from the OGPU in Moscow contained instructions to the secret service in London to carry out a purge of such ‘outside elements’ as still remained in ROP‘!

  One of the intriguing aspects of all this documentation is the frequent appearance of Sir V. Kell, whom much of the accompanying letters are addressed to. To give a couple of examples: a letter and accompanying material from the foreign office, dated 2 March 1932, on ROP and a reference in a letter, marked secret, of the 12 May 1931 from J. MacIver at the Home Office to ‘Holt’ in which he asks for more information on the ‘ROP Danger, beyond Sir Kell’s letter of January 1930’. In Holt Wilson’s reply ‘for Col.Sir V.G. Kell’, dated 1 April 1931, Wilson writes about the dangers of sabotage.

  Kell was the first Director General of MI5 (and was known as ‘K’!). According to Wikipedia (drawn from Popplewell: Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the British Empire 1995,) during World War I, Kell headed the MI5 section dealing with Indian revolutionaries in India and Europe, called MI5 (g) and was connected to the establishment of counter-espionage networks. It would appear Kell maintained a close interest in Indian affairs.203 When my mother was interned, much of the documentation then also was signed by him, presumably before his forced resignation. Given the randomness of the ‘arrests’, maybe - though this seems far-fetched, Kell’s earlier involvement with Indian affairs alerted him subsequently to the name of ‘Moos’. But Kell was also notorious as an ant-Communist, opining in the 1930s that fascism insists on the interests of all classes and was an understandable reaction to Communism which preached class war (Brinson and Dove, 2014).

  End-note

  203. Kell was removed by Churchill in May, 1940. MI5 had become overburdened with the introduction of internment. Within the first six months of the war, 64,000 citizens of Germany, Austria and Italy resident in the UK had to undergo security interviews to confirm that they were “friendly aliens”.

  Appendix 8

  The Workers’ Olympics

  There were three internationally organised Workers Olympics, the first in Frankfurt, organised by the Socialist Workers Sport international (SAS) associated with the SPD. Workers sports organisations had been active as political and communal groups since the 1850s partly providing a front for socialist political activity. (Liberal democratic politics in Germany from the 1840s to the 1870s were debated mainly within gymnastic association that were less prone to being spied on by the Prussian government (I would like to thank Lehmann for a copy of his paper Action as Property: Sport in Modernism, originally delivered at the Victoria and Albert Museum)

  Soon after the LSI began in 1922 to plan for a Workers’ Olympiad in Frankfurt in 1925, the RSI, which was a separate organisation, demanded that the four RSI sections (Russia, Czechoslovakia, France and Norway) participate with full privileges. Although LSI rules specified that participation in its activities be restricted to members, they were initially flexible, hoping for a unified international movement but the LSI’s – sectarian - demand that the RSI clubs had to join the LSI, was rejected by the RSI and the LSI then rejected RSI involvement. In fact, the RSI then tried to get into the Olympics, causing further friction between the two organisations (Steinberg, 1978).

  Through opening ceremonies overflowing with red flags, mass free exercises in which hundreds of participants engaged in simultaneous choral movements, the mass pyramids with which the festival ended and the Weihespiel ‘Kampf um die Erde (Struggle for the World), a powerful dramatic presentation using large speaking and acting choruses that portrayed sport as the source of strength for the creation of a new world, the Olympiad demonstrated proletarian solidarity and brotherhood’ (Steinberg, 1978).

  The success of these Olympics was phenomenal - about 100,000 attended, the largest sporting event ever: they embraced men and women and children and actively encouraged the participation of people in the audience in mass exercises (the most popular of all the events). It was also a statement about inclusion and internationalism after the failures of the SPD and the Second International to oppose the First World War. They believed in the importance of the body which daily was exploited and the seat of capitalist exploitation but which, during sport, the worker could regain control over and also use in the pursuit of solidity in sport and elsewhere. ‘The aim [of the Workers Olympics] was to promote political emancipation (socialism) for those with no ready access to economic, social and political decision making processes; reformation of working hours and structuring of leisure time through meaningful activities; improving living conditions for the largest parts of society; formation of a genuinely new (working class) culture with original expressions; and ensuring that a new generation would have improved access to education, safe working conditions and better health than their parents ‘ (Lehmann, July 2012).204

  The Workers’ Olympics stressed the bourgeois character of the official Olympics and emphasised its own internationalism e.g. no national flags, its educational purpose, such as the promotion of working class culture, and the importance of mass participative, (Lehmann, V and A, p17). Apparently, the official Olympics, organized by Baron de Coubertin in 1924 had drawn about similar numbers, though it, unlike the Workers Internationale, emphasised competition and prizes, severely limited the participation of women and, like the modern Olympics, did not entertain either group sporting activities or audience participation! Anybody interested in this aspect of workers sport should try to see the film, directed by Prager: The First Workers Olympics, and check out the work of U. Lehmann from whose lecture at the Tate Modem, in July 2012, this endnote is largely drawn.

  Participants in the Second WorkersA Olympic which took place in Vienna in 1931 in a period of more evident
class conflict, presented more martial imagery, with an emphasis on the prole-tariat’s need to ready itself for class struggle through workersA sport and the construction of workers militias (Lehmann).205

  The Communist sports groups organised a series of workers sports festivals, starting in 1922, some of them with international participation, including from the USSR, and supported by up to hundred thousand, but never on the scale of the Frankfurt Olympiad. These events all had accompanying cultural activities, which appear to have been close to compulsory viewing.

  End-note

  204. Lehmann, The New Great Power: The First Workers’ Olympics, 1925, July 2012, presented at Tate Modern.

  205. I would like to thank Ulrich Lehmann for a copy of his paper: Action as Property: Sport in Modernism, originally delivered at The Victoria and Albert Museum

  Appendix 9

  Lotte Moos

  My mother’s life between 1933 and 1940 was eventful in its own right. But this study is not her so the appendix will only sketch in her life and highlight the points which most effected Siegi.

  Lotte was born in December 1909 to bourgeois culturally Jewish parents in Berlin. Her father was a merchant, her mother, most unusually for that time, especially for a woman and a woman from a not - that - distant ‘Ost-Juden’ background, an accountant. Lotte was the youngest of three sisters: Annamarie, Kate and her. She told me she was the apple of her father’s eye, I suspect because, though he had wanted a boy, Lotte was the brightest of the three, the most adventurous and, like him, a bookworm. (She once told me she had read most of Dostoevsky by the age of 11. When I gasped, she replied: Why not?) She apparently had an article accepted by a Berlin daily at about the same age.

  She left the Gymnasium (a version of grammar school) and home at a remarkably early age, probably around 15, and went to work in a photographer’s shop in the early days of film. She lived, she told me, as far from her parents as possible in the Eastern - and working class -reaches of Berlin. I never found out exactly what went wrong at home but know her mother used to hit Lotte on the face for being naughty (which I suspect she rarely was) and that there were serious problems about how her parents behaved towards the eldest daughter, Annamarie. I suspect that Lotte did not feel she could protect her less clever sister from her parents and that contributed to her early flight from home.

  In around 1929, when she was 20, Lotte joined an agit-prop group, probably Die Truppe, where she met my father, who was directing, and generally a significant figure in the agit-prop world. Soon after, in 1931, she went to Humbolt university in Berlin to study economics where she got nothing but A’s. Having lived together in a number of addresses across ‘eastern’ and ‘middle’ Berlin, from early on in their relationship, Siegi and she got married in October 1932, because, she told me, they were preparing for flight. It was a very small wedding, Siegi was late (one of my mother’s few stories) and she led me to understand her parents did not approve of Siegi and did not attend (but I’m no longer so sure about this).

  Lotte denied belonging to the Communist Party (KPD) even when she started to confess to me, under pressure, about other parts of her life. What fools, is how she would talk of the KPD members in Berlin, including my father in this embrace. But papers have come to light which suggest she was a member between 1934 and 1936. I guess her paranoia about Stalinism ran so deep she could not confess to this even when she was in her late 90’s!

  But Lotte was very much to the left of any brand of Social Democracy, and also, like Siegi, rejected religion, very much including Judaism. When Richard and I used to visit my parents in the 1960s and early 70s, she would tell Richard she had supported Brandler (briefly leader of the KPD before expulsion for right deviationism - see end-note 55). She became a keen reader of Labour, then Socialist, Worker in the 1960s and 1970s, and, even after Siegi’s death, came out on a number of anti-Tory demonstrations when already in her 80s.

  Lotte, though not an activist like Siegi, was certainly politically astute and told me that it was she who insisted on their leaving Germany as the Nazi storm clouds gathered (discussed in the main body of the biography). She told me, maybe with hindsight, that she knew all was lost on May 1 1929. My father, always the more optimistic one, would never have succumbed to such pessimism of the spirit!

  Unlike my father who went into hiding on the night of the Reichstag fire, Lotte felt safe enough to merely remove herself to a distant aunts in the countryside outside Berlin - she had, she said, been unwell. She then applied openly to the police for exit papers and permission to leave. Police documents state that she officially left Germany on 27.7.1933, almost five months after Siegi had gone into hiding.

  Lotte told me that, she caught a train to Paris. In April, dressed in a neat suit as if she were going to a funeral, so as to look less suspicious. She had no idea she was leaving her parents and Berlin forever. Those Nazis would not last more than a few months, she told me, and then the German bourgeois would get rid of them. Or so she had believed, with a mixture of (inaccurate) class understanding and snobbery.

  In Paris, she made use of a network, I suspect Jewish contacts, to get herself a job as a bobineuse which allowed her to support herself.207 She found a flat in a working class block and waited for Siegi.

  She used to tell the story which I believe but may nonetheless be apocryphal that, one day in October, she went down to the Gare de L’Est for the first time, impelled by intuition, and there was Siegi sauntering off a train. The intervening six months must have very difficult for her.

  But then things start to go wrong. Until the last years of her life, most of the little she told me, turned out to be lies. So my sketch of the next part of her life is partly based on what she did finally tell me, partly reconstruction, partly an input from David Perman who interviewed her when she was already in her 90s to write her biography.205

  Whatever the cause, Lotte left Paris in 1933 at least 3 months before Siegi and only a couple of months after they had re-met. Maybe it was because she had relatives in the UK who could ‘sponsor’ her and therefore she could establish a relatively easy claim to right of entry, maybe it was because Siegi had a political role to fulfil in Paris, maybe this is an early sign of their impending domestic disturbances. She told me she had insisted that she would go to London and the LSE, whether he came with her or not, and that France was not safe. Again, it is impossible to know how far it was to follow her that Siegi left in February 1934, how far it was Party instructions and how far Siegi too spotted the increasing threat of the extreme right. (He left only weeks before Deladier became President.) If we believe Lotte, and on this matter I tend to, by 1934 she had twice saved my father’s life.

  Lotte arrived in London, and was admitted by an essentially kindly customs officer (from one of her stories). But, to her lifelong distress, LSE refused to accept her existing qualifications: she would have had to take the entry exams like an 18 year old and Lotte probably partly out of pique - she was after all an outstanding student in Berlin, partly for financial reasons, refused.

  She got herself a small job teaching German at the Linguists club. There she met Brian Gould Vershoyles. Brian was a few years younger than Lotte, good looking and from a ruling class Protestant liberal Irish family (For more detailed information, please refer to Barry McCloughlin’s ‘Left to the Wolves’). It is impossible to know for sure what their relationship became but a couple of years later, she follows Brian to the USSR, against Party instructions. He was, though she did not know this, a low-grade spy for the Russians, a courier of messages. It is not clear what passport she travelled on to Vienna but she appeared to have gone via Vienna where she met - for the last time - her beloved father. She sends Siegi (addressed to Lawn Road) a card from Vienna by Titian of ‘Jesus and the adulteress’, where the scribes are arguing with Jesus whether the woman should be stoned!

  Moscow turned out to be horrific. Brian and Lotte were spied on and bullied by the Party. They had to move from one crumby hotel to o
ne that was an even worse. Lotte became very ill. Undoubtedly, their behaviour was careless, naïve even - they tried to speak to people about many sensitive issues such as food shortages and queuing - which Lotte hated, went on demonstrations and generally ignored that Russia was a place where the level of repression was heading towards the 1937 lethal show trials. The story ends dreadfully. Siegi campaigned tirelessly to get her out, contacting the great and the good in the UK in an effort to get pressure brought on the UK Embassy to get Lotte out of the USSR, even apparently sending her money. Lotte is finally allowed out – according to her, theoretically to go to a Youth Conference. When she finally spoke to me about this, she said she ‘escaped, rather than being let out’, but sadly refused to develop on this.

  Brian, who had not been allowed out, first got sent to Spain (I suspect this was part of the deal which got Lotte released) to act as a radio engineer, his trade. Lotte sent him articles and letters including supposed code supporting POUM. Brian was kidnapped and shipped to the Soviet Union. He is then interrogated and sent to a prison in Siberia where he died. In the interrogation, his inquisitors persist in asking him questions about Lotte. It is clear from the notes from Brian’s inquisition that she was thought to be a Trotskyist (false) and Brian is therefore also seen as therefore also sympathetic to Trotskyism.206 It amounted to a death sentence.