Leo Flieg

Leopold Flieg was born into a Jewish working-class family in Berlin on 5 November 1893. == Communist Party of Germany ==

The founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) took place in Berlin over three days between 30 December 1918 and 1 January 1919. The core of the founding membership consisted of those who had hitherto been Spartacus League members; Flieg was a party member and part of the leadership team from the outset. He worked closely with Willi Münzenberg on the creation of the Young Communist International ("Kommunistische Jugendinternationale" / KJI), serving as a member of its executive committee from its launch in 1919 till March 1922. He was re-elected several times before Communists were excluded from the Landtag in 1933. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) became increasingly polarised during the later 1920s between those who were supportive of Stalin and those who dared to speculate that perhaps Lenin's successor should have been Leon Trotsky. The CPSU and the KPD were closely linked at various levels; party ruptures in Moscow often found powerful echoes among the comrades in Berlin. A major programme of expulsions was carried out in 1928 following the Wittorf Affair, during which Flieg was one of party leader Ernst Thälmann's only allies. Many of those expelled later established an alternative party. Sources insist that through this period Flieg carried out his party functions with skill, loyalty and meticulous care, without regard to whether the party leadership might be considered too far to the left or too far to the right. Then, in May 1932 Flieg was relieved by the KPD of his party responsibilities, seen as having become too close to Heinz Neumann, a close political comrade and a personal friend. In 1930/31 Neumann had become critical of Thälmann, and thereby also of Stalin, both of whom, he said, were underestimating the dangers presented by the rise of the Nazi Party. In April 1932 Neumann was stripped of his party functions and summoned to Moscow. Flieg was identified as a "member of the Neumann group" and his demotions, accompanied by the inevitable mutterings about Trotskyite sympathies, followed a few weeks later. His membership of the politburo was reduced to "candidate membership". == In exile ==

Despite his disgrace in Germany, Flieg still had influential friend in Moscow as a result of his years as linkman for the Berlin activities of the OMS. He knew Piatnitsky and Abramov-Mirov and other Comintern leaders from long years of working together on "intelligence matters". By the end of 1932 he was working in Moscow for the Comintern executive committee. Sources are not entirely consistent over his postings over the next few years. In January 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany and Communist activists were either arrested (or worse) or escaped abroad. Moscow and Paris both quickly became informal headquarter locations for the KPD in exile. Flieg was sent to Paris and was able to renew his important hands-on political work as a "technical secretary to the politburo". At Easter that year he received an invitation from the Comintern to a meeting in Moscow. Those with contacts in the Soviet Union were by this time fully aware of the rising level of political arrests under way in what later came to be known in English language sources as the Great Purge. Flieg knew the risks inherent in returning to Moscow and friends urged him to stay in Paris. The Swedish banker Olof Aschberg urged him not to go, and promised support in seeking "emigrant status" from the French authorities. But Flieg felt constrained to accept the invitation. He had responsibilities for party monies, and feared he might be accused of embezzlement by Comintern chiefs in Moscow if he did not comply with their order. == Death ==

mugshot, 1938 Flieg returned to Moscow in June 1937 and installed himself once more in the "Hotel Lux". His meeting with Comintern management took place, but he received only a reprimand. Early in 1938 the German representative among the Comintern leadership, Philipp Dengel, lodged an application for Flieg to be permitted to leave the country again. Authorisation never came through. Instead, on 20 March 1938, Flieg was arrested by the NKVD and charge with "membership of a right-wing Trotskyite spying organisation". In the course that lengthy succession of torture sessions he was persuaded to incriminate himself and many others. In the written "confession" extracted from him he confirmed his membership of a Comintern anti-Soviet conspiracy. On 14 March 1939 Flieg was condemned to death by a military tribunal of the High Court and executed by shooting. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957. == Legacy ==

Personal paranoia at the top of the Soviet government which underpinned the Great Purge can be seen as a sufficient explanation for Flieg's conviction. He was only one of many hundred Comintern workers and collaborators who fell victim to it. Documents from the Soviet Union that became available after 1990 disclosed a hitherto unsuspected level of involvement by leading members of the German community of exiled communists in Moscow. In the words of one headline that appeared in 1990, "more than a thousand German communists fell victim to the Stalin Terror, with the approval of leading comrades in the Communist Party of Germany". Subsequent investigation of contemporary documents suggests to some that the involvement of the leading German communist comrades probably extended beyond mere approval. In 2002 work undertaken on more recently studied Soviet documents led one specialist historian to point the finger at Herbert Wehner (identified in Soviet records of the time under the party name "Kurt Funk"). Wehner returned from Soviet exile in 1946 and rose to become a leading figure in West Germany's Social Democratic Party. Under NKVD interrogation in the Lubyanka Building during 1937 Wehner found himself accused of joint responsibility for the arrest, in Germany, of the German party leader, Ernst Thälmann, back in 1933. The accusation might have been expected to have ended in Wehner's death, but it did not. Wehner chose to co-operate. He wrote for his interrogators a lengthy report entitled "Report of investigation into deeply ingrained Trotzkyite activity in the German anti-fascist movement" ("Untersuchungsbericht zur trotzkistischen Wühlarbeit in der deutschen antifaschistischen Bewegung"). The report included the names of all the communist German political exiles in Moscow who shortly afterwards fell under suspicion of being "Trotskyites" and / or members of "counter-revolutionary groups". Wehner's report on Flieg included the observation that he had been characterised by party leader Ernst Thälmann as a rogue (" Er sei, so Wehner, vom Vorsitzenden Ernst Thälmann als Gauner bezeichnet worden"). Soon after Wehner submitted his report hundreds of KPD refugees were detained by the Soviet authorities. For Reinhard Müller this was part of a desperate "survival strategy", which for a terrified Herbert Wehner worked in its own terms, but for which hundreds of others paid the price. An alternative interpretation might be that the German political exiles caught up in the Great Purge would have been arrested anyway, and Wehner's active collusion merely facilitated the exercise. == References ==