Carl Vital Moor

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Carl Vital Moor , also known as Karl Moor , (* 11 December 1852 in Friborg , † 14 June 1932 in Berlin ) was a Swiss journalist and social democratic politicians, as well as a secret agent for the Central Powers in the First World War .

biography

Carl Vital Moor was born in Freiburg (Switzerland) in 1852 as the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Moor. His father came from the canton of Friborg and turned away from the family after he was born. The German Baron Theodor Freiherr Buirette von Oehlefeldt, whom Maria Anna Moor later married, is often incorrectly stated as Moor's biological father, but this is based on Moors own statements. The young Carl Moor grew up in Aarau , Graz and Nuremberg . He studied at various German universities from 1871 to 1874 and then in Bern until 1876 . Between 1876 and 1881 he was re-enrolled at German universities. He attended courses in law, political science , history, philosophy , philology and anthropology , but never finished his studies. Even during his student days he worked as a journalist for the Zurich Tagwacht .

In 1881 he was expelled from Germany with reference to the Socialist Act, whereupon he moved to Basel . There he worked between 1881 and 1885 as a station assistant in the Basel train station as an employee of the Swiss Central Railway . During this time he joined the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP). In 1885 he was for a short time the non-drafting editor of the socio-politically oriented Swiss border post in Basel.

At the beginning of the 1890s he moved to Bern and lived there until 1917. In 1894 he became editor of the Berner Tagwacht , after he had previously become chairman of the “Berner Arbeiterunion”, which published this newspaper. He held this position until 1907. Because of his radical views, there was a split in the Bern labor movement. Among other things, he quarreled with Albert Steck , who pursued a somewhat more moderate policy. After his death in 1899 Moor was able to achieve a leading position among the Bernese Social Democrats.

In 1897 he was elected to the Bern City Council, of which he was a member until 1920. He remained in the Grand Council , which he also joined in 1897, until 1922.

From his youth, Moor had contact with socialists from various countries. Among other things, he took part in congresses of the First and Second International and was able to make many contacts. This is how he met Lenin at the International Socialist Congress in 1904 . In 1908 he became the Swiss representative in the “International Socialist Bureau” (ISB). In 1915 he took part in the Zimmerwald conference .

After his mother died in 1908, he inherited an amount worth millions. With these financial resources he supported the Bolsheviks in exile in Switzerland. In general, he supported various socialist parties over the course of time with several hundred thousand francs. In order to support the Russian Revolution , he gave the Bolsheviks a loan that was to be repaid after the revolution. He therefore traveled to Moscow in 1917 to claim his money back, but initially remained unsuccessful and therefore moved back to Bern in 1919. Since he was now in great financial difficulties, he went back to Moscow in 1920 and tried by all means to get his money back. It was not until 1927 that he managed to get most of the sum back. In the same year he went to Berlin, where he spent the last years of his life in a private sanatorium. In 1932 he married the nurse Vera, née Eremeeff, who was born in Russia in 1888 and died that same year.

Intelligence activity

Although Moor was clearly left-wing politically up to the beginning of the 20th century, he spied on the Bolsheviks for the Central Powers during the First World War . He worked for both the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, informing neither of the two belligerent powers about his employment with the other. His goal was to create a separate peace between the Central Powers and the Bolsheviks, whom he had supported with his money. To whom his loyalty belonged has not been fully clarified, but he did not seem to want to harm the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks or the Zimmerwald Conference.

His secret service activities became known to the public when the German and Austrian archives were opened in 1945. Before that he was only considered a supporter of the Bolsheviks and one of the last great pioneers of the First International. But through his stepfather he had contact with various influential people in the German and Austrian government, such as the Bavarian Minister of War and the Bavarian envoy in Vienna. This made it easy for him at the beginning of the war to convince the ambassadors of the Central Powers in Bern that he was on their side. He provided them with information on the revolutionary groups of the Social Democrats and always tried to bring in his own ideas. His superiors were particularly interested in what happened at the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915 and the Stockholm Conference in 1917 . His statements and information reached the highest places, such as the German negotiator in Versailles , Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau .

Political functions

  • 1882: Joins the Social Democratic Party in Basel
  • 1894: Chairman of the Workers' Union
  • 1897–1920: Member of the Bern City Council
  • 1897–1922: Member of the Bernese Grand Council
  • 1908: Swiss representative in the International Socialist Bureau
  • 1909: President Berner SP

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Leonhard Haas: Carl Vital Moor 1852-1932. A life for Marx and Lenin . Benziger Verlag, Zurich / Einsiedeln / Cologne 1970, p. 12-15 .
  2. ^ Marina Rumjanzewa : A Swiss as a financier of the Russian revolution. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . January 26, 1999.
  3. ↑ Heinz Schurer: Karl Moor. German Agent and Friend of Lenin . In: Journal of Contemporary History . No. 5 , 1970, p. 131-152 .
  4. ^ Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf : Germany between East and West. Karl Moor and German-Russian Relations in the First Half of 1919 . In: Archives for Social History . No. 3 , 1963, p. 223-263 .
personal data
SURNAME Moor, Carl Vital
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Moor, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss journalist, social democratic politician and secret agent
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1852
PLACE OF BIRTH Freiburg in Üechtland
DATE OF DEATH June 14, 1932
Place of death Berlin