Henry Robinson (resistance fighter)

Henry Robinson (born May 8, 1897 in Brussels , † 1944 in Berlin ) was a functionary of the Comintern and the Communist Youth International (KJI).

Life

Robinson grew up in Belgium as a child of a Russian father and a Polish mother. During the First World War he studied in Geneva, where he worked with Willi Münzenberg .

At the beginning of the 1920s he worked as political director of the KJVD district in the Ruhr area and therefore more often at conferences in Berlin, where he met his partner Klara Schabbel . In 1923 they took part in the fighting against the occupation of the Rhine and Ruhr areas by French troops. From around 1930 both worked for the Comintern intelligence service, which later merged with that of the Red Army. Robinson became the section head for Switzerland, France and Great Britain, his partner secured the connection to Berlin and through the Soviet trade agency there also the connection to Moscow until June 1941.

In December 1943, Robinson was arrested by the "Rote Kapelle" commando , which, according to British archives, had become aware of Robinson through a tip from Leopold Trepper . After six months of Gestapo -haft in France with constantly repeated questioning under torture Robinson was in the detention center in Berlin-Moabit laid, where he was murdered by the Gestapo.

literature

• Gilles Perrault : On the trail of the Red Chapel. Europaverlag, Vienna et al. 1994, ISBN 3-203-51232-7 .
• Hans Coppi : The “Red Orchestra” in the field of tension between resistance and intelligence work. The Trepper Report from June 1943. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. 44, 1996, 3, ISSN  0042-5702 , pp. 431-458, ( online , PDF file; 7 MB, accessed on July 2, 2010).
• Thierrie Wolton: Le grand recrutement. B. Grasset, Paris 1993, ISBN 2-246-44821-2 .
• Hans Schafranek , Johannes Tuchel (Ed.): War in the ether. Resistance and espionage in World War II. Picus, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85452-470-6 .

Web links

• UKNA