Leo Roth (agent)

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Leo Roth (born March 18, 1911 in Galicia , Austria-Hungary , † November 10, 1937 in Moscow ) was a German agent of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and partner of Helga von Hammerstein , a daughter of Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord .

Origin and professional training

Roth was born on March 18, 1911 in Rzeszów in the then Austro-Hungarian Galicia. He was the son of a Jewish textile merchant who emigrated with his family to Berlin in January 1913 . After secondary school, Roth began an apprenticeship as a locksmith, as he was seeking practical training for the planned emigration to Palestine .

Political beginning

As a 13-year-old, Roth joined the left-wing youth group Poalei Zion . In 1926 he joined the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) , but a year later, like Nathan Steinberger, he was excluded from the KJVD as a Korsch supporter . Instead, he became a member of the Lenin League and associated with Ruth Fischer , Arkadi Maslow and Hugo Urbahns, who were ostracized by the KPD . In 1929, as part of the demarcation of the KPD from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) , which was now being fought as "Social Fascists", Roth became a member of the KJVD again and became a full-time functionary in the illegally operating "BB Apparat", the organization for company reporting in the Berlin-Brandenburg district the KPD. In 1930/1931 he received intelligence training in a special school with attached military training ("M-School") in the Soviet Union .

activity

On returning to Germany, he lived illegally from 1933 under various aliases (above all Ernst Hess and Viktor, also Rudi, Stefan, Berndt, Friedrich Kotzner, Albert) and was Reich instructor of the KPD's BB apparatus. In 1932 he became Hans Kippenberger's secretary . Under the party name “Viktor” he rose in 1933 to become one of the most important functionaries of the “M apparatus”, the illegal military-political organization of the KPD. As head of the department for “special connections” he organized the so-called top connections between the KPD Politburo and the individual members of the KPD Secretariat such as Kippenberger and Herbert Wehner, as well as informants from business, the military and politics. On behalf of the KPD, with the consent of John Schehr , he also maintained connections a. a. to British, French a. Czech secret service, to the military, diplomats and journalists of these countries like Margret Boveri . These tasks led to frequent trips with forged papers to western and eastern countries as well as to neutral countries like Switzerland . With the help of the KPD's intelligence service, the information received by Roth was mostly sent as encrypted radio telegrams via the Soviet embassy to Moscow. From 1934 Roth was head of the "Abwehr" in the KPD apparatus.

Albert Einstein

Einstein's secretary Helene Dukas and her sister had sublet part of their Berlin apartment to Luise Kraushaar , KPD secretary for special tasks. a. Messages deciphered , and Leo Roth also used Kraushaar's office. The members of the KPD Sigmund Wollenberger and Albert Wollenberger belonged to Helene Dukas' in-laws. The husband of Einstein's stepdaughter Margot was Dimitri Marianoff, then the right hand man of Arthur Normann, the head of Soviet spies in Germany. Einstein himself taught at the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH) at the suggestion of Anna Seghers until he emigrated , and so he constantly had contact with other left-wing people such as John Heartfield , Egon Erwin Kisch , Jürgen Kuczynski , Willi Münzenberg , Erwin Piscator , Annie Reich and Karl August Wittfogel . He had shown sympathy for “socialist” ideas in other ways as well. Against this background, it is obvious that he not only knew about the secret functions of Kraushaar and Roth in his secretary's apartment, but was happy to tolerate them.

Hammerstein family

In 1928, Roth met the 15-year-old Helga von Hammerstein, the third child of General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, then Chief of Army Command, in the Socialist Student Union . At that time she was already interested in communist ideas. The two moved together in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , where Nathan Steinberger, Helga's previous friend, also lived. In 1930 Helga left grammar school, joined the KPD and made herself available to her under the code name "Grete Pelgert". From 1935 to 1936 Helga also provided Gerd Kaden with information. Roth, on the other hand, had contact with her two older sisters Marie Luise and Marie Therese through Helga . The former had been a member of the KPD since 1927, for which she had carried out covert orders since 1930, and for a time had a relationship with Werner Scholem . All in all, Roth and others obtained secret information from politics and the Reichswehr from these sources , which the father of the three daughters still had at their disposal even after his privatization at the end of January 1934. Probably the most detailed of the records of Hitler's speech on February 3, 1933 to members of the Reichswehr in Hammerstein's official apartment comes from his files; it was only discovered in the Comintern archive in 2000 . One of the revelations from this source, which at the time also caused a great stir internationally, was the “Brown Book on Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror” , which Willi Munzenberg published in Paris .

The Reichstag fire

In 1933, Roth's department obtained photocopies of the top secret indictment against the defendants in the Reichstag fire trial , Georgi Dimitroff , Marinus van der Lubbe and others. Roth personally brought the copies to Paris, where they were handed over to the “Investigative Committee to Investigate the Reichstag Fire”, which was founded by Willi Munzenberg's “World Committee for the Victims of Hitler's Fascism”. Roth also managed to win Norman Ebbutt , correspondent for the London Times and spokesman for the foreign press in Germany, as a secret reporter for the KPD. The material that Roth collected was deposited at the US consulate in Leipzig , where Roth could also organize illegal press conferences.

Fememord

At the beginning of 1934 Roth had obtained the weapon for the murder of Alfred Kattner , who had been "turned over" by the Gestapo , then provided the murderer Hans Schwarz with a forged passport and brought him out of the country accompanied by Helga von Hammerstein.

Travel and contacts

In 1934, under the code name "Ernst Hesse", Roth was a temporary speaker at the "M-Schule" of the Comintern in Moscow, then defense chief of the KPD in the Saar area , where he headed the communist agitation in the run-up to the Saar vote in January 1935 and, for example, Herbert Wehner Obtained a journalist's ID and secure accommodation. Presumably in consultation with Erich Honecker , he was also involved in armed attacks on facilities on the German front . After the vote had been canceled in favor of connection to the German Reich, he met in Prague with Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht . After that, like Wehner, he moved to Amsterdam , lived there with Helga von Hammerstein and from there headed the entire defense apparatus of the KPD for West Germany for a year.

Herbert Wehner

Since 1932 at the latest, Roth had frequent exchanges with Herbert Wehner alias "Kurt Funke" as part of his secret service work. The cooperation between the two was particularly close during their work in the Saar area. Wehner characterized "Viktor" in his "testimony" as follows:

“Viktor, who was in charge of the work of the Kippenberger apparatus in this section at the time, was one of the most capable organizers I have come to know. He created and maintained connections on a scale that I have not found before or after any other ... He put all his youthful elasticity, his enormous urge for revolutionary activity, his extraordinary grasp of political nuances at the service of this work, in which he opened. "

Victim of the purge

In the "Brussels" conference of the KPD in 1935 near Moscow , the M apparatus, which was controversial in the Central Committee, was partially dissolved and the previous head, Kippenberger, was removed from the Central Committee. This also weakened Roth's position, as he was Kippenberger's confidante and a supporter of the elected Politburo members Hermann Schubert and Fritz Schulte . Roth was removed from his post in the KPD and sent to Moscow. From the beginning of 1936 he worked as "Ernst Hess" in a Soviet research institute for cars and tractors. To his misfortune came the fact that since the assassination of the first secretary of the Leningrad party organization Sergei Kirov at the end of 1934 another Stalinist purge began because of alleged "Trotskyist elements" , which finally culminated in the Great Terror . In June 1936 the party had received a specific written denunciation of Roth by Grete Wilde (alias "Erna Mertens") (which was later to incriminate Herbert Wehner as well), on November 22, 1936 he was arrested by the NKVD in Moscow for this reason . One of the allegations against him was that he had informed the military attachés of the English, French and Czechoslovak embassies in Berlin about internal matters of the KPD and received regular money for it. During the interrogations he weighed heavily on Hans Kippenberger, but tried to exonerate Helga and Marie-Luise von Hammerstein by providing false information about Marie-Therese von Hammerstein, who at that time was already out of danger because she had emigrated to Japan . On August 30, 1937, Wehner replied in a multi-page report to allegations by the Comintern that he had been very familiar with Roth. In it, he distanced himself from some of Roth's actions and attitudes, but justified others. The Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR found Roth guilty of espionage and preparation for terrorist attacks on November 10, 1937, and sentenced him to death. Leo Roth was shot dead in the Lubyanka basement on the same day .

family

Leo Roth probably had no children. Helga von Hammerstein escaped the fate of her partner in the "Moscow human trap" because Walter Ulbricht spoke out against the emigration she wanted to the Soviet Union. She married Walter Rossow in 1939 and died in 2005.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roth, Leo (Viktor) . In: Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst: German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945. 2., revised. and strong exp. Edition. Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
  2. ↑ Hans Magnus Enzensberger 2008: Hammerstein or Der Eigensinn. A German story . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 978-3-518-41960-1
  3. ↑ Bernd Kaufmann u. a. 1993: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937 . Dietz, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-320-01817-7 , p. 191.
  4. ^ Franz Feuchtwanger: The KPD's military-political apparatus in the years 1928–1935. Memories. In: 'International Scientific Correspondence on the History of the German Labor Movement (IWK), Vol. 17, Issue 4, Dec. 1981, pp. 485-533
  5. ↑ a b c d Reinhard Müller 1993: The Wehner Files. Moscow 1937 to 1941 . Rowohlt, Berlin, 1st edition, ISBN 978-3-87134-056-7
  6. ^ Gabriele Gerhard-Sonnenberg 1976: Marxist Workers Education in the Weimar Period (MASCH) . Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag , Cologne, ISBN 978-3-7609-0245-6
  7. ↑ a b Siegfried Grundmann 1998: Einstein's files: Einstein's years in Germany from the perspective of German politics , Springer, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-540-63197-2
  8. ↑ For a long time Scholem was suspected instead of Roth of having been the contact person for the intelligence service. This version is now considered refuted. See Ralf Hoffrogge : Werner Scholem - a political biography, UVK Verlag, Konstanz 2014, pp. 395–408.
  9. ↑ Herbert Wehner 1982: Certificate. Personal notes 1929–1942 . Edited by Gerhard Jahn, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1982, ISBN 3-462-01498-6
  10. ↑ Bernd Kaufmann u. a. 1993: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937 . Dietz, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-320-01817-7 , p. 389 ff.
  11. ↑ Reinhard Müller 2001: Human trap Moscow. Exile and Stalinist Persecution . Hamburger Edition, 1st edition, ISBN 978-3-930908-71-4
personal data
SURNAME Roth, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roth, Leon (full name); Hess, Ernst (pseudonym); Victor (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German agent of the KPD
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Galicia , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH November 10, 1937
Place of death Moscow , USSR