Naum Isaakowitsch Eitingon

Nahum Eitingon ( Russian Наум Исаакович Эйтингон even Nahum Eitingon ; born December 6, ^jul. / 18 December  1899 ^greg. In Shklov in Mogilev Governorate , Russian Empire (now Belarus ); † 3. May 1981 in Moscow ) was a Soviet Intelligence officer.

Life

Eitingon came from a family of Jewish merchants, his father was the head of the bookkeeping of a factory. After Naum had attended the seven classes of the secondary school in Mogiljow , he decided in March 1917 to take a position at the local administrative authority for statistics, which he soon gave up. After the October Revolution , he worked for the Mogilev City Council's food procurement office.

In 1919 he joined the Bolshevik party . From 1920 he worked in various positions at the Cheka secret service , leading the fight against what were known as “gangs” of the remains of the White Army in Gomel Governorate and later in Bashkiria . From 1923 to 1926 he studied Oriental Studies and Sinology at the Military Academy of the Red Army in Moscow and, after successfully completing his studies as a resident of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, was sent to the rank of consul first to Beijing and then to Harbin , where he worked until the Soviet Union was broken up Consulate remained in 1929. During his service in China, among other things, he was involved in the intrigues and the dismissal of the de facto dictator Marshal Zhang Zuolin by his rival Chiang Kai-shek .

Eitingon was then sent as a resident to the Soviet diplomatic mission in Istanbul , where he had the task of gathering reliable information on the plans of Great Britain and France in the Middle East. In order not to arouse suspicion with the Turkish authorities, Eitingon officially worked there as an attaché under the name Leonid Naumow. After the head of the OGPU's residency in the Middle East, Grigory Sergejewitsch Agabekow , escaped , the residency in Istanbul was immediately closed and all employees were ordered back to Moscow.

Since 1931 Eitingon was under his pseudonym Leonid Naumow employee of the foreign department of the Soviet secret service, then head of the 8th subdivision, which was responsible for France and Belgium. In 1933 he was promoted to head of the 1st subdivision responsible for the USA; he had been to the United States several times, and it is believed that he may have made a significant contribution to expanding the espionage network there.

During the Spanish Civil War , Eitingon was General Leonid Kotow responsible for the persecution and murder of Trotskyists . He was Deputy Head of the Residency of the Soviet Secret Service in Spain, Alexander Orlov , and in this capacity was responsible for building up the Spanish-Republican secret services and training staff. After General Orlov fled to the West, he became head of the residency, but his most important task was to organize the evacuation of Soviet "specialists" from Spain, as the defeat of the Republicans was imminent. In early 1940 he became an illegal resident of the Soviet secret service in Paris .

Together with Pavel Sudoplatov , Eitingon organized the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 . He chose Ramón Mercader , the son of his lover Caridad Mercader, as the assassin . After the successful assassination attempt, Eitingon, who had supervised the execution directly in Mexico, escaped and returned to Moscow in early 1941, where he was awarded the Order of Lenin “for his services to the state” . In May 1941 he was also appointed deputy head of the 1st Department of the People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) of the Soviet Union. During the Great Patriotic War , together with Sudoplatov, he was one of the organizers of the partisan movement in the hinterland of the German occupation forces and was responsible for several acts of sabotage against the Wehrmacht supply lines on the Eastern Front.

From late 1946 to early 1947, Eitingon was appointed by Josef Stalin's personal order to be responsible for the training and development of the secret services of the future communist China government under Mao Zedong . In just a few months, Eitingon was appointed deputy head of the so-called "Office No. 1" of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR, which was responsible for the preparation and implementation of acts of diversion and sabotage.

Eitingon was arrested in 1951 in the course of the campaign against the " rootless cosmopolitan ", which was obviously anti-Semitic, and only released after the death of Stalin in March 1953 on the orders of Lavrenti Beria , with whom he was friends, and made deputy head of the 9th Department appointed by the Ministry of Interior of the USSR. After Beria was arrested in July 1953, Eitingon was also arrested and, after several years in prison, only sentenced to 12 years imprisonment in a secret trial in 1957 for “treason”. After Nikita Khrushchev was dismissed , Eitingon was released early and from 1965 worked as an editor at Meschdunarodnye otnoschenija (German: International Relations ). It was not until 1992 that his case was reopened as part of the review of crimes of the communist system in the Soviet Union and he was posthumously rehabilitated for lack of evidence.

literature

• Vadim Abramov: Evrei v KGB. Palatschi i Zertwy . Moscow, 2005 [German: Jews in the KGB. Executioner and victim].
• Mary-Kay Wilmers : The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story . Faber and Faber, London 2009, 2010 edition ISBN 978-0-571-23473-8

Web links

• Article in Российский гуманитарный энциклопедический словарь ( memorial from December 21, 2012 in the archive.today web archive ), accessed on September 13, 2010