Walter Germanowitsch Kriwitzki
Walter Germanowitsch Kriwitzki ( Russian Вальтер Германович Кривицкий with the maiden name Samuel Gersevich Ginsberg ; born June 28, 1899 in Podwołoczyska , Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; † February 10, 1941 in Washington, DC ), was an officer in the Soviet General Military Service (GRU) as well as high defectors in the west.
Life
Kriwitzki grew up as the son of a wealthy Jewish trader in the small Polish town of Podwołoczyska in Galicia. After the end of the First World War, he came into contact with Marxism-Leninism and joined the Bolshevik party . Due to his multilingualism (Russian, German, Polish and Ukrainian), he was used as a saboteur in the enemy hinterland. Later he also worked as a commander ( KomDiv ) of military units. But finally he came to the Cheka . He worked as an agent in various countries for a long time. In the run-up to German October (1923), Kriwitzki was one of the organizers sent from the Soviet Union to plan a German revolution. Until 1936, as a GRU resident , he was in charge of Soviet military espionage for Western Europe.
After the decision to set up an international brigade in September 1936, Kriwitzki organized the recruitment of volunteers for the Spanish Civil War in The Hague . As a defector, Kriwitzki fled to Paris in 1937, at the height of the Stalinist purges , in which countless of his friends and former comrades in the Red Army were shot as spies and enemies of the state. From 1939 he stayed with his wife and son in the USA. There he published various articles in the Sunday Evening Post about the work of the Soviet secret services abroad and explained the political / economic situation in the Soviet Union. The articles were later summarized in the book In Stalin's Secret Service .
He was found dead on the bed at the Bellevue Hotel (now The George ) in Washington , with his gun beside him. Suicide was assumed to be the official cause of death. Therefore, the local police, ignorant of who the dead person was, did not open a murder investigation. After it became known who the deceased was, the most important evidence on the weapon and in the room were already useless for a murder investigation.
In view of the murder of the defector, GRU officer and friend Ignaz Reiss, and also the murder of Trotsky in exile in Mexico, a homicide crime cannot be ruled out either.
Works
- Hellmut G. Haasis (ed.): Walter G. Kriwitzky: I was Stalin's agent. Nevertheless-Verlag, Grafenau-Döffingen 1990, ISBN 3-922209-33-5
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d Walter Krivitsky: In Stalin's Secret Service. "Memoirs of the first soviet master spy to defect." , Enigma Books, 2000.
- ↑ Stalin's American Spy : Noel Field, Allen Dulles and the East European Show trials; accessed on September 29, 2019
- ^ Antony Beevor : The Spanish Civil War , 2nd edition, ISBN 978-3-442-15492-0 , page 203.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kriwitzki, Walter Germanowitsch |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Кривицкий, Вальтер Германович (Russian); Ginsberg, Samuel (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Soviet officer and defector of the Military Intelligence Service (GRU) |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 28, 1899 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Galicia |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 10, 1941 |
| Place of death | Washington, DC |