Leopold
Trepper, the son of Jewish parents, was
born in Novy-Tang, Poland, on 23rd February,
1904. When he was a boy his family moved to Vienna.
After
the October Revolution Trepper joined
the Bolsheviks. He worked in Galician
mines and in 1925 he organised an illegal strike at Dombrova. He was
arrested and spent eight months in prison.
In
1926 Trepper migrated to Palestine. He remained a member of the Communist
Party and worked against the British until being expelled in 1928.
Trepper
now moved to France where he worked for Rabcors, an illegal political
organization, until it was broken up by French intelligence. Trepper
escaped to Moscow where he was recruited by the NKVD.
For the next six years he worked as a spy in Europe. In 1939 Trepper
established the Red Orchestra network
and organised underground operations in Germany, France, Holland and
Switzerland.
Red
Orchestra worked closely with the French Communist Party and succeeded
in tapping the phones of Abwher in France.
Trepper was also able to provide detailed reports on the plans for
a German invasion of the Soviet Union.
In
the spring of 1942 the first Red Orchestra
agents were arrested in Belgium. Some agents broke under torture and
the Germans were able to liquidate the network in Belgium, Holland
and Germany. The Red Orchestra's headquarters were raided in November,
1942. Trepper managed to escape and remained in hiding until Paris
was liberated.
Trepper
returned to Moscow in January, 1945. Joseph
Stalin ordered his arrest and was kept in prison until 1955. He
moved to Poland where he became head of the Jewish Cultural Society.
After many years of trying, Trepper was eventually granted permission
to emigrate to Israel in 1973 where he published his autobiography,
The Great Game. Leopold Trepper
died in Israel in 1982.
(1)
Leopold Trepper wrote about his Jewish background
in his autobiography, The Great Game (1977)
My name
Trepper, shows no trace of my origins. My friends - the Trauensteins,
the Hamershlags, the Singers, and the Zolmans - also had Germanized
names. One day, preoccupied by this question, I consulted the teacher
who met with us once a week to give us an hour's lesson in the history
of the Jewish people. At the end of the nineteenth century, he explained,
the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian empire had been authorized to change
their names. German surnames, it was thought, would enable the Jews
to be more easily integrated into the Austrian population; even first
names were changed.
(2)
Leopold Trepper was brought up in Novy-Targ, a small town in Galicia
that at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire.
The Jewish
community in Novy-Targ, which was about three thousand strong when
I was a child, had been in existence since the founding of the town
in the Middle Ages. The district was inhabited by very poor peasants,
who had to struggle to extract a meager subsistence from unproductive
land. In the villages the people only ate bread once a week. The daily
fare was potato pancakes and cabbage.
On Sunday,
the peasants came to Novy-Targ by the hundreds to attend mass; they
carried their shoes on their shoulders and did not put them on until
they were just about to enter the church. The Jews who tilled the
land were no better off- for them, too, a pair of shoes had to last
a lifetime.
The number
of people who left for the United states and Canada increased with
every year. Hoping to find the new Eden, they prepared joyously for
the long voyage. I can still see them, the collars of their shirts
wide open over what passed for suits. They carried little wooden suitcases,
and they looked proud in their magnificent bowler hats.
(3)
Leopold Trepper, the head of the Red Orchestra,
kept Joseph Stalin and the Red
Army informed of the planned German invasion of the Soviet Union.
He wrote about this in his autobiography, The Great Game (1977)
On December
18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better known as Operation
Barbarossa. The first sentence of the plan was explicit: "The
German armed forces must be ready before the end of the war against
Great Britain to defeat the Soviet Union by means of Blitzkrieg."
Richard
Sorge warned the Centre immediately; he forwarded them a copy of the
directive. Week after week, the heads of Red Army Intelligence received
updates on the Wehrmacht's preparations. At the beginning of 1941,
Schulze-Boysen sent the Centre precise information on the operation
being planned; massive bombardments of Leningrad, Kiev, and Vyborg;
the number of divisions involved.
In February,
I sent a detailed dispatch giving the exact number of divisions withdrawn
from France and Belgium, and sent to the east. In May, through the
Soviet military attaché in Vichy, General Susloparov, I sent
the proposed plan of attack, and indicated the original date, May
15, then the revised date, and the final date. On May 12, Sorge warned
Moscow that 150 German divisions were massed along the frontier.
The Soviet
intelligence services were not the only ones in possession of this
information. On March 11, 1941, Roosevelt gave the Russian ambassador
the plans gathered by American agents for Operation Barbarossa. On
the 10th June the English released similar information. Soviet agents
working in the frontier zone in Poland and Rumania gave detailed reports
on the concentration of troops.
He who
closes his eyes sees nothing, even in the full light of day. This
was the case with Stalin and his entourage. The generalissimo preferred
to trust his political instinct rather than the secret reports piled
up on his desk. Convinced that he had signed an eternal pact of friendship
with Germany, he sucked on the pipe of peace. He had buried his tomahawk
and he was not ready to dig it up.
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