Willi Münzenberg
Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940) was a German Communist. He was one of the most influential propagandists of the Twentieth Century, and was notable for his front organizations and other tactics which would go on to be developed by both East and West in the Cultural Cold War.[1]
As a young Communist, Münzenberg was recruited by Leon Trotsky into the circle of intellectuals around the exiled Vladimir Lenin in Geneva. With Lenin's return to Russia in 1917, Münzenberg moved to Berlin as the highest ranking Communist outside the Soviet Union.[2]
In 1921, Münzenberg established the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe to send famine relief to the Soviet Union.[1] This was the first major project in a vast propaganda network that would become known as the Münzenberg Trust.[3]
After the Reichstag Fire in January 1933, Münzenberg upstaged Hitler's show trial of Communist Marinus van der Lubbe by staging a mock counter-trial in London and publishing The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag.[1]
According to a report extract dated 6 December 1937, in the files of the British Security Service, Münzenberg was moving closer to the International Communist Opposition at around this time:
- It is considered by Lovestone that great headway is being made by the Paris Centre and it is worthy of note that, more particularly since the Comintern has been victimising Germans in the course of its heresy hunts, something approaching an understanding, or at all events a better understanding, has taken place between Heinz Brandler and Willi Muenzenberg, though there has, of course, been no suggestion of open co-operation. Willi Muenzenberg is at the moment by no means persona grat with Moscow.[4]
Münzenberg was expelled from the German Communist Party in 1938.[5]
During the late 1930s, Münzenberg operated a radio station which broadcast into Germany from Paris. Its activities during the Munich crisis influenced the thinking of the BBC's Sir Stephen Tallents.[6]
Among those who worked for Münzenberg's station in the early months of World War Two, were Ernst Adam and Alexander Mass, who would later become assistants to Sefton Delmer of Britain's Political Warfare Executive.[7]
Münzenberg disappeared in France in June 1940, while fleeing the German advance.[8] His body was found in the woods outside the town of Montagne, near Grenoble, in October 1940. French officials quickly concluded the death was suicide, a verdict which has been questioned because of the absence of a note or distinctive injuries associated with what appeared to be a self-inflicted hanging.[9]
Contents
Legacy
Of the six contributors to The God that Failed, three had worked with Münzenberg, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler and Louis Fischer.[10] Koestler, notably, had helped to edit one of Münzenberg's 'brown books', The Nazi Terror in Spain.[1]
Several former members of the Münzenberg Trust were present at an August 1949 meeting in Frankfurt with Melvin Lasky which discussed plans for an anticommunist propaganda organisation.[11]
Affiliations
- German Communist Party
- Comintern
- Internationale Arbeiterhilfe
- Münzenberg Trust
- Young Communist International
- World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism
- Committee of Vigilance and Democratic Control
- Writers’ Congress in Defense of Culture
- Committee for War Relief for Republican Spain
- Committee of Inquiry into Foreign Intervention in the Spanish War
Connections
- Leon Trotsky
- Vladimir Lenin
- Arthur Koestler
- Louis Gibarti
- Gustav Regler
- Manès Sperber
- Ruth Fischer
- Nicola Chiaromonte
- Otto Katz
- Johannes Becher
- Alfred Kantorowicz
- Paul Willert[12]
- Ernst Adam
- Alexander Mass[13]
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Michael Scammell, The Mystery of Willi Münzenberg, New York Review of Books, Reviews of The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West by Sean McMeekin Yale University Press, 397 pp., $32.50; Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg, and the Seduction of the Intellectuals by Stephen Koch, with an introduction by Sam Tanenhaus Enigma Books, revised and updated edition, 421 pp., $18.00 (paper), 27 April 2010.
- ↑ Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wulitzer: How the CIA played America, Harvard, 2008, p.12.
- ↑ Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wulitzer: How the CIA played America, Harvard, 2008, p.12.
- ↑ Exctract, Notes on the Communist Opposition Movement, Sept.1935-Sept.1937, 6 December 1937, KV2/580, National Archives.
- ↑ Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wulitzer: How the CIA played America, Harvard, 2008, p.15.
- ↑ David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive 1939-1945, St Ermin's Press, 2002, p.32.
- ↑ David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive 1939-1945, St Ermin's Press, 2002, p.42.
- ↑ Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wulitzer: How the CIA played America, Harvard, 2008, p.15.
- ↑ Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wulitzer: How the CIA played America, Harvard, 2008, p.11.
- ↑ Francis Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta, 1999, p.65.
- ↑ Francis Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta, 1999, p.71.
- ↑ Stephen Koch, Double Lives - Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, Harper Collins, 1996, p.308.
- ↑ David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive 1939-1945, St Ermin's Press, 2002, p.42.
