"THE GESTAPO IS DEAD - LONG LIVE THE GPU!"
LASKY, MELVIN J.
"The Gestapo Is Dead- Long the Gpu!" By Melvin J Losky Editor, "Der Monat" BERLIN. TWO SMALL NEWS ITEMS APPEARED in the beck pages of the local newspapers recently which were, in a...
...Was Herbert Kriedemann an agent of the Gestapo...
...Paris had become for me a private and personal world, just as Chicago had...
...diftkult tarn them to learn that ideas can play a role in affecting one's destiny, and in influencing the destiny of society...
...Here was this city and this country which had been so often called "the cradle of liberty...
...Their language was halfmystery to me...
...Both of these cities are too much a part of my life experience...
...Here was this city of such extraordinary beauty, the capital of a country which was so rich, and had once been so powerful...
...he had meant to "purify the political atmosphere...
...The first was date-lined Hanover, and read: "The high German Court here today acquitted Kurt Mueller chairman of the West German Communist Party, of charges of 'libel' and 'slander' which had been preferred against him by Herbert Kriedemann, leading West German official of the Social Democratic Party...
...Now they were going back to the world of reality— tired people...
...There was so much beauty, so much charm, so much grace in this city, in its orderly streets and its harmoniously arranged parks, its historic sites and buildings, its churches and galleries, I could not take in...
...But there is more in these items than meets the eye...
...The Communists presented to the court all the documents they possessed Kriedemann was involved all right...
...I had recalled the streets of Paris, the Seine at the end of the day, the Romanesque tower of the abbey oj Saint Germain des Pres, Notre Dame, and so many other Paris sights...
...Agents," "spies," "informers," in/behalf of Hitler, the British Secret Service...
...He was cautioned to be more careful about evidence in the future —as if it were the objective "ambiguity" of the evidence which had prompted the Communist campaign...
...IN MY FIRST DAYS in Paris, I was constantly in danger of being overwhelmed...
...TWO SMALL NEWS ITEMS APPEARED in the beck pages of the local newspapers recently which were, in a footnote-like way, more revealing about the current German situation than many a great story about Bonn or the Buhr...
...Stores and store fronts, the images of strangers seen for an instant in the street, signs, busses and metro stations, all this had been charged with emotion...
...The Gestapo Is dead...
...e THE UNEXPECTED punch-line to the whole case comes from that.other apparently unrelated news item...
...And what was most devastating, two: that in the documents themselves there was the repeated Gestapo objection that Kriedemann's information was increasingly being shown as "worthless," was either wrong and misleading or, in most cases, long since known...
...After his release he was seized and sentenced again in 1943...
...Mueller had called Kriedemann a former 'Gestapo agent'----" The second was a local Berlin story: "Forty-three-year-old Frau Frieda •Koerber confessed today that she had lured her neighbor, police investigator Friedrich Zeplick intp the Soviet sector in order "to get some coal...
...Now, it was no more strange or unusual to me to return to Paris than it is to return to Chicago...
...He disappeared, and was not heard from until one day a man turned up who had just been released from the Soviet zone concentration camp of Sachsenhausen...
...Impulses ate weaker in all fields of action...
...Who was Friedrich Zeplick...
...And I found myself becoming strangely agitated...
...The daily papers, with few exceptions, are outrageously bad...
...was based on a kind of technical naivete...
...But they had overlooked two main points...
...The Nazis finally seized K. in Occupied Holland and sentenced him to two years...
...Shortly before Kurt Mueller, in a desperate drive to win left-wing votes among the Bush miners, had spoken and written the accusation most flagrantly, the trial began...
...There were also workers at the meeting...
...The Judas reward which she had received flrom two "unknown persons" amoimted to two hundred marks...
...They are still tired from the War and the occupation...
...He had been warned against this by Eastern political agents...
...The court decision in favor of the Communist Mueller—.which at the same time also cleared Kriedemann...
...long live the OFVI" Paris Lovely in Spring, But Ideas Growing Stale By James T. Farrell HEM OtfE;OOES to a nef city, W especially if it is hf a f6reign country, it is best to be like a child...
...When De Gaulle finished speaking, there was cheering, and up near the platform where he spoke, young GauHists chanted like college boys: "De Gaulle to power...
...And yet there was a difference from the first time I had looked at crowds on the streets of Paris...
...attd^diaaftcesJ'^ I recalled' a world of surfaces and altered the spatial relationships of these surfaces just as I had so often done concerning rooms, streets, the height of the elevated structure on the South Side of Chicago...
...One: that Kriedemann had acted on instructions from an established anti-Nazi opposition and had managed in his capacity as "liaison man" to save many refugees with lastminute tip-offs...
...My memories were such a singular mixture of accurate recollections and peculiar mistakes...
...I remembered the order of stores on some streets and I had LCOmpldtely m%Ukeri notions >E space...
...There is a story behind each — and a tragic connection...
...The myth does not come to be believed, but it damages...
...Anct the French are more gentle than they have ever been...
...Paris looked the same...
...Here, clearly, is the melodramatic atmosphere of contemporary German politics...
...The living had lost...
...He told of his meeting Zeplick there...
...Here I was, back in Paris,, and I had already seen many of the things I wanted to see once more...
...They were strange and mysterious • beings living in a world that was not my world...
...In my mind, in my life, Chicago and Paris were not such a great distance apart...
...AT DE GAULLE'S MEETING in the Bois de Bologne on May 1, there were about 100,000 people...
...But It was not the same...
...This occurred shortly before Zeplick's disappearance...
...muttered one cynical Berlin 'newspapetman...
...Half-truths, lies, irrelevan' cies are mixed and repeated again and again, It would be wrong to underestimate this old Nazi "great lie" technique in Germany...
...The Taegllche Rundschau printed photostats...
...There, on instructions froth the SPD center, Kriedemann took up connections With several Gestapo men who had approached him...
...The daytime crowds on the streets of Paris seemed the same as they had seemed in 1931...
...He knew the increasing suspicion that was beginning to fall on K., and had indicated his willngness to testify as a witness in his behalf...
...The war and the defeat had left scars...
...Then the crowd dispersed...
...Many discussions in the press seem even elementary...
...Below that surface, there is sadness, spiritual fatigue, French people, whoa one talks to them, will say that they are tired, that France is tired...
...He told of the previous threats to him, which had once caused him to flee to Western Germany...
...the FBI, are denounced with regular indignation in the official Soviet paper, the Taeoliche Rundschau, and the German Communist press...
...Many of them lived out their most impressionable years at a time when their country was occupied and conquered...
...THE CHARGES AGAINST Kriedemann, one of the younger and most capable of German socialists, has been part of a systematic Soviet-Communist campaign to discredit Kurt Schumacher and the SPD...
...I had seen them very much as I had seen people on the streets of Chicago in my boyhood...
...They were like a crowd leaving a movie show...
...In a new and strange environment, one learns and feels more if one is willing to be like a child...
...Zeplick, ironically, had been a minor police official ifl "Berlin* and knew the whole Kriedemann story from the inside Gestapo angle...
...The Gestapo received from Kriedemann all kinds of information about anti-Nazi actlvltes and personalities...
...Is the famous "Ost-Buro" of the SPD a mere adjunct of Western intelligence services...
...THINKING OF ALL THIS, I was forcibly struck with the child-like character and quality of one's first impressions and memories of a foreign city...
...Both sides were playing for "lives," and it was a risky, dangerous game...
...In their universities, there was no freedom...
...Kriedemann was able to learn from them who the Gestapo was after, how much it knew, what next moves were planned...
...Paris was never more beautiful than it wsa this Spring, As I walked alMsst, a line from Baudelaire kept reeurrinv in my mind: La froidi majttte de la femme sterile...
...I walked about the streets of Paris on a warm afternoon, recalling my earliest impressions of the city...
...A batch of documents from Gestapo archives fell into Russian hands...
...The Koerber woman has been arrested and she has confessed...
...America did not seem so far away...
...They listened earnestly when De Gaulle, dressed In a parachute trooper's khaki uniform, stood by himself on a high platform and spoke in vague terms of a French solution to the problems of the day and of an end of the government of mediocrity...
...fled from Germany to Prague in 1934 and there kept up opposition activities...
...Finally, Kurt Schumacher appointedan investigating committee of his party to look into the "Kriedemann case" and the decision was for K. to institute court proceedings...
...And now, back in Paris, these early impressions crowded upon me...
...If anything, they are rndfe polite...
...They had been given a dream, a rather soothing dream...
...Well, there is always enough relevant and related background material to make the accusations VagUely credible...
...When Mueller had charged that "it was ridiculous for a man who belonged to the Gestapo to pose as a victim of fascism," he had been acting "in good faith...
...The living had not created it...
...It was...
...Ideas in Paris seem to be growing stale...
...This tru4m struck me most iorcibly one night when I sat alone in the Cafe Deux Magots...
...The gaiety of Paris ;s on the surface...
...The young anti-Nazi Kriedemann...
...Here was this home of such a great human tradition...
...And it was the creation of men who were dead...
...From Prague he fled to Amsterdam where the socialist anti-Nazi center was reconstructed shortly before and during the first period of the war...
...And I thought of Americe...
...They went about their lives and were not even aware of me...
...They were still suffering from the wounds and blows of defeat...
...Small questions and doubts are raised...
...And the young couples stood and sat, listening and holding hands...
...Are Fritz Heine and Waktemar von Knoeringen (two of the West-German socialists under heaviest attack) in touch with British secret service...
...And the old people stood and sat, with tired faces, listening to a political expression of a dream...
...Zeplick told the story £f his abduction in a Russian car by NKVD agents that day of his trip with Frau Koerber...
...I watched them as they did so...
...Foolishly, one day he accepted his neighbor's suggestion to pick up some coal in the Eastern Sector (an everyday Berliner pilgrimage...
...it was a distinction worth making...
...For years, I had thought of returning to Paris...
...The campaign was unrelenting...
...The German Communists took up the charges with glee...
...The best are the conservative ones, Le Monde and Figaro...
...The new generation grew up in the days of the Occupation...
...For me, that line seemed to concentrate so many of my own imprmlina...
Vol. 32 • July 1949 • No. 28
