Struggle for the Russian Soul: The Truschnovitch Kidnaping
MUHLEN, NORBERT
THE TRUSCHNOVITCH KIDNAPING Norbert Muhlen At 7:30 on the evening of April 13, Alexander Rudolf Truschnovitch, a physician who fled the Soviet Union twenty years ago, left his home in West Berlin...
...Neither neighbor thought much about it at the time...
...The Glaeskes' poodle crouched in a corner, wounded and whimpering, the only living witness of what had happened...
...earlier, the defection of Yuri Rastvorov from the Soviet mission in Japan had become known...
...Truschnovitch, whom I knew for several years, was a short man...
...At some length, it told how all Russian refugees were misused by the Americans and sorry they had ever left Russia...
...Perhaps 250 Germans, and at least one other Soviet refugee, have been kidnaped by the Communists in recent years...
...Truschnovitch was to meet Heinz Glaeske, a German architect and former PW in Russia who now headed a branch of the Berlin Association of Returned PWs...
...Glaeske had promised to introduce him to a number of people who had recently been released from Soviet slave-labor camps...
...In 1935, the German-Jewish journalist Berthold Jacob, a refugee from the Third Reich, was kidnaped from Basle, Switzerland by a Gestapo agent named Wesemann and brought across the German border...
...When West Berlin police called by the Glaeske women arrived, a neighbor told them that on the dimly-lighted staircase she had met two men carrying the limp body of another man...
...The nine protest notes sent by the U.S...
...Rainer Hildebrandt and others) of the Freedom League for German-Russian Friendship, and a member of the NTS, a Russian exiles' group...
...Switzerland, backed by an articulate world public opinion, demanded that the Nazis immediately return the victim (a foreigner, it should be noted, with whose radical political views the Swiss had little sympathy...
...This had been done, a few days after their arrival in East Berlin, in the case of those Westerners who had really come eastward of their own free will, such as John Peet, the former Reuter's correspondent, and several others...
...election, who promised during the campaign to encourage and support liberation movements behind the Iron Curtain, continue to permit members of liberation groups to be terrorized and to be kidnaped from our own soil at the will of the Soviets...
...On the way, he mailed a letter to his wife, who was out of town...
...The wording of this fantastic "statement" and the other reactions of the Soviet press indicate why Truschnovitch was kidnaped at this particular time...
...When the call was made, a friendly voice answered that everything was fine...
...Soviet propaganda had to produce a case in which a "secret Western agent" chose to break with the West if the genuine defections and revelations of Soviet agents were to be offset...
...That Truschnovitch has not yet been subdued by the drugs and tortures of the MVD is proved by the fact that he has not been exhibited to the world press at a Soviet press conference...
...More important, the Communists wanted to demonstrate to Soviet citizens??especially to Soviet soldiers ??that the West offers them no hope, that American agents use all refugees for criminal acts against the Russian people, that no self-respecting Russian can live decently in the West, and that the West fights with repulsive weapons for a lost cause...
...Government were answered by Communist shrugs of the shoulder: Your man must have gotten lost somewhere...
...The Russian soldiers were repeatedly told about the dire conditions awaiting Soviet defectors in the West...
...Truschnovitch told me what he had learned from his talks with Red Army men in East Germany??of their widespread desire to flee to the West, and of the traps used by the Soviets to prevent their escape...
...There was no further mention of the case in the East German press until April 21, when the Communists presented a lengthy statement allegedly written and signed by Truschnovitch, headlined, "Why I Have Broken with the Past...
...is responsible for maintaining order and freedom in West Berlin...
...Two weeks later, a messenger from the Communist secret police brought to West Berlin a letter in Truschnovitch's hand to his son, repeating that he had left of his own free will, and asking that the West forget him...
...Before Truschnovitch left to meet Glaeske...
...When the neighbor asked what was going on...
...Today, Weiland is still languishing in an East German jail...
...The last time I saw Truschnovitch was at a party for Alexander Kerensky shortly after the East German revolt last June...
...Less than an hour later...
...On the morning of April 15, ADN, the East German news agency, announced that Truschnovitch had decided to break with the American espionage and diversionist agencies, to deliver himself to the Communist authorities, and "to prove his honesty" by personally bringing them an important criminal agent of the American espionage services...
...First, the defections of Vladimir Petrov from the Soviet Embassy in Australia and of Nikolai Khokhlov from the Soviet secret police in Frankfurt were already known to their Soviet bosses...
...Switzerland threatened to break off diplomatic relations with Hitler's Reich and to retaliate in economic and other ways...
...61 years old, head of the Russian Refugee Relief Committee in Berlin, a co-founder (with the late Ernst Reuter...
...The Truschnovitch kidnaping is the latest of a long series of Soviet acts of terror in Berlin...
...The group entered a new German car which was waiting in front of the house with a driver inside and the motor running...
...Upon delivering this letter, the MVD messenger himself asked for political asylum in West Berlin...
...By this clear and unequivocal demand, Switzerland forced the Nazis to send Jacob back to Basle...
...Soviet soldiers who had unsuccessfully tried to flee were shown before their executions to the assembled troops with the explanation that they had been extradited by the West...
...After the Linse kidnaping, West Berlin police took thoroughgoing precautions, but kidnapings cannot be stopped by technical police and security measures alone...
...Glaeske's apartment was in a quiet residential section near Kurfurstendamm: nearby was the headquarters of the Polish Military Mission...
...that Truschnovitch was there but didn't want to be disturbed...
...he instructed his office to call Glaeske's place at 10 P.M...
...Lacking the proof of a personal appearance, and determined to confuse the West, Ernst Wollweber, the new East German MVD boss, has kept supplying the West over the past month with many contradictory news items to cast doubt on Truschnovitch's personal and political reliability, and to make it seem as if he had not been kidnaped by the Soviets...
...The United States, for its part, has sent protest notes, but these have failed to impress the Soviet authorities...
...Truschnovitch, it said, had discovered that all Russian refugees were forced by the Western, particularly the American, secret services "to commit diversionist acts, espionage and terror against the peaceful and prosperous Soviet Union...
...The leaders of the victorious party in the last U.S...
...Glaeske had put his finger to his lips in a gesture of silence, while the young woman said that the man had to be rushed to a first-aid station...
...THE TRUSCHNOVITCH KIDNAPING Norbert Muhlen At 7:30 on the evening of April 13, Alexander Rudolf Truschnovitch, a physician who fled the Soviet Union twenty years ago, left his home in West Berlin for an appointment...
...this time, Glaeske announced the sudden illness of his visitor...
...Our Government has preferred to look the other way rather than protect its allies in the most sensitive spots of the cold war...
...What is it doing to free Weiland...
...Glaeske's wife and mother returned home to find the apartment empty, several pieces of furniture overturned, blood stains on the wall, and the carpet on the staircase landing missing...
...In June 1952, Walter Linse, a leader of the anti-Communist Free Jurists' organization, was kidnaped in broad daylight...
...The two men were preceded by a young woman and followed by Glaeske...
...When, in November 1950, the Socialist veteran of Nazi concentration camps, Alfred Weiland, a West Berlin teacher, was abducted to East Berlin, this reporter wrote (The New Leader, December 4, 1950): "The U.S...
...Therefore, Truschnovitch had voluntarily returned home...
...middle-aged and apparently unconscious: her description indicated that this was Truschnovitch...
...Conservative, neutrality-conscious Switzerland was not afraid of "provoking" the Nazis...
...How long will we continue to be afraid of "provoking" the Communists, thereby continuing to lose dignity, friends and power...
...What is it doing to prevent further kidnapings...
...A second tenant met the group one floor below...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 19
