Emil Pietzuch

Emil Pietzuch (9 March 1899 – 1943?) was a German Communist activist-militant. After 1933 non-Nazi political activity was banned: Pietzuch became a resistance activist. Although few precise details of his activism during the early Hitler period survive, it is believed that he was at the centre of a resistance network ("...Widerstandorganisation Emil Pietzuch") in Berlin comprising at least 40 men and women. He was forced to flee the country for the last time in 1937 and ended up in the Soviet Union where he fell foul of the institutionalised paranoia that was a feature of Stalin's rule. He died in a Soviet labour camp, probably at the end of 1943. Here he was identified by the code name "Artur". Here he was arrested and detained on charges of espionage offences against the Czechoslovak state. Release soon followed, however, and he made his way back to Moscow.

It is likely that the mistrust of comrades which had been apparent in Prague will have followed him to Moscow where he fell foul of the Stalin Purges which were intensively focused on German political exiles in Moscow in response to the sudden invasion in June 1941 of the Soviet Union by German forces in defiance of the non-aggression pact negotiated and concluded between the dictator-states two years earlier. On 22 June 1941, Emil Pietzuch was arrested by the homeland security services. He faced trial on 4 December 1943 and was sentenced to five year's loss of liberty. He did not survive his detention, and indeed probably died at the hands of the Gulag in 1943.