Leo Flieg

Leopold "Leo" Flieg (5 November 1893 – 15 March 1939) was a German communist politician. A founding member of the Communist Party of Germany, he was regarded by some as an "éminence grise" to the national leadership. He served as organizational secretary of the party from 1922 to 1932 and as a member of the Landtag of Prussia from 1924 until the Nazis came to power in 1933. He fled to Moscow soon after, where he was arrested in 1938 and executed in 1939, during the Great Purge.

Early life Leopold Flieg was born into a Jewish working-class family in Berlin on 5 November 1893.

Communist Party of Germany The founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) took place in Berlin over three days between 30 December 1918 and 1 January 1919. The core of the founding membership consisted of those who had hitherto been Spartacus League members; Flieg was a party member and part of the leadership team from the outset. He worked closely with Willi Münzenberg on the creation of the Young Communist International ("Kommunistische Jugendinternationale" / KJI), serving as a member of its executive committee from its launch in 1919 till March 1922. He was re-elected several times before Communists were excluded from the Landtag in 1933.

In May 1932 Flieg was suddenly dismissed from his various functions by the KPD. At the time a party newspaper - identified, perhaps inevitably, as a Trotskyist newspaper - noted that party comrades had probably barely heard of him. But Flieg had nevertheless become the stabilizing figure ("der ruhende Pol") in the party Central Committee: "... quiet and inconspicuous, no puffed up bozo, but a completely reliable and punctilious party official, Leo Flieg survived under a succession of leadership regimes. He had taken down Brandler's secret minutes without batting an eyelid. He had distributed the circulars produced by Ruth Fischer and Werner Scholem, and those in the know suggest that deep down Fischer was the only one whose vision he really shared. But he survived. He survived Ewert (who never entirely trusted him), and since 1928 he had survived for four years as "head of personnel" under Thälmann's leadership, effectively mastering the considerable feat of managing Thälmann's office. Those diplomatic talents must be saluted.""... still und unscheinbar, kein hochfahrender Bonze, aber ein absolut zuverlässiger und pünktlicher Beamter, hat Leo Flieg manche Zentrale überlebt. Er hat Brandlers Geheimprotokolle geführt, ohne mit der Wimper zu zucken. Er hat die Rundschreiben von Ruth Fischer und Werner Scholem expediert, und Kenner behaupten, die Ruth-Fischer-Zentrale sei auch die einzige gewesen, mit der Flieg im Grunde einverstanden gewesen sei. Trotzdem hat er auch Ewert überlebt, der ihm wenig getraut hat, und er hat seit 1928 als Personalchef der Thälmann-Zentrale immerhin vier Jahre das Kunststück fertiggebracht, das Büro eines Thälmann zu leiten. Alle Achtung vor solchen diplomatischen Talenten...". Many of those expelled later established an alternative party. Sources insist that through this period Flieg carried out his party functions with skill, loyalty and meticulous care, without regard to whether the party leadership might be considered too far to the left or too far to the right. Then, in May 1932 Flieg was relieved by the KPD of his party responsibilities, seen as having become too close to Heinz Neumann, a close political comrade and a personal friend. In 1930/31 Neumann had become critical of Thälmann, and thereby also of Stalin, both of whom, he said, were underestimating the dangers presented by the rise of the Nazi Party. In April 1932 Neumann was stripped of his party functions and summoned to Moscow. Flieg was identified as a "member of the Neumann group" and his demotions, accompanied by the inevitable mutterings about Trotskyite sympathies, followed a few weeks later. At Easter that year he received an invitation from the Comintern to a meeting in Moscow. Those with contacts in the Soviet Union were by this time fully aware of the rising level of political arrests under way in what later came to be known in English language sources as the Great Purge. Flieg knew the risks inherent in returning to Moscow and friends urged him to stay in Paris. The Swedish banker Olof Aschberg urged him not to go, and promised support in seeking "emigrant status" from the French authorities. But Flieg felt constrained to accept the invitation. He had responsibilities for party monies, and feared he might be accused of embezzlement by Comintern chiefs in Moscow if he did not comply with their order. In the course that lengthy succession of torture sessions he was persuaded to incriminate himself and many others. In the written "confession" extracted from him he confirmed his membership of a Comintern anti-Soviet conspiracy. On 14 March 1939 Flieg was condemned to death by a military tribunal of the High Court and executed by shooting. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957. Documents from the Soviet Union that became available after 1990 disclosed a hitherto unsuspected level of involvement by leading members of the German community of exiled communists in Moscow. In the words of one headline that appeared in 1990, "more than a thousand German communists fell victim to the Stalin Terror, with the approval of leading comrades in the Communist Party of Germany". Subsequent investigation of contemporary documents suggests to some that the involvement of the leading German communist comrades probably extended beyond mere approval.

In 2002 work undertaken on more recently studied Soviet documents led one specialist historian to point the finger at Herbert Wehner (identified in Soviet records of the time under the party name "Kurt Funk"). Wehner returned from Soviet exile in 1946 and rose to become a leading figure in West Germany's Social Democratic Party. Under NKVD interrogation in the Lubyanka Building during 1937 Wehner found himself accused of joint responsibility for the arrest, in Germany, of the German party leader, Ernst Thälmann, back in 1933. The accusation might have been expected to have ended in Wehner's death, but it did not. Wehner chose to co-operate. He wrote for his interrogators a lengthy report entitled "Report of investigation into deeply ingrained Trotzkyite activity in the German anti-fascist movement" ("Untersuchungsbericht zur trotzkistischen Wühlarbeit in der deutschen antifaschistischen Bewegung"). The report included the names of all the communist German political exiles in Moscow who shortly afterwards fell under suspicion of being "Trotskyites" and / or members of "counter-revolutionary groups". Wehner's report on Flieg included the observation that he had been characterised by party leader Ernst Thälmann as a rogue (" Er sei, so Wehner, vom Vorsitzenden Ernst Thälmann als Gauner bezeichnet worden"). Soon after Wehner submitted his report hundreds of KPD refugees were detained by the Soviet authorities. For Reinhard Müller this was part of a desperate "survival strategy", which for a terrified Herbert Wehner worked in its own terms, but for which hundreds of others paid the price. An alternative interpretation might be that the German political exiles caught up in the Great Purge would have been arrested anyway, and Wehner's active collusion merely facilitated the exercise.