Ludwig Martens

Ludwig Christian Alexander Karl Martens (or Ludwig Karlovich Martens; ; – 19 October 1948) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, Soviet diplomat, and engineer.

Early years Ludwig Martens was born on in Bachmut, in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate in the south of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). Ludwig's father, a German-born industrialist named Karl Gustav Adolf Martens, was the owner of a steel mill in Kursk, Russia. There were five sons and two daughters in the family. Two of them, Ludwig and Olga, became professional revolutionaries.

In 1893, Martens graduated from a Kursk Realschule and entered Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology, from which he graduated to become a mechanical engineer.

He was fluent in English, German, French, and Russian.

Political career While at the State Institute of Technology, Martens became acquainted with Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov. Soon he became a member of their illegal Marxist group League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. As the Soviet Bureau's administrative head, commercial attaché, and financial advisor, Julius Hammer, father of Armand Hammer, was assigned to generate support for the Russian Soviet Government Bureau and funded the Bureau by money laundering the proceeds from illegal sales of smuggled diamonds through his company Allied Drug.

In June 1919, under pressure from the Lusk Committee, the Bureau was searched by police.

In response to charges by the United States Department of Justice, Martens stated in Washington, D.C., on 10 January, 1920, that he had done nothing to justify being deported. “My activities in the United States have been entirely friendly and along commercial lines,” he said. After hearings in the United States Senate and the United States Department of Labor, Martens was finally deported to Soviet Russia in January 1921.

From 1927 to 1941, he was the Chief Editor of the Technical Encyclopedia.

During World War II the son of Ludwig Martens, Wilhelm Ludvigovich (Willy) Martens, was active in head of the Free Germany committee intended to organize German POWs to fight alongside the Soviets against Axis troops. The committee was organized in Krasnogorsk in 1943. Wilhelm Martens also worked as a Soviet intelligence officer.