Stalin exceeded Hitler’s tally of top party leaders, as the following murder toll demonstrates.
Politbureau: Killed by Stalin: Hermann Remmele, Heinz Neumann, Fritz Schulte, Hermann Schubert – four.
Politbureau: Killed by Hitler: Ernst Thälmann, John Schehr – two.
Central Committee: Killed by Stalin: Hugo Eberlein (founder of the Comintern), Hans Kippenberger (head of the KPD military apparatus), Leo Flieg (KPD Organisations Secretary), Willy Leow (head of the Red Front Fighters’ League), Willi Koska (head of Red Aid), Heinrich Susskind and Werner Hirsch (chief editors of
Rote Fahne, the KPD daily), Erich Birkenhauer, Alfred Rebe, Theodor Beutling, Heinrich Kurella (all on the staff of
Rote Fahne), Kurt Sauerland, August Creutzburg. Total – 11.
Central Committee: Killed by Hitler – nine.
Even excelling Hitler as a butcher of Communists did not sate the blood-lust of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy. Following the conclusion of the Stalin-Hitler pact in August 1939, Stalin dealt one last treacherous blow to those whom he had betrayed in 1933 and persecuted after they fled to the USSR from the Nazi terror in the succeeding years. Former KPD militants still languishing in Stalin’s camps all over the USSR were collected together at one point and handed over to the SS on the newly-established Soviet-German frontier in what Molotov termed ‘the former state of Poland’. The widow of the murdered Heinz Neumann was one of them, and she later described this scene of unbelievable perfidy and degradation in her autobiographical
Under Two Dictators:
There were 28 men... in our group. Betty [Olberg] and I, an old professor and a prisoner with a wounded leg were taken on in a lorry. The men had to walk. We got out on the Russian side of the Brest-Litovsk bridge, and waited for them to come up, looking across the bridge into occupied Poland. The men arrived and then a group of GPU men crossed the bridge. We saw them returning after a while, and the group was larger. There were SS officers with them. The SS commandant and the GPU chief saluted each other. The Russian... took out some papers from a bright leather case and began to read out a list of names. The only one I heard was ‘Margarete Genrichovna Buber-Neumann’. Some of our group began to protest and to argue with the GPU. One of them was a Jew... another was a young worker from Dresden, who had been mixed up in a clash with the Nazis in 1933 as a result of which a Nazi had been killed... His fate was certain. We went over the bridge. The three who had protested were hustled along with the rest... The GPU officials still stood there in a group watching us go. Behind them was Soviet Russia. Bitterly I recalled the Communist litany: ‘Fatherland of the Toilers, Bulwark of Socialism, Haven of the Persecuted.’
Miraculously, Mrs Neumann survived her four-year term in Ravensbrück concentration camp, though not before she had been persecuted once more, not merely by her Nazi jailers, but by her camp inmates still loyal to the Stalinist line that had led them into captivity. Because her husband had been purged in Moscow, women KPD prisoners at Ravensbrück were instructed by their leaders to treat her as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ and ‘enemy of the people’.
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Those were of course also the charges hurled against the defendants at the three Moscow Show Trials of 1936, 1937 and 1938. Here too, the question of Germany loomed large.
Even amongst some of the most loyal of Stalin’s supporters it was being admitted that their patron had permitted Hitler to come to power in Germany. Stalin’s answer was to exploit the Moscow Trials to ‘prove’ not only to the CPSU leaders and the Soviet working class, but to the entire international workers’ movement, that it was not he who had served as an ally of German fascism, but Trotsky and all those Communists in the USSR who had, at various times in the past associated themselves with an oppositional tendency.