There recently arrived in the mail a
heavy book package. The arrival of a
book is no rare event in this household, but I was nonetheless puzzled, as I
usually remember what I have on order.
I opened it to discover a thick
paperback (nearly six hundred pages) entitled La véritable histoire de l’Orchestre Rouge—The Real History of the “Red Orchestra”—by Guillaume Bourgeois. It was a complimentary copy with a nice
author’s inscription. The cover art is
catchy: superimposed dark silhouettes of trenchcoated “spooks” upon a swastikaed
red background. As many readers will
know, the “Red Orchestra” was the name given by the Nazi counter-espionage
agencies to the Russian spy rings working in western Europe just before and
during World War II. In the slang of the
German agencies, spies were “violinists”.
Hence the Sonderkommando (special unit) established by the Nazi
authorities to root them out called the large ensemble of Communist spies an
orchestra, the Rote Kapelle. In terms of the popular espionology of action
movies and spy thrillers, no group is more famous than the Red Orchestra and no
single spy more heroic than its Conductor, the legendary Leopold Trepper.
As for the book’s
author, Guillaume Bourgeois, a professor of modern European history at the
University of Poitiers, he is not a complete stranger to this blog. He was my host on a memorable picnic at Vaux-le-Vicomte,
which I wrote about at the time last year.
We first met soon after I had published
The Anti-Communist Manifestos in
2009. One of the four anti-Communist
bestsellers I had written about was Out
of the Night (1941), by a one-time German Comintern agent named Richard
Krebs. This man became famous overnight
under his pen-name “Jan Valtin” with the publication of his blockbuster. For although I had never heard of the book
when I stumbled upon it in a junk pile in Cranbury NJ, it was the bestseller of its year, and it
played no insignificant role in the literary history of the Cold War and
especially in the creation of American anti-Communism.
Bourgeois, an expert
on Communist activities in the pre-War European maritime unions, knew a great
deal about Krebs/Valtin. Slightly
embarrassingly, indeed, he knew more than I did, despite the fact that I had
published a couple of essays on him based on archival materials in the
Princeton library.
Leopold Trepper, Super-spy
The received wisdom
concerning the Red Orchestra is that it was one of the most successful
espionage groups of all time. Its leader
was Leopold Trepper (1904-1982), a Polish Jew whose development, like that of
Arthur Koestler, took the not uncommon path through youthful Zionism to Communism. He was recruited by the GRU and eventually
was directing several loosely connected espionage groups in Germany and
elsewhere in Western Europe, especially Belgium and Switzerland. Readers of John le Carré and Alan Furst will
know something of the weirdness of living in a hall of mirrors presided over by
faceless manipulators of disinformation and handlers of double agents. Such
authors might prepare them for Trepper’s autobiography, The Great Game (Le grand jeu,
1975). According to Trepper, the “great
game” was the complicated ruse by which he was able repeatedly to hoodwink the Abwehr (German Counter-espionage) and to
deploy a major engine of Resistance under the very noses of the German
occupiers. Using mainly amateur but
politically committed agents, the Red Orchestra was able to deliver a veritable
mother lode of crucial information to Moscow.
Part of the Trepper legend is that he actually forewarned Stalin of
Operation Barbarossa (Hitler’s stab-in-the-back invasion of his treaty ally,
the Soviet Union, in June of 1941).
Unfortunately, Stalin refused to believe him. Likewise the Red Orchestra was credited with
stealing and transmitting information crucial to the Soviet victory at the
Battle of Stalingrad (autumn and winter of 1942/43), the turning point of the
European war.
That is essentially
the history of the Red Orchestra in most books on the subject, and what’s not
to like? Surely we all love to imagine
detestable Nazis in their spit-and-polish uniforms being outfoxed by grizzled peasants
in berets, frumpy housewives, and old nondescript guys in really bad suits—you
have seen it a dozen times in the movies.
This heroic history was pleasing to the war’s victors, and especially to
the French Communist Party, which advertised itself as the heart of the
Résistance and the “party of the 75,000 fusillés”*--the
number of their comrades who had faced German firing-squads. Later, in the Cold War, ex-Nazis and other
Germans had their own reasons to encourage the West to fear the nearly supernatural
powers of Soviet intelligence. But is
this the true history of the Red
Orchestra?
One of the big
problems in studying spies is that spies are, quite literally, professional
liars. Unfortunately they don’t always
start telling the truth when they turn to autobiography. That is the problem I had (have) with “Jan
Valtin”. Not all that many super-spies
live to tell about it. Those who do can
reasonably expect that there are few other survivors in a position to contradict
their fibs. Unfortunately for them there
are archives. Guillaume Bourgeois has been chasing the
history of Communist espionage through the archives of Europe for the last
twenty years.
To call his findings
“revisionary history” is putting it mildly.
This terrific book will surely soon be translated into English for the
convenience for the large number of espionage buffs in the Anglophone
world. For the moment I shall say no
more than that it is comforting to learn that on occasion truth is not stranger than fiction, just more
interesting.
Guillaume Bourgeois in mid-allnighter
*The
Nazis were champion murderers, but this is an instance of political poetic
license. There were perhaps four thousand civilians executed during
the German occupation of France. The
number of Communists among them is significant but uncertain.
Many of the fusillés were
randomly selected “reprisal” hostages.
