GERMANY: The Apparatus

Ernst Wollweber is a master craftsman. His trade is trouble. A short, pudgy Communist of 52, with a fat, pockmarked face that has rarely been photographed, he sits at a bureaucrat’s desk in the former Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin. Ostensibly, he busies himself with the mundane details of shipping to & from Communist Germany. Actually, Ernst Wollweber is boss of an enterprise called the Wollweber Apparatus, which channels illegal trade in strategic supplies to the Communists.

A Complete Boiler Plant. The apparatus also handles sabotage and espionage, spreading discontent, and setting off occasional riots among the West Germans. But its prime project is illegal trade—to use the U.S.-supported industrial economy of Western Germany as an arsenal for Communism. West Germans are forbidden to sell arms, munitions-making machinery and important strategic items to Red territory. But many West Germans have been skirting the ban. During the first six months of the Korean war, West German trade with Communist China jumped 2,700%; iron & steel exports to the Chinese Reds alone went from nearly zero to more than $2,000,000 last year.

In 1950, West Germans managed to slip more than $74 million of strategic materials into the Soviet zone on an ostensibly “legal” basis, with the help of phony invoices, bribed or lax custom guards, intricate shipping techniques. On one occasion, 89 separate pieces of machinery were passed through West German custom guards; reassembled on the other side, they turned out to be a complete boiler factory. Other supplies move through “triangular trade”—a West German industrialist will ship a smelting plant, for example, to Belgium and from there it will be shipped to East Germany. In addition to this “legal” trade, the Communists are getting smuggled goods from West Germany at a rate which some estimate as high as $350 million a year.

The illegal trade has reached such alarming proportions that U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy came home last month to report to Washington and discuss more stringent countermeasures. McCloy was sure that most of the smuggling and tricks for getting around the trade bans were the work of professional operators financed by “Communist agents who are throwing a good bit of gold around.” Most formidable of all the professionals are Ernst Wollweber and the trained, dedicated underground men of his apparatus.

Like Mushrooms. Ernst Wollweber and the German Communist movement grew up together. The son of a Silesian miner who was killed in World War I, he went to work as a stevedore in his teens. He joined the German Communist Party on the day it was formed, 32 years ago. In the dank darkness of the Communist underground, Wollweber’s peculiar talents sprouted like mushrooms. He was shrewd and quick-minded, capable of great courage and matchless brutality, a man capable of believing himself when he snarled, as he often did to a wavering follower: “Death is easy.” During World War I he helped sabotage some German cement barges. By war’s end he was a stoker on the battleship Helgoland and was hard at work stoking up the fires of the German naval mutiny. It was Stoker Wollweber who gave the mutiny signal to the Helgoland’s crew. When truckloads of shouting armed mutineers stormed into Bremen, the man in the lead was stocky Ernst Wollweber.

Wollweber’s first journey to Moscow was, like almost everything in his career, dramatic and violent. Unable to cross Poland, which was then at war with Russia, he and a colleague signed on a North Sea trawler. They smuggled a band of Communists aboard and hid them in the fish tank. At sea, the Trojan horse was opened, the armed Reds seized the trawler’s officers and sailed into Murmansk. (The shipping company afterwards billed the Soviet government for the trawler; the bill was paid without a murmur.) In Moscow, Comrades Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin gave Wollweber a hero’s reception. In his brief stay there, Wollweber sensed that Stalin was the man to back in the party struggle then brewing, and he bet his future on it. Wollweber and Stalin have been personal friends since.

Drink & Women. Back in Germany, Wollweber became boss of the Comintern’s maritime division and organizer of the worldwide courier system on which the Comintern depended for its life. As a respectable front—and a means of getting immunity from arrest—he got himself elected to various parliamentary bodies, where he won a reputation as a dull orator and, socially, a bore who told long stories of his exploits with drink and women.

Under the Nazis and their perpetual Communist manhunt, Wollweber actually thrived. One of the few party leaders who neither fled into exile nor fell into the Gestapo’s hands, he installed the Communist cadres underground and kept them operating. Often the Gestapo breathed down his thick bull neck. Once a gang of Danish Nazis working for the Gestapo kidnaped him off the streets of Copenhagen, but the Danish police intervened and set him free.

Wollweber graduated in the ’30s to chief of the Comintern’s western operations. Out of Copenhagen (where he operated from the same office building used by the Gestapo) he spun a web of sabotage. During the Spanish Civil War, his men concentrated on ships carrying supplies to Franco, sabotaged 21 German, Italian and Spanish ships. During World War II, his apparatus turned to Nazi installations in Norway and to materials that the Swedes were selling to the Germans. Under German pressure, the Swedes , arrested Wollweber one day in 1941 and prepared to hand him over. But he casually produced papers showing that he had become a Soviet citizen and got off with a jail sentence for stealing explosives. Even during his imprisonment, Wollweber kept his apparatus working. Many a Baltic ship listed as a mine casualty was actually the victim of a Wollweber time bomb secreted in its hold. Three of Sweden’s most modern destroyers went to the bottom.

Pancake on Legs. Ernst Wollweber spent the last years of the war in Russia. In 1946, he came back to Germany and stepped into his seemingly legitimate job in the Ministry of Transport. He has a glowing bald spot, and his once rugged frame has grown so fat and flabby that his staff refer to him covertly in the Berlin dialect as “Pfannkuchen uff Beene”—pancake on legs. But inside, as the West is learning to its discomfort, Ernst Wollweber is still the tough and brutal plotter, still a master of his craft. His diligent Red troublemakers and riot-prompters speckle Western Germany. His saboteurs have infiltrated West Germany so extensively in recent months that West German industrialists announced last week they were planning a mutual security program to protect their plants. His smooth exploitation of the West Germans’ desire for trade and of the opportunities for smuggling was working so well that occupation authorities were considering stringent measures. As a sample, the U.S. ECA mission to Germany took steps last week to withhold 6,000,000 marks in ECA counterpart funds from a Ruhr steel firm that has been engaging in illegal trade with the Communists. It was the first, but probably not the last, real countermeasure against the Wollweber apparatus.