Rudolf Herrnstadt (18 March 1903 – 28 August 1966) was a German journalist and communist politician. After abandoning his law studies in 1922, Herrnstadt became a convinced communist. Despite his bourgeois origins, he was accepted into the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1931 and worked for the Soviet military intelligence service Glawnoje Raswedywatelnoje Uprawlenije (GRU, "Main Administration for Intelligence"). As a foreign correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt, he worked in Prague (1930), Warsaw (1931 to 1936) and Moscow (1933). He emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1939, days before the Invasion of Poland, where he was active in the fight against the Nazi state as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Neue Zeit in the National Committee for a Free Germany from 1944 during the German-Soviet War.
After the end of World War II, Herrnstadt returned to Berlin in 1945. He was editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung, initially in the Soviet occupation zone and from 1949 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and played a key role in founding the Berliner Verlag publishers and the left-wing newspaper Neues Deutschland, the central organ of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). From 1950 to 1953 he was a member of the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED and a candidate for the Politburo of the SED.
In the early 1950s, Herrnstadt campaigned for democratization within the SED, but lost the power struggle against the General Secretary of the Central Committee,Walter Ulbricht. After the uprising of 17 June 1953, where Herrnstadt had shown understanding for the protests in articles in Neues Deutschland, he and other opponents of Ulbricht lost their seat on the Central Committee for "forming anti-party factions." In the same year, he also lost his position as editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland. In 1954, he was expelled from the SED and was not rehabilitated until the end of his life.
Rudolf Herrnstadt came from a Jewish family in the Upper Silesian city of Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland His mother Maria-Clara came from a merchant family that had become wealthy after 1870.[1] His father Dr Ludwig Herrnstadt worked as a lawyer and notary in Gleiwitz, and - despite his legal work for various large companies - had been a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) since 1894[2] and was a social democratic city councilor in Gleiwitz.[3], In a CV written for the Soviet military intelligence service around 1930, Rudolf Herrnstadt wrote that his father earned around 1,200 Reichsmarks a month, while the monthly salary of an Upper Silesian industrial worker fluctuated between 80 and 150 marks. He therefore describes his father as a "member of the Jewish sector of the upper bourgeoisie".[1] He had a brother Ernst Herrnstadt, born in 1906.[3]
Herrnstadt attended the Catholic grammar school in Gleiwitz from 1912 to 1921 and began studying law in 1921, initially at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and then at the Ruprecht Karl University in Heidelberg from March 1922. In October 1922, Rudolf Herrnstadt informed his parents that he did not want to continue his studies but wanted to work as a writer in the future. His father then ordered that his underage son had to work in the Upper Silesian pulp mills.[3] Herrnstadt worked there until autumn 1924 as a payroll clerk, cashier, warehouse manager and finally as secretary to the management.[4]
Against his parents' wishes, Herrnstadt returned to Berlin in November 1924.[3] He earned his living from support payments from his parents and as an editor for the Drei-Masken publishing house, while at the same time working as a freelance writer. In May 1928 he applied to the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt and was initially employed as an unpaid assistant editor, and from autumn 1928 as a typesetter (known as a technical editor).[3][4] He was one of the journalists promoted by Theodor Wolff. Howver, in November 1929, Herrnstadt was sacked by the Rudolf Mosse publishing company for writing a sensationalist story about 240,000 workers in the Ruhr region who had been locked out of work.[5] Businesses using the paper for advertising threatened to withdraw their advertising budget, but Wolff brought Herrnstadt back to work in the editors office.[3] Within the publishing house, Herrnstadt was known as a communist and was considered to be a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) due to particular opinions he held.[6]
At the newspaper, Herrnstadt met the aspiring German editor Ilse Stöbe,[7] eight years his junior and became good friends with her.[8] The couple eventually became engaged.[9] Herrnstadt believed that the political ideology of capitalism with its inherent structural problems in the 1920's would be replaced by socialism, or indeed communism.[6] From the beginning, Stöbe shared the same political ideology as Herrnstadt. There was an expectation that both of them would join the KPD.[10][11] However, a study by the German historian Elke Scherstjanoi found that the couple were told by a KPD official in the Karl Liebknecht house, that they were more useful to the communist party, working outside the KPD.[12][a] On 5 June 1930, Herrnstadt became the correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt in Prague.[13] While there he repeatedly tried to join the communist party.[14] His persistance brought him to the notice of Soviet military intelligence, who recruited him as an Red Army GRU agent[14] and gave him the codename "Arbin".[15]
When Herrnstadt returned to Berlin in 1931, he introduced Stöbe to "Dr. Bosch", who in reality was the Soviet rezident in Berlin, the Latvian Jewish communist and historian Yakov Bronin (1904-1984).[16] Bronin recruited Stöbe as an agent for the GRU. Her codename was "Arnim".[17][15]
In 1931, Herrnstadt was sent to Warsaw as a foreign correspondant for the Berliner Tageblatt.[15] and found an apartment in Nowogrodzka.[18] In Germany, the arrival of Adolf Hitler at the seat of power would have made Herrnstadt a target, both as an unrepentant communist activist and as a Jew.
Herrnstadt began the cultivation of a group of left-leaning, liberal anti-nazis[19] as part of establishing a residenzy. By 1936, these included folk from the Germany embassy that included the ambassador Hans-Adolf von Moltke, the legation councillor Rudolf von Scheliha and the press-secretary Hans Graf Huyn.[19] as well as connections to the Polish writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, poet Julian Tuwim, the actress Ida Kaminska and the Polish foreign minister Josef Beck.[18] Herrnstadt's espionage group in Warsaw was made up him and Stöbe and included Gerhard Kegel and his wife Charlotte Vogt, the couple Marta (Margarita) and lawyer Kurt Welkisch, at times also the publisher Helmut Kindler and his childhood friend, the lawyer Lothar Bolz.[20] Kindler in his book "Zum Abschied ein Fest : die Autobiographie eines deutschen Verlegers" (A farewell party: the autobiography of a German publisher) describes how he was recruited for a short time.[21]
After the German-Polish non-aggression pact concluded in 1934, Herrnstadt "turned his attention entirely to efforts to create a security alliance between Poland and Hitler's Germany."[22]
By 1936, using the Editor’s Law, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had removed many foreign Jewish correspondents and by that point only a few remained. Herrnstadt was one of them.[23] On 12 March 1936, Herrnstadt left the Berliner Tageblatt[24] when liberal editor-in-chief Paul Scheffler resigned from his post.[25]
Although Moltke was politically sympathetic to Herrnstadt, he couldn't defend him as he was Jewish. [24] From that point forward, he avoided all contact with him.[26] Rudolf von Scheliha was of a different mettle and continued to maintain contact with Herrnstadt and the Stöbe, although their meetings were kept secret.[27] Both Herrnstadt and von Scheliha had similar political views on the Nazis, however, they had different views on the Soviet Union as von Scheliha was opposed to communism.[27] To convince him otherwise, Herrnstadt decided to persuade Von Scheliha to pass embassy reports by disguising the delivery location of the intelligence, i.e. to show they weren't going to the Soviet Union.[25][27] In 1937, he travelled to England and through Ernest David Weiss and his agent Ilse Steinfeld, a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt who worked for The Guardian, he met the German legation councillor Hermann von Stutterheim (1887-1959)[28] of the German embassy in London.[b][29] When he returned to Warsaw, he informed Von Scheliha that had met a contact in England, who was an "intermediary" for the secret service who was interested in the political situation in Poland. He further informed him that he was authorised to act for this intermediary.[29] This finally convinced Von Scheliha by mid-September to begin supplying embassy reports. From November 1937 to August 1939, Herrnstadt supplied 211 intelligence report to the Soviet Union that were considered valuable.[29] In 16 August 1939, Von Scheliha reported that an Invasion of Poland was to begin on 1 September 1939.[30]
With the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in 1939, Herrnstadt fled to the Soviet Union and came to reside in Moscow, where he applied and was accepted into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[31] Despite criticism from some members of the German exile community for his "anti-revolutionary" views, Herrnstadt was among the members of the National Committee for a Free Germany. He returned to Germany as a member of the Sobottka Group, which laid the groundwork for the Soviet Military Administration in Germany in Mecklenburg.[32]
According to a report by German political author and historian Wolfgang Leonhard, his "upper-class past" was evident, among other things, from the fact that while he was still working in the Soviet Union as chief editor of the newspaper of the "National Committee for a Free Germany", he attracted attention by addressing his subordinates using the formal "You".[33]
After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 Walter Ulbricht was summoned for a visit to Moscow with the new Soviet leadership, where he was criticized for his introduction of collective farms and a slower course towards socialist construction. Herrnstadt was among the domestic critics of Ulbricht's line of the SED as a leading politician with candidate member status in the SED's Politburo and chief editor of the Neues Deutschland; a key ally during this time was Wilhelm Zaisser, who criticized Ulbricht from his position as the country's Minister of State Security and a leading party ideologist. However, Herrnstadt's dissension against the course of the Ulbricht faction was also criticized by Soviet adviser Vladimir Semyonov, who answered Herrnstadt's attack by replying that "in two weeks you may no longer have a state."[34]
Ulbricht-led East Germany had pursued a course of reform since March 1953. After the 1953 East German Uprising, which initially weakened Ulbricht's position in the SED and the Soviet Union, Zaisser issued a Politburo motion to replace Ulbricht with Herrnstadt as SED First Secretary. However, the situation reversed after Nikita Khrushchev consolidated power over the Soviet government in Moscow and purged Ulbricht's opponent Lavrentiy Beria.[35] Herrnstadt was removed from his position in the SED's Politbüro the same year. He was also removed from the Neues Deutschland at around the same time at the Ulbricht's request, according to the autobiography of fellow communist Markus Wolf.[36]
Herrnstadt died on 28 August 1966.