Herbert Wehner in the Lubjanka

(last modified April 2004)

In the course of the year 1937, Herbert Wehner was ordered to appear in the Lubjanka in Moscow at least four times. While he was there, he supplied the NKVD with several written reports about the German "Trotskyists" and about individual German emigrants. Thanks to Wehner's cooperation, a NKVD order signed by People's Commissar Jeshov was drawn up which unleashed a wave of arrests of German immigrants living in the Soviet Union. Newly available documents from the NKVD and Comintern archives in Moscow provide the basis for an analysis of the genesis of Stalinist terror, the role of denunciation by individuals and within the Communist Party, and Wehner's autobiographical strategies of repression.