Wolf also witnessed the mass arrests, the purges, and the poverty of the Soviet Union-and he also kept faith with the cause. He also spent his childhood in the Soviet Union, attending the same elite schools for children of foreign Communists as Leonhard did, as well as the same wartime training camp the two had shared a bedroom there, solemnly calling each other by their aliases-these were the rules of deep conspiracy-although they knew each other’s real names perfectly well. Markus Wolf was also the son of a prominent German Communist family. “Curious, I thought, that this had never struck me before!” That was when he began to have the doubts that inexorably led him to plot his escape.Īt exactly that same moment, in exactly the same city, another high-ranking East German was coming to precisely the opposite set of conclusions. Leonhard walked away and entered his own, top-category dining room, where white cloths covered the tables and high-ranking functionaries received three-course meals. The comrade was astonished: “But … aren’t they all members of the Party?” Leonhard told him that the answer depended on what sort of meal ticket he had-different ranks of officials had access to different dining rooms. While walking down the hall of the Central Committee building, he was stopped by a “pleasant-looking middle-aged man,” a comrade recently arrived from the West, who asked where to find the dining room. The turning point, when it came, was trivial. Yet he and his ideologically committed friends “instinctively recoiled from the thought” that any of these events were “in diametrical opposition to our Socialist ideals.” Steadfastly, he clung to the belief system he had grown up with.Īnne Applebaum: Resist the urge to simplify the story He had witnessed the terrible poverty and inequality of the Soviet Union, he had despaired of the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany between 19, and he knew about the Red Army’s mass rapes of women following the occupation. While he was still a teenager in Moscow, his mother had been arrested as an “enemy of the people” and sent to Vorkuta, a labor camp in the far north. Leonhard had lived through a great deal by that time.
“It’s got to look democratic,” Ulbricht told him, “but we must have everything in our control.” He had one central task: to ensure that any local leaders who emerged from the postwar chaos were assigned deputies loyal to the party. Leonhard was put on a team charged with re‑creating Berlin’s city government. The son of German Communists, he had been educated in the Soviet Union, trained in special schools during the war, and brought back to Berlin from Moscow in May 1945, on the same airplane that carried Walter Ulbricht, the leader of what would soon become the East German Communist Party.
Though only 28 years old at the time, Leonhard stood at the pinnacle of the new East German elite. To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.
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