Celebrated Soviet spy dies

Press, 22 January 1982, Page 6

Celebrated Soviet spy dies

NZPA-Reuter Jerusalem

Leopold Trepper,leader of the Moscow-directed “Red Orchestra,” one of the Second World War’s largest and most effective espionage networks, has died in Jerusalem. He was 77.

Mr Trepper, a Polish-born Jew, had lived in Israel since 1974 after spending 10 years in Soviet prisons. The Red Orchestra gave the Soviet Union valuable information on German movements and plans and was said by historians to have been the first to warn Moscow in 1940 of German plans for the invasion that took place in June the next year. Mr Trepper said in his

own memoirs that Stalin personally rejected the warning with the charge that Mr Trepper was tricked by British propaganda. The German intelligence chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, said Mr Trepper’s network cost the Third Reich the lives of 200,000 soldiers.

Mr Trepper first emigrated to the , Britishgoverned Palestine in the late 1920 s where his Communist activities pitted him against both the Zionist movement and the British police which finally expelled him.

Mr Trepper then went to the Soviet Union which sent him as an agent to Western

Europe. He was arrested and expelled from France. Based in Belgium, Mr Trepper organised a wideranging espionage network which covered France the Netherlands, Belgium, and Nazi Germany itself. The network, made up of agents from 11 nationalities, was given the name Red Orchestra by the Nazis who captured and killed 216 of the original 290 members. Mr Trepper himself was captured bv the Gestapo at the end of 1942 and said he had escaped ( from their hands. Historians have differed on the circumstances of the escape and on the subsequent operations of the Red

Orchestra though some survivors were reported to have become double or triple agents. At the end of the war Mr Trepper returned to the Soviet Union where he was thrown into prison until 1955 and his family was told he had died.

Mr Trepper returned afterwards to Poland where he dedicated himself to re storing the social and cultural life of the remnants of the once-thriving Jewish community there. The rise of Polish antisemitism during the 1967 Middle East War prompted Mr Trepper to apply to leave for Israel but his requests were rejected until 1974.