IN THE TOILS

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 35, 4 November 1933, Page 18

IN THE TOILS

Horrors of Russian O.G.P.U

Two commands sound constantly through the cells of the "Inner Prison” of the Secret Police —the dreaded Lubianka in Moscow. The first, “Na dopros!” (“For cross-examination!”) means prolonged mental torture for some wretched man trapped iu the police net. The second, "Citizen, pack up your belongings and follow me," is the sentry’s formula which means the approach of death. Dr. Karl Kiudermann heard both phrases many times during his two years’ confinement. His book, “In the Toils of the 0.G.P.U.,” is a grim record of the farcical "justice” of the 0.G.P.U., a record of forged confessions, crowded and vermin-infested cells, the use of hypnotism, drugs and ageuts-provoeateurs, and all the incidental horrors of Moscow prison life. The writer was one of three German students who, in the autumn of 1924, were arrested in Moscow on a trumpedup charge of espionage aud counterrevolution activities—elaborated later into a ' plot” to murder Trotsky and Stalin. This story of three hostages and a Soviet “frame-up” would seem almost incredible if it were not paralleled so nearly by the recent case of the British engineers. After their sudden arrest the students were separated and confined in the' Lubianka, where ten days passed before Kindermann’s first cross-exam-ination. He was placed in a filthy and overcrowded cell, criminals and political prisoners herding together; he saw his cell-mates ordered out to execution, and he saw also how one man, a Russian engineer, demoralised by weeks of mental agony, won "liberty” by agreeing to serve the O.G.P.U. as a secret agent. At Kindermann’s first examination he was shown “confessions” which he was told his friends had signed. Still, he refused to commit himself, and three months of close imprisonment passed before his next ordeal, after which the O.G.P.U. placed bogus prisoners in his cell to manufacture "proofs” of his guilt. Attempts were made to terrify Kindermami. “Descending to the cellar,” he writes on one occasion, "we walked close to five or six cells which had iron gratings instead of doors. Inside each of them crouched several men, apparently awaiting execution. Once the soldiers halted before one of the cells for some reason unknown to me. “Beeping in I saw that the floor was of cement. The walls, had formerly been white; but they were now all blood-spattered. In one corner stood a huge bucket of water and a broom. A man with a revolver in his hand was sitting on a chair. After we had halted for about a minute, one of the three soldiers gave orders for us to move on.” Later, after continued resistance Kiudermann was hypnotised and drugged and made to sign a “confession.” The O.G.P.U. was determined to bring him to trial. A prominent Bolshevist agitator and bis partners had just been sentenced to deatli for Communist murders in Leipzig, and the O.G.P.U. had decided to “frame up” a trial in which a number of Germans would figure iu roles parallel to those of the Leipzig agitators. “Third degree” methods continued week after week. At last, after months had dragged by, during which Kiudermann, imprisoned with an agent-provocateur, once feigned madness for five days, and also went on long periods of hunger-striking, he and his friends—whom he had not met since the arrest eight months before—wore brought to trial at the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R.—in effect nothing more than an O.G.P.U. department. Von Ditmar, under acute pressure. had broken down and pleaded guilty. The trial was the parody of justice made familiar to English people during this year’s Metro-Vickers ease. The “adviser” assigned to Klndermann was an incompetent, tired old man, who knew no language except Russian. Ulrich, President of the Court, with his “bestial, cynical features"—this man also conducted the recent trial—gave the idea of “a butcher who had just emerged steaming from an abbatoir rather than a judge.” The farce —“a rather clumsy piece ot play-acting,” said Klndermann in Court —was played for eight days. Toward the close, after a tissue of O G.P.U. falsehoods, Ulrich and another judge, who seemed frankly bored, spent their time whispering ind joking with each other. ’lhe verdict was inevitable —a triple death sentence. . Then, for seven months, penned in a small cell in the “Condemned Corridor” of the Lubianka, Kiudermann waited day by day for death, the silence disturbed periodically by the hooting of the “Black Raven,” as they called the lorry that took the condemned across to the execution cellar.

Kindermaun’s sentence was commuted to 10 years’ imprisonment, but the O.G.P.U. did not tell him so, and he learned of it only on Christmas Eve, 1925. through a long-delayed letter front home. He and Wolscbt. were removed to appalling cells in the Butyrki Prison. but You Ditmar. according to the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, ‘died from a heart seizure on March 23, 1926. in the Inner Prison of the Lubianka.” He had known too much. Finally, the Secret Police secured their ends when the German Government agreed to exchange Skoblevski ami his fellow-Tcliekists—whose German death sentences had been commuted—for the two students still alive. It was September. 1926. Kindermann and Wolscht bad been in the toils ef the O.G.P.U. for two years.