Pitiless Fate Part 5

When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin first made up his mind to prepare an invasion of Germany following the collapse of the Third Reich, one of the uppermost questions on his mind was how to convince the German masses to accept Communist rule once the Red Army finished what Stalin expected would be a swift and easy conquest of the former Nazi homeland. To that end he commissioned NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria to research the story of the Dresden mutiny to see if there was any information in the mutineers’ background that the Kremlin could use as material for pro-Soviet propaganda. If he couldn’t find any, Beria said casually, he could always gin some up. Facts meant little to the NKVD boss-- except, that is, when they could be used to advance his personal or ideological agendas. Or to destroy his perceived enemies. Beria was one of the most shameless manipulators on either side during the Second World War, and his campaign to sell the Dresden mutineers as proto-Marxists was a textbook example of his talent for performing such manipulation.

His first step in making that campaign work was to enlist the NKVD’s research staff in an investigation aimed at finding evidence of pro-Communist views on the part of Sgt. Witzleber and his fellow mutineers. That would prove easier said than done; few documents of Witzleber’s life before the mutiny had survived the Great War, and of those which did survive the vast majority hinted that the architect of the Dresden uprising detested the Communists almost as much as he loathed the Hohenzollern regime whose callousness had first driven him to revolt. Beria quickly decided it would be necessary to use a combination of some very sophisticated forgery and good old-fashioned lying to transform Witzleber into a Marxist icon.

This was where a group colloquially known as “the tinkerers” and formally designated Special Section 105 came in. Utilizing a combined team of counterfeiters and propagandists, they spent most of their working hours creating phony historical documents designed to look authentic and skew history in favor of the Marxist agenda-- in short, 105’s job was to turn truth into lies and lies into truth. Stalin couldn’t have asked for a better accomplice in his efforts to sway Germans in favor of Communism. A subsection of 105, known as “the Dzherzinsky Film Club”, was entrusted with assisting the main group’s work by turning out propaganda films emphasizing the things shared in common by the workers of Germany and Russia.

With the Soviets and the West constantly spying on one another, it didn’t take long for word of Special Section 105’s existence to filter back to the officers of counterintelligence experts in London and Paris. Nor for that matter did one have to wait long before the White House got a hint of what Section 105 and the Dzherskinsky Film Club were up to. While running a surveillance operation in March of 1941, FBI agents in northern California spotted two Russian nationals hauling what looked like a fairly sophisticated printing press into an apartment building in San Mateo; comparing notes with a fellow FBI operative the next day, they learned the Russians were suspected to be members of Section 105 and were using the San Mateo apartment as a subsidiary base for 105’s propaganda operations. Within less than a week after the printing press had been sighted a federal judge in San Francisco had issued a warrant giving the bureau clearance to begin wiretapping the phones in the 105 agents’ flat.

As the wiretap was being put into place in San Mateo, back in NKVD headquarters in Moscow Section 105 was receiving help in their mission from German Communist collaborators eager to advance the cause of Marxism in their homeland-- not to mention all of Europe. The chief man among these collaborators was Walter Ulbricht, a German Communist Party stalwart who had been living in the Soviet Union since the mid- 1930s. Ulbricht, a onetime German army deserter who had embraced the Marxist cause back in 1918, had always longed to make the men of the Dresden mutiny into heroes of the Marxist struggle and been frustrated by his lack of success in convincing his fellow Germans to regard the mutineers as the vanguard of the inevitable Communist revolution Marx had once predicted would overthrow the capitalist system.

Ulbricht’s first assignment as a member of Special Section 105 was to write a script for a short film about the relationship between Heinrich Witzleber and Ernst Vanaker, Witzleber’s main co-conspirator in the Dresden mutiny. It was to say the least a problematic task for him, as Vanaker had been a high-ranking officer and having a member of the bourgeoisie as a sympathetic character in the story of the mutiny simply wouldn’t fit the Communists’ purposes. After racking his brains for a solution to this conundrum, Ulbricht decided to get around it by inventing a politically correct fictional life story for Vanaker; his script turned the colonel, who in real life had been the second son of a highly prosperous Leipzig banker, into a corporal descended from six generations of carpenters. Just who Ulbricht and his cohorts expected to fool with this ruse-- other than themselves, that is --is unclear. Vanaker’s true biography had been public record for decades, and as a matter of fact would serve as a major weapon for Winston Churchill’s government during the British propaganda counter-blitz against Stalin after the Soviet Union finally went to war with Great Britain.

When Ulbricht’s finished script was filmed by the Soviet state-run motion picture company Mosfilm, the kindest thing one could say about it was that it was artistically uneven. Secret police agents who were at the premiere of Herr Vanaker, as the movie had been named when the the final draft of the script was written, secretly kept notes on the audience’s reaction to the movie-- and that reaction was for the most part very negative. One report to NVKD chief Lavrenti Beria broke the unfortunate news that moviegoers in one Leningrad theater had actually laughed at the film’s portrayal of Vanaker’s life story. (In typical Stalin-era fashion, all the audience members present at the Leningrad premier of Vanaker were subsequently arrested and several of them shot by an NKVD firing squad as punishment for having dared to make fun of the movie.)

To counter Moscow’s cinematic propaganda efforts, the British government commissioned its own film on the mutiny, simply titled as Dresden. While a bit more melodramatic than some critics would have liked, it was certainly more faithful to the truth about Vanaker’s life-- and the mutiny in general --than the Soviet film had been. At Churchill’s invitation, a group of the surviving mutineers visited London in September of 1942 to watch a preview screening of Dresden at the Royal Albert Hall. Without exception Mr. Churchill’s guests agreed that this movie was the superior of the two cinematic accounts of the mutiny.

The invocation of the Dresden mutiny by both Allied and Soviet propagandists to suit their governments’ respective purposes wasn’t limited to the silver screen. In May of 1943 His Majesty’s Stationery Office, the print media arm of the British government, published a 3- part series of books that highlighted the mutineers’ anti-Communist ideological leanings. Translated into a number of European languages, copies of the books were air-dropped by the RAF into Soviet-occupied sectors of Europe in a concerted effort to undermine Special Section 105’s work. As one might expect this sort of thing didn’t go over very well with Stalin or his inner circle; by July of 1943 the Soviet ruler had issued a directive to the NKVD ordering its deep-cover agents in Great Britain to locate and destroy the workshop were the books were being published.

They would have had better luck trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack; British intelligence agents did a first-rate job of misdirecting the would-be saboteurs as to where the books were actually being printed. They were assisted in their disinformation campaign by elements of the American OSS, which in late October of 1942 had started mounting its own anti-Stalin propaganda campaign in Soviet-occupied sectors of continental Europe. As the battle between Soviet and Allied ground forces for possession of Germany escalated, so did the propaganda campaign for the hearts and minds of the German people. By the time American combat troops finally began to arrive in England in the spring of 1943, one of out every three Allied combat air operations over German territory was a so-called “propaganda bomb” mission in which canisters of anti-Soviet leaflets were dropped over German towns and cities near the Red Army’s front lines. Publicly the Soviets scorned these canisters as “ineffectual toys”, in the words of Joseph Stalin, but in private Stalin and many of his peers within the Communist elite were frightened that the “propaganda bombers” might be doing their job all too well and ordered the Soviet air force to wipe such planes out whenever and wherever they flew into Soviet-controlled airspace....

Even some Soviet filmmakers, albeit under the cloak of anonymity, would concede Dresden was of greater artistic quality than Herr Vanaker; a bootleg copy of Dresden circulated among the Mosfilm staff until the end of the Second World War.