Ignace Reiss


Ignace Reiss – also known as "Ignace Poretsky," "Ignatz Reiss," "Ludwig," "Ludwik", "Hans Eberhardt," "Steff Brandt," Nathan Poreckij, and "Walter Scott "–was one of the "Great Illegals" or Soviet spies who worked in third party countries where they were not nationals in the late 1920s and 1930s. He was known as a nevozvrashchenec.
An NKVD team assassinated him on 4 September 1937 near Lausanne, Switzerland, a few weeks after he declared his defection in a letter addressed to Joseph Stalin. He was a lifelong friend of Walter Krivitsky; his assassination influenced the timing and method of Whittaker Chambers' defection a few months later.

Career

Early life

Reiss was born Nathan Markovich Poreckij in 1899 in Podwołoczyska, then in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, just across the river from Volochysk, then in Podolia, Tsarist Russia. His mother was a Lithuanian Jew from across the river and his father non-Jewish. His father had his elder brother and him educated in Lwow, the provincial capital. There, he formed lifelong friendships with several other boys, all of whom would become committed Communist spies. These boys included Kalyniak, Willy Stahl, Berchtold Umansky, his brother Mikhail Umansky, Fedia, and the young Walter Krivitsky. During World War I, the friends traveled when they could to Vienna, where they gathered around Fedia and his girlfriend Krusia. The name Krusia became a codename between these friends in later years. Reiss also visited Leipzig, Germany, to meet German Socialists: there, he met Gertrude Schildbach, who later aided his assassination. He earned a degree from the Faculty of Law, University of Vienna. In 1918, he returned to his hometown, where he worked for the railway. His older brother was killed during the Polish-Soviet War in 1920.

Fourth Department: "Ludwig"

In early 1919, Reiss joined the newly formed Polish Communist Party, since his hometown had become part of the Second Polish Republic. The KPRP adhered closely to the policies of Rosa Luxemburg. Julian Marchlewski represented the KPRP at the 1st Congress of the Comintern in March 1919.
By the summer of 1919, he had received a summons to Vienna, Austria, where he moved quickly from work with agencies of the newly formed Comintern to "Fourth Department of the General Staff"—which became the Soviet GRU. He then conducted party work in Poland. There he met Joseph Krasny-Rotstadt, a friend of both Rosa Luxemburg and of fellow Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. Having fought in the Bolshevik Revolution, Krasny was already directing propaganda for Eastern Europe. During this time, Reiss published a few articles as "Ludwig" in one of Krasny's publications, called The Civil War.
In early 1920, Reiss was in Moscow, where he met and married his wife, Elisabeth. During the Russian-Polish War in 1920, Willy Stahl and he received their first assignment, Lwow, where they distributed illegal Bolshevik literature. By 1921, as he took on the alias "Ludwig", Reiss had become a Soviet spy, originally for the GPU/OGPU, and later the NKVD. In 1922, he was again working in Lwow, this time with another friend of Fedia and Krusnia's from Vienna, Jacob Locker. Elisabeth was in Lwow, too. Reiss was arrested and charged with espionage, which carried a maximum five-year sentence. En route to prison, Reiss escaped his train in Cracow, never to return to Poland.
From 1921 to 1929, Reiss served in Western Europe, particularly Berlin and Vienna. In Berlin, their house guests included Karl Radek and :de:Larissa Reissner|Larissa Reisner, ex- wife of Fedor Raskolnikov. In Vienna, friends included Yuriy Kotsiubynsky, Alexander Schlichter, Angelica Balabanov, Paul Ruegg, Ivan Zaporozhets, Alexander Lykov, and Emil Maurer. In Amsterdam, Reiss and his wife knew Henriette Roland-Holst, Hildo Krop, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, "Professor Carvalho", "H. C. Pieck", and most importantly "Henricus" or "Henryk Sneevliet". In this same period, Richard Sorge brought Hede Massing to Reiss for training.
In 1927, he returned briefly to Moscow, where he received the Order of the Red Banner. From 1929 to 1932, Reiss served in Moscow, where he worked in a nominal post of the Polish section of the Comintern—already sidelined as "foreign". Among the people whom Reiss and wife knew at that time were Richard Sorge, Sorge's superior, Alexander Borovich, Felix Gorski, Otto Braun, Max Maximov-Friedman, Franz Fischer, Pavlo Ladan, and Theodore Maly. Valentin Markin reported to Reiss in Moscow, who in turn reported to Abram Slutsky.

Break with Stalin and assassination (1937)

From 1932 to 1937, Reiss was stationed in Paris. There, Reiss and his wife met Egon Erwin Kisch, Alexander Rado, Noel Field, Vasily Zarubin, and Arthur Stavchevsky.
By 1936, their friends were returning to Moscow one after the other, most of whom were shot or disappeared during the Great Purge. Reiss himself received a summons back to Moscow, but allowed his wife to travel there in his stead in late 1936, staying into early 1937. In early 1937, Krivitsky was recalled but managed to finagle his way out again on foreign assignment.
Upon Krivitsky's return, Reiss composed a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, addressed to Stalin and dated July 17, 1937. He returned the Order of the Red Banner with his letter, stating that to wear the medal "simultaneously with the hangmen of the best representatives of the Russian worker" was beneath his dignity. He went on to condemn the excesses of Stalin's purges and the actions of Soviet state security services. He also declared "I am joining Trotsky and the Fourth International". While criticizing Stalin and Yezhov, Reiss promised not to reveal any state security secrets.
, where Reiss met Schildbach, who led him to his death
Reiss then fled with his wife and child to the remote village of Finhaut, Valais canton, Switzerland, to hide. After they had been hiding for a month, Gertrude Schildbach contacted them. Schildbach acted on the instruction of Roland Lyudvigovich Abbiate, alias Francois Rossi, alias Vladimir Pravdin, codename LETCHIK, a Russian expatriate, citizen of Monaco, and a Soviet NKVD agent. She refused a request by Abbiate to give Reiss a box of chocolates filled with strychnine but agreed to set up a meeting with him. On September 4, Reiss agreed to meet Schildbach in Lausanne. His wife and son Roman boarded a train for :fr:Territet|Territet, Vaud canton, Switzerland. Reiss stayed with Schildbach and was then to board a train for Reims, France, to meet Sneevliet. Then he was to rejoin his family in Territet. He never made it to his train to Rheims.
As Reiss's wife relates in her memoirs, she went to Vevey to meet Schildbach again on September 5, but the woman never showed up. On September 6, she saw a small article in a Lausanne newspaper about a dead man with a Czech passport in the name of "Hans Eberhardt" found dead on the night of September 4 on the road from Lausanne to Chamblandes. She later identified the body carrying Eberhardt's passport as that of her husband.
Reiss, then using the alias "Eberhardt," was lured by Schildbach onto a side road near Lausanne, where Roland Abbiate was waiting for him with a Soviet PPD-34 submachine gun. Realizing what was about to happen, Reiss lunged for Schildbach, grabbing a lock of her hair before Abbiate shot him. Reiss was hit by fifteen bullets from Abbiate's submachine gun, killing him instantly: he was found with five bullets in the head and seven in the body. The two then dumped Reiss's body on the side of the road. Later police investigations revealed that a long strand of grey hair was found clutched in the hand of the dead man. In his pockets were a passport in the name of Hans Eberhardt and a railway ticket for France. An American-brand automobile, abandoned on 6 September at Geneva, was found to contain abandoned clothing, which led to the identification of two men and a woman. One of the men was Roland Abbiate, who had registered on 4 September at the Hotel de la Paix in Lausanne with Schildbach, the two had fled without their baggage and without paying their bill. The woman was none other than Gertrude Schildbach, of German nationality, a resident of Rome, and in reality a Soviet OGPU agent in Italy. The other man was Etienne-Charles Martignat, born in 1900 at Culhat in the Puy-de-Dôme, living since 1931 at No 18 Avenue de Anatole France, Clichy, Paris. Among the effects left by Schildbach at the hotel was a box of chocolates containing strychnine. Soon thereafter, a deposit in a Swiss bank was made in Gertrude Schildbach's name in the amount of 100,000 Swiss francs. However, as France's left-wing Popular Front Government of the period did not wish to upset diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Stalin, no arrests or announcement of the results of the police investigation were made at the time.
In a 1951 French Ministry of Interior study titled A Soviet Counter-espionage Network Abroad: the Reiss Case, the French government analyzed the actions of Soviet state security forces involved in Reiss's abduction and liquidation. Published on 20 September, the study concluded that "the assassination of Ignace Reiss on 4 September 1937 at Chamblandes near Lausanne, Switzerland, is an excellent example of the observation, surveillance and liquidation of a `deserter' from the Soviet secret service."

Aftermath

On the first anniversary of Reiss's assassination, his wife described their situation:

Family

Between 1920 and 1922, Reiss married Elsa Bernaut in Moscow; at times, Reiss used her maiden name as another alias.
They had one child, a boy named Roman, born around 1926.

Influence

1952: ''Witness'', by Whittaker Chambers

Reiss appears in the 1952 memoirs of Whittaker Chambers, Witness: his assassination in July 1937 was perhaps the last straw that caused Chambers not only to defect but to make careful preparations when doing so:
Suddenly, revolutionists with a lifetime of devoted activity would pop out, like rabbits from a burrow, with the G.P.U. close on their heels—Barmine from the Soviet legation in Athens, Raskolnikoff from the Soviet legation in Sofia, Krivitsky from Amsterdam, Reiss from Switzerland. Not that Reiss fled. Instead, a brave and a lonely man, he sent his single-handed defiance to Stalin: Murderer of the Kremlin cellars, I herewith return my decorations and resume my freedom of action. But defiance is not enough; cunning is needed to fight cunning. It was foredoomed that sooner or later the door of a G.P.U limousine would swing open and Reiss's body with the bullets in the defiant brain would tumble out—as happened shortly after he deserted. Of the four I have named, only Barmine outran the hunters. Reiss's death moved me deeply.

Compared to Reiss, Chambers considered far more carefully how to elude the Soviets when he defected in April 1938, as described in Witness.

1995: ''Ignace Reiss'', by Daniel Kunzi

Swiss filmmaker :fr:Daniel Künzi|Daniel Kunzi made a 53-minute documentary film called Ignace Reiss: Vie et mort d'un révolutionnaire about Reiss's life and death, following several years of research. The film includes testimonials, historical footage, a reconstruction of his assassination, all narrated by readings from his wife's memoirs.

1998: ''Fear of Mirrors'', by Tariq Ali

"Ludwik" forms the background history of Tariq Ali's 1998 novel Fear of Mirrors, set during German reunification in 1990. Ali was fascinated by the story of Ignace Reiss: "Ludwik became an obsession with me."

Reiss's inner circle

Elsa Reiss