hunger strike—not unlike many IRA prisoners—and was released
eight days later to avoid any negative publicity. For reasons still un-
clear, his final arrest occurred on 13 August 1942, and he was kept at
Montjoy Prison and the Athlone internment camp for the remainder
of the war.WEHNER, HERBERT (1906–1990). A former communist func-
tionary widely suspected of treason while a leader of the Sozialde-
mokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), Herbert Wehner was born
in Dresden on 11 July 1906, the son of a working-class family. After
a brief affiliation with an anarcho-syndicalist group, he joined the
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) in 1927 and rose to dis-
trict leader for Saxony within two years. In 1930, owing to his politi-
cal skill and rhetorical ability, Wehner became the youngest delegate
elected to the Saxon parliament. Shortly afterward, however, the
KPD central committee decided to use him as a “technical secretary”
based in Berlin and working closely with KPD chair Ernst Thälmann.
In the wake of the mass arrests that followed the Nazi takeover in
1933, his knowledge of local conditions as an underground organizer
helped the party set up an alternate system of illegal cells. Despite ex-
erting little influence on the outcome of the Saar plebiscite in January
1935, he later emerged at the Brussels party conference as a member
of the exile-KPD’s central committee and was assigned the task of
forging a united front with German émigrés in Paris.
In December 1936, in the midst of the Stalinist purges, Wehner
was recalled to Moscow along with other members of the exile-KPD.
In the fevered atmosphere of accusations and counteraccusations,
Wehner (alias Herbert Funk) not only denounced several dozen com-
rades as traitors (including Hans Kippenberger) but was himself the
object of similar defamatory remarks. During an interrogation a year
later, officials from the NKVD (Soviet People’s Commissariat of In-
ternal Affairs) feigned a recruitment attempt but in actuality used the
opportunity to gather evidence against him in preparation for his ar-
rest. Wehner’s fortunes changed dramatically with the waning of the
terror and the removal of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, and in early
1941 the Comintern dispatched him to Sweden as an Illegaler (alias
H. M. Kornelis). Although he was seriously considered for NKVD
recruitment prior to Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, his
484 • WEHNER, HERBERT