Wollenberg’s increasing disillusionment with Stalin’s leadership
led him to find common cause with the opposition group centered
around Nicholas Bukharin and Jan Karlovich Berzin, the head of
Soviet military intelligence. Because of his vocal criticism of KPD
strategy, he was ousted from the party on 4 April 1933. Using a false
passport in the name of Wilhelm Rüdiger, which had enabled him
to return to the Soviet Union, he took refuge in Warsaw and Prague
before continuing to Paris. His overriding aim was to combat both
Hitler and Stalin—“the enemy brothers” as he characterized them. In
the meantime, a major Stalinist purge directed against the “counter-
revolutionary, terrorist, Trotskyist Wollenberg-Hölz spy organiza-
tion” was carried out in Moscow by the NKVD (Soviet People’s
Commissariat of Internal Affairs), which by 1938 had claimed the
lives of 70 persons associated with the two men (Max Hölz was also
a KPD militant who had run afoul of the party and died mysteriously
in the Soviet Union in 1933).
Following the Allied landings in November 1942, Wollenberg
joined the American forces in French North Africa and became a
press officer for the U.S. Army in Bavaria at the end of the war. His
journalistic career continued afterward in Munich, and he became
a member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands in 1951.
Despite his harsh critique of Stalin, no expression of regret for his
revolutionary activity in Germany and work with the early Red
Army ever appeared in his subsequent writings. In 1964, Wollenberg
moved to Hamburg, where he died nine years later.WOLLENBERGER, KNUD (1953– ). An agent of the Ministerium
für Staatssicherheit (MfS) who informed on his own spouse, Knud
Wollenberger possessed dual East German and Danish citizenship.
Trained as a mathematician and recruited by the MfS in 1972 under
the code name donald, he infiltrated the Danish and U.S. embas-
sies to obtain knowledge of their security systems. A position at the
Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
next brought him into contact with his future wife, Vera Lengsfeld, a
founding member of an early peace and ecological group in Berlin-
Pankow as well as the daughter of an MfS officer.
For the next decade, Wollenberger reported in detail about his
wife’s growing role in the dissident movement. Her protest of the
WOLLENBERGER, KNUD • 505