the campaign trail at the party’s urging and was elected to the Prus-
sian Landtag in 1928 and the Reichstag in 1932. Under the protec-
tion of parliamentary immunity—and with generous government
travel allowances at his disposal—his espionage activities continued
undeterred.
After the Nazi accession to power, Wollweber’s next destination
was Copenhagen, where the Comintern had relocated its all-impor-
tant West European Bureau. He reactivated an earlier sailors’ union
network based in Hamburg before being called to Moscow in 1935
to initiate even more aggressive undercover action. What became
known as the “Wollweber League” was to appear independent of
Moscow and all local communist parties, even though it received
critical logistical support from Department IV. Composed of some
300 sailors and dockers throughout northern Europe and China, it
sought to sabotage the ships belonging to the members of the anti-
Comintern Pact—Germany, Italy, and Japan. The result was the
sinking of 250,000 tons of shipping and the deaths of 10 sailors.
High-ranking Nazi officials such as Joachim von Ribbentrop and Rein-
hard Heydrich explicitly pointed to the Wollweber League’s com-
plicity in their reports, and Wollweber (code name ernst tolsty)
was charged accordingly. He was finally apprehended in Sweden in
1940 and held in custody for the next four years. On 15 November
1944, the Soviet Union arranged his transport from Stockholm back
to Moscow.
Wollweber returned to Germany in early 1946. During the occupa-
tion period, he became head of the general directorate of navigation.
Given the alarm expressed at the time by Norwegian and Swedish of-
ficials, it seems most likely that his sabotage activities had resumed,
even though solid evidence is lacking. Upon the establishment of
the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949, he was desig-
nated the director of shipping in the Transportation Ministry. In the
aftermath of the Uprising of 17 June 1953, Wollweber succeeded
the dismissed Wilhelm Zaisser as head of the Ministerium für
Staatssicherheit (MfS), now a downgraded state secretariat within
the Interior Ministry. GDR head of state Walter Ulbricht would have
preferred his own candidate, Erich Mielke, but accepted Wollweber
due to the insistence of Soviet authorities. Acting on the spurious
explanation that the uprising or “fascist putsch” could be traced to the
WOLLWEBER, ERNST • 507