served as a soldier in World War I. A devout Catholic and anti-Nazi,
he immigrated to Switzerland in the early 1930s and started a small
publishing firm. Roessler was a friend of Stephan George and
Thomas Mann, two great German writers also living abroad.
Beginning in 1936 his publishing house, Vita Nova Verlag, began
to publish anti-Hitler literature. Through his ventures, he made con-
tact with military officers and dissident anti-Nazi politicians inside
Germany who opposed Adolf Hitler’s plans for European domina-
tion. Roessler first developed a contact with a Swiss reserve mili-
tary intelligence officer who had contacts with British intelligence.
Later he approached Sandor Rado, the GRU rezidentin Switzer-
land, through a cut-out, Rachel Deubendorfer. Roessler was able to
produce critically important information on the German order of
battle, military plans, and strategy. Roessler dealt with Rado care-
fully, and he was successful in preventing Rado from taking over
the Lucy Ring.
By 1942 German counterintelligenceidentified the GRU clan-
destine radio station and demanded that the Swiss police shut it
down. In 1943 Swiss intelligence finally broke up Roessler’s ring; he
was arrested but was acquitted in a trial that took place after the col-
lapse of the Nazi regime. In Moscow, the Lucy material was com-
pared with Ultrainformation provided by John Carincross. GRU
analystsobviously saw the comparison and may have drawn the con-
clusion that the Western allies were trying to manipulate Soviet mil-
itary intelligence.ROMANOV FAMILY, MURDER OF. On the evening of 16–17 July
1918, at the express command of Vladimir Lenin, a squad of Chek-
istsmurdered the deposed Romanov tsar along with his wife and five
children in the basement of the Ipatyev House in Yekaterinburg (re-
named Sverdlovsk from 1920 to 1991). Lenin ordered their execu-
tionto preclude their liberation by an advancing White Army. The
firing squad included seven Russian and six Latvian Chekists. It was
commanded by Yakov Yurovsky, who believed that he was avenging
the victims of anti-Semitic pogroms. Contrary to legend, there were
no survivors.
Yurovsky later gave a revolver used in the murder of the royal fam-
ily to the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow’s Red Square, and224 •ROMANOV FAMILY, MURDER OF06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 224