December 1904, the son of a sailor. Returning from several years
at sea and joining the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands in May
1923, he participated in an abortive uprising in Hamburg the fol-
lowing October. His formal training occurred in 1925–1926 at a
Comintern school housed in Leningrad’s old Duma building. On
assignment in the United States, he was arrested in Los Angeles dur-
ing the maladroit murder attempt of a suspected informer. Released
in 1929 after three years in San Quentin Prison, Krebs resumed his
undercover work, first as political chief of the Comintern’s Marine
Section based in Hamburg and then as inspector general of commu-
nist activities in Great Britain.
Following Adolf Hitler’s accession to power, he returned to Ger-
many but was captured in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. Extreme
torture resulted in Krebs’s recruitment by the Gestapo, but he still
acted under Soviet command. Abducted by Stalinist agents during
a posting in Copenhagen and marked for probable execution in the
Moscow purges, he fled via Paris to the United States in 1938. The
communist press retaliated by labeling him “one of the most impor-
tant spies of the Gestapo,” intending to discredit him in the West, but
to no avail. In 1940, his best-selling autobiography, Out of the Night,
appeared under the nom de plume Jan Valtin, giving the American
public one of the first insider accounts of the intricate worldwide
web of Soviet subversion and espionage—in his words, “a vast maze
of imposing façades and underground passages.” The British edition
was cut due to wartime censorship, and the German translation was
delayed until 1957. Krebs served as a volunteer infantryman in the
U.S. Army during World War II and became an American citizen in- He died of pneumonia on 1 January 1951.
KRICHBAUM, WILLI (1898–?). A senior SS officer and later Soviet
double agent in the Organisation Gehlen (OG), Willi Krichbaum
was born on 7 May 1898. A veteran of World War I, he joined the
Gestapo in 1933 and became closely associated with Reinhard
Heydrich. In 1936, he was appointed the frontier inspector southeast
and then head of the Geheime Feldpolizei after the outbreak of war.
Although known as a ruthless foe of the anti-Nazi military conspira-
tors, Krichbaum escaped prosecution after the war and was engaged
as a personnel recruiter for the OG. Among the numerous former
248 • KRICHBAUM, WILLI