Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. In summer 1932, under orders
of Georgi Dimitroff, the secretary of the Comintern’s West Euro-
pean Bureau, Stahlmann assumed the editorship in Berlin of the new
periodical Balkan Federation. In the aftermath of the Reichstag fire
the following year, he and his wife took refuge first in Vienna, then
in Zurich, where the magazine was revived under the name Balkan
Correspondent. When its editorial office was transferred to Paris and
the less overtly communist European Voices took its place, he spent
only a short time in the French capital before embarking on an as-
signment in Spain.
In late 1936, following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War,
Stahlmann arrived at a small village in Estremadura with instructions
from the GRU to organize a multinational unit designed to cause dis-
ruption behind enemy lines. Its success led to the task of transforming
a commando group into a motorized partisan battalion. Maintaining
close contact with officials from the NKVD (Soviet People’s Com-
missariat of Internal Affairs) as well, he supplied “special cadres”
trained in sabotage operations along with reliable persons to help
track down suspected Trotskyists. In December 1937, he was recalled
from Spain to assist his ailing wife with the publication of European
Voices. The outbreak of war, however, hastened his departure from
Paris and brought him eventually back to Moscow.
The Comintern next sent Stahlmann to Stockholm to investigate
the foundering attempts to reestablish contact with the KPD. In a
joint report, he and Herbert Wehner, the head of the Comintern’s
German section, concluded that grievous errors had exposed the
Berlin-Stockholm nexus to the Gestapo and that the head of the
operation, Karl Mewis, should be relieved immediately. They also
began to explore how the KPD could be rebuilt in Germany with the
infusion of new instructors. These plans never materialized, for not
only did a dispute develop between the two men, but Swedish police
apprehended Wehner in February 1942. Narrowly avoiding arrest six
months later, Stahlmann remained undercover in Sweden for the next
three years to fulfill his other set of instructions from the GRU—to
build a partisan group, to signal the departure of Luftwaffe aircraft
via radio, and to disrupt the Wehrmacht’s lines of communication.
Already in 1944, Stahlmann had been selected for important
postwar work in Germany. He arrived in the spring of 1946 and was436 • STAHLMANN, RICHARD