Herbert Crüger (17 May 1911 – 17 January 2003) was a German political activist and politician (KPD) who, as a young man during the Nazi years, became caught up in espionage activity. During the postwar decade, as the division of Germany seemed to have become permanent, millions of people fled from East Germany to West Germany. More unusually, Herbert Crüger was one of those who, having ended up in "the west", crossed the internal frontier in the other direction, probably, at least in part, because his communist politics made it hard for him to obtain suitable employment in the west. In the east, he became a university lecturer and author. In 1958, he fell foul of a political purge and spent some years in the vast Bautzen penitentiary. He was released in 1961 but had to wait until 1990 for his formal rehabilitation.
Biography Herbert Crüger was born in Berlin-Rixdorf. His father worked as a book printer, but died in September 1914 after an intestinal operation. His mother, widowed with three boys aged three, six and seven, always blamed the sloppiness of the nurses for her husband's relatively early death. The outbreak of war a couple of months earlier was already placing increased pressure on medical services. Herbert was the three-year-old boy. The boys' mother came from a peasant family that before the mass urbanization of the late nineteenth century had been settled for many generations in Sadenbeck (Prignitz). By the time the war ended Herbert Crüger was seven. It was around this time that a doctor pronounced him anemic, after which he was fed every day with a fresh raw egg garnished with sugar. Food was desperately short supply at this time, but the family already kept several hens in their Berlin apartment, which was less remarkable at that time than it would become subsequently. He attended school locally. Because of their financial situation, there were no school fees to pay; but his brothers had left school as soon as allowed in order to contribute to the family's budget. Herbert was impatient to do the same. When he left school he was still too young to join the navy, so he joined the merchant navy as a ship's boy ("Schiffsjunge") after his Uncle Adolf and Aunt Anna had helped him convince his mother to let him go. But in October 1927 he turned up at the home of two cousins in Hamburg, clutching a small suitcase containing a couple of shirts and underwear. Uncle Friedrich, his Hamburg relative, knew a "Heuerbaas" (maritime jobs agent), a small man with a beard who spoke no German but only the Hamburg dialect.
Back on dry land, between 1928 and 1931 Crüger undertook, and completed, a commercial apprenticeship with "Deutsche Fiat Automobil Verkauf s-A.-G.", a major car dealership. The period was one of widespread economic depression, however, and for Crüger the apprenticeship was followed by unemployment. By 1931 he was a member of the Hitler Youth. Crüger was an admirer of Otto Strasser, a senior National Socialist Party member long regarded as the leading figure on the party's anti-capitalist social-revolutionary left-wing. Although it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Herbert Crüger's own autobiography, published in 1997 with the benefit of more than half a century of hindsight, may have been a little selective in its recall of the long-running struggle between the Strasser faction and the hate-driven Hitlerite faction of the Berlin-Neukölln Hitler Youth group, it is beyond dispute that shortly after Otto Strasser's forced resignation from the National Socialist Party, and after failing to create a breakaway Strasserite faction of it, Herbert Crüger, resigned with like-minded friends from the Hitler Youth group. In 1932 he joined the Young Communists.
Almost immediately, he joined the Rote Jungfront, which was the youth section of what amounted to the paramilitary wing of the Communist Party. During 1932/33 he worked as a "technical" (i.e. military) leader with the Red Front Fighters ("Roter Frontkämpferbund" / "Rote Jungfront") for the organisation's Berlin-Neukölln sub-district. For a couple of months during the summer in 1933 he left Berlin to stay on a farm and work with the Landvolkbewegung (loosely "National Peasants' and Farmers' movement") in East Prussia. At the start of that year the National Socialists had taken power and almost immediately transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Non-Nazi political activism was banned. The Landvolkbewegung had many of the characteristics of a political party and Crüger's involvement with it was illegal.
Although the Sturmabteilung (SA) is largely remembered as a paramilitary branch of the National Socialist Party it was, especially before 1934 strongly influenced by communist ideology. Not all the young people who had been enthusiastic backers of Otto Strasser had left the movement when Strasser was expelled from the National Socialist Party. This gave rise to the use of the term "Beefsteak Nazis" (brown - Nazi - on the outside but red - Communist - in the inside). Contemporary estimates varied widely, but it is likely that during the early 1930s at least 20% of the SA membership comprised these so-called "Beefsteak Nazis". That provides context for the reference in sources to Crüger having worked inside the SA for the "M-Apparat", a shadowy organisation which operated as an intelligence service on behalf of the (after 1933 illegal) Communist Party. Elsewhere there are indications that his role was involved more with proselytising than with intelligence gathering. Always an incorrigible networker, he inveigled his way into National Socialist student groups to urge a critical assessment of the party leadership "which in its practical politics [had since taking power] ... backed off from much of what it had hitherto been promising". He was able to distribute to his SA comrades political leaflets, prepared for him, which in his words "picked up on the current opinion in the SA .... and demanded to know who the real enemies were, the Communist workers or the big capitalists".
At the beginning of August 1934, as he met a comrade by the entrance of a function they were attending at the "Haus Vaterland", a large restaurant in the Potsdamer Platz, the two of them were surrounded by four men and detained. It was immediately obvious that they had been arrested by the Gestapo and that it would not be possible to escape. The men suggested going for a discussion to a café on the corner where it would be quieter, but once they had all started walking they continued on to the Reich Security Main Office in what was then known as Prince Abrecht Street ("Prinz-Albrecht-Straße"). The small one-person cells in which each of them were placed had barely enough space for the flatbed and bucket with which they were furnished. Crüger had in his back trouser pocket between eight and ten thin paper sheets of "illegal material". The bucket was empty and clean so that if he tore up the papers and threw them in it, they would undoubtedly be retrieved and examined. He had only just finished eating his papers when he heard a key in the door and a guard appeared, indicating with a nod that Crüger should follow him to a larger cell where a couple of SS officers were waiting to question him., In the end, Herbert Crüger was held in investigatory detention between August 1934 and July 1935. However, there is no mentioned of his having faced any sort of formal trial.
In November 1935, he was able to flee to Czechoslovakia where he based himself in Prague and, starting in 1936, resumed his activities for the "M-Apparat" (Communist Party intelligence service). It was in Prague, still in 1935, that he joined the Communist Party of Germany. By 1937, he was in Barcelona, working for the intelligence services of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. He returned to Prague in 1938, but moved on again in September, presumably in connection with the incremental German occupation. By the time he arrived in Zürich he had acquired a Czechoslovak identity and was using the name "Josef Novák". The real Josef Novák had been killed while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, identified, in the passport, as a painter.
Using his Czechoslovak identity, he now embarked on the study of Art History and Archeology in Zürich where he was permitted to attend lectures as a "guest student" ("Gasthörer"). Both his chosen subjects were, he believed, consistent with at least one version of Josef Novák's stated occupation as a "painter", and both were safely non-political. Zürich had become home to many German political exiles, especially from the worlds of arts and entertainment, and his exile there enabled Crüger to re-establish several former friendships and to cultivate some new ones. In March 1939 he moved out of the little guest house where he had been staying and teamed up with the actress Mathilde Danegger whom he had seen on stage when she was appearing with the Cabaret Cornichon. (A mutual friend working at the cabaret ticket office had engineered an introduction between the two after asking Crüger which of the girls appearing on the stage he found most attractive.) Crüger and Danegger subsequently married, probably during the mid-1940s. Through Danegger he met a number of other exiled German stage performers. Active in her support for the German Communist Party, she was well connected with various individuals who would become members of the arts and cultural establishment in the German Democratic Republic after 1949.
During the early summer of 1940, rumours began to circulate that the German army was about to invade France. It seemed unlikely that the invasion would take place across the Franco-German border which was well defended, but in Switzerland there was a belief that the Germans might seek to invade either through Belgium to the north or through Switzerland to the south. A precautionary general mobilisation of the Swiss army took place in September 1939 and during the early months of 1940 many Zürchers moved south and east towards Ticino and Graubünden, believing the higher mountains would offer greater safety than the relatively flat central belt of the country. The German invasion of France, when it came in May/June 1940, used the northern route, but the Swiss government remained intensely nervous, and during 1940s Crüger and Danegger made plans to try and emigrate to Mexico, where they had contacts or to the United States of America. But then the message came through from the party leadership that members of the German Communist Party exiled in Switzerland should stay in Switzerland. This put an end to their plans to escape across the Atlantic. During the Summer of 1940, the Swiss authorities prepared a number of labour camps: the plan was to intern all able-bodied foreign residents and set them to work in the national interest. In September 1940 Crüger was sent to the Felsberger Labour Camp near Chur, in Graubünden. In Felsberg he became part of a labour gang of between 120 and 150 people set to build a supposedly strategic road. Most of the gang were Jews who had escaped from Nazi Germany or Austria. A handful of the labourers had fled Germany because they were communists.