History of Stalinism | The forgotten life story of Martha Naujoks

On 12 June 1937, the "International Control Commission" (IKK) and the party leadership decided to exclude Inge Karst "as a non-trustworthy element" to expel her from the party. During this time, there were also discussions about sending her from the Soviet Union to another theater of operations. These plans were apparently dropped. She was notified of her expulsion from the party without any further explanation, and only on July 29, a further six weeks later. This made her one of approximately 900 Germans expelled from the KPD between autumn 1936 and early 1938.

The expulsion, it can be assumed, hit Inge Karst like a blow. Removal from the party and thus from the proletariat movement after 17 years of highly active, intensive, and risky activity! Just three days after learning of the expulsion, she wrote a handwritten letter to Wilhelm Pieck, requesting a meeting, "since I find myself in a situation where I don't know what to do": "It's not just about saving my party honor, but also about clarifying the events in Hamburg to serve the whole cause and bring clarity not only for me but also for the party."

The following day, Karst lodged a complaint with the IKK and comrades Dimitrov and Pieck in a detailed letter. She lodged an appeal against the decision, but received no response. In the following months, she took extensive steps to convince the party that her exclusion was unjust.

While the accusations here are directed against her, other parts of her correspondence with the relevant party authorities also speak a surprisingly confident language. As early as August 1937, she criticized clearly and emphatically: "No comrade of the German party here in Moscow has spoken to me in a comradely manner in the interest of the investigation. This is simply unacceptable for me personally, too." Furthermore, at a time when comrades, including friends and acquaintances, were constantly being arrested in her accommodation and in the Hotel Lux opposite, she asserted her right, aware that the party had erred in her case. In January 1938, she wrote another of her many letters, calling on the IKK and the German party leadership to reinvestigate her case.

In it, she quite aggressively accuses IKK employees of having examined her case documents "insufficiently thoroughly (...) and also not objectively (...)." While she made the mistake of not disclosing her mother's membership in the Lenin League, she herself had never belonged to any group or faction against the party. Her release from prison in October 1933 was equally unsuspected, since her release also included the release of elected officials Elise Augustat and Alice Wosikowski. She concludes again in the confident tone of a revolutionary wronged by her comrades. She cleverly (or desperately?) uses Stalin as an authority for her cause, and does so in words whose clarity is shocking:

"I deeply regret that I do not have a copy of the expulsion order in my hands and therefore cannot comment on the further points it contains. Comrades! I have been a member of the party since I was 17. My entire development, my entire conscious life, has been spent actively working for the party in the continuous political struggle. In my illegal work in 1921 in Halle, and in 1923, and from 1933 to 1935 in Hamburg, I proved that I am willing to give everything, even the uttermost, for the party. The verdict on these 17 years of party activity was passed in half an hour. You understand, comrades, what agonizing months I have endured since then, since 'for ordinary party members, remaining in the party or being expelled from it is a matter of life and death' (Stalin)."

"No comrade of the German party here in Moscow has spoken to me in a comradely manner in the interest of the investigation."

Martha Naujoks, 1937

"To use every last bit" in a "matter of life and death" – in response to this dramatic, existential request, she only receives the message that further information is being sought.

The determination—even in her criticism of the party bureaucracy!—and the effort evident in these lines are all the more remarkable given that she has found herself in an uncertain, increasingly deteriorating situation in recent months. Being non-party, and even worse, a former comrade, also poses a significant threat to her social situation. This entails the termination of her employment at the editorial office, jeopardizing her livelihood and housing.

At the same time, the impacts are getting closer and closer. On November 24, 1937, she informs the German party leadership of her "uncertainty and corresponding material hardship" and desperately lets them know: "At the moment, I am at the end of my strength." Just two days later, her Moscow friend Roberta Gropper is arrested as a member of an allegedly "anti-Soviet group." The former Central Committee member Heinz Neumann was arrested. Whether the arrest shocked her more because of the successful disguise of her counter-revolutionary friend or because of the extent of the repression is unclear.

In any case, she saw it necessary to dispel any suspicion of proximity to the arrested woman and, on her own initiative, informed the KPD representative at the Comintern about the whereabouts of Gropper's typewriter in her possession. Even a typewriter that had been given as a gift, an important political and professional tool at the time, could confer a reputation for anti-party sentiment on its new owner. But that wasn't enough. Four months later, in April 1938, Käthe Schulz, who, like Inge Karst, was staying at the "Sojusnaja" Hotel, even sharing a room with her and Ruth Stolz, was arrested. Are the three comrades all at home at this moment, hear the knocking and wonder who the “comrade from the NKVD” is for? came?

Although the arrests are so dramatically affecting her these days, she continues to speak clearly of her expulsion from the party as an "injustice." Not only is her situation "morally unbearable," but the subsequent dismissal from her Comintern position also puts her "material existence in jeopardy." From her room number 90 in the Soyuznaya Hotel, she states in early April 1938: "I believe, comrades, that I can claim the right to have this morally oppressive situation brought to an end and to have my situation fully clarified as soon as possible."

At this point, the third of the show trials in the city of their exile had just concluded; in March 1938, Nikolai Bukharin and other old Bolsheviks had been publicly humiliated and condemned on charges of forming a "bloc of rights and Trotskyists," and shortly thereafter shot.

Perhaps it was simply luck that her name was not written on the NKVD officers' orders, but rather those of her friend Roberta Gropper and her roommate Käthe Schulz. Perhaps the trust placed in the young party worker by one of the leading comrades was crucial. At this point, darkness again reigns. However, it is likely that it was favorable for her case that the two people who had pushed for her expulsion—Władysław Stein-Krajewski and Grete Wilde—had themselves fallen victim to Stalinist terror about a year earlier. Stein-Krajewski was arrested in May 1937 and shot in September; Grete Wilde, arrested in October 1937, presumably died in a Gulag camp in 1943.