Helmut Damerius

Helmut Damerius (16 December 1905 – 29 September 1985) was a German communist, theatre director, writer and the founding member of the Left Column, an agitprop theater group.

As the Nazi Party gained in strength, he went into exile in Moscow, only to be arrested in the so-called Hitler Youth Conspiracy and sentenced to a long term in a Soviet prison.

In 1923, Damerius joined the Communist Party (German: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and he and his wife had a baby, who died as a small child.

He began studying at the State Institute for Theater Arts in Moscow and he applied for citizenship in the Soviet Union.

[1] In 1935, Damerius acted with troupe member Bruno Schmidtsdorf in Wangenheim's anti-Nazi film,[1] released in the United States in 1936 as Der Kampf.

He received his Soviet citizenship in 1935[6] and transferred to the State Institute for Theater Arts in Moscow, where he studied drama direction.

[1] On 17 March 1938 he was arrested by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, on suspicion of having been involved with the Hitler Youth Conspiracy[5] and was expelled from the KPD.

[6] In 1945, he was accused of "counter-revolutionary agitation" and was sentenced to five years in a forced labor camp,[1] where he was put in a vermin-infested cell and given rations of 300 grams of black bread and a single ladle of thin soup.

Under the belief that the Communist Party leadership knew nothing about the gulags, he wrote to Joseph Stalin 17 times over the course of his internment, never once receiving a reply.

[4] In 1947, his second conviction was reviewed and commuted to banishment to a "free settlement" in Kazakhstan,[1] where he was not permitted to travel within the Soviet Union,[4] much less abroad.

[8] The officer, Nikolai Mitrofanov, denied beating Damerius and even refused to acknowledge that the NKVD had ever practiced torture.

The reversal read, "By decision of the Moscow Military District War Tribunal, 22 September 1955, the verdict of 1938 is overturned and Helmut Damerius is reinstated of all rights.