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.
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).
[b][1][3] 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.
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.
[1] 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.
[6] 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.
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".
[6] 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.
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").
[4] 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).
[3] 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").
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.)
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.
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.
Although Waser barely knew him, the professor addressed a powerful letter to the relevant government department insisting that Crüger must be released as a matter of the greatest urgency in order that he might progress his studies.
Waser's motivation was primarily that he was a decent man, deeply opposed to the government policy of sending foreigners off to labour camps.
Faced with the resulting political pressures the police department agreed that Crüger could be released from the camp ahead of the next term, although up until then he was required to remain in detention.
Nevertheless, freedom was not uninterrupted: during the years until 1945 he had to endure a further four periods in a succession of Swiss labour camps, each time for a duration of approximately three months.
The shifting of tectonic political plates, whereby the Soviet occupation zone had been relaunched as the German Democratic Republic in October 1949, five months after the French, British and American occupation zones had been pushed together and relaunched as the German Federal Republic may also have played their part in as much as they confirmed that the division of Germany into two states allied to two militarily competing power blocks.
When Herbert Crüger fell from grace at the end of 1950 the party condemned him as a "Westemigrant": his decision not to settle in the Soviet occupation zone back in 1946 now counted against him.
The authorities immediately let it be known that the uprising had been a counter-revolutionary outburst, but its timing, directly after an increase of the number of hours in the standard working week, and in the context of entrenched postwar austerity, persuaded Crüger that sufficient explanation for the mass action by the workers on the city streets, most notably in Berlin, did not need the support of some underlying tortuous political conspiracy theory.
[10] The authorities were evidently content that Crüger's teaching in the aftermath of the 1953 uprising should remain "under the radar", but his response to First Secretary Khruschev's very long "secret speech", delivered to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the final week of February 1956, which gave details of "Stain's crimes" and was informally disseminated across East Germany during 1956 and 1957, eventually triggered a political nemesis.
In the eyes of the authorities Crüger's determined attempts to defend Steinberger confirmed his role as one of those intellectuals who represented a threat to the government.
On the successful battles against unMarxist opinions",[d] Crüger and his former institute director, Heinrich Saar, were the focus of a sustained political attack.
Early in 1960 Mathilde Danegger, still making frequent appearances on East German cinema and television screens and still regarded by the authorities as relatively "reliable", sent a letter to Ulbricht, pleading for mercy (ein "Gnadengesuch") on behalf of her husband.
Crüger also worked at the Institute for Economic History as a researcher for Jürgen Kuczynski, an economist of such intellectual and political eminence that, remarkably, the authorities never presumed to cast aspersions on his sometimes off-beat conclusions on the East German reality of Soviet-style Marxism.