Hotel Lux
By the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had come to regard the international character of the hotel with suspicion and its occupants as potential spies.
Germans who had fled Nazi Germany, seeking safety in the Soviet Union, were interrogated, arrested, tortured, and sent to forced labour camps.
[6] In June and July 1921, 600 delegates who came to the Third World Congress of the Communist International from 52 countries were housed at Hotel Lux.
These were not refugees but dedicated Communists from Great Britain, Australia and the United States who went to "help build Socialism."
In at least one case an American-born young man who lived with his parents in the Lux volunteered with the Red Army and was killed in combat in the War.
In 1934, after the murder of Sergei Kirov, Joseph Stalin began a campaign of political repression and persecution to cleanse the Party of "enemies of the people".
[11] Stalin viewed the foreign occupants of Hotel Lux as potential spies,[9] or as a Moscow newspaper assumed of Germans (and Japanese) in 1937, they were working actively on behalf of their own country.
Arrests came in the middle of the night,[13] so that some residents slept in their clothes, others paced the floor, or played games of concentration to mask the stress.
Walter Laqueur later wrote of the period, "There was no rhyme or reason as to who was arrested and who was not, the security organs were given a plan to fulfill, a certain number of people were to be arrested in a certain region, and from this stage on it was more or less a matter of accident at whose door the NKVD (the secret police) emissaries would knock in the early hours of the morning.
"[14] The procedure was for the NKVD to knock, the accused was told to pack a small suitcase with a few things, get dressed and wait outside the door to be picked up and taken away.
[15] In the morning, the doors of those arrested were sealed;[16][note 1] the wives and children had to move to other quarters and were ostracized as "enemies of the state".
[9] By 1938, in order to get upstairs in the hotel, a propusk was needed, a document that said one was authorized to get past the armed guard, standing in front of the elegant Art Nouveau elevator.
"[1] Of the 1400 leading German communists, a total of 178 were killed in Stalin's purges, nearly all of them residents of Hotel Lux.
"[3] When Leon Trotsky was killed in August 1940, the purges at Hotel Lux stopped, bringing a brief respite to the exiles.
[citation needed] Ten months later, in June 1941, Operation Barbarossa began, Nazi Germany's assault on the Soviet Union.
[1] At the end of World War II, the Ulbricht Group left Hotel Lux for the airport to return to Germany on 30 April 1945 to become the new leaders of the German Democratic Republic.
[9] The purpose of the trip and whether or not the assignment was temporary or a permanent return to Germany was not known to the whole group until they arrived in Berlin.
In 2007, it was announced that the Mandarin Oriental Moscow, a luxury hotel, would be built[25] behind the restored historic facade.
[9] In East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, the Socialist Unity Party commissioned memoirs (Erinnerungsberichte) from former exiles who had lived there.
"[18] Other people turned away from the Communist Party, some as a result of their exile in the Soviet Union, and wrote more bluntly and critically about the hotel, such as Ruth von Mayenburg, who in one passage, used cannibalism as a metaphor to describe the period.
