In Bucharest, he met communist activist Timotei Marin, whom he hid after the latter escaped a dragnet initiated in August 1926 by the Siguranța secret police of the Kingdom of Romania.
This investigation also targeted Pavel Tcacenco, Boris Ștefanov and Elek Köblös, all members of the banned Communist Party of Romania (PCdR, later PCR).
[1] Moreover, the political and economic crisis of the Weimar Republic created a dynamic atmosphere, with Koffler partaking in street movements, demonstrations and campaigns.
At the same time, he helped fund the extravagant lifestyles of party members, including Foriș, Bela Breiner, Teohari Georgescu and Iosif Chișinevschi, who frequently asked him for loans that would finance see houses, cars, furniture and travel.
He was part of the editing committee of the clandestine gazette Scînteia, to which he was a frequent contributor, along with Solomon Schein, Ion Popescu-Puțuri and Ștefan Voicu.
[7] The seminal event within the PCdR during this period was the June 1935 arrest of three leading members: Ana Pauker, Marcovici and Dimităr Ganev, denounced by a fourth, Ion Zelea Pîrgaru, with whom Koffler was in touch.
[8] The committee came into being as Joseph Stalin lost interest in the Comintern and largely left the various communist parties to raise their own revenues, while at the same time, supply routes from Moscow to Bucharest were becoming ever more uncertain in the face of Nazi Germany's rise and tightened security along the Dniester River.
Most of the funds came from Jewish industrialists, with other money given by pro-English figures or businessmen who expected an Allied victory in the ongoing World War II.
[11] The suspicions of collaboration were bolstered by communist fellow-traveler Petru Groza, who would charge that his December 1943 arrest involved Koffler as a police provocateur.
[11] Second, because Koffler was a highly inconvenient witness to the bitter factional struggles for control of the party that took place from 1940 to 1944, and stood in the way of the eventual victor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who wished to impose his own version of events on official history.
[14] Fourth, because Gheorghiu-Dej wanted revenge, personally ordering a harsh interrogation regime that, according to a witness speaking in 1967, included an officer pulling out over a third of his white hair during one session.
Eventually, he began to appear insane, with some doctors believing he was dissimulating in order to avoid the need to incriminate other party members, while others thought he had truly become schizophrenic under torture.
He retracted his earlier admission of guilt and steadfastly declared himself innocent, which pushed Gheorghiu-Dej to opt for his execution, as opposed to the case of Bellu Zilber, who saved his life by cooperating.