In 1937 he became a Captain, and shortly after that, in the Karl Marx Division, he became the youngest Major, and then a Battalion Commander, in the International Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army.

[1] During a 1991 interview with German-American journalist and retired U.S. intelligence official John O. Koehler,[2] Janka, recalled his encounters in Spain with fellow KPD exile and future East German Secret police chief Erich Mielke.

During the winter of 1936, Janka was summoned by the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the political police of the Second Spanish Republic, and personally interrogated by Mielke.

In Mexico he ran the publishing business "El Libro Libre", which also employed fellow exiled German writer Anna Seghers.

After a brief period working with the leadership of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany/Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) he joined the board of DEFA, the state-owned film studio.

[citation needed] On 6 December 1956 Walter Janka was arrested on a charge of counter-revolutionary conspiracy[6] and held in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Remand Prison.

Harich was brought into the July show-trial by Judge Walter Ziegler as a leading prosecution witness: his testimony now heavily implicated Janka.

In 1972 his official recognition as a Victim of the Nazi regime (Verfolgter des Naziregimes / VdN) was reinstated, and he was accepted back into the ruling SED.

However, his autobiographical coloured scenes from his "Journey to Gandesa" about his experiences of the Battle of the Ebro during the Spanish Civil War remained unfilmed, and he terminated his contract with DEFA in 1973, having retired from it in 1972.

[1] During the 1980s Janka wrote articles, traveled several times to West Germany and gave lectures about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

Finally, barely more than six months before the fall of the Berlin wall, on 1 May 1989 he was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit (Gold/first class) "in recognition of outstanding services to the creation and development of socialist society in the German Democratic Republic".

[13] As the end of the German Democratic Republic approached, Janka's memoir of his 1956 arrest and subsequent imprisonment was published, in October 1989, by Rowohlt Verlag under the wry title "Difficulties with the truth" ("Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit").