Johann Wenzel

Johann Wenzel (born 9 March 1902 in Niedau in Nowy Staw, died 2 February 1969 in Berlin) was a German Communist, agent of the GRU and radio operator of espionage group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr in Belgium and the Netherlands.[1] His aliases were Professor, Charles, Bergmann, Hans, Hermann. Wenzel was most notable as the person who exposed the Red Orchestra after his transmissions were discovered by the Funkabwehr, later leading to his captured by the Gestapo on 29–30 June 1942.[2]

Life

Wenzel came from a working-class family and was the son of a farmer.[1] After leaving school Wenzel worked as a locksmith apprentice in a coal mining company in the Ruhr and in a company of the Krupp Group in Essen. Wenzel was a communist in his youth and joined the Young Communist League of Germany in 1921 and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1925.[1]

Career
Organisational diagram of the first Jeffremov Group
Organisational diagram of the second Jeffremov Group

In 1929-1930 Wenzel travelled to Moscow to take a military-political course as a Kursant under a covername, Horst that was run by the AM Apparat of Communist International.[3] When Wenzel returned he worked as a full-time instructor for communist military issues in Hamburg, Bremen, Essen, Düsseldorf and Cologne using the covername Hermann, for the next several years[1] During this period Wenzel was likely already in touch with the veteran Soviet intelligence officer Henry Robinson who would later become an assistant to Leopold Trepper and technical director of the AM Apparat for Western Europe in 1940 and director of an espionage network in France.[4]

In the summer of 1933, Wenzel travelled to the Netherlands with Theodor Bottländer an official of the AM Apparat department of the Central Committee of the KPD, to obtain information on Marinus van der Lubbe who was in Berlin and who was among those accused of setting the Reichstag fire.[1] After the fire, the German Communist Party was banned, forcing Wenzel to flee. In 1935 Wenzel was ordered to report to the 4th Division of the General Staff of the Red Army, the Intelligence directorate to be intensively trained as a Wireless telegraphy (WT) operator[1] in preparation to be a technical advisor in Western Europe.[3] In January 1936 he travelled to Belgium under the guise of a student of mechanics and enrolled at a technical school.[3] There he met the Soviet intelligence officers Leopold Trepper who controlled seven espionage networks in Western Europe and Anatoly Gurevich his assistant, who controlled one those networks. His express mission was to use his new training to set up an radio network in Belgium but the Belgian authorities refused him permission to remain, so he moved to the Netherlands in early 1937 where he made contact with Daan Goulooze who was director of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) and who acted as the main liaison officer between the CPN and the Communist International in Moscow.[3] With Goulooze they discussed plans for the construction of a radio network in the Netherlands.[3] In early 1938 Wenzel entered illegally back into Belgium and it is likely that he resided with Franz Schneider and his wife Germaine. Schneider was a Swiss communist who had connections with Henry Robinson.[5] In 1939 he became a technical advisor on WT procedures and codes to Anatoly Gurevich and trained a number of WT operators in the Low Countries.[5] Wenzel was also a technical advisor to Konstantin Jeffremov who was a Soviet agent who ran a separate network in the Netherlands.[5]

From December 1940 to July 1942 Wenzel transmitted intelligence by WT to the Soviet Union.[5] In November 1941 on orders from Anatoly Gurevich, Wenzel transmitted messages on information that Gurevich had received from Harro Schulze-Boysen, in October 1941 in Berlin.[1] In May 1942, following Mikhail Makarov's arrest, Wenzel was invited to re-establish a WT link to Moscow by Jeffremov, after Jeffremov took over Anatoly Gurevich's network after he escaped to France.[5] In May 1942, Wenzel commenced transmitting important traffic to the Soviet Union.[5] In June 1942, following the capture of Hersch Sokol who was the WT operator for Leopold Trepper in Paris, Léon Grossvogel a Soviet intelligence officer who was Treppers assistant ordered Wenzel to become the WT operator for Trepper in France.[5]

Capture
Diagram of the Trepper Group in Belgium

By using direction finding and radio intercept monitoring techniques, from the goniometric stations in Nuremberg, Augsburg and Brest[6] that had formed a triangulation azimuth, the Funkabwehr were able to identify an illegal radio transmission that came from the home of Wenzel at his Brussels home at 12 Rue de Namur.[2] It took some days to identify the correct location due to the layout of the building and the electric railway that ran through the neighbourhood, but on 29–30 June 1942, Captain Harry Piepe[7] along with some men including policeman and Luftwaffe personnel sealed off the street in Laeken in Brussels.[2] When the Abwher broke into the apartment in the tenement that Wenzel was located, the Abwehr surprised him and he took off over the rooftops, firing his pistol at the Germans as he tried to escape but he was eventually arrested[2] on 20 July 1942.[8]

During the search of the apartment, it was found that Wenzel had left a series of coded messages and two messages written in the German language that were waiting to be enciphered.[2] These messages contained the details of such startling content, the plans for Case Blue, that Piepe immediately drove to Berlin from Brussels and after revealing his find and explaining its relevance, met with Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris arranged an immediate meeting with Wilhelm Keitel who was chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.

Wenzel was taken to St. Gilles Prison in Brussels.[2] Piepe informed Karl Giering the director of Gestapo in Brussels and he forwarded a message to the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) Section IV Subsection 2A, requesting any details regarding on Wenzel, and they returned a number of card indexes that were found detailing Wenzel's early communist career and his name was identified in the RSHA Black Book as a wanted man.[2]

Such was the urgency by the Germans to reveal the communist network that was associated with Wenzel that he was subject to brutal interrogation including torture that lasted six to eight weeks and he eventually confessed to everything including his cover-name, The Professor, due to him being a specialist in radio telephony and its technology. After his torture he was a broken man and he agreed to collaborate with the Germans in a playback operation using Wenzel's radio transmitter that began on 6 August 1942[5] and was controlled by Heinz Pannwitz of Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle at a house on Rue de l'Aurore in Brussels.[2]

Escape

Over several months, the guards at Rue de l'Aurore became lulled into a false sense of security and either on the 17 or 18 November 1942, Wenzel managed to escape from the guards of the Sonderkommando, when they failed to lock an outside door. Wenzel noticed this, fled and locked the door behind him and managed to get away.[2]

References
  1. "Wenzel, Johann". Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur (in German). Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin. Retrieved 11 April 2019.
  2. Stephen Tyas (25 June 2017). SS-Major Horst Kopkow: From the Gestapo to British Intelligence. Fonthill Media. pp. 91–92. GGKEY:JT39J4WQW30. Retrieved 11 April 2019.
  3. Kesaris, Paul. L, ed. (1979). The Rote Kapelle: the CIA's history of Soviet intelligence and espionage networks in Western Europe, 1936-1945. Washington DC: University Publications of America. p. 383. ISBN 0-89093-203-4.
  4. Kesaris, Paul. L, ed. (1979). The Rote Kapelle: the CIA's history of Soviet intelligence and espionage networks in Western Europe, 1936-1945. Washington DC: University Publications of America. p. 342. ISBN 0-89093-203-4.
  5. Kesaris, Paul. L, ed. (1979). The Rote Kapelle: the CIA's history of Soviet intelligence and espionage networks in Western Europe, 1936-1945. Washington DC: University Publications of America. p. 384. ISBN 0-89093-203-4.
  6. Nigel West (October 1988). The SIGINT secrets: the signals intelligence war, 1900 to today : including the persecution of Gordon Welchman. W. Morrow. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-688-07652-8. Retrieved 25 April 2019.
  7. Harry Piepe working for section IIIF of the Abwehr in 1942, finally identified the correct apartment. He was interviewed in 1965 by the French journalist Gilles Perrault and an account of this is contained in the Kesaris, Paul. L, ed. (1979). The Rote Kapelle: the CIA's history of Soviet intelligence and espionage networks in Western Europe, 1936-1945. Washington DC: University Publications of America. p. 384. ISBN 0-89093-203-4
  8. Kesaris, Paul. L, ed. (1979). The Rote Kapelle: the CIA's history of Soviet intelligence and espionage networks in Western Europe, 1936-1945 (pdf). Washington DC: University Publications of America. p. 384. ISBN 978-0-89093-203-2.
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