Word: valtin
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...Austrian Communist Party, one of the first to break with Stalin; Eugene Lyons (Assignment in Utopia); the late General Walter Krivitsky. For Editor Riesel these characteristic contributors afforded a probable reason for the visit: Communist footpads were looking for the address of Richard Julius Herman Krebs, alias Jan Valtin, ex-Communist author of Out of the Night, currently best-selling Baedeker of the Stalinist underworld. The raiders found no addresses...
...copies. It told how OGPU agents murdered on order-and saw to it that the murders looked like accidents. It told how they kidnapped their enemies-and the kidnappings looked like unsolved disappearances. The work of a German ex-Communist who wrote under the name of Jan Valtin, it painted a savage picture of the depravity of the Comintern, OGPU agents, the world's Communist parties...
Back in 1923, when the U. S. was beginning to worry about its gang wars, young Jan Valtin and 27 fellow Communists, armed with guns and hand grenades, attacked five policemen in a station in Hamburg ("From the floor a policeman was still firing. The stevedore crushed his face with a kick of his heavy boot. Another policeman had the side of his neck torn away; he was bleeding to death under a table. . . ."). While the U. S. was worrying about the depression in 1930, Conspirator Valtin was carrying money from Antwerp to Montevideo, glued into the lining...
...morbid seriousness. Citizens read about it, brood about it, usually come to the moody conclusion that the U. S. is a violent, lawless, desperate land, with a mighty black record compared to other nations. With this belief foreigners have been prompt to agree. But to many a reader of Valtin's real-life thriller, it came with a sudden shock of realization that other nations have their mad dogs too. Compared to them, such U. S. gangsters as Al Capone are very small change...
...Night is an autobiography, but through its pages slinks many a Communist bigwig. There is Bulgarian Comrade Georgi Dimitrov, now secretary of the Communist International, once hero of the Reichstag fire trial. Valtin reveals him as the flabby, dandified, over-perfumed head (for many years) of the Comintern's West European underground section. There is sly, foxy Heinz Neumann, who plotted the 1927 uprising in Canton, China. Once Stalin's darling, he was shot in Stalin's Purge. There is George Mink, ex-Philadelphia taxi driver, Communist organizer of New York's water front, OGPU gunman...