Mark Almond
Moscow’s Media Mogul
The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Müzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West
By Sean McMeekin
Yale Univeristy Press 397pp £22.50 order from our bookshop
IN LATE OCTOBER 1940, the decayed remains of a man were found on the Vichy French side of the Swiss border. The corpse was identified as that of Willi Münzenberg, a Communist refugee from Nazi Germany.
Interned, like other anti-Nazi refugees, as an enemy alien in France at the outbreak of the war, Münzenberg had made a break for freedom as Hitler's armies swept through France in June 1940. He was on the run not only from the Gestapo but also Stalin's NKVD.
The Vichy coroner ruled
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