For People Who Devour Books

Mar 2004

20th Century, Biography, Political history, Russia & the Soviet Union

Mark Almond

There Are, Indeed, Some Lessons to be Learned

Survivors’ Tales

Spy State

Germany’s Most Wanted

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