In 1939 Leopold Trepper, an agent for the NKVD, established the Red Orchestra network in Europe. and organized underground operations in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Red Orchestra worked closely with the French Communist Party and succeeded in tapping the telephones of the Abwher in France. Trepper was also able to provide detailed reports on the plans for a German invasion of the Soviet Union.
In the spring of 1942 the first Red Orchestra agents were arrested in Belgium. Some agents broke under torture and the Germans were able to liquidate the network in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. The Red Orchestra's headquarters were raided in November, 1942. Leopold Trepper managed to escape and remained in hiding until Paris was liberated.
Leonard Trepper, the son of Jewish parents, was born in Novy-Tang, Poland, on 23 February 1904. When he was a boy his family moved to Vienna.
After the Soviet October Revolution Trepper joined the Bolsheviks. He worked in Galician mines and in 1925 he organized an illegal strike at Dombrova. He was arrested and spent eight months in prison.
In 1926 Trepper migrated to Palestine. He remained a member of the Communist Party and worked against the British until being expelled in 1928.
Trepper now moved to France where he worked for Rabcors, an illegal political organization, until it was broken up by French intelligence.
Trepper escaped to Moscow where he was recruited by the NKVD. For the next six years he worked as a spy in Europe.
Trepper returned to Moscow in January, 1945. Joseph Stalin ordered his arrest and was kept in prison until 1955. He moved to Poland where he became head of the Jewish Cultural Society. After many years of trying, Trepper was eventually granted permission to emigrate to Israel in 1973.
Leonard Trepper died in Israel in 1982.
Just goes to show you how much gratitude the Soviet government had for hard working folks.
One of the members of the Red Orchestra in Germany was an American woman, Mildred Harnack, a Milwaukee native and University of Wisconsin-Madison alumna and faculty member from the 1920s. She had joined the German resistance and became the only American woman executed for treason during World War II. As members of the group, Mildred and her husband, Arvid Harnack, assisted in the escape of German Jews and political dissidents, and for years provided vital economic and military intelligence to both Washington and Moscow. But in 1942, the Gestapo arrested, tortured, and tried some four score members of the Harnack's group and she was guillotined in Berlin on 16 February 1943.