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He turned up in China, charged with purging the party of spies and dissidents, sent so many men to their deaths that he was known as "The Executioner." He first came to the U.S., according to the FBI, in 1933, as chief liaison man between the party and the Comintern. An obscure figure known only as Edwards, he was seldom seen by the party rank & file. He moved in & out of the country freely. (The House Committee held a passport application which demonstrated how the trick was turned. It was dated Aug. 31, 1934, bore the name of a Communist writer, Samuel Liptzen. It was filled out in the handwriting of a left-wing lawyer, one Leon Josephson. Clipped to it was Eisler's photograph.)
Eisler appeared in Moscow to attend a Comintern school, in Spain as commissar of German Loyalist troops. In 1939, during the days of the Russo-German pact, he was in France. He was thrown into a concentration camp, kept there until 1941. Released, he assumed the role of a harmless refugee, headed for the U.S. again.
Abnegation. In many ways, Gerhart Eisler's life as a Queens apartment dweller was as quiet as he indicated. Although he had a Viennese wife—his second—in Stockholm, he settled down comfortably with a slim Polish girl named Brunhilda, who had accompanied him across the Atlantic. (Eisler maintains that he got a Mexican divorce from his Stockholm wife in 1942, married Brunhilda in Norwalk, Conn, the same year.) He became an airraid warden, contributed to a blood bank, nodded pleasantly to his neighbors.
But he had other names and other activities. As Hans Berger he wrote articles for the Daily Worker. As Julius Eisman he made frequent visits to the Manhattan offices of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee—a Communist front organization which had duped Bennett Cerf, Charles BOyer, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and many another big name into becoming its sponsors. The Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee gave him monthly checks for $150. By means of the party grapevine, he was in touch with Samuel Kogan, alias Carr, a member of Canada's Communist atomic spy ring.
After listening to all this, the House Committee charged him with conspiracy to overthrow the Government, contempt of Congress, perjury, income-tax evasion and passport falsification. It ordered him sent back to Ellis Island and asked the Justice Department to act in a hurry.