Ernst Wollweber is a master craftsman. His trade is trouble. A short, pudgy Communist of 52, with a fat, pockmarked face that has rarely been photographed, he sits at a bureaucrat's desk in the former Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin. Ostensibly, he busies himself with the mundane details of shipping to & from Communist Germany. Actually, Ernst Wollweber is boss of an enterprise called the Wollweber Apparatus, which channels illegal trade in strategic supplies to the Communists.
A Complete Boiler Plant. The apparatus also handles sabotage and espionage, spreading discontent, and setting off occasional riots among the West Germans. But its prime project is illegal trade—to use the U.S.-supported industrial economy of Western Germany as an arsenal for Communism. West Germans are forbidden to sell arms, munitions-making machinery and important strategic items to Red territory. But many West Germans have been skirting the ban. During the first six months of the Korean war, West German trade with Communist China jumped 2,700%; iron & steel exports to the Chinese Reds alone went from nearly zero to more than $2,000,000 last year.
In 1950, West Germans managed to slip more than $74 million of strategic materials into the Soviet zone on an ostensibly "legal" basis, with the help of phony invoices, bribed or lax custom guards, intricate shipping techniques. On one occasion, 89 separate pieces of machinery were passed through West German custom guards; reassembled on the other side, they turned out to be a complete boiler factory. Other supplies move through "triangular trade"—a West German industrialist will ship a smelting plant, for example, to Belgium and from there it will be shipped to East Germany. In addition to this "legal" trade, the Communists are getting smuggled goods from West Germany at a rate which some estimate as high as $350 million a year.
The illegal trade has reached such alarming proportions that U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy came home last month to report to Washington and discuss more stringent countermeasures. McCloy was sure that most of the smuggling and tricks for getting around the trade bans were the work of professional operators financed by "Communist agents who are throwing a good bit of gold around." Most formidable of all the professionals are Ernst Wollweber and the trained, dedicated underground men of his apparatus.
Like Mushrooms. Ernst Wollweber and the German Communist movement grew up together. The son of a Silesian miner who was killed in World War I, he went to work as a stevedore in his teens. He joined the German Communist Party on the day it was formed, 32 years ago. In the dank darkness of the Communist underground, Wollweber's peculiar talents sprouted like mushrooms. He was shrewd and quick-minded, capable of great courage and matchless brutality, a man capable of believing himself when he snarled, as he often did to a wavering follower: "Death is easy." During World War I he helped sabotage some German cement barges. By war's end he was a stoker on the battleship Helgoland and was hard at work stoking up the fires of the German naval mutiny. It was Stoker Wollweber who gave the mutiny signal to the Helgoland's crew. When truckloads of shouting armed mutineers stormed into Bremen, the man in the lead was stocky Ernst Wollweber.