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Wollweber's first journey to Moscow was, like almost everything in his career, dramatic and violent. Unable to cross Poland, which was then at war with Russia, he and a colleague signed on a North Sea trawler. They smuggled a band of Communists aboard and hid them in the fish tank. At sea, the Trojan horse was opened, the armed Reds seized the trawler's officers and sailed into Murmansk. (The shipping company afterwards billed the Soviet government for the trawler; the bill was paid without a murmur.) In Moscow, Comrades Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin gave Wollweber a hero's reception. In his brief stay there, Wollweber sensed that Stalin was the man to back in the party struggle then brewing, and he bet his future on it. Wollweber and Stalin have been personal friends since.
Drink & Women. Back in Germany, Wollweber became boss of the Comintern's maritime division and organizer of the worldwide courier system on which the Comintern depended for its life. As a respectable front—and a means of getting immunity from arrest—he got himself elected to various parliamentary bodies, where he won a reputation as a dull orator and, socially, a bore who told long stories of his exploits with drink and women.
Under the Nazis and their perpetual Communist manhunt, Wollweber actually thrived. One of the few party leaders who neither fled into exile nor fell into the Gestapo's hands, he installed the Communist cadres underground and kept them operating. Often the Gestapo breathed down his thick bull neck. Once a gang of Danish Nazis working for the Gestapo kidnaped him off the streets of Copenhagen, but the Danish police intervened and set him free.
Wollweber graduated in the '30s to chief of the Comintern's western operations. Out of Copenhagen (where he operated from the same office building used by the Gestapo) he spun a web of sabotage. During the Spanish Civil War, his men concentrated on ships carrying supplies to Franco, sabotaged 21 German, Italian and Spanish ships. During World War II, his apparatus turned to Nazi installations in Norway and to materials that the Swedes were selling to the Germans. Under German pressure, the Swedes , arrested Wollweber one day in 1941 and prepared to hand him over. But he casually produced papers showing that he had become a Soviet citizen and got off with a jail sentence for stealing explosives. Even during his imprisonment, Wollweber kept his apparatus working. Many a Baltic ship listed as a mine casualty was actually the victim of a Wollweber time bomb secreted in its hold. Three of Sweden's most modern destroyers went to the bottom.