Rudolf Herrnstadt

Rudolf Herrnstadt
Herrnstadt – a 1952 sketch
Born	(1903-03-18)18 March 1903 Gleiwitz, Province of Silesia, German Empire (Gliwice, Poland)
Died	28 August 1966(1966-08-28) (aged 63) Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, East Germany
Occupation	journalist

Rudolf Herrnstadt (18 March 1903 – 28 August 1966) was a German journalist and communist politician – most notable for his anti-fascist activity as an exile from the Nazi German regime in the Soviet Union during the war and as a journalist in East Germany until his death, where he and Wilhelm Zaisser represented the anti-Ulbricht wing of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the 1950s.

Herrnstadt actively provided intelligence about Nazi Germany and Poland to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Herrnstadt was born in the Upper Silesian city of Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland), where his father was employed as a lawyer. He began studying law in Heidelberg in 1922, but moved towards writing instead, becoming a journalist for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt in 1929. He began working for the newspaper in 1925 as a typesetter. He joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1929, fleeing the country in 1933, when the arrival of Adolf Hitler at the seat of power made Herrnstadt a target, both as an unrepentant communist activist and as a Jew.

Herrnstadt came to work for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s and spent most of the decade in Warsaw. With the invasion of Poland by the Nazi military in 1939, Herrnstadt fled to the Soviet Union and came to reside in Moscow, where he applied and was accepted into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Despite criticism from some members of the German exile community for his "anti-revolutionary" views, Herrnstadt was among the members of the National Committee for a Free Germany. He returned to Germany as a member of the Sobottka Group, which laid the groundwork for the Soviet Military Administration in Germany in Mecklenburg.