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"King of Saboteurs" - Ernst Wollweber, German communist, active in Sweden during the Second World War, eventually Stasi commander in the GDR, finally purged and forgotten. Ernst Friedrich Wollweber (1898 - 1967) was State Secretary of State Security from 1953 to 1955 and Minister of State Security of the German Democratic Republic from 1955 to 1957. He rose quickly through the party ranks and by 1921 had become a member of the KPD's Central Committee and Political Secretary of Hesse-Waldeck. When the KPD was outlawed in Germany after the Reichstag fire of February 1933, Wollweber was forced to flee to Copenhagen and later to Leningrad. From 1936 to 1940, Wollweber organized the "Organisation Against Fascism and in Support of the USSR", better known as the Wollweber League. After World War II, Wollweber returned to Germany and joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in 1946.
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When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
