Soldier of Communism

"The general is a heavy, gigantic man. His eyes lie deep in his massive face. His nature is jovial. He appears phlegmatic. But I suspect that the joviality can fall like a mask, and the somewhat flabby features grow taut. His lips are thin. I will not be surprised if I hear him make hard decisions." So wrote a German Communist of "General Gomez," commander of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and a professional soldier in the cause of Communism.

Born in 1893 in Germany's turbulent Ruhr, Gomez was actually Wilhelm Zais-ser. He had got his taste for fighting in Germany's World War I army, in which he rose to the rank of lieutenant. When the bloody "workers' rebellion" broke out in the Ruhr in 1923, Zaisser organized workers' brigades. He was already known as the "Red General of the Ruhr." Taken prisoner, he escaped to Russia, where he became a Soviet citizen and a colonel in the Red army. During the Nazi regime, he returned to Germany, a leader and organizer of the Communist underground.

After his Spanish Civil War days, he went to Moscow, only to be thrown into a Russian jail, apparently because of the failure of Communist intervention in Spain. The resourceful Stalin remembered him when Germany attacked Russia in 1941, put him to work indoctrinating German officers taken prisoner. Zaisser, as he now called himself again, helped build a renegade German army inside Russia. But it was four years before Stalin let him go back to Germany. In 1945 he turned up in Saxony-Anhalt as chief of police. His real job was building up the 130,000-man Volkspolizei, the paramilitary Communist police army in East Germany. He was made State Security Minister in the East German government.

Last week, in a shakeup following the June 17 workers' revolt, Zaisser was one of half a dozen who lost their jobs. He was the biggest to fall. His Ministry of State Security was merged with the Ministry of the Interior, and he was kicked off the German Communist Party's Central Committee and the German Politburo. The official reason: "Representing a wing hostile to the party, and being an exponent of the defeatist line calculated to undermine the unity of the party."

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