U.S. Free Trepper Committee
U.S. Free Trepper Committee
Background
An interesting internal Communist Party USA (CPUSA) factional fight between old-line Stalinists (anti-Jewish, anti-Israel) and ethnic Jewish CP members and supporters showed up in their fight over the issue of whether the Soviet Union should free one of their top spies from WW2, "Leopold Trepper", the leader of the highly successful pre-WW2 and WW2 spy operations in Europe and then Nazi-occupied Europe known as "The Red Orchestra" (Red Orchestra)(aka "Die Rote Orkestra"). He was arrested by the Soviets in 1945 and spent 10 years in jail until his release to his native Poland in 1955.
For many years, he desired to join his wife and children in Israel, though he was an avowed communist all of his life. Committees to free Trepper were set up throughout Europe, the US and Israel to get him freed. This is why the "US Committee to Free Trepper" was created by members of the CPUSA, their longtime sympathizers/supporters and a few liberal Jews who were not connect to the Party (the useful dupes).
This pro-Trepper faction was actually supporters of the CPUSA's Jewish ethnic faction that was against Soviet anti-Semitism and supported a CP publication known as "Jewish Currents" as versus the Stalinist faction's "Jewish Affairs journal, published by the Jewish Affairs Commission of the CPUSA led by Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker and old-line Stalinists.
There were two lists of supporters of the Trepper Committee and both are reproduced below en toto because some names on the earlier one do not show up on the later letterhead of that group. Other resources on this Committee and Trepper will be listed at the end of this section.
This Man Caused 200,000 Nazi Casualties
A "notice" appeared in the New York Times (NYT) "The Week in Review" (Sunday) section of September 30, 1973, which was a call for support/contributions to the "U.S. Free Trepper Committee". It was a short item with one photo, some text and a partial list of sponsors.
"This Man Caused 200,000 Nazi Casualties". Today he needs your help!
He is LEOPOLD TREPPER, a Polish Jew whose intelligence network, the Red Orchestra, operating in occupied Europe, caused irreparable damage to the Nazi army. Today he is alone and dying in Warsaw. The Polish government has six times denied him permission to leave Poland and be reunited with is family. HELP SET TREPPER FREE!!!
- Write to Edward Gierek, First Sec'y , United Polish Workers Party, c/o Polish Mission, 9 E. 66th Street, New York 10021 - Write to your Senator and Congressperson
Clip-Out coupon: "Enclosed is my contribution of $_____ to help the U.S. Free Trepper Committee, 317 West 93rd Street #73, New York, N.Y., 10025. You may use my name as a sponsor of the Committee"
Sponsors
(partial list).
- Rep. Bella Abzug - D-NY. Longtime CPUSA supporter and possible covert member of the CPUSA. Documents referring to her membership have not been found at the National Archives though an intelligence researcher for Congress said that he saw an investigative report about her membership and that of her husband Martin Abzug. She was a member of the congressionally identified CPUSA front, "National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and participated in at least one Soviet legal front, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), also cited by Congress as a Soviet front. Her record of supporting mixed communist fronts and causes is very extensive including the publication Jewish Currents. See her page at KW.
- James Aronson - open Marxist associated with "Monthly Review" (MR) and other openly Marxist publications
- Paddy Chayefsky -- playwright
- Noam Chomsky - longtime Marxist
- Emil Fackenheim
- Maxwell Geismar - open Marxist scholar and writer
- Allen Ginsburg - poet
- Herbert Gold
- Vivian Gornick - admitted former CPUSA member who was still in the far-left intellectuals' orbit
- E.Y. Harburg aka Yip Harburg - movie song writer/writer. Long id. CPUSA member
- Martin Peretz - leftist liberal moneybags for far-left causes including the Communist-taken over National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) of the 1960s. See Alice Widener USA magazine reports about him and the NCNP.
- Morris Schappes - longtime id. CPUSA member and writer
- Yuri Suhl - another longtime id. CPUSA member and writer
- Arthur Waskow - far-left, at that time, Marxist agitator (i.e. The Mayday Protests of 1971), who claimed to be a rabbi but was associated with the CPUSA-influenced/partially funded Institute for Policy Studies and far-left neo-Marxist Jewish groups such as Breira and the New Jewish Agenda (NJA), among others
End of Ad/Notice