Leopold Zakharovich Trepper (23 February 1904 – 10 January 1982) was a Polish Communist and career Soviet agent of the Red Army Intelligence. With the code name Otto, Trepper had worked with the Red Army since 1930. He was also a resistance fighter and journalist.
Trepper and Richard Sorge, a Soviet military intelligence officer, were the two main Soviet agents in Europe and were employed as roving agents to set up espionage networks throughout Europe and in Japan. While Sorge was a penetration agent, Trepper ran a series of clandestine cells for organising agents in Europe. Trepper used the latest technology at the time—small wireless radios—to communicate with Soviet intelligence. Although the Funkabwehr's monitoring of the radios transmission eventually led to the destruction of Treppers organisation, this sophisticated use of the technology-enabled the espionage organisation to behave as a network with the ability to achieve tactical surprise and deliver high-quality intelligence, such as the warning of Operation Barbarossa.
In 1936, Trepper became the technical director of a Soviet Red Army Intelligence unit in western Europe. He was responsible for recruiting agents and creating espionage networks.
Trepper was an experienced intelligence officer, and an extremely resourceful and capable man completely at home in the west. He was a man who could not be drawn in conversation, who lived a reclusive life, and had a talent of judging people that enabled him to easily penetrate significant groups.
By the start of World War II, Trepper controlled a large espionage network in Belgium, that had links with Dutch, German and Swiss agents and operated seven separate espionage networks in France. His operation was known as the Red Orchestra to the Abwehr.
Life
On 23 February 1904, Leopold Trepper was born to a large Jewish family of 10 children in Nowy Targ, Poland, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. Trepper's father was a travelling farm machinery and seed merchant who later died when Trepper was almost twelve, leaving the family in financial straits. His parents sent him to school in Lwów, to escape the strongly militant and anti-Semitic tradition in Poland. Trepper met his future wife, Luba, in Lwów. She worked in a chocolate factory and took evening classes to train as a teacher. She was also a Jewish communist who travelled under the aliases Sarah Orschitzer and Luba Brekson. After school, Trepper moved to Kraków to study history and literature at the Jagiellonian University. His lack of money led him to left-wing student groups. After the October Revolution, he joined the Bolsheviks and became a communist.
After the Polish–Soviet War, Poland suffered an economic crisis and Trepper had to leave university due to a lack of funds. He found work first as a workshop locksmith, mason, and later worked in the mines in Katowice. After leaving the mines, he worked in Dąbrowa Górnicza where, due to extreme poverty and lack of food, he agitated the workers in Dombrova to strike. As one of the ringleaders, he was caught and imprisoned for eight months. His later pseudonym, Domb, came from Dombrowa, the German stylization of Dąbrowa Górnicza.
Trepper applied for a visa to France when he found it impossible to obtain work after the uprising, but was refused. Earlier, in 1916, Trepper had joined the Zionist, socialist movement Hashomer Hatzair. This membership was to help him in 1926 to emigrate to Haifa, Palestine, via Brindisi to work on the roads and later as an agricultural worker in a kibbutz. Orschitzer followed Trepper to Palestine. She was involved in an illegal communist demonstration, and was arrested and jailed; she would have been deported had she not married a Palestinian citizen.
After moving to Tel Aviv in 1929, Trepper became a member of the central committee of the Palestine Communist Party. Between 1928 and 1930, Trepper was the organiser of the Eḥud or Unity faction, a Jewish-Arab communist labour organisation within the Histadrut trade union body; most of its members came from the Kerem HaTeimanim area and worked against the British forces in Palestine. In 1929, he attended a meeting of the International Red Aid, where he was identified as an agitator and militant communist by the British, who subsequently arrested and interned him for 15 days at the citadel's prison in Acre, Israel. Trepper organised a hunger strike after learning that the communist prisoners were to be deported. He was released after news of the hunger strike reached London and the British newspapers, and he and the hunger strikers were placed on stretchers outside the prison, as they were too weak to walk due to lack of food.