The 'Red Millionaire' who exposed Nazi terror through publishing, the Comintern's greatest propagandist, who broke with Stalin
"Stalin, you are a traitor!" — Münzenberg's response to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
The Comintern's most brilliant mass-propagandist. He founded Workers International Relief, co-founded the League Against Imperialism, and his Brown Book (1933) exposed the Reichstag fire as a Nazi frame-up. He broke with Stalin and died under mysterious circumstances.
Career timeline
1915–1919Secretary, Intl. Union of Socialist Youth Organizations
1919–1921First Secretary, Young Communist International
1921–1937Founder & leader, Workers International Relief (IAH/Mezhrabpom)
1924–1933Reichstag deputy for Hesse-Nassau (KPD)
1927–1935Co-founder & leader, League Against Imperialism
Palestinian activist linking anti-colonialism and anti-fascism
In Spain in 1936 he addressed Moroccan soldiers serving Franco, confronting the tension between anti-fascist solidarity and colonial rule in North Africa.
Palestinian communist activist, writer, and translator. Raised in Jerusalem and educated in Moscow, he went to Spain in 1936 to support the Republic. His propaganda work among Moroccan soldiers serving Franco linked anti-fascism in Spain with Arab liberation. He later worked in journalism and literary translation. His memoirs provide an Arab participant’s perspective on the Spanish Civil War.
Career timeline
1924Worked in the British Mandate Department of Posts and Telegraphs in Jerusalem, where Jewish workers introduced him to communism, and he joined the Palestine Communist Party.
1925–1928Sent by the Palestine Communist Party leadership to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) in Moscow, where he married a Ukrainian communist.
1930Elected a member of the Palestine Communist Party Central Committee at its Seventh Congress in Jerusalem and helped edit its clandestine newspaper, ilal-amam.
1931–1933Arrested by the British authorities and sentenced to two years, served in the Jerusalem, Jaffa and Acre prisons; kept under police surveillance for six months after his release.
1933–1936Sent by the Comintern to Paris to edit the Arabic monthly al-Sharq al-Arabi, which the French authorities shut down in early summer 1936.
1935–1936Studied the Soviet experience of the national question in Tashkent, then was sent by the Comintern to Spain in August 1936 to conduct propaganda among Moroccan troops fighting for Franco.
1937–1939Moved to Syria and Lebanon, active in communist circles in Damascus and Beirut and writing for the party press; expelled from the Syro-Lebanese Communist Party for criticising the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939.
1939–1948Returned to Jerusalem to work for the British-run Near East Broadcasting Service and turned to literature, publishing Pushkin (1945) and Chekov (1947) in Cairo.
1948–1976Moved with the radio station to Limassol, Cyprus, after the 1948 Nakba, living there until 1950, then continued in Beirut as a journalist, translator and literary critic.
1976–1979Moved to Athens, where one of his daughters lived; he died there in 1979 and was buried in the city.
